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I let out a little laugh as my gaze drifts upward. Her hair is tangled. Matted. A little greasy, except for the hairs at her temples, which are starting to frizz.
She is a complete mess, and maybe it’s just the recent near-death experience, but she looks absolutely perfect.
Her eyes widen, and I realize I’ve said it aloud.
“Perfectly wretched,” I amend as I intentionally shift my thoughts over to Lolo. It seems to require superhuman effort because she suddenly seems very far away, and I don’t just mean in a different state.
“Back at you,” Katherine says. “Lolo would never accept your seed if she could see you now.”
I can’t help it; I smile.
Katherine blinks in surprise.
“That was a real one.”
“A real what?” I say.
“A real smile,” she says, pushing her finger into my cheek. “I got you.”
I bat her hand away. “You didn’t get me. I smile all the time.”
“Not like that. Not for real.”
Before I can respond, I’m interrupted by grumbling from the front of the bus. The bus driver curses as he angrily tosses the neck of the microphone aside. Apparently he tried to make an announcement, but the PA system isn’t working.
He slams it back down and then shouts over the whining and moaning, “Anyone hurt?”
A man in his late fifties or early sixties raises his hand. “My foot hurts.”
“I don’t got time to hear about your damn gout right now, Jim. Anyone else have a gripe?”
Three-quarters of the passengers lift their hands.
“Anyone seriously injured?” the driver amends impatiently.
Everyone’s hands drop, albeit reluctantly.
“Excellent. Well, at least there’s a little bit of good news to balance out the bad.”
A man in the front raises his hand like a kid in school. “What’s the bad news?”
The driver lights a cigarette and uses it to gesture at the hazy bus. “This totaled hunk of metal isn’t going anywhere tonight. We’re stuck.”
Katherine leans toward me and opens her mouth, but I put a hand over her mouth. “Don’t say it.”
For once, she listens to me, but I still know what she was going to say.
Everything up until this moment was child’s play because right now in the middle of nowhere, in a totaled bus, amid a blizzard?
Now it can’t get any worse.
TWENTY-SIX
KATHERINE
December 23, 11:29 p.m.
“There is no way this is the right way. Check your phone,” Tom orders me.
“Oh sure. Now you want me to check it. You’re always hollering at me to be more present in the moment.”
Tom gives me an incredulous look over his shoulder. “Now you’re choosing to have principles? When we’re lost on a deserted road that hasn’t been traversed since Grover Cleveland was in office?”
I’m too exhausted and in too much pain to retort, even to drop the fascinating tidbit that Cleveland is the only president to have served two nonconsecutive terms in office. Tom hates when I drop random trivia, and the fact that I skip an opportunity to annoy him says plenty about my current condition.
Tom stops in his tracks when he sees me struggling with my suitcase. If this street has seen a snowplow, it hasn’t been today, and rapidly accumulating snow makes the spinner wheels on my expensive suitcase irrelevant. Tom picked his up within seconds of leaving the bus. I’d have done the same, but the gash in my back has added “oozing” alongside “excruciatingly painful” on its list of characteristics.
Tom stalks back toward me, looking like an angry warrior trudging through the snow, and without a word, he takes my bag. Grateful, I let him. This is no time to play my favorite game of anything you can do, I can do better.
A half hour ago, the thought of spending another second on a totaled bus with thirty adults and four babies was too horrendous to even consider. Especially given the surplus of foul odors, the lack of heat, and the nonstop crying, which by the way, wasn’t even from the babies.
Estimated time until the tow truck could get to us? Three hours. “Give or take.”
Needless to say, Tom and I decided to take our chances with the blizzard. A decision that may very well be the end of us, because our current status?
Slowly trudging down a dark, deserted country road.
And lost. Very lost.
“Katherine.” Tom’s voice is sharp. “I thought you said the motel was a ten-minute walk. We’ve been walking for twice that. How much further?”
“I don’t know!” I exclaim. “Okay? I have no idea.”
“Well, then check your damn phone!” he yells again.
I swipe snowflakes off my eyelashes—not one of my favorite things. “I don’t have any service.”
“What do you mean?” He stops again. Turns. “We had full bars on the bus.”
“Well, gee, Tom.” I gesture around at the pitch-black night and whipping snow. “We’re not on the bus, are we?”
It would have had more bite if my teeth weren’t chattering, but Tom rises to the bait even through the softball delivery.
