The Passage (27 page)

“I won’t say nothing.”

“Good.” She nodded briskly, satisfied, and pointed her eyes out the windshield again, her smooth brow furrowing thoughtfully. “Doughnuts. Now, I don’t know why I stopped here of all places. You probably don’t want doughnuts, do you?”

Just the word made a blast of saliva wash down the insides of his mouth. He felt his stomach growl. “Doughnuts is all right,” Carter said. “The coffee’s good.”

“But they’re not a real meal, are they?” Her voice was firm; she’d decided something. “A real meal is what you need.”

That was when Carter realized what the feeling was. He felt
seen
. Like all along he’d been a ghost without knowing it. It came to him all of a sudden that she meant to take him with her, take him home. He’d heard about folks like her but never believed it.

“You know, Mr. Carter, I think God put you under that freeway today for a reason. I think he was trying to tell me something.” She put the Denali in gear. “You and I are going to be friends. I can just feel it.”

And they
were
friends, just like she’d said. That was the funny thing. He and this white lady, Mrs. Wood, with her husband—old enough to be her father, though Carter almost never saw him—and her big house under the live oaks with its thick lawn and hedges, and her two little girls—not just the baby but the older one too, cute as a bug like her sister was, the two of them like something in a picture. He felt it right down to the marrow, the deepest part of him. They were friends. She’d done things for him that no one ever had; it was as if she’d opened the door to her car and inside was a whole big room, and in that room were people, and voices saying his name and food to eat and a bed to sleep on and all the rest. She’d gotten him work, not just her yard but other houses, too; and wherever he went, people called him Mr. Carter, asking him if maybe he could do something a little extra today, because they were having folks over: blowing leaves off the patio or painting a set of chairs or pulling leaves from the gutters, or even walking a dog every now and again.
Mr. Carter, I know you must be busy, but if it’s not too much trouble, could you … ?
And always he said yes, and in the envelope under the mat or the flowerpot they’d leave an extra ten or twenty, without his having to ask. He liked these other folks, but the truth was they didn’t matter to him; he did it all for her. Wednesdays, the best day of the week—her day—she’d wave to him from a window as he wheeled the mower from the garage, and sometimes, lots of times, come out of the house when he was done and cleaning up—she didn’t leave the money under the mat like the others, but put it in his hand—and maybe sit for a spell with cold glasses of tea on the patio, telling him things about her life, but asking him about his, too. They’d talk like real people, sitting in the shade.
Mr. Carter
, she’d tell him,
you’re a godsend. Mr. Carter, I don’t know how I ever got one thing done without you. You’re the piece of the puzzle that was missing
.

He loved her. It was true. That was the mystery, the sad and sorrowful mystery of it all. As he lay now in the dark and cold, he felt the tears coming, rising all the way from his gut. How could anybody ever say he’d done anything to Mrs. Wood when he’d loved her like he did? Because he knew. Knew that even though she smiled and laughed and went about her business, shopping and playing her tennis and taking trips to the salon, inside of her was an empty place, he’d seen it that first day in the car, and his heart went out to this, like he could fill it for her just by wanting to. The days when she didn’t come out to the yard, more and more as time went by, he’d catch sight of her, sometimes, sitting on the sofa for hours, letting the baby just cry and cry because she was wet or hungry, but not moving a muscle: it was like all the air had gone out of her. Some days he didn’t see her at all, and he guessed she was deep in the house somewhere, being sad. He’d do extra things on those days, trimming the hedges just so, or picking weeds out of the walk, hoping if he waited long enough she’d come out with the tea. The tea meant she was all right, that she’d gotten through another day of feeling awful like she did.

And then that afternoon in the yard—that terrible afternoon—he found the older girl, Haley, alone. It was December, the air raw with dampness, the pool full of winter leaves; the little girl, who was in kindergarten, was wearing her blue school shorts and a collared blouse but nothing else, not even shoes, and sitting on the patio. She was holding a doll, a Barbie. Didn’t she have school today? Carter asked, and she shook her head, not looking at him. Was her mama around? Daddy’s in Mexico, the girl stated, and shivered in the cold. With his girlfriend. Her mama wouldn’t get out of bed.

He tried the door but it was locked, and rang the bell and then he called up to the windows, but no one answered. He didn’t know what to make of the little girl, outside alone like that, but there was lots he didn’t know about people like the Woods, not everything they did made sense to him. All he had was his dirty old sweater to give the girl, but she took it, wrapping it around herself like a blanket. He got to work on the lawn, thinking maybe the noise of the mower would wake up Mrs. Wood and she’d remember her little girl was outside alone by the pool, that she’d accidentally locked the door somehow.
Mr. Carter, I don’t know how it happened, I fell asleep somehow, thank God you were here
.

He finished the lawn, the girl watching him silently with her doll, and got the skimmer from the garage to clean the pool. That was when he found it, along the edge of the path: a baby toad. Weren’t no bigger than a penny. He was lucky he’d missed it with the mower. He bent to pick it up; it weighed nothing in his hand. If he hadn’t been looking at it with his own eyes he’d have said his hand was empty, that’s how light it was. Maybe it was the girl watching him from the patio, or else Mrs. Wood sleeping behind him in the house; but it seemed, right then, like the toad could set things right somehow, this tiny thing in the grass.

—C’mere, he said to the girl. C’mere, I’ve got something to show you. Just a little baby of a thing, Miss Haley. A little baby thing like you.

He turned then to find Mrs. Wood, standing in the yard behind him, not ten feet away; she must have come out the front, because he hadn’t heard a sound. She was wearing a big T-shirt, like a nightgown, her hair all whichaway around her face.

—Mrs. Wood, he said, why there you are, glad to see you’re up now. I was just about to show Haley here—

Get away from her!

But it wasn’t Mrs. Wood, not the one he knew. Her eyes were gone all wild and crazy. She looked like she didn’t know who he was.

—Mrs. Wood, I just meant to show her something nice—

Get away! Get away! Run, Haley, run!

And before he could say another word she’d shoved him, hard, with all her strength; he tumbled backward, his foot tangled on the skimmer where he’d left it on the pool deck. He reached out, a reflex, his fingertips catching and holding the front of her shirt; he felt his weight taking her with him, nothing he could do to stop it, and that was when they fell into the water.

The water. It hit him like a fist, his nose and eyes and mouth filling with it, with its awful chemical taste, like demon’s breath. She was under and over and all around him as they sank, their arms and legs twisted around each other’s like a net; he tried to free himself but she held fast, dragging him down and down. He couldn’t swim, not a stroke, he could sort of bob along if he had to but even that scared him, and he had no strength to stop her. He craned his head to find the shining surface of the water where it met the air, but it could have been a mile away. She was pulling him down, into a world of silence, as if the pool were an inverted piece of sky, and that was when he figured it: that was where she wanted to go. That’s where she’d been headed, all along, since that day under the freeway when she had stopped her car and said his name. Whatever had kept her in that other world, the one above the water, had finally snapped, like the string of a kite, but the world was upside down, and now the kite was falling. She pulled him into a hug, her chin against his shoulder, and for an instant he glimpsed her eyes through the swirling water and saw they were full of a terrible, final darkness. Oh please, he thought, let me. I’ll die if you want me to, I would die for you if you asked, let me be the one to die instead. All he had to do was breathe. He knew that as clear as he knew his own name, but try as he might he couldn’t make himself do this; he had lived his life too long to give it up by will alone. They hit the bottom with a soft thump, Mrs. Wood still holding him, and he felt her shoulders twitch when she took the first breath. She took another, and then a third, the bubbles of the last air in her lungs rising beside his ear like a whispered secret—
God bless you, Mr. Carter
—and then she let him go.

He didn’t remember getting out of the pool, or what he’d said to the little girl. She was crying loudly and then stopped. Mrs. Wood was dead, her soul was nowhere around anymore, but her empty body slowly made its way to the surface, taking its place among the floating leaves he’d meant to clean. There was a kind of peacefulness to everything, a terrible brokenhearted peacefulness, like something that had gone on too long had finally found a way to finish. Like he’d begun to disappear again. It might have been hours or minutes before the neighbor lady came, and then the police, but by that time he knew he wouldn’t tell a soul what had happened, the things he’d seen and heard. It was a secret she had given him, the final secret of who she was, and he was meant to keep it.

Carter decided it was all right, what was going to happen to him now. It felt inevitable. Maybe Wolgast had lied, or maybe he hadn’t, but the work of Carter’s life was over; he knew that now. Nobody was going to ask him again about Mrs. Wood. She was just a thing in his mind, like some part of her had passed straight into him, and he wouldn’t have to tell nobody about it.

The air around him broke with a hissing sound, like air leaking from a tire, and a single green light appeared on the far wall where a red one used to be; a door swung open, bathing the room in a pale blue light. Carter saw he was lying on a gurney, wearing a gown. The tube was still threaded into his hand, and looking at the place where it pulled at his skin under the tape made it hurt fiercely again. The room was larger than he’d guessed, nothing but pure white surfaces except for the place where the door had opened and a few machines on the far wall that looked like nothing he knew.

A figure was standing in the doorway.

He closed his eyes and leaned back, thinking, All right now. All right. I’m ready. Let them come.

“We have a situation.”

It was just past ten
P.M
. Sykes had appeared at the door of Richards’s office.

“I know,” Richards said. “I’m on it.”

The situation was the girl, the Jane Doe. She wasn’t a Jane Doe anymore. Richards had gotten the news off the law enforcement general feed a little after nine. The girl’s mother was a suspect in a shooting, something at a fraternity house; the boy she’d shot was the son of a federal circuit judge. The gun, which she’d left at the scene, had led local police to a motel near Graceland, where the manager—a list of priors that filled two pages—had ID’d the girl from the photograph the cops had taken of her on Friday, at the convent where the mother had dumped her. The nuns had spilled their story, and something else that Richards didn’t know what to make of—some kind of disturbance at the Memphis Zoo—before one of them had picked out Doyle and Wolgast from a surveillance video taken the night before at the I-55 checkpoint north of Baton Rouge. Local TV had gotten the story in time for the evening news, when the Amber Alert had gone out.

Just like that, the whole world was looking for two federal agents and a little girl named Amy Bellafonte.

“Where are they now?” Sykes asked.

On his terminal, Richards called up the satellite feed and pointed his viewer at the states between Tennessee and Colorado. The transmitter was in Wolgast’s handheld. Richards counted eighteen hot points in the region, then found the one that matched the number of Wolgast’s tracking tag.

“Western Oklahoma.”

Sykes was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Do you think he knows yet?”

Richards recalibrated the viewer, zooming in.

“I’d say so,” he said, and showed Sykes the data stream.

Target velocity, 120 kph
.

Then, a moment later:

Target velocity, 133 kph
.

They were on the run now. Richards would have to go get them. Locals were involved, maybe state cops. It was going to be ugly, assuming he could even reach them in time. The chopper was already inbound from Fort Carson; Sykes had made the call.

They took the rear stairs to L1 and stepped outside to wait. The temperature had risen since sunset. A thick fog was ascending in loose coils under the lights of the parking circle, like dry ice at a rock concert. They stood together without talking; there was nothing to say. The situation was more or less a complete and total screwup. Richards thought of the photograph, the one that was all over the wires. Amy Bellafonte:
beautiful fountain
. Black hair falling straight to her shoulders—it looked damp, like she’d been walking in the rain—and a smooth, young face, still with some baby fat fluffing her cheeks; but beneath her brow, dark eyes with a knowing depth. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt zipped to her throat. In one hand she was clutching some kind of toy, a stuffed animal. It might have been a dog. But the eyes: the eyes were what Richards kept coming back to. She was looking straight at the camera as if to say,
See? What did you
think
I was, Richards? You think nobody in the world loves me?

For a second, just one, he thought it. It brushed him like a wing: the wish that he were a different kind of person, that the look in a child’s eyes meant something to him.