The roads are going to hell. Sue can feel it, that queasy little shimmy in the back tires whenever she adjusts the wheel more than a few degrees in either direction. It's snowing harder now. Still, the Expedition is holding steady at sixty-five, sometimes seventy-five when the road straightens out. She's got another half-hour until she gets to Gray Haven, maybe longer if the weather continues to fall apart like it is.
Still, she's had plenty of experience driving under adverse conditions. You can't drive an ambulance for eleven years without experiencing everything that bad weather, bad karma, and plain rotten luck have to offer. Before she left it all behind to become Mrs. Phillip Chamberlain, Sue delivered babies in the middle of electrical storms and drove stroke victims through nor'easters. Once, when her ambulance broke down in the middle of Buttfuck Idaho she and her partner kept an eight-year-old with his throat half torn out by a German shepherd alive and calm for an hour and a half until a helicopter arrived, and the kid eventually recovered enough to send her a crayon-drawn thank-you note. Sue used to keep it stashed above the visor of her ambulance. Back in the day, she was the golden girl-the one everybody said could eat stress and shit sonnets.
The road rises and falls and the opening lines of one of Veda's favorite board books, a story that Sue's read her at least a hundred times, keeps repeating stupidly through her head:"Up slippery hills cars creep, don't beep. Inside the hills the giants sleep." It is what you get with kids. The children's authors of America erect a little writer's colony in your forebrain, and no matter how grim or horrific the circumstances you find yourself in, they're always ready with a bit of utterly inappropriate doggerel.
Driving on. She's got the road mainly to herself. She passes several cars, a Dunkin' Donuts truck, even a couple of snowplows, but there's no sign of the farm pickup she saw earlier. The more she thinks about it, the more certain she is that it's the one from two months earlier, the afternoon of the pumpkin patch.
One day back in late October, a week before Halloween, Sue and Marilyn took Veda pumpkin-picking outside Lexington. Veda ran up and down the rows of gnarled green vines and pumpkins, stopping every few feet to attempt to pick one up until she finally found one small enough to lift. The three of them went out to dinner afterward and Veda fell asleep in the car, the crisp air and exercise having done its job. Sue dropped Marilyn back at her condo, then headed back to the house with her sleeping daughter still clutching the miniature pumpkin in her car seat.
They were just a few miles from home, cruising along a backwoods two-lane road, when somebody started flashing their headlights at her from behind. Sue slowed down, thinking the driver wanted to pass, but then he slowed down too, coming up close behind her, and Sue felt all her alarm systems go on at once. The vehicle was an old pickup with a big grille, round fenders, and wide-set headlights, just like the one tonight, and the driver was waving her over to the shoulder.
Maybe, she remembered thinking at the time, the guy was just flagging her down to tell her she had a taillight out or something. But a lonely stretch of road five miles outside of town was the last place she wanted to find out. When the farm pickup slowed down, Sue floored it and lost him, got her little girl home and locked the doors. In the garage she checked the Expedition. The taillights, and everything else, were just fine. And she hasn't seen the farm pickup again until tonight.
But is that really the case?
The headache between her eyes is starting to come back. Because now she's thinking of an evening just a week or so ago when she was downtown doing some Christmas shopping at Prudential Center, pulling out of the parking garage, and a pair of headlights swept out after her. She only got a glimpse of the vehicle before it vanished in traffic, but hadn't it looked like the same farm truck? Hadn't she recognized, just for a split second, that grinning grille and rounded front end?
Even then, the connection between the two events pulsed in and out of her mind and vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Because who would really be followingher? What were the odds that it was the same truck?
But now she realizes that it was.
How long, exactly, has he been following her?
Again her thoughts go to Marilyn and Sue prays (yes, prays, and any ambulance driver who tells you they've never muttered a prayer is lying, heartless, or both) that somehow the nanny is able to protect Veda or at least reassure her, hold her hand or sing to her. An eighteen-month-old girl can't possibly understand what's happening to her. Sue doesn't know enough about childhood trauma to know if this is a blessing or a curse. She just prays that Marilyn is insulating Veda from the worst of it, that the man who has her has done nothing to either of them physically, prays that despite hearing Veda scream that one time over the phone. But even if he hasn't touched Veda, except for the time he made her cry on the phone, even then, how much therapy will she need as an adult just to get her through the distant memory of this night?
But maybe, just maybe, it's still all right. Maybe Veda's already cried herself out and fallen asleep. It is possible, isn't it? Eight o'clock is her bedtime. Maybe in the morning she'll wake up and Marilyn will be there and Sue will arrive and it will all be like a bad dream.
Or maybe they're already dead.
"Stop that," Sue says aloud to herself. "You stop that shit right now."
But behind that tough snarl-and it is tough, Sue can hear that much just listening to the sound of her own voice-another scared, selfish question hangs, rotating slowly, the one question that she simply cannot help asking on some level. Just two hours earlier she was an affluent thirtysomething-year-old ex-wife and mother, and Veda was just another one-and-a-half-year-old coming home with her nanny to get ready for her nightly bath before bedtime. Why is this happening to them?
Because the past is never done with us. Not in any substantial way.
Screw you, Phillip, Sue thinks. Screw you, you unreliable rat, you child-abandoning shitbag, you worthless waste of skin. You're in Malibu right now, no doubt jogging naked down some beach when you're not mixing up a pitcher of sour apple martinis for your newest surgically enhanced fuck doll while three thousand miles away some faceless maniac does Christ-knows-what to your only daughter. So forgive me if your charming philosophical views on the past don't quite engage me like they used to back in the jolly old days of yore.
Instead Sue thinks of Veda, holding the image of her daughter in her mind's eye. In this vision Veda is sleeping, chin tucked, mouth slightly open, snoring gently but deeply enough that Sue can see the straps of her car seat tightening and loosening slightly across her daughter's chest. Marilyn sits beside her, awake, alert, ever vigilant. Sue embraces the image, coddles it. As if imagining Veda in her car seat might somehow preserve her, protect her.
Which she knows is patently ridiculous.
But Suealso knows with that same lead-pipe certainty that a certain amount of ridiculous faith in oneself must be waterproof, fireproof, and shockproof until it is impervious to doubt. For better or worse, she has learned two or three hard lessons about the depths of human depravity, probably knows more on the subject than anyone she's ever met. And the one thing she took from that experience in the summer of 1983 was that when there's blood on the line, whether it's your own or somebody else's, there is no room for self-doubt.
It's surely the reason why she got so bored in college and dropped out to become an EMT. Once you've been fire-baptized, you lose your taste for the milk and cookies of academic life.
And Sue thinks, here we go loop-de-loo, dovetailing into the central undercurrent of her life, something that a bald, pretentious little psychiatrist named Dr. Henry from Harvard Square had pointed out to her the one time she actually tried therapy. Dr. Henry's observation-put forward manfully enough considering that he was a short little clinician with a high-pitched voice and coffee breath-was that Sue Young has always related to the best things in her life neither through their presence nor their absence but their loss.
And not even bald, fat little Dr. Henry was fey or fussy enough to suggest that Sue Young's "innocence" might have been the first and most influential loss of her life, the one by which all other losses would be measured. But the idea had still sat there unspoken between them, session after session, staring at them like a lab rat chewing on a legal pad. Until the day that Sue walked in and handed his receptionist an envelope containing a letter that said, in essence, she was going to find another way to spend the hour from two to three on Thursday afternoons.
The sign up ahead reads:GRAY HAVEN -6.
Sue floors it.