Pia huddled against Rachel, who was doing her best not to crush up against the trucker, who revved the engine hard and loud.
I leaned out the open door and screamed, “Dean, get in the truck!”
Crushed by his impossible choice, he turned his head toward us, his face a map of sorrow. His chest and shoulders caved, all defeat and gloom.
“Come with me, Dean,” Simone cooed. A flash of fire had come back into her eyes. “It will be as it has always been, we can forget this ever happened—”
“Dean, no!” I cried to him. “This is your only chance!” The trucker gunned the engine, and we lurched forward. I screamed at him to stop, and he looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
Dean signed, “Family,” and took out the packet of photos. With badly shaking hands he peeled back the plastic layers and fanned the snapshots out toward his mother. Tears streamed down his face.
She lifted the gun and fired. The photos scattered like white birds. He watched the scraps of Polaroids falling down all around him, uncomprehending, till his face hardened and he signed something to her I couldn’t catch. She began to raise the gun again toward Dean, or the truck, it was hard to tell.
Dean spun around and bolted toward us, vaulting up onto the running board and catapulting himself into the cab, bow and arrows clattering. He slammed into me, kinetic, an animal pursued, all muscle and intent. The pain in my arm was incomprehensible.
“How dare you leave me!” Simone shrieked, sprinting toward us at a stunning pace. “I’ll kill you all!” She lowered the gun toward one of the tires. Fired. A popping sound, a hiss.
“Go!” Pia shrieked, and slammed her foot down on the accelerator. The truck roared to life and leapt with fury against its multi-ton load. Cursing us, the driver wrestled the wheel back from Pia and slammed the engine into gear. Suddenly we had traction. We all pitched backward as the truck surged forward, overcoming the loss of the tire with sheer horsepower and momentum. Grimacing, the trucker ground the gears higher and higher as the rest of us stared into the oversize rearview mirror. Simone ran at us, firing until she appeared motionless in the center of the road, growing smaller with each second that passed.
? ? ?
Just the sense of motion, of being carried by something with a motor, and by no physical effort, was enough to make me weep with relief. And to be borne aloft by this enormously strong machine, by someone who knew how to harness it, felt almost supernatural, a blessing beyond comprehension.
Pia and Rachel sank back into the decaying seats of the cab, crying softly and mumbling all kinds of thanks to gods none of us believed in, or maybe we believed in them lately. Dean sat up rigidly, gripping his bony knees with trembling hands. He gazed into the rearview mirror long after Simone was out of sight.
Pia’s shoulder had begun bleeding again, and pretty badly. The trucker glanced at her as we thundered down the pitted road.
“I’m going to take you to the Regional Hospital down Millinocket, okay?”
We each nodded or grunted our assent.
“But, hell, who’s chasing you back there? The way you come at me, like a bunch of crazy people, I never seen anything like it.”
No one said a word. The effort to tell the story was beyond anyone’s capacity, yet I wanted to tell it, needed someone to believe us, some act of recognition for what we had been through—the death of Rory, Sandra’s murder. But at the time, just the fact that someone wanted to hear it was good enough.
Soon we turned off the logging road onto a real highway, one with lines down the middle, the occasional streetlight glowing an eerie green even in daylight. Telephone poles looped by as we entered the complex machinery of the world, the McDonald’s and the Subways, the Exxons and Burpees, the Laundromats and strip malls. Dean had given up on the rearview and sat up staring at everything man-made that went by until after an hour or so he collapsed back in his seat and watched the woods, the endless parade of green in all its variety and all its sameness.
After
September 27
49
It’s been just over three months. My arm still aches now and then, but thanks to Rachel, you can’t tell by looking at it that it was ever broken. The thing is, I don’t mind the occasional twinge because it takes me back there, to all that happened on that river in those woods, and reminds me that there are things I should never forget. Not that I ever could.