Mad River Road Read online

  “My hobbies?”

  “Do you have any?”

  “Do you?”

  “Not really,” she admitted after a pause. “I guess I should.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. My mother loved to play Scrabble. She used to talk me into playing with her. But then she never liked the words I put down—she said they were too simple and that I needed to make better use of my letters—so she’d end up making the words for both of us, and I’d just kind of sit there until it was over. She always won. And my sister plays bridge. She’s always trying to get me to take it up, but I don’t know. She and her husband are always screaming at each other when they play. I used to collect Barbie dolls when I was little,” Jamie continued, smiling at the distant memory. “Does that count as a hobby?”

  “Do you still collect?”

  Jamie shook her head.

  “Then I don’t think it counts.”

  Jamie frowned, wondering what had become of her collection of Barbies. She hadn’t seen the dolls—hadn’t even thought of them—since she’d moved out of her mother’s house. Probably they were still there, she realized, nestled securely among her mother’s belongings. Those same belongings she and Cynthia were supposed to be going through this very evening. “Your turn,” Jamie said to Brad, mentally tossing her old collection of Barbies through the car window. They were part of her past. The man beside her was her present. Maybe even her future, she allowed herself to think. “I’ve talked enough. It’s your turn.”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. Stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Yeah. Stuff. Details.”

  “Details?”

  “Life’s in the details. Isn’t that what they say?” Is that what they said? Or was it God? God was in the details. Or was it the devil?

  “Life’s in the details,” Brad repeated. “I like that.”

  Jamie felt a flush of pride. She’d said something he liked. No point in changing it now. “What are some of the things you like to do? Aside from … you know.”

  “Aside from making love to you?” His head swiveled toward her, his tongue resting provocatively between his teeth.

  “Aside from that,” Jamie said quickly, feeling the familiar stirring between her legs. “Watch the road.”

  “Why? Is it doing something interesting?”

  Jamie smiled. “I mean, I already know you like computers.”

  “Computers?”

  “Well, you design software. Isn’t that what you said?” Had she misunderstood?

  “Sorry, I thought you asked about my hobbies.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have any.”

  He smiled. “Well, I like movies.”

  “Yeah? What kind?”

  “The usual guy-kind. Action, war movies, thrillers.”

  “I like thrillers,” Jamie agreed. “Maybe we can go to one later. Maybe there’s a drive-in.”

  “A drive-in? They still have those?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s one along the highway somewhere.” She stared at the strip of long grass that divided the north and south traffic, saw nothing but the lines of cars moving steadily in both directions.

  “How’d your mother die?” Brad asked suddenly.

  Jamie released a deep breath of air. “Cancer. It started in her left breast about five years ago. The doctors operated, thought they got it all. But it was only hiding. Cancer’s real sneaky that way.”

  “It came back,” Brad stated.

  “This time right between her lungs, so there was nothing they could do.”

  “Must have been hard for her.”

  “I guess. She didn’t believe in complaining. Said facts were facts, and you had to accept them. She was a judge,” she added.

  “What kind of judge?”

  “Criminal court.”

  “Sounds like one tough lady.”

  “She wasn’t easy.” Jamie shrugged. “I think it’s hard when you’re in a position of power, you know, when you have that kind of control over other people’s lives, and you spend all day telling people what to do, and then you come home and you’ve got to deal with this wiseass kid who thinks she knows everything. I mean, here the woman is in court, where nobody so much as goes to the bathroom without her permission—I mean that literally—and everyone’s deferring to her left, right, and center, hoping to get a favorable ruling, and here she’s got this daughter who’s always arguing with her, and who never listens, let alone takes her advice, so it’s got to be hard.”

  “On both of you, I would imagine.”

  “She used to throw her hands up in the air, like this.” Jamie illustrated, extending her arms and stretching her fingers, as if she were tossing confetti. “And then she’d stomp out of the room, muttering to herself. ‘Fine. Have it your way. Do what you want.’ You could just picture her judge’s long, black robes trailing after her.” Jamie shook her head. “She said I was incorrigible.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Willful, uncontrollable.” She sighed. “Impossible to rehabilitate.”

  “Impossible to rehabilitate,” Brad repeated, smiling. “I like that.”

  “I don’t know. I like to think I’m a good person.”

  “Which is exactly your problem.”

  “What is?”

  “You think too much.”

  “What about your mother?” Jamie asked, finding it vaguely curious that every time she asked about him, they ended up talking about her. Was she really so self-centered?

  The skin around Brad’s mouth tensed, pulling back into a stiff smile. His fingers tightened their grip on the wheel. “What about my mother?”

  “Well, you told me about your sisters, but you didn’t say anything about your mom and dad.”

  “That’s because there isn’t much to say. They’re just typical, upstanding, hardworking, God-fearing citizens of this great country of ours.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Why would I be sarcastic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re thinking too much again.”

  “Where do they live?” Jamie persisted, trying a different tack.

  “Texas.”

  “I’ve never been to Texas.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’ve never been a lot of places.”

  “Then I’ll have to take you there someday.”

  Jamie smiled. “I’d like that.”

  “You’ve lived in Florida all your life?”

  “Most of it. My mother wanted me to go to Harvard, of course, but I opted to stay in Florida. I lived in Atlanta for a while,” she added, almost reluctantly.

  “What’s in Atlanta?”

  “My ex-husband.”

  “And his mother,” Brad said, lowering his voice.

  It all comes back to mothers, Jamie thought. “Let’s not go there,” she said.

  “On the contrary,” Brad said. “We’ll be passing through Atlanta in another few hours. Maybe we should drop in and say hello. How’d you like that?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Jamie said. “Is that a cop car?” She pointed toward a black-and-white sedan at the side of the highway.

  “Shit.” Brad pumped the brake in a futile effort to reduce his speed before being tagged by radar.

  Too late. The cruiser was already behind them, lights flashing.

  “Shit,” Brad said again, banging the palm of his hand against the steering wheel.

  Jamie held her breath as Brad brought the car to a halt, frightened though she wasn’t sure why. She swiveled around in her seat as the officer approached, a visor and helmet covering his eyes. Brad lowered the window as the officer leaned inside.

  “License and registration, please.”

  Brad reached in his pocket as Jamie popped open the glove compartment and retrieved the car’s registration.

  “Remove the license from your wallet, please,” the policeman instru
cted Brad, who promptly did just that.

  “Any idea how fast you were going?” The officer’s gloved hand closed over the license and registration.

  “I’m not sure,” Brad said. “I didn’t think it was too—”

  “I clocked you at eighty-four miles per hour,” the officer interrupted. “This is a seventy-mile-an-hour zone.”

  “I was just trying to keep up with the flow of traffic,” Brad explained.

  “Wait here,” the officer directed, returning to his car.

  “Bastard,” Brad muttered.

  “What’s he doing now?” Jamie asked.

  “Checking to make sure there are no outstanding warrants.”

  “Are there?” Jamie had heard stories of southern roadside justice, apocryphal tales of travelers being forced to pay exorbitant speeding fines on the spot, and being hauled off to jail if they couldn’t produce the necessary cash. She wondered whether her car was about to be impounded, and what it would be like to spend the night in some small-town holding cell. She pictured her mother watching the events from somewhere in the cloudless blue sky, saw her shaking her head. “Brad? Are you all right?” she asked, suddenly aware of his rigid posture, the scowl that had overtaken his jaw.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Brad?” she asked again as the officer reappeared at the side of the car.

  The policeman handed back their license and registration. “This area’s pretty heavily patrolled. I suggest you slow down if you don’t want to get stopped again.” He wrote out a ticket, handed it through the window. “Oh, Mr. Fisher,” he added, about to back away. “Your rear tire’s looking a little low. You might want to stop at Tifton and have somebody take a look at it.”

  “Will do,” Brad said.

  “Thank you, officer,” Jamie said as the policeman retreated. “It was nice of him to tell us about the tire—”

  “Asshole,” Brad sneered, stuffing both the license and the registration into the pocket of his jeans.

  “How much is the ticket for?”

  In response, Brad ripped the ticket into half a dozen pieces, dropped them to the floor at his feet. “What difference does it make?”

  “What are you doing?” Jamie protested. “It’s not going to just go away.”

  “It just did.” He started the car, waited for a break in the traffic, then pulled into the right lane, quickly increasing his speed until he was driving well above the limit.

  Jamie said nothing. Obviously he was upset, and the last thing she wanted to do was say anything that might upset him further. “What do you think is wrong with the tire?” she ventured after several seconds.

  “How should I know? It’s your fucking car.”

  Tears sprung to Jamie’s eyes, as if he’d slapped her, hard, across the face.

  “Sorry,” he said immediately. “Jamie, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she stammered.

  “No, it’s not all right. I had no business snapping at you like that.”

  “You were upset.”

  “That’s no excuse. I’m really sorry.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jamie said. “I mean, it was just a ticket. We were speeding.” She glanced toward the dashboard.

  Brad quickly brought the car’s speed back within the acceptable limits. “Sorry,” he apologized again.

  “I take it you don’t like cops,” Jamie stated.

  Brad laughed.

  Immediately Jamie felt the tension dissipate. She laughed gratefully. Everything was okay. They’d hit a slight blip in the road, courtesy of the Georgia State Police, but now everything was back to normal.

  “I hate the bastards,” Brad said, instantly shattering the tranquility.

  Once again, Jamie’s body tensed, her breathing stilled. “Why?”

  Brad rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his hand, narrowed his eyes as he checked the rearview mirror. Clearly he was deciding how much to tell her. “When I was seventeen,” he began, “my father got a new car. A Pontiac Firebird,” he continued, gradually warming to his subject. “Fire-engine red. Black leather seats. Power-everything. It was a real beauty, and he was so proud of it, always washing and polishing it. God forbid you leaned against it or got your dirty fingerprints on it. He’d go crazy. Well, of course, what do you do when you’re a seventeen-year-old boy who wants to impress the girls, and whose father has a new, red Firebird?”

  “You didn’t.”

  He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “One night, I waited till my parents were asleep, then I took that freshly cleaned, spanking-new car out for a spin, with my favorite girl, Carrie-Leigh Jones, sitting on the black leather seat beside me. And I’m thinking, if this doesn’t get me laid, nothing will.”

  Jamie smiled, although she sensed disaster looming.

  “We drove around a while—I was real careful, didn’t speed or show off or anything—and then we headed out to Passion Park, or at least, that’s what we called it, ’cause in those days that’s where everybody went to make out. It was real quiet that night. I think because it was pretty late, and most of the kids had already gone home. Anyway, we start fooling around, and I’m just rounding second base, as we used to say, when I hear this car pull up—I assume it’s just some other lucky guy—but before I can even look up, this flashlight is shining in my face, and these two cops are dragging me out of the car, and they’re beating the shit out of me, right in front of Carrie-Leigh.” Brad’s face darkened with the memory of what happened next. “I’m barely conscious when this one officer throws me over his knee, like a little kid, and holds me down while his buddy starts whipping me with his belt. And I’m crying, man. I’m begging them to stop. And I hear one of the policemen say to Carrie-Leigh, ‘Why don’t you find yourself a real man?’ and promising they won’t tell her parents where they found her if she keeps her mouth shut about what happened.”

  Jamie could barely speak. “What happened then?”

  Brad shrugged. “ ’Bout what you’d expect. They drove Carrie-Leigh home. Left me in the dirt to fend for myself.” There was a long pause. “Eventually I made it home, terrified of getting blood on those damn black leather seats. Stupid me was still hoping my father was asleep. But there he was, waiting at the front door. Turns out he was the one who’d called the cops, told them to teach me a lesson.”

  “He told them to beat you up?”

  “Saved him the trouble, I guess.” Brad smiled. “He laughed when he saw me. Told me if I ever touched his car again, he’d kill me with his bare hands.” Brad laughed, a joyless sound that bounced off the car’s windows.

  “That’s so horrible.”

  “No, that’s just life. What’d your mother say—facts are facts, and you gotta accept them? Hey, look.” Brad pointed to a large sign on the side of the road.

  WELCOME TO TIFTON, the sign proclaimed. THE READING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

  “I wonder how they know that,” Brad mused.

  “Maybe we should stop and get something to eat,” Jamie said. “Have that tire looked at.”

  Brad nodded. “I’m really sorry, Jamie,” he said again.

  Jamie reached over to take his hand. “For what?” she asked.

  EIGHT

  ALL righty, Dylan. Come on up now,” Emma called down from the top of the stairs. She was wrapped in a large mustard-colored towel, a smaller one curled around her wet hair. “It’s time to get ready for bed.”

  No answer.

  Emma’s bare feet padded across the hall at the top of the stairs. She peered into her son’s bedroom. The size of a postage stamp, she thought, depression hovering as her eyes passed over the cot-size bed in the middle of the room, the brown shag bath mat that served as a rug lying on the floor beside it, the plain wood dresser propped unsteadily against the opposite wall. One of Dylan’s school drawings, an unframed pastiche of colorful images—a big green hill, a stick figure in a red coat and oversize white skates jumping into the air, arms and legs joyously akimbo,
a smiling, yellow sun in the far right corner of the page, a bunch of disembodied, pink and blue Smiley Faces scattered throughout—supposedly representing “What Winter Means to Me”—was Scotch-taped to the wall and served as the room’s only art. “Dylan, come on, sweetie. Where are you?” Emma checked her watch. It was just past seven o’clock. That gave her almost half an hour to get dressed and dry her hair, then see her son through all his various bedtime rituals before she had to be at Lily’s. Hopefully he’d be asleep before Mrs. Discala arrived. Providing, of course, she could find him.

  A sudden terror seized her, and she froze. What if their hiding place had been discovered? What if Dylan’s father had gained access to the house while she was busy singing in the shower? What if he’d absconded with her son and disappeared into the night? She’d have only herself to blame, she was thinking. There’d been no reason to wash her hair. It had looked absolutely fine the way it was. Why was she trying to impress a bunch of women she didn’t know and cared even less about, women whose company she’d actively shunned until a mix-up in the day’s mail had brought a charming and unassuming young woman to her door, a woman offering the renewed possibility of a life filled with something other than running and sleeping and stifling bedtime rituals? A life of friends and conversation, she thought. A life. It had been just too tempting to turn down. “Dylan!” Emma called again, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria.

  “I’m hiding,” came a small, muffled voice from inside his tiny closet.

  Emma exhaled a relieved breath of air from her lungs. “Well, come on out. It’s bedtime.”