“Will you please just tell me why? This traffic is ridiculous! I pay the taxes for these roads! I have a right to be here!”
“Sir, I am going to ask you to not ask questions and to move the vehicle into the off-bound lane.”
“Why can they pass and I can’t?” the driver says, gesturing at the hatchbacks and ancient Volvos puttering through. His wife in the passenger seat goes from looking embarrassed, hiding her face, to looking alarmed. She sits upright and puts her hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?” says the cop.
“Excuse me? I don’t think that’s necessary! I just want to know why they can go through and I can’t. My mother is sick,” he says, gesturing north, where I’m assuming there’s a hospital or nursing home, “and I just want to take the kids”—he gestures to the backseat—“to see her one last time. We don’t know how long she has, and just . . . Please, officer. This is America! Harry Truman did not intend for the highways to function in this way!”
“Sir,” the cop says, unmoved by this poor guy’s pleas, “I’m going to have to ask you again to please step out of the vehicle.”
“I know my rights!”
“Daddy?” I hear a voice say, very faintly. It’s coming from this guy’s car two ahead, just in front of Bobby, who we’re now directly behind, and one lane over. “Daddy?”
The man turns around to look at his kids in the backseat.
“Sir? Please,” the cop says, and the man gives him his attention again. “I’d prefer real strongly not to have to ask you again.”
The man looks at his wife, and I can see her nod a bit. Slowly, with not an ounce of resistance left, the guy gets out of the car. The cop steps next to him and begins speaking quietly into his ear. The man’s face goes slack. Something in him breaks. A few more cops come around.
“Get back in the car, sir,” they tell him.
The little girl who asked for her daddy is sobbing audibly.
“Sir, if you could quiet your child,” says a cop, and it’s not a question.
The guy asks his daughter to please be quiet through the part of his mouth that’s not trembling.
“We’re here to serve and protect, sir,” I can hear the cops saying, all five of them at once. The guy’s just staring ahead. His daughter’s kind of weeping still, but she’s trailing off a bit. They tell the guy’s wife to get behind the wheel and take the car into the westbound lane and to drive along. They help the guy into the backseat next to his daughter and an even younger child sitting in a car seat. They keep their hands on him at all times. He sort of slumps a bit.
“Have a pleasant day, ma’am,” they say to his wife, who is looking back at her husband and trying to get the car going, and looking back at her husband and pulling onto the off-ramp that all non-Iceling traffic is being funneled onto, while the cops stand outside and nudge their hats up with their guns.
Now Bobby’s up. And we know he’s probably going to make it, because the only cars they’re letting through are carrying at least one teenager with straw-colored hair and those strange petal-like cheekbones—something I didn’t start noticing before this Iceling traffic jam but now can’t stop noticing. We are almost 100 percent certain that Bobby’s going to make it through, but still, I can hear my heart thumping again anyway, and so I grab Stan’s hand.
“He’ll make it,” says Stan, as the cops signal Bobby forward.
“I know,” I say, as the signaling cop holds up his hand for Bobby to stop.
“It’ll be fine, and then we’ll make it too,” says Stan, through what I would guess are gritted teeth, but I can’t say for certain, because I’m unable to look at anything but what’s unfolding in front of me.
Two police officers are leaning into Bobby’s car, at both the driver and passenger windows. My eyes flick up quick to the rearview: There are thumping sounds all around me now, and one of them may or may not be my heart, but one of them is definitely Ted’s fist, which is pounding against the door. I try to get Callie to find my eyes in the reflection, but she doesn’t. Something else I cannot sense holds a claim over her stare. Something else has made it so her eyes are as wide as two bright full moons.
Still gripping Stan’s hand, I turn around to face her. I reach out to Callie, needing her without being able to articulate why, my free hand groping for hers, to hold her, to tell her we’ll be fine, we’ll be there soon, she’ll be home soon. This is what I need her to need me to tell her right now, and my heart is crumbling with the weight of knowing she might not need me at all.
“Callie,” I say. “Kid sister,” I say, softer. I take my hand off her hand to wipe at my eye, and as soon as I do, her eyes snap over to me. She reaches out her hand, close enough to make me believe she’s reaching for my hand, and my face breaks into an ugly-cry smile. “Hey, kid sister,” I say. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Then Stan squeezes my hand hard and sudden. I snap my neck around. Two smiling cops are waving Bobby through.