The bitter air has gotten to me, too. How they say venom affects a person is what the cold is doing to me. First, it was stinging, but now it’s numbing. I wonder if soon my entire body won’t give way to paralysis. I have to force myself to concentrate on the road.
“Is that”—he pauses, runs his fingertips against the knobs—“a radio?”
“Go ahead, turn it on.”
Adam pushes a button. The sound of static startles him, and he flinches as though he’s been given an electric shock.
“It’s okay, here, let me show you.” I fiddle with the tuner. Nothing but dead air.
Just as I am about to push the
AM
button, a monster rises up in front of us and blocks our path. I jam on the brakes and swerve sharply.
Adam is thrown against the dashboard, and knocks his head.
I look behind me. It lingers just at the edge of the brake lights’ red glow.
“Stay here.”
As soon as I get out, there’s that smell again. Those same noises are still in pursuit of us. I much prefer being in the car than out in the open. Forcing myself onward, I walk ten yards before I see it. I still don’t understand. Sticking right up through the tarmac in the middle of the road is a tree.
“What is it, Mom?”
“Get back in the car, Adam.”
“What’s wrong?” he asks, as though it is perfectly natural for a tree to be growing on a broken yellow line.
I usher him back into the car. This time he doesn’t argue with me when I tell him to put his seat belt on.
Not too long down the road, we pass a sign I’ve never seen before: a blue triangle with an emblem that looks like a whirligig. There’s another
tree in the street, and behind it three others. Slowing down, I steer the car around them. Vines are snaked across the street so thick I can’t see the asphalt. And then there is no going forward. Nothing short of an encroaching army of timber barricades our way.
Through the windshield, I watch the scraggly tops of these giants shake their heads at us. Instead of growing straight, their trunks are bent at impossible angles, their twisted branches reaching toward us. Adam is out before I can tell him no. He approaches the front line cautiously, as you would a herd of elephants. By the time I get to him, he is stroking the base of one of the trees. He looks at his fingertips, as if he expects the bark to have stuck to them. He puts his arms around it. “They are wonderful!”
No, not wonderful. I pace from one end of the road to the other. In either direction, the line of trees seems to stretch indefinitely.
When I turn around, Adam is gone.
“Adam?” I wave the flashlight frantically. The beam is scattered against the dense foliage.
“Adam!” I yell. I can feel the earth spinning on its axis. Either that or the road is bucking me. I have a hard time staying upright. “Adam, where are you?”
I rush between two trees, and find myself in a forest so dense I immediately lose my bearings. Did I come from this direction? Or that? “Adam!”
“I’m right here.”
I swing the flashlight to the left. He is sitting on a branch that is bent all the way to the ground.
“Don’t you ever—” I notice him holding his side. He is laboring.
“I just wanted to climb a tree.”
I am trembling so hard when I get him back in the car that it is an effort to turn the ignition. “You cannot just wander off like that! Do you hear me? Ever!”
Theo once wandered away from Mama and me at the grocery store. It didn’t take but a minute to find him in the candy aisle filling his pockets, but Mama took him by the shoulders and shook him and yelled loud
enough for everyone to hear how he could have been lost forever. On top of everything, there is this new fear. How easy it is going to be for the big, wide world to wedge itself between Adam and me.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
I nod in agreement, suppressing tears. Neither one of us is terribly composed. Adam starts chewing on his thumbnail, something he hasn’t done in years. I try to steady my hands by taking a firm grip on the steering wheel.
“What do we do now?” Adam asks.
Without answering, I turn the Oldsmobile around. We go back the way we’ve just come, back down this godforsaken road just like all those years ago when Dobbs Hordin was in the driver’s seat and I was the teenager who didn’t think anything bad could happen to a person.
It’s silly to think the backwoods has fallen into rank behind us and is advancing on us, but I drive a little faster and keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. Picking up on my cue, Adam looks over his shoulder out the back window, too. I turn on the overhead light. Who’d have thought electrical lighting would be such a comfort?
Gone from Adam’s face is the wonder from earlier; it is now bleached with fear. Chewing on his lip and his arms crossed at his chest, he squints into the darkness as though things are about to fly at us out of it. Adam knows nothing at all about anticipating, because in a controlled environment he’s never had to anticipate. He can’t possibly know to protect himself. This now terrifies me. More terrifying is how terrible I have become at anticipating. How, then, am I to protect him?
It has become stuffy in the car. I roll the window down just an inch. Adam cringes at the cold, pulls his collar up around his ears, and draws his hands into his sleeves. He appears to be shrinking in his clothes. I locate the switch for the heater, but nothing other than cold air blasts through the vents.
I can’t decide what exactly the weather is doing. It feels like a storm, but mostly the sky is clear. I used to spend hours describing weather to
Adam—gully washers, hail, you name it. I was so good at describing sticky, hot summers that we’d strip down to our skivvies and shoot each other with water guns made from straws. This here, there’s no good description for it.
Where is that intersection?
Adam groans when we go over another bump, which I now realize must be tree roots rumpling the pavement. We pass the turnoff to Dobbs’s property. Not only is there no gate, the ten-foot barbed-wire fence that used to front the property is gone, too. All that remains is the same
NO TRESPASSING
sign.
The car rumbles along. Something in the air catches in my throat. Adam looks over at me.
“It’s just a tickle,” I tell him, but the cough revs up. Soon it is bad enough that I have to pull over to the side of the road, except there is a thicket where the shoulder ought to be, so I stop the car in the lane and hope a truck doesn’t come blaring down on us. Or maybe that would be just fine. I could get out and say, “I am the taken girl. I am Blythe Hallowell,” and that would be the end of it.
“Something’s in the air. Do you smell that?”
Adam nods.
Not just vegetation. Chemicals, perhaps. Chlorine?
No car is in sight. There are no lights anywhere, not even in the distance where a freeway ought to be. “Lock your door,” I tell Adam between coughing spasms. This is all we need now, me to cough myself loopy.
“Here you go.” Adam hands me a canteen of water from the backseat.
“What else does he have back there? Any chance of a chain saw?”
It’s meant as a joke, but Adam gives me a sober look. “You can’t expect it to be how you remember it.”
I can’t think of anything to say. In fact, I’ve completely drawn a blank on how to treat him. A few minutes ago, he had the enthusiasm of a young boy, not an iota of caution; now, he is this almost-grown-up telling me not to take my memory so seriously.
“Okay.” Future tense. His eyes glaze over.
“They’re going to ask about what happened to Mister.” I don’t dare take my eyes off the road. “I might have to go someplace and straighten everything out.”
“It’s not a crime what you did.”
“No, it isn’t.” Even to my own ears, this has the muffled tone of uncertainty. I don’t know any more what a crime is or isn’t. It’s hard to think of crime the way it is written in books when I’ve lived so many years with rules instead of laws.
“I won’t let them lock you up. I’ll tell them I did it.”
I shake my head. “Nobody’s going to get locked up.”
Up ahead is a sign. I stop twenty yards in front of it. Through the vines, I make out,
TONGANOXIE, 15 MI
. To get to Lawrence, we should be going in the opposite direction. Who knows, perhaps Tonganoxie is no longer the one-horse town it used to be. Maybe it is now the hub of Douglas County, with a state-of-the-art emergency room.
After a while, the jarring and bumping of the uneven road gives way to a smooth, almost pleasing drone. Adam, though, has drawn his legs up to his chest and knotted his arms around them. Without realizing it, he has started to hum. He has hums for different moods—when he’s content or bored or lost in thought. High-pitched hums come when he’s wound up. The more worried he is, the lower the pitch tends to be. This one has so much bass it can mean only one thing: he is in a full-blown panic. To distract him from his thoughts, I suggest he look through the glove box. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, so I point to the little lever. He pulls it and springs back in his seat when the compartment drops like a big gaping jaw. I’ve never seen him this jumpy.
“Got a lot of junk in there, doesn’t he?” I comment.
Adam rifles through Dobbs’s things, holding up each find for me to see: an odd collection of tokens; registration papers so old they are taped together along the folds; something called a Disposal Zone Pass.
“What else does he have in the box back there?”
Adam brings it to the front seat. It is a soup-to-nuts survival kit, complete with army rations, a folding shovel, and a compass. After examining all the items, he puts them back and conducts a search for other secret compartments in the car. He is thrilled to find a map under the visor. He opens it, holds it up to the overhead light, and announces in a trembling voice that Dobbs has crossed out many of the routes.
“Let me see that.” I push the brakes and let the car idle where it stops.
Not only has Dobbs scratched out some of the roads, he has penciled in squiggly trails connecting the missile complex to various locations. None of his notations are legible. For some reason, Lawrence has a big
X
through it.
“What does that mean?”
“Who knows?” I answer. “Put it away; we don’t need it.” I grip the steering wheel and keep driving.
“He’s circled Oskaloosa. Is that a town? Maybe we should go there.”
“Put it away, Adam.”
“I found where we are.” He thrusts the map at me. I jam on the brakes again. We follow Adam’s finger until it comes to hash marks. “What do you suppose he means by these?”
I snatch the map and toss it over my shoulder. “Nothing. It’s one of his crazy ideas, is all. You checked under the seats yet?”
Adam bends down and runs his hand beneath him. He comes up with a cassette tape. “What’s this?”
“Watch.” I shove the cassette tape into the machine, and Patsy Cline starts singing. With Dobbs, it’s always country music.
“I don’t want to think about him.” Adam pushes buttons until the tape ejects.
“Just wait till you hear all the different kinds of music. You’re going to love classical music. Mozart, Bach—”
He cuts me short. “How could you stand it?”
I want to talk about things from before my captivity, and Adam wants a reconfiguration of everything that happened after it. It doesn’t
matter how far back in time we go; we are both dragging the deadweight of the past into our fresh new start.
“How could you stand what he did to you? Why didn’t you try to escape?”
“Oh, Adam. I tried to get away. I drove myself crazy trying to get out. And then when you came along, I was so scared he’d take you away from me if I tried anything.” I tell him about the baby and living without Charlie and the ventilation shaft where I used to scream for help and busting my foot against the door. Instead of a beginning, middle, and end, the story comes out haphazard and makes about as much sense as a riddle told backward.
“Why didn’t anyone come for us?” Adam’s tone has turned accusatory.
“I’m sure they tried. I’m sure they looked just about everywhere they could think to look.”
“Maybe they’re all dead.”
It’s my turn to get short. “Don’t you say things like that. If you want to blame someone, blame Mister. Blame me. But you are not to blame them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asks after a while. He knows of my deceit, but he still cannot grasp the why of it.
Because I was thinking like a mother—not a narrator. A mother has to find the kinder story. “I’m sorry, son.” I am always going to be sorry. Even something as big as being free can’t change that.
He gives me that inscrutable look and then stares ahead into the night. “I’d have killed him a long time ago.”
We approach another sign too overgrown with vines to be of any use, but I feel my spirits lift. An intersection will be up ahead. If I read the map right, I can make a right and go a few miles till we hit County Road 1057 and then double back toward Lawrence.
“Do you think there are people living in space by now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because there sure aren’t any people around here.”
“There will be. Another few miles and there’ll be so many people you won’t know what to do with yourself.”
No sooner do I make this proclamation than I notice what’s wrong with this end of the road: utility poles lying on the ground. None of them have any wires attached to them.
“Do I look like them?” Adam continues.
“Of course you look like them.” But if the utility poles aren’t up, there can’t be any electricity in this area.
“What if your parents don’t like me?”
“Adam, don’t talk like that.” I begin tallying all his many wonderful features because I’d just as soon as not point out the growing list of things wrong with this route.
And then there is no way around it.
I slow down in plenty of time; even lit up by one headlight, it makes no sense. Stranded at the railway crossing is a freight train. Dobbs’s hash marks.
“Wow,” Adam whispers.
It’s immediately apparent the train has been parked here a long time. The containers are rusty and in some places missing their sides altogether. One of the containers has toppled over.
“Can we go look?”
“Stay where you are, Adam.”
“It’s so huge. Please, Mom, can we just—”
I scream as someone raps on the passenger window. A bearded, dirty face scowls at us and raves some incoherent protest.
Adam lurches toward me as the man bangs against the window so hard it’s a wonder it doesn’t shatter.
“What does he want?” Adam asks.
I throw the car into gear and hit the gas. “We’re not going to find out.” I steer the Oldsmobile sharply to the left onto the gravel utility road running beside the tracks. “Hang on!”
There are other shapes emerging from the containers now, some with torches. One of the ragged figures marches straight into our path
and I dare not swerve for the ditch beside us. I don’t know how to drive this fast. “Get out of the way!” I pummel the center of the steering wheel and the horn blares loudly, but the man continues to advance until his body careens off the hood, and goes flying into the darkness.
“Oh God, oh God.”
The back window cracks, and something solid hits the side of the car hard enough to jostle it.
“They’re throwing stuff at us!”
“Get down, Adam!”
We are nearing the front of the train, where a blockade is forming across the access road. Men are pushing barrels and shopping carts into a big pile, and they are chanting.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“It’s okay, my boy. Everything’s going to be okay. Just stay down.”
I tighten my grip on the wheel and then jam the accelerator all the way to the floorboard. The tires churn up stones which pelt the undercarriage like machine-gun fire. The barricade is no match for the Oldsmobile. Boxes and carts go flying every which way, and I can’t be sure whether the burlap-covered objects we hit are sandbags or bodies.
We go a good ten miles farther before I slow down and check on Adam. He gets back onto the seat, and leans away from the window.
The tightness in my chest returns and between coughing jags, I ask, “Are you okay?”
Adam is bent at the waist, but he gives me a winning smile, which can only mean he’s faking.
“Is that what people are like?” His chin is trembling.
Checking the rearview mirror, I tell him it’s a homeless camp because that’s what my mind would have it be. Never mind this is Douglas County, Kansas, land of miles and miles of nothing. I don’t tell him that I am in a lot of trouble now. Folks may let the Dobbs thing go, but a hit-and-run?
No turning back now. We carry along the dirt road until we must be well on our way to Kansas City. Somewhere along the line we are bound to hit a major thoroughfare, a gas station, or a farmhouse.
“Oh, son, they’re much, much longer than this.”
“But where do they end?” He says it like all roads should meet at a wall or a ledge or a dead end. He’s been aboveground less than an hour, and already I am forgetting that for him the world fits neatly on textbook-size pages, that countries are confined to diagrams.
“Take a look at that map again. See if you can make head or tail of it.”
The smell of fumes sticks to my tongue, thick enough almost to chew. Light-headed, I feel my confidence tapering. Adam won’t be fooled by my brave face.
He is poring over the map. His hands are still shaking. “I see the train tracks. He’s got a line here with arrows. That’s got to be good, right?”
“I’ll take another sip of that water, if you don’t mind.”
Adam hands me the bottle. It is slippery. I turn on the overhead light. Blood on the bottle and his hand.
“I’m okay, Mom,” he insists, but the spreading stain on his shirt contradicts him. The stitches must have ruptured. “It’ll quit bleeding in a minute; it’s just because I twisted funny.” He presses his hand to his side and folds over.
Now. I look through the windshield at the moon. Now would be a real good time to help us out a little.
Of its own doing, the car begins to slow. I press the accelerator pedal as far as it will go and then pump it, but the Oldsmobile keeps slowing down and gradually sputters to a complete stop. Several red lights come up on the dashboard. I have no idea what any of them mean. A gust of wind bangs against the car on its way into the pitch of night. I turn over the ignition and pump the gas. Nothing happens.
Adam leans over to look at the control panel. “We’re out of gas,” he announces matter-of-factly.