NOS4A2(30)

Vic walked into one of her swings, knocking it out of her way with a rattle of rusty chains.

Her father had his Harley out in the driveway, was wiping it down with a chamois. When he heard the clatter of the swings, he glanced up—and dropped the chamois, his mouth opening as if to cry out in shock.

“Holy f*ck,” he said. “Vic, are you all right? What happened?”

“I was on my Raleigh,” she said. She felt this explained all.

“Where is your bike?” he asked, and looked past her, down the road, as if it might be lying in the yard.

It was the first Vic realized she wasn’t pushing it. She didn’t know what had happened to it. She remembered hitting the bridge wall, halfway across, and falling off the bike, remembered the bats going shree-shree in the dark and flying into her, striking her with soft, felty impacts. She began to shiver uncontrollably.

“I was knocked off,” she said.

“Knocked off? Did someone hit you with their car?” Chris McQueen took her in his arms. “Jesus Christ, Vic, you’ve got blood all over you. Lin!”

Then it was like the other times, her father lifting her and carrying her to her bedroom, her mother rushing to them, then hurrying away to get water and Tylenol.

Only it was not like the other times, because Vic was delirious for twenty-four hours, with a temperature that climbed to 102. David Hasselhoff kept coming into her bedroom, pennies where his eyes belonged and his hands in black leather gloves, and he would grab her by a leg and ankle and try to drag her out of the house, out to his car, which was not K.I.T.T. at all. She fought him, screamed and fought and struck at him, and David Hasselhoff spoke in her father’s voice and said it was all right, try to sleep, try not to worry, that he loved her—but his face was blank with hate, and the car’s engine was running, and she knew it was the Wraith.

Other times she was aware that she was shouting for her Raleigh. “Where’s my bike?” she shouted, while someone held her shoulders. “Where is it? I need it, I need it! I can’t find without my bike!” And someone was kissing her face and shushing her. Someone was crying. It sounded awfully like her mother.

She wet the bed. Several times.

On her second day home, she wandered into the front yard naked and was out there for five minutes, wandering around, looking for her bike, until Mr. de Zoet, the old man across the street, spotted her, and ran to her with a blanket. He wrapped her up and carried her to her house. It had been a long time since she had gone across the street to help Mr. de Zoet paint his tin soldiers and listen to his old records, and in the intervening years she had come to think of him as a cranky old Nazi busybody who once called the cops on her parents, when Chris and Linda were having a loud argument. Now, though, she remembered that she liked him, liked his smell of fresh coffee and his funny Austrian accent. He had told her she was good at painting once. He had told her she could be an artist.

“The bats are stirred up now,” Vic told Mr. de Zoet in a confidential tone of voice as he handed her to her mother. “Poor little things. I think some of them flew out of the bridge and can’t find their way home.”

She slept during the day, then lay awake half the night, her heartbeat too fast, afraid of things that made no sense. If a car drove by the house and its headlights swept the ceiling, she would sometimes have to cram her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming. The sound of a car door slamming in the street was as terrible as a gunshot.

On her third night in bed, she came out of a drifting fugue state to the sound of her parents talking in the next room.

“When I tell her I couldn’t find it, she’s going to be f*ckin’ heartbroken. She loved that bike,” her father said.

“I’m glad she’s done with it,” said her mother. “The best thing to come out of this is that she’ll never ride it again.”

Her father uttered a burst of harsh laughter. “That’s tender.”

“Did you hear some of the things she was saying about her bike the day she came home? About riding it to find death? That’s what I think she was doing in her mind, when she was really sick. Riding her bike away from us and off into . . . whatever. Heaven. The afterlife. She scared the shit out of me with all that talk, Chris. I never want to see the goddamned thing again.”

Her father was silent for a moment, then said, “I still think we should’ve reported a hit-and-run.”

“You don’t get a fever like that from a hit-and-run.”

“So she was already sick. You said she went to bed early the night before. That she looked pale. Hell, maybe that was part of it. Maybe she had a touch of fever and pedaled into traffic. I’ll never forget what she looked like coming into the driveway, blood leaking from one eye like she was weeping . . .” His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, his tone was different, challenging and not entirely kind. “What?”

“I just . . . don’t know why she already had a Band-Aid on her left knee.” The TV babbled for a while. Then her mother said, “We’ll get her a ten-speed. Time for a new bike anyway.”

“It’ll be pink,” Vic whispered to herself. “Any money says she’ll buy something pink.”

On some level Vic knew that the loss of the Tuff Burner was the end of something wonderful, that she had pushed too hard and lost the best thing in her life. It was her knife, and a part of her already understood that another bike would, in all likelihood, not be able to cut a hole through reality and back to the Shorter Way Bridge.