Dakota Blues (21 page)

The eighteen-wheeler flashed its headlights again and again. Forty tons of truck would not slow quickly. The Bronco raced alongside the van, inching forward but not able to pass unless Karen slowed, and she would not.

As the road curved slightly, Frieda cursed, and Karen saw what her friend had seen: the eighteen-wheeler led a convoy. Karen would have to choose. If she kept up this pace, the men would have to back off or die. Or she could slow down and let them cut in front of her, avoiding the head-on and letting them live, but endangering herself and Frieda.

She knew what she should do. Karen was a good person. She’d been raised to a life of sacrifice.

Her hands tightened on the wheel.

The van flew down the road shoulder to shoulder with the Bronco. The trucker flashed his lights.

Acid flooded her gut.

The pedal was flat against the floor.

Her hands were numb, death-gripping the wheel.

I’m doing everything I can. I think this is it. There’s nothing more I can do. I gave it my best.

As Karen raced toward the big rigs, the roaring in her ears began to deaden all sensation. A cool fog wafted into the darkest remote conduits of her mind, and her heartbeat seemed to slow.

I did everything I could.

But if you give up now, you’re going to die, she thought, trying to elicit the sense that this was an important fact and that some emotion should rise from it, yet she felt increasingly detached. What does it mean, she wondered, as the sound of the road receded, and the lights and the horns faded, and she drifted into the silence within, when you’ve tried hard all your life to do everything right, be fair to people and play by the rules, you take care of your family and don’t steal and you lift up your employees and…and you’re erased from the earth just for sport?

I don’t deserve this. I’ve been good all my life, and for this? I was a good kid, a good adult. Even when Dad got in his moods. “Try to be good,” Mom would plead, as if that would stop him from beating the shit out of both of us.

An epitaph, carved in a chunk of granite, flashed before her eyes: “She was a good girl.”

Karen blinked. The Bronco was still beside her, the rigs roaring down on her, horns blaring, lights flashing. Elbows locked, she held the wheel steady, refusing to yield. The men jumped around inside the SUV like wild chimps.

At the last second the Bronco braked and swerved hard to the left, careening off the shoulder and out of control. The convoy roared past, partly hiding from Karen the sight of the Bronco cartwheeling across the prairie, spewing a roostertail of dirt and carving a swath through the sagebrush.

Frieda clawed at the seat and twisted around to see the wreckage behind them. The smoking Bronco lay upside down in the scarred landscape a hundred yards from the highway, its wheels spinning, roof crushed. The convoy slowed, and the last eighteen-wheeler pulled to the shoulder. The driver, holding a fire extinguisher, ran toward the wreckage.

“Aren’t you going to stop?”

Karen barely heard Frieda’s voice above the roaring in her ears. She muscled the RV into a sweeping curve, too fast.

“Karen.”

The tires screamed in protest.

“I think they’re dead. Karen?”

The van slowed slightly. “Good,” Karen tried to say, but couldn’t, because she had no spit left. She began to shake and eased her foot from the gas pedal. Her elbows floated away from her body, and her hands couldn’t feel the steering wheel.

“Dear.” Frieda’s hand reached over, trembling, her grasp warm on Karen’s forearm. “Please.”

The van rolled to a stop on the shoulder as the first ambulance appeared over the next hill.

.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

T
he trooper finished scratching notes on his clipboard and handed Karen’s license back to her. “If we need to, we’ll be in touch.”

Karen nodded, her jaw clamped. Wordlessly, she and Frieda walked back to the Roadtrek, arms linked tightly. She helped Frieda into her seat and rounded the back of the van. Shaking, she rested against the bumper, her eyes blurring the red-dot fence line of burning flares that stretched around the emergency vehicles. A fireman in yellow slicker directed traffic past the mess, traffic that slowed to eyeball the smoking wreck as they headed northward.

Her veins throbbed with the charred remains of adrenaline and emotion, and she wondered by how many years this incident had shortened her life.

Not as much as theirs.

She pushed herself into a standing position, the effort almost too much. Feeling as if her feet were weighted with cement blocks, Karen climbed back into the van, put it in gear, and began driving slowly toward Denver. Thankful for Frieda’s silence, she played the decision over and over again in her head, but for all her torment, when she reached for guilt she came up empty.

It was bizarre. Fifty years a Catholic, and she felt no compulsion to race to Confession, no burning need to call out to the heavens for forgiveness. Even though her failure to Put Others First had directly resulted in their death.

Theirs, not hers.

The Karen Grace who went to bed last night in a campground in Cheyenne was not the same woman who now puttered down the freeway toward Denver. This new Karen was less heroic, less admirable in every way, and yet she battled a feeling of pride. She had survived and had saved Frieda’s life while she was at it. If she felt any guilt at all it was for her
lack
of guilt.

They rolled south, the strip of road slicing through featureless miles of high desert, browning as they approached the arid steppes outside Denver.

How is it possible to go along every day of your life as one kind of person, and then something happens and you change, becoming your own opposite? When she was driving hell-bent across the desert, she wanted to kill them. How very un-Karen-like.

She drove on, wrestling with it.

It’s almost as if there’s a piece of fabric stretched out across your life, she thought, and part of you lives above that piece of fabric, and part below. The part above is the capable, nice, everyday kind of person you show your friends and family. The part below is the extreme negative, the part that isn’t quite rational, that doesn’t cope so well-or, actually, it does, resulting in heinous, unthinkable outcomes. The strength of the fabric determines how often the lower part breaks through, corrupting the goodness above.

You might be neurotic and prone to tearing–silk–or someone sturdier, made of burlap. Then all of a sudden something happens, like the third or fourth time he forgets your birthday or maybe gives you a black eye. Or you find yourself facing down the possibility of death, and the barrier rips, exposing all the writhing ugliness underneath.

“Jesus!” She swerved to avoid a small sedan.

“Welcome back to civilization,” said Frieda.

“Sorry.”

Frieda stared out the window. “I can’t get those boys out of my mind.”

“They weren’t boys. They were dangerous men, and we did what we had to do.”

“I know.” Frieda turned back toward the window.

Over and over again, the Bronco spun out across her mind, forcing Karen to reevaluate whether she had overreacted, needlessly causing their deaths. She tried to apply logic. The men had a choice. The decision and consequences were theirs, and she had reacted logically to preserve her own existence and Frieda’s. Anybody with a brain would have made the same decision. She and Frieda were lucky to have escaped, and yet, luck had nothing to do with their survival. They had survived due to Karen’s determination. Her only remorse sprang from the impact on Frieda.

And from the loss of her mother’s precious mementoes, now rotting outside of Cheyenne. Nothing could make her drive back over that stretch of highway. She wanted only to get back home to the familiar.

Karen glanced over at the older woman who dabbed at her nose with a ragged tissue. Frieda glanced back. “Stop worrying. I’ll feel better after I see Jessie and the baby.”

“Are you going to tell your daughter?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, no. If Sandy knew, she’d have me committed. And right after that she’d have a nervous breakdown. No, let’s keep our mouths shut.”

Karen slowed as the highway became more congested near Denver. The Continental Divide loomed to the west. Soon she would be scooting along their southern tip, heading westward toward home. She took a calming breath, the first in over an hour.

Frieda rolled her window down an inch. “A long time ago, Sandy tried to get me to move to Denver. She and Richard felt humiliated that her dad and I still lived back in Hicksville. Richard’s got the money, she said. You can live where it’s nice.” Frieda shook her head at the memory. “Nice.”

“I thought your house in Dickinson was pretty nice.”

“Exactly. But she wanted to buy a house in Denver and let us live in it rent-free. I don’t know if it was Richard’s idea of a tax shelter or they really wanted to help, but I told her no. She kept insisting and we had a fight. We didn’t speak for a while. Finally I told her if she wanted to buy us something, make it a Roadtrek and we’ll use it to come visit.” Frieda smiled. “We got the RV we always dreamed of, and she got to feel like a big shot.”

“I’m sure she worries about you.”

“She doesn’t give me any credit at all.” The broad swaths of open land began to shrink into strip malls and subdivisions. Karen paid more attention to the road now as it fed into downtown, the traffic flowing like water through a narrowing chute. She knew how to avoid tailgaters and speeders in her own car, but the Roadtrek wasn’t as nimble. She was happy to see their off-ramp coming up.

Once on city streets, she eased off the pedal. They passed an upscale mall with a Saks and Nordstrom’s. A brace of gleaming skyscrapers reached into the sky to the south, and Frieda pointed to a silver-blue high rise. “That’s where Richard works, up on the twentieth floor. He has his own law firm.”

“What does Sandy do?”

“Sandy decorates.”

“She’s an interior decorator?”

“Not exactly. She does her house, over and over again.”

They turned onto a shaded parkway that ran past gated neighborhoods and manicured parks, soccer fields and jogging paths, until they reached the entry gate to a private community. As they were cleared through the guardhouse, Karen felt like she was back in her private community in Newport. Same winding lane, same fairways next to the road, same gigantic tract homes.

They found the address on a sprawling split-level on a corner lot. Three sets of limestone steps marched down the hill to the driveway. A stream cut across the lawn, coursing over fiberglass boulders to a small pond where fake deer nibbled grasses along the banks. Karen parked the van at the curb.

At the top of the steps, a heavy wooden door flew open and a blond woman emerged in a bulky beige pantsuit. She hurried down the steps, her hands at her fleshy cheeks like a kid on Christmas morning. Her chubby arms engulfed Frieda. “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh.”

Frieda struggled out of her daughter’s arms. “Good Lord, Sandy, let go. You’re going to crush me.”

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re finally here, Mom. It’s so good to see you.” Sandy, her mascaraed eyes resembling twin spiders, turned to Karen. “And you are?”

“This is Karen. You might remember her from the old neighborhood.”

Karen reached forward to shake hands. “Hi, Sandy.”

“Sandra.” She squeezed Karen’s fingertips, avoiding an actual handshake. “Would you mind parking your camper down at the end of the street?”

“Yes, we would mind,” said Frieda.

“Those are the neighborhood rules, Mom. We can’t have old vehicles unless they’re in the garage. The neighbors will complain.”

“Are you going to stand here worrying about your neighbors or invite us in?”

Sandra blinked. “Forget it. Is anybody hungry? Lucia can make us lunch.” She turned and guided Frieda toward the stairs, glancing over her shoulder at Karen. “You can put Mom’s bags on the second floor, third door on the left.”

.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

W
hen Sandra and Frieda disappeared into the house, Karen slumped in the drivers’ seat, where she was tempted to put the key in the ignition and escape to the Rockies. She watched a gardener working on the property next door and wondered how long she could get away with sitting outside.

Checking her phone, she found Steve had left half a dozen messages, so she called him back.

“When are you coming home?”

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “I don’t have a job anymore so there’s not that much reason to hurry.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I got fired.”

“What the hell? What happened?”

“Other than Wes is insane?”

“Jeez, I’m sorry. What an asshole.”

“Exactly.” For once they had a common enemy instead of each other.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She could picture him running his hand through his hair, thinking hard, trying to fix things. A painful wave of nostalgia washed over her. For all his selfishness, he represented the familiar. Familiarity was comforting, especially after what happened this morning. But comfort could be dangerous, too. “All I can do is get the word out to my friends and hope for a nibble.”

“I know people who know people. I can help, if you want.”

His data-base was huge, and she needed a job. “Thank you.”

“But we need to settle things,” he said. “The house is sitting vacant.”

“The other shoe drops.”

“Karen, I’m just being practical.”

“I still live there, remember?”

Then he sighed. “I’ve retained counsel.”

“I know. Jean told me.”

“You probably should, too.”

Karen leaned back against the head rest. So this is how it worked, one side forcing the other to lawyer up. How quickly he had moved to that option.

“It’s the only way,” he said. “I’m sorry, but we need to move forward.”

“You mean you do.” They sat in silence, two separate new humans forming out of the old one. “When is she due?”

“I don’t want to discuss it.”