She could feel the rust building up behind her wheel wells—invisible now, but if it went untended, the corrosive brown would bloom across the caverns and there would be no stopping it. These were the things that led lesser vehicles to ruin. The slow, steady wearing away of a body. Unless you were made of plastic—that never withered. It cracked, cheap, and clattered off.
The Barbra still wasn’t talking. The Barbra seemed different today. She moved her seat forward, granting Grace an extra half inch of precious space. The scarf was still wedged into her window frame, but the Barbra let it flutter, its soft fabric brushing her hot glass. Strangest of all, the woman leaned ever so slightly, almost unnoticeably, into Charles. Grace didn’t even look up. What was the point of Grace? The Barbra leaned and Charles, always ready to be adored, canted his body towards the Barbra, a grateful puppy, tongue lolling in the perfumed breeze. Men! So simple! Withhold a thing and it becomes instantly desirable.
The Barbra reached one spider arm up and draped it across Charles’s shoulders, wedging a hand between his neck and the headrest until the sharp edges of the cursed woman’s diamond rings dug into her plush seat and then, without warning, the hand began to undulate, kneading, pressing, prodding, into Charles’s neck, and Charles dipped his head forward, fluttering his eyes. It was disgusting. An obscenity. Flesh and blood might be different from metal and glass, but this was a display as brazen as a twenty-four-karat-gold gearshift.
She shuddered.
She swerved.
And, a moment too late, remembering Grace in the backseat, she tried to catch herself. There was no time. The rings kept digging against her soft parts, and the road just slipped out from under her.
A ribbon, loose, spooling away.
She could feel her bolts tighten in their holes and then: Boom. Crash. Done.
三十四
High Point, NC
2,911 Miles
A SICKENING SPIN.
Grace looked up, confused.
Spinning backwards. Spinning sideways.
She gripped the door handle.
Infinitely slow.
Her right leg flung itself skyward until it was stopped by the door itself.
Out of time.
Grace slid sideways. Her neck arced back and her head knocked against the seat, ping-ponging weightlessly.
Airborne. Up, above the gravel on the shoulder, nose down and rear up.
Her face was knocked against the window and her eyes were open. She seemed to be upside down. It was green outside. It sounded like they were underwater. It felt as if she were a necklace in a gift box all padded with cotton. Why would she think something like that? She was so weird sometimes.
A crunch, a scream, a bright, shrill shattering of glass.
And then everything slammed back to earth and sped up faster, faster, faster, and Grace was bracing her feet against the seat in front of her even though it was above her now, and an arm, her own arm, was flung violently in front of her face, luckily shielding her eyes against a hailstorm of glass shards, and she was waiting, every nerve in her body lit up, waiting for the spinning to end, because it had to end; accidents always ended, no matter how bad they were.
Mom, she thought, said, screamed. “Mom!”
Stillness.
Then, “Grace! Gracie!”
For a too-brief angels-and-rainbows-and-unicorns sort of second, she thought that maybe it really was her mother, watching over her, or that maybe she was dead now, and there actually was an afterlife. But, of course, it was her father.
“Bu yao hai pa! Baba gen ni yi qi!”
“Me, too. I’m here.”
三十五
Helios, NY
SAINA BREATHED IN, nervous. Leo’s truck windows were rolled down, and a recent bout of summer rain made everything smell like warm asphalt; the grass and trees were green in that vibrant way that happened only in the East Coast gloom. They sped by, a verdant mass, as Leo gunned past a vintage truck. This would be her first public appearance since she’d holed up in the Catskills, and Saina wanted to do it as much as she didn’t.
“Don’t think of it as being in hiding,” said Leo. “Think of it as a hiatus. Now you’re ready to get back in the ring.”
“How did you know?”
“Because I know you, Saina. And I know that you’re not going to stay up here and perfect your house forever. And these Bard kids, they’re gonna love you.”
She felt warm. Seen. And a little bit indignant.
“Hey, Saina.”
“Yeah?”
“How come you never talk about your mom?”
“What? Why bring this up now?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. And you don’t let me in, always.” He smiled a big flash of a smile at her. “Sometimes I have to stage an emotional sneak attack.”
Saina looked out the window. “You know, when I first moved up here, this lady at the hardware store told me that I shouldn’t even think about planting until the leaves on the trees were as big as squirrel’s ears.”
“Why don’t you talk about her? And that’s true, by the way.”
“Isn’t that just so country? Sometimes people are exactly who you secretly hope they’ll be.”
Leo took his hand off the gearshift and placed it on her knee.
“Do you think about her? You must. I don’t have a single memory of my mother, my birth mother. All I have is a picture, and I still think about her all the time.”