The Cloisters(91)

“It’s not, Rachel. Do you think I wanted to end up at The Cloisters? Do you think I wanted to get mixed up in all this? I didn’t have a choice.”

“Of course you did. You could have gone back to Walla Walla. You could have left after Patrick died. You could have chosen, a million times, not to do things with me that got you deeper and deeper into this, but you did. At every turn, you did. And you know why? Because we’re the same, Ann.”

She was wrong to believe I had a choice. There were, I knew, no real choices in life. I knew this with absolute certainty, because I had not chosen to be on the road that day. Nor had my father chosen to have his car break down on his way home, its repairs long overdue, on the one blind bend between Whitman and our home. I could see the darkness in the cards now. In the face of Saturn and the milkiness of the moon—I could see what had happened that day, what I had worked so hard to forget. The way I had driven home from campus, down the country road that center-cut the wheatfields, fields whose grasses had grown high, ready for mowing. And on the bend, I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t seen the car through the crowded stalks of wheat. I had only felt it—the thump, the force so inconsequential against the bumper of my truck.

Only, in the rearview, had I been able to see the scene. To see his body, laid out at the edge of the gray strip of asphalt. I had run back, I remembered that now. But it was already too late. And he had told me, then, to go. To keep going. To never stop until I was far from home. It wasn’t your fault, he had said. Don’t let this ruin your life. Although, of course, it already had.

My father, however, had been right. It was, I now knew, not my fault. Fate had intervened to put us both on the road that day, under a blistering August sky. Rachel was wrong to believe I had ever had a choice. Choice was a fiction. Because if I’d ever had a choice, I would have veered left, I would have gone the long way, I would have done anything to prevent what happened to my father—what happened to me—that afternoon. And if choice was so easy to marshal, then I would have chosen to stop the tears that came to my eyes, to catch my breath, to stop my voice from matching the howling of the wind, the crash of the rain. The memory my mind and body had worked so hard to repress—my father, his body bloody, the blond fields and dusty soil around us, my hands on the wheel—was once again pouring out of me.

“Ann,” Rachel said, closing the distance between us and wrapping her arms around me. “It’s over,” she said. “We can’t go back.”

And I cried, louder still, because she was right. We couldn’t go back, and even worse, I didn’t know if I wanted to. Because all of it, even my father’s death, had led me here. Rachel was right, we were the same. But it wasn’t a relief, that realization. It was a crushing defeat, and it was all I could do to wrap my arms around her and slump against her body, to let her hold me up.

“I did it for us,” she whispered against my neck.

And there was, somewhere inside me, something that wanted to believe her, that desperately wanted it to be true. To have it be Rachel and me from here on out—no more father figures, no more fathers, no more lovers. But I had seen in the cards what was next, and in it, through my shaking body and haunted mind, I found some relief. And just as my past had found me in the cards, I knew I couldn’t escape the future they had made for me, either. I didn’t have a choice.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


By the time dawn was beginning to spread across the Adirondacks, I was already on the country road, walking in the direction of town. I held my hand out, thumb up, every time I heard a car, but with the sun barely risen, they were few and far between, mostly work trucks already full of people and loaded with ladders on their way to job sites.

When I had been walking for around an hour, a woman dressed in a housekeeping uniform pulled over and rolled down her window.

“Where you headed?” she asked.

I didn’t know.

“Anywhere I can catch a bus,” I said. I had slung my packed bag over my shoulder, my frame weighed down with a backpack as well.

“That’ll be Johnsburg,” she said, reaching across to push open the passenger door from inside. “I can take you most of the way.”

We drove in silence with the hardwoods whipping by outside. Her car smelled of cigarettes, and she continually tapped the ash from the one in her hand out the edge of the window.

“You running from something?” she asked after we had been driving for a few minutes. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. You just look like someone who is running from something.” She gestured at my backpack on the back seat.

“Sort of.”

“Is it a boy? I had to run from a boy once. When a relationship hits the skids—” She whistled and rolled her eyes.

“A bad relationship,” I said.

“You’ll make it. I thought I’d never fully get away, but I did. And he didn’t find me, if that’s what you’re worried about. They always say they’ll find you, but they rarely do. They get bored looking or take up with your sister—in my case, it was my sister—and then—”

She slammed on the brakes to let two deer pass in front of the car; my head nearly hit the dash. I wondered if her seat belts even worked.

“That was close,” she said.

As the deer made their way into the thicket, the stag turned its head to look at me, its black eye glassy and emotionless.