No no no no. Hadn’t Joe just pointed out to her that morning that her wheelchair needed a shot of oil? She hadn’t even noticed the wheel squeaking. After a while, you just tuned these things out.
Now, it was the loudest sound in the world.
But it was a very faint squeak. Her scream had been much, much louder. If the car was listening, would it really hear a barely audible chirp from the mechanism of her wheelchair?
She pushed back again.
Squeak.
And again.
Squeak.
Slowly, she retreated backward up the level driveway, each partial rotation of the wheel sending lightning bolts of pain up her arms and to her shoulders. She kept her eye on the Arrival the entire time.
As the car slowly reversed, the body trapped underneath twisted like a pretzel. The head appeared stuck in place as the legs moved from the rear of the car to the front. Soon, two bare legs appeared below the front bumper. The toenails were painted a dazzling green.
“Oh my, no,” Lillian said.
One foot was shoeless. On the other there remained a mangled, pink strappy sandal.
Lillian took a breath. She recognized the green toenails, that pink sandal.
Daniella.
Lillian kept any further screams tightly bottled up inside her throat. If the car really had heard her, she didn’t want it hearing her now.
She pulled back on the wheels, her arms throbbing with pain.
Squeak.
The car stopped at the base of the driveway. It sat there, sideways. Listening.
Lillian, using every ounce of strength she could muster, had backed up more than twenty feet. She was at the house.
She took several seconds to catch her breath. Her throat was dry and parched. She desperately needed a glass of water. Just as soon as she got in the house. She’d wheel herself up to the kitchen tap, and even if she couldn’t reach the cupboards for a glass, she’d grab a pot from one of the lower cabinets and drink out of that if she had to.
She suddenly had an uncontrollable tickle in her throat. She tried to gather together some spit, to swallow, to do anything she could to not—
Cough.
The second she coughed, the car’s front wheels turned toward the drive. The Arrival, with Daniella’s body trapped beneath, sensed her, a hyena with its nose to the wind.
Lillian realized she had only seconds to get into the house. Then it hit her what had to be done to accomplish that.
She had to roll herself up the ramp.
The fucking ramp.
Twenty-One
“Goddamn it!” Sandra said. “Pick up!”
Why weren’t the kids answering their phones?
Using Lisa Carver’s cell, Sandra had tried to raise Archie, then Katie, and struck out both times. She was this close to slipping into panic mode. Crazy cars were knocking people off left, right, and center and she couldn’t get hold of the kids.
But panic was not an option. She needed to keep a clear head. If she could manage to do that nine months earlier, when the police knocked on her door to tell her there’d been an accident, she could do it.
Even in the midst of all this current chaos — the burning fire truck, the Arrivals acting like a pack of wolves, Lisa Carver dead and missing a leg — her mind went back to that night.
It was nearly midnight when Sandra heard, first, the doorbell, then someone rapping hard. Her first thought was that it had to be Adam. He’d gone out on a late-night run to help some woman get her car started, and somehow, she figured, he’d lost his keys and couldn’t get into the house. But as she descended the stairs, blue and red beams of light strobed through the window and bounced off the walls. Before opening the door, she glanced outside and saw a Garrett Island police car idling at the curb, wisps of exhaust from the tailpipe caught in the soft glare of a streetlight.
She opened the door. Standing there was Joe Bridgeman. She recognized him immediately. They’d spoken many times. Run into each other at the local fish and chip joint, ended up in the same lineup at the ATM. Garrett Island was a small enough place that it was hardly a coincidence when you bumped into people you knew.
His jaw was set firmly, and he took his hat off before he said, “Sandra.”
She knew it had to be bad. She knew it had to be about Adam.
Sandra could barely make out the sentences coming out of Joe’s mouth. What she heard were key words. She heard “Adam.” She heard “Pelican Point.” She heard “accident.” She heard “asleep at the wheel.” She heard “so sorry.” She heard “pronounced dead at the scene.”
The disjointed words were enough to put it all together.
Once she was over the initial shock — and really, had that happened yet? — the first thing she thought about, even before she considered what this loss meant to her, was how it would devastate Katie and Archie.
For a millisecond, she had this wild, irrational idea that maybe she could keep the news from them. Stall. Tell them their father had gone on a trip to Bolivia to look for hard-to-find motorcycle parts. Postpone their grief.
Which, of course, was ridiculous. Because within seconds of Chief Joe showing up at her door, the kids were coming down the stairs, Archie in a pair of Batman pajamas he’d had since he was eight, had refused to retire, and, somehow, still managed to fit into, and Katie in one of her father’s old Harley-Davidson T-shirts that came down to her knees.
That was when Sandra nearly lost it, seeing her daughter in that shirt. But somehow, she held it together. If she fell apart, she and her kids would be like three castaways from a sunken ship, all floating off in different directions. She had to be the life raft. She had to be the one who kept them afloat.
“Is that the police?” Archie asked, excited, as though their presence could be anything but thrilling. But Katie’s face was shattered. She could read her mother’s expression. She knew something bad had happened.
While Joe hung back by the front door, Sandra sat them down in the living room and told them. Archie said there had to be a mistake. He was sure he’d heard his father come home earlier, that he was already in the house, that he couldn’t have been on Pelican Point and had an accident because he was here. He’d probably gotten into bed next to his mother and she hadn’t even noticed.
Sandra tried to stop him, but he slipped from her arms and ran upstairs to check. And when he failed to find his father, he began to shout his name.
“Dad! Dad! Where are you! Wake up! There’s been a mix-up!”
Tears ran down Katie’s face. A moment later, Archie stood at the top of the stairs and whispered, “I can’t find Dad.”
So Sandra had been their life raft, their port in the storm, their rock — ladies and gentlemen, choose your favorite cliché. She had held them together, done everything she could to support them, even working for assholes like Albert Ruskin and Lisa Carver (not wishing to speak ill of the dead, of course), and there was no way, no how, that a bunch of fucked-up Dinky Toys were going to stop her now.
Sandra was going to find her kids and make sure they were safe.
All she had to do was figure out how to do that.
It was time to look for Ruskin. He was the one most likely to have some answers. He’d rebuffed her before, ignored her when she’d asked to use his phone.
Sandra wasn’t in the mood for any more fucking rebuffing.
Albert Ruskin was on hold with Arrival tech support.
On hold. The assistant to the CEO was on hold.
The company had established a tech support line on day one. A toll-free number Arrival owners could call anytime, day or night, if they were having an issue with their vehicle. The Arrival turned out to be such a trouble-free automobile that the techies hired to stand by the phones complained they often had nothing to do. (There had been a story in the Washington Post that many of them spent their time surfing porn sites.) Most calls came from new owners having trouble getting their cars to understand their commands. Which was why, when someone took delivery of an Arrival, they were required to read aloud several specially formulated sentences, in the language of their choice, that captured every nuance of a person’s speech, regardless of accent or speech defect. But some problems were difficult to predict, like people unfamiliar to New York asking to go to an address on Houston Street, unaware that the New York Houston was pronounced house-ton, not hew-ston, like that city in Texas.