فصل پنجاه و شش

FIFTY-SIX

Rachel slapped her face until it began to tingle, and still she kept nodding off. Once she snapped fully awake (she was in Pittsfield now, and had the turnpike all to herself) and it seemed to her for a split second that dozens of silvery, merciless eyes were looking at her, twinkling like cold, hungry fire.

Then they resolved themselves into the small reflectors on the guardrail posts. The Chevette had drifted far over into the breakdown lane.

She wrenched the wheel to the left again, the tires wailing, and she believed she heard a faint tick! that might have been her right front bumper just kissing off one of those guardrail posts. Her heart leaped in her chest and began to bang so hard between her ribs that she saw small specks before her eyes, growing and shrinking in time with its beat. And yet a moment later, in spite of her close shave, her scare, and Robert Gordon shouting ‘Red Hot’ on the radio, she was drowsing off again.

A crazy, paranoid thought came to her. It was just the weariness, undoubtedly the weariness, but she began to feel that something was trying to keep her from getting to Ludlow tonight.

‘Paranoid, all right,’ she muttered under the rock-and-roll. She tried to laugh – but she couldn’t laugh. Not quite. Because the thought remained, and in the eye of the night it gained a spooky kind of credibility. She began to feel like a cartoon figure who has run into the rubber band of a gigantic slingshot. Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner … inertia becomes … what? … elementary physics … something trying to hold her back … stay out of this, you … and a body at rest tends to remain at rest … Gage’s body, for instance … once set in motion … This time the scream of tires was louder, the shave a lot closer; for a moment there was the squealing, grailing sound of the Chevette running along the guardrail cables, scraping paint down to the twinkling metal, and for a moment the wheel didn’t answer, and then Rachel was standing on the brake, sobbing, she had been asleep this time, not just dozing but asleep and dreaming at sixty miles an hour, and if there had been no guardrail … or if there had been an overpass stanchion … She pulled over and put the car in park and wept into her hands, bewildered and afraid.

Something is trying to keep me away from him.

When she felt she had control of herself, she began to drive again – the little car’s steering did not seem impaired, but she supposed the Avis company would have some serious questions for her when she returned their car to BIA tomorrow.

Never mind. One thing at a time. Got to get some coffee into me, that’s the first thing.

When the Pittsfield exit came up, Rachel took it. About a mile down the road she came to bright arc-sodium lights and the steady mutter-growl of diesel engines. She pulled in, had the Chevette filled up (‘Somebody put a pretty good ding along the side of her,’ the gas-jockey said in an almost admiring voice), and then went into the diner, which smelled of deep-fat grease, vulcanized eggs … and, blessedly, of good strong coffee.

Rachel had three cups, one after another, like medicine – black, sweetened with a lot of sugar. A few truckers sat at the counter or in the booths, kidding the waitresses, who some-how all managed to look like tired nurses filled with bad news under these fluorescents burning in the night’s little hours.

She paid her check and went back out to where she had parked the Chevette. It wouldn’t start. The key, when turned, would cause the solenoid to utter a dry click, but that was all.

Rachel began to beat her fists slowly and forcelessly against the steering wheel. Something was trying to stop her. There was no reason for this car, brand-new and with less than five thousand miles on its odometer, to have died like this, but it had. Somehow it had, and here she was, stranded Pittsfield, still almost fifty miles from home.

She listened to the steady mutter-drone of the big trucks, and it came to her with a sudden, vicious certainty that the truck which had killed her son was here among them … not muttering but chuckling.

Rachel lowered her head and began to cry.