I kept the phone open on my lap and waited. It wouldn’t be much of a task to simply hit Dre over the head, take the cross, and disappear into the woods with Sophie, the cross, and my peace of mind. My left hand clenched the door handle. I flexed the fingers, relaxed. Ten seconds later, I found myself clenching the handle again.
The cell phone screen lit up:
Patience, patience.
In the woods, the yellow light reappeared. It hovered, steady, about three feet off the ground.
My cell vibrated, but it wasn’t a text this time, it was an incoming call from a restricted number.
“Hello.”
“Hey, my…” Yefim’s voice dropped out for a second. “… you at?”
“What?”
“I said where…?”
The phone went dead in my ear.
I heard something thunk into the gravel on the near side of the platform. I peered out the windshield, but I couldn’t see anything, with the hood of the Saab in the way. I kept looking anyway, because that’s what you do. I gave the wipers a quick flick on and off and sloughed off the snow. A few seconds later, Dre appeared at the same spot in the woods where he’d vanished. He was moving fast. He was alone.
My phone vibrated. I heard a horn. I looked down and saw RESTRICTED NUMBER on my screen.
“Hello?”
“Where you?”
“Yefim?”
The windshield vanished behind a cloak of mud. The Saab shook so hard the dashboard rattled. The seat shimmied beneath me. An empty coffee cup tipped out of the cup holder and fell to the floor mat on the passenger side.
“Patrick?… you go… I no… stage.”
I flicked on the wipers. The mud swept right and left, thinner than mud, I realized, as an Acela blew through the station. “Yefim? You keep dropping out.”
“Can… hear… guy?”
I got out of the car because I couldn’t see Dre anymore, noticed my hood was speckled with whatever had hit my windshield.
“I can hear you now. Can you hear me?”
Dre wasn’t on the platform.
He was nowhere.
“I… fuck…”
The connection died. I flipped my phone closed, looked left and right down the platform. No Dre.
I turned back around and looked down the line of cars beside my own. There were six of them, spread out, but I saw the same liquid splashed across their hoods and windshields under the weak white lights. The Acela had vanished into the trees, going the kind of fast you thought only jets could go. The wet cars and wet platform glistened with something besides melting snow.
I turned my head, looked at the platform, turned again, looked at the cars.
Dre wasn’t anywhere.
Because Dre was everywhere.
I found a flashlight and two plastic supermarket bags in the trunk of Dre’s car. I put the bags over my shoes and used the handles to tie knots around my ankles. Then I walked through the blood to the platform. I found one of his shoes down the track, tucked into the inside of the rail. I found what could have been an ear a few feet farther down on the platform. Or it could have been part of a nose. Apparently, an Acela going top-speed didn’t run you over; it blew you up.
On my walk back up the tracks, I spotted a shoulder between the track and the woods. That was the last of Dre I ever saw.
I went to the spot where he’d entered and exited the woods. I shone my flashlight in there, but all I could see were dark trees with clumps of leaves pooled at their bases. I could have gone in farther, but (a) I don’t like woods; and (b) I was running out of time. The Acela passed through Mansfield station, three miles up, and there was a chance someone would spot blood on the front of it or along the side.
Yefim, I could assume, had long since left and taken Sophie and the cross with him.
I walked back across the tracks and at first I didn’t compute what I saw there. Part of me understood it enough to hold the flashlight beam in place, but the other half of me couldn’t make sense of it.
I bent by the gravel between the tracks and the fence that rimmed the parking lot. I’d heard a thunk as it landed, as someone, for who knew what reason, tossed it from the woods to the other side of the tracks. And Dre had come rushing out after it and stepped into the path of over six hundred tons of steel traveling 160 miles an hour.
The Belarus Cross.
I pinched the top left corner of it and lifted it out of the gravel. It was speckled with evaporating snow that revealed it was as bloody as the windshields in the parking lot, as bloody as the platform and the trees and the stairs I descended to Dre’s car. I popped the trunk and sat on the edge and removed the plastic bags and placed them in a third plastic bag. I found a rag in the trunk, and I used it to wipe off the cross as best I could. I tossed the rag into the plastic bag and tied off the handles. I took the bag and the cross up front with me and placed them on the passenger seat and got the hell out of Dodgeville.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was only one pediatrician in a fifteen-mile radius of Becket, a Dr. Chimilewski, two towns over in Huntington. When Amanda pulled up in front of the office at ten the next morning, I stayed where I was and let her go inside and keep her appointment. I sat in Dre’s car and replayed the conversation I’d had with Yefim on my way out of Dodgeville. He’d called me minutes after I left the train station and nothing we’d discussed made any sense yet.
When Amanda came out twenty minutes later, I was waiting with a cardboard cup of coffee that I offered to her. “I guessed cream, no sugar.”
“I can’t drink coffee,” she said. “It aggravates my ulcer. But thanks for the thought.”
She clicked the remote on her car to unlock the doors and came around me with the baby in the car seat. I opened the door for her.
“You can’t have an ulcer. You’re sixteen years old.”
She snapped the car seat into its base in the backseat. “Tell that to my ulcer. I’ve had it since I was thirteen.”
I stepped back as she closed the door on Claire.
“She okay?”
She looked through the window at the baby. “Yeah. She’s just got that rash. No cause. They said it’ll go away, just like Angie said. They said babies get rashes.”
“Hard, though, right? All these things that could be real health scares turn out to be absolutely nothing, but you never know so you got to get it checked out.”
She gave me a small and weary smile. “I keep thinking they’re going to throw me out next time.”
“They don’t throw you out for being too careful about your child.”
“No, but they tell jokes about you, I’m sure.”
“Let ’em tell jokes.”
