anything could collide with one’s neat, well-ordered life at any time. The girl wore a ski jacket and large, cruelly unflattering glasses, made worse somehow by white fur earmuffs. Her mouth was round, a red gate of wonder. She was twelve, maybe eleven, and eleven was the same age when-and then the white SUV began its lazy flip- flops down the embankment.
But once on the long straightaway toward I-70, she found herself veering right instead of left, toward the sign that read LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY, to that strange, unfinished road that her family had always called the highway to nowhere. How they had gloried in giving directions to their house. “Take the interstate east, to where it ends.” “How can an interstate end?” And her father would triumphantly tell the tale of the protests, the citizens who had united across Baltimore to preserve the park and the wildlife and the then-modest rowhouses that ringed the harbor. It was one of her father’s few successes in life, although he had been a minor player-just another signer of petitions, a marcher in demonstrations. He was never tapped to speak at the public rallies, much as he longed for that role.
The Valiant was making a terrible sound, the right rear wheel scraping against what must be a crushed fender. In her agitated state, it made perfect sense to park on the shoulder and continue on foot, although the sleet had now started and she became aware with each step that something was wrong. Her ribs hurt so that each breath was like a jab with a tiny knife, and it was hard to carry her purse as she had always been instructed-close to the body, not dangling from her wrist, a temptation for muggers and thieves. She hadn’t been wearing her seat belt, and she had bounced around inside the Valiant, hitting the steering wheel and door. There was blood on her face, but she wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Mouth? Forehead? She was warm, she was cold, she saw black stars. No, not stars. More like triangles twisting and turning, strung from the wires of an invisible mobile.
She had been walking no more than ten minutes when a patrol car stopped alongside her, lights flashing.
“That your Valiant back there?” the patrolman called out to her, lowering the window on the passenger side but not venturing from the car.
Was it? The question was more complicated than the young officer could know. Still, she nodded.
“You got any ID?”
“Sure,” she said, digging into her purse but not finding her wallet.
He got out of the patrol car and attempted to take the purse to look for himself. Her scream shocked her even more than it did him. There was a fiery pain in her left forearm when he tried to slide the purse past her elbow. The patrolman spoke into his shoulder, calling for assistance. He pocketed her keys from her purse, walked back to her car, and poked around inside, then returned and stood with her in the sleeting rain that had finally started. He mumbled some familiar words to her but was otherwise silent.
“Is it bad?” she asked him.
“That’s for a doctor to say when we get you to the ER.”
“No, not me. Back there.”
The distant whir of a helicopter answered her question.
“It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t control it-but still, I really didn’t do anything-”
“I’ve read you your rights,” he said. “The things you’re saying-they count. Not that there’s much doubt you left the scene of an accident.”
“I was going to get help.”
“This road dead-ends into a park-and-ride. If you really wanted to help them, you’d have pulled over back there or taken the Security Boulevard exit.”
“There’s the old Windsor Hills Pharmacy at Forest Park and Windsor Mill. I thought I could call from there.”
She could tell that caught him off guard, her use of precise names, her familiarity with the area.
“I don’t know of any pharmacy, although there’s a gas station there, but-Don’t you have a cell phone?”
“Not for my personal use, although I carry one at work. I don’t buy things until they work properly, until they’re perfected. Cell phones lose their connections and people have to yell into them half the time, so you can’t safeguard your privacy. When cells work as well as landlines, I’ll buy one.”
She heard her father’s echo. All these years later, he was in her head, his pronouncements as definitive as ever.
The young patrol officer regarded her gravely, the kind of awed inspection that good children reserve for those who have misbehaved. It was ludicrous that he could be so skeptical of her. In this light, in these clothes, the rain flattening her short, spiky curls, she probably looked younger than she was. People were always placing her at a full decade below her real age, even on those rare occasions when she dressed up. Cutting her long hair last year had only made her look younger still. It was funny about her hair, how stubbornly blond it remained at an age when most women needed chemicals to achieve this light, variable hue. It was as if her hair resented its years of forced imprisonment under those home applications of Nice’n Easy Sassy Chestnut. Her hair could hold a grudge as well as she could.
“ Bethany,” she said. “I’m one of the Bethany girls.”
“What?”
“You don’t know?” she asked him. “You don’t remember? But then I guess you’re all of, what-twenty-four? Twenty-five?”
“I’ll be twenty-six next week,” he said.
She tried not to smile, but he was so much like a toddler claiming two and a half instead of two. At what age do we stop wishing to be older than we are, stop nudging the number up? Around thirty for most, she assumed, although it had happened to her far earlier. By eighteen she would have done anything to renounce adulthood and be given another chance at childhood.
“So you weren’t even born when-And you’re probably not from here either, so no, the name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“Registration in the car says it belongs to Penelope Jackson, from Asheville, North Carolina. That you? Car didn’t come up stolen when I called the tag in.”
She shook her head. Her story would be wasted on him. She’d wait for someone who could appreciate it, who would understand the full import of what she was trying to tell him. Already she was making the calculations that had long been second nature. Who was on her side, who would take care of her? Who was against her, who would betray her?
At St. Agnes Hospital, she continued to be selectively mum, answering only direct questions about what hurt where. Her injuries were relatively minor-a gash to the forehead that required four tiny stitches, which she was assured would leave no visible scar, something torn and broken in her left forearm. The arm could be stabilized and bandaged for now but would require surgery eventually, she was told. The young patrolman must have passed along the Bethany name, for the billing person pressed her on it, but she refused to speak of it again no matter how they poked and prodded. Under ordinary circumstances she would have been treated and released. But this was far from ordinary. The police put a uniformed patrolman outside her door and told her that she was not free to leave even if the hospital determined it was appropriate. “The law is very clear on this. You must tell us who you are,” another cop told her, an older one, from traffic investigation. “If it weren’t for your injuries, you’d be in jail tonight.” Still she said nothing, although the thought of jail terrified her. To not be free to come and go as she liked, to be held anywhere-no, never again. The doctor entered the name “Jane Doe” on her chart, adding “
