"What's on your mind?" she asked. But she knew. Many of the same things reeled stormily in her mind, too.
"I was just thinking that it's over," Peter said. "High school. Being a kid." This was only partially true. In the front of his mind was the dream, bright and jagged as a saw blade. He'd dreamed about flying before, many times. It was only natural. Aviation was his future; he lived for it. But this was the first time things had taken such a catastrophic turn, and there was no way he was going to tell Kelly about it. Her own nightmare was that he would someday perish in a crash. Thinking back on it now, he supposed that his dream tied in with some of the other feelings he was having. The fears, the uncertainty about what Laughren had so aptly termed "the fickle and often treacherous road ahead." It was no longer a metaphor. "It's really over."
"Aren't you glad?"
Peter nodded. "Right up until this morning I was overjoyed, ready to do back flips. But now that it's here. . .” He sighed. "I mean, after today, we're probably never going to see half of those people again."
Kelly chuckled. "I can think of more than a few who I'm not gonna miss."
"Me, too. . . but you know what I mean." She did. "And it's not only that. Tomorrow we're off on our trip, and when we get back there'll only be a few days left before we move down to Kingston. I mean, here we are planning to live together, and we haven't even told our folks about it yet. Then there's military college. What if I spend three years down there and they tell me I'm not cut out for the air force?"
Peter's admission of uncertainty surprised and unsettled Kelly. Before today he'd never expressed even the slightest doubt regarding their future, particularly where flying was concerned—he was going to become a fighter pilot come hell or high water. But his sudden confidings pleased her, too. It meant that he trusted her, and she felt that much closer to him for it.
She tried to hearten him. "You've already been through the candidate screening in Toronto, Peter, and they've all but guaranteed your eligibility."
It was true. He'd been to the Aircrew Selection Center in Toronto the month before for a series of rigorous tests, and had done well. And he already had a private pilot's license.
"I know, I know." He seemed suddenly close to tears. "It's just. . .”
Then it dawned. "Is it your mom?"
Peter paused a moment before answering, surprised at how brittle his emotions had become on this of all days. . . and astonished at how, after just under a year together, Kelly seemed so unfailingly able to place her finger directly on the sore spot.
"When she kissed me in the auditorium," Peter said, spitting out each word as if it bore some repulsive taste, "there was booze on her breath."
Kelly made a small disappointed sound in her throat.
"You know, I honestly thought she'd be okay. After my father died—" Peter missed a beat, realizing with a jolt that it had been five years since his dad had keeled over dead from a heart attack—"it looked as if she was going to lose it completely. Jack Daniel's was her only friend during those dark days." He blew air through his teeth in a humorless chuckle. "I still don't know why she took it so hard. The old man was a total prick to her." He paused, remembering. "But then she seemed to come around. I can't say for sure, but I think I had a lot to do with it. The piano, the marks, football. . . all of that."
Peter turned to face Kelly. Tears had formed glimmering pools in the troughs of his eyelids. "Just lately, she's gone back to the boozing again. Nothing serious, just the occasional weekend fling. . . but I'm afraid once I'm gone, she'll slip back over the edge."
"She's still got Sammy," Kelly said, biting her tongue against an urge to verbalize her true feelings about Peter's mother. It could only worsen an already delicate situation. "He's only fourteen, but—"
"I've never said this to anyone," Peter cut in. "It kills me to even think it. But. . . my mother doesn't love Sam, Kelly. Not the way she does me. Sam was an accident. After me, she never intended to have another." He sighed. "I don't think Sam can help her."
"Try not to think about it," Kelly said, chilled—but not entirely surprised—by this admission. "You'll do what you can. But you've got a life of your own now." She kissed him. "And you've got me."
Seized by a sudden, fierce arousal, Peter shifted his body over Kelly's. Sharing his need, Kelly turned and lifted the raven locks from her neck, baring the nape.
Peter kissed her there, knowing how it brought her alive.
It was five o'clock and the end-of-June sun still hung high. For six solid days temperatures had skyrocketed into the high eighties and early nineties, and the forecasts offered no hope of a break. Uncle Jim's airfield—a six-bay hangar and a frost-heaved landing strip—was a forty-minute drive from the city, northwest of Sudbury on Highway 144. Peter and Kelly had been on the road for about twenty minutes and had just passed the turnoff to Dowling. The last of the city's mining-ravaged outskirts lay far behind them, and now rich pine forest stretched out for miles on either side.
Peter swerved out to pass a lumbering transport loaded with Blue Label, if you could believe the logo on the trailer.
Cuffing sweat from her brow, Kelly shouted over the roar of the bike. "Hey, let's hijack that truck!"
Peter nodded, his silver Bell helmet setting off sunflares with the movement. "That'd make us a hit at the party," he called back to her. "Beer, anyone?"
Onaping came next, then Cartier, twelve miles later. Beyond that, 144 was little more than a weather-bleached strip of concrete, running like a zipper between two thighs of bush.
Bush, bush, and more bush.
Lulled by the heat and by the stuttering monotony of the center line, Peter slipped-into a logy semitrance. He was aware of the vibration of the bike and the pressure of Kelly's hands on his hips, but these perceptions only added to the soporific effect. Gradually, his mind switched over to autopilot.
His thoughts wound back absently to the events and sentiments of the now dwindling day, turning them over like Rubic's cubes, arranging them into different patterns. The porcupine toiling its way out of the ditch didn't even catch his eye. He might have picked it up with his peripheral vision, but the image didn't crystallize until it was already too late.
Then he did see its waddling brown bulk, and with a cold lump of terror in his throat he tried to swerve around it—
But in the last possible instant, the doomed beast chose the direction of Peter's swerve as its own. With a swiftness anomalous to its species, it dove into the whirring spokes of the Honda's front wheel.
The creature exploded, knots of raw tissue and fire-tipped quills spraying into Peter's face.
The front wheel locked at sixty miles an hour.
For the space of a heartbeat, unreality triumphed. Nothing happened. They simply hung there, neither in control nor completely out of it. Then reality resumed its treacherous reign and the bike flipped saddle-over-headlight, catapulting Kelly into space. Still clutching the handgrips, Peter watched her go, and for another tilted spasm unreality overswept him. That was Kelly out there, and she was totally airborne, her flailing limbs giving the impression of someone swimming through the thick summer air.
Impossible.
There followed an infinite moment of downy free-fall. . .
Then the bike went over hard. Peter's first, terrified intake of breath stunk of gasoline, sun-baked pavement, and scalding oil. His helmet struck the asphalt with a pistol crack and split like a rotten egg, stunning him. Colored pinpoints of light pulsed on his retinas, blooming like oil drops on water, and a dreadful flat horn bleat a concussive note in his head.
I'm about to die, Peter thought with dark profundity.
Then came the pain.
Four hundred pounds of mindless machine pinned him to the pavement, grinding his body like a bug beneath a boot heel. Obeying the laws of friction and force, the bike swept him along before its load of momentum. He tried to roll away but couldn't, the weight of the bike clutching his leg like shark's teeth. He could fe
el the blacktop rasping through his jeans, flaying off skin, planing down to the bone. In a reflex, he thrust his hands out in front of him, but the asphalt chewed into them, too. He twisted at the waist, trying to distribute the scalding pain. Beneath his face, inches away, the flat gray back of the highway blurred incessantly past, and for a hideous moment Peter wondered if the still roaring Honda would mill and grind until there was nothing left of him but a long bloody streak and a coagulated cluster of bone.
Now the concussive bleat in his head changed in quality. It deepened, seemed to exteriorize, becoming a deep-throated bellow overspread by a high keening shriek that whirled around inside his helmet.
But he was going to be all right. He knew that now. The bike was slowing, and although the world swam and the stars were out and the pain was titanic, he was still conscious. He would walk away from this one, scraped and bloodied, maybe a busted kneecap on the left—
Kelly!
The thought paralyzed him.
What about Kelly?
He was lying on his belly, still facing north, when the bike came to an abrupt, begrudging halt. He craned his neck around and spotted her, several yards back on the roadside. She was hobbling toward him, one arm flailing over her head, the other dangling at her side, a fractured butt of bone jutting obscenely through the skin. There was blood and she was yelling something, but she was up and she was moving and she was going to be okay, too.
Relief surged through him. He waved, doing his best through the pain to grin. . . but Kelly was still yelling, really howling, he realized. What was she saying? He couldn't hear her over that infernal noise inside his helmet.
Pushing up on raw palms, Peter angled his gaze another twenty degrees and glimpsed what Kelly was yelling about, beheld the source of that solid, bellowing roar.
The beer truck, rumbling like doom out of the heat shimmer, veering hard to the left in an ill-spent effort to avoid the over-turned bike. It bore down on him like the closing halves of a gargantuan jackknife, locked wheels spewing white smoke. . .
And there was nothing he could do but watch.
The truck was thunder, the truck was the serpent-hiss of air brakes, the truck was the earsplitting howl of the air horn.
The truck was everything.
Punted like a pop can, the bike entered the air in a lazy spiral.
And Peter went under, past sunlight on polished chrome, past hot breath and foul smells into dark guts and a lifetime of hideous nightmares. The right rear wheels of the cab rolled over his legs at the knees—he could actually see them going over his knees—and then he was tumbling, over and over, faster and faster, a bit of cloth in a wicked wind.
The world became a bloodied pastiche of layered sensation: alternating glimpses of road and underbelly, road and underbelly; hot whiffs of mechanical body fluids; the terrible beastly moan of metal straining against metal; raw pain screaming from every nerve fiber in hellish concert with the air horn.
A snap!
(That came)
A deep, sickening, greenstick snap!
(from inside me!)
Bright Light.
Dead? Am I dead?
no
It had passed over him. The truck had passed over him, and now he lay flat on his back on the highway. The Bright Light was not God's celestial corridor but the sun, hot as slag on his face. He had journeyed through a dark eternity that had lasted only seconds—and he was still alive. Incredibly, he was still alive.
Legs busted bad. . . can't move. . .
The sun was so terribly hot on his face, he could feel the skin blistering, he could feel that and he could hear the truck. The horn had fallen silent, but now came the earsplitting artillery blasts of steel snapping trees, and the jangling, shattering clangor of hundreds upon hundreds of exploding beer bottles.
He could feel the sun on his face—
But that was all.
Where is the pain? Why is there no pain?
In his tottering mind Peter screamed out a prayer, begging for pain, pleading for brutal, mind-eating, nerve-blasting pain—
Something hovering over him now, blocking the sun, pooling cool shadow on his face.
"Kelly?" A feeble whisper.
"Oh, Peter, yes, it's me! You're alive, thank God you're alive!"
Kelly. Above him, leaning over him, her voice hectic and high. Blood dripped from her shattered arm and freckled his forehead. . . wet, warm, tacky. He could feel that, and he wanted to tell her he could feel that and nothing else. . .
But the truth of what that meant, the unspeakable truth of what that crisp interior snap! had been, dried up the words in his throat.
The world was swimming. . .
Swimming away.
There was a voice out there now, beyond Kelly's, and Peter prayed it was God's voice, if there was a God. He prayed it was God's voice calling him Home.
But it was only the trucker, stumbling toward them from his toppled rig. "Hey! Hey! You kids all right?"
Swimming. . .
Floating? Am I floating?
Kelly's voice. Kelly's touch. Kelly's hair tenting his face.
Then nothing.
Nothing at all.
TWO
The haggard face in the west window startled her. That's me, Leona Gardner realized as her reflection resolved into ghostly focus. . . and in that moment she knew what she would look like when she got old. Not a pretty sight.
Turning away, Leona took another stiff belt of Jack Daniel's, wincing at its bite and at the hot tingle it sent capering through her body. Already comfortably plastered, she toasted the vacant chair opposite.
"Smooth sippin' Tennessee whiskey!" she cried, slurring the words. She snickered and lit another Tareyton.
Wreathed in smoke, she punched the rewind button on the reel-to-reel. Then, not wanting to, she glanced again at her reflection in the window glass.
Now it seemed to be speaking to her.
Look at you! it reproached her, its drawn lips unmoving. A fine figure of a mother. You're a mess! A weak, disgusting mess! The boy's got to fly the coop sometime.
"Fuck you," Leona growled. And in a furious reflex, the hand holding the lit Tareyton shot out and clutched the yellow sheers, jerking them hard in an effort to obscure the mocking reflection. But the force she used was too great, and the curtain rod let go, swinging down and batting a house-plant to the floor. Now there was a pungent burnt smell, and Leona realized that her cigarette had ignited the sheers. Cursing again, she crushed the tiny blue flame between her fingers. Now there was a nickel-size hole, charred black at the edges.
Leona felt the scald of bitter tears.
Sam appeared in the doorway, his eyes behind his thick glasses puzzled and afraid, one finger worrying an angry-looking zit on his chin.
Leona glared at him. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing," Sam mumbled, dropping his gaze. "I just—"
"Then go about your business."
Head hung, Sam slouched back to his room.
On the kitchen table the reel-to-reel continued to spin. It had completed the rewind cycle, and now the loose end of the tape flapped annoyingly. Ignoring the fallen curtains, Leona clumsily rethreaded the tape, then hit the play button again.
Peter's music swelled from the whirring machine, filling her heart, quelling her pointless rage. She swilled and listened, her gaze straying through the living room archway to the piano by the big bay window. A white Yamaha. A baby grand. Peter had earned the money for it all by himself, starting with a paper route when he was only eleven.
Leona smiled. Whenever she thought of her boy, all of life's troubles seemed to just glide away. They were still there, of course—she wasn't that drunk. But for the time being they lost some of their urgency, some of their nagging importance.
The telephone rang, jarring Leona out of her near stupor. "Sam?" she shouted. "Get that, will you?"
No answer.
"Sam!"
Nothing.
She
turned down the volume on the recorder and wobbled to her feet. Weaving, she crossed to the wall phone by the doorway and lifted the receiver, almost fumbling it.
"Hello?"
A gruff male voice said, "Is this the Gardner residence?"
"Yes?" A tiny dagger of fear slipped between Leona's ribs.
"What—"
"To whom am I speaking?"
"Mrs. Gardner. Who is this?"
"It's Sergeant Mitchell of the Sudbury Regional Police, Mrs. Gardner."
Dread reared up and kicked Leona Gardner in the stomach. Peter! Her Peter was up in that damned airplane. . .
"Is it Peter?" she cried, abruptly sober. "Is it my boy?"
Sam reappeared in the doorway, his face expectant and pale.
"I'm afraid so, Mrs. Gardner," Mitchell said gravely. "There's been an accident."
Leona's legs failed her and she sat down hard, her teeth clacking together as her fanny struck the floor. Sam took an uncertain step toward her.
"Is he. . . ?"
"His condition is listed as critical, Mrs. Gardner. He's in surgery right now, at the University Hospital. I regret having to give you this news."
The receiver plopped into Leona's lap; her hands thudded limply to the floor. Jumping its attachments, her small engagement diamond skidded across the linoleum and vanished among the dust kitties under the stove. Leona sat with her back to the wall and gazed without seeing at her feet, her pallid face stricken with shock.
Sam took the receiver and put it to his ear.
"Mrs. Gardner?"
"No. This is Sam, Peter's brother." His finger worked a beet-red blemish on his cheek. "Please, what's happened?"
"Your brother's been involved in an accident," Mitchell said, his voice formal and low. "He's badly hurt, Sam. He's in surgery right now."
"Oh," Sam muttered, his thoughts whirling crazily. "Wha. . . what should I do?"
"You and your mom should get over to the hospital, son."
"Yes," Sam agreed. He simply could not envision his brother hurt. Peter was indestructible, Peter was. . . hurt?
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