NOS4A2(85)

Lou sat next to her, head lowered, frowning in thought. “What if she comes back? Wayne was pretty freaked.”

“We’re headed to New Hampshire tomorrow. I don’t think she’s going to find us up there.”

“You could come to Colorado. You wouldn’t have to stay with me. We wouldn’t have to stay together. I’m not asking for anything. But we could find you a place where you could work on Search Engine. The kid could spend the days with me and the nights with you. We got trees and water in Colorado, too, you know.”

She sat back in her chair. The sky was low and smoky, the clouds reflecting the lights of the city so that they glowed a dull, dirty shade of pink. In the mountains above Gunbarrel, where Wayne had been conceived, the sky was filled to its depths with stars at night, more stars than you could ever hope to see from sea level. Other worlds were up in those mountains. Other roads.

“I think I’d like that, Lou,” she said. “He’ll go back to Colorado in September, to go to school. And I’ll come with him—if it’s all right.”

“Of course it’s all right. Are you out of your mind?”

For a single instant, long enough for another blossom to fall into her hair, neither of them spoke. Then, at a shared glance, they burst into laughter. Vic laughed so hard, so freely, she had to gasp to get enough air into her lungs.

“Sorry,” Lou said. “Probably not the best choice of words.”

Wayne, twenty feet away, turned on the stone wall to peer back at them. He held a single dead sparkler in one hand. A ribbon of black smoke drifted from it. He waved.

“You go back to Colorado and find me a place,” Vic said to Lou. She waved back at Wayne. “And at the end of August, Wayne will fly back, and I’ll be with him. I’d come right now, but we’ve got the cottage on the lake until the end of August, and he’s still got three more weeks of day camp paid for.”

“And you’ve got to finish working on the motorcycle,” Lou said.

“Wayne told you about that?”

“Didn’t just tell me. He sent me pictures from his phone. Here.” Lou tossed her his jacket.

The motorcycle jacket was a big, heavy thing, made of some kind of black nylonlike synthetic and with bony plates sewn into it, Teflon armor. She had thought it was the coolest jacket in the world from the first time she put her arms around it, sixteen years before. The front flaps were covered in faded, frayed patches: ROUTE 66, SOUL, a Captain America shield. It smelled like Lou, like home. Trees and sweat and grease and the clean, sweet winds that whistled through the mountain passes.

“Maybe this will keep you from getting killed,” Lou said. “Wear it.”

And at that moment the sky above the harbor pulsed with a deep red flash. A rocket detonated in an eardrum-stunning clap. The skies opened and rained white sparks.

The barrage began.





I-95


TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, VIC DROVE WAYNE AND HOOPER BACK to Lake Winnipesaukee. It rained the whole way, a hard summer downpour that rattled on the road and forced her to keep to under fifty miles an hour.

She was across the border and into New Hampshire when she realized she had forgotten to refill her prescription for Abilify.

It required all her concentration to see the road in front of her and stay in her lane. But even if she had been checking the rearview mirror, she would not have noticed the car following at a distance of two hundred yards. At night one set of headlights looks much like any other.





Lake Winnipesaukee


WAYNE WOKE IN HIS MOTHER’S BED BEFORE HE WAS READY. SOMETHING had jolted him out of sleep, but he didn’t know what until it came again—a soft thump, thump, thump at the bedroom door.

His eyes were open, but he didn’t feel awake, a state of mind that would persist throughout the day, so that the things he saw and heard had the talismanic quality of things seen and heard in a dream. Everything that happened seemed hyperreal and freighted with secret meaning.

He did not remember going to sleep in his mother’s bed but was not surprised to find himself there. She often moved him to her own bed after he nodded off. He accepted that his company was sometimes necessary, like an extra blanket on a cold night. She was not in bed with him now. She almost always rose before him.

“Hello?” he said, knuckling his eyes.

The knocking stopped—then started again, in a halting, almost questioning way: Thud? Thud? Thud?

“Who is that?” Wayne asked.

The knocking stopped. The bedroom door creaked open a few inches. A shadow rose upon the wall, the profile of a man. Wayne could see the big bent crag of a nose and the high, smooth, Sherlock Holmes curve of Charlie Manx’s forehead.

He tried to scream. He tried to shout his mother’s name. But the only sound he was able to produce was a funny wheeze, a kind of rattle, like a broken sprocket spinning uselessly in some tired machine.

In the mug shot, Charles Manx had been staring straight into the camera, his eyes bulging, his crooked upper teeth pressed into his lower lip to give him a look of dim-witted bafflement. Wayne couldn’t know him by his profile, and yet he recognized his shadow in a glance.

The door inched inward. The thump, thump, thump came again. Wayne struggled to breathe. He wanted to say something—Please! Help!—but the sight of that shadow held him silent, like a hand clamped over his mouth.