Laverne got into her car and breathed a sigh of relief. She started the engine and was glad to be finally heading toward her own house at the end of a very long day.
Neither she nor anyone else took note of the fact that the headlights that Pat had seen go out belonged to Ronnie’s Firebird. Not even Mr. Wheeler, who kept tabs on everything that happened in the neighborhood, would be able to say later that he saw the Firebird parked maybe fifty yards up Locust in the shadows between two streetlights.
No one was there to bear witness to the fact that shortly after Pat and Missy left with the girls and Brandi closed her curtains and Laverne made her way to her own home, the Firebird’s headlights came back on and the car eased away from the curb. It crept along, as if the driver already knew exactly where he was going, and, therefore, found no need to hurry.
27
Pat was a few miles up the blacktop, still nearly five miles from home, when he saw a set of headlights on high beams coming closer behind him. Soon they filled the van with their glare.
“Jeez, someone’s trying to blind me,” he said, and then he slowed down so the car would have to pass.
But it didn’t. It stayed right on his bumper, the lights so bright Missy had to shade her eyes with her hand.
“Some idiot,” she said. “A real bozo. Doesn’t he know how dangerous this is?”
Pat couldn’t pull off onto the shoulder because the little strip of pavement and grass before the road slanted off into a deep ditch was covered with a bank of snow from where the plow on the salt truck had pushed it. He put his window down and stuck his arm out to wave the car around him.
The cold air rushed into the van, and Missy shivered. Still the car stayed where it was.
Finally, Hannah’s quiet voice came from the back. “It’s Dad,” she said, merely stating that fact.
Pat put up the window and tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “Hang on,” he said. He tapped his brakes, and Ronnie’s Firebird braked hard and fell back a tad. Pat looked into the rearview mirror. “Maybe that’ll do the trick.”
But soon the headlights were close again and this time Missy could hear the roar of the Firebird’s engine.
“Here he comes,” Pat said, and he eased off the accelerator, letting the van coast along at forty miles per hour, hoping Ronnie would press on and soon he’d be around them and his taillights would be growing dimmer in the distance.
The Firebird, though, swung out into the left lane, and after all that brightness the van seemed so dark to Missy. She could look across Pat and see the Firebird pull even with the van.
Then Ronnie started to edge the Firebird across the center line. Pat steered as far to his right as he could, but the Firebird edged closer until its front fender scraped up against the van, and Missy felt it rock a little.
“Dear God,” she said.
And it was as if Ronnie had somehow heard her prayer. He slowed the Firebird. He steered it back to the left of center.
Pat saw his chance, and he pressed down on the van’s accelerator. He shot ahead, his headlight beams stretching out down the blacktop.
The Firebird fell back, and soon its headlights disappeared. It was dark again inside the van, and though Missy was trembling, she steeled herself and she told the girls everything was all right. That they were almost home, and everything was fine.
Ronnie watched the van pull away from him. He slowed to forty and then thirty-five, and finally he was creeping along at twenty miles per hour, watching the taillights of Pat’s van crest a hill. Ronnie kept his eyes on those taillights until the van went down the slope of the hill, and then he couldn’t see them anymore. His girls were in that van, and he understood now the danger he’d put them in when he’d bumped it.
He hadn’t meant to do it. At least he didn’t think he had. He’d only wanted the van to stop. He’d wanted to gather his girls into the Firebird and take them someplace where no one would ever be able to find them, and little by little all the bad things swirling around them would stop, and they’d be a family, happy forever. He feared he’d ruined any chance at that, but still he had to try.
At the next crossroads, he slowed and turned the Firebird around. He started back up the blacktop toward Goldengate. It was time to start facing facts, time to tell his own story, time to say exactly what was what.
28
Ronnie didn’t bother to knock. He just opened the door and walked in. Brandi was sitting on the couch, facing the front door, every light in the house turned on as if she were waiting for him.
She didn’t even move when she saw him. “Where have you been?”
Her voice was all flattened out, not soft and sweet the way it was the night she came into the bedroom and told him Pat Wade was there and he’d better come out to hear what he had to say. Ronnie remembered the way her fingers trembled when she buttoned his shirt for him and how later, once Pat had told him about the fire — once Ronnie understood that Della and Emily and Gracie and the baby were gone and he knew he needed to get to the ones who were left — Brandi said she’d be there waiting for him. She’d made it plain she wasn’t going anywhere. Her heart was tied up with his. Then, now, forever.
“I’ve been driving,” he said
He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he’d gone to the river, walked out on the ice, got down on his knees, and looked up at the stars and the crescent moon. He couldn’t tell her about opening the blade of his knife and thinking long and hard about what he might do with it before giving up on that idea. Most of all, he couldn’t tell her what he’d just done out there on the blacktop. He couldn’t say that he’d been so angry about Missy and Pat taking his girls, he’d been a crazy man. He’d tried to chase them down. He’d bumped their van, and if they’d been driving any faster, or if Pat hadn’t been on the lookout — well, Ronnie didn’t like to think about what might have happened. He couldn’t get the picture out of his head, the one he’d manufactured, of that van leaving the blacktop and going airborne, turning over and over, his daughters — the people who mattered most to him in this world — at the mercy of another one of his hotheaded decisions.
His life was out of control, but all he could offer Brandi was this: “That night,” he said. “The night the trailer burned.” He got down on his knees in front of her, and he gathered her up, his arms easing in between her back and the couch. He lay his head on her swollen stomach. He listened for the baby moving about. Then he said the rest. “I didn’t go out for a drive because I was antsy. I knew I was going out there to the trailer.”
He closed his eyes and held onto her. He needed to know what she’d say next, but he was afraid to hear it.
“Ronnie,” she finally said in a shaky voice. “Did you—”
He wouldn’t let her say the words. He’d save her from that. “Please,” he said before she had to finish her question. “Baby, please don’t think that of me.”
She let the minutes stretch on, willing to do that, wishing that she and Ronnie could stay where they were for a good long while. Just the two of them in the brightly lit house, his head on her stomach, her hand stroking his hair again. She’d feared when Laverne had gone and Missy and Pat had driven away with the girls that she’d turned a corner into a dark room and she’d never be able to see her way out of it. Then Ronnie came back. Here he was, holding onto her, and she’d asked the question she’d had to ask. Had he set that trailer on fire? He’d asked her to please not think that of him, and she was trying. She was doing her best to believe he was innocent. She let that belief build from the way his hands fit into the small of her back and cradled her, the way he lay against her now, his eyes closed as if there on his knees he was giving himself to her. Broken down as he was, he was still hers. She’d loved him long and hard and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him and then being alone when their baby came.