His voice, soft as fur, came at her out of the darkness: “Jesus, you sound like my mother. But you’re not my mother, right?”
And that got her, that reminded her of what was real, what counted, what she was doing here on this dark road. With him. “No, baby,” she said, softening, and she reached out her hand to him. “I’m not your mother, I’m your lover. And when we get home, watch out.”
So that was that. Whether the gun was loaded or not or whether she was going to enter into a contract with the sheriff’s department under threat, duress and coercion and go to jail for the better part of her natural life or wind up shot herself or just assert her right to travel in her own personal property to her own house and reclaim the personal property she kept there was anybody’s guess. But it was late and Willits wasn’t exactly Times Square and they’d be turning off well before they got into town proper and there really wasn’t anything that could go wrong. She was just being a slave and a coward even to think it. The cops were asleep. And so was everybody else.
18.
WHEN THEY WERE COMING up on her turnoff she couldn’t decide whether to use her signal or not, but then she figured not, because if anybody was watching why broadcast her intentions? “This is it up here,” he said suddenly, fully alert and ready for anything, and she was impressed that he could pick out the road in the dark even though he’d only been to the house once. He was smart—and he’d been born with an internal compass too, no ravine or trail or gulley or back road too remote for him, the kind of person who would always land on his feet no matter where you tossed him. And if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was a coward. Or a slave. He might have been in outer space half the time, but if ever there was anybody born who would take them on, no holds barred, he was the one. And maybe that was suicidal, maybe it was mental—it was, it definitely was—but as she turned into the dark lane between the two vestigial fenceposts that picked the thread of it out of the night for her, she was glad he was there. If anything happened, which it wouldn’t, she’d at least go out in a blaze of glory.
The front end let out a little shriek and then the tires were hissing along the blacktop and she flicked off the headlights, just in case. “Blaze of glory,” she said aloud, tailing it with a nervous cackle, and she was as crazy as he was, Jesus.
She pulled just off the road a hundred yards from her house, then thought better of it and swung a U-turn so the car was facing the other way in case they needed to make a quick exit. With no moon, her house was in darkness, nothing showing there but what the stars gave up. Ditto the L-shaped ranch house of her closest neighbors, the Rackstraws, an older couple with grown children out of the house and a dog so ancient and decrepit it had forgotten how to bark. “Okay,” she said, her fingers wrapped around the door handle, “you know the drill. I’m just going in the house, my own house, that’s all, for like ten minutes. And you’re just going to sit here, right? Don’t even get out of the car. Okay?”
She watched him a moment, the profile of him, too dark to see his features—all she could tell was that he was staring straight ahead, out the windshield and down the road the way they’d come. And that he was wound up, strung tight as wire. “Okay?” she repeated and leaned in to peck a kiss to his cheek before she slipped out of the car and started up the road.
As soon as the door eased shut and she was out there in the night, her tension began to fade. This was her home, her turf, the place where she’d lived for the past eight and a half years since she’d given up on Roger, the place where she walked Kutya and exercised her clients’ horses in the fields and sat out on the deck in the evenings to watch the sun slip down over the distant gray band of the ocean. What was she afraid of? It was her right to be here—it was anybody’s right. This was a free country. Or so they claimed.