She’d left him behind at the rest stop and he had to admit to himself that it hurt, but he couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know him, had just met him, and though she obviously wanted to help him, how could she truly trust him? In his heart, he didn’t believe that his issues—his disfigurement and agoraphobia—had anything to do with her decision to leave him. She was simply being careful in a world where anything less could be terribly dangerous, even deadly. But even now, in the grip of a panic attack, Boone remembered her soothing voice, her comforting words, and he played them over and over again in his head. And his breathing started to slow. And his heart stopped jumping. And the nausea never even arrived. The grip of the attack was loosening, its fingers relaxing around him. Soon, he felt nearly normal again.
“You aren’t gonna puke, are you? Adam, I think this guy’s gonna puke.”
“No,” Boone managed to croak, “I’m not gonna get sick.”
He took a deep breath. It had passed; the panic attack passed by without ever truly arriving, like a giant meteor with devastatingly destructive potential streaking past within mere miles of Earth. At least that was how it felt to Boone. But it passed him by, barely grazing him. That had never happened before, not out in public, and not when he was so close to succumbing. Was it possible, after six long years, that he was getting better? Certainly he had a long way to go, but he had made major strides in just the past hour.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, he had hope. It wasn’t like he planned to parade his damaged face around in public all the time, even if he was cured—scare the kiddies a few times a day, freak out a few old ladies—but it would be nice not to be a prisoner of his little city block. At least the choice would be his when to sneak out and when to stay home.
“You looked like you were gonna puke,” the guy said. Boone remembered his name was Ron.
“I’m fine, Ron. I was just getting a bit carsick, but I’m okay. Really.”
“I seriously don’t want you hurling in my car, man,” the driver said. That was Adam.
“I won’t get sick, I promise you. I’m fine now. Just a bad moment, that’s all.”
“You wanna ride up front?” That was the third guy, Ricky.
“Don’t worry about me, guys,” Boone said. “I’m good. I really am. And listen, again, I really appreciate you giving me a ride like this.”
After a brief silence, Adam finally said, “Don’t sweat it. Going that way anyway.”
“That way” meant past Franconia Notch State Park, where the Old Man of the Mountain once surveyed the surrounding peaks before tumbling from his cliff face, transforming in a matter of moments from a state symbol into a mere pile of rubble. Boone could think of no other place to go. Since leaving his apartment, he hadn’t been visited by whatever entity had been haunting him. The ghost or spirit or whatever it was seemed content to leave him to his mission, whatever that was. However, Boone was counting on a little direction at some point, some spectral evidence telling him where to go or what to do next. In the meantime, all he could think to do was to follow the ghost’s lead as best he could, and the messages he’d received pointed to the Old Man of the Mountain.
In the backseat beside Boone, Ron cleared his throat. “So, dude, I hate to ask, but, well, you know…”
“My face?” Boone asked.
“Yeah.”
“Car accident.”
Silence for a moment, then Ricky asked, “What about your eyes?”
“What about them?”
“They look…funny. Sorry, man, that’s the only word I could think of.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Boone said. “I’m blind in one eye and partially blind in the other.”
“Man, that’s rough.”
Boone nodded.
“So, you can’t see?” Ricky asked.
“Not a hell of a lot.”
Ricky added, “Guys, maybe we should…I don’t know…should we—”
“What?” Boone asked.
Ricky hesitated. Everyone seemed to be waiting for him to continue, so Boone stepped in. “No, guys, you shouldn’t do anything else for me. You’re doing more than enough. Just drop me somewhere near the park. I’ll work it out from there.”
After a moment of silence, Adam said, “Well, if you think you’ll be okay.”
“I’ll be all right, seriously.”
“We kind of hate to abandon you out there,” Ron added.
Boone smiled. “Like I said, I’ll be fine. But thanks.”
And, as strange as those words sounded to Boone, he actually thought they might prove to be true one day.
Someone turned up the volume on the radio. Boone didn’t care for the music, which pounded and vibrated the speakers to the point that they seemed on the verge of blowing, so he tuned it out. He thought back to those soft, warm hands on his cheeks, and the soft, warm words in his ears. He marveled that a woman he’d met only briefly, someone he’d never see again, could, with a moment’s touch, have such an impact on him. She had reached through the veil of descending darkness and pulled him into the light. She’d shown him that it was possible to fend off one of his attacks without resorting to a mad scurry back into his apartment the moment his heart started to flutter. The more he thought about it, the more he began to believe that he just might be replaying her words in his head for a long time, whenever panic threatened to topple him, until maybe, one day, he beat this thing for good. And maybe she’d shown him a way to cope until then. It wasn’t like no one had ever told him this would be possible—it was just that Alice actually proved it to him.
Boone almost smiled. The night was getting better. Not only had he had some success standing up to his agoraphobia, but he hadn’t been tormented by his personal demon—or ghost or whatever—since he left his apartment. If there wasn’t so much evidence proving that Boone hadn’t imagined everything, he might have been forced to revisit the idea that the haunting had stopped when he left his apartment only because his subconscious had gotten its way—it had forced him out in order to make him confront his phobia. But the evidence was there. Boone couldn’t have programmed his computer to make the letters H and N glow, nor to repeat only those letters over and over. And he had the bruises to prove that the pictures had sailed from the walls. No, Boone had not imagined all this. So the ghost’s silence of late meant that Boone was indeed on the right path, that the spirit was satisfied with his progress and direction and hadn’t yet needed to prod him or alter his course. Boone assumed, as he’d assumed since he left home, that the ghost would make itself heard again when it had something to say, some new instruction to give. Until then, it was nice to not be haunted for a while, not to be assaulted by flying pictures and threats of violence and damnation.
The car’s slowing pulled him from his thoughts.
“Why are we pulling in here?” Ricky asked.
“We need gas,” Adam replied.
“Where?” Ricky said. “Here?”
“Yeah, here,” Adam said. “Is that okay with you?”
Ricky said nothing. Boone did his pigeon-head-cock motion to try to see out the window. All he saw was dark. Adam opened his door. Beside Boone, Ron did the same.
“I’m staying here,” Ricky said.
Boone was starting to get a bad feeling. Someone threw open his door. The outside rushed in. Boone cringed.
“Come on, gorgeous,” Adam said. “Get out.”
Boone shook his head. The air from outside the car started to crawl over his skin. He shivered at its touch.
“Let’s go,” Adam said. “Don’t make this hard on yourself.”
“I can’t,” Boone said. His heart was skipping now, on the verge of a full gallop.
Someone snatched his gym bag from between his feet. Over the roar of blood that had started pounding in his ears, he heard a zipper.
“Nothing but clothes,” Ron said.
“Too bad,” Adam said. “He’s gotta have money, though. What about it, buddy?”
“Come on, man, don’t make us do it this way,” Adam said.
Boone tried to slow his breathing, his heartbeat. He tried to picture Alice’s compassionate eyes, eyes he’d never actually seen. He strained to hear her voice, her words of comfort. But harsh voices drowned her out, and rough hands tugged at him now, making it impossible to concentrate.
“Ricky?” Boone said.
“I can’t help you, man,” Ricky said as Boone was hauled from his seat and dragged through gravel. They let him go and the open air of the night pressed down on him with all its ferociously dark weight. Boone was suffocating. While he gasped like a goldfish out of its bowl, voices floated above him.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“I don’t know. Think he’s having a seizure?”
“What do we do?”
“Get his money and get out.”
“You think maybe this isn’t a good idea after all?”
“Why not?”
“He’ll tell the cops.”
“What’s he gonna tell them? It’s not like he can ID us. He can’t see. Doesn’t even know what we’re driving.”
“He knows our names.”
“Won’t do him any good without knowing what kind of car we’re in. What, the cops are gonna pull over every car on the highway? All for a hundred bucks or whatever he has in his wallet? No way.”
“You sure?”
“It’s too late now anyway. Look at him. Something’s wrong with him. You wanna take him back into the car like that? I don’t.”
“I guess not.”
Hands rolled Boone over and tugged his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. He tried weakly to resist but other hands held his own. They took his cell phone from his other pocket.
“A few hundred bucks. Not too bad. Plus his phone.”
Something landed on his back. His wallet.
“Come on, let’s go.”
Footsteps headed away.
They were leaving.
They were leaving Boone out here in the open.
He pushed to his knees.
“Wait,” he gasped. “Keep the money…but don’t leave me…”
A car door slammed, then another. Boone struggled to his feet, swayed unsteadily, then staggered toward the car just a few feet away.
“Wait…”
The engine revved and tires spit gravel. Boone lurched desperately toward the dark shape, then felt like someone had hit him with a refrigerator as he bounced off the car’s front quarter panel. He rolled once and came to rest on his back. The car pulled away. He was alone.
The right side of his body ached deep. Slowly, he moved his leg, which didn’t seem to be broken. He shifted his hip. Nothing broken there, either. He thought he might escape with nothing worse than a three-foot-long bruise in the morning.
As he lay there, gravel biting into his back, his leg throbbing, Boone felt the open air all around him, threatening to close in on him, to smother him, to finally claim him once and for all. He closed his eyes to the darkness. He reached his hands up to his cheeks and pretended they were Alice’s hands. He told himself in her voice that he’d be okay, that he’d get through this one like he’d gotten through all the others, that although he was in the wide open, nothing was harming him, nothing had ever harmed him in the wide open, the air was fine out here, so he had no reason to fear it. Alice’s voice reassured him, her touch calmed him. And, finally, it was over. The panic never took him. It had stared him down, growling and snarling and threatening to drag him into darkness, but it never got him. He’d fought it off.
Though she was miles away, Alice had done it again.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
ALICE WATCHED THE Audi’s taillights ahead of her. She had hoped to see the blond boy sitting in the car, looking back at her, reassuring her that she was still on the right path, but the other car’s windows were too darkly tinted for her to see inside. She had to hope she had read the situation correctly. The boy had led her to the car. Presumably, when the time was right he’d find a way to tell her where to go or what to do next.
The radio was playing a commercial about discount mattresses, so Alice changed the station and heard the opening notes of Elton John’s song “Daniel.” Without thinking, Alice changed the station again, flipping until she heard Rod Stewart’s raspy voice telling her that “Tonight’s the Night.” Alice sang along for a verse, then asked aloud, “We going the right way, kiddo?”
On the radio, Rod Stewart sang, “It’s gonna be all right.”
“I guess that will have to do for now,” Alice said.
She felt an itch on her cheek and reached up to give it a quick scratch. Her hand lingered on her skin and she thought back to the unfortunate man at the rest stop…Boone. Looking back, she couldn’t believe she had touched him like that. She’d reached out and held the face of a perfect stranger. But he’d needed it and she seemed to have done him good. She ran her hands across her cheek, feeling the softness and remembering Boone’s rough-shaven left cheek and his smooth, rubbery right one. Without the scars, he would have been a very handsome man. Thinking about him now, though, she didn’t see the scars, though she could still almost feel them under her fingers. What she saw in her mind were his deep green eyes. He may have been blind in one and nearly blind in the other, but they were striking eyes nonetheless.
“Tonight’s the Night” ended and Alice switched stations again. Elton was just finishing up with “Daniel.” She turned off the radio.
Daniel. She’d been so distracted by the events of the past couple of days that she’d barely thought about her husband. She felt both a little guilty and a little excited by that. She suspected that Daniel’s days were typically so busy that she barely crossed his mind, but because she had so much less in her life than he had in his, he occupied, by default, a larger percentage of her life than she did of his. This little adventure had given her something of her own that didn’t also belong to Daniel, something besides her art, and that was exciting to her.
But shouldn’t she still have thought about Daniel? Shouldn’t she have wondered how his convention was going? How many new contacts he’d made? How many clients he’d signed? This was really important to him.
“Wait a second,” she said aloud. “What about me?”
Shouldn’t he have been more sympathetic, more supportive when she told him that Rappaport had turned her down for his studio?
“He knew how important this was to me.”
Generally, when discussing her dream, Daniel either said the wrong things or he said the right ones without sounding like he truly meant them. On the phone yesterday, when she told him about Rappaport, he’d been distracted by work and she’d cut him slack for that. But should she have been so quick to give him a pass? Even if he was busy, he should have remembered how much this had meant to her, how high her hopes had been, and therefore how hard she would take Rappaport’s rejection. As her husband, he should have felt her pain as if it were his own, even if to a lesser degree. Yet he had listened to her bad news with one ear while he monitored his colleagues in the bar with his other, and as a result, he’d barely heard her. He may have registered her news, but not her mood. He knew she was disappointed, but he didn’t bother to know just how much. And this saddened her.
“Do you still love him?” she asked herself. The voice was hers but the words were her mother’s, echoes of words spoken less than half a year ago. She had visited New York last spring, staying with Alice and Daniel for a week. At the end of that time, as Alice waited with her for her train, she took Alice’s hands in hers and asked that question.
“Of course I do,” Alice had replied without actually thinking about it. “Why would you even ask that?”
“Because I know you well, Alice, and I know how you are when you’re happy and I know how y
ou are when you’re sad. And you aren’t truly happy. At least you don’t seem it to me.”
“And I seem sad to you?” Alice asked.
“No, not really.” Her mother shook her head. “You seem sort of somewhere in the middle, which is no place to be. If you’re happy, great, you’re happy, and if you’re sad, then maybe you’re sad enough to do something about it, to make whatever changes you need to make. But if you’re somewhere in the middle, well, then you may just keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t know. Is it enough for you?”
Before Alice could answer, her mother’s train arrived.
Over the last year, Alice thought a lot about that conversation. She loved Daniel. But was she still in love with him? She hated to resort to that tired question, one that so many people asked themselves, but it was apt. She cared for Daniel a great deal, no doubt about it, but things had changed when they learned they would never have children together. A biological child was out of the question and Daniel wasn’t interested in adopting. So when Alice looked at her life, her future, she saw the two of them…just the two of them. And it was starting to look lonely. She wondered for a time whether that meant happiness was an unreachable goal for her. Would life without children be without joy to her in all circumstances? Or was it just life alone with Daniel that she feared would seem so empty?
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