by Blake Crouch
"No," she says. "We never come back."
# # #
At some point during the night, Vi lifts Max from his place between us, and puts him to bed on his pallet on the floor. She climbs back under the covers and snuggles up beside me.
I’m awake. I don’t anticipate sleeping tonight.
"Will you hold me?" she asks.
I raise my arm and she rests her head on my shotgun-bruised shoulder. It’s cold in this room. Most of our clothes lie drying in the bathtub.
Vi drapes her leg over mine and whispers, "What are we going to do tomorrow?"
I cup her face in my hands.
Last two souls on the face of the Earth.
There are things I want to say to her—shards of comfort and warmth and nothing’s as bad as it seems and no you are not a bad person and yes we did the right thing today.
But they would be lies, and we are so far beyond that now.
# # #
I don’t sleep.
Before dawn, I slip out of the room and walk down to the beach. I sit in soft sand, watch the tide push in. The lights of a shrimp boat shine several miles out. No sound save the breakers.
A lean and tall older gentleman jogs past, northbound toward the five a.m. twinkling of Kill Devil Hills. As I watch him dwindling up the coast, it hits me—there are people who will live eighty-five years and never know a fraction of the horror I experienced yesterday.
Sure, they’ll mourn the passing of parents, a spouse, close friends.
They might suffer the depression of living a life of compromise.
Shit jobs. Marginalization. Termination. Resignation. Envy.
They’ll see wars on television—children pulled out from rubble in scorched, bullet-ridden rags, maimed and dead.
But they will not know gunning a young woman down on a tidal flat to save themselves. Won’t face the knowledge that they’re capable. How easily they’d do it. That the squalor of humanity, broadcast by grim robots on the evening news, abides also in them.
Their decency is a luxury, their violence sleeps for now, those whose monsters are car wrecks and cancer and the boredom of the suburbs, those who believe goodness is the prevailing station of our species. Their age of civilization and progress is a flicker in the dark eternity of violence.
Now light tinges the Outer Banks with a soft peach stain.
I watch a fisherman wade out into the warm surf.
Gulls are crying, Nags Head waking, that delicate hour of the morning gone as the Earth turns into the sun’s dominion, a cuticle of pink fire peeking over the edge of the sea.
# # #
I climb into bed and spoon Vi. She stirs. I stroke her yellow hair, still damp from last night’s bath, smelling faintly of that cheap motel conditioner.
"Oh, Max," she murmurs. "I want to…yeah."
She turns over. Smiling. At peace.
When her eyes open, they die.
"I was dreaming."
"It was a nice one."
"Yeah. You shaved. I like it."
She sits up, crawls to the end of the bed, and peers down at her son.
"Where’d you go this morning, Andy?"
"Down to the beach. Watched the sun come up."
"I didn’t think you were coming back. Thought that’s how you were going to do it. Just slip away, back to your paradise."
I hear the baby’s soft cry. Vi leans down, lifts him up.
"Are you hungry, little baby boy?" she coos.
Vi slides off the bed and comes to her feet, standing there in panties and undershirt, Max groping at her breasts.
"I’m ready, Andy," she says.
"Ready?"
"To go home."
# # #
I drive 64 west, over the long bridges that span the sounds of Roanoke and Croaton and the Alligator River. We rise and rise above the ocean. The flatness of the coastal plain gives way to rolling pasture and forest, the consistency of the soil turning from sand to rich red clay, those toothpick pines of the eastern swamps now crowded and lost among maple and hickory.
It feels strange to be inland. The farther from the sea we run, the Outer Banks seem more like afterimages of dreams. It would be so easy and comforting to find atonement in the remoteness and disorientation of our imprisonment. I glance at Vi, wondering if she’ll coax the last nine months and what she did on Portsmouth into donning the aura of a brutal fantasy, one more nightmare to repress.
At four o’clock, we skirt the south side of Raleigh and bore westward, across Jordan Lake, through Pittsboro, Siler City, and Ramseur. We enter the town of Lexington as the sun balances on the horizon, so blinding I can scarcely see the road.
"You hungry?" I ask, catching Vi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
She sits in the back nursing Max.
"I could eat."
"Best barbeque joint on the planet is just ahead. How about we stop there? Besides, the car’s running hot."
"Fine. I need to change Max anyway."
I pull the Kites’ Impala into the crowded parking lot of Lexington Barbeque # 1.
We walk together, like a family, to the back of the line that snakes out of the front doors.
"Whole fuckin’ town’s here tonight," Vi says.
"Yeah, well, it’s what they call good eatin’."
The evening is muggy and clear, and the hickory-fueled fire inside the kitchen spits the sweetest-smelling smoke up the chimney and out into the cooling night, no greater tease in the world if you’re hungry.
As we inch toward the doors, I glance at the families who’ve come out for their Friday night dinner, innocuous and tame, a cheery hopeless bunch, moving orderly and herd-like toward the feeding trough. They talk of church and jobs and things they want to buy at Wal-Mart. They feel so ordinary and safe.
We finally make it inside, find a pair of vacant stools at the counter, and order two large plates. They come in a hurry—chopped pork shoulder, red slaw, hushpuppies, and tall Styrofoam cups of sweet tea. I haven’t had western-style North Carolina barbeque in ages, and it’s better than I remember it.
I finish long before Vi and ask for a piece of peach cobbler.
Max squirms in her lap, making it difficult for her to eat.
"Let me hold him for you," I offer, taking the infant under his arms and lifting him into my lap. I dandle Max on my leg and he smiles.
An older woman on her way to the cash register stops and makes silly faces at him.
The waitress brings my cobbler and a scoop of vanilla ice cream that has already begun to melt. As I stab my fork into a steaming peach slice, Vi says, "I’ve been thinking."
"Yeah?"
"About what I’m going to say happened. I mean, this is all I’ve thought about in the car today."
She glances over her shoulder and then continues, her voice lower, barely more than a whisper above the din of restaurant noise.
"I leave you in a motel in Davidson tonight. We have just enough cash left. Then I go home. I’m sure Max thinks I’m dead. Everyone’ll want to know what happened. It’ll be crazy. I’ll tell them most of the truth. About Rufus and Maxine. About Luther."
"About Portsmouth?"
"What good would that do? I’ll make you a hero, Andy. Say you saved our lives, but that I left you in Ocracoke. Took the car, got the hell out of there. No one will question me running after what I’ve been through. I dare them to.
"And tomorrow, I find a way to come to you. I’ll bring money. We have some savings, enough to get you home, back to your paradise."
"Vi—"
"Shut up, Andy. This’ll work. You’re innocent. I know that now. But to everyone else, you’re the Heart Surgeon. They don’t know about Orson. What he made you do. All they know is your face, the Washington Boxes, bodies dug up at your home on Lake Norman, the rumors, the—"
"You think I’m innocent, Vi? Think you are?"
Vi glares at me as if I’ve slapped her. She takes Max and storms out of the restaurant. I leave a twenty wi
th the check under my ice-filled cup and follow her back to the car.
She’s sitting in the front passenger seat when I climb behind the wheel and close the door. We stare through the bug-splattered windshield at families lumbering toward the restaurant.
"Andy," she says, her voice holding at a whisper, as though volume might break it, "you tell me right now what else we were supposed to do."
"I don’t know."
"Well, I have to know that what I did to that poor boy—"
"There are no answers, Vi. All I’m saying is we aren’t innocent. Me especially. You had a son to protect. You did it for Max. I did it for me."
"But they’d have killed him if you didn’t—"
"I’m telling you, Vi, I did it for me."
She lifts Max up so that his tiny head rests on her shoulder. His eyes begin to glaze and close. He sleeps.
"Only way I’m gonna be able to go on, is if I know there was no other way. That I had to do it. That my son would’ve died if I didn’t."
"Then believe that. But I’ve had enough."
"What are you talking about?"
"I can’t go back to Haines Junction and pretend like none of this happened. Hide in the woods till I’m eighty. I’ve killed two people in my life, Vi. Because I was scared of dying. Orson and Rufus were right about me—"
"Andy—"
"No. They were. That’s the kind of man I am. I have murder in my heart. But so do you. So does that little girl walking between her parents. So does your sleeping baby boy."
"I don’t believe that."
"Fine. Believe whatever it takes so you can look yourself in the mirror and not shudder. I can’t anymore. That’s why I’m doing this."
Her voice quivers: "Doing what?"
I hand Vi the car keys.
"Surrendering. To you. Right now. I want you to take me to your precinct tonight. I’m done, Vi."
"Are you crazy?"
Her voice wakes Max. The baby emits a feeble cry.
"You want to go to prison?"
"Think that’s how it’ll end up?"
"Andy, it won’t be too difficult for them to pin murders on you you didn’t do, considering where they found some of those bodies."
"I don’t care. I’m going to tell them the truth. What they do with me is out of my control."
"You gonna tell them about Portsmouth?"
"I’m going to tell them the truth, Vi."
Crying now, "About me killing that boy?"
"I don’t know."
"Andy, please. Let me help you. You feel like this right now, but will you feel like this for the next fifteen years? Or the rest of your life? Do you honestly want to rot in prison?"
I sigh, lean back into the warm vinyl, the summer sky now fading into dusk. I can’t imagine next week. Can’t even see tomorrow. I could cry, but I don’t.
"Look, if I don’t do this, I won’t last. I’ll get up to the Yukon, kill myself. I’m close to it now. I want to. There’s comfort in the idea of it. Please do this for me, Vi. Please."
# # #
Vi guides us home—64 to Statesville, I-77 to Davidson. I sit in the passenger seat holding Max, asleep in my arms, watching rivers of carlight streaming south toward Charlotte.
As we cross Lake Norman, rimmed with the light of wealth, I think of my old home, glowing somewhere out there in a distant cove.
Vi reaches over, steadies my hands.
# # #
The knot in my stomach tightens when she veers onto Exit 30. I shut my eyes, feel the car come to rest at the stoplight. Ten seconds. Accelerating again. Turning left. Cruising through Davidson, the college close now. In the autumn, I’d take a manuscript and spread a blanket out on the grass of its lovely campus, surrounded by those tall, molting trees.
We make a right onto Jackson Street, my heart throbbing. After several blocks, we turn again. The car stops, Vi shifts into park, and the engine dies.
My eyes open. We’re parked in front of the Davidson Police Department.
It’s real now.
Vi says, "Sure you don’t want us to make a go of it up in Canada? Speak now or forever."
She’s kidding, but it sounds forced, her voice thick with tears. I look at her and see that she’s aching to be home. To forget.
"Better take him." I hand Max over, careful not to wake him. "Will you come in with me?"
"I need to go home, Andy. They’ll try to keep me here, and I want to see my husband before the madness starts."
I’ve gone short of breath.
"So just walk in there, huh?"
"Tell them who you are, that you’re turning yourself in."
I notice two men in plainclothes sitting on a bench near the entrance, having a good laugh. One of them gets up and staggers around, impersonating what can only be a bombed sobriety test.
"You’ll be all right, Vi?"
"Sure."
I open the door, step outside, and close it. The window is down. I peer back through it. Vi reaches out, squeezes my hand.
I walk toward the entrance. When I reach the sidewalk, I glance back, see Vi sitting in the Kites’ Impala, her pretty face lit by a streetlamp, crying.
I hear one of those men near the entrance say, "And this fuckwit didn’t even know he had the stop sign wrapped around his bumper. He’d been draggin’ the damn thing for two miles. I just followed the trail of sparks!"
The approach of my footsteps arrests their harsh laughter.
They exchange looks of fleeting embarrassment, caught in a moment of levity. Wiping their eyes, they regard me with the newfound scowls of lawmen, beefy blonds, clean-shaven, with hard, alert eyes and trimmed mustaches that blend into their pale faces.
I address the man who’s standing.
"You fellas police officers?"
"I am," he says.
The engine of the Impala roars to life.
"Could we have a word in private, please?"
# # #
The first thing Vi notices are the forsythia bushes. They were seedlings when she and Max planted them last September. In her absence, they’ve shot up nearly to the windows. She can’t bare to wonder what else has grown and changed and died.
She parks on the street and turns off the engine. Arcadia Acres twinkles in what she takes for eight p.m. silence, but as she gazes across the treeless subdivision at all the glowing houses, she detects a symphony.
Here are the instruments: whisper of lawn sprinklers, hammering, crickets, voices passing through thin walls, the mechanical tone of the nearby interstate. Suburban music. Fruit of a peaceful species. Vi basks in it. Lets it speak to her. Anesthetize her.
This is the norm. This is what is real.
She lifts Max from the passenger seat and opens the door.
As she walks around the car and onto the upward-sloping driveway, she notices that the garage door is open. A man kneels inside on the concrete, gently tapping a nail into a board. His back is to her, the shape of his body indistinct in the weak illumination of the overhead light bulb. Only when she stops, ten feet away, does she know with certainly that this man is her husband.
The tears begin to roll as she stands there, watching him start the nail. From the back, he seems to have lost his lean runner’s physique.
Max raises the hammer, strikes the nail with a concussive clack that startles Max Jr.
When the infant cries out, the man glances back.
A ghost stands in the driveway with a child in its arms.
# # #
In the late summer of twenty twenty-two, I was on the plains of west Kansas.
I was three days out from North Carolina, en route to Denver, to be interviewed by a reporter who had something I very much wanted back. She’d purchased an old manuscript of mine at auction for an embarrassing price. It had been taken from my cabin in Haines Junction, Yukon, many years ago when I was newly incarcerated. But instead of publishing it, she’d called me, informed me of her recent acquisition, and offered to return it on
the condition that I agree to an exclusive interview, that would serve as the basis for my only authorized biography: Life of Darkness: The Andrew Thomas Story.
I quit the interstate two hours shy of the Colorado border and drove into the town of Voda, Kansas. I checked into the only motel in town, The Voda Inn, and walked three blocks to The Voda Restaurant, adjacent to Voda Pawn, and across the street from Voda Auto, Voda Video, and Voda Liquor.
The seeming inconsequence of the town was only amplified by its position on the immense prairie. It was just a black speck on my roadmap, the sort of place you pass through in wonderment that people actually live there. So isolated, so dwarfed by the expanse of land and sky, it seemed it should have all the permanence of a solitary raindrop in a desert, and yet it held on, defying evaporation.
It was near dusk as I strolled the sidewalk toward the restaurant.
Three boys skateboarded down the center of Voda Street. I sat down on a bench to rest my legs and watch them. You could see the prairie behind the motel, glowing bronze in the sun, going on forever.
The hideous lighting and putrid jazz endeared the Voda Restaurant to me immediately. I imagined this place was a hot reservation on prom night and Valentine’s Day. It was rural fancy, the cloth napkins and suited host undermined by the linoleum flooring and tire store light fixtures. I even detected a faint rubbery odor.
Marge, my sturdily-hefted waitress, seated me in a corner. As I browsed the menu, I heard voices slipping through a cracked door in the back wall. I thought it might be a waiter calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering there were only two other customers, that seemed unlikely.
Leaving my table, I walked over to the door and nudged it open.
"B-eleven."
"Hit."
I peered into a private room, roughly half the size of the main dining hall.
A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of Battleship.
Marge came up behind me holding a pitcher of ice water.
"It’s a very important match," she whispered. "They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few months. Tonight’s the championship."
I returned to my table and let Marge read the longest description of a special I’d ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in three hundred words. She couldn’t stop smiling and brushing her ashen hair behind her ears.