"Hello?"
"Susan."
"I'm…please, I'm sorry. I slipped. It was a mistake."
"Susan."
"Don't hurt her. Do whatever you want to me. I'm sorry. I swear it won't happen again. Just please-"
"Susan."
Her teeth snap shut. She closes her eyes. She cannot bear the moist optic glimmer that she senses coming from the pickup's eccentrically tooled sideview mirrors, those dark eyes shining like tumors from their rusty chrome sockets.
The driver's side door opens and a man steps out. His face is lost in the darkness, but she can tell from the angle of his head and shoulders that he's looking straight at her. Snowflakes spill through the headlights aiming off into the woods.
Holding the phone very close to her ear, Sue says, "Please. Please don't hurt her."
For a moment the man doesn't move. He seems to be watching her even more closely, as if trying to make a decision about something. Then he gets back up behind the wheel and slams the door.
"Thank you," she says. "Thank you so m-"
The truck spins its tires and lurches back into motion, its motor pounding off down the highway in a steadily diminishing array of asymmetric taillights. It leaves her there clutching the phone, not sure whether the voice is still with her or not. In the silence she realizes she can hear him breathing.
"You've made it this far," the voice says. "But so far it's been relatively easy. What you're going to do next isn't going to be nearly so easy. But I know you can do it, Susan." And does he actually chuckle? "I have faith in you."
She waits. He does not make her wait long.
"You're familiar with Route 114, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"It runs east and west, right along the state line. If you follow it far enough to the east it takes you out to the coast. But you're going to start out by taking it west. Back to a little town called Gray Haven. You do know Gray Haven, don't you, Susan?"
"Of course." Her voice feels detached from her, like something recorded a long time ago and played back. It doesn't sound like her at all. "I grew up there."
"That's right, Susan. You grew up there. In fact, you left something behind and tonight, you're going to get it back."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I don't know what you're talking about,"he mimics cruelly, and it seems like he should be laughing, but he's not. There is no hint of humor, not even sarcasm, in his voice. It's like before, when it turned nasty, but this is much, much worse. "You listen to me, you worthless little cunt, because I'm only going to say this once. The only thing you're doing when you play dumb is putting this knife closer to little Veda's throat. Now, do you know what I'm talking about?"
There's another pause, Sue leaning forward into the phone, and in the background, horribly, she can hear Veda again, starting to cry in a shrill wail. It is not a cry of fear now, but unquestionably a cry of pain.
"Wait, please, stop!" Sue shouts, tears in her eyes again, voice going to pieces. "I'll do whatever you want! Just please don't hurt her anymore!"
He doesn't answer her and she's left with the sound of Veda crying louder. Sue feels the abrupt soreness in her breasts and the left cup of her bra is wet with milk from her undamaged left nipple, the left breast being the only one able to produce milk for Veda after the accident. She hasn't nursed her daughter in almost six months but her body doesn't seem to care about this. Sue is still crying too, unable to control herself, and the next voice she hears isn't the man on the phone at all. It's Phillip's voice, in her head, calm and clear and in its way almost as real as the one coming through the cell phone.
Stop it, Sue. Just stop it, right now.
She catches her breath. In spite of everything, she's startled into silence at how vividly she can hear him.
This is bad. It's the worst. But nothing's ever been solved with tears. So just…stop…crying.
"All right," she whispers. Not whimpers, just whispers. And in a moment she has nearly regained the fullness of her voice. Through the receiver she can hear her daughter still crying, but she's calmed down a bit too, thank God, and it sounds as if whatever the man on the other end was doing to her has stopped, at least for now. Maybe he was just pinching her, she thinks. Maybe not even that. If Marilyn really is there, maybe she was somehow able to protect Veda. Or comfort her. Marilyn would do anything for Veda, Sue knows, putting her own life on the line for Veda if that is what it takes.
At least this is what she chooses to believe, for this very moment at hand, and if it gets her through to the next moment, then she may continue to believe it.
"A long time ago," the voice on the phone says, "you and your friend did something that neither one of you will ever forget. You do know who I'm talking about, Susan. You know very well."
Sue Young sits perfectly still like a figure in a snow globe, amid the increasing chaos of tumbling white, staring out the windshield at the bare trees along the road, a dense thicket of questions tightening around her like some kind of barbwire shroud.
"Yes."
How does the voice on the other end know about this? It is one thing to know about her life now, where she works, where she lives, and what kind of car she drives. Even to have gone into her house and looked through her things-an intruder with enough intelligence and motive could have done that.
But nobody knows about what they did that summer, the thing that bonded them together permanently. In a peculiar way, she herself doesn't know about it. It has not been on her mind, at least the daytime part of her mind, since she graduated high school. In fact, it is as if some arcane form of psychological self-defense had wiped him completely from her consciousness even before she left Gray Haven.
Phillip, she knows, has not been so lucky.
For whatever reason-perhaps just because he is a man and not so consciously accustomed to the sprockets and flywheels of psychological micromanagement-he has not been able to expel the nightmares so handily. Only after they were married did she realize that he still had nightmares about it. They attacked in cycles, serially, industriously corroding whole layers of insulation off his ordered and businesslike thoughts right up until the point that he left her eighteen months ago. Sometimes he'd thrash so violently in bed that she was afraid he might hurt himself, or her. Sometimes he shot straight up in bed with a scream like nothing she'd ever heard from him when he was awake. His eyes were open but he was still dreaming. There was sweat in his hair, pasting it down in thick brown fingers to his forehead. Even when the dreams were at their worst, he refused to tell her about them, but Sue always knew-on the same level that she herself remembers. She knows all this because he is Phillip Chamberlain, the only boy she ever loved, and because they went through it all together, approximately one lifetime ago.
"Tonight you're going back to Gray Haven," the voice says.
"What?"
"You're going back to pay your respects. Do you know the place?"
"Who are you?"
"Answer the question, Susan. Do you know the place?"
"I know the place, but-"
"Good."
Again Sue is silent. In the background she can hear Veda again, not crying but whimpering, tired, hungry, wanting it to be over.Oh honey, oh sweetie, I sympathize. And Sue has to hang up on the voice to keep from asking to talk to her baby girl again.
Because she already knows this is how this game will be played.
Whatever privileges she might have had to make special requests are gone.
For the sake of her daughter she is going to do exactly what the voice asked.
She is going back to Gray Haven.