Infinity + One (4 page)

FINN CLYDE WASN’T a stupid man. In fact, he was brilliant. As a child he was fascinated by reoccurring themes in nature. Why do most flowers have five petals? Why are honeycombs shaped like hexagons? Why do numbers have corresponding colors? He was eight before he realized not everyone saw the colors.

Numbers also had weight. When he multiplied them, the numbers swirled in his head like a blizzard in a child’s snow globe, the answers settling in his mind softly, just like the snowflakes, as if gravity were responsible for the solution. As he got older, the fascination with the patterns nature presented grew into a fascination for probability, using mathematical formulas to predict outcomes. And his predictions became eerily accurate. So much so that he could handily beat anyone at chess, poker, or even games that seemed governed by chance. There was no such thing as chance to Finn. Chance could be analyzed, sliced, diced, and pegged using a little brain power.

But even Finn Clyde couldn’t predict that his brother, Fish, would get desperate, rob a convenience store with a stolen weapon, and drag Finn into the mess. Finn was brilliant, but he was also young. And he was loyal. And Finn had run toward his brother instead of driving away when Fish took a bullet in the stomach after demanding that the Vietnamese owner of the convenience store empty his cash drawer. Fisher Clyde died in the front seat of their mother’s car in his brother’s arms. And at barely eighteen, Finn Clyde’s fortunes took a definite turn for the worse. Life had not been kind since then, and at twenty-four, six and a half years after that fatal night, Finn Clyde was still brilliant, but he wasn’t nearly as young or loyal, and he wasn’t running toward trouble anymore. And Bonnie was trouble.

She was asleep, her head resting against the window, her arms wrapped around her middle as if she was physically holding herself together. She was slim, almost too slim. She said she was twenty-one, but she could pass for younger. When he had seen her perched on the railing, arms braced, her slim form appearing through a sudden and almost suspiciously providential parting of the fog, he had thought she was a kid. A boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen. And he’d driven past. You didn’t stop on Tobin Bridge. Hell, you didn’t walk or bike on Tobin Bridge. He didn’t know how the kid managed to be where he was. Where she was, Finn corrected himself.

He was heading northbound across the bridge into Chelsea. He had a stop to make—a goodbye—and then he was gone. The Blazer was packed with everything he owned in the world, and he was leaving Boston, leaving it all. New start, new people, new job. New life. But something about that figure in the fog, perched for flight, whispered to the old Finn Clyde, the Finn that didn’t know better, the Finn that ran toward trouble. And before he knew it, he was pulled off in a maintenance lane, trotting back toward the jumper.

When she’d spoken he recognized his mistake. The kid was a woman. Her voice was a smoky drawl, a voice so completely at odds with her enormous sweatshirt and her tear-stained face that he’d almost fallen off the bridge himself. Then she’d looked at him, and Finn saw something he’d seen on a thousand faces in the last six and a half years. Beat-down, hopeless, finished, blank. It was a look he had battled in his own reflection. It was defeat.

Finn wasn’t good with words. He didn’t know how to talk her down. He’d been tempted to throw statistics at her—he’d started to—spouting something about odds. Then he’d seen her high-heeled red boots, and it had thrown him. Those boots weren’t the boots of a runaway teenager or a penniless prostitute. Those boots looked expensive. They looked like they cost more than most people in his neighborhood in Southie made in a week. And he’d been immediately disgusted with her. He’d even taunted her a little, thinking that she was after attention or even a thrill, thinking in minutes her Harvard boyfriend was going to show up in his Beamer and beg her to come down.

Something in her eyes changed as the words left his mouth, and once again, Finn realized he had predicted wrong. He’d lunged for her as she let go, Fisher’s death suddenly so fresh in his mind he could hear his brother’s gurgling last breath. Fisher had died, but this girl would not.

She had thrashed angrily when she fell but she’d only cried when he’d handed her her hat. Her hair looked like someone had attacked her with a pair of pruning shears. If Finn needed more proof that this girl was in trouble—beyond the suicide attempt—the hair solidified it. So he’d eagerly left her when she’d demanded he go. But then he’d sat on the Blazer’s rusted bumper, torn between his own survival and the survival of the weeping girl he’d walked away from. When she’d suddenly stepped out of the fog in front of him, he had felt a rush of relief, followed quickly by a flood of dread.

She had pulled herself together. She wasn’t crying anymore, and her voice was steady, and after a minute of hesitation, she’d seemed determined even. She wanted a ride. With him. A complete stranger. Finn grimaced inwardly. Now, here they were.

Just two hours ago, he’d been heading across the bridge into Chelsea to say goodbye to his mother before he left town. Alone. Now he was on his way to Vegas with an unwanted passenger huddled against the door, sleeping like he’d shot her with a tranquilizer gun. He should pull over, wake her up, demand some answers, and insist that she let him drop her somewhere. But he just kept driving, like a man in a trance, each mile taking him farther from Boston and deeper into the mess he was sure he’d gotten himself into. And she slept on beside him.

I WOKE UP before I hit the water and swallowed the scream that was still trapped in the dream. I was cold, stiff, and I didn’t know where I was. I jerked upright, and a thin, wool blanket fell from my shoulders. I took in the dusty dashboard and the broad windshield that revealed a rest area littered with tired stragglers, benches, and businesses, poorly lit in the pre-dawn darkness. And then my eyes found him—Clyde-who-didn’t-look-like-a-Clyde—and I remembered.

He was slumped behind the wheel, his arms folded, his legs stretched out into the footwell where my own rested. It was colder than snot inside the car, and he’d fallen asleep with his hat on. I patted my own, making sure it was still there. We were twins in our snug caps, a pair of cat burglars staking out a hit. But that’s where the similarity ended. His hat was slightly skewed, and I could see clumps of blond hair peeping below the edge of the cap at his neck. He had a strong, squared off jaw beneath the bristle of beard that looked more careless than cultivated. His nose was marred, or maybe improved, by a small bump on the otherwise smooth ridge. His lips were neither full nor thin but slightly parted in sleep, and I noted with surprise that all together, this catalogue of features combined to make an appealing face. He was handsome.

Gran would not approve. She was always more suspicious of the “pretty ones,” as she put it. Gran got pregnant at fifteen with my dad, and I don’t think she ever forgave Grandpa for that, though she was married to him for thirty years before he was killed in a mining accident the year Minnie and I turned ten. Gran moved back to Grassley, into our already crowded excuse for a house, and I started singing for my supper. Gran had big plans, even then.

I felt the bubbling anger that had become a gossipy, new friend wake up in my chest, viciously listing all of Gran’s sins. I pushed the thought away before I got too caught up in her faults, my eyes finding Clyde’s face again in the dark. I should call Gran and let her know I was okay. But I wasn’t going to. I didn’t care if she was worried. I didn’t care if she was upset. I didn’t care what she wanted. She’d gotten everything she wanted up to this point. She could deal.

I should have been afraid, sitting in the dark with a stranger named Clyde. No one knew where I was—hell, I didn’t know where I was. For that matter, I didn’t really know
who
I was, and for the first time in years, I didn’t care very much. I felt a shifting and a settling inside me. My plan had gone all wrong, but maybe it was okay. I had let go and now found myself in a new dimension where there was just me, the sweatshirt on my back, and whatever money was in Gran’s purse. I was in a different world, and in this place there was possibility and peace. And it felt liberating. I felt free.

Plus, Clyde had obviously put a blanket around me. And he hadn’t groped or killed me while I slept. Two points for Clyde. Three, if you counted the episode on the bridge. I found myself smiling stupidly out into the darkness, the smile banishing the angry resident in my heart and the Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder, pestering me to make a call and turn myself in.

“You’re scaring me a little,” Clyde said suddenly, his voice thick with sleep.

I jumped a foot in the air and my hands gripped the dash like I was in the front seat on a roller coaster, heading downhill.

“I apparently just scared you too,” Clyde muttered, lifting his feet back to his own side of the cab and pulling his hat back down over his forehead.

“Why am I scaring you?” I asked, and my voice cracked.

“You’re sitting there smiling at nothing. It’s creepy.”

“It wasn’t nothing. It was something.” I shrugged. “How long was I asleep?”

“A while. By the time I got off in Chelsea, turned around, and came back across the bridge into Boston, you were dead to the world. It took me almost an hour to get out of Boston—there was some big event getting out at the TD Garden, I guess. Traffic was horrible. I drove for another couple of hours, and I pulled off here about an hour ago to close my eyes.”

I tried not to wiggle in my seat. That traffic jam around the TD Garden was all my fault.

“Where’s here?” I asked.

“We’re just off the Mass Pike just about to cross into New York.”

“So we’re still in Massachusetts?”

“Yeah. But not for much farther.” He was silent, staring forward. And somehow I knew what he wasn’t saying. We were still in Massachusetts, so I could still turn back.

“I’ve never been outside of Massachusetts,” he volunteered suddenly, surprising me. “This will be a first for me.” He turned his head toward me slowly. “How ‘bout you?” And he waited, holding my gaze.

“A first for me too. I mean, first time in Massachusetts.”

“How long were you here?”

“What time is it?”

Clyde checked his watch, tipping the clock face this way and that to catch the paltry light from one of the street lamps rimming the rest area parking. Nobody wore watches anymore. But Clyde apparently did. “Four a.m.”

“Well, then I guess I’ve been in Massachusetts about twenty-four hours.” We had rolled into Boston early yesterday morning in our cavalcade—a bus for me and Gran and all the people necessary to make Bonnie Rae Shelby beautiful, a bus for the band and the sound crew, a bus for the back-up singers and dancers, and two semis filled with the sound equipment and all the staging. The Bonnie Rae Shelby
Come Undone
Tour was a huge undertaking. And I’d managed to come undone with just a sweatshirt, boots, and a pair of jeans. And Bear’s hat. Don’t forget that. I could have told my record label that we didn’t need all that other stuff.