They watched as the girl got out of the driver’s side and went around to open the passenger door and a lady with a coat slung over her head so no one could see her face came out and the girl and two women, wearing high-vis vests, ushered her through the doors of the clinic, none of them listening to a word the people around them were saying, or looking at the pictures of these innocent babies, or paying them any heed at all, just heads down and straight inside like they couldn’t wait to murder another baby. Like they didn’t care in the least.
Well, after that, he’d seen enough. He took the pamphlets and Ken’s number and shook hands with the people standing out there in the baking heat and he promised them all that he would read up on things and maybe join them next time. They were all such nice people. Very welcoming, which he thought everyone could agree was rare these days.
His sister wasn’t too pleased when he took the pamphlets out after dinner and started flipping through them. Said something about those people being zealots and having no right to tell her what she could or could not do with her body and how she wouldn’t stand having that propaganda in her house and that Bonnie would have agreed with her, too, which was when he got really mad, because why did she have to bring Bonnie into all this? How could she presume to know more about his wife than he did?
There were a lot of things he could have said to her then, but instead he got up from the sofa and shook his brother-in-law’s hand and told him to kiss his nieces for him at breakfast and he walked out the front door, his sister shouting at him at first and then telling him to stop being such a damn fool, it was dark out and too late for him to drive all the way to Columbus, but he didn’t so much as turn his head toward her, he was so mad. He’d never been so mad in his life, and he thought about it the whole ride home, and about the pictures on those signs of those poor helpless little babies, and that girl driving the Jeep and the way she had just dismissed all of them like they were nothing at all.
The next morning, he called Ken and made plans to come back up to Austin the following weekend.
He got used to the new routine pretty quick. On Saturday mornings, he’d get up early, stop by the gas station to fill up the tank and pour a couple of regular coffees in his thermos for the drive, and then he’d hit the road. Most of the time he went to Austin, where Ken and the rest of the group would be gathering at their spot outside the entrance.
Betsy always baked something for them—cookies or brownies, something sweet to keep them going—and she’d pass them around while they waited for the first car to come through. Those first few moments were his favorite. In a funny way, it reminded him of being in a locker room before a big game. He’d played football back in high school—made varsity his junior year—and he’d always gotten a rush the minute before they stepped out on the field, when he could hear the crowd cheering and picture the cheerleaders twirling, and the coach would bring them in for a huddle and he would feel the anticipation rising off him and his teammates like a thick steam. It was never as good as it was in that moment, even if they won, because in that moment they were shining and perfect, and as soon as they got on the field they would start to tarnish.
He had his job, sure, but it wasn’t the same. There was the boss above him, who retreated into his office and closed the door, and there were the guys working the floor below him, who stopped dicking around when they caught sight of him and turned all straight-faced and diligent. His guys liked him—he was good to them, only busted their balls if he had to, always said yes to vacation requests—but he wasn’t on their team.
The only person who’d been on his team was Bonnie. They’d been a team of two, him and her—they didn’t need anybody else. People used to make comments about it, would say how it wasn’t natural for two people to spend all their time together like that. “Don’t you guys have any friends?” his sister asked once, and he and Bonnie just looked at each other and smiled. Why did he need friends when the only person he wanted to spend any time with was Bonnie?
Standing there on Saturday mornings, the air still carrying a chill, their breath coming out of them in little foggy puffs, one hand wrapped around a thermos of coffee, the other holding one of Betsy’s brownies wrapped in a paper napkin, he felt like he was finally part of something bigger than him again, a team huddled together, steaming with anticipation and ready to fight.
He didn’t think other people would understand, or, more accurately, he didn’t think his sister would understand. After the blowout at her house, he didn’t call her for a couple of days. She’d always been a hothead—when she was little, their mother used to stick her in the hall closet when she was having a tantrum because the coats would stop her from hurting herself when she started headbutting the wall—and he’d learned over the years that she took at least three days to return to orbit after a blastoff.
Him, he’d stopped being pissed off as soon as he walked through his front door. By then, his anger had dissolved like an Alka-Seltzer, and he was left with an empty stomach and a vague feeling of regret. He didn’t like upsetting his sister. He didn’t like upsetting anybody.
When he finally did call her, he could tell straightaway that he’d judged it right: she wasn’t mad anymore. She launched into a long story about her dog getting sprayed by a skunk and her son trying to give the dog a bath in tomato juice and how the dog had shaken itself out and sprayed tomato juice all over the bathroom and how was she supposed to get tomato juice off the ceiling? And he told her that she should try vinegar next time and she said, “I should have called you in the first place, you always know this kind of stuff,” and that was when he knew she’d forgiven him. That’s why when they were getting off the phone and she asked if he’d been to any more bullshit protests, he told her no, he hadn’t, and he wasn’t planning to, even though he’d been up three nights in a row looking up some of the websites that Ken had suggested, and had already sent a text saying he’d be there next Saturday.
His sister had her team, you know? She had a whole goddamn football team between her husband and the kids and the dog and her friends from school and her friends from work and her friends from who knew where else. She made friends easily, his sister, which possibly explained why she had never felt the need to keep her temper in check: there was always somebody else in line waiting to tell her how great she was.
It wasn’t like that for him. It was just the football team, and then Bonnie, and then nothing. Until Ken and Betsy and everybody who gathered outside the clinic on Saturday mornings opened their arms and invited him into their huddle and he felt some part of him that had been missing for he didn’t know how long slot back into place.
Outskirts of Yeso, New Mexico—148 Miles to Albuquerque
Cait saw a few squarish shapes rise from the horizon. Yeso was nothing more than a ghost town, all but abandoned and creepy as hell. Cait remembered it clearly from past trips. She also knew it marked the halfway point to Albuquerque.
She’d thought Rebecca was starting to open up a little. The way she’d laughed about the gas station attendant, the way she’d let her eyes close for a few miles. Cait had felt the knife sliding along the clamshell, loosening the muscle, just the way they’d taught her when she’d worked in the kitchen at the Catch back in high school. Gently, gently. You didn’t want to crack the shell.
But then she’d mentioned the husband and Rebecca had seized back up.
She was running out of time.
It was ridiculous, this whole charade. Pretending like she didn’t already know nearly everything there was to know about Rebecca, or everything the Internet would tell her. As if she didn’t know that her husband was Patrick McRae. A man who was in a high-profile Senate race. A man who had been described by The Washington Post as “electric.”
A man who had detonated an atomic bomb at the center of her life.
Two Months Earlier
Cait woke up to the sound of her phone buzzing. She picked it up, squinting at it in the dim light, saw nine missed ca
lls and thirteen text messages and God only knew how many WhatsApp notifications. All of them asking the same thing: “Have you seen the video?”
Alyssa had sent a link. Cait padded into the kitchen, put the kettle on the stove, and clicked play while she waited for it to boil.
It had been filmed on someone’s phone in the audience. She could tell by the way the picture shook every time applause rang out, which was often. There was a man standing on a stage in a suit, his tie loosened around the throat, his hair darkened with sweat. When the video opened, he was mid-flow, his voice soaring as he hit the punch line. “We cannot accept anything less for our country!”
The crowd roared.
The kettle whistled.
Cait poured a stream of boiling water into the French press and started to wonder why the hell everyone was so keen on her watching this guy. She hit pause while she finished making her coffee. It was one of her little pleasures in life, sitting in her tiny egg-yolk-yellow kitchen in the morning and drinking a good cup of coffee. She wasn’t about to rush it.
She took a sip and hit play. The man in the suit lurched back to life. A question from the audience. “Congressman McRae, what do you think about the Me Too movement?”
“Well, sir, I was lucky enough to be raised by a strong woman, and now I’m married to one.” He took a moment to nod toward the pretty blonde standing behind him. “I believe that women deserve respect, and I believe that any man who rapes or sexually assaults a woman is lower than a dog.” He paused for the applause. “That said, I think some people are taking things a little too far. I believe that everyone—man, woman, gay, straight, black, white—is responsible for their actions and the consequences of those actions. Too often I see the names of good, honest people being dragged through the mud on the Internet and on social media. These tools have made it all too easy to point a finger at someone and—boom!” His hands mimicked a mushroom cloud. “Their life goes up in smoke. If someone has done wrong, they should be punished, but here in America, we believe in innocent until proven guilty. We believe in civil discourse. We believe in hearing both sides of the story before destroying a person’s reputation.”
Cait put down her coffee. Her stomach had soured. She knew what was coming next, sure as if it were a freight train bearing down on her and she was tied to the tracks.
“Take what happened with that musician Jake Forsythe. I know Jake, I’ve been a big fan of his music for a long time, and I always try to catch one of his shows when I’m in Austin. Now, I’m not pretending to know what happened between him and that girl that night. Maybe he crossed a line. Maybe he made her uncomfortable. Maybe, God forbid, he even hurt her, though I honestly believe that if he did, it was unintentional. I don’t know. None of us do, except for the two people who were in that bedroom that night. What I do know from speaking with Jake is that she never gave him a chance to explain himself or to apologize for what happened. She just ran out of his bed and went straight to tell her story on the Internet, where he was hanged, drawn, and quartered by the court of public opinion. What bothers me the most is that she did it anonymously, so she couldn’t be questioned on her account of the evening, and her credibility couldn’t be verified.” He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, shook his head. “I’m not saying she’s a liar, but to me, that doesn’t sit right. To me, if you come out and accuse someone of wrongdoing, you should stand behind your words. Personally, I believe that—unless a crime has been committed—matters of the bedroom should be kept private between two consenting adults, rather than aired on the Internet for strangers to judge.” He took a breath. “I believe in women, and I believe that men who have been proven to hurt women should be punished. But I also believe in responsibility, and civility, and the right to privacy in our homes and our bedrooms. Because if we lose that”—another shake of the head—“we lose the very principles that bind us together as a nation.”
The applause was deafening. Whoever was filming was clapping so hard that he knocked the phone right out of his hand, and the video cut off abruptly.
She checked the tally at the corner. Seven hundred thousand views and climbing.
Yeso, New Mexico—141 Miles to Albuquerque
They passed a burnt-out shack, its blackened eyes staring back at them sightlessly, piles of curled-up rubber tubing stacked in front of the boarded-up front door. Low-slung brick bunkers crumbled by the side of the road, their metal doors bolted shut and rusted, faded graffiti sprayed across the fronts.
Rebecca’s face was pale in the moonlight. “Where are we?”
“The village of the damned, basically. Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here soon enough.”
They passed a derelict barn, its door hanging from the hinges, the timber frame bleached white in the headlights. Outside, a tractor lolled on its one remaining tire. “It’s like the whole place got wiped out in a single day,” Rebecca marveled as they rolled through. A factory loomed over them, its cement smokestack cracked and crooked. It looked abandoned, too. “I wonder if the factory shut down.”
“Maybe. I’ve been through here a couple times and have never seen a single sign of life.”
Rebecca shuddered.
They passed what once had been the post office, the painted sign rubbed to a dull smear on the bricks. There was nothing for them in a place like this, at least nothing they’d welcome. It felt like something was watching them. Something, not someone.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rebecca whispered.
Cait nudged the gas. She could see the edge of town up ahead. Just one last building, and then a return to the cold emptiness of the desert.
They passed a house, a clapboard Cape with a sagging front porch. A pair of rocking chairs slumped there, still in the breezeless night. If you squinted, you could see what it looked like once: a dollhouse writ large, all lace curtains and painted woodwork and sweet, folksy charm. But now it was like the rest of the town: hollow-eyed and barely standing, the paint bleached away by the harsh desert sun, the wooden frame splintered and rotting. Forgotten and unloved.
In the window, a single candle flickered.
“You don’t think anyone lives there, do you?”
Cait shook her head. “I don’t know. But somebody must have lit that candle.”
“Jesus.”
A pair of headlights swung out from behind the house.
“Someone’s awake,” Cait said, her eyes locked on the rearview mirror.
Headlights lit the black tarmac a silvered gray.
“Who is it?” Rebecca’s voice was tight with panic.
“I don’t know.”
Cait pressed down harder on the gas pedal. The little house soon disappeared from sight, but the headlights blazed steadily behind them.
“Maybe we woke them up,” Cait said. Her heart was thudding at the base of her throat. She couldn’t see the shape of the front end through the harsh glare of the headlights, but she knew in her bones what it was.
Rebecca’s face was a mask of blank terror in the moonlight, and Cait could see that her hands had curled into tight fists. “Can you see?” Rebecca asked.
Cait glanced again into the rearview mirror. “No,” she admitted. “Nothing.”
The headlights never got any closer than a few hundred yards. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. The lights behind them were constant, never wavering.
“Maybe whoever it is just decided to run an errand.” Cait’s voice sounded strange to her own ears, high and slightly strangled.
“At this time of night?”
“Maybe it’s an emergency. It’s not like there’s anywhere in that town where they could go.”
“How fast are you going?”
Cait looked at the speedometer. “Sixty.” She felt the deep hum of the engine under her feet.
“If it was an emergency, don’t you think they would have passed us by now? There’s no one else out on the road—they could be doing eighty.”
“I don’t know,” Cait snapped. “I have
no idea what they’re doing out here. I have no idea if they’re following us, or going to the drugstore, or looking to murder us, or just decided that five a.m. is a fine time for a drive. I don’t know, okay?” Cait shut her eyes, just for a second. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I’m just . . .”
“Scared.”
Cait nodded.
“Me, too.”
They let their eyes drift back to the mirrors. The headlights were still there, watching, waiting.
“How far do you think it is until the next town?” Rebecca asked.
Cait shook her head. “I’m not sure. Maybe a half hour.” The gas tank mysteriously emptying. The pickup truck trying to run them off the road. The creepy gas station attendant, the man from the diner . . . She should have gotten them off this road by now. They were sitting ducks out here, had been for hours, and she’d done nothing to protect them. She was supposed to be the one in charge here. She was anything but. “Do you have any signal on your phone?”
Rebecca pulled it out of her bag and looked at it. “Nothing.”
Silence descended, just the sound of the two engines, the faint moan of the radio, and the throb of their hearts beating in their chests as they waited.
Two Months Earlier
Rebecca knew she shouldn’t have bought it.
She was in Target, picking up a few bags of Halloween candy just in case they had trick-or-treaters this year. That was unlikely—it seemed more organized now, parents only letting their kids go to the homes of people they knew rather than knocking on every door in the neighborhood like she had when she was a kid. Still, better to be safe than sorry. The last thing she wanted was someone turning up at the door and having to hand them a couple of wrinkled dollar bills or, worse, an apple as a consolation prize.
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