Chapter 1 #2
She chewed on her lip and glanced back at the minivan and Lyle. He watched us with his intense eyes, unblinking. She looked back at me and took me by the shoulder. She guided me off the sidewalk like I was an old man. Or a crazy person.
“Daddy?” Lyle asked as I clambered into the passenger seat.
It had been a long time since he’d called me “Daddy.”
“Hey, bud,” I said, turning carefully in the seat to meet my son’s eyes. “How ya doing?”
“Dad, where’d you go? You didn’t come home last night.”
Amy opened the driver’s-side door and got in. She started the engine, glancing sideways at me.
“I’m not sure, buddy,” I said, keeping one eye on Amy. “I’m trying to figure that one out myself.”
“Are you really okay, Dad?”
Amy looked into the rearview mirror, frowning at the change in Lyle’s tone.
He did this, sometimes, catching us off guard.
One minute he was a normal, albeit quiet and bookish, seven-year-old kid.
Then he’d say something so adult it threw us.
His affect changed. Even the way he looked at us changed.
I once asked my own father about it, if he’d ever experienced anything like that with me, during one of the rare occasions we had something approaching a civilized conversation.
He just shrugged, distracted as always, and said kids were weird.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, bud, I’m okay.”
Lyle sat back in his seat. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile and not a frightening grimace and turned around in my seat, stifling a groan.
We drove for the next few blocks, Amy glancing over at me or up in the mirror at Lyle every few seconds.
I tried not to move, tried not to let out any sound as we went over bumps.
I looked sideways at Amy, catching glimpses of her in the corner of my eye.
I was usually pretty good at reading her.
Better than most people, her sister included. But I couldn’t read her now.
I took a breath. Steeled myself. “Amy.”
She held the steering wheel so tight the tendons in her hands stood out. “Yes.”
“Is it—is it the fourteenth? It’s Tuesday?”
Her lips drew into a line. She met my gaze for a second, her eyes wide. “Yes, Scott. It’s the fourteenth.”
I nodded and put my head back against the seat. We didn’t speak the rest of the way to the duplex.
My Honda was in my half of the driveway. It didn’t look too bad, considering. The passenger-side front was a little mangled, but it appeared drivable. I wasn’t looking forward to the repair bill. It was obvious to everyone, including my insurance, that I was at fault.
Amy walked before me up the steps and let Lyle into the house. He disappeared into his room before I’d closed the front door.
“Shouldn’t he be at school?” I asked.
“I took the day off, so I let him take the day off, too.” She took a breath. “Come on.” She walked toward our bedroom. I followed her, grimacing at each step.
In our room, Amy rounded the bed, heading for the master bathroom.
She knelt and got cotton pads and a bar of soap from under the sink.
When she stood, her brow remained furrowed as she looked at me.
She stepped back to give me space. There was a battered version of myself in the mirror.
I looked, if it was possible, even worse than I felt.
I started to unbutton my shirt, peeling sticky fabric from the bloody splotches across my skin.
“We need to talk about this,” she said.
“Yeah.” I got my shirt halfway off. I took a long look at myself.
I’d torn a ragged strip of skin from my chin, revealing raw, exposed flesh beneath.
There was a deeper gash on my forehead, just above my eyebrow.
The top of my left ear oozed blood. The rest of my body was worse.
I was lucky I hadn’t broken anything. I’d been going, what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight miles per hour when the car vanished?
And I was lucky the truck hadn’t hit me.
The truck that hadn’t been behind me a second earlier.
I stopped. I leaned against the sink, staring into my own bloodshot eyes. I took in a breath, the air cool on my lips and tongue, and let it back out in a shuddering wave that shook my whole body.
What was going on? Was I going crazy?
“Scott.” Amy’s voice cut through my thoughts. She sounded like she’d said it more than once.
“Yes,” I said, my voice distant to my own ears.
I tried to take the shirt the rest of the way off.
I grimaced as a large patch of cloth clung to the pinkish meat under the scraped-off skin.
The torn fabric had pressed into the wound.
Pulling it out felt like dragging needles through exposed nerve endings.
“God,” Amy said. “Here.” She took the shirt and worked the edges when the fabric stuck to my bloodied skin.
She was firm but gentle, and she did a better job than I’d been doing.
When the shirt was clear she stood back and watched as I pulled my khakis off one leg at a time.
“Scott, you need to talk to me. I mean—what happened? You disappear for a day and show up like this, looking like you got in a fight with a mountain lion. A fight you clearly lost, you—”
I glanced at her in the mirror, hearing the shift in her tone.
She trembled. I turned and grasped her shoulders.
She went rigid in my hands, then allowed me to pull her close.
Her hair felt soft against my chest, one of the few places on my upper body that wasn’t covered in cuts and scrapes.
“Honey. Honey, I wasn’t in a fight. No mountain lions were involved.
None were in the vicinity, I swear. Not even a big house cat. ”
The tiniest hint of a smile quirked at the edges of her mouth.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I do know, okay? But it … it’s going to sound crazy.”
She pushed back. “Tell me.”
I let my arms fall. I turned back to the sink and started washing the scrapes and cuts with a washcloth as I spoke.
The water in the sink turned a brackish pink from blood and bits of gravel.
Talking distracted me from the sting. A little.
“I was driving to work like every other morning.” I struggled to keep my tone even.
Felt around the edges of what I was saying and what Amy needed to hear.
Prodded at the truth even as I spoke. “Everything was normal. I was running late, but nothing too bad.”
“And this was yesterday?”
I hesitated, glancing at myself in the mirror again, as if my reflection would have the answer.
It didn’t feel like it had been yesterday.
It felt like it’d been half an hour ago.
“Yes. Anyway. I was driving down Winslet.” I winced as I rubbed some pebbles and dirt out of a raw patch on my shoulder.
They rattled down the curved porcelain of the sink. “Then the car disappeared.”
“What does that even mean, Scott? You said that before. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. I know it doesn’t make sense. But that’s what happened. One second, I’m driving, the next I’m in midair, a foot off the ground, still going twenty-five miles an hour. Must’ve rolled half a football field before I stopped. Then I almost got hit by a truck.”
“And that’s what all this is from?” Amy motioned at my body.
“Yes.” I rubbed the dirty scrapes, wincing every time the rough cloth touched broken skin.
Amy stared at me. “Okay, Scott. Assuming that’s true, that was yesterday morning. These look fresh. Like they happened twenty minutes ago.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“What?”
I turned. “Amy. Honey. When the car disappeared, when I stopped rolling, I thought it was still the thirteenth. I thought it was still Monday morning. The rest of Monday never happened, not for me. One second, it’s Monday, the next, it’s Tuesday.”
The worry lines were back. Amy stood next to the bathtub and was very still.
“Say something,” I said. I almost smiled. “Anything.”
“Did you hit your head, Scott? When you were in the accident?”
I didn’t feel like smiling anymore. I faced the mirror again. “I don’t think so.”
“I think we should take you to see a doctor.”
“I’m okay. These all look worse than they really are.”
“I’m not talking about the scrapes, Scott.”
I rinsed the washcloth and started on another patch of bloody skin. “Yeah. I know.”
“I’m going to call Dean’s, see if there’s anyone available to see you this morning. You should call work. Tell them you were in an accident, that you won’t be in today, either.”
I nodded.
She stood for a second, watching me. She reached out and touched my bare shoulder, on a part of skin that wasn’t torn up. She did it gently, carefully. Like stroking a wild animal. “I’ll call Dean’s.”
“All right.”
She gave me another searching look, then walked out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut as she went.
I stopped dabbing my wounds and stared at myself in the mirror again, leaning forward until I was inches away. My own hazel-blue eyes, bloodshot and haggard, revealed nothing.
“You’re fine,” the doctor said as he shouldered his way through the door, one arm balancing his laptop.
“Apart from all the abrasions and dermal contusions, of course. You’ll want to keep those clean and use a topical antibiotic to prevent infection.
Over-the-counter should do, although I can give you a prescription if you prefer. ”
I sat on the examination table, the thin, crinkly paper rough and cold under my bare legs. Amy perched on the bench next to the doctor’s desk. Lyle sat next to her, legs hanging off his seat, his intense eyes taking in his surroundings.
“The X-rays all came back negative,” the doctor said. He pulled the swivel chair from under the desk and sat, glancing at me over the top of his reading glasses. “No fractures, no broken bones.”
“What about a concussion?” Amy asked.
“No sign of a concussion, either.”
“What about this, this missing day, or whatever?”