The car lurches forward—they’re so nearly at the tree as to be basically upon it—and then, all at once, they’re next to it. And while they should, within the space of a few seconds, be safely past it and on the other side, Will can tell it’s going to go wrong an instant before it does. As he feels, from the passenger seat, the tire treads losing their grip on the slick surface of the road, he hears more than sees the tree give way. The sound isenormous, a sharp crack that seems to splinter through the air itself, and activates some scrabbling, primordial survival instinct in the back of Will’s mind.
Then it’s all happening too quickly to keep track of. The car is spinning—Will can see half the tree falling, in little glimpsesat the peak of every turn, like a terrifying flip-book—the tree is landing, knocking off one of Casey’s mirrors but otherwise missing the car—the car isstill spinningand—no, wait, it’s…not. Casey is hooting and hollering in delight and cutting the wheel and?—
“Oh my God, did you spin out onpurpose,” Will demands, all one gasping breath. “Youbastard, I thought we were going todie?—”
“Eh,” Casey says, the smallest edge of a smile stealing onto his face. “Nah. From that thing?” He shakes his head, and says again: “Nah. Couple broken bones, maybe, or neck injury if you’re very unlucky, but you’d probably live.” When Will makes an outraged little noise in reply, Casey smirks and adds, “Anyway, I wasn’t spinning out; I was just spinning. Quicker to get out of the trajectory, in the circumstances. It’s only spinning out if you’re not in control.”
Will decides to ignore this and cranes around in his seat to look at the damage behind them. Whistling, and then remembering his father used to do that and wishing he could wind the sound back into his mouth like fishing wire, he says, “Not going to be pretty getting back in, is it? Whole road’s blocked off.”
Casey looks in the rearview mirror as Will settles back into his seat, and swears. Then, tightly: “God. Well. Problem for later me, I guess.” Pulling an unhappy face, and clearly mostly to himself, he mutters, “Really piling them up for that guy today, aren’t I? Let’s all spare a thought for him.”
As Casey blows out a breath, and then throws the shifter back into gear and starts peeling down the road, Will does his best to regulate his breathing and heart rate. In fairness, it’s abithard to tell the difference between his own pulse thudding in his ears and the rain still lashing down around them, or to hear the raggedness of his own breathing over the howling of the wind outside. It’s possible that Will’s doing a great job ofregulating his response to that particular near-death experience. Perhaps he is completely calm, and simply can’t tell.
I think being completely calm isn’t usually a mystery to the self, says the cool, rational, Selma-esque voice in the back of Will’s mind.Also, critical note for you: He’s driving very fast again, but you still don’t know where you’re going,or what on earth has even happened, so…
“Look,” Will says, a sense of dread stealing over him as he remembers what little he knows about what drove them out here in the first place, then deepening as he clocks how quickly the nearby fenceposts are starting to whip past. “I know we don’t, uh…get along, or whatever, but can youpleasetell me what the hell is happening? Meredith and I grew up together, and I literally met all of her kids like three hours ago, and Walter Gramlich did very muchdie, so. If it has to be a no-questions-asked thing, then fine, happy to help, whatever it is, but if not…whatis it?”
Casey sucks in a harsh breath. “Yeah. So—Todd? You met Todd?”
“God,” Will says, swallowing hard against a sudden wave of nauseousness. “Yes, I met Todd. I liked Todd. He jumped?”
“Not exactly,” Casey says, in a growl. “I guess he and some of his friends were out there daring each other to jump, but they all told her they didn’t mean it, that it was just messing around, being stupid. But something happened, I guess part of the bridge collapsed or something, and the rest of them got clear in time but Todd didn’t. Swept into the river.” Casey glances at the clock, gnawing on his lower lip, and swears again, low, under his breath.
“Jesus,” Will says, swallowing hard.
“Yeah,” Casey says, shaking his head. “His friends couldn’t quite agree, but one of them insisted he saw Todd trying to swim against the current; said he tried to grab for him, andmissed. Mere tried 911, but EMS can’t get over the bridge because itisn’t there.So she tried me because Todd has GPS tracking on his phone that shows up on hers, one of those family monitoring things, you know, and a few months ago I got him this waterproof phone case because?—”
“He kept breaking them,” Will says, nodding along, too concerned about Todd to remember to be self-conscious about having already discussed Casey with other people in the roughly twenty-four hours since meeting him. “He told me you did, yeah.”
“Thank God, right?” Casey says, with a slightly shaky laugh. For a second, he looks almost green in the dim light of the cab, but it might be a reflection from the lighting; when he speaks again, his voice is steadier. “Anyway, the phone is pinging somewhere on the perimeter of the property line—Meredith says it bounced around for a while, and now it looks like it’s stopped right at the edge of the river. She hopes it’s the edge of the river, anyway. She sounded pretty…” He trails off without finishing the sentence, but Will can imagine; no parent is going to sound anything but gut-wrenchingly frantic in that situation. Casey leans forward a little, obviously urging the car to pick up yet another few miles per hour of speed, as he says, “This is just the fastest route. She’s on her way, but with the weather this crazy she’s not sure how long?—”
“No, of course,” Will says, shaking his head, sick with worry for her, for Todd. “Someone had to go, in case—sometimes it just comes down to timing, right, and—you couldn’t—of course you had to go.”
“Yeah,” Casey says, after a long, slow beat. “That’s right.”
Silence blooms out between them, yawning into the heart of the car even as they hurtle down the rain-slick road, barely able to see more than a few feet in front of them through the thick curtain of the downpour. Will tries not to let his newly acquiredfear of hydroplaning to his quick and painful death show in his face or body language, contains himself to shifting a little against the worn leather seat covers when he notices the speedometer climbing into territory he wouldn’t take it on asunnyday. Still, it’s not an uncomfortable silence, except in all the ways that it is, because it’s a fraught, uncertain moment, and those are always uncomfortable. But between them, in some little way, something that was tight and tense seems to uncurl a little, in spite of the circumstances—soothed like a panicky animal by the urgency of the task, or the hum of the motor.
It’s a stolen moment of peace, though, too much to face to allow them much more than a breath or two of pause, and after a second, Will finally remembers to say: “Oh!Whereare we going? You said edge of the property line, but I’m pretty sure—” He peers out into the wet, angry blackness that was once a familiar thoroughfare, trying to orient himself, then continues: “Yeah, I thought so—look, if we keep going this way we’re going to hit that stupid forest, and unless things have changed a lot since I was a kid, the owners aren’t going to let us cut through?—”
“Oh, no, definitely not,” Casey agrees, sounding sour. “Nota friendly bunch; I’m not interested in tangling with them today. Doubt they’d help us even for a kid’s life, to be honest. But it’s not going to be an issue—I know a shortcut.”
“A shortcut?” Will pulls up his mental map of the farm, trying to think of how this could possibly be so. They pulled out of the market parking lot and turned left on the main road; Robertson property is passing them quickly by on the right. They’re already beyond the outbuildings, the first orchard,andthe cornfield, the final fence marking the property line wicking by, and all that’s left between here and the forest is?—
“Oh my God,” Will says, as he sees Casey flip his turn signal and start twisting the wheel, “are you going to use theprivate road?It’s blocked off, man! Look!” Hegestures at the length of metal chain, fitted in the middle with aPrivate road: no accesssign, which is hanging from two posts on either side of the road.
“Oh no,” Casey says sarcastically, rolling his eyes even as he guns the engine. “A single length of rusty chain! However will I defeat that with only the power of myenormous truck,” and then he’s driving through it as though it’s nothing, thePrivate roadsign banging as it hits the ground behind them.
“That…did not occur to me as an option,” Will admits, impressed in spite of himself. There’s something oddly attractive about the man’s sheer audacity, his willingness to do things that Will would never even consider trying himself.
“Shouldn’t be private, anyway,” Casey mutters. “It’s not like it’s somebody’s driveway. Road’s a road. Sometimes there’s anemergency.”
Will swallows, his thoughts sliding, the way he’s been willing them not to, to what might be happening to Todd right now. Casey’s must, too, because they fall into a tense, anxious silence, which lasts for the last few minutes of their breathtakingly fast drive.
Abruptly, Casey whips the wheel to the right, and they’re barreling through a tight gap in the fence line that Will never would have seen, let alone cleared, in time. It puts them back on Robertson land, as close to the river as even the farm’s dirt roads get, and Will expects Casey to stop the car. Instead, he continues to drive, urging the truck off the dirt road and through an already winterized planting field, directly towards a line of thin, scraggly maple trees, unhappy in their placements at the edge of an eroding slope. Will knows those trees were put there to denote the end of the plantable ground, and that beyond them sits a long, low incline down to the riverbank, and thus thewater. If someone were to drive directly through one of the gaps between those trees, as Will is half-convinced Casey intends to do, then that person and any unfortunate passenger whohappened to be with them would briefly fly through the air before crashing into the water. Will takes deep breath in and…
…releases it in one shocked, punched-out exhale when Casey throws the emergency brake, sends the car spinning sideways through the mud before it skids to a perfect stop mere inches from the tree line.
“Wow,” Will breathes, not meaning to, so surprised to be alive that he can’t help it. The skill it must take to drive a car so dangerously without crashing it?—
