Chapter Two
A tractor-trailer snarls past, shaking the little hatchback and sending Sarah stumbling from the highway’s gravelly shoulder into the ditch. “Stupid, stupid,” she mutters as she climbs back up, the near-frozen mud biting into the soles of her sneakers. Why did she think getting away would be easy?
A black and white cruiser pulls up behind the hatchback and parks. Bile rises in the back of Sarah’s throat. They can’t have found her already. She buttons up the neck of her peacoat with cold-numbed fingers and flips up the collar to hide her stained hoodie.
The officer who climbs out of the car is a tall, burly white man whose mask barely contains his greying beard.
Sarah suddenly feels naked as the wind whips her bare cheeks.
He looks her up and down. She guesses he’s cataloguing her surface traits: her hair’s severe black gloss, her skin extra pale and sallow from months spent indoors, and her eyes.
It always comes down to the eyes. Ben once compared her to a Modigliani portrait, which wasn’t the compliment he thought it was.
“You’re far from home, miss,” the officer says, very loudly and slowly, having come to the usual conclusion.
Sarah forces a smile. “I was on my way to see my brother in Timmins.” She hopes the officer doesn’t expect her to prove this. Graham isn’t expecting her, and she’s not sure if he’d welcome visitors during a pandemic.
He blinks. “Can I see some ID?” he says, this time a little faster.
“It’s in the car.”
Sarah opens the passenger door of the hatchback with shaking hands, trying to remember everything her Black friends ever told her about being pulled over by the cops. “I’m getting my wallet,” she calls out over the hammering of her heart.
The officer, thankfully, doesn’t flinch when her hand disappears into the backpack on the front seat. Her fingers glance off the knife’s crusty handle, and she hastily pushes it beneath her water bottle and change of clothes.
She pulls out her wallet, places it on the roof of the car, and backs away. The officer opens the wallet, his eyebrows lifting at the amount of cash she’s carrying. “Sarah. That’s an unusual name.”
“Really?”
“Well, for you, eh?” he says, and Sarah fights to keep the smile on her face. “Where’re you from?”
“Toronto.”
He sniffs. “That’s just as bad.”
“As bad as what?”
“You know,” the officer says, and she does. “It’s not a good time to go visiting.”
“My brother lives by himself, and—and so do I.”
He places the wallet back on the roof of the car. “I’ll call you a tow truck.”
“Thank you.”
He looks her up and down again. “Don’t thank me yet,” he says, and unease shrinks her stomach into a knot.
The officer ambles back to his car and sits inside, bringing a cell phone to his ear. Sarah scoops up her wallet and drops it in the backpack.
The snow is either coming down heavier or blowing off the scraggly trees perched on the rocks. Sarah huddles on her hatchback’s passenger seat against the numbing cold and dread. There’s nothing she can do but wait for the outcome of a stranger’s phone call.
She continues to smile, in case the officer is watching.
She feels smaller than she’s ever felt before, dwarfed by the rock outcroppings and the grey highway that stretches on forever.
When she’d started out, the highway had promised freedom.
The unknown hadn’t seemed as vast and scary.
She’d been excited to see so many trees.
Sometimes, as she drove, sunlight would catch on a creek or pond, a glittering oasis tucked in the woods.
And then the trees would spring up again, and the water would disappear like a daydream.
Just a lovely secret revealed to drivers who happened to glance out the passenger window at the right place and time.
Now, standing still, the trees reveal nothing. The shaggy conifers cower under a veil of falling snow. The grey sky leeches the color out of everything, leaving only the grimy tint of salted slush splashed on the underskirts of her hatchback.
The officer has been off his phone for a while, writing in a tiny notebook.
The blood roars in Sarah’s ears, or maybe it’s another truck rattling past. They’ll be looking for her.
And this officer will remember her. Of course he will.
He won’t remember her face, but he’ll remember what she looks like. The box she ticks.
A muddy tow truck materializes out of the falling snow and pulls up behind the police car. The officer gets out to greet the driver. A rangy young white man bounds from the truck, his mask tucked under his chin.
Sarah reluctantly climbs back out into the cold. The tow truck driver glances up at the sudden movement and yanks the mask up over his nose. “Shit,” he says, stepping back. Sarah’s teeth grind behind her smile. “Are you fucking kidding me, Isaac? She could have the virus.”
“She’s from Toronto,” the officer says.
“Exactly.”
“We can’t leave the car on the side of the highway, Jerry. It’s a traffic hazard.”
“Fine. I’ll take the car, but not her. Lars’ll probably quarantine it for a few days before he touches it.”
Panic surges in Sarah’s chest like heartburn. “A few days?”
Jerry blinks at her in surprise and then turns back to the officer. “So she’s gonna need someplace to stay.”
“I could call my brother—” she starts.
“Timmins is almost six hours away, and it’ll be dark soon. And you can’t ask him to drive in this.” The officer gestures at the flurrying snow, and Sarah’s legs threaten to buckle, because he’s right.
“She can’t come to town,” Jerry says, twitching like a rabbit. “The inn’s closed, and no one’s doing Airbnb anymore. And even if they were, no one’s gonna take her.”
“I haven’t been anywhere but the grocery store for months, and I always mask up,” Sarah says, struggling to keep her smile in place. “I don’t have COVID.”
Jerry spits on the gravel. “We don’t know that. Shit, you don’t know that.”
“Is there anywhere I can go?” she asks, trying to keep dismay from cracking her polite surface.
The officer shakes his head. “Every place around here is closed. Though I could ask—” He clicks his tongue.
Jerry smirks. “The Suicide Motel?”
The officer shoots him a look that could sear glass.
“My nephews run a motel just outside of town. They’re closed too, but I could ask them to put you up.
They had good reviews before—” He waves his hand, as if before is another place, like the city Sarah just left.
“You’ll have to quarantine for two weeks before we let you in town to get your car. ”
“But my brother could pick me up tomorrow—”
The officer’s eyes narrow above his mask.
“I don’t know what it’s like in Toronto—” The name of her hometown comes out as a sneer, and she realizes with a sinking heart that being from the big bad city is another mark against her.
“But in Sweetside, we take the pandemic seriously. Half our seniors died, including my in-laws, and a bunch more folks are on ventilators in North Bay. So no one comes through unless they’ve got a clean bill of health. I hope you don’t have anywhere to be.”
Sarah’s face is starting to ache from smiling. “No. Not at all.”
* * *
Sarah’s sneakers skid over the frosty gravel of the highway’s shoulder.
Although she’s found her mask and put it on, Jerry still won’t come within ten feet of her.
She places the car key on the driver’s seat and steps away to give him space, fighting hopeless tears.
That key was her key to freedom. The key to the future.
But she’d been foolish to think she deserved one.
And now here she is, dependent on—as the Tennessee Williams play says—the kindness of strangers.
She doesn’t remember A Streetcar Named Desire ending well for Blanche.
She fists her bare hands in her coat’s pockets, shrinking every time a blob of snow deposits a sloppy kiss on her ears.
Her mask’s cotton layers aren’t enough to block the wind’s icy claws, and she’s frozen inside and out.
The police officer is on the phone again, inside his car.
He doesn’t make eye contact with her, and neither does Jerry.
The tow truck driver hooks up her car, and the blinking rear of the old hatchback disappears into the horizon.
Sarah watches forlornly as snow fills in the tire tracks.
Minutes later, there’s little evidence her car ever existed.
She’d wanted to disappear, but not like this.
A red pickup does a U-turn and pulls in behind the police car. A stack of plywood juts out of the back, covered loosely with a tarp.
The officer climbs out of his car and beckons at Sarah. “That’s Caleb, my nephew.”
Sarah peers at the truck, trying to make out her savior through the blowing snow and swaying windshield wipers.
Another white man sits behind the wheel, his shoulders filling out a red buffalo plaid jacket.
A wing of dark brown hair falls over his forehead as he grabs the mask dangling from the rearview mirror.
She catches a glimpse of a square chin dimpled with a cleft before it disappears beneath the fabric.
“Uncle Isaac,” the man calls out as he hops down from the truck.
Although they’re both masked, Sarah can see the family resemblance.
The height, the broad shoulders, the purposeful way they move.
These are men who never have to think about how much space they take up because they’re used to people making room for them.
Although her jaw aches, Sarah plasters on another smile, hoping it reaches her eyes as most of her face is covered. Unlike the officer and the tow truck driver, Caleb doesn’t seem surprised by her appearance. He regards her steadily with deep-set blue eyes that never drop below her neck.
“Caleb, this is Miss—I can’t pronounce her last name. This is Sarah.”