She heard his sigh of exhaled breath as his head fell back against the seat.
The drive was almost too much of a challenge; it was one of the worst jobs she had ever undertaken. Terror is strong and breath-stopping, but it is usually brief; it passes quickly. Fear, the kind that had haunted her for months, has its own built-in anesthesia. And when despair is deepest there is no need to struggle, only to endure. What made the drive so bad was the need to keep constantly on the alert, to anticipate, not only the normal hazards of the road, but any unexpected, almost unimagined supranormal danger. She realized that the worst kind of fear is fear for someone else. She damned herself for involving Michael in her danger, and speculated wildly as to how she could extricate him-if it wasn’t already too late.
Through it all she drove steadily, surely, never taking her eyes from the road. The torrential rains had flooded out many sections, and she drove through shallow sheets of water at a crawl, her throat tight with fear of flooding the engine. But the worst moment was the roadblock.
A tree was down on the road ahead; but she didn’t know that, not at first, she saw only the barriers and the flashing lights of the police car.
Her foot hit the brake and her hand fumbled for the gear lever. There was a side road, a block or two back… She realized the stupidity of that move, just in time, and brought the car to a sedate stop. She had barely time to reach over and pull Michael’s jacket across his slung arm as the police officer came up to the side of the car.
She rolled down the window.
“What’s the trouble?” she demanded, with the ordinary annoyance of an innocent motorist who is delayed.
“Tree across the road. The crew is working on it, but you’ll be better off going around; it’ll take some time.” The man’s eyes moved past her, to the silent figure sprawled across the other seat. “Something wrong, miss? Need any help?”
He was very young, the policeman; his voice was kind. Momentarily Linda fought the urge to break down and tell him the truth. A doctor, a nice safe hospital for Michael…Then she saw the boy’s nostrils quiver, and she realized that the brandy bottle must be leaking. Either that, or Michael had taken more than she thought.
“That must have been quite a party,” the policeman said. “Your husband, ma’am?”
“What makes you so sure we’re married?” Linda asked, with an attempt at a smile.
He was young, but he wasn’t stupid. Pushing his cap back, he smiled back at her.
“I didn’t see your ring at first,” he explained, indicating her left hand, which was taut on the wheel. “But, you know, it’s a funny thing; we see a lot of drunks, you can imagine. Sometimes a girl’s date passes out, but usually it’s a married guy.”
“That must give you rather a jaundiced view of marriage.”
“No, not really. Oh-oh, I get it. You mean the husbands are driven to drink?” The young man laughed. He had pink cheeks and even, white teeth, and he was obviously bored with his dull post. “Well, maybe. But what I always figured was, I figured the boyfriends were more anxious to look good. It’s not a very nice thing to do, pass out on a date and make her drive you home.”
“I’m sure you’d never do a thing like that, whether you were married to the girl or not,” Linda said. Every nerve in her body was screaming for haste, but she couldn’t show it. If she gave him any cause to ask for her driver’s license, they were finished.
“Well, I’ll tell you, ma’am, you pull a few bodies out of the wrecks and you get to realize it isn’t worth it. Well, I guess you don’t need a lecture; you look like you’d never had a drink in your life.”
“Thank you,” Linda said sweetly. She batted her lashes at him. “I certainly haven’t had one tonight.”
“No, I could tell that. If you had-well, I’d have wanted to stop you from driving. It’s even more dangerous on a bad night like this. You sure you don’t need any help with your husband?”
“Thank you, but I can manage.” Michael stirred and muttered; and Linda said quickly, “I’d better get him home to bed. You say there’s a detour?”
“Yes, ma’am. Two blocks back, you turn right, then left at the next corner, and you’re on Main Street…”
She didn’t need the directions, but she nodded her thanks and pretended to listen intently. She turned the car carefully under his benevolent but critical eyes, and started back; wondering, as she did so, why she had the urge to hide their tracks. She was acting as if they might be objects of an ordinary search, instead of a quest by something not limited by human senses. Was that her intelligence, struggling against superstition, or simply overcaution? She gave it up, with a shrug that was a little desperate. Rational or not, the purpose was achieved; that nice boy would not think of her and her drunken bum of a husband if anyone came looking for a crazy girl fleeing with her lover.
Her lover. She drove on, automatically, through the night. Once, at her worst, she had prayed that she would never love anyone again. Love had betrayed her too often. With her father, who had died and left her, and her mother, who had never given a damn about her because she was a girl, and had “all these funny ideas.” And, after she had gone to him for the security her childhood had lacked, with Gordon. He had not only failed, he had used love as a weapon against her, a blindfold to hide his true nature, a spy that betrayed her own weaknesses. Love? It was a chameleon word with a thousand meanings. There were as many kinds of love as there were human beings-a hundred times more, because every human being had that many different feelings which he called by the same name.
Beside her, Michael moaned and shifted. His head dropped onto her shoulder. She adjusted her weight and kept on driving, eyes steady on the road.
When she first saw him, she regarded him not as a man but as a ladder by means of which she might climb out of the pit where Gordon held her prisoner. She had meant to ensnare his senses so that his reasoning faculties would be blinded, and he would obey her demands with the uncritical partisanship which that kind of “love” induced in the victim. It was a blindness with which she was only too familiar.
Not that she had meant to tell him the truth. Some tale of conventional “mental cruelty” would have done the trick-or so she thought. She knew now that she would never have caught this man with anything so crude. She might more safely have appealed to his sense of compassion. But that was a double-edged weapon, too easily turned against her-“poor girl, she needs help but doesn’t know it; we must hurt her for her own good.” Gordon had already used that, and it had almost worked. But that was Michael’s strength; no appeal that was purely emotional could convince him completely. He had a critical brain, critical even of himself, and it functioned. Even now, though he “loved” her-whatever he might mean by that word-he was still asking questions. He had come to her defense not because of “love” but because the tireless critical brain had produced facts that cracked his first predilection in favor of Gordon and Gordon’s explanations.
With that kind of intelligence she had no quarrel; in fact, it might be the only solid thing in a shifting universe, and the one quality above all others that had made her turn to him. But love, whatever else it was, was not a sterile agreement of similar minds. And, after the last agonizing months, she was no longer sure of her capacity to give anything beyond that.
The inert mass beside her stirred again, and she started.
“Are you awake?”
“I’m not sure… Where are we?”
“About halfway to the city. I haven’t been planning; I’ve just been driving.”
“Pull over as soon as you can find a place.”
They were approaching a town, and she found the parking lot of an all-night diner. She left the engine idling, pushed down the parking brake, and turned to Michael.
He was upright and aware, but the dull look in his eyes alarmed her.