Nicole held her hand out for Lewis’s backpack. He tossed it over and she produced the tape again, looping it around my knees and ankles. She did the same with Thomas. “You’re going to have to hop in,” she said, opening the two doors at the rear of the van. It was wide open for cargo, with two seats up front. I saw what looked like a small pile of folded moving blankets.
From his backpack, Lewis took out what looked like winter ski masks, with holes for the eyes, mouth, and nose.
He pulled the ski mask down over my head, with the holes at the back. I heard Thomas grunting his objections as his ski mask went on. Someone took me by the shoulders—Nicole, I thought, since the hands felt smaller than a man’s—and led me into a quarter turn. “Two hops and you’re at the bumper,” she said. “Sit down and shoogle yourself in.”
It took three, and I nearly fell over on the third. I felt the bumper at my knee, turned around, sat on the edge, and leaned over carefully until my upper arm touched the floor. Then I slowly shifted my body forward into the vehicle.
“Okay, dumb-ass,” Lewis said to Thomas. “Shuffle on over here.” I felt the van shift as Thomas fell into it. “Move up.”
Then Nicole’s voice. “We’ll be on the road for a few hours. Not a sound out of you. We’ll be making stops. Tolls, gas. Somebody might come up to the window, say something. Don’t be stupid and make any noise. That will get you killed. It’ll also get whoever hears you killed.”
“We already need gas,” Lewis said. “Went through a tank getting here from Burlington.”
I heard some ruffling next to me. The moving blankets. Someone was unfolding them, shaking them out. They were draped over us, I supposed, in case anyone looked inside. I didn’t think it could get any darker, at night, inside the ski mask, but I was wrong. The world went pitch-black, and the sounds around me became more muffled.
The rear doors slammed shut; then the driver’s door opened and closed, followed by the passenger’s. I didn’t know which one of them was driving, not that it mattered. The key was turned and the van rumbled to life. Tires crunching on gravel as we rolled on down the driveway, away from my father’s house, and then turning onto the road.
We’re never coming back here, I thought.
I had a lot of time to think, in my lightless, smothering isolation.
I’d thought, when we first headed out, I’d be able to get some sense of where we were going by the turns the van made. Hadn’t I seen that in a movie somewhere, or a Batman cartoon, or a Sherlock Holmes episode? The hero concentrates on the vehicle’s movements, estimates the speed by the sound of the tires, pictures the landmarks they’re passing, and by the time they come to a stop, he knows exactly where they are.
After three turns I had no idea where we were.
Just after we left the house, we made a stop for gas. I guessed we were at the Exxon, where I’d filled up a couple of times since coming back to Promise Falls. But once we were on the road again, I soon lost my bearings. It wasn’t long before I was certain we were on an interstate. We were doing probably sixty or seventy miles an hour, and we weren’t stopping or slowing down at all. Occasionally, I could hear the roar of eighteen-wheelers passing us, which suggested interstate to me. Every five or six seconds there was a small thunk as the tires went over a pavement seam. The tires would hum, then thunk; hum, then thunk. If I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, I might not have noticed the repetition, but lying on the cold metal floor of the van, there wasn’t much else to listen to. Every noise and bump was amplified.
And throughout all these various ruminations, one other thought kept surfacing.
Who the hell called Thomas’s phone?
Who had identified himself as Bill Clinton?
Surely not the Bill Clinton.
I’d walked in on Thomas when he was having one of his imaginary chats with the former president, and the receiver had been sitting firmly in the cradle. He had not been on the phone talking to anyone.
But none of us had imagined that phone ringing. I hadn’t imagined Lewis saying the caller had identified himself as Bill Clinton. Lewis handled the call the same way I might have, had I not been familiar with Thomas’s fantasies.
Except now I wasn’t sure what was fantasy and what was real. I couldn’t explain that phone call. It made no sense to me at all.
It couldn’t be Clinton.
Couldn’t be.
But it was somebody.
As I was thinking that, another phone began to ring. We were about half an hour into our trip. At first I wondered whether it might be my cell, which Lewis had slipped from my jacket at one point and tossed into his backpack, but I was pretty sure I’d seen him power it off. Maybe Julie calling to find out what had happened to us, why we weren’t at the house when she arrived. But it was a different ring. Mine sounded like a piano, but this one mimicked an old-fashioned phone. After two rings, I heard Lewis say, “Here.”