Night Road (16 page)

Zach lurched toward them. He was so unsteady he tripped over a stone and fell down. “Is she okay?”

“Iss time to go,” Mia said. “Mom’ll kill us if we’re late. Wha time is it?”

“Two ten,” Lexi said, squinting at her watch. She thought that was right. The numbers were dancing and blurring.

“Oh SHIT.” Zach staggered to his feet. “We gotta go.”

They made their weaving, unsteady way up the bank and across the grassy lawn, stepping around the bodies of their passed-out classmates. Mia stepped on someone’s arm and laughed, yelled, “Oops! Sorry.”

As they staggered to the car, it hit Lexi: Zach was drunk. She turned to him.

He stood there, swaying like a palm tree in the trade winds, his eyes closed.

Then she looked at Mia, who was puking again. Blood was dripping down the side of her face.

“You can’t drive,” Lexi said to Zach.

Mia got closer to the car and bent forward like a rag doll, pressing her cheek against the hood. “Call Mom,” she said. She dug in her pocket for her phone, dropped it on the ground.

Lexi picked up the phone.

“No way,” Zach said. “Lass time she practically grounded us.”

“Hesh right,” Mia said. “Less jus go.”

Lexi tried to concentrate, but she couldn’t. All she could really think about was that they should call Jude, but what would Jude think of Lexi then? What if Eva found out about this? Lexi had promised to be good, and here she was at a party again.

Mia shivered violently. “I’m freezing, Zach ’tack. Where’s my coat? An my head hurts. Why does my head hurt?”

“We should sleep here,” Lexi said.

“Mom would kill us,” Zach said, stumbling forward, slamming into his car. He wrenched the driver’s door open and fell into the seat. The keys were in the well; he searched around, swearing, and then laughed, “Got ’em.”

“Get out of there, Zach,” Lexi said. “You’re too drunk to drive.” She walked around the driver’s side of the car, trying not to stumble or fall. “Mia, help me,” Lexi said. “Tell Zach he’s too drunk to drive.”

“Iss only a mile…” Mia said. “An Mom did flip out lass time we called.”

“I can do it,” Zach said, smiling sloppily.

“Come on,” Mia moaned, wiping more blood from her forehead. She opened the car door and fell into the backseat. “Ouch,” she said, laughing, and then curled up into a fetal position on the seat.

Zach slipped the key into the ignition and started the engine, which roared to life in the quiet darkness. “Come on, Lex. Iss no big deal. Less go.”

“I don’t know,” Lexi said, shaking her head. The movement pushed her off-balance and made her fall forward; she hit the side of the car. “Wait. I gotta
think.
This isn’t a good idea…”

Eleven

Beep
.

Beep
.

Beep
.

Jude sat up, bleary-eyed.

She was on the sectional in the living room. Her cell phone lay on the cushion beside her, chirping. An infomercial flitted silently across the TV screen.

She struggled to focus on the small face of her watch. 3:37. Then she flipped open her cell phone. There was a text from Mia.

Sry wr late
.
On our way
.
Luv U
. The text had come in at 2:11.

Oh, they
would
be sorry. They’d come home late, not checked in with Jude, and forgotten to turn off the exterior lights. This would be their last party for a while. She got up, turned off the TV and the outside lights, and locked the front door. As she climbed the stairs, she tried to decide whether to wake them up or yell at them tomorrow.

She opened Mia’s door and turned on the light. The bed was empty.

She felt a ping of fear, like a drop of acid on bare skin, and went to Zach’s room.

It was empty, too.

Take a breath, Jude
. They missed their curfew; that was all. They’d started to leave the party and then been caught up somehow.

She called Mia’s cell. It rang and rang, then went to voice mail.

It was the same with Zach’s phone.

She ran downstairs to her room. Miles lay sleeping in bed, a book open on his chest, the television on.

“It’s late, Miles, and they’re not home.”

“Call them,” he mumbled.

“I did. No one answered.”

Miles sat up, frowning, and glanced at the clock. “It’s almost four o’clock.”

“They’re never this late,” she said.

Miles ran a hand through his hair. “We don’t want to panic. They probably lost track of time.”

“We could drive over there,” Jude said.

Miles nodded. “I think—”

The doorbell rang.

“Thank
God
.” Jude felt a rush of relief, then a burst of anger. “They are
so
grounded,” she muttered, leaving the room.

She stepped out into the long, dark hallway. It was black … and then red … yellow. Lights cut through the darkness, blinking, blaring.

Police lights.

She stumbled, almost fell. Then Miles was beside her, steadying her.

She felt herself moving forward but she wasn’t really walking. She was a piece of flotsam caught up in her husband’s motion.

Two policemen stood outside their door. It was raining, hard; why did she notice that? She knew these men, knew them and their wives and their children, but they shouldn’t be here now, at her house, in the middle of the night, their images flashing red and yellow.

Officer Avery stepped forward, his hat in his hand.

She saw everything in pieces, out of focus, as if she were looking through binoculars set for someone else’s eyes; staccato bursts of color, a macabre night, rain that looked like bits of ash falling from the sky.

I’m sorry. There’s been an accident.

Words. Sounds. Lips that moved and the sound of heavy breathing. Falling rain.

Mia … Zach … Alexa Baill …

She couldn’t process it, couldn’t make sense of it.
My babies … you’re talking about my children.

“They’ve been airlifted to Harborview, all three of them.”

“They’re okay?” she heard her husband ask, and it shocked her so badly she almost pulled away from him. How could he find a voice now? Ask anything?

Did the policeman answer? What had he said? Jude couldn’t hear anything over the rain, or the beating of her heart. Was she crying? Is that why she couldn’t see?

Miles looked at her, and in his eyes she saw how breakable they both were, how fragile. It had happened in an instant, this new frailty; in the time it took them to walk from their bedroom to the front door, they had been pared down, their bones weakened. She thought his touch would bruise her now, leave a mark.

“Let’s get dressed,” he said, taking her by the arm. “We need to go.”

*

The drive to the hospital seemed to take forever. There were no ferries running at this hour, so they had to take the bridge to Kitsap County and drive around to Seattle.

In the car, they didn’t speak. Silence felt manageable; words did not. It took concentration just to draw in each breath and exhale without crying.

She wished she were a religious woman. All that spirituality she’d cultivated didn’t help her now; she needed faith, an antidote to this escalating fear. When they parked, Jude turned to her husband. He looked drawn and gaunt and the look in his eyes was harrowing.

She wanted to comfort him, as she did so often when he came home from work still mired in loss. She wanted to tell him not to think of the worst, but she was too brittle to even offer an arm.

Inside the bright white hospital, Jude straightened her shoulders and forged ahead, trying to manage her fear by controlling everything around her. But her questions went unanswered, her calls for help unheeded.

“Stop,” Miles finally said, taking her aside in the crowded hallway. “Just let them do their jobs. All we can do is wait.”

She didn’t want to do nothing, but she had no choice. So she stood there, overwhelmed by helplessness, trying not to cry. Waiting.

Finally, at just past six in the morning, they got an answer. It felt as if they’d been here for decades, but in truth, it had been less than an hour.

“Mia is in surgery,” the man in front of her said. He was a big black man with tattooed biceps and the kindest, molasses-colored eyes she’d ever seen. His orange scrubs looked more like prison clothes than hospital wear. “She suffered some pretty severe internal injuries. That’s all I know,” he added when Miles began to question him.

“She’ll be okay, though,” Jude said. Everything felt scrambled in her head, sounds seemed to be muffled. Why could she hear her own heartbeat in all this noise?

“The surgeon will come out to talk to you when he’s done, but it will be a while. They just went in,” the nurse said.

“And Zach?” Miles asked.

“I’ll take you to see him,” the nurse said. “He sustained some chemical burns to his face and eyes, so he’s bandaged. Before you ask, Dr. Farraday, that’s all I know. He also cracked a couple of ribs. The girl, Alexa, is in with a doctor right now, but I think her injuries are less severe. A broken arm, a forehead laceration.”

“Burns?” Jude said. “How bad is it? Has he seen a specialist? There’s that doctor from the UW—what’s his name, Miles?”

Miles took her hand. “Later, Jude,” he said firmly, and she felt that helplessness rise up in her again.

They followed the nurse into a private room, where her son, the boy she’d thought only last week was looking so much like a man, lay in a metal-railed bed all alone, surrounded by machines. The right side of his face was bruised and swollen, misshapen somehow. Bandages wrapped his head, mushrooming out above his ears. A rectangular gauze pad covered the lower part of his right cheek and jawline.

Miles squeezed her hand, and this time she clung to him.

“We’re here,” Miles said.

“I’m holding your hand, Zach,” Jude said, trying not to cry as she stared down at her son’s bruised, burned face and bandaged eyes. His other hand was bandaged up past his wrist. “Just like I used to, remember? I used to hold your hand all the way into the classroom in kindergarten. You got cool in eighth grade—after that, I could only hold your hand in the car, and only for a few minutes. I used to reach back into the backseat, remember? And you’d hold my hand for a few minutes, just so—”

“Mom?”

For a moment she thought she’d imagined his voice. “Thank God,” she whispered, squeezing his hand.

Zach tried to sit up. “Where am I?”

“Lie still, son. You’re in a hospital,” Miles said.

“I … can’t see … What happened?”

“There was a car crash,” Miles said.

“Am I blind?”

Of course not,
Jude wanted to say. It couldn’t be true, not to her son who had been afraid of the dark. “Your eyes are bandaged, that’s all.”

“We don’t know the extent of your injuries yet,” Miles said evenly. “Just rest, Zach. The important thing is that you’re alive.”

“How’s Mia?” Zach asked quietly, still sitting up. He looked around, blind behind all that gauze. “And Lex?”

“Mia’s in surgery right now. We’re waiting to hear,” Jude answered. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. This is a wonderful hospital.”

“And Lexi?” Zach asked.

“The nurse thought she was going to be fine. We’ll know more soon,” Miles said.

“Just rest, baby,” Jude said, using her voice to soothe him as she had so often when he was little. “We’ll be right here.”

She sat by his bed, as she’d done so many times in his life. A few moments later, Miles left again to check on Mia’s status. Waiting for answers was terrible, but Jude had to bear it. What choice did she have? And she believed in the deepest part of her soul that Mia would be fine. She had to believe that.

Behind her, the door opened again. “No news yet,” Miles said.

Jude looked down at Zach again, trying to think of what to say to him. Words felt heavy and unwieldy and she couldn’t tame her fear enough to
think,
so she dug deep into the past, went back to the days when she’d had two babies who tangled up together like puppies in her lap, and she told him his favorite story. She didn’t remember it word for word, but she remembered enough to start. “The night Max wore his wolf suit to make mischief, his mother called him Wild Thing and sent him to bed without dinner…”

As she remembered the words—something about the gnashing of his terrible teeth—she tried to distance herself from the memories they evoked. But how could she? The story reminded her of a boy who’d cried when she turned the lights out in his room, a boy who’d been terrified of monsters in the closet and under the bed. Only his sister’s presence could really calm him. Jude had ignored all the good parenting manuals and let the twins climb into bed with her and Miles.

And now his eyes were wrapped; he was deep in the dark.

“Mom?”

She wiped her eyes. “What, baby?”

“Have you seen Lexi?”

“Not yet.”

“Go see her. Tell her … tell her I’m fine, okay?”

She squeezed his hand and let go. “Of course.” She stood up, shaky on her feet, and turned to Miles. “You’ll hold his hand while I’m gone?”

“Of course.”

She pretended not to notice that they couldn’t look at each other anymore. “Okay, then.”

She stayed a second longer, unable somehow to leave her son; then she left the room and went out into the brightly lit hallway. Pausing to get her bearings, she walked up to the busy nurses’ station.

“Can I get information on Alexa Baill?” she asked.

“Are you a relative?”

“No.”

“She is in Room 613 west. That’s all I can tell you.”

Jude nodded and left the nurse’s station.

At 613 west, she paused a moment, then opened the door.

The room held two beds. The one by the window was unoccupied. In the other lay Lexi. Although her bed was angled up, she was asleep. Her pretty, heart-shaped face was bruised, her left eye had a bandage above it, probably from a laceration, and her left arm was in a cast. Beside her, Eva Lange sat in a plastic chair. The woman looked older than Jude remembered, and smaller. She had her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

Jude had heard so many stories about this woman over the years, how she’d picked up Lexi sight unseen and offered her a home. Eva had had hardly any money, and only a rented trailer and a secondhand car to her name, but she’d welcomed Lexi in. “Hello, Eva,” Jude said. “May I come in?”

Eva looked up. Her dark eyes swam with tears and the wrinkles on her cheeks were accordion-deep. “Sure.”

“How is she?” Jude asked.

“How should I know? Getting a doctor to talk to you is like finding a winning lotto ticket.”

“I’ll have Miles get you some information. It’s hard, though. We’re waiting to hear about … Mia, too.” Jude looked at Eva, and though they had almost nothing in common, they had this moment, this mother’s worry strung between them.

“I don’t get it,” Eva said softly, her eyes moist. “She told me she was spending the night at your house. With Mia.”

“Yes. That was the plan.”

“But they weren’t home at 3:30?”

It occurred to Jude suddenly, sharply, that her children were responsible in this, that they’d driven … and that she had let them go. “They ignored their curfew.”

“Oh.”