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“Give me the keys,” she said.
When he handed them to her, she picked up her purse and left the house. Started the engine. Drove away.
Chapter 25
Manitowoc, Wisconsin, didn’t have any mountains.
It didn’t even have proper hills. It was right on Lake Michigan, and the city was as flat as any town at sea level. Rosemary drove west, through farmland, small towns, forest, irrationally itching for something to climb.
She didn’t know if it was legal for her to drive in America. She didn’t care. There was no traffic to speak of on the back roads, and it wasn’t difficult to point the car in a straight line and stick to the speed limit. What was the worst thing that could happen?
What could be worse than what had already happened?
She drove through nothing, shot down the highway until finally the land started to undulate and she began to feel hopeful that she would find something to throw her body against.
A brown state park sign. She pulled off where it told her to, parked in the lot, shoved keys and mobile in her pockets, and pointed herself down the trail that seemed most likely to head uphill.
She hiked as fast as she could push herself, counting her footsteps, one after the next. Sweat beaded at her hairline and bloomed under the arms of the button-up blouse she’d purchased on her Manhattan shopping excursion. Mud caked the sides of her supple leather flats, ruining them, but it was all ruined, wasn’t it? It didn’t make a difference if she ruined it some more.
Finally, the trail acquired a mild slope. She pushed herself harder, willing her muscles to burn, seeking the ache, the pain, the fatigue that would wipe her blank and let her drop away inside her head.
She didn’t want to think. She wanted to erase herself in exertion. She wanted to count.
The hilltop came too quickly. There was a concrete pad, a bench, and a picnic table. She crossed to the scenic overlook, her pulse beating in her fingers, which swelled when she hiked and had always ached on Everest, even at Base Camp.
The view gave her nothing but rolling green pastureland. Nothing threatening or intense, nothing to test herself against. Her hands curled into fists.
She hated this.
Rosemary hated that she’d walked out on her daughter, that she’d fought with her and failed her and left her and disappointed her.
She hated that she and Kal had broken up. That they’d careened right into the fight she’d been trying to avoid and found themselves in a place as bleak and impossible as she’d feared.
Most of all, she hated that she’d flung her body up this bump of soil in an attempt to obliterate herself, because it made it all too obvious—too stupidly obvious—that this was what she’d been doing from the beginning. She’d never had a hope of finding herself on Everest. Not when she’d been trying so hard to erase herself completely. She’d given herself a plan to follow so she didn’t have to make any decisions.
Her marriage had controlled her. She’d left it only to replace one kind of control with another. Anything to keep from having to authentically live her life.
It had literally taken an avalanche to shake her out of her tracks.
Rosemary sat on the picnic table. A robin perched atop the signpost at the end of the trail, singing its robin song to the world at large. It looked bedraggled, as though it had recently molted or would soon. It wanted a mate.
She wanted her daughter back. And Kal.
God, she wanted Kal.
She extracted her mobile from her pocket and stared at the screen. She’d like to phone him, but she didn’t know what they could possibly say. She’d left him mute and angry, stolen his mother’s car, stranded him with people he didn’t know, to wait for her to return.
She wanted to speak with someone, though. She didn’t think she could work her way out of this mess alone. Rosemary opened the contacts app on her phone. Allie had put her number in, but Rosemary didn’t want to speak with Allie.
Whose number did she know?
The only one she could think of besides Winston’s was her ex-mother-in-law Evita’s.
Evita would be home. She lived in a mansion with an old-fashioned telephone in every room, and she always picked up. She considered it unforgivably rude to deliberately let a call go to the answering machine.
She’d also been at odds with Rosemary throughout the entirety of her marriage, never approved of her, and manipulated her son into making mistakes that nearly destroyed his relationship with his brother.
Rosemary’s feelings about Evita were a complicated mixture of respect, disappointment, and admiration—none of which suggested that she would make a good confidante.
