Mile 81

4. THE LUSSIER FAMILY (’11 Expedition)

Six-year-old Rachel Lussier shouted, “Look, Mommy! Look, Daddy! It’s the horse-lady! See her trailer? See it?”

Carla wasn’t surprised Rache was the first one to spot the trailer, even though she was sitting in the backseat. Rache had the sharpest eyes in the family; no one else even came close. X-ray vision, her father sometimes said. It was one of those jokes that isn’t quite a joke.

Johnny, Carla, and four-year-old Blake all wore glasses; everyone on both sides of their family wore glasses; even Bingo, the family dog, probably needed them. Bing was apt to run into the screen door when he wanted to go out. Only Rache had escaped the curse of myopia. The last time she’d been to the optometrist, she’d read the whole damn eye chart, bottom line and all. Dr. Stratton had been amazed. “She could qualify for jet fighter training,” he told Johnny and Carla.

Johnny said, “Maybe someday she will. She’s certainly got a killer instinct when it comes to her little brother.”

Carla had thrown him an elbow for that, but it was true. She had heard there was less sibling rivalry when the sibs were of different sexes. If so, Rachel and Blake were the exception that proved the rule. Carla sometimes thought the most common two words she heard these days were started it. Only the gender of the pronoun opening the sentence varied.

The two of them had been pretty good for the first hundred miles of this trip, partially because visiting with Johnny’s parents always put them in a good mood and mostly because Carla had been careful to fill up the no-man’s-land between Rachel’s booster seat and Blake’s car seat with toys and coloring books. But after their snack-and-pee stop in Augusta, the squabbling had begun again. Probably because of the ice cream cones. Giving kids sugar on a long car trip was like squirting gasoline on a campfire, Carla knew this, but you couldn’t refuse them everything.

In desperation, Carla had started a game of Plastic Fantastic, serving as judge and awarding points for lawn gnomes, wishing wells, statues of the Blessed Virgin, etc. The problem was the turnpike, where there were lots of trees but very few vulgar roadside displays. Her sharp-eyed six-year-old daughter and her sharp-tongued four-year-old boy were beginning to renew old grudges when Rachel saw the horse-trailer pulled over just a little shy of the old Mile 81 rest stop.

“Want to pet the horsie again!” Blake shouted. He began thrashing in his car seat, the world’s smallest break-dancer. His legs were now just long enough to kick the back of the driver’s seat, which Johnny found très annoying.

Somebody tell me again why I wanted to have kids, he thought. Somebody remind me just what I was thinking. I know it made sense at the time.

“Blakie, don’t kick Daddy’s seat,” Johnny said.

“Want to pet the horrrrsie!” Blake yelled. And fetched the back of the driver’s seat an especially good one.

“You are such a babykins,” Rachel said, safe from brother-kicks on her side of the backseat DMZ. She spoke in her most indulgent big-girl tone, the one always guaranteed to infuriate Blakie.

“I AM AIN’T A BABYKINS!”

“Blakie,” Johnny began, “if you don’t stop kicking Daddy’s seat, Daddy will have to take his trusty butcher knife and amputate Blakie’s little feetsies at the ank—”

“She’s broken down,” Carla said. “See the traffic cones? Pull over.”

“Hon, that’d mean the breakdown lane. Not such a good idea.”

“No, just swing around and park beside those other two cars. On the ramp. There’s room and you won’t be blocking anything because the rest area’s closed.”

“If it’s okay with you, I’d like to get back to Falmouth before d—”

“Pull over.” Carla heard herself using the DEFCON-1 tone that brooked no refusal, even though she knew it was a bad idea; how many times lately had she heard Rache using that exact same tone on Blake? Using it until the little guy broke down in tears?

Switching off the she-who-must-be-obeyed voice and speaking more softly, Carla said, “That woman was nice to the kids.”

They had pulled into Damon’s next to the horse-trailer when they stopped for ice cream. The horse-lady (nearly as big as a horse herself) was leaning against the trailer, eating an ice cream cone of her own and feeding something to a very handsome beastie. To Carla the treat looked like a Kashi granola bar.

Johnny had one kid by each hand and tried to walk them past, but Blake was having none of that. “Can I pet your horse?” he asked.

“Cost you a quarter,” the big lady in the brown riding skirt had said, and then grinned at Blakie’s crestfallen expression. “Nah, I’m only kiddin. Here, hold this.” She thrust her drippy ice cream cone at Blake, who was too surprised to do anything but take it. Then she lifted him up to where he could pet the horse’s nose. DeeDee regarded the wide-eyed child calmly, sniffed at the horse-lady’s dripping cone, decided it wasn’t what she wanted, and allowed her nose to be stroked.

“Whoa, soft!” Blake said. Carla had never heard him speak with such simple awe. Why haven’t we ever taken these kids to a petting zoo? she wondered, and immediately put it down on her mental to-do list.

“Me, me, me!” Rachel bugled, dancing around impatiently.

The big lady set Blake down. “Lick that ice cream while I lift your sister,” she told him, “but don’t get cooties on it, okay?”

Carla thought of telling Blake that eating after people, especially strange people, was not okay. Then she saw Johnny’s bemused grin and thought what the hell. You sent your kids to schools that were basically germ factories. You drove them for hundreds of miles on the turnpike, where any drunk maniac or texting teenager could cross the median strip and wipe them out. Then you forbade them a lick on a partially used ice cream? That was taking the car seat and bike-helmet mentality a little too far, maybe.

The horse-lady lifted Rachel so Rachel could pet the horse’s nose. “Wowie! Nice!” Rachel said. “What’s her name?”

“DeeDee.”

“Great name! I love you, DeeDee!”

“I love you, too, DeeDee,” the horse-lady said, and put a big old smackeroo on DeeDee’s nose. That made them all laugh.

“Mom, can we have a horse?”

“Yes!” Carla said warmly. “When you’re twenty-six!”

This made Rachel put on her mad-face (puckered brow, puffed cheeks, lips down to a stitch), but when the horse-lady laughed, Rache gave up and laughed, too.

The big woman bent down to Blakie, her hands on knees covered by her riding skirt. “Can I have my ice cream cone back, young fella?”

Blake held it out. When she took it, he began to lick his fingers, which were covered with melting pistachio.

“Thank you,” Carla told the horse-lady. “That was very kind of you.” Then, to Blake, “Let’s get you inside and cleaned up. After that you can have ice cream.”

“I want what she’s having,” Blake said, and that made the horse-lady laugh some more.

Johnny insisted that they eat their cones in a booth, because he didn’t want them decorating the Expedition with pistachio ice cream. When they finished and went out, the horse-lady was gone.

Just one of those people you meet — occasionally nasty, more often nice, sometimes even terrific — along the road and never see again.

Only here she was, or at least here her truck was, parked in the breakdown lane with traffic cones neatly placed behind her trailer. And Carla was right, the horse-lady had been nice to the kids. So thinking, Johnny Lussier made the worst — and last — decision of his life.

He flipped his blinker and pulled onto the ramp as Carla had suggested, parking ahead of Doug Clayton’s Prius, which was still flashing its four-ways, and beside the muddy station wagon. He put the transmission in park but left the engine running.

“I want to pet the horsie,” Blake said.

“I also want to pet the horsie,” Rachel said in the haughty lady-of-the-manor tone of voice she had picked up God knew where. It drove Carla crazy, but she refused to say anything. If she did, Rache would use it all the more.

“Not without the lady’s permission,” Johnny said. “You kids sit right where you are for now. You too, Carla.”

“Yes, master,” Carla said in the zombie voice that always made the kids laugh.

“Very funny, Easter bunny.”

“The cab of her truck’s empty,” Carla said. “They all look empty. Do you think there was an accident?”

“Don’t know, but nothing looks dinged up. Hang on a minute.”

Johnny Lussier got out, went around the back of the Expedition he would never finish paying for, and walked to the cab of the Dodge Ram. Carla hadn’t seen the horse-lady, but he wanted to make sure she wasn’t lying on the seat, maybe trying to live through a heart attack. (A lifelong jogger, Johnny secretly believed a heart attack was waiting by age forty-five at the latest for anyone who weighed even five pounds over the target weight prescribed by Medicine.Net.)

She wasn’t sprawled on the seat (of course not, a woman that big Carla would have seen even lying down), and she wasn’t in the trailer, either. Only the horse, who poked her head out and sniffed Johnny’s face.

“Hello there. ” For a moment the name didn’t come, then it did. “. DeeDee. How’s the old feedbag hanging?”

He patted her nose, then headed back up the ramp to investigate the other two vehicles. He saw there had been an accident of sorts, albeit a very tiny one. The station wagon had knocked over a few of the orange barrels blocking the ramp.

Carla rolled down her window, a thing neither of the kids in back could do because of the lockout feature. “Any sign of her?”

“Nope.”

“Any sign of anyone?”

“Carl, give me a ch—” He saw the cell phones and the wedding ring lying beside the partially open door of the station wagon.

“What?” Carla craned to see.

“Just a sec.” The thought of telling her to lock the doors crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. They were on I-95 in broad daylight, for God’s sake. Cars passing every twenty or thirty seconds, sometimes two or three in a line.

He bent down and picked up the phones, one in each hand. He turned to Carla, and thus did not see the car door opening wider, like a mouth.

“Carla, I think there’s blood on this one.” He held up Doug Clayton’s cracked phone.

“Mom?” Rachel asked. “Who’s in that dirty car? The door’s opening.”

“Come back,” Carla said. Her mouth was suddenly dust-dry. She wanted to yell it, but there seemed to be a stone on her chest. It was invisible but very large. “Someone’s in that car!”

Instead of coming back, Johnny turned and bent to look inside. When he did, the door swung shut on his head. There was a terrible thudding noise. The stone on Carla’s chest was suddenly gone. She drew in breath and screamed out her husband’s name.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Rachel cried. Her voice was high and as thin as a reed. “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

“Daddy!” Blake yelled. He had been inventorying his newest Transformers and now looked around wildly to see where the daddy in question might be.

Carla didn’t think. Her husband’s body was there, but his head was in the dirty station wagon. He was still alive, though; his arms and legs were flailing. She was out of the Expedition with no memory of opening the door. Her own body seemed to be acting on its own, her stunned brain just along for the ride.

“Mommy, no!” Rachel screamed.

“Mommy, NO!” Blake had no idea of what was going on, but he knew it was bad. He began to cry and struggle in his car seat’s webwork of straps.

Carla grabbed Johnny around the waist and pulled with the crazy superstrength of adrenaline. The door of the station wagon came partway open and blood ran over the footing in a little waterfall. For one awful moment she saw her husband’s head, lying on the station wagon’s muddy seat and cocked crazily to one side. Even though he was still trembling in her arms, she understood (in one of those lightning-flashes of clarity that can come even during a perfect storm of panic) that it was how hanging victims looked when they were cut down. Because their necks were broken. In that brief, searing moment — that shutterflash glimpse — she thought he looked stupid and surprised and ugly, all the essential Johnny out of him, and knew he was already dead, trembling or not. It was how a kid looked after hitting the rocks instead of the water when he dived. How a woman who had been impaled by her steering wheel looked after her car slammed into a bridge abutment. It was how you looked when disfiguring death came at you out of nowhere.

The car door slammed viciously shut. Carla still had her arms wrapped around her husband’s waist, and when she was yanked forward, she had another lightning-flash of clarity.

It’s the car, you have to stay away from the car!

She let go of Johnny’s midsection just a moment too late. A sheaf of her hair fell against the door and was sucked in. The top of her head smacked against the car before she could tear free. Suddenly the top of her head was burning as the thing ate into her scalp.

Run! she tried to scream at her often troublesome but undeniably bright daughter. Run and take Blakie with you!

But before she could even begin to articulate the thought, her mouth was gone.

Only Rachel saw the station wagon slam shut on her daddy’s head like a Venus flytrap on a bug, but both of them saw their mother somehow pulled through the muddy door as if it were a curtain. They saw one of her mocs come off, they got a flash of her pink toenails, and then she was gone. A moment later, the white car lost its shape and clenched itself like a fist. Through their mother’s open window, they heard a crunching sound.

“Wha’ that?” Blakie screamed. His eyes were streaming tears and his lower lip was lathered with snot. “Wha’ that, Rachie, wha’ that, wha’ that?”

Their bones, Rachel thought. She was only six years old, and not allowed to go to PG-13 movies or watch them on TV (let alone R; her mother said R stood for Raunchy), but she knew that was the sound of their bones breaking.

The car wasn’t a car. It was some kind of monster.

“Where mommy-n-daddy?” Blakie asked, turning his large eyes — now made even larger by his tears — on her. “Where mommy-n-daddy, Rachie?”

He sounds like he’s two again, Rachel thought, and for maybe the first time in her life, she felt something other than irritation (or, when extremely tried by his behavior, outright hate) for her baby brother. She didn’t think this new feeling was love. She thought it was something even bigger. Her mom hadn’t been able to say anything in the end, but if she’d had time, Rachel knew what it would have been: take care of Blakie.

He was thrashing in his car seat. He knew how to undo the straps, but in his panic had forgotten how.

Rachel opened her seat belt, slid out of her booster seat, and tried to do it for him. One of his flailing hands caught her cheek and administered a ringing slap. Under normal circumstances that would have earned him a hard punch on the shoulder (and a time-out in her room, where she would have sat staring at the wall in a boiling fugue of fury), but now she just grabbed his hand and held it down.

“Stop it! Let me help you! I can get you out, but not if you do that!”

He stopped thrashing, but kept on crying. “Where Daddy? Where Mommy? I want Mommy!”

I want her too, asshole, Rachel thought, and undid the car seat straps. “We’re going to get out now, and we’re going to. ”

What? They were going to what? Go up to the restaurant? It was closed, that was why there were orange barrels. That was why the gas pumps in front of the gas station part were gone and there was grass poking out of the empty parking lot.

“We’re going to get away from here,” she finished.

She got out of the car and went around to Blakie’s side. She opened his door but he just looked at her, eyes brimming. “I can’t get out, Rachie, I’ll fall.”

Don’t be such a scaredy-baby, she almost said, then didn’t. This wasn’t the time for that. He was upset enough. She opened her arms and said, “Slide. I’ll catch you.”

He looked at her doubtfully, then slid. Rachel did catch him, but he was heavier than he looked, and they both went sprawling. She got the worst of it because she was on the bottom, but Blakie bumped his head and scraped one hand and began to bawl loudly, this time in pain instead of fear.

“Stop it,” she said, and wriggled out from under him. “Put on your man-pants, Blakie.”

“H-Huh?”

She didn’t answer. She was looking at the two phones lying beside the terrible station wagon. One of them looked broken, but the other —

Rachel edged toward it on her hands and knees, never taking her eyes off the car into which their father and mother had disappeared with terrifying suddenness. As she was reaching toward the good phone, Blakie walked past her toward the station wagon, holding out his scraped hand.

“Mom? Mommy? Come out! I hurted myself. You have to come out n kiss it bet—”

“Stop right where you are, Blake Lussier.”

Carla would have been proud; it was her she-who-must-be-obeyed voice at its most forbidding. And it worked. Blake stopped four feet from the side of the station wagon.

“But I want Mommy! I want Mommy, Rachie!”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the car. “Not now. Help me work this thing.” She knew perfectly well how to work the phone, but she had to distract him.

“Gimme, I can do it! Gimme, Rache!”

She passed it over, and while he examined the buttons, she got up, took him by the back of his Wolverine tee-shirt, and pulled him back three steps. Blake hardly noticed. He found the power button of Julie Vernon’s cell phone and pushed it. The phone beeped. Rachel took it from him, and for once in his dopey little-kid life, Blakie didn’t protest.

She had listened carefully when McGruff the Crime Dog came to talk to them at school (although she knew perfectly well it was only a guy in a McGruff suit), and she did not hesitate now. She punched in 911 and put the phone to her ear. It rang once, then was picked up.

“Hello? My name is Rachel Ann Lussier, and—”

“This call is being recorded,” a man’s voice overrode her. “If you wish to report an emergency, push one. If you wish to report adverse road conditions, push two. If you wish to report a stranded motorist—”

“Rache? Rachie? Where Mommy? Where Da—”

“Shhh!” Rachel said sternly, and pushed 1. It was hard to do. Her hand was trembling and her eyes were all blurry. She realized she was crying. When had she started crying? She couldn’t remember.

“Hello, this is nine-one-one,” a woman said.

“Are you real or another recording?” Rachel asked.

“I’m real,” the woman said, sounding a little amused. “Do you have an emergency?”

“Yes. A bad car ate up our mother and our daddy. It’s at the—”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” the 911 woman advised. She sounded more amused than ever. “How old are you, kiddo?”

“I’m six and a half. My name is Rachel Ann Lussier, and a car, a bad car—”

“Listen, Rachel Ann or whoever you are, I can trace this call. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. Now just hang up and I won’t have to send a policeman to your house to paddle your—”

“They’re dead, you stupid phone person!” Rachel shouted into the phone, and at the d-word, Blakie began to cry again.

The 911 woman didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, in a voice no longer amused: “Where are you, Rachel Ann?”

“At the empty restaurant! The one with the orange barrels!”

Blakie sat down and put his arms over his face. That hurt Rachel in a way she had never been hurt before. It hurt her deep in her heart.

“That’s not enough information,” the 911 lady said. “Can you be a little more specific, Rachel Ann?”

Rachel didn’t know what specific meant, but she knew what she was seeing: the back tire of the station wagon, the one closest to them, was melting a little. A tentacle of what looked like liquid rubber was moving slowly across the pavement toward Blakie.

“I have to go,” Rachel said. “We have to get away from the bad car.”

She dragged Blake to his feet, staring at the melting tire. The tentacle of rubber started to go back where it had come from (because it knows we’re out of reach, she thought), and the tire started to look like a tire again, but that wasn’t good enough for Rachel. She kept dragging Blake down the ramp and toward the turnpike.

“Where we goin, Rachie?”

I don’t know.

“Away from that car.”

“I want my Transformers!”

“Not now, later.” She kept a tight hold on Blake and kept backing, down toward the turnpike where the occasional traffic was whizzing by at seventy and eighty miles an hour.

Nothing is as piercing as a child’s scream; it’s one of nature’s more efficient survival mechanisms. Pete Simmons’s sleep had already thinned to little more than a doze, and when Rachel screamed at the 911 lady, he heard it and finally woke up all the way.

He sat up, winced, and put a hand to his head. It ached, and he knew what that sort of ache was: the dreaded HANGOVER. His tongue tasted furry, and his stomach was blick. Not I’m-gonna-hurl blick, but blick, just the same.

Thank God I didn’t drink any more, he thought, and got to his feet. He went to one of the mesh-covered windows to see who was yelling. He didn’t like what he saw. Some of the orange barrels blocking the entrance ramp to the rest area had been knocked over, and there were cars down there. Quite a few of them.

Then he saw a couple of kids — a little girl in pink pants and a little boy wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. He caught just a glimpse of them, enough to tell that they were backing away — as if something had scared them — and then they disappeared behind what looked to Pete like a horse-trailer.

Something was wrong. There had been an accident or something, although nothing down there looked like an accident. His first impulse was to get away from here in a hurry, before he got caught up in whatever had happened. He grabbed his saddlebag and started toward the kitchen and the loading dock beyond. Then he stopped. There were kids out there. Little kids. Way too little to be close to a fast road like I-95 on their own, and he hadn’t seen any adults.

Gotta be grownups, didn’t you see all those cars?

Yes, he’d seen the cars, and a truck hooked up to a horse-trailer, but no grownups.

I have to go out there. Even if I get in trouble, I have to make sure those stupid kids don’t get smeared all over the turnpike.

Pete hurried to the Burger King’s front door, found it locked, and asked himself what would have been Normie Therriault’s question: Hey afterbirth, did your mother have any kids that lived?

Pete turned and pelted for the loading dock. Running made his headache worse, but he ignored it. He placed his saddlebag at the edge of the concrete platform, lowered himself, and dropped. He landed stupid, banged his tailbone, and ignored that, too. He got up, and flashed a longing look toward the woods. He could just disappear. Doing so might save him oh so much grief down the line. The idea was miserably tempting. This wasn’t like the movies, where the good guy always made the right decision without thinking. If somebody smelled vodka on his breath —

“Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus-jumped-up-Rice-Krispies-Christ.”

Why had he ever come here?

Holding Blakie firmly by the hand, Rachel walked him all the way to the end of the ramp. Just as they got there, a double-box semi blasted by at seventy-five miles an hour. The wind blew their hair back, rippled their clothes, and almost knocked Blakie over.

“Rachie, I’m scared! We’re not supposed to go in the road!”

Tell me something I don’t know, Rachel thought.

At home they weren’t supposed to go any farther than the end of the driveway, and there was hardly any traffic on Beeman Lane in Falmouth. The traffic on the turnpike was far from constant, but the cars that did come along were going superfast. Besides, where was there to go? They might be able to walk in the breakdown lane, but it would be horribly risky. And there were no exits here, only woods. They could go back to the restaurant, but they would have to walk past the bad car if they did.

A red sports car swept past, the guy behind the wheel blaring his horn in a constant WAAAAAAAA that made her want to cover her ears.

Blake was tugging her, and Rachel let herself be tugged. At one side of the ramp were guardrail posts. Blakie sat down on one of the thick cables running between them and covered his eyes with his chubby hands. Rachel sat next to him. She didn’t know what else to do.