Any Minute (16 page)

What’s wrong with you, Sarah? You’ve never been able to do anything right, have you?

No wonder you can’t give yourself to anybody. You’re not worth anything.

Water gushed in muddy streams along the curb. For perilous seconds, she couldn’t see the road. The wipers beat back and forth with what seemed like frantic speed, unable to scrape the glass clear before the deluge filled it again, every beat of the wipers punctuating her grief-stricken heart.

Here you are, always messing up other people’s lives. You messed up your mother’s life and now you’re messing up Joe’s, Mitchell’s, and Kate’s too.

She leaned forward, as if that would help her peer out the windshield. She braked. The tires sent up thick walls of spray.

What were you thinking? How far did you think you could push Joe and expect him to put up with it?

When the phone vibrated on the seat beside her, she wanted to chuck it out the window into oncoming traffic. But this phone was her lifeline to her employer, who waited for her at a five-star eating establishment with a demanding client at his side and eggs Benedict on order. He waited while steam rose from the spout of a silver coffeepot and the
maître
d’
laid out place settings for three. Mr. Tom Roscoe, whom she hadn’t disappointed, who liked the way she thought on her feet, who’d said she was part of an elite breed, who’d told her he thought she was capable of anything.

His text sounded more harsh than usual.

Y
OU COMING OR WHAT?

I can’t do this,
she cried in desperation to the God her grandmother had once taught her about.
You’ve got to fix me. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t go on like this anymore. Nothing’s working for anybody. I’ve tried my best, but I just can’t make it happen.

Gridlock besieged the city. Inbound traffic, the Kennedy, the Ike, the knotted interchange everyone called the Hillside Strangler, all slowed to a crawl because of the rain. Sarah took the first exit ramp she could, flipped on her blinker, steered left around a corner and headed toward the bridge. That’s when she spotted the boat drifting along the river, taunting her with its purposeful glide upstream. Her breath hitched tight in her throat.

Oh no you don’t!
Only idiots would set sail in this weather.
If you think I am going to get caught with the bridge up while you glide by, you are wrong!

With eyebrows knit and teeth bared at her rearview mirror, she located an unnervingly small space and, without signaling, shoehorned her way into it. The driver behind her laid on his horn. She passed to the right and swerved directly to the middle lane, cutting off a second driver, practically knocking off his bumper because he had the audacity to slow her down.

Red lights would start flashing along the bridge any minute. Barricade arms would begin their slow, excruciating descent to stop all travel in both directions. The bridge would jolt apart and rise as slowly as syrup, gigantic gears screeching in complaint. And so help her, she wouldn’t be brought to a standstill behind that web of rising girders and the trussed arches parting and the road gaping open. Not today.

Her temples began to throb. With one hand she sifted through the contents of her purse in search of aspirin. The CTA bus hissed to a halt directly in front of her. Even one-handed, Sarah was ready. She dodged left, barely missing a bicycle. The cyclist shot her a look halfway between outrage and terror. Behind her he jumped the curb, dismounted on the sidewalk, and apparently chose to walk the rest of the way.

Ahead, the boat struggled to make headway, low in the water, her heavy cargo lashed in place with chains. Water churned in the wake of mammoth propellers. Smoke plumed from one smut-tarnished stack.

If the ninth-floor guys got a kick out of her NASCAR driving, they would’ve been awestruck if they could see Sarah Harper now. Every racetrack-inspired maneuver numbed the icy emptiness of the night before. Every Mario Andretti move kept her from replaying Joe’s plainspoken, painful words. Each Indy 500 tactic gave her license to conceal the hurt behind other long-ago scabs and scars.

Each time Sarah finagled her way into another lane, she was in her very own speed contest, running from the truth.

By the time Sarah gunned her engine and pulled around a delivery truck, the warning lights on the bridge burst to life. The bells started ringing as the barricades began their torturous, slow descent. Brake lights flickered ahead. She leaned forward, as if her body language could inspire the three drivers in front of her to keep moving. “Not yet. Go go go go
go
.”

For one maddening moment, she thought she couldn’t proceed. Everything ahead seemed to be drawing to a standstill. In slow motion, one compact car passed from the opposite direction. It doused the side of the Lincoln with one fateful burst of spray. Then, nothing in the oncoming lane, only open road.

Sarah saw her way clear. She downshifted and slammed the accelerator to the floor. Her tires squealed on the asphalt, shimmied where they hit rain. The stiff-armed barriers were folded midpoint like a drill-team captain halfway through a routine. Sarah swept past the idling vehicles blocking her way. She swept past clanging lights and concrete abutments. She slalomed through the barricade, skidding left, veering right, without slowing down.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Sarah smelled burning rubber. Just let someone try to come after her! By the time they could stop her, she’d be placing a linen napkin on her lap, sipping coffee from a china cup, and discussing commodity-futures prices. In surprise, she saw the gaping mouth of the bridge already yawning open. She saw the huge jaws of its mouth parting to reveal a taunting grin of steel teeth.

She remembered her motto:
Life is there for the taking.

Sarah felt the bridge’s iron gearwheels rumbling beneath her feet. She hadn’t realized she was driving steadily uphill. In one swift second, she considered whether to put the pedal to the metal or throw on the brakes. She cataloged the danger and shoved it aside. She could make this.

The speedometer needle nudged eighty. The sky passed in a blur of balustrades and steel. Sarah felt wheels leave the ground and suddenly, horrifyingly, knew she’d been wrong.

Already she heard sirens in the distance. In her wake a bridge-authority operator had thrown an emergency switch. She heard tons of metal shudder to a stop. Below her the ship’s throttle had gone into full reverse, whipping up water. But it was too late. The road ahead had already opened. She had nowhere to go but down.

The bridge’s underpinnings hung in her path. She crooked an arm over her face and braced for impact. The car missed the bridge by inches. For long seconds she hung in an awful void, suspended between all that was behind her and all that was yet to come.

And then she plummeted.

The Lincoln’s nose struck cold water at full velocity. Metal sheered off. She tasted blood. Adrenaline shot through her, numbed her with needlelike precision.
I’m in trouble.
Her heart pounded faster than it had ever pounded before. When she tried to scream for help, nothing came. Fear clamped her throat, leaving her no voice. The constricted sound that escaped was something between a gasp and a reedy cry.

Somewhere in the distance, the talk-radio host ranted on about some foreign policy. Water sloshed around her elbows as she struggled with the seat belt. How many times had she clasped and unclasped this buckle with ease, never stopping to give it a second thought?

She jabbed the button with her thumb. She yanked the straps, trying to make them release. With water to her neck, she remembered the tiny pocketknife in the glove compartment. She had found it in the parking garage and pitched it in there a few months ago. As her face sank underwater, she took one last, frantic breath and reached for the dashboard.

Sarah’s personal data assistant wafted in front of her hand. No more memos or alarms or schedules. Its screen had gone dead.

She couldn’t reach the glove compartment no matter how hard she stretched or how long she tried.

She tried to kick herself free. Somewhere in the past moment, the XM channel had dissipated into silence.

One last time she tried to unfasten the seat belt on her own, holding her breath, bubbles escaping her mouth. The bubbles moved away from her face at an odd angle; she was losing her bearings fast.

I’m in trouble.
Her last thought.
I’m in trouble.

The icy river closed overhead, leaving no trace of where she’d been.

Chapter Eleven

M
itchell Harper could tell you how a kid could find ways to get in trouble in class, especially a restless kid like him. The day had barely started and, for some reason, he couldn’t stop squirming in his seat. Ever since the bell had rung and Mrs. Georges had announced they wouldn’t have math as scheduled today but would jump directly into their assigned oral presentations, he’d been feeling anxious. He couldn’t have felt more fidgety if he had centipedes in his pants.

First of all, he hadn’t exactly
finished
his oral presentation. He’d planned to work on it last night, copying down interesting facts from the Internet about the rainforest jaguar. But he’d forgotten his homework the moment his dad showed up with those Cubs tickets. If Mrs. Georges asked him to stand and give his presentation now, the only things he could tell the class about jaguars were that they had four legs and maybe spots. (Did all jaguars have spots or just some?) He could also tell the class that jaguars weren’t afraid of anything.

The first time Mrs. Georges singled him out for disrupting the class that day, he hadn’t meant to be spinning his Cubs pencil. He’d been admiring it secretly behind the ledge of his desk, thinking he’d never seen an eraser this color before, examining the tiny wrap of red tin, thinking how it looked nice with those red
C
s and the blue shiny paint. Sometimes when Mitchell worked math problems, especially a particularly complicated column of subtraction, he chewed his erasers. He hoped he wouldn’t get nervous and chew this one because Mrs. Georges didn’t like it when he did.

Mrs. Georges interrupted his thought. “Mitchell Harper. Would you step to the front of the class please and share that item with us? The one you insist on playing with? Is it a toy?”

His face went hot. He felt the tips of his ears burning. “No, ma’am. It’s a pencil.”

He felt everyone watching as he traipsed up the three rows of seats toward the chalkboard. Mrs. Georges made him deposit the pencil in her palm, closed her fingers around it, and informed him she would return it at the final bell if he would make an effort to remind her at the end of the day.

The second time Mrs. Georges singled him out, he hadn’t meant to be squeaking his shoes against the floor. His teacher asked, “Mitchell Harper, are you making that frightful sound?”

Until that second he hadn’t noticed the squeaking. But when he froze in embarrassment, the sound stopped.

“Is it you?”

Who knew rubber soles could screech and squish like that when they got wet? His sneakers had gotten soaked clear through when he’d made the mad dash out the door to the school bus. His mom was going to have a fit when she found his rain boots shoved under the table, right where she’d dropped them.

He nodded.

It horrified him to imagine that Mrs. Georges would make him walk forward to give up his shoes the same way she’d made him give up his pencil. Thankfully, she didn’t. She eyed his feet with distaste, her mouth pursed as tight as if she’d been eating lemons.