"Of course not. If they've figured out who I am, they'll be listening."
"I didn't think so. Will you tell me where you're headed now?"
"I'll go, and when I'm done, I'll come home. You know how this works. Nobody knows anything about places, and it makes everybody safer."
"I'm not sure what to say. Drive carefully?" He sat at the table and watched her. The silence grew longer, until it was a barrier between them. "I'm wondering how much of the attraction is the girl, and how much is the baby. Can you tell me that, at least?"
"I'd say half and half," she said. "Two people." She turned toward him, her eyes narrowing.
He met her stare. "You're avoiding the question. You haven't done anything like this in years. Why this one? Because it was a pregnant girl. Other times, you took people away from their troubles, gave them new names, and that was the last they saw of you."
"I left when I thought they were safe," she said. "I don't think she's safe yet, and she asked me to come back. If I'm there to help her make the big transitions, she'll be more likely to survive them. You're right that I like babies, Carey. I love babies. But if you think it's going to make me happy to watch another woman having a new baby and then spend a couple of months teaching her how to take care of it, you're wrong. That's pure pain. She's going to have what I want most, and that's not pleasant. But I'm going to do it."
He looked down at the table, and she set his plate of eggs in front of him carefully, as though she were keeping herself from throwing it. He looked down at the plate, and pushed it away. "I love you. I'm sorry."
"Me, too."
He put his arms around her and held her. "I know you believe you have to do this."
"I do have to."
"When are you leaving?"
"In a minute or two. I just wanted to wait until you were awake so I could say good-bye."
"Then there's no point in having the last thing we remember about today be an argument." He put his arms around her and held her.
She gave him a long, lingering kiss. "Thanks, Carey." She stepped back. "This is a good time to go."
They walked to the back door and he picked up her suitcase to carry it. If he noticed that it was much heavier than it looked because of the guns and ammunition, he didn't show it. They went down the steps by the back door and walked to the garage. He said, "Be careful."
Jane took her suitcase from him, kissed him once more, then turned away. During the summer she had bought a five-year-old Ford SUV under the name Willa Stahl. She'd bought new tires, had the vehicle serviced, and made sure it would get her across the country. She took out the pair of thin goatskin gloves she had in her purse and put them on before she touched the door handle, got in, and looked back at the house, then at Carey. "I love you." Then she started the engine. Carey stepped away from the vehicle, and she backed out, waved once, and drove off.
As she steered along the quiet street under the big trees and turned onto the boulevard in the direction of the Thruway entrance, she couldn't force her thoughts away from Carey. It had occurred to her that if Carey had not been persistent, she would never have married. By the time she was twenty-two she had lost nearly everyone she loved. Her father had died in a construction accident on a bridge in Washington when she was twelve, and her mother had died of cancer shortly after she graduated from college. Her grandparents were long gone. She had retained relationships with the relatives on the Tonawanda reservation and a few in other places. She spoke frequently with Jake Reinert, the elderly next-door neighbor in Deganawida who had been her father's closest friend. But because of the work she did, she had become more and more adept at being elusive and difficult to corner. She was on the road most of the year, came and went quietly, and didn't cultivate any relationships that required her to answer questions.
Jane had met Carey at a party years before when they were students at Cornell. He was from Amherst, which was close enough so they could occasionally share rides home on holidays. She had lost touch with him for years after graduation, when he was in medical school and surgical residency, and then one day he had simply turned up at her front door in Deganawida. She opened the door and there he was. He said, "Hi. I was just updating my address book." He had come back to live in Amherst, just as she had come back to Deganawida. He had set up a practice doing surgery at Buffalo General.
They became better friends than they'd ever been at college. She asked him to the movies, he took her to dinner. She did not recognize for the first year that he was courting her. He dated other women constantly, complained to her about them and asked for her advice. He was a tall, handsome, funny young surgeon in a city where such men were as rare as whirling dervishes, so he got no sympathy from Jane Whitefield.
Jane had never wanted to fall in love with Carey McKinnon. She had resolutely remained his friend without encouraging anything more, until the evening when everything changed. She had been away with a client for a month, and came home physically exhausted and emotionally drained. He was at her house waiting for her with roses. She was simply too tired to care about her determination to keep him at a distance. He offered to rub her back, and while he was doing it, the barrier between them dissolved. Afterward, he had been so concerned about her feelings that she'd had no choice but to admit she liked him more than before. A few months later he asked her to marry him, and she refused. She explained that she was perfectly willing to keep having sex with him, but she couldn't have the sort of relationship that restricted her movements or required her to answer questions.
For the next year he stayed near her and waited. Eventually, as he had probably known it would, a day came when her reluctance stopped making sense to her. It was pointless. After she had spent a year going out with him most nights when she was in town and then sleeping with him, he asked her for the hundredth time why she wouldn't marry him and she gave in.
Today was one of the reasons why she had been reluctant. She had not wanted to feel this way over and over, to experience this sense of loss, the knowledge that she might never see him again. She supposed she resented him a little, too, at the moment. Letting someone get so close to her had been an act of faith that she had known was a risk. Intimacy—letting someone see her weaknesses and doubts—shouldn't have been a license to use them in an argument. He should never have talked about the baby.
It had been five years since she had taken to the road like this to meet a runner. What she was beginning to wonder was whether she had spent those five years trying to make herself into a different woman so she would be a good wife to Carey, or if she had been using her marriage to him as a disguise to hide herself from her enemies. If it was the first, she was cheating herself, and if it was the second, she was cheating Carey.
Her route was the same one she had driven with Christine three months ago, but now the world she moved through was different. The northern latitudes had changed from summer to fall, so the air that rushed by outside the car was cooler, and the sun seemed always to shine at a lower angle so it was in her eyes most of the day and went down just at dinnertime. She drove as much as possible in the dark. At night a car was just a pair of bright lights in a rearview mirror. She was harder to see, and when she was seen it would be harder to tell that she was a woman driving alone.
Jane knew the best places to stop late at night as she made her way west. After midnight the interstate highways outside cities were largely the domain of long-haul truckers, and the roads inside cities were mostly occupied by young men who would be better off doing their drinking at home. Jane stayed with the trucks, and kept her speed just a few miles above the limit. She didn't want to take the chance of being pulled over by a cop and having him find two M92 Berettas and thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She made one stop to sleep at a motel outside Chicago, and then pushed on to Minneapolis, heading into the city after dawn with the sun at her back.