Dr. Pine adjusts his glasses and then closes his notebook. The gestures seem designed to delay the inevitable — he’s going to say there’s no point.
“I’m a fan of Dr. Carlisle’s work,” he says at last.
“It’s another opinion,” Mom says, “and that’s good, but we haven’t heard yours yet.”
Her voice trembles, but Tara is almost painfully proud of her for speaking up.
“Every case is different,” Dr. Pine says again, a hedge that no one, even Tara, wants to hear.
“Scale of one to ten,” Rick says.
“Pardon?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how... how close to dead is she?”
“Rick, you asshole,” Shannon says, whirling on him. “What kind of question is that?”
“A fair one,” he replies, standing firm. “Dr. Pine has treated hundreds of patients in similar conditions. He has an opinion, and I’d like to hear it. We all need to hear it.”
No, we do not, Tara thinks.
Dr. Pine looks at each of them individually. Tara is last. His eyes are on hers when he says, “On a scale of one to ten, if one is the most alive, then physically she’s probably a two or three. She needs assistance, of course, but her body is healthy and it will continue to survive, though obviously not to thrive, for the foreseeable future.”
“And what about the soul?” Rick says, and Shannon rolls her eyes on cue.
“I think he means her mind, Doctor. Is she with us?”
More than any of you want to know, Tara thinks, because they’ve all had moments in front of her that she is sure they wouldn’t have wanted her to witness. Moments when their love was buried beneath fatigue and frustration. She doesn’t blame them for this, but it doesn’t make those moments any less hurtful.
“I’d encourage more tests.”
“But right now? What would you say based on the tests you’ve already done?” Rick presses.
“Eight,” Dr. Pine answers without hesitation. “Based on what we’ve already done.”
Eight. On a scale of one to ten, he is rating Tara’s brain as far closer to dead than alive.
“Then we’ll do more,” Shannon says, but there’s a hitch in her voice.
Everyone’s faith is beginning to waver.
Not fair, Tara thinks. I was just giving a ride to a stranger. Why isn’t he trapped like this instead of me?
But Oltamu is worse off than her, of course. Oltamu is dead; she’s heard them say this.
Maybe the wolf got him.
If she could shake her head, she’d do it just to get rid of that strange recurring image of the wolf with raised hackles and narrowed eyes and pinned-back ears and exposed fangs. That wasn’t real, and Tara can’t afford to have any distractions in a brain that’s already failing to do its job. She’s got tests to take, and if she can’t pass them, she’s going to end up just like Oltamu.
Don’t think that way. Once you start that, you’re done.
A voice whispers that she is already done, that it is time to give up, give in, quit. She fights it off.
Oltamu is dead; Tara Beckley is not. Tara Beckley is alive and not only that, her thumb has twitched.
She thinks again of the cellar in 1804 London Street, where she once stood in the blackness, gasping, cobwebs on her face, tears in her eyes. She remembers that in that moment of panic, she turned her head to face that darkness directly, and she found the faintest glimmer of light. It was a long way off, and she wasn’t sure that she could make it there or if freedom existed beyond it, but she had seen it, and she had tried.
There’s a glimmer of light inside this vacant house too. Among all the dark hallways and unknown corridors and treacherous stairs, there are cracks and gaps. The doors might be locked, the windows sealed and shuttered, but there are always gaps.
Find one and force it open. Then someone will notice. Someone will hear.
Tara retreats into the blackness, imagining the corridor between her brain and her thumb, and she gets to work.
Part Three
On the Back Roads
19
Hank Bauer lived in what had once been a hunting camp. He’d purchased the cabin intending to keep the property’s purpose intact, but then his wife learned of his affair with a waitress at Applebee’s, and the hunting camp rapidly became his home. He often told this story as a cautionary tale of the risks of marriage — but never of the risks of having an affair with a waitress, Applebee’s or otherwise.
Those hunting-camp days seemed long ago and far away. He felt some shame over the way his marriage had ended but no real regret for how his life had gone. He was good on his own, always had been, and the marriage and the mortgages had been the real mistakes, the steps out of character. That had been trying on a suit he knew he’d never care for even though it sure looked nice and comfortable on other men. Margaret had called him an arrested adolescent during the divorce, and he didn’t disagree. His life had been mostly games and gambling, drinking and storytelling, hard rock and hangovers. It wasn’t an adulthood anybody should really take pride in, but he’d learned to lose his shame over it all the same. At sixty-one, he was too old to be embarrassed. He’d had fun.
And he’d done well too. Not well enough for the mortgage in Cape Elizabeth that had scared him right into the welcoming arms of Applebee’s, but well enough that it had been a long time since he’d worried about money. He’d found himself in the insurance business by accident — didn’t everyone get there that way? — but the money was steady, you got to meet plenty of people, and sometimes you actually had the sense that you’d helped to ease a person’s mind.
On the day that he returned to his home on twenty-seven acres of woodland and trout-brook frontage and found the kid in the black baseball cap waiting on him, Hank was largely content with his life. The only thing nagging at him that afternoon was Abby Kaplan.
He’d met Abby when she was just thirteen. Her mother had bolted after determining that raising a child was less enjoyable than being one, and so it had been just Abby and her father, who was a good man with a bad booze habit. He was also the most talented natural mechanic Hank had ever seen, probably capable of building a functioning engine out of duct tape and toothpicks if you spotted him the gasoline. Hank’s first encounter with Jake Kaplan’s daughter didn’t have the makings of a lifelong friendship: she had stolen his car.
Hank had a ridiculous, souped-up ’85 Trans Am back then, and he’d trusted Jake Kaplan to retool it. Then one day the police called to tell him they’d recovered his stolen car and had the thirteen-year-old thief in custody. The cops said she’d been doing ninety-four when they clocked her, and Hank’s first question was “How was she handling it?”
He’d told the cops not to press charges, which hadn’t pleased them, as they believed he was aiding and abetting the development of a local delinquent. And maybe he had been. But Abby was honest and apologetic when they spoke, ready for consequences, and Hank was struck by both the sadness of her demeanor — a good kid expecting bad things, as if that were preordained for her — and her infatuation with his old muscle car.
Jake Kaplan, a good ol’ boy’s good ol’ boy with a worldview shaped by drunks and dropouts, didn’t often mention Abby’s missing mother, but that day he did.
“Abby wants to race,” Jake told Hank mournfully.
“So let her race. Don’t need to have a driver’s license on the oval. Ed Traylor’s boy was racing when he was no older than Abby.”