he drove, the further his thoughts were pulled into the past. Images streaked by with the mile markers: strange adventures in the Pine Barrens, Mr. Canelli and his lawn...early fix-it jobs around Burlington County during his late teens, usually involving vandals, always contracted
Tension began building in him after he passed Exit 7. Jack knew the reason: He was approaching the spot where his mother had been killed.
It was also the spot where he had—how had Kolabati put it?—'drawn the line between yourself and the rest of the human race.'
It had happened during his third year at Rutgers. A Sunday night in early January. Jack was on semester break, he and his parents driving south on the Turnpike after visiting his Aunt Doris in Hightstown; Jack had the back seat, his folks the front, Dad driving. Jack had offered to take the wheel, but his mother said the way he wove in and out of all those trucks made her nervous.
As he remembered it, he and his father had been discussing the upcoming Super Bowl while his mother watched the speedometer to make sure it didn't stray too far over the limit. The easy, peaceful feeling that comes with a full stomach after a lazy winter afternoon spent with relatives was shattered as they cruised under an overpass.
With a crash like thunder and an impact that shook the car, the right half of the windshield exploded into countless flying, glittering fragments. He heard his father shout with surprise, his mother scream in pain, felt a blast of icy air rip through the car. His mother moaned and vomited.
As his father swerved the car to the side of the road, Jack jumped into the front seat and realized what had happened: A cinder block had crashed through the windshield and landed against his mother's lower ribs and upper abdomen.
Jack didn't know what to do. As he watched helplessly, his mother passed out and slumped forward. He shouted to get to the nearest hospital. His father drove like a demon, flooring the pedal, blowing the horn and blinking the headlights while Jack pushed his mother's limp body back and pulled the cinder block off her. Then he removed his coat and wrapped it around her as protection against the cold gale whistling through the hole in the windshield.
His mother vomited once more—this time all blood, splattering the dashboard and what was left of the windshield. As he held her, Jack could feel her growing cold, could sense the life slipping out of her. He knew she was bleeding internally, but there was nothing he could do about it. He screamed at his father to hurry, but he was already driving as fast as he could without losing control of the car.
She was in deep shock by the time they got her to the emergency room. She died on the way to surgery: a lacerated liver and a ruptured spleen. She’d exsanguinated into her abdominal cavity.
The incalculable grief. The interminable wake and funeral. And afterward, questions:
His father withdrew: the senselessness of the tragedy had thrown him into a sort of emotional catatonia in which he appeared to function normally but felt absolutely nothing.
Jack's response was something else: cold, nerveless, consuming rage. He was faced with a new kind of fix-it job. He knew where it had happened. He knew how. All he had to do was find out who.
He would do nothing else, think of nothing else, until that job was done.
And eventually it
A lifetime ago. Yet as he approached that overpass he felt his throat constrict. He could almost see a cinder block falling...tumbling toward the windshield...crashing through in a blizzard of glass fragments...crushing him. Then he was under and in shadow, and for an instant it was nighttime and snowing, and hanging off the other side of the overpass he saw a limp, battered body dangling from a rope tied to its feet, swinging and spinning crazily. Then it was gone and he was back in the August sun again.
He shivered. He hated New Jersey.
4
Jack got off at Exit 5. He took 541 through Mount Holly and continued south on the two-lane blacktop through towns that were little more than groups of buildings clustered along a stretch of road like a crowd around an accident. The spaces between were all open cultivated field. Fresh produce stands advertising Jersey Beefsteak tomatoes dotted the roadside. He reminded himself to pick up a basketful for Abe on the way back.
He passed through Lumberton, a name that always conjured up ponderous images of morbidly obese people waddling in and out of oversized stores and houses. Next came Fostertown, which should have been populated by a horde of homeless runny-nosed waifs, but wasn't.
Finally, Johnson, NJ, on the edge of the fabled Jersey Pine Barrens.
And then he was turning the corner by what had been Mr. Canelli's house. Canelli had died and the new owner must have been trying to save water, because the lawn had burned to a uniform shade of pale brown. He pulled into the driveway of the three-bedroom ranch in which he, his brother, and his sister had all grown up, turned off the car, and sat a moment wishing he were someplace else.
No sense in delaying the inevitable, so he got out and walked up to the door. Dad pushed it open just as he reached it.
'Jack!' He thrust out his hand. 'You had me worried. Thought you'd forgotten.'
His father was a tall, thin, balding man tanned a dark brown from daily workouts on the local tennis courts. His beakish nose was pink and peeling from sunburn, and the age spots on his forehead had multiplied and coalesced since the last time Jack had visited. But his grip was firm and his blue eyes bright behind the steel-rimmed glasses as Jack shook hands with him.
'Only a few minutes late.'
Dad reached down and picked up his tennis racquet from where it had been leaning against the door molding. 'Yeah, but I reserved a court so we could warm up a little before the match.' He closed the door behind him. 'Let's take your car. You remember where the courts are?'
