Mad River Road (13 page)

“Remove the license from your wallet, please,” the policeman instructed Brad, who promptly did just that.

“Any idea how fast you were going?” The officer’s gloved hand closed over the license and registration.

“I’m not sure,” Brad said. “I didn’t think it was too—”

“I clocked you at eighty-four miles per hour,” the officer interrupted. “This is a seventy-mile-an-hour zone.”

“I was just trying to keep up with the flow of traffic,” Brad explained.

“Wait here,” the officer directed, returning to his car.

“Bastard,” Brad muttered.

“What’s he doing now?” Jamie asked.

“Checking to make sure there are no outstanding warrants.”

“Are there?” Jamie had heard stories of southern roadside justice, apocryphal tales of travelers being forced to pay exorbitant speeding fines on the spot, and being hauled off to jail if they couldn’t produce the necessary cash. She wondered whether her car was about to be impounded, and what it would be like to spend the night in some small-town holding cell. She pictured her mother watching the events from somewhere in the cloudless blue sky, saw her shaking her head. “Brad?
Are you all right?” she asked, suddenly aware of his rigid posture, the scowl that had overtaken his jaw.

He didn’t answer.

“Brad?” she asked again as the officer reappeared at the side of the car.

The policeman handed back their license and registration. “This area’s pretty heavily patrolled. I suggest you slow down if you don’t want to get stopped again.” He wrote out a ticket, handed it through the window. “Oh, Mr. Fisher,” he added, about to back away. “Your rear tire’s looking a little low. You might want to stop at Tifton and have somebody take a look at it.”

“Will do,” Brad said.

“Thank you, officer,” Jamie said as the policeman retreated. “It was nice of him to tell us about the tire—”

“Asshole,” Brad sneered, stuffing both the license and the registration into the pocket of his jeans.

“How much is the ticket for?”

In response, Brad ripped the ticket into half a dozen pieces, dropped them to the floor at his feet. “What difference does it make?”

“What are you doing?” Jamie protested. “It’s not going to just go away.”

“It just did.” He started the car, waited for a break in the traffic, then pulled into the right lane, quickly increasing his speed until he was driving well above the limit.

Jamie said nothing. Obviously he was upset, and the last thing she wanted to do was say anything that might upset him further. “What do you think is wrong with the tire?” she ventured after several seconds.

“How should I know? It’s your fucking car.”

Tears sprung to Jamie’s eyes, as if he’d slapped her, hard, across the face.

“Sorry,” he said immediately. “Jamie, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she stammered.

“No, it’s not all right. I had no business snapping at you like that.”

“You were upset.”

“That’s no excuse. I’m really sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” Jamie said. “I mean, it was just a ticket. We
were
speeding.” She glanced toward the dashboard.

Brad quickly brought the car’s speed back within the acceptable limits. “Sorry,” he apologized again.

“I take it you don’t like cops,” Jamie stated.

Brad laughed.

Immediately Jamie felt the tension dissipate. She laughed gratefully. Everything was okay. They’d hit a slight blip in the road, courtesy of the Georgia State Police, but now everything was back to normal.

“I hate the bastards,” Brad said, instantly shattering the tranquility.

Once again, Jamie’s body tensed, her breathing stilled. “Why?”

Brad rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his hand, narrowed his eyes as he checked the rearview mirror. Clearly he was deciding how much to tell her. “When I was seventeen,” he began, “my father got a new car. A Pontiac Firebird,” he continued, gradually warming to his subject. “Fire-engine red. Black leather seats. Power-everything. It was a real beauty, and he was so proud of it, always washing and polishing it. God forbid you leaned against it or got your dirty fingerprints on it. He’d go
crazy. Well, of course, what do you do when you’re a seventeen-year-old boy who wants to impress the girls, and whose father has a new, red Firebird?”

“You didn’t.”

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “One night, I waited till my parents were asleep, then I took that freshly cleaned, spanking-new car out for a spin, with my favorite girl, Carrie-Leigh Jones, sitting on the black leather seat beside me. And I’m thinking, if this doesn’t get me laid, nothing will.”

Jamie smiled, although she sensed disaster looming.

“We drove around a while—I was real careful, didn’t speed or show off or anything—and then we headed out to Passion Park, or at least, that’s what we called it, ’cause in those days that’s where everybody went to make out. It was real quiet that night. I think because it was pretty late, and most of the kids had already gone home. Anyway, we start fooling around, and I’m just rounding second base, as we used to say, when I hear this car pull up—I assume it’s just some other lucky guy—but before I can even look up, this flashlight is shining in my face, and these two cops are dragging me out of the car, and they’re beating the shit out of me, right in front of Carrie-Leigh.” Brad’s face darkened with the memory of what happened next. “I’m barely conscious when this one officer throws me over his knee, like a little kid, and holds me down while his buddy starts whipping me with his belt. And I’m crying, man. I’m begging them to stop. And I hear one of the policemen say to Carrie-Leigh, ‘Why don’t you find yourself a real man?’ and promising they won’t tell her parents where they found her if she keeps her mouth shut about what happened.”

Jamie could barely speak. “What happened then?”

Brad shrugged. “ ’Bout what you’d expect. They drove Carrie-Leigh home. Left me in the dirt to fend for myself.” There was a long pause. “Eventually I made it home, terrified of getting blood on those damn black leather seats. Stupid me was still hoping my father was asleep. But there he was, waiting at the front door. Turns out he was the one who’d called the cops, told them to teach me a lesson.”

“He told them to beat you up?”

“Saved him the trouble, I guess.” Brad smiled. “He laughed when he saw me. Told me if I ever touched his car again, he’d kill me with his bare hands.” Brad laughed, a joyless sound that bounced off the car’s windows.

“That’s so horrible.”

“No, that’s just life. What’d your mother say—facts are facts, and you gotta accept them? Hey, look.” Brad pointed to a large sign on the side of the road.

WELCOME TO TIFTON, the sign proclaimed. THE READING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

“I wonder how they know that,” Brad mused.

“Maybe we should stop and get something to eat,” Jamie said. “Have that tire looked at.”

Brad nodded. “I’m really sorry, Jamie,” he said again.

Jamie reached over to take his hand. “For what?” she asked.

A
LL
righty, Dylan. Come on up now,” Emma called down from the top of the stairs. She was wrapped in a large mustard-colored towel, a smaller one curled around her wet hair. “It’s time to get ready for bed.”

No answer.

Emma’s bare feet padded across the hall at the top of the stairs. She peered into her son’s bedroom. The size of a postage stamp, she thought, depression hovering as her eyes passed over the cot-size bed in the middle of the room, the brown shag bath mat that served as a rug lying on the floor beside it, the plain wood dresser propped unsteadily against the opposite wall. One of Dylan’s school drawings, an unframed pastiche of colorful images—a big green hill, a stick figure in a red coat and oversize white skates jumping into the air, arms and legs joyously akimbo, a smiling, yellow sun in the far right corner of the page, a bunch of disembodied, pink and blue Smiley Faces scattered throughout—supposedly representing “What Winter Means to Me”—was Scotch-taped to the wall and served as the room’s only art. “Dylan, come on, sweetie. Where are you?” Emma
checked her watch. It was just past seven o’clock. That gave her almost half an hour to get dressed and dry her hair, then see her son through all his various bedtime rituals before she had to be at Lily’s. Hopefully he’d be asleep before Mrs. Discala arrived. Providing, of course, she could find him.

A sudden terror seized her, and she froze. What if their hiding place had been discovered? What if Dylan’s father had gained access to the house while she was busy singing in the shower? What if he’d absconded with her son and disappeared into the night? She’d have only herself to blame, she was thinking. There’d been no reason to wash her hair. It had looked absolutely fine the way it was. Why was she trying to impress a bunch of women she didn’t know and cared even less about, women whose company she’d actively shunned until a mix-up in the day’s mail had brought a charming and unassuming young woman to her door, a woman offering the renewed possibility of a life filled with something other than running and sleeping and stifling bedtime rituals? A life of friends and conversation, she thought. A life. It had been just too tempting to turn down. “Dylan!” Emma called again, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria.

“I’m hiding,” came a small, muffled voice from inside his tiny closet.

Emma exhaled a relieved breath of air from her lungs. “Well, come on out. It’s bedtime.”

“You have to find me.”

Emma whipped the towel from her head, slung it across her bare shoulders, took a series of exaggerated steps toward the small landing. “I have to find you? But
you’re such a good hider. It’s too hard.” She clumped toward her bedroom, made a loud show of opening and closing the bedroom door. “No, you’re not there. Where are you? Can you give me a hint?”

Muffled giggles from the next room.

Emma returned to Dylan’s room. “And you’re not here,” she continued, approaching the bed and lifting up the thin, brown-and-white-striped blanket hanging over its sides. “Let’s see. Are you under the bed?” She paused. “No, not under the bed.”

“Try the closet,” her son whispered loudly.

“I think I’ll try the closet,” Emma announced, crossing the room in several long strides and pulling open the closet door, immediately spotting Dylan curled into a tight little ball on the floor at the back of the closet, his head buried beneath a pile of week-old laundry she kept forgetting to take to the Laundromat. “No, you’re not here,” Emma said as the laundry shook with laughter. “Where can you be?”

“Look on the floor, silly.”

“The floor? There’s nothing on the floor but this pile of dirty clothes.” Emma bent down. “I better take this stuff to the Laundromat and throw it in a washing machine before it stinks up the whole house.”

Dylan screamed in delight, pushing his head through the laundry and scattering the clothes around the small space. “It’s me, Mommy,” he shouted, jumping into her arms.

Emma stumbled back in shock. “No! Don’t tell me you were hiding under the laundry.”

Dylan nodded his head emphatically up and down. “Fooled you.”

“You certainly did.”

“Now it’s your turn.” Dylan climbed down her body, looked up at her expectantly.

“Oh, sweetie, I can’t now. I have to get dressed and dry my hair.”

“No. You have to hide.” Big blue eyes threatened tears.

Emma knew better than to argue with those eyes. “Okay. But then you have to get ready for bed. Deal?”

“Deal,” Dylan agreed.

“Close your eyes and count to ten.”

He was already on five before Emma was out the door. Where should I hide this time? she wondered, hurrying into the bathroom and stepping into the still-wet tub, drawing the shower curtains closed around her. What she wouldn’t give for a separate shower stall, she was thinking, as he reached ten.

“Ready or not, here I come.”

And a Jacuzzi, Emma found herself fantasizing, waiting for her son’s footsteps on the tile floor. Instead she heard him clumping down the stairs. Where was he going? He had to know she was hiding in the shower. It was where she always hid. What was he doing? She pulled back the white plastic curtain and inched cautiously out of the tub, tiptoed toward the stairs. She heard him rummaging through the kitchen cupboards.
As if I could squeeze myself into one of those tight little spaces
, she thought with a smile, returning to the bathroom to run a comb through her hair, then applying some blush to her cheeks and mascara to her eyelashes. “Maybelline, of course,” she informed her reflection, hearing Dylan run from the kitchen into the dining room.

“I can’t find you, Mommy.”

“Keep looking,” Emma encouraged, lining her lips with a nude pencil, then applying two coats of deep pink lipstick, before reaching under the sink for her hair dryer. A surge of hot air blew against her scalp as she made a mental list of the clothes in her closet. What does one wear to a book club meeting? she wondered. A skirt seemed too formal, while jeans might convey a lack of respect. Probably a simple pair of black pants was the way to go, she decided, although the only pair she had were wool and getting a little heavy for this time of year. What she needed were a few new things, nothing outlandish or impractical, just a few pairs of cotton slacks and some nice tops. Of course Dylan could also use some new things, she thought, feeling a pair of accusing blue eyes gazing up at her.

“You’re not hiding,” Dylan said, lower lip trembling.

“I was,” Emma started to explain, “but—”

“We have to do it again.”

“Dylan—”

“Not Dylan!” he protested angrily. “My name isn’t Dylan.”

Emma was immediately on her knees in front of her son, her fingers digging into the delicate flesh of his skinny arms. “Yes, you are. You’re Dylan Frost. Say it.”

“No.”

“Remember what we talked about? Remember how important it is that you be Dylan Frost? At least for a little while longer?”

“I don’t want to be Dylan Frost.”

“Do you want them to come and take you away from me? Is that what you want?”

Her son shook his head vehemently, his eyes growing wide with fear.