She sprays the back of his neck. He doesn’t move, but she takes a step away from the mist.
“Bitch,” he says, “I swear to God…”
“Caroline,” Audrey says, and pulls hard enough to get her friend off balance, and suddenly they are moving, they are stumbling, they are reeling toward the light, their bodies so slow and heavy and all they want is the light—the beautiful yellow light of the station! But when Audrey goes for the glass door Caroline grabs her once again, and there’s a brief struggle before Audrey looks in and sees: the woman who gave them the key, sitting at the counter as before, solving her puzzles as before, so pink and soft and alone in the cramped little store. And maybe you can get the door locked in time and maybe you can’t, but if you can’t, and the boys get in there…
The RAV4 sits where Caroline left it, still running. Its doors fly open and slam again and the boys have not grabbed them, the boys are nowhere in sight as the RAV4 drops into gear, as it lurches and fishtails out from under the lights of the station, and the girls are in it and their hearts are slamming.
“Are you all right?” Caroline yelling through her tears—the burn of the pepper. “Audrey, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Slow down!”
“Do you even know where we are—?”
“We’re two miles from the highway. Slow down.”
“Who are you calling?” Audrey holds the phone in both hands—her arm is fine, why didn’t she use it?
“The police.”
“The police? What are they gonna do?”
“Those boys might follow us.”
“Fuck, I should’ve got the license—”
“Yes, hello,” Audrey says calmly. “I’m calling to report an attempted assault.”
“Attempted rape,” Caroline yells.
“Yes, we’re all right now. What? Where are we—?”
They are on the narrow and dropping two-lane road. They are halfway down the hill before Caroline thinks of the sleet, before she remembers the iron trestle bridge at the bottom—and yet when she applies the brakes nothing happens. Or rather, something very strange happens: the car turns quarterwise to the road and continues on at the same speed.
“Caroline, don’t brake—”
“What?”
“Take your foot off—”
“Audrey, shit—”
They are briefly broadside to the road, and then they are backwards to it, looking back up the hill the way they’ve come—there’s their tiretracks carving a long black DNA helix in the sleet—one or both of them screaming as they come around again, and the steering wheel has come loose from the car, spins with meaningless ease in Caroline’s hands, and the whole world spins with it, the sleet angling crazily in the beams of the headlights—the snowy shoulder, the road, the trestle bridge all slurring by—until at last the car slips from the road and plows face-forward into the deep snow of the shoulder, the passenger-side wheels sinking into the ditch, and the car plows and plows through the snow, and it slows, and at last comes abruptly to rest, just short of the outermost ironworks of the bridge and on the very crest of the high riverbank. The two girls stiff-arming wheel and dash, looking out into empty space, their hearts banging. Sleet diving through the headlights on its way to a landing they cannot see, far below.
“Caroline,” Audrey says.
“What?”
“Put the car in park, please.”
Caroline puts the car in park. What they want is the lack of movement. What they want is stillness. It’s like that scene in the movies when the car totters on the cliff’s edge. Though the car is not tottering and it’s not a cliff, it’s a riverbank, but still.
The cab is an aquarium, green-hued from the gauges, encased in glass. A heavy, underwater world. Even the air smells of it—tastes of it: plant life, silt, fish. Their heartbeats pulse between them on the currents, send messages one to the other on the green and conductive air. Fine hairs lift from Audrey’s head and sway like black cilia. The girls find each other’s eyes and find something—perhaps their screams, still ringing in their ears, perhaps the giddy rolling of their guts as the car spun round and round—to laugh about, breathlessly.
“You fucking blinded me!” says Caroline, laughing. “Did you see that poor peckerwood?” And then she sees the headlights in the rearview mirror—two yellow lights descending the hill, unwavering, locked in, steady. As if this driver traveled some other kind of road, where the laws of physics still held.
“Damn, that was quick,” she says, and Audrey sees the headlights too in the side-view mirror.
“Caroline.”
“What?”
“That’s not the police.”
Caroline looks again. “How do you know?”
“They’re not throwing their lights.”
That’s right: Audrey’s daddy is a sheriff. Audrey has ridden shotgun through the Arctic hinterlands, has probably thrown the lights herself. Thrown the sirens. Let’s go get ’em, Deputy.
Where is that sheriff now? Where is that daddy?
Lying in his bed, dying of his cancer.
Audrey remembers the phone and lifts it to her ear. “Hello? Hello—?”
Headlights descend and pour their light into the cab, and when Audrey looks over her shoulder her face is a kind of light itself, moon-bright, and nearly all the color driven from her eyes, the pupils like black pinholes. She lowers the phone and says as quietly as anything Caroline has ever heard from another person’s lips, “Hold on, Caroline.”
The headlights grow so near they are blocked by the RAV4’s tailgate, and still they flood the cab with light, the driver pulling onto the shoulder too but not as far over, short of the deep snow. There’s the sound of tires in the snow, and then there’s the sound of tires failing to stop in the snow, of tires skidding in the snow. And then there’s the bump.
You couldn’t even call it an impact. A love tap, Caroline’s papaw would say—and the Mardi Gras beads click and sway, brilliant in the light. The tiny, multicolored rabbit’s foot. And it’s then, at the moment of the bump, the love tap, that the hawk and the squirrel come back to Audrey, flapping into her mind like something she once dreamed, a shrieking figment having nothing to do with real life, and she briefly thinks—briefly believes: This, too, this is not real!
A love tap, a miscalculation—an accident, surely. And over the edge they go.
How must this have looked to the driver who watched it happen: the RAV4 squatting in the deep shoulder snow one moment, solidly at rest, lit up in his headlights, the bags and suitcases of the cargo area, the heads of the two girls in the front seats—and then the bright oval of the passenger’s face as she turned to look back at him. Was it that bright sudden face that distracted him, that accounts for the failure to stop in time, the bump of machine on machine and the resulting, the unbelievable, visual of the back end of the RAV4 rising into the air as the front end dipped and the whole of it, machine and luggage and girls and all, slipped all at once out of view? Just—gone.
Did the girls scream? Was there time? Was the outcome too swift and too certain for screaming? The forward tires locked in park, did Caroline Price slam her powerful legs at the brake pedal anyway? What thoughts fired in their brains as the car dropped, gathering speed from its own weight, flying nose-first toward the black surface of the river—a darkness and coldness too incredible to imagine. The black, smooth ice full of its own burning lights, its own stars. Did the girls in that span of two, maybe three heartbeats, find each other’s hands? Like girls who have done so all their lives did they reach out in the dark? Like sisters did they find and grasp?