The Longest Night (42 page)

“Paul, all that time, and you didn't
tell
anybody. You didn't tell
me
.”

“It's hard to explain.”

“But this is horrible. Three people have died!”

“I know,” he said, feeling sick.

She shook her head but kept quiet, realizing the depth of his grief. They pulled out onto the highway, leaving the testing station and the reactor behind, and for one excruciating moment Paul felt desperate to leap out and run back to it; too much had happened, he belonged there, how could he leave? But Nat drove on steadily without stopping.

T
HEY SLOWED ON
H
IGHWAY
20 as the snowy fields fell behind them and the town approached, hunkered into itself, white-roofed and gray. If people were choosing to leave town, Paul could hardly tell. He had no idea what the official word had been on the reactor, what the average Joe had heard.

Then Nat pointed and said, “Look.” Paul lifted his head from the window to see a heavily bundled middle-aged woman standing on a street corner holding a sign nearly as tall as she was. In red block letters it said
TELL US THE TRUTH COMBUST. ENGINEERING
. The woman pumped the sign at them, and someone from a truck yelled at her to go home and mind her own business.

Paul had seen protests and sit-ins on television and on the cover of
Life
but never in person, and it was riveting. He couldn't tell if it felt like watching something brave or irritatingly deranged. “Good for her,” Nat said quietly, which surprised him on the one hand, but on the other didn't.

It was only a few blocks later that Paul spied Master Sergeant Richards's car in front of them. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. It shouldn't have been a shock; in this small town you couldn't drive anywhere without seeing someone you knew, and there was only one highway into town from the CR-1. Still, it was a slap in the face to see Richards's pearly Cadillac just cruising along ahead of them, the low flare of its tail fins and glow of brake lights against asphalt and snow. He recognized Richards's head of gray and brown hair, the pretty neck and curls of Jeannie beside him. Richards had probably figured he'd be released soon, with his low exposure, and had asked his wife to pick him up.

In that same instant Nat sat bolt upright. Her hands clenched the wheel. “Do you
see
them?” she said through gritted teeth. “Do you see them driving?”

“It's okay,” Paul said. “They'll get what's due to them. He'll get what's due. There's a process—”

“It isn't fair.”

“I know—”

“It isn't fair!” she raged. “He could have killed you! You, my
you
!” which he could hardly follow, but she kept going. “And those poor men! And look at him, just driving off to who knows where to spend the next few days in peace!” She banged the horn and Paul jumped. “Pull
over
!” she shouted.

“He can't hear you.”

They were coming up to the bridge. Beside them the long, low falls hung immobilized, frozen as if a spell had been cast upon them; black water yawned at the base.

“He could have wrecked my
family,
” Nat said.

“But he didn't. We're still here, Nat. We're fine.”

“And what's he going to get, an army hearing? What, dock him a month's pay?” She pointed at the car. “They have
persecuted
us for no reason ever since we got to this town!”

“What do you mean?” To his knowledge Nat had only spoken with Richards and his wife the once, at their dinner party.

With that she pressed her foot to the gas and the Wayfarer leaped with a clattery roar, like a mechanical door falling. In seconds she cleared the strip of road between their car and the Richardses', pulled up behind them, and laid on her horn again. Richards's eyes flashed in the mirror, his wife turned back to stare, and Paul felt the disdain in their eyes, the gaze of powerful and untarnished people upon someone unbalanced. He almost wanted to egg Nat on.

But he said, “Nat.”

“I want to talk to them,” she seethed, jabbing his hand away with her elbow. Richards was stopped at a light; he looked twitchily back at her as she rolled down her window and shouted into the freezing air, “Pull
over
! I want to talk to you.”

Richards leaned out. “I see you've got your boyfriend's car again,” he called.

Paul felt the color drain from his face . He sat tightly in the seat and said, “Let's just go home.” In his head he said some other things. Then, before he could blink, Nat pressed the gas so that the tires spun and sent the Wayfarer run-and-jumping into the Coupe de Ville's bumper with a shockingly loud crash.

Paul's and Nat's heads thudded against the seat backs and forward again.

“Holy Christ,” Paul said, leaning forward to see. The shiny steel was dented in around the license plate. “You smashed his bumper. Have you gone
crazy
?” he cried, more appreciatively than it sounded and also with a sinking heart, because there went Richards hollering out his window, saying Nat was going to pay for that, his car cost over five thousand dollars, she was a trollop who drove her boyfriend's car around town, and so on. He was still shouting when the light turned; Jeannie Richards, who seemed about ready to die on the spot, tapped his arm, and he jammed his foot onto the gas, speeding away from them, still turned back to jab a blocky index finger at Nat, his big face contorted with rage, the outer contours of his mouth winnowing rapidly from one oval into another; and, of course, driving in this manner, there was no way he could have seen the pedestrian.

The pedestrian registered first as just a shape, a moving shadow: a tall, thin man loping across the street in winter boots, crossing just in front of the bridge. He wore a thick flannel work coat and a hat with earflaps, and carried a canvas bag that appeared to be full of books. He stopped to shift the bag in his arms. Paul couldn't believe how long it took—how close Richards's car bore down, closer, closer—until the man turned to them, his face open with surprise, eyes wide, and dived out of the way.

Richards jerked his car across the opposite lane and off the road. It seemed to drop, like an optical illusion, over the edge of the riverbank. Paul stared. Nat slammed on her own brakes with a yelp and their car slowly spun, so that for a minute after the Coupe slid over the bank their backs were to it, and Paul could almost convince himself that he'd imagined it, that they'd turn around and find the cream-colored car still sitting on the road. Instead he and Nat were stuck staring at the few oncoming cars, which dodged them by delayed reaction, people honking, someone pulling over, the pedestrian in the corner of Paul's eye turning back to stare in confusion, his bag of books spilled everywhere, making splashes of brown and green and blue across the snowbank. Nat drifted the Wayfarer to the side of the road where she turned the key and sat for a moment in stunned silence.

“Are you all right?” Paul asked her, grasping her shoulder.

“I'm fine.” She twisted around in the seat. “Paul, are they okay?”

He opened his door and crunched through ice-crusted snow toward the bank; she got out and followed. When he crested the ridge he stopped for a moment in surprise. The Coupe de Ville had skidded backward down the shallow riverbank and broken through, its tail end sinking, front half still clinging to land with weak traction. Beneath the chunky, ice-thickened water its rear lights glowed faintly red. Paul saw with relief the figures of Richards and Jeannie on the bank, Richards huddled by the car, Jeannie a short distance up the slope. She must have gotten out before the car slid all the way down.

Then he heard Richards shouting: enraged about his car, Paul thought. But Jeannie turned frantically to look up the bank, shrieking for help, and the terror in her voice registered with Paul as something more. Her eyes locked with his and she waved her arms in a panic: “My daughter's in there!”

Now Paul could see what was happening. Richards was trying to get back in; he climbed half over the front seat as the car groaned downward, quickly filling. Why, Paul thought, aghast, hadn't it occurred to him that the child might be in the car? It hadn't even crossed his mind and he was horrified, hoping the little girl hadn't been hurt in the car's thudding descent, hoping Richards would emerge any second, holding her up like a trophy. Paul bolted down the bank, instantly going down hard—the rocks were iced clean over—and crawled, then half-stooping-scrambled, to the car.

When he got there Richards was still struggling across the passenger seat. He'd grabbed the child by the hair and one arm and was trying to pull her up through the front. Freezing water poured into the car like a fishbowl.

“Take her,” Richards shouted, and Paul squeezed in around him, the edge of the door pulling him slowly down as it sank. His feet slid over the icy rock toward the water. A wave sloshed into the car, washing once, to Paul's horror, over the girl's head; he elbowed past Richards between the two front seats and grabbed the girl under the armpits, heaving her head above the water. Slippery, desperate seconds passed as he shoved back against the passenger seat, one knee on it and the other foot outside the car, his shoes like useless flippers against the slick, iced-over rocks. Finally he dragged her onto the passenger seat, lurched back again, and got them both free of the car.

He went to his knees, clutching her cold trunk to his chest. She was terrifyingly silent and he slapped her on the back, hard and then harder. Jeannie was sliding toward him screaming, but though she was almost upon them the noise was all background, tinny and distant, until the little girl sputtered, choked out a vomity hiccup of water, and began to cry.

“Oh, thank God,” Paul said. “Thank God,” and felt his throat harden up. She was about the size of Liddie and all he could feel as he held her was overwhelming gladness and relief. He kissed her cold, wet hair the way he would have kissed his own girls' if they'd appeared before him, and strained up the bank to hand her to Jeannie.

“Here,” he said. “I think she's okay.”

Jeannie choked out a sob. She bundled the child into her fur coat and rocked her, weeping, pulling back again and again to look her daughter in the face and make sure she was okay.

Paul glanced back at Richards and saw him kneeling beside the car, his hands on his thighs, sides heaving.

“Is she all right?” Nat cried as she descended the bank. Paul wanted to remind her to be careful, but he wasn't quite able to speak. He saw that she had pulled an old blanket from the Wayfarer's backseat, and she and Jeannie wrapped it around the child, who was crying hard now. They closed in around her, patting and rubbing and shushing. Something about the two women with the child in the middle made the lump in Paul's throat larger, and he stood back, washed over with relief so strong that his knees nearly buckled, a spreading wet circle on his chest in the shape of the girl: This one he had saved.

“The police are on their way,” someone called over the ridge.

Richards limped up the bank, teeth chattering, face blue-gray. “Angela?” he rasped. His rear foot slid out from him; he pushed himself hands and knees over a flat swath of boulder.

“She's all right,” Jeannie called, not taking her eyes from the girl. “Not a scratch, just wet and cold.” Angela was calmer now, resting against Jeannie's chest, sucking her thumb. Jeannie swayed, briefly closed her eyes.

“Thank God,” Richards said as he reached them. He stood, wincing, and ran a hand over his face. His front teeth were outlined red as though he'd sucked blood through a straw. He spat onto the rocks and looked to each of them in turn, a little disoriented.

In the distance Paul could hear a siren wending toward them. Then, below them, there was the sound of suction followed by a terrific groan. The car trailed lower into the trough of river. The windshield slid under, then half of the hood, until just the grille showed like eerily grinning teeth. Around it a black oval in the ice widened, welcoming.

“Holy Moses,” someone called, peeking over the top of the bank, “is that your
car
?”

There was another deep, grinding racket, and then the Coupe's headlights slipped underwater with the surety of something it had planned for all its life.

“Yes,” Richards said finally, “that's my car.”

Jeannie snickered softly. She rested her chin on Angela's bundled head. “Well,” she said, rocking the girl from side to side, “it was.”

Now the car sat in a shadow world just below the surface. Elegant belches of air rose from it one by one.

“That fucking car,” said Paul, shaking his head.

“Her lights are still on,” Richards whimpered.

And then, they went out.