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  I ducked down and saw Becki was driving, and that Kyle was strapped into the passenger side, asleep or crashed out, head lolling forward.

  Becki’s hands were clamped to the wheel, and she was staring straight ahead.

  “Becki?”

  She turned to look up at me, as if in disbelief. Her left eye was half shut, the cheek beneath it swollen.

  “John?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  But I couldn’t hear what she said next.

  CHAPTER 30

  I squatted down by the side of the car, awkwardly reaching my arms through the open window to put them around Becki’s shoulders. When she’d stopped crying—which didn’t take long—I retreated to let her rub her face dry and push the hair out of her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Call me, maybe?”

  “John, I’ve just driven all the way up here from fucking Oregon. Does that sound to you like a phone call kind of situation?”

  I heard the door to the pizza place open, and turned to see Kristina coming out onto the sidewalk.

  “We’re paid up in there,” she said.

  “Kristina,” I said, but I didn’t know what to follow her name with. She walked away.

  Becki watched her go. “Who’s that?”

  I ignored the question. “What’s going on here, Becki?”

  “What’s going on is we’re in deep shit,” she said, with a terrible little smile.

  I drove to the motel, with Becki following. The office was shut but I eventually roused Marie from her television and got the keys to the room next to the one I had. It took a while to get her to understand that friends of mine had arrived and I was getting the room on their behalf, but I didn’t want her to see Becki’s face. Partly because motel keepers can be funny about renting to women with facial bruising. Also because such things are memorable.

  When I got back out Becki was standing leaning against the side of her car, smoking. Her idiot boyfriend was still passed out in the passenger seat.

  “What’s the deal with Kyle?”

  “He’d been awake seventy-two hours straight.”

  “Wake him up and move him inside.”

  She managed to get Kyle out of the car and more or less on his feet. When he saw me he looked vaguely relieved for a moment, but then his eyes slid away.

  As Becki shuffled him over to their door I went into my own room and washed my face and hands and stared at my reflection for a while. Much of me had yet to catch up with the fight I’d been in, never mind what had happened since. I realized Bill would be on his feet again by now, and that if he wanted to find me, it wouldn’t be hard. So be it. I was done running from that situation. Telling Kristina about it had proven this to me, if nothing else. If Bill needed a pound of flesh, he was welcome to come and take it. He was owed.

  Next door I found Becki apparently alone in the room.

  “Where is he?”

  “I told him to take a shower. It was overdue.”

  I heard that they’d been in town for forty minutes when I found them, plowing methodically up and down each street in turn. Becki had decided on the way across the mountains that’s the only thing she could do, given I wasn’t answering my phone. This meant they must have made it here from Marion Beach in not much over six hours, which required driving at speeds I didn’t even like to think about.

  “I told you to go to your father’s,” I said.

  “I did exactly like you said. I packed a bag and I was out of there in under fifteen minutes. I didn’t go straight to my dad’s because . . . I needed to think, work out how to explain the whole bag of shit to him. Also I knew if I waited an hour he’d have left for the restaurant already. Otherwise he’d have stayed at home going nuclear on me over Kyle and I just didn’t need that. You’ve only ever been a positive thing in Dad’s world, John, and so you haven’t seen all sides of him. When he goes to war, the collateral damage can be significant.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “So I drove around, trying to get hold of Kyle to tell him what you said, but I couldn’t raise him, so in the end I decided I’d left it long enough, and went over to my dad’s place. And Kyle’s right fucking there, sitting on the doorstep. He’d said he’d finally gone back to our apartment, must have missed me by ten minutes. He’d guessed where I’d go.”

  “Did you tell him to go away?”

  “No, John. I did not. He’s my boyfriend. He only hadn’t been answering my calls because his battery ran out, and then he lost his phone someplace. He broke down when he saw what had happened to me.”

  “Though he hadn’t come earlier, when you told him on the phone?”

  “He wanted to get a gun from somewhere and go talk to these people.”

  “Christ,” I said. “Which evidently didn’t happen, thankfully.”

  “No. So we talked, and I got some sense out of him for the first time in days. I told him we had to find a way of making everything okay. He asked me . . . I agreed to go back to our apartment with him, talk things through, try to work something out.”

  “What was that going to be? The solution?”

  “I don’t know, John.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We went home. Kyle had been up for, like, days, and I’d told him a shower would be a good thing on several levels. Then I realized he was taking a really long time about it and when I get to the bathroom and find him bright and perky I of course realize just how fucking dumb I’ve been.”

  “Because that’s where the remains of the original stash was, which is why he wanted you to come back with him. He’d already been home to find you weren’t there and he’d lost his keys along with his phone and didn’t feel quite up to the task of breaking into a second-story apartment.”

  Becki’s face went blank, and her chin trembled for a moment, but her eyes stayed dry. “Yep.”

  “I’m sure that’s not the only reason he wanted to see you,” I added, feeling old and cruel.

  “I’m glad you are,” she said. “Because I’ve been back and forth on the subject. So I’m screaming at him and he’s shouting, too, and it’s close to getting out of hand, when I see something out of the window. A huge black GMC coming up the way, one of those things looks like it wants to be a Hummer when it grows up. The people who live on our street don’t own that kind of vehicle.”

  I rubbed my temples with my fingers. “Christ.”

  “Right,” she said bitterly. “So we split. Down the fire escape and over the fence into next door’s yard. Thank fuck, I had parked around the corner instead of right outside, but there’s no way out of there except down that same street, and they saw us leave.”

  “They came after you?”

  “First I thought I’d just tear around for a while, and they’d fall off and we’d get a chance to work out what to do next. But no. Up the coast, through Astoria, they’re still on us. Dude can fucking drive, too. I am no stranger to red on the speed dial, as you know, but this guy’s pedal to the metal all the way. And Kyle’s just lolling there in the passenger seat smoking and has nothing useful to suggest, and there was only one thing I could think of, so I spun out over to Portland and up the interstate to Seattle, and . . . well, here we are.”

  “When did you last see them?”

  “I’m not sure. On the highway, that kind of car’s not so distinctive as in Marion Beach. I thought I saw it behind us on 90 just before we started over the mountains. But it could just have been another car, right? They could have given up?”

  “They could,” I said. I put my hand out.

  “What?”

  “Your car keys.”

  I went outside and drove her car out of the lot. I went a couple of blocks until I found a tangle of residential streets and stowed the car at the end of it, on the far side of a high-sided truck. It wasn’t perfect but short of driving it thirty miles and sending it off the road it was never going to be,
and the night was going to be complicated enough without me having to explain to Becki why I’d trashed her beloved car. I found what I expected to find under the passenger seat, and took it with me. I picked up a six pack from a liquor store on the corner and walked back to the motel through the drizzle, feeling like I was on autopilot.

  When I got back I knocked on room 10 and said my name. Becki locked the door again behind me.

  “I still don’t hear any movement from in the bathroom.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Maybe he fucking drowned.”

  I set the beers on the bedside table and handed one to Becki, who twisted the cap and drank a third of it in one swallow. She was too tired to stand but too wired to sit, and she looked young and unhappy, too, like a child who’d realized she’d wandered into a playground game that little kids didn’t win.

  “We’ll work it out,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it. So what’s up in your life?” she said. “Who was that chick? What happened to your face and hands? We going to cover that in the debriefing?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Shame. I could do with some light relief.”

  “Then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “Are you pissed at me for coming up here?”

  “No. I just don’t know what I can do for you. Kyle’s dug his own grave and he’s still digging.” I reached into my coat and took out the package I’d removed from her car. I held it up in front of her.

  Becki smacked her hands up against the sides of her face, and turned toward the bathroom.

  “You ASSHOLE!” she shouted. “I swear,” she said, turning back to me. “I didn’t know he’d brought it.”

  “I believe you. But there’s lots you don’t know about him now. Like that he would manipulate you back to your apartment, against all common sense, just because he wanted his drugs. Like there’s not just cocaine in this bag, but crystal meth.”

  “No fucking way,” she said angrily. “He’s never . . .”

  But she wasn’t sure. She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “What am I going to do?”

  I shrugged, put the package back in my jacket.

  “I’m sorry I came,” she said miserably. “I was just so fucking scared and I didn’t know where else to go. Once I got the idea of you in my head it was like there was something to aim for. It was dumb.”

  “You did fine,” I said. “It’s what I would have done.”

  “Really?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  I walked through the room and opened the bathroom door. Kyle was slumped on the floor, head back against the wall. His mouth was open and he was snoring quietly. I noticed that the bathroom door, like the one in my own room, had a key. I dropped my pack of cigarettes in his lap, removed the key from his side, and left the bathroom. Then I locked the door and put the key in my pocket.

  “Get some sleep,” I told Becki.

  “You going to give me that key?”

  “No,” I said.

  Back in my own room I lay on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. My head was full of things I did not want to revisit. The sight of what had happened to Jassie that afternoon. The memory of Bill’s face, as he looked at me in his hallway, realizing what I was implying and what he was going to do about it. What I had not managed to do in that whole fiasco was to get a sense of whether Bill had known about me and Jenny, and thus if Ellen’s harping on about punishment was likely to have a bearing on my life. Even if I had been sure about that, the next step required believing in things in which I did not believe.

  I could not get my thoughts to go in straight lines, and unless I concentrated they all ended up collecting in the same cul-de-sac: the image of my hand resting on a woman’s, on a table in an empty pizza restaurant, how large and three-dimensional that hand had felt, and how warm. That and the fact that when Kristina left, she’d said we were paid up, rather than “I.” Big deal, and probably I had achieved nothing except complicate the only positive relationship I had left in this town, but as I drifted toward sleep I did not regret what I had done. Sometimes the things you do without thinking are the closest to the truth you’ll ever come.

  Just before I went under I reached into my pocket, took out my phone, and laid it on the bedside table, where I would be sure to hear it, if anybody called. I wasn’t thinking anyone necessarily would.

  Nobody called, but I did dream.

  In the dream it was the middle of the night and I was walking alone through the streets of Black Ridge. There was something about the way the main east-west drag curved through the town that was working at me, and I didn’t realize I was close to the motel I’d used to meet Jenny Raines in until I was upon it.

  The entire building was dark, no cars in the lot. As I stood looking, feeling bitter regret for the things I had done in those rooms, I saw the curtains of one move aside.

  It was too dark to see who or what might have opened them, but I thought I saw a pale oval shape reflecting moonlight, just above the level of the sill.

  I turned stiffly away and walked through town in a series of jump cuts, ending up on Kelly Street. The window in the Write Sisters was whole again, though badly cracked—lines jagging across the middle in a pattern I nearly recognized, a blood splatter across the middle in a shape that looked a little like an animal. When I got back to Marie’s I stood for a while in the road. Here every light was on, every curtain open, though all the rooms beyond were empty.

  I heard something behind me, and turned.

  When I saw nothing I walked across the road and into the forest, as I had in reality a few nights before. The farther I went into the trees the more I felt I could hear noises from between them, the murmur of distant conversation.

  This scared me but I started to run, heading in the direction of the sounds.

  I ran faster and faster, threading between the trunks, convinced that I could now not only hear voices ahead, but smell wood smoke or something like it. Something strong.

  I missed the shape of a large tree root in the darkness, tripped, and went sprawling on the ground. All the air was knocked out of me and for a moment my vision went white, as if I was about to lose consciousness. I don’t know what would have happened if I had. Would I have woken? Died?

  I rolled onto my back, and pushed myself upright.

  There were people standing back in the trees, looking at me. Two tall, and three smaller.

  I couldn’t see their faces, or tell how far away they were. I tried to push myself backward, pathetically, getting no purchase on the floor, feet scraping and scrabbling.

  Suddenly the group was spread out, with the two taller figures much nearer to me. A man and a woman, exhausted, bony, wearing clothes that were dirty and worn and old-fashioned. The man was closest, only a few feet away, and as he pushed his face closer down to mine, like a dog scenting a stranger, I saw it was scarred across the cheeks and forehead with a pattern of freshly slashed cuts that I knew was the same as the marks I’d seen on the back of my motel room— and that his face was my own.

  Then they were all gone.

  There was no sound, no wind. I got to my feet and panned my vision across the hundred and eighty degrees in front of me, until my eyes began to prickle and my ears roar, and finally heard something coming through the undergrowth toward me.

  I turned slowly around, as afraid as I ever have been in my life.

  And woke up.

  CHAPTER 31

  She could have stolen a car. She possessed that skill, assuming the vehicle was of certain types—a legacy of the bad old days. But she didn’t want to leave town like that, a thief skulking away in the night. She wanted to leave as Ellen.

  Not Ilena.

  So she’d gone to the place on Brooker and took the only car they had left, an anonymous compact. The guy behind the desk told her many things about mileage and insurance and filling the car up before reaching her (unspecified) destination, but she was unable to take it in. She didn�
�t think John was right, that she had a concussion, but her head definitely wasn’t working right. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten—before the hospital, certainly—so it could be that was it. Could be, but probably wasn’t. It was the town, the trees. They were all in her head.

  After a while the rental clerk stopped trying to tell her stuff she clearly wasn’t taking in, and gave her the keys. He gave her body a good looking over at the same time, until she stared at him, and he stopped.

  She went to the lot around the side of the office and stood in the dark looking at the cheapest car she’d driven in a long time.

  Since before Gerry. Might as well get used to it. The money she had wouldn’t last long. She would need a job and an apartment and many other things, to walk around the world’s shelves and try to find objects and situations to care about, if she could.

  Time to start again.

  Again.

  Only when she was behind the wheel did it begin to feel completely real, only then did she get her aching, cloudy head around what she was planning to do: leave the only place she’d ever been genuinely happy. The cause of that happiness was gone, of course, dead and gone, but still we put our faith in places. We think that if we just lived somewhere different, everything would be okay. We believe that if we paint the stairway a bright new color, and clear out the closets, our minds will follow. We’ll take just about any ray of hope rather than accept that 95 percent of the world we inhabit exists within the confines of our own skulls.

  She wished she had something to bring with her, but it couldn’t be. She had brought a few objects from the house the morning before, the morning of the crash, but they were in a bag in the trunk of her car and she had no idea where that was. Towed somewhere after the accident, presumably, but either she hadn’t been told where or she’d forgotten. It would have been nice to have those things, small though they were. A couple of items of clothing, bought in special places. A book in which he’d written a loving message. A napkin from a café in Paris, from that first weekend. She had secretly put it in her pocket when he went to the bathroom. She had known it was the start of something. Sometimes, you just do, and keeping souvenirs is the only way we have of pinning those moments down before the world takes them away.