And I, a child who’d grown up like Eloise at the Plaza, eating pâté de foie gras before I could pronounce it, suddenly found myself in the middle of a nowhere that I now, nearly twenty years later, called home.
So my father’s question, seemingly vague, was really direct and to the point. My mother, married to two consecutive brothers, had actually stopped drinking during Earnest’s lifetime. Knowing her as he did, though, Earnest left all his money to Sam, with a proviso to take care of her and of me “as he deems best.” And now Sam himself was dead. In all likelihood his death made me a multimillionaire.
Uncle Earnest died seven years ago, when I was off at college, and none of us had seen Sam since. He simply vanished. Jersey and I got our checks every month. She drank hers, and I put mine into an account and left it there. Meanwhile, I did something radical, something the Behn family women had never done. I got a job.
It was when I started working as a nuclear security officer, my first week on the job, that I heard from Sam. He phoned my office, though God knows how he knew where I was.
“Hi, hotshot,” Sam said—his favorite name for me ever since we were children. “You’ve broken a family tradition: no high notes or high kicks in the chorus line?”
“‘Life upon the wicked stage ain’t ever what a girl supposes,’” I quoted from my vast, unsolicited musical repertoire. But was I ever happy to hear his voice. “Where have you been all these years, blood brother? You don’t need gainful employment, I gather, now that you’re the full-time family benefactor. Thanks for all the checks.”
“In fact,” Sam corrected me, “I’m gainfully employed by a variety of governments that shall remain unnamed. I provide a service no one else can—with the possible exception of those who’ve been hand-trained by me: a group of one. Maybe one day you’ll consider going into a joint venture?”
And the cryptic hint of a job offer was the last I’d heard of Sam until my phone call from the executor.
I felt the tires start to suck under the snow. The whole car was sliding, pulling with a riptide force off the road.
Adrenaline gushed as I snapped to and gripped the steering wheel. Throwing my whole weight behind it, I yanked those massive tons of steel back from the edge of the shoulder. But now I was hurtling in the opposite direction, out of control.
Bloody hell, I couldn’t run off the road! There was nothing out there but snow and more snow. It was so black, the snowfall so thick, I couldn’t even see what was beyond the road on either side—maybe a sheer drop. I heard my mind, as if inside a well, screaming “Fool! Fool!” while I racked my brain trying to recall when I’d passed the last light in the abyss out there. Fifty miles back? A hundred?
As these panicky thoughts ran through my mind I was still able, with that dual processing ability we come equipped with, to marshal my muscles and juices to bring the car back under control. I rocked it back and forth like a yo-yo, trying to prevent it from spinning out, trying to feel beneath me—as I would under a pair of skis—the tires hydroplane on the new snow that had now formed a slick, waxy surface atop the deeper, and lethal, layer of diamond-hard black ice.
It seemed forever until I felt I was winning the wrestling match, and the rhythm of the thousands of pounds of steel started to move toward a center of balance. I was shaking like a leaf as I let it slow to thirty, twenty-five. I took a deep breath and nudged it back up, knowing like every mountain girl that you never stop completely when the snow’s coming down like that, or you may never get momentum again.
As I moved on into the black and empty night, casting up prayers of gratitude, I slapped my face a few times, hard, and rolled down the car window to let the blizzard come in and swirl around inside. Needles of snow cut my skin. I took a deep breath of icy air and held it in my lungs for a minute. I wiped my stinging eyes with the back of my glove, then yanked off the ski cap I’d been wearing and shook my hair around wildly in the whirling wind that was battering around inside the car, blowing bits of paper in its wake. By the time I rolled the window back up, I had returned to reality, greatly sobered. What the hell was wrong with me?
Of course, I knew what was wrong. Sam was dead, and I was having trouble visualizing life on this planet without him. It was what a schizophrenic might call being “beside yourself” with grief. Though I hadn’t seen or heard much from Sam these past seven years, he was always there in everything I did. In a way, he was the only really close family I’d ever had. For the first time I realized that in his absence I had conversations with him in my mind. Now I had no one to talk to, even in my head.
Still I wasn’t about to join Sam in the happy hunting grounds this moment. Certainly not by flunking an intelligence test out here on the midnight road. It was then that I noticed a glow in the distance that I could just make out through the thick lacy curtain of snow. It was large enough to be a town, and there weren’t that many out here in the high desert. It looked like home to me.
But the adventure was not quite over.
I pulled up on the road above the house that
