Allison had no idea what else to tell her. What did you say to a woman whose son was somewhere in these mountains with killers on his heels, and all thanks to her? Everything that came to Allison’s mind sounded like an empty reassurance. She wondered if it might have been different if she’d been a mother herself. Did you know the code, then, did you have the right keys for the right locks? There had been some days, usually when she was saying good-bye to a group of boys at the end of the summer, when she’d wished she’d had the experience. But she also believed in what she and Ethan had decided years ago-they didn’t need to have children to have an impact on their lives. She’d seen that play out every year.
Then the boys went home. Then it was just the two of them again, for many months. She didn’t know what this woman was feeling, couldn’t, never would. And some dark part of her was relieved by that.
“Where’s his father?” Allison asked.
Jamie didn’t answer immediately. Then she wet her lips, pushed her hair back over her ear, and kept her eyes firmly ahead as she said, “In Indiana, on the phone with his attorneys and the police, trying to make sure that if…that when Jace is found, I won’t have any say in what happens next.”
“Can he do that?”
“I won’t fight it. When I find him, he’ll go home. And home isn’t with me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want to be a mother, Mrs. Serbin. I have told this story countless times to countless people, and I have never said that. I have hedged and rationalized and made excuses and told lies. I have not told anyone other than my ex-husband that I never wanted to be pregnant in the first place and that I spent the months after I found out I was trying to talk myself into wanting to be a mother, without any luck. I thought it would just happen, maybe. That the body would convince the mind as things went along. It didn’t happen. I had a child but never wanted to be a mother. How horrible is that?”
They wound onward and upward and neither of them spoke again until they saw the taillights of another car and Jamie was forced to slow down. The change in speed seemed to disrupt the atmosphere in the car, and Allison said, “Does your ex-husband know that you’re here? Does anyone know that you’re here?”
“You do.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re ignoring his calls. Or will he not-”
“I’ve come to bring Jace home. One way or another, I’m going to bring Jace home.”
“Maybe you should call Jace’s father. At least to tell him that-”
“Please stop.”
“What?”
“I just want to find Jace. Can we just talk about how to do that?”
“Fair enough,” Allison said, but she was thinking now about Jace and Ethan, and about the two who were probably already in the mountains, the men who spoke as if time stood still for them while they killed, after which they moved on at their leisure, and she was suddenly certain that she didn’t want to be there when Jamie Bennett found her son. One way or another, she’d said. Words from a woman trying hard to be brave, but Jamie had not met those men and she did not know what the other way would be like.
The hail started just after they reached ten thousand feet. By then, Jace was gasping without shame, not even trying to hide how winded he was, and Hannah was stopping to rest every fifty or sixty steps. The warm wind had continued to blow in their faces, thunder and occasional lightning behind it, and now came the hail. It was a shower, and the ice pellets were not small. They bombarded the plateau and rattled off the rocks, and the wind picked up to a howl.
“We’ve got to stop,” Jace said.
“Where?” Hannah answered. She had to shout at him even though he was just a few feet away.
He wanted to have an answer for that. He felt like he should have. What had Ethan said about this? Nothing; that was the problem.
“I could build a shelter,” he said. But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the plastic, and there were no trees nearby for a primitive shelter. Even if there had been, what could he build in this wind? The branches would be torn from his hands. Ethan could do something, but Ethan wasn’t here.
“We stay high,” Hannah told him. “Storms like this blow over fast.”
The hail was drilling down on them, stinging, and Hannah had one hand up to shield her face, but Jace could tell there was no confidence in her. She didn’t know what to do about the storm either. This was supposed to be his job, but all he knew was that they didn’t belong on the peaks in a storm. Great. It wasn’t that easy to get off the peaks though.
“I’ll put up that shelter you gave me. We can get in that-”
“We’re not getting in that. And it’s for fire anyhow. Not lightning. We’ve got to keep going, Connor.”
He turned and tried to look back into the wind then had to lower his head against the stinging ice. He didn’t like her choice of staying high. Lightning had been one of the first things Ethan talked about when they got up into the peaks. But down below was the glaring glitter of the mountainside on fire and the smell of smoke so strong that it made his eyes water. He didn’t know which choice was worse. He wished he had someone else to ask. He wanted to defer, to avoid making a decision. That was what parents were for. You might not like their decisions, but you had to live with them. Up here, though, with the storms ahead and the men who wanted him dead behind, he wasn’t sure if even his parents could make the right decisions.
“I wonder if my dad knows where I am,” he said.
That got Hannah’s attention. She turned back and said, “I thought they sent you up here to hide you?”
“I mean right now. I wonder what my parents have been told. I wonder if Ethan even made it down to tell them. Because if they were told…” His voice broke and he cleared his throat. “If they were told, why hasn’t anyone come for me?”
“People came for you. We chose to send them away.”
She was right, of course. But he didn’t mean those people. He’d meant his parents themselves, with armed police, the way it had been the night he saw the killings. He’d been scared then, but he’d been in the right place too. With the right people. Everything had happened the way it should have, at first. But then the police couldn’t find the men he’d seen, and now…
“Nobody will ever know what it was like,” he said.
Lightning flashed and showed Hannah’s face in bright white, her eyes dark against her skin, like sockets in a skull.
“I’ll know,” she said. “Connor, your parents sent you here because they thought it was the right thing, you understand that?”
“Look what it’s turned into. This is the right thing?”
He wanted to quit again, the way he had the night before, and the way he had when he saw the man with the rifle through the binoculars. He’d done well for a while. Once they were in the woods and walking, he’d tried to keep his survivor mentality. It was leaving him once more, though, draining away; he was like a battery on empty, and as he squinted against the smoke in the air and let the ice drum away on his skin, he didn’t know if he could recharge it again.
“The right choice can go very bad sometimes,” Hannah told him. “You have no idea.”
He sat down and pulled his water bottle free. He was thirsty, and you weren’t supposed to get thirsty. That meant you’d gone too long without water. Sip, sip, sip, Ethan said. Don’t chug, don’t gulp, just keep sipping.
Now he gulped, drinking as much as he could. Even the water tasted smoky. The wind was full of it and he was glad for the sting because maybe that meant she wouldn’t know that he was trying not to cry. He looked back into the darkness they’d come through, wondering where the men from the quarry were.
“Would you have done it?” he said.