Dr. Carlisle smiles as if Tara has given consent and stands. “Then let’s get to it.”
The doctor lied about the MRI scanner. It doesn’t make Tara feel merely a little claustrophobic. It’s petrifying.
The machine looks big enough from a distance, but when they slide Tara into it and the rest of the room vanishes from view, the rounded walls close in on her, and it’s like being in a coffin. When the hatch behind her is sealed, she’s instantly convinced that there’s not enough air in this thing, and the panic that overtakes her is the worst since her return to awareness. Maybe worse. What if she can’t breathe in here, what if she begins to hyperventilate? She can’t bang on the walls or scream or thrash; she can’t do anything to let them know that she needs out.
She’s Twitchy Tara again, worthy of her big sister’s snarky nickname, anxiety swelling to panic when she knows it’s irrational.
She’s certain each inhalation is using up her oxygen supply in this coffin-like enclosure, and now she’s worse than paralyzed — she’s paralyzed and entombed.
Be brave, damn it!
She tries to think of 1804 London Street again, of the long journey down dark halls. She can’t conjure up the image, though. And that was so long ago; that happened to a child! She doesn’t need a child’s courage, she needs a woman’s warrior heart.
The Allagash.
The name rises unbidden in her mind, and suddenly she sees the Allagash River, the big, beautiful, dangerous river that bisects northern Maine’s roadless, townless wilderness. The river flows south to north, an unusual path in North America. In her freshman year at Hammel, when she was afraid she couldn’t hack it at school, couldn’t make friends, couldn’t survive so far away from home, Tara went alone to kayak on the Allagash. Imprudent; reckless, even. But necessary. She would make her decision there — whether to stay through the semester or go back to Cleveland and enroll somewhere local, somewhere familiar. Or maybe head west, find a school near Stanford, near Shannon.
But first, she wanted to see this river.
She was afraid that day. She saw no one. She was alone in the wilderness. But gradually, the fear faded enough that she found the beauty of the place. She paddled south against the current and then rode it back to the north, and she took the kayak out of the river as the day faded and the last of the sunlight was filtered through the pines and cast a gorgeous green-gold sparkle over the water. She knew in that moment, bone-weary but renewed, that she could take whatever challenges Hammel sent her way.
She thinks of the river now, remembering the fragrance of pine needles and the feel of the cool water and the soft cry of a loon. Remembering the green and gold light on the bejeweled surface of the river, the river that flowed north instead of south. This river that she had conquered alone.
She blinks. Not a full blink, but a Tara blink, a flick of the eyes.
The tube fills with blue light. The MRI chamber darkens, and this actually helps, because she’s less aware of the squeeze of the tight space now, and she can see the movie playing on the screen.
The scene shifts to a woman running across sand dunes and alongside a battered wooden fence. A young man behind her, breathless, calling out, “What’s your name again?”
Chrissie, Tara thinks before the answer comes.
She knows it all. The most re-watchable movie of all time — all due respect to Shawshank, but the prize has to go to Jaws — and the only thing Tara has to do now is watch it once more while lighting up the correct areas of her brain.
No pressure.
Chrissie and the boy keep up their stumbling run along the darkened ocean, peeling their clothes off awkwardly, and he yells at her to slow down, then tumbles drunkenly onto the dune as Chrissie dives into the lapping sea and swims out into the dark water.
Tara tracks the action, but her mind is on the first time she saw the movie, at their house in Shaker Heights back when Dad was still alive. They’d sent her to bed, saying she was too young, but Shannon had crept in and told her she could see the screen from the back of the hallway.
Just don’t make any noise, Shannon had commanded. If you make any noise, they’ll know you’re here.
They hadn’t known. Tara had passed that test. Now it’s the same test, and she needs to fail it. Make some noise, T., she tells herself. Let them know you’re here.
Chrissie is swimming toward the buoy, alone in the sea. Smiling, tossing her blond hair. Then the camera angle changes and shows her from below. Legs dangling.
And the music starts.
The first soft notes, growing louder as the camera closes in, Chrissie floating in graceful, blissful ignorance and then—
Tara’s heart thumps with Chrissie’s first scream.
She’s seen the damn movie a hundred times, and still she cringes, no different than that night back in the dark hallway when she was seven years old.
Chrissie thrashes, screams, cries for help. Her drunk boyfriend is passed out on the shore, waves teasing the soles of his bare feet. Out in the blue-black sea, Chrissie grabs the buoy and clings to it, a moment’s safety, a last desperate chance.
Then the unseen attacker has her again, tugging her toward deep, dark water, while the only one who can save her is sprawled on his back in the sand, oblivious.
“Please help!” Chrissie screams. Her last words before she vanishes from the screen, pulled into the depths.
Good-bye, Chrissie, Tara thinks. I heard you.
But did her auditory cortex activate? Did Tara put out a glimmer of light for poor Chrissie?
She will know soon.
29
Abby woke before dawn, stiff and aching but rested. Reality crept back, terrible memories of the previous day, and when she sat up, her hand brushed the stock of the SIG Sauer. The touch of the gun removed the last vestiges of hope that this might have been a vivid nightmare.
A nightmare, yes. But not the kind you woke up from.
She rose and stretched, the sound of her popping joints loud in the empty house. Her throat throbbed and there was pressure behind her eyes and under her jaw that promised the arrival of a cold. Hardly a surprise; she’d spent one night bedded down in wet leaves and the next on the wood floor of an empty house. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with water, then cupped her hands and drank. The water had a mineral taste to it, but that was fine, and the cold of it soothed her throat. She walked back out and stood on the second-floor landing. Moonlight filtered down from above, and she followed it up the stairs and into the third-floor master suite. She sat on the floor there and stared at the shadowed trees as the moonlight gave way to gray and then to rose hues and then the world was back, though it didn’t feel like the world she knew. Abby was alone in a strange house in a strange town, sitting in a bedroom that contained absolutely nothing but a scoped rifle she’d stolen from a murdered friend.
How many hours had it been since she’d grudgingly boarded the train to Boston to meet with Shannon Beckley?
A different lifetime. But she’d been in this situation before, in a way. More than a few times.
The first time she’d flipped a car, it had been in New Hampshire. She’d known her tires were thin, but there were seven laps left and she was sitting in third and although her engine was overmatched by the two cars in front, she was sure she could beat them. She’d gotten outside on turn two and the car in front moved to block her while the leader shifted inside to attack the straightaway, and Abby saw a gap opening like a mistake in a chess game. It was going to be tight, and it was going to test what was left of her tires, but she could do it.