This John fella sounded a lot better than the guy who got her pregnant. “What happened?”
“Same shit that always happens. He only thought with his dick. I wanted The Notebook romance, and he wanted to bang me.”
I cringed.
“No, it didn’t happen,” she said. “I avoided him after he sent me the first dick pic.”
“First?”
“Of many. John was a capital ‘P’ Pervert. He sent me one on Snapchat not too long before all this happened.” She nodded toward the windshield, out at the falling snow. “The message said ’Still yours if you want it, babe.’ I sent back ‘Maybe…’ Of course, being the perv he is, he took the bait and asked me to send him a picture of my tits. So I sent him the most disgusting image of swollen cow udders a Google search could find, and that was the last I heard from him.” She cackled.
“Should’ve called the cops. I’m pretty sure you can’t just send pictures of your dong to people. It’s sexual harassment or something.”
“Weren’t you a cop?”
“Fireman.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well, if I called the cops every time I got a surprise dick pic on Snapchat or Tinder, they woulda blocked my number.”
I shook my head. “I could never be a woman.”
“Sure you could. Just put on a wig and tuck it in.”
“Tuck it in?”
She pointed below my belt.
“That’s not what I meant, but you’re disgusting, Mia.”
She laughed again, and I laughed with her, glad she was distracted. Her laughter, however, abruptly stopped and turned into a grunt of pain. Her body was gearing up for another contraction.
Through her short, sharp breaths, she whispered, “I’m not gonna make it.”
I barely heard her over the roar of the engine, which I had been pushing to its absolute limit for the better part of the hour we’d been on the road.
“What?”
“This…it’s going to kill me. I can feel it. It’s k-karma. OH…FUCKKKKKKK!”
“Breathe, Mia. Breathe.” Those words had become our mantra—that, and “fuck.”
“Karma for being a shitty puh-person. Karma for fightin’ with my m-mom and k-killin’ Billy.”
I gave her my hand. As she squeezed, my knuckles ground together until I was sure the bones had fractured. “Keep breathing, it’s gonna pass. Forty-five seconds, that’s it, and then you’re home free.”
I guided the snowmobile out from the cover of trees as the road curved like the map said it would, and that was when something in the distance caught my attention. I guessed it was only half a mile away, and easy to see in the darkness.
It was a gray tower standing nearly two hundred feet on a rise of snow-covered land.
A light shone at its apex.
A beacon.
Hope.
I pulled my hand from Mia’s weakening grip and shouted, “Look!”
She gave no reply. When I turned to her, I saw her eyes rolling to the back of her head. Her body had gone limp, and she was sliding to the floor.
“NO-NO-NO! MIA!”
I grabbed her arm and shook, thinking she was dead. The whole time, I hadn’t slowed down. Nor were my eyes on the expanse of white in front of us.
“MIA, WAKE UP! MIA!”
She jolted.
“Mia, stay with me!” I shouted. “We’re almost there! Five more minutes!”
She mumbled something. I had no idea what she said; her voice was too thick with pain and exhaustion to understand.
I looked down at the seat. Blood. Even more than I’d seen earlier. Warm and sticky. Steam radiated from it in wispy white waves. My stomach dropped—not with sickness but with fear.
That much blood… These conditions…
Things were only getting worse.
And worse.
A loud clank rattled from somewhere beneath my feet. I had hit something. In the frosty rearview, I saw a metal object sticking out of the snow. I thought it was the roof of a covered bus stop waiting area, but I wasn’t sure. Whatever the case, the snowmobile shook and one of the skis cracked. At the same time, as we listed to the left, the headlights flickered, went out, and then came back on at about twenty percent power. A wire must’ve come loose.
As I righted the sled with a few harsh jerks on the wheel, Mia began rolling off of the seat. I shot a hand out to grab her before she could land on her belly. All her weight (dead weight, my brain whispered) bent my elbow back, and I bellowed in pain.
She wasn’t dead. I knew this because she turned her head and vomited. It was mostly frothy white spittle, but there were flecks of blood in it. Her head lolled as she moaned. I reached over and cleared as much of the sick as I could from her mouth. Meanwhile, the snowmobile dragged to the broken side again, and I snapped both hands back on the wheel.
The lighthouse, I told myself. The lighthouse, the lighthouse, the lighthouse.
It was growing closer, but at what seemed like an insanely slow rate.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it...” Mia murmured. “It was an accident, Ma. I promise…”
Still talking. Delirious, but still talking. I thought that was a good sign. I didn’t want to lose either one of them, her or the baby, but if I lost both…I wasn’t sure how I’d find the strength to continue.
The windows had fogged over. I could barely see through the windshield. I swiped away the condensation in a series of tiny arcs, moving as quickly as I could, still fighting with the steering wheel to keep us in a straight line.
In the seconds before the glass fogged over again, the dimmed headlight illuminated the outline of a covered bridge. The covered bridge Ramsey had told me about before we fled, which meant that beyond the heavy curtain of snow, the City’s gates awaited us.
Once you get through it, you’re just about home free, Grady. That is, if they even let your asses in…
“Oh, they’ll let us in,” I whispered. “I’ll make
