Panic

Panic Page 39

She was unreasonably annoyed that Bishop had helped Dodge in this way. She wondered if Bishop had risked coming tonight—somewhere in the crowd, the dark masses of people, faces indistinguishable in the weak moonlight. She was too proud to text him and see. Ashamed, too. He’d tried to talk to her, to explain, and she had acted awful.

She wondered whether he would forgive her.

“How are you feeling?” Nat asked her. She’d offered to stay with Heather until the last possible second.

“I’m okay,” Heather said, which was a lie. Her lips were numb. Her tongue felt thick. How would she drive when she could barely feel her hands? As she pulled the car up to her starting position, the headlights lit up clusters of faces, ghost-white, standing quietly in the shadow of the trees. The engine was whining, like there was something wrong with it.

“You’re going to be fine,” Nat said. She twisted in her seat. Her eyes were suddenly wide, urgent. “You’re going to be fine, okay?” She said it like she was trying to convince herself.

Diggin was gesturing to Heather, indicating she should turn the car around. The engine was making a weird grinding noise. She thought she smelled something weird too, but then thought she must be imagining it. It would all be over soon, anyway. Thirty, forty seconds, tops. When she managed to get her car pointed in the right direction, Diggin rapped on her windshield with his fingers, gave her a short nod.

At the other end of the road—a thousand feet away from her, a thousand miles—she saw the twin circles of Ray’s headlights. They went on and off again. On and off. Like some kind of warning.

“You should go,” Heather said. Her throat was tight. “We’re about to start.”

“I love you, Heather.” Nat leaned over and put her arms around Heather’s neck. She smelled familiar and Nat-like, and it made Heather want to cry, as though they were saying good-bye for the last time. Then Nat pulled away. “Look, if Ray doesn’t swerve—I mean, if you’re close and it doesn’t look like he’s going to turn . . . You have to promise me you will. You can’t risk a collision, okay? Promise me.”

“I promise,” Heather said.

“Good luck.” Then Nat was gone. Heather saw her jog to the side of the road.

And Heather was alone in the car, in the dark, facing a long, narrow stretch of road, pointing like a finger toward the glow of distant headlights.

She thought of Lily.

She thought of Anne.

She thought of Bishop.

She thought of the tigers, and of everything she’d ever screwed up in her life.

She swore to herself that she wouldn’t be the first to swerve.

While in a dark basement, with the smell of mothballs and old furniture in his nose, Dodge realized, too late, why Nat had taken his keys—and, crying out, fought against his restraints, thinking of a little time-bomb heart, ticking slowly away.…

Something in the engine was smoking. Heather saw little trails of smoke unfurling from the hood of the car, like narrow black snakes. But just then Diggin stepped into the center of the road, shirtless, waving his T-shirt above his head like a flag.

Then it was already too late. She heard the high-pitched squeal of tires on asphalt. Ray had started to move. She slammed her foot onto the accelerator and the car jumped forward, skidding a little. The smoke redoubled almost instantly; for a second her vision was completely obscured.

Panic.

Then it broke apart and she could see. Headlights growing bigger. The slick sheen of the moon. And smoke, pouring like liquid from the hood. Everything was fast, too fast—she was hurtling down the road, there was nothing but two moons, growing larger . . . closer . . .

The stink of burning rubber and the scream of tires . . .

Closer, closer . . . She was hurtling forward. The speedometer ticked up to sixty miles per hour. It was too late to swerve now, and he wasn’t swerving either. It was too late to do anything but crash.

Flames leaped suddenly out of the engine, a huge roar of fire. Heather screamed. She couldn’t see anything. The wheel jerked in her hand, and she struggled to keep her car on the road. The air stank like burning plastic, and her lungs were tight with smoke.

She slammed on the brakes, suddenly overwhelmed with certainty: she would die. She saw movement from somewhere on her left—someone running into the road?—and realized, a second later, that Ray had swerved to avoid it, had jerked his wheel to the left and was plunging straight into the woods.

There was a shuddering crash as she sailed past him, flames licking her windshield. She was screaming. She knew she had to get out of the car now, before she hit anything.

Skidding, shuddering, spinning in circles; the car was slowing, it was drifting toward the woods. Heather fought to open the door. The handle caught and she thought she would be trapped there as the fire consumed her. Then she shoved with her shoulder and the door popped open and she jumped, rolled, felt the bite of pavement on her arm and shoulder, tasted dirt and grit, heard a distant roar of sound as if people were yelling her name. Sparks showered from the wheels of the car as it flipped off the road and into the woods.

There was an explosion so loud, she felt it through her whole body. She covered her head. Now she could hear that people were calling her name—and Ray’s, too. A siren wailed in the distance. For a second, she thought she must be dead. But she could taste blood in her mouth. If she were dead, she wouldn’t be able to taste any blood.

She looked up. The car was in ruins; a column of flame was eating it, turning it to rubber and metal. Amazingly, she managed to sit up, and then to stand. She felt no pain, as if she were watching a movie about her own life. And now she couldn’t hear anything. Not the voices calling to her, urging her out of the road, away from the car—not the sirens, either. She was in a watery, deep place of silence.

She turned and saw Ray struggling to get out of his car. There was blood trickling down his face; three people were trying to pull him from the wreck. When he’d swerved, he’d gone straight into a tree; the hood was crumpled, compressed nearly in half.

And now she saw why.

Standing in the middle of the road, perfectly still, not twenty feet away, was the tiger.

It was watching Heather with those deep black eyes, eyes that were old and sorrowful, eyes that had watched centuries go to dust. And in that moment, she felt a jolt go through her, and she knew that the tiger was afraid—of the noise and the fire and the people shouting, crowding the road on both sides.

But she, Heather, wasn’t afraid anymore.

She was compelled forward by a force she couldn’t explain. She felt nothing but pity and understanding. She was alone with the tiger on the road.

And in the final moment of the game, as smoke billowed in swollen plumes into the air and fire licked the sky, Heather Nill walked without hesitation to the tiger, and placed her hand gently on its head, and won.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8

heather

IN EARLY OCTOBER, CARP ENJOYED A WEEK OF FALSE summer. It was warm and bright and, if it weren’t for the trees that had already changed—deep reds and oranges interspersed with the deep green of the pines—it might have been the beginning of summer.

One day, Heather woke up with the sudden, strong impulse to return to where the game had begun. A mist rose slowly over Carp, shimmering, dispersing finally in the mounting sun; the air smelled like moist ground and freshly cut grass.

“How’d you like to go swimming, Bill?” she asked Lily when Lily rolled over, blinking, hair scattered across the pillow. Heather could see the light pattern of freckles on Lily’s nose, individual lashes highlighted by the sun, and thought her sister had never looked so pretty.

“With Bishop, too?” Lily asked.

Heather couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “With Bishop, too.” He had been driving home every weekend from college, to fulfill his community service duties. And to see Heather.

In the end, she decided to invite Nat and Dodge, too. It seemed right, somehow. When the small yellow envelope containing a single gold key—the key to a strongbox at a local bank—had arrived mysteriously in the mail, she had collected and divided the money among the three of them. She knew Dodge had given most of his portion to Bill Kelly; they were building a small memorial for Little Kelly at the site of the Graybill House, which had been demolished. Nat was taking some acting classes in Albany, and she’d gotten a job modeling clothes on weekends at the Hudson Valley Mall.

And starting in January, Heather would enroll in the Jefferson Community College’s program in veterinary services.

Heather packed the trunk with a blanket, beach towels, mosquito repellent, and sunscreen; a stack of old, waterlogged magazines from Anne’s living room; a cooler full of iced tea; several bags of chips; and creaky beach chairs with faded, striped seats. She could sense that tomorrow the weather would turn again, and the air would be edged with cold. Soon Krista would get out of her thirty-day program, and then Heather and Lily might have to return to Fresh Pines, at least temporarily. And soon the months of rain would come.

But today was perfect.

They arrived at the estuary just before lunch. Nobody had spoken much in the car. Lily had squeezed in between Dodge and Nat in the backseat. Nat braided a portion of Lily’s hair and whispered quietly to her about which movie stars she thought were the cutest; Dodge had leaned his head back against the window, and it was only from the occasional way his mouth twitched into a smile that Heather knew he wasn’t asleep. Bishop kept one hand on Heather’s knee as she drove. It still seemed miraculous to see it there, to know that he was hers—as he always had been, in some way. But everything was different now.

Different and better.

Once out of the car, all their restraint lifted. Lily went whooping into the woods, holding her towel over her head so it flapped behind her like a banner. Nat chased after her, swatting away the branches in her path. Dodge and Bishop helped Heather clear out the trunk, and together they all went pushing through the woods, loaded down with towels and beach chairs and the cooler clinking ice.

The beach looked cleaner than usual. Two trash cans had been installed at the far end of the shore, and the sand-and-gravel strip of beach was free of the usual cigarette butts and beer cans. Sunlight filtering through the trees patterned the water in crazy colors—purples and greens and vivid blues. Even the steep face of the rock wall across the water, from which all the players had jumped, now looked beautiful instead of frightening: there were flowers growing out of fissures in the rock, Heather noticed, tangled vines sweeping down toward the water. The trees at the top of the jumping point were fire-red already, burning in the sun.

Lily trotted back to Heather as she was shaking out the blanket. There was a light breeze, and Heather had to tamp down the corners with different belongings: her flip-flops, Bishop’s sunglasses, the beach bag.

“Is that it, Heather?” Lily pointed. “Is that where you jumped?”

“Nat jumped too,” Heather said. “We all did. Well, except Bishop.”

“What can I say?” He was already unlacing his Converses. He winked at Lily. “I’m chicken.”