Sighing, she texted to Jolynn up in Centennial, something trivial about the sheet sale at Park Meadows Mall. The more vapid the better. Be a bitch if it clouds it out, pretend you’re not a social scientist. Not a mother. Not an NSA widow. Lacie is fine. Tom is fine. Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t…
She frowned as her cell phone auto-corrected ‘Frette’ linens to ‘Friday.’ It was only her glance up at the corrector bubble on the iPhone’s crystal face that caused her to see that she was drifting her Hummer straight into the Escalade in front of her. In two seconds or less, she would cause a low-speed collision.
She slammed on the brakes. The H4 screeched to a halt once more. The pickup driver behind her shouted a singled redneck-inflected word — “Lady!” and she started to giggle before she could stop herself. The balding man behind her was furious. He chewed on a cigar, patted the outside of his door with a rain-slicked hand. What kind of a fool would keep his windows down during an April rainstorm?
Sorry, tough guy. What can I say?
Blushing at her own careless behavior, Sophie gave a little wave to her rearview mirror. Behind her, the pickup driver straightened his cap, flicked his cigar butt against the US Highway 119 sign, and gave her a little wave of his own. More of a fist pump, actually. She laughed again and the man behind her smiled despite himself.
Looking forward, she could see that a traffic jam had jumbled itself where Richman Street turned into the Ameristar casino. Nothing unusual, but she could hear people shouting. And someone crying. And hundreds more were — what? Was that chanting? She turned the radio down. The clamor of outraged protesters came to her through the window-glass.
What in the Hell was going on?
Can’t take this anymore. Lacie is fine. She’s with grandma. You just need to get this under control and she can come home. Sophie turned her wedding ring with her thumb, tried to stop her hands from shaking. She’s fine.
Looking back past the pickup and at the line of gamblers’ cars slowing down behind her, Sophie clicked her turn signal on. But the cars in the lane to the left of her were already too close together to let her in. The driver alongside, Mrs. Claverdale no less, waved her an apology. Sophie mouthed, “No problem” and gave a shrug. The silvery-haired old woman snarled dramatically at the unseen protesters blocking the intersection up ahead, and Sophie laughed once more. Her voice had a nervous edge to it, an hysterical edge, like crystal. She didn’t like it.
Taking a last long drink of her sugary coffee, she resigned herself to a tedious wait in the right-hand lane. Always. Always, I’m too far from home, she thought. Too selfish. Too alone.
The voice on the radio changed. She had successfully tuned out Chris-tine Col-lins and the BBC, but now it was Jake Handler again on the microphone, a man she respected and knew personally. A good friend of Tom’s. She turned the volume back up and was comforted by Jake’s trademark polite annoyance at giving his air time to someone else. But he also sounded — what? Sophie’s mouth tensed into a straight line of enforced calm. Jake Handler, a man who hunted wolves in his spare time with a bow and arrow and stayed out in the wilderness alone for weeks at a time, making sure he only killed starving animals who had no pups, was afraid. No, he was controlling it, but he was terrified.
His voice echoed in little spirals around the Hummer’s interior as Sophie’s right hand shook a little harder, turning the radio up too high. “Once again, thank you Christine,” Jake was saying sarcastically back at the BBC tape, “but meanwhile here in the States, we have actual and new news about the real emergency developing since this afternoon in downtown NYC. Tensions in Manhattan and Jersey and far beyond today are continuing to soar out of control. At the, ah, in the intersection of Tudor City Place and, ah… East Forty-First, now this I repeat is in New York City right by the United Nations Headquarters… protesters broke down police barricades and, and they attempted to block Russian and Chinese delegates from entering the United Nations. A fistfight broke out, and someone fired shots. A staffer to Ambassador Dmitri Altukhov, let’s see, her name is — was — Vasilisa Mirskii. He’s elderly, she was shielding him. She was, she was killed, okay? By the protesters, by the police? No one seems to know.”
“So far in the police and Federal crackdown, continuing into this evening, we have reports of… what is this, nine American citizens confirmed dead, including two innocent bystanders and one policeman, names being withheld. What? Okay, okay. And we have, what? Christ. Ah, forgive. Forgive me, everyone. Please. We have reports of one hundred and eighty-seven injured. Solidarity protests are springing up in cities and towns across the nation at this hour, including in our very own beloved Black Hawk and Central City, they’re calling it Occupy Intersections. Can you believe that?”
“So. So, okay. I don’t know. I don’t know. Please, please keep the lines open because we’re just three of us here and we’re waiting for more. What? No. I’m not saying that. Look, I’m on, okay? People, please wait for this to pan out with Associated. Don’t listen to the Internet. Stay in your homes. That’s all I can, folks, this, I can’t—”
Sophie killed the radio. A blinding light flashed across the sky.
She jumped up in her seat, almost cutting her shoulder where the seatbelt had twisted against her silk blouse’s neckline, as lightning flashed and the rain began to worsen. The chants were getting louder. A strange sound clattered up and faded away inside the Hummer’s interior, and she found herself looking over at the back seat and then down at the brake pedal, looking for the source of the curious sounds.
She swallowed, and the noises stopped. Her teeth had been chattering.
The Escalade pulled further up ahead, and Sophie could see.
Her mind struggled to process the revealed spectacle tangling itself along the street and sidewalks outside the Ameristar. Somehow a tanker and a delivery truck had gotten stuck in the intersection. There were at least five police cars all around them, lights flashing in wild reflecting arcs of red and blue. Officers shouted and waved, one policewoman pointed with her baton, a barely-restrained German Shepherd was barking at the crowd with foam pouring out of its jaws, and the two trucks which were stuck in the intersection slowly began to struggle their way through a mass of people, smoking their way up westbound 119. Thrown rocks and bricks bounced off the side of the tanker. A beer bottle shattered against the trailer’s flank. In the void left by the two trucks’ passing, Sophie could see just what was causing traffic to snag in every lane in all four directions.
There must have been at least four hundred people milling angrily in the street, shouting. Chanting. Whoever Sophie thought of as protesters — dirty granola college kids, perhaps? — these people were not them. Some were gamblers and tourists, others were friends who Sophie knew well from her favorite restaurants and shops. There were people in wheelchairs, others standing all around them, black people and white with their arms looped through one another in human chains. Human walls, parted temporarily into two waves by no more than a dozen police and two frenziedly barking dogs. There were grandmothers, waving papers over their heads and ignoring the pelting rain. All shouting, screaming. There were children out there, and some of them were shouting too, some were even smiling up at their parents with the infectious energy, the power of it all. Some of the mothers were holding babies.