The Narrows(16)

Fifteen years…

Tom was one of Evan’s friends and had been over to the house countless times. The flirtatiousness between them had always been of the innocuous variety, or so Maggie had thought. She had flirted with men in the past but never adulterously. So how had the situation with Tom gotten so goddamn out of hand? Tom had been over at the house one night, drinking too much with Evan. Under the pretense of using the bathroom, he’d followed her into the house while Evan remained on the back porch. Yet he hadn’t used the bathroom; he’d followed her into the kitchen, his shirt partially unbuttoned, and leaned against the refrigerator while they talked in quick, glib, declarative sentences. It wasn’t that he was drop-dead gorgeous or even roguishly handsome—Tom Schuler was a bit too skinny and his face was patchy with old acne scars—but that did not seem to matter to Maggie. For whatever reason, she felt a flutter of uneasiness while he talked to her, his eyes drinking her in. And she found that she liked this uneasiness.

Tom had left their house that evening with Maggie’s cell phone number, along with some indistinct promise in his eyes. Later that evening, she had lain awake in bed, staring at the misaligned panels of moonlight playing across the ceiling as Evan snored like an old hunting dog beside her. She wondered what Evan would think if he knew she’d given Tom Schuler her cell phone number. Moreover—and this was the forbidden part, yet at the same time, the part that elicited some childlike glee within her—she wondered what Evan would do if she were to have an affair with Tom Schuler and he found out.

That childlike glee was gone now. Sitting behind the wheel of her husband’s car, cleaning up the smeared streamers of makeup from her face, she felt as obvious as a beacon of light on a darkened coast. Terror enveloped her when she realized that there would be no way to hide the smell of sex from her husband once she got home. Would he leave her? Would he hit her? On both counts, she thought maybe he would.

Tonight’s rendezvous at Crossroads was the culmination of a monthlong game of cat and mouse. Tom had pursued her with regularity, calling her whenever he knew Evan was at work, trying to convince her to meet him for a drink. A few times she promised she would but later backed out, sending him vague texts that suggested conflicting schedules and last-minute chores. If Tom was ever dissuaded by her continual misdirection, he never let on.

Finally, when he proposed they have a few drinks at Crossroads while Evan was on the late shift—strictly platonic, he had assured her—she had agreed. Of course, she did not put any stock in his promise of chastity, and while she was uncertain what her intentions were up until she was taking her clothes off in the downstairs hallway of his house, she had showered, shaved, groomed with meticulous dedication, and spritzed herself with expensive perfume. She had selected her tightest pair of jeans and a loose-fitting blouse that revealed her tanned and freckled cleavage. Just one drink, she’d promised herself, knowing damn well she was a liar before she ever got in the car and drove out to Crossroads on Melville Street.

Maggie reapplied her makeup then ran a brush through her hair. She spied a bottle of perfume on the floor beneath the accelerator, which she scooped up and administered liberally to her neck, hair, shoulders, and breasts. When she finished, she dug her cell phone out of her purse and deleted the call log. To her knowledge, Evan had never snooped through her phone, but she wasn’t about to leave it up to chance.

After she replaced all her fallen cosmetics back in her purse, fixed her hair, and sat behind the wheel staring blankly off into the darkness for some undisclosed amount of time, a warm serenity seemed to overtake her. After a few more minutes, she felt calm enough to drive. Her plan was to get back to the house, take a shower, and crawl into bed before Evan got home from the night shift. With any luck, she could pull it off as though the affair had never happened.

She dropped the gearshift to Drive, readjusted the rearview mirror, then pulled slowly back out onto Full Hill Road. She drove slowly, the car’s headlights cleaving through the muddy darkness. She hated this stretch of Full Hill Road—hated, as a matter of fact, all the wooded roadways that snaked out of downtown and wound up into the rocky foothills of the mountains. Maggie Quedentock did not like to feel like she was alone.

Pressing the accelerator closer to the floor, the Pontiac advanced to a rough gallop, the black woods on either side of the road a smudgy blur. More calmly now, Maggie switched the radio back on and surfed through the stations until she found an old Beach Boys number. It soothed her. When she glanced up at her reflection again in the rearview mirror, she was pleasantly surprised to find a timorous smile on her face.

Something darted out into the road. Maggie saw it only peripherally—the slight, colorless approximation of a person—before she struck it with the car. Simultaneously slamming on the brakes and spinning the steering wheel, the car shuddered then fishtailed. The acrid stench of burning rubber filled her nose.

The car finally came to a stop in the middle of the road. Having achieved a complete 180-degree spin, the vehicle’s headlights now illuminated the road in the direction that she had come. The reek of scorched rubber was hot and suffocating. Shaking, Maggie looked over one shoulder and peered out the dark rectangle of the Pontiac’s rear window. Aside from the few feet of asphalt illuminated in the blood-red glow of the brake lights, the world beyond was pitch-black. For all Maggie knew, she could have been staring off into space.

My God, I felt the f*cking impact. If I live to be one hundred, I will never forget what that felt like…what it sounded like…