Linda’s heart broke wide open and she put a gentle hand to Cole’s cheek, wishing she had the power to whisk away his anguish. But she knew she could not. She had her own guilt to deal with, in allowing Cole to join her, in standing there and watching as he walked away from his family. She had her own doubt. Her own shame. And she could guess, gazing ahead to the confrontation that she could see coming, and at the forces bearing down upon them even now as they sat here on the roadside, that there would be much more than this to grieve before it was all over.
The path she had chosen would require tough choices, sacrifice and loss. It already had. Now Cole had to feel the consequences of the choice he’d made: to stand beside her as an ally as they confronted those who would threaten their world. And maybe there were deeper consequences for them both to face. Deeper choices they had made. Deeper choices the whole world had made, even though they might never have felt like choices at all. They lived in a world chock-full of consequences, it seemed. It was only right, that she and Cole should bear their portion of acceptance and responsibility and loss.
For now, there was little she could think to do but to tell the truth as she saw it. I left my kids, Cole had said. “Yes, you did,” she replied. She ran her fingers down to his chin, then let her hand fall away to her lap. “So it’s now our job to make that count for something.” She held his eyes with her own, letting the raincloud of fears and thoughts and wants and wounds that pulsed and churned between them break apart and dissipate in the bright sun of her regard. A warm, joyful sensation bubbled up from her heart and kindled a smile on her face. A great peace washed over her soul. They could do this. They could stand the pain and doubt. They could feel the fear. They could walk the path they’d chosen. There was no grief that could last forever. The human face was simply too eager to smile.
Another car approached, slowing a bit as it neared them, before zooming off. Cole followed it as it passed, then looked over to see the President hunched low in her seat. She winked. “I’d better get back in the dungeon,” she said, rolling her eyes. When the car was gone, she opened her door and did just that.
7.3
Five miles down the road the President started laughing uncontrollably. Curious, Cole got the idea to fold the back seat forward so that they could talk while he drove. That would require a stop. Glancing down, he noticed that they needed gas anyway, so he continued into the next town, Marshfield, and pulled into the Quik-E-Stop there.
Linda quieted as he pulled up to the pumps. He swiped his card and set the nozzle on autocut, then stepped around to lower the seat back on the right side. As soon as Linda saw him she started laughing again. Cole couldn’t help himself and laughed along. “What?” he said.
She waved him away, shaking her head in an attempt to stop herself. “Just … pump the gas,” she finally managed to say. Cole lifted an eyebrow and went around to finish the task, then got back into the driver’s seat and started the car. He adjusted the rearview mirror downward and they caught each other’s eye. Linda laughed even harder.
“What?” he demanded, grinning broadly.
The President drew in a huge breath, wiping the tears from her eyes. That seemed to control it a bit. “Your father!” she managed to say before laughing again. “I can’t believe I called bullshit on your father!”
Cole pictured his father standing there and taking it as the President of the United States got in his face. “That was something,” he answered with a sigh. Something Cole never thought he’d see.
Linda’s laughter sputtered out and she wiped her eyes. Cole glanced at her in the mirror. She looked peaceful. The laughter had released a great deal of pain. The shadows that had haunted her eyes since their first meeting had faded away.
Linda noticed him looking at her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“That was your dad, Cole! I had no right to—”
Cole shook his head and laughed. “I could fill a stadium with people who would have paid good money to watch that.”
“Yeah, but—” Linda closed her eyes, as if replaying the scene. “I hope the kids didn’t witness it.”
“I don’t know. It’s like, maybe it’d be good for them. You know?”
Linda shrugged. “Looks like your father dotes on them.”
“Yeah. And they really love him. But they know that things are off between their Grandpa and me.”
Linda adjusted the pillow under her head and closed her eyes. “You wanna talk about it?”
“About what?”
“About what’s up with your father.”
Cole turned his attention to the road. The interstate was coming up in a mile and he knew that they’d have to take it for a bit, to catch route 114 up to Eastbound. The thought of that frightened him. They were more likely to encounter the police on the interstate. “Um, Linda?”
“Yeah?”
“Check and make sure you can pull that seat back up, okay? We gotta get onto the interstate for a bit. I need to know that we can close it in a hurry.”
Linda scooted back and reached out to grab the seat. She pulled but it barely moved. “I can’t get it,” she said. “The angle’s wrong.”
Cole reached back with his right hand and lifted. Once he got it started Linda could pull it the rest of the way. “I can’t get it to latch,” she said, her voice muffled.
Cole glanced back. “It looks closed. Good enough.”
The President pushed out enough to get an arm through and shoved her shoulder bag under the seat back to keep it from going all the way forward. Then she pushed herself back out a bit, wriggling around to get more comfortable. They caught each other’s eye in the rearview mirror and Linda smiled courageously. Cole sighed. “So,” he finally said, “my father.”
“Your father.”
Cole took the ramp up to the interstate. His heart lurched to see a state cruiser speeding southward, its lights screaming. He eased into northbound traffic and checked his speed, watching the cruiser disappear in his side mirror. “My father,” he repeated.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, her voice warm with invitation and kindness. She’d settled in once again, eyes closed, a slight smile on her face, as if she could hear anything Cole had to say and not be undone by it.
“Yeah, well. It’s … complicated. My father has always been…”
“Hard?”
“Well, you know It’s a Wonderful Life, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s just say dear old dad was more Mr. Potter than George Bailey.”
Linda looked up to catch Cole’s eye. “That must have been rough,” she said.
“Yeah, but, you get used to it, you know? And he’s softened over the years. You saw him with the kids.”
“So what did you do wrong?” she asked.
Cole flinched. A tandem rig blew by on his left, rattling the car. Cole slowed a bit. What did he do wrong? Where do you start? And how do you speak of it? “I told you about, you know … how Ruth died.”
Linda nodded. “NewAir 413,” she replied.
“Right. So. About a week before that, I told Ruth that I thought that, you know, that maybe we should separate.”
“Oh, Cole,” moaned the President, in sympathy with Cole’s obvious distress. She shook her head slightly. “Jesus.”
“Yeah. It was a mess. I was too. It was like, well, we talked all that week. And cried. And then she had to go to London and … and….”
“And her plane went down.”
Cole nodded. There were tears welling in his eyes but he held them back. Knuckles white on the wheel, he stared out over the road. After a moment he could speak again. “So at the funeral, I’m standing there, just watching as the people file in. Dad comes up from behind and says to me ‘Well, Cole, at least this’ll save you on legal bills.’ And then he walked away.” Cole’s chest heaved as the deep hurt welled up once again. Tears flooded his cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lin
da from the cargo compartment.
“I didn’t even know she’d told anyone, least of all my father.” Cole’s voice was wistful, aching, choked with regret and bitter with betrayal. He could never get that week back. Never make it right. Never work it out. Ruth’s cold smile and quick peck would remain forever in his mind, the last moments of their time together, fraught with unfinished business and hope and anger and misunderstanding, a song stuck in his head that would never fade to silence.
“I didn’t know she’d told anyone,” he repeated.
He glanced up to see the cop in his rearview mirror just moments before the siren sounded.
7.4
He could see the Lyndonville exit just ahead. He could see the road that would take them to Keeley’s house, to whatever plan the President had in her head, to what safety they might find there. Two-tenths of a mile and they’d have been off this goddamned interstate, and the goddamned state trooper now sitting in his car right behind them as traffic zipped past, the goddamned state trooper with his goddamned clipboard and his goddamned sunglasses and his goddamned attitude that didn’t have a clue what was going on or what was at stake, that goddamned trooper would have gone zipping past just like the rest of the traffic and he and Linda would have been free. Fuck!
Cole’s guts squirmed as he watched the trooper climb slowly from his cruiser, all stern caution and confidence. He could feel the eyes of every passing motorist slide over his face as he sat there: exposed, trapped, caught, with absolutely no way out. The trooper walked slowly toward his Forester, stopping for a moment at the hatchback door and bending down to reach for the latch, as if he knew the President was lying in the cargo compartment, as if he’d been told exactly what road, exactly what time, exactly which car, exactly which door. As if he were not a state trooper at all but some sort of alien, a robot, a Terminator, with the power to read minds and see through walls. Cole would not have been surprised to see the trooper morph into some huge and lethal machine, to see him raise his rocket-launcher arm and blow them both straight to hell. After a moment the trooper rose to his feet and walked around to Cole’s open window. He hadn’t touched the hatchback door. Cole glanced back quickly, to make sure Linda had pulled the seat back up as tightly as was possible.
“License and registration please, sir,” said the trooper, his voice a caricature of every movie cop Cole had ever seen. The trooper stood at his window with his hand outstretched in self-assured anticipation that Cole would give him exactly what he had requested. Cole reached for his wallet and his glove box and did just that.
“Uh … was I speeding, officer?” Cole managed to ask, wincing inwardly at how nervous he sounded.
The policeman glanced at Cole’s documents and then handed them back. “Your speed was fine, sir,” he said stiffly. “But you have what looks like a blanket hanging from your back door, dragging on the road. It’s obscuring your license plate.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck, Cole cursed inside. Fuck! He struggled to catch his breath before the gasp welling up inside of him got out where the trooper could hear it. Clenching the steering wheel to keep his hands steady he looked up at the trooper and smiled. “You’re kidding me,” he said, scrunching his nose again and again. It was all he could think to say.
“Excuse me?” said the cop.
Cole winced, smiling all the harder, sure that his face was more rictus than grin. “I mean … it must have been … I think one of my kids must have left it there.”
The trooper nodded, looking out over the traffic for a moment before returning his gaze to Cole. A tanker truck slammed past, flapping the trooper’s jacket sleeves in its wake. “No doubt, sir,” he said, when the noise had died down. When Cole continued to just sit and smile he added, “So shall I fix it for you, sir?”
Cole staggered inwardly, twitching as if he’d just been slapped. He was sure the trooper could see it. His mind raced to Grace, lying there in that deep, mysterious sleep, waking one day to learn that her father was in prison. His foot pressed lightly on the accelerator, ready to punch and run. He could feel his heartbeat in the space between his fingertips and the steering wheel, as if his life was bleeding out before him. Only seconds left. He opened his mouth to speak, gagged on his own words, and cleared his throat. “I, uh, no. Sir. No thanks. I’ll get it.” He knew then how people could wet themselves in such moments. His body was barely under his control. His fingers stretched and curled on the wheel like worms in the rain.
The officer nodded, clicked his tongue, wrinkled his nose, as if he were matching Cole’s words to the Vermont State Police Official List of Reasonable Responses, as if he were walking Cole’s answer along a straight line to see if it wavered. He took a single step backward. “So, then, you’ll be getting out and fixing it yourself. Is that right, sir?”
Cole nodded quickly. The trooper stood and stared. There was no way out of this. They were dead. Cole thought he heard a faint clunk come from the back and flashed immediately on his memory of the President bursting forth to confront his father. His heart began to hammer. He opened his mouth to speak. He had to say something. But he could not seem to make his mouth move.
A black ball appeared just inches above his hood. Cole didn’t see that it had come from anywhere. It was just there. Six inches across, maybe. Black like a crow is black, slightly shiny, tinged with blue. It didn’t hover, really. Hovering implied some small movement and this was so still that Cole could sense the Earth itself moving underneath. He stared.
“Sir?” asked the trooper.
Cole glanced at the trooper, then back at the ball. “Do you see that?” he asked, his hands flourishing like a game-show hostess.
The trooper glanced over at the ball, then back at Cole. “The black ball, sir?” he asked, his voice unfazed.
Cole laughed with bewilderment. “Yeah. The black ball,” he said, as if the trooper had just noted the end of the world with nothing more than a nod.
“I see it, sir,” replied the trooper. “So, about that blanket….”
Cole was about to respond when the light from an explosion ahead blasted his eyes, followed immediately with a roar that shook the whole car. The trooper was almost flung to the ground, catching himself with a side step and a hand on Cole’s luggage rack. Cole peered up the road as a fireball punched the sky. He thought for a second of the tanker truck that had passed only a moment before.
Traffic was coming to a standstill, taillights flashing a line of warning, as if the fireball needed any help. The trooper dusted himself off, his attention on the explosion. “You have a good day, sir,” he said absently, not even looking at Cole. He returned to his car as quickly as he could and lurched out onto the interstate, speeding toward the blaze while the road was still clear enough to do so. Cole started the Forester and shifted into gear. In seconds he was on the ramp, veering away from the interstate, the trooper, and whatever it was that had just happened.
It was only then that he thought to wonder where the black ball had gone.
7.5
Cole pushed through the convenience store door carrying two bottles of juice, a chocolate-covered donut, a bag of cheddar-cheese popcorn, and a vague twinge of guilt: first, because while many countries were dealing with food riots and rationing, Americans could still seem to get all the junk food they could afford and, second, because the money in Cole’s pocket had come from the wrongful death settlement that had resulted from his wife’s dismemberment. He looked up at the sky, squinting against the brightness and wondering if there was anyone looking back down on him. He chuckled at the thought. It was all just too much. And the “too much” was piling higher so swiftly now that he’d lost all hope of keeping up. He sighed his surrender, remembering one of his father’s favorite phrases: he would simply have to “summer on.” There was never time for winter in Ben Thomas’s kingdom. That’s just the way the world works, m’boy. Nobody ever said it was fair.
Cole ducked into the car and handed a drink and the donut back to Linda, slam
ming the door on his father’s unsolicited advice. “Orange juice and chocolate.” He shook his head in mock disgust. “I don’t know how you can stomach it.”
Linda laughed, then gestured with a quick toss of her head. “How’s it look out there?”
“I think we’re good for a while,” Cole mused, peering out the passenger side window at the fire, now a couple of miles behind them. Black smoke hung in the sky like a dirty towel on the back of a chair. “Must’ve been diesel fuel in that tanker. And it looks like every cop and emergency crew in the state has gone to check it out. So we may have a clear shot to Eastbound.” On the drive into Lyndonville he’d seen three police cars shoot past them toward the interstate. Since pulling into the Gas ‘n’ Get, he’d seen two fire trucks. “The sirens must be driving you crazy,” he said.
“Well, I am kind of in the dark here, Cole,” she said. “You okay?”
Cole inserted the key and started the car. “I’m doing good, Mrs. President,” he said, pressing his lips in thought. “My heartbeat’s down to around two hundred and my pants are starting to dry.” He turned back to Linda and flashed his eyebrows with good humor.
“I was about to come out and talk to that trooper myself, you know.”
“I do know. Which is why I’m so glad your little friend showed up when he did.”
Puzzlement slipped over the President’s face. “My little friend?” she asked.
“Yeah. Little black ball. About the size of a grapefruit. Came and just sat there over the hood till the tanker blew.” Cole noticed the look on Linda’s face. “Not a friend of yours?”
Linda shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cole. The seat back was up. I didn’t see it.”
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