“You were just driving and the car died?”
“Yeah, well, I stopped. Just to, you know. Get out and look at the stars. This used to be one of my favorite places to come and think.”
Tina watched as she hooked the hungry jaws of the jumper cables up to her battery, then to Tina’s. She added another black cable, and attached the open clamp to a piece of metal near the Cobalt’s engine.
Only now did Tina smell herself and recall that she reeked of smoke. She’d seen the woman’s nose wonder at the stench, and the power of the smell returned to her anew. I built a fire in the woods. I took a walk and built a fire. So ridiculous.
The woman walked back to her car and started the engine.
“We gotta let it run for a couple minutes.”
Tina tried to imagine the forces that had brought the two of them here, what had bound them for each other on this same lonely stretch of Stillwater. God’s plan, always unavailable. But here they were in the cosmic shimmering.
The woman applied the gas, revving the engine so it growled like a suspicious dog.
Tina’s skin was clammy. Her shoulders and back throbbed from the pulling and the digging. The sprain in her wrist ached. She could feel the woman watching her through the windshield.
The woman came out. How ridiculous that she could not think of her name but could recall the dances and Vicky’s and sleepovers and her face beside the orange lockers and in the stadium bleachers.
“Did you pick up Todd Beaufort earlier? Outside the Lincoln?”
“Todd?” She heard her voice squeal, the tinny sound murder on the bones inside her ears. “No. No, I haven’t seen him in a while. A long time.”
The woman only nodded.
“Okay, let’s give it a try.”
She slipped into the driver’s seat of the Cobalt. The ignition turned over with a weak sputter on the first try.
“Ha ha! Success. I’m your hero, Ross.”
Without warning, a sob escaped her throat. The woman looked up.
“I’m sorry,” said Tina. “I’m so stupid—just. Thank you. I’m sorry.”
She got out of the Cobalt, and before Tina could stop her, the woman wrapped her arms around her. She was warm and strong.
“It’s okay, girl,” she said. “You’ll be on your way. No worries.”
When she let go, Tina wiped her eyes and thanked her again, but her face fluttered with unease. She smelled like a house fire. If she didn’t throw up, she’d pass out. The woman didn’t stop staring at her.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled. “I really need to go now.”
The woman said nothing and went to remove the jumper cables. Tina took the opportunity to amble back to her trunk. She found Cole’s windbreaker stuffed into the clutter in the back. She folded it over the tire iron and walked back around to the front of the car.
The woman was saying, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but if you want I can give you a ride back into—” when Tina dropped the windbreaker and swung the tire iron at her face as hard as she could.
The name came to her as she caught her long-ago friend on the skull with a sharp crack. A spackle of blood jettied from her scalp, and she fell onto her butt on the asphalt. With the name came a memory: how this friend used to crack her up by flipping up her eyelids so they stuck, like her face had turned inside out. She was still sitting up, clutching her jumper cables, gazing up at Tina, more bewildered than anything: Just, wait—why? when Tina cocked both arms, fire searing through her chest muscles. Tina pictured her head coming apart. She would hit until some unseen bone in her face gave way and her eye popped out. She would hit until the tire iron and the ground and the woman’s head of carefully combed blond was wet and black with blood. She would hit until she was sure this woman could never tell her story. She would hit until she could see Cole on the other side of this awful moment. She would hit while she wept, while she prayed, while realms of the watching dead pried her eyes open and made her see the endless answers to what her skull too would look like.
But Tina didn’t swing. So instead, the woman got to her feet. She actually took a moment to wipe dirt from her behind. The wound on her head bled down the side of her face; Tina had more raked her across the scalp than anything else. Her arms were exhausted from swinging, from digging, and Stacey was a foot taller, an athlete, a tough girl. She took a step and easily ripped the tire iron from Tina’s hand. She shoved her back against the car, pinning her arms.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Stacey hissed into her face. “What did you do that for?”
The panic, the sob, and the terror began all at once in her chest, and rose like a mushroom cloud up her throat. The sound she made was a child’s wail.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I’m really so sorry.”
“Why did you do that, Tina?” Stacey relaxed her grip. “What is going on with you?”
Tina flapped her hands the way she had when she panicked as a little girl. The reality of what she’d done returned to her, a snaking desolation. Seeing this person from her past, from a separate, untroubled life, broke her away from what she’d seen in the woods. She was Lot’s wife peering over her shoulder. She saw the blisters forming on his skin. Another sob escaped.
“Todd was with you, wasn’t he?”
Tina began to weep in full.
“I don’t know,” she gasped. “I don’t know what I did what I did why I did.”
“Tina, easy. Easy.” Stacey took her chin. Blood continued to trickle down her blond. “What do you mean? What happened?” She hesitated. “Was Todd with you?”
“What I did,” she repeated. Then wailed. “Why I did what I did.” She crumpled to the ground, knees tucked under her. The surface of the road felt gritty and cool.
“What did you do? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. Snot bubbled in her nose, and she moaned. “I don’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know.”
Heaving in the dark, both cars’ engines a steady drone, Tina began to scream. She screamed until the screaming turned back to weeping, the weeping to whimpering. She was barely aware of Stacey scrambling in the car for her phone.
She left herself behind then. The first police car came. They put her in handcuffs and had her sit in the back of the patrol car while Stacey explained what had happened and what Tina had said. She thought of Cole back home in their bed, dead to the world, unaware of what his fiancée had done for a least a little while longer. Her head hurt from crying. She couldn’t wipe her nose or eyes, so the moisture just hung on her face. A female officer came into the car. She was old and wore her hair in a tight gray bun. She asked her who she’d been with that night, what had happened. Tina wasn’t sure she heard these words leave her mouth, but later they would tell her it’s what she said: “I left him in the woods.”
An ambulance took Stacey away, and more police began to arrive. Ryan Ostrowski was one of the officers who came next. He looked at her first with curiosity, and then with great fear. He wouldn’t go near her. She could hear the other officers asking him to go talk to her, but he refused. She could hear him saying it wasn’t appropriate, that he knew her (“It’s goddamn New Canaan, Strow, we all know someone!”). All the flashing lights were too much. They drove her brain crazy, and she closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Marty Brinklan was standing over her. He took off the handcuffs and sat with her in the back of another ambulance while a paramedic shone a light in her eyes. When the medic finished looking her over, Mr. Brinklan asked her if she was okay.