Walter was walking back up to the rest stop. Jolie saw Becca as well, waiting for him. Danni continued to shove her head against the field. Jolie didn’t try to stop her. The only person who could get her to stop would be Matt, and the boy wanted to be alone.
“That didn’t go well,” Kent said.
Kent was looking in her direction, though not at her. The boy no longer saw. He only heard and spoke, and the second part of that was starting to fail.
When it comes to that, Matt had said, then I’ll do it.
“It went as well as it could have,” Jolie said.
Snowflakes fell all around them, and Jolie wished she felt them. She zapped a couple of them with her green lightning, but it wasn’t all that satisfying.
“That’s the problem,” Kent said. “Let’s be honest here, Walter isn’t going to hand Becca over. He said he would, but I doubt that there’s anything we could say or do to him to get him to pull forward with his side of the bargain.”
“He can’t stay in there forever,” Jolie said.
“He doesn’t have to,” Kent said. “All he has to do is stay in there until this blizzard is over. I can’t hear any cars in the immediate distance, but who knows, in a few hours if it stops snowing, maybe a plow or two will come by? How the hell are we going to explain this to them? I mean, look at me! I don’t have any arms or legs!”
“We can kill anyone who interferes,” Jolie said. The words felt like hot grease in her mouth.
“Oh right, like you honestly want to kill anyone else,” Kent said. “There’s only one person who needs to die tonight. Anyone else is more collateral.”
Behind them, Jolie saw bright blue light shoot up into the sky.
Matt shouldn’t have taken his mother’s NaU, but who else could have? If it went to Kent, then it would have accelerated the boy’s rotting. Jolie couldn’t take it, since it might hurt the baby. If Robbie had stayed and perhaps tried to figure some of these things out first, then none of them would be in this situation. Instead, he took his daughter and wife and more or less told these kids the news that he had essentially cursed them, and said that they didn’t matter. He didn’t even give an apology.
But Robbie did things without any caution. It doomed them all in the first place.
****
Jolie felt Matt’s wheelchair start to escape her grasp. She should have let him wheel himself in, but she was concerned that he might have another attack. Sure his father might think that he was weak for not being able to wheel himself into the house, but Jolie was confident that Nigel would think even less of his son if the boy had another episode or attack right in front of him.
She didn’t call after him as he made his way down to his room. He opened it and shut the door behind him, leaving her there.
Nigel was on her first.
Although the man had to look up at her, Jolie smelled the alcohol on his breath, laced with the despairing that seemed to seep into every pore of the man’s exterior. She almost pitied him, if she didn’t hate him, and of course, if he didn’t hate her.
“What happened?” Nigel said, crossing his arms.
Jolie looked down at him and shrugged.
“Nothing,” she said. “We had a fun time; that was all.”
“See,” Robbie said. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Why is there blood on your shirt?” Nigel said.
“We murdered a guy,” Jolie said. “Short guy too, had too much to drink. Danni and I cut his throat and threw him in the pigpen. You a fan of pigs, Nigel?”
“That’s Mr. Torres to you,” Nigel said. “Just like my son is a Torres and not a McCarthy.”
“Names aren’t that important,” Robbie said.
“Yes, pigs certainly don’t mind,” Jolie said.
Nigel squinted his eyes and turned away.
“He was out too late,” he said.
“It’s only nine,” Robbie said.
“Well, I felt a draft coming in,” Nigel said. “He’s never going to get better if you keep letting him go out this late.”
“He wanted some time with his friends,” Robbie said.
“Plenty of people,” Nigel said, “have done stupid things to hang out with their friends over the years. My son is no different. What if something happened?”
“If anything happened,” Robbie said. “Then I’m sure Jolie here would tell us, or at least ask for help on one thing or another . . ..”
And on and on their conflicts would go.
This wasn’t the first one of them that Jolie had been privy to over the years, and unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last. She liked hanging with Matt and being with him, and perhaps he felt the same. The two of them would go to the University of Albany together, and who knows? Maybe down the road, there would be a marriage in their future and a family.
Jolie had been coming to Matt’s house for years, back when they had only been friends with one another before the special “girl” and “boy” were added to the beginnings of those words.
The house was old, as Carol’s family had been old members of this town. Robbie was new, but he was a welcome change, even if he didn’t know how to change a tire or replace a calibrator in the middle of winter. He was an educated man who spent most of his time at his research facility. How Carol had made the shift from Nigel to Robbie, a doctor who did odd experiments up at his lab in Argyle, she might never know. It was a good change, to be sure, but Jolie was impressed at the woman’s flexibility with her preference for men.
Though the woman didn’t have much of a
