Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
Halston
Then . . .
Liv has been watching the side mirror.
I check mine.
Two sets of headlights, four cars back, holding the same distance they’ve been holding since we hit the parkway.
“Hal.”
“I see them.”
“They’ve been—”
“Since the merge. I know.”
The phone is on speaker on the center console.
Creed’s voice comes through thin with distance and airport noise.
He just landed in Minnesota. He plays tomorrow.
He should be in a hotel car right now, annoyed about time zones and post-flight stiffness, not listening to me make one bad decision after another in the rain.
“Hal, you should’ve waited for Aren.”
“No.”
“Hal—”
“Aren’s doing other things,” I say. “This can’t wait. Remember that people in my family have always had suspicious endings. Even when the death certificate says otherwise.”
“It’s raining. Pull over.”
“Aren should be at the strip. The pilot is ready, and the jet is fueled. Forty-three minutes.”
“Forty-three minutes is too long.”
“It’s not too long if I don’t stop.”
“Hal. Hal, listen to me. I’ll send a driver.”
“I can do this.”
“Stay where you are.
“ Call Aren.”
“I already called Aren.”
“Then call him again.”
The rain gets harder.
The wipers can’t keep up. They drag water across the windshield and leave more water behind, each pass smearing the road into black glass and red brake lights. I have to lean forward against the wheel to see, and the two sets of headlights behind me are close by a car length.
Liv is very quiet beside me.
Too quiet.
That scares me more than anything Creed can say through the phone.
“Liv.”
“Yes.”
“Seat belt all the way.”
“It is.”
“All the way, Liv.”
“Hal, it is.”
Her voice has gone calm in the way it does when fear has moved past noise. I’d rather she scream. I’d rather she swear at me. I’d rather she accuse me of being controlling, reckless, emotionally unavailable, all the things she says when she’s trying to keep herself from crying.
Instead, her hand rests on the door grip, white-knuckled and patient, while I drive us toward a strip of private asphalt at the edge of a county neither of us has ever had a reason to visit.
The car behind the car behind us pulls into the left lane.
Creed says, “Hal.”
“I see them.”
“They’re moving up,” Liv says.
The headlights come fast.
Too fast.
The lead chase car, the one that’s been holding four lengths back since the parkway, drops into the right lane behind me. The second car closes on my left.
I’m being boxed in before I’ve decided whether to let myself be boxed in.
I floor it.
The car jumps. The engine takes the order without complaint. We hit ninety in two seconds, and the lead car falls behind for a beat.
For one stupid beat, I think this is going to work.
Then the car on my left matches me.
Then it pulls ahead.
Then it cuts the wheel.
I jerk right.
The bumper kisses the bumper.
Metal speaks to metal in a scream too brief to be useful, and Liv makes a sound that isn’t a word. The wheel goes light in my hands for one terrifying half second before it comes back.
“Hal.”
“I’m okay. We’re okay. I’m okay.”
“They—”
“I know, nothing is going to happen to you,” I assure her.
Creed is saying something. I can’t hear him. Blood pounds in my ears. The rain is louder than the speaker. The wipers slap at the windshield. The second car has dropped back, giving itself room to come at us again.
I take the exit.
I take it without signaling, without slowing, with the wheels skipping once on the white line. The two cars behind me overshoot the ramp by half a length, and that is the only gift the road gives me all night.
Now I’m on a service road.
Two lanes.
Unlit.
Trees on both sides.
The tarmac is twelve miles down this road if I don’t get lost and nine miles if I do.
“Hal. Hal, talk to me.”
“I took the exit.”
“You took the—”
“They missed it. They’re coming back. Two minutes.”
“Hal—”
“Creed. Call my name and I’ll answer. I can’t have another conversation.”
Silence on the speaker for one beat.
Then Creed says, “Hal.”
“Yes.”
“Hal.”
“Yes.”
“Hal, babe.”
“I’m here.”
Liv reaches across and puts her hand on my thigh. She doesn’t look at me. She’s watching the rearview now. Her hand on my thigh is the calmest part of the car.
I think—and I will remember thinking this, I will remember it on a witness stand in a courtroom ten years from now, I will remember it on a kitchen floor in a brownstone in Brooklyn with her hand on my chest—
I think: I shouldn’t have chosen the inheritance.
I think: I should’ve walked away when my father died.
I think: Cornelius’s name is on a building in Midtown, and that building can fall down for all I care. But the woman in this seat can’t, and the man on this phone can’t, and I’ll burn the building myself before I let either of them pay the cost.
I think: How do I save her?
The headlights come back into the rearview.
Both sets.
Closer this time.
“Creed.”
“I’m here.”
“They’re back.”
“Aren is nine minutes out. I have him on the other line. Nine minutes, Hal.”
“I don’t have nine minutes.”
“Hal—”
The lead car pulls into my lane and brakes hard.
I see it before I have time to think about seeing it. The red of his brake lights flares right in front of me. He means to make me slam mine. He means to force me into him so the second car can put them into me.
My foot goes to the brake pedal the way my foot has gone to the brake pedal ten thousand times in the two years I’ve been driving this car.
The pedal goes to the floor.
The pedal goes to the floor and doesn’t come back.
There’s no resistance. No catch. No grind of pads finding rotors.
Nothing under my foot but the metal of the floor pan through the carpet, and the car ahead of me is still right there, and the rain is still coming down, and my foot is pressing on a pedal disconnected from anything in the world that could save us.
I don’t say anything.
I don’t have time.
I cut the wheel.
I cut right because right is where the shoulder is, and the shoulder is where I have a chance. The car responds because it doesn’t know its brakes are gone. The car has only been told to turn.
We go around the lead car on the gravel of the shoulder at eighty miles an hour with the rear end fishtailing and Liv’s body slamming against the door, her hand still on my thigh, Creed’s voice saying my name through the speaker without stopping.
“Hal. Hal. Hal. Hal.”
We are past the lead car.
We are on a stretch of road that goes uphill for half a mile and then— I know this from the GPS I memorized three hours ago in the apartment, I know this because I memorized everything, I know this because I’ve been a man who memorizes routes since I was eleven years old—bends hard left around a stand of pines with a guardrail on the outside.
Half a mile.
Then a left turn.
With no brakes.
“Liv.”
“Yes.”
“The brakes are gone.”
“What?”
“The brakes are gone, Liv. The pedal is on the floor.”
Her hand on my thigh closes.
She says, “Okay.”
That one word hurts worse than panic.
She trusts me.
Even now.
Especially now.
“Hal—”
“I know.”
“Hal, listen to me,” Creed says. “The downshift. Downshift, Hal. Engine brake. Drop it. Drop it now.”
“I’m dropping it.”
I drop it.
The car screams.
The tachometer goes red.
The deceleration barely deserves the name. The hill slows us more than the engine does, the hill and the rain and whatever mercy lives in physics when prayer has no jurisdiction.
The curve is coming.
The curve is coming, and it’s a curve I’ve driven in dry weather at posted speeds, not at sixty-eight in the rain with no brakes.
The two cars are behind me again.
I see them in the rearview.
Pulling up.
One on each side.
Trying to put me into the guardrail before the curve does it for them.
I think: It doesn’t matter who hits us.
I think: It only matters that she lives.
I think: Creed.
The car on my left taps the rear quarter panel.
Light.
Almost gentle.
A touch a driver gives when he wants you to know he’s been there the whole time and could’ve been worse.
The rear end goes.
I correct, but not enough.
The car begins to rotate around its own center, and the world outside the windshield becomes rain and pine and headlights and guardrail.
Somewhere inside all of it is the curve I memorized this morning.
Somewhere beside me is the woman I love.
Somewhere through a phone on a center console that has slid sideways with everything else is the man I love, saying my name over and over.
Hal Hal Hal Hal.
The way a person says a name when there’s nothing else left to say.
I take one hand off the wheel.
I have one second.
I use it to put my hand on the side of Livia’s face.
Her cheek under my palm.
Her eyes finding mine for one half second before impact.
Her mouth shaping a word I won’t remember for ten years.
The word is my name.
Then the guardrail.
Then the rotation.
Then the slope of the embankment where the trees have been waiting the whole time, patient, indifferent, exactly where the road map said they would be.
Then the sound of metal crunching.
Then—
A bar with a number nineteen jersey on a woman who has decided to be suspicious of me.
Creed’s mouth on mine in a hotel on New Year’s.
A courthouse in February, and a clerk named Gloria and a vow about never leaving the room.
Liv’s hand on our wedding certificate, her voice saying, ‘He is not decorative.’
Three trinity knots, all of them new, lined up on a kitchen counter at three in the morning.
I am the man.
I was running.
I was running because I didn’t want the money.
I was running because Cornelius’s legacy was the price they were going to make us pay.
I was running because the only thing in the world I couldn’t afford to lose was sitting in the passenger seat with her hand on my thigh and a man on the speaker saying my name.
I was running toward Creed.
I was running toward a plane.
I was running toward a country where the three of us could be the three of us.
I was running.
I was running.
I was . . .
I fucked it up.