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In the next moment, he was gone and she was over the hill. He had probably been gunning it for that four-way intersection with the yellow caution light, looking to cut her off there. He would have to follow the winding road he was on all the way into town before he could turn and come back after her. She had maybe a full minute on him.

The bike swung through a high, tight curve, and she had a glimpse of Paugus Bay below, dark blue and cold. She wondered where she would be locked up, when she would next see the water. She had spent so much of her adult life in institutions, eating institutional food, living by institutional rules. Lights-out at eight-thirty. Pills in a paper cup. Water that tasted like rust, like old pipes. Stainless-steel toilet seats, and the only time you saw blue water was when you flushed.

The road rose and dropped in a little dip, and in the hollow there was a country store on the left. It was a two-story place made out of peeled logs, with a white plastic sign over the door that said NORTH COUNTRY VIDEO. Stores still rented videos out here—not just DVDs but videotapes, too. Vic was almost past the place when she decided to swing into the dirt lot and hide. The parking area extended around back, and it was dark there beneath the pines.

She stood on the rear brake, already going into her turn, when she remembered there was no rear brake. She grabbed the front brake. For the first time, it occurred to her that it might not be working either.

It was. The front brake grabbed hard, and she almost went over the handlebars. The rear tire whined shrilly across the blacktop, painting a black rubber streak. She was still sliding when she hit the dirt lot. The tires tore at the earth, raised clouds of brown smoke.

The Triumph jackhammered another twelve feet, past North Country Video, crunching to a stop at last in the back of the lot.

A nighttime darkness waited beneath the evergreens. Behind the building, a loop of sagging chain barred access to a footpath, a dusty trench carved through weeds and ferns. A dirt-bike run, maybe, or out-of-use hiking trail. She had not spied it from the road; no one would, set back as it was in the shadows.

She didn’t hear the cop car until it was very close, her ears full of the sound of her own ragged breath and overworked heart. The cruiser shrieked past, the undercarriage crashing as it skipped over the frost heaves.

She saw a flicker of movement at the edge of her vision. She looked up at a plate-glass window, half pasted over with posters advertising the Powerball. A fat girl with a nose ring was staring out at her, her eyes wide with alarm. She had a phone to her ear, and her mouth was opening and closing.

Vic looked at the footpath on the other side of that chain. The narrow rut was drifted with pine needles. It pointed steeply downhill. She tried to think what was down there. Route 11, most likely. If the path didn’t lead to the highway, she could at least follow it until it petered out, then park the bike in the pines. It would be peaceful among the trees, a good place to sit and wait for the police.

She shifted into neutral and walked it around the chain. Then she put her feet on the pegs and let gravity do the rest.

Vic rode through a felty darkness that smelled sweetly of firs, of Christmas—a thought that made her shiver. It reminded her of Haverhill, of the town woods, and of the slope behind the house where she had grown up. The tires bumped over roots and rocks, and the bike shimmied across the uncertain ground. It took great concentration to guide the motorcycle along the narrow rut. She stood on the pegs to watch the front tire. She had to stop thinking, had to go empty, couldn’t spare any room inside her head for the police, or Lou, or Manx, or even Wayne. She could not try to work things out now; she had to focus instead on staying balanced.

It was, anyway, difficult to remain frantic in the piney gloom, with the light slanting down through the boughs and an atlas of white cloud inscribed on the sky above. The small of her back was stiff and tight, but the pain was sweet, made her aware of her own body working in concert with the bike.

A wind rushed in the tops of the pines with a gentle roar, like a river in flood.

She wished she had had a chance to take Wayne on the motorcycle. If she’d been able to show him this, these woods, with their sprawling carpet of rusty pine needles, beneath the sky lit up with the first best light of July, she thought it would’ve been a memory for both of them to hold on to for the rest of their lives. What a thing it would be, to ride through the scented shadows with Wayne clutching her tight, to follow a dirt path until they found a peaceful place to stop, to share out a homemade lunch and some bottles of soda, to doze off together by the bike, in this ancient house of sleep, with its floor of mossy earth and its high ceiling of crisscrossing boughs. When she closed her eyes, she could almost feel Wayne’s arms around her waist.

But she only dared close her eyes a moment. She breathed out and looked up—and in that moment the motorcycle arrived at the bottom of the slope and crossed twenty feet of flat ground to the covered bridge.





Shorter Way


VIC TAPPED THE REAR BRAKE WITH HER FOOT, AN AUTOMATIC GESTURE that did nothing. The motorcycle kept on, rolling almost to the entrance of the Shorter Way Bridge before she remembered the front brake and eased herself to a stop.

It was ridiculous, a three-hundred-foot-long covered bridge sitting right on the ground in the middle of the woods, bridging nothing. Beyond the ivy-tangled entrance was an appalling darkness.

“Yeah,” Vic said. “Okay. You’re pretty Freudian.”

Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t Mommy’s coochie; it wasn’t the birth canal; the bike wasn’t her symbolic cock or a metaphor for the sexual act. It was a bridge spanning the distance between lost and found, a bridge over what was possible.