She shook her head, not understanding.
“Some other children went missing that year, Mrs. McNaughton, and at least one of them might be alive and well. My hope is that the same is true for Charlie.”
She looked at me and I saw a cautious happiness in her face. It made me feel guilty. “I hope so, too,” she said, and clasped her hands together as if in prayer.
I got up and took her hand, thanked her for her help. I promised to return her photograph and not to leave her only with questions. She stood at the door and held her hand up in a wave as I got into the Jeep and pulled up the gravel drive toward the highway. I was thinking that hope is not always a gift.
As I pulled onto Route 206, in the rearview mirror I saw a black 1969 Firebird with tinted windows approaching. My heart did a little dance and I pulled over to the side of the road, expecting to see the car pull up behind me. But it didn’t. It passed by, the engine revving as it did. Relief and disappointment duked it out in my chest. As I watched the car disappear around the next turn, I remembered then that Jake had said the police had impounded his car. I wasn’t ready to face him anyway, not with these new suspicions tugging at my pants leg. If he already knew about the other missing kids, then that meant he knew about Jessie Stone. He’d known before he even met me. I tried to think about what that might mean, and a thick curtain came down in my mind. I didn’t want to deal with it.
I pulled back onto the highway and drove toward Skully’s Mountain, on my way back to Hackettstown. In the absence of any better ideas, I thought I’d head to the clinic where Teresa Stone had taken Jessie. What was I going to do there? I didn’t really know. I was going to have to get creative. I was operating under a faith that the universe conspires to reveal the truth, that lies are unstable elements that tend toward breaking down.
The sky above me had gone a moody gray black, threatening snow. As I moved under a canopy of trees, it grew dark enough that I had to turn my headlights on. I drove through a small town center and turned off the main drag onto a smaller road that wound up Skully’s Mountain. It was a dark, narrow pass, and as I pulled over a small one-lane bridge at the base of a steep incline, I saw that it was edged only by a wooden guardrail protecting against a drop into a wide rushing river.
That was when I saw the Firebird again in my rearview mirror. How it had wound up behind me, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t make out the form of the driver, but something went dark and cold inside me. I put my foot down hard on the gas and the Jeep burned a little rubber as I took off up the incline.
But the Jeep couldn’t compete with the muscle of a Firebird. In a second, it was on top of me, its high beams reflecting blindingly in my mirrors. I felt a heavy thud as the car rammed me from behind. In the movies, when people get hit from behind, it never seems to be especially jarring. It felt to me like the earth below my car had shifted, as my head knocked forward and then snapped back hard. I was jolted and involuntarily let go of the wheel for a second. The Jeep veered sickenly toward the edge before I could grab the wheel again. I overcorrected and wound up swerving to the other lane and just pulled back as another car came around the bend, its horn wailing in alarm as it flew past.
Mortal terror slows everything down and I felt like I was in a time warp as the Firebird rammed me again. All I could hear was the sound of my own ragged breathing as we came up on the next hairpin turn. I pushed my foot down on the gas but the Firebird was too fast; it came up on me again harder than before. Tears sprang to my eyes, casting the road in a wet blur.
“Stop it!” I screamed at no one.
Another jolt sent the Jeep swerving into the oncoming lane. I hit the mountainside guardrail and saw sparks fly as the Jeep bounced off it. The Firebird pulled up quickly beside me so that I couldn’t get back over. I looked over and saw nothing but the tinted black window. Suddenly anger cleared the fog of fear that was clouding my brain. I didn’t know who was driving that car and I didn’t care. I turned the wheel sharply, slamming the side of the Jeep hard into the Firebird. They don’t call them muscle cars for nothing; it felt like I’d hit a stone wall. The car swerved a bit but held its ground. I was really pissed then. I slammed it again, harder, not caring if I took us both over the side of the mountain. We drove like that, racing, the chassis of our vehicles joined in a horrible screech of metal on metal. Then I saw the glow of approaching headlights just past the curve.
The Firebird wouldn’t give ground. I leaned on my horn, hoping to alert the oncoming driver that I was in his path. I knew if I slammed on my brakes on a curve like this, I’d flip the Jeep or still wind up in a head-on collision with the approaching car because I wouldn’t have time to get back over to the right side. I leaned on my horn again, praying that the driver heard me and would slow, but just then the Firebird gunned its engine and took off. I jerked the wheel and moved back into the right-hand lane, I swear, two seconds before a red Dodge truck came fast around the corner. The truck flew past me, an angry horn reprimanding me for my careless driving. I watched as the Firebird disappeared around the next curve.
I slammed on the breaks and sat there, my hands gripping the wheel, my teeth gritted, every muscle in my body on fire with adrenaline. I was shaking uncontrollably. I wept into the steering wheel until I saw a car approaching from behind. Then I drove shakily up the rest of the mountain and when I got to the other side pulled into a Burger King drive-through and got myself a chocolate milkshake and fries. Having almost been murdered on a mountain road, very possibly by the man I’d been recently sleeping with, I figured I owed it to myself. I sat in the parking lot quaking, crying, and shoving greasy French fries into my mouth as fast as I could without choking myself.
The thoughts in my brain were spinning. I found that I couldn’t really process what had just happened to me, what I was supposed to do next. I wasn’t able to identify the driver of the car, but it had to be Jake’s car. Had it been him at the wheel? Why would he want to hurt me? If not him, then who? How did they get his car? And over and over the same question: Why was any of this happening? As I sat sipping the milkshake, still shaking, that horrible feeling of aloneness settled in the marrow of my bones. But I’d stopped crying. I was beyond that now. I was out of tears.
When you discover that the foundation of your life has been constructed over a sinkhole and every wall has begun to crumble, what do you do? Where do you go? My mind drifted as thoughts that had no relevance to the moment presented themselves for consideration, as if to give my frazzled brain a little recovery time. For some reason, I thought about my mother.
Back in the years after I graduated from college, I took the 4/5 train every Wednesday and Friday to attend a yoga class on the Upper East Side. It was at a hideous time, six to seven-thirty in the morning, but I found that, if I could make it, it significantly improved the quality and productivity of my day. On a particularly cold February morning, I walked to Fourteenth Street in the early darkness and descended into the Union Square subway station. Still half asleep when the train arrived, I got on and sat down. The train paused in the station and I looked out the window. Fluttering there was a monarch butterfly. It seemed to hover beside the window as I stared at it in wonder. I thought, How could it be here, in this dark, underground place in winter? How could it survive in the cold? But there it was. I looked around the train to see if any of the other passengers noticed, but they were all dozing or reading. They all missed it, this tiny miracle. And when I looked back, it was gone. The doors closed and the train pulled from the station.
It occurred to me, not then but now as I sat in the parking lot in the likely totaled Jeep, that that was how I loved my mother. Behind glass in a train that was always leaving the station. My mother was someone you admired for her beauty, for her charm, for the strength of her character. But like that monarch butterfly, she was ultimately distant and elusive. Something to be glimpsed but not held. It might have been different if she hadn’t lost Ace. Because I think we all knew on some level that he was her one true love and that when he abandoned her, she never quite recovered. That for all the fire and conflict in their relationship, she adored him. There was a light that shone from within her when she looked at my brother. When he’d gone, the stage went dark. And we were all left to fumble around, finding new roles in her production.
I guess I hated her a little for that, as much as I loved her. In my most secret heart I always believed that if she could have chosen to lose one of us, it would have been me, that she would have traded me to have Ace back in a heartbeat. Maybe it wasn’t true, but I believed that through most of my adolescence and into adulthood.
Anyway, life doesn’t work like that. You can’t make trades. Or so I thought.
twenty-five
