The Narrows (7 page)

From her purse, which she’d tossed haphazardly onto the passenger seat in an effort to leave Tom Schuler’s house as quickly as possible, she produced a small black makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her lap then fumbled with the zipper until the contents spilled into her lap and onto the floor.

“Fuck.”

Get it under control, lady. You’re vibrating like a guitar string.

She leaned forward, the side of her face resting against the steering wheel, and scrounged around in the footwell. When her fingers brushed along the thin, square packets of moist towelettes, she snatched them up and hastily peeled one open, her eyes volleying furtively between her unsteady fingers and the blotchy mask of her face in the rearview mirror. She was attractive and she kept in good shape, exercising several times a week and watching what she ate, yet the visage staring back at her was horrific.

She exhaled nervously then began wiping the streaks of mascara that had leaked from her eyes to the tops of her cheeks. The smell of ammonia burned her nostrils.

Fifteen years of marriage and this is what I do.
Again, she unleashed a shaky breath, this time certain she could smell Tom Schuler on her. Her mouth was full of him. His perspiration was commingled with hers, too, clinging guiltily to her body like an illness. Moreover, she could still feel him inside her—a tender, vacant sensation nestled between her thighs that, even now, simultaneously nauseated and excited her.
Fifteen years of marriage.

She and Evan had dated on and off throughout high school, and even for a while after graduation. They’d fumbled through their fair shares of other relationships—Evan had even gotten engaged to a woman from Delaware, though it had never culminated in marriage—before reconnecting. At that point she had been thirty, and although she did not feel the motherly desire to have children, she knew that a woman in her forties had a better chance of being killed by terrorists than getting married. Or so she’d heard. Whatever the case, forty had only been a scant decade away at that point, and the notion that she might be doomed to spend her life unmarried and alone terrified her.

She confessed her desire to Evan on more than just a few occasions, but Evan Quedentock, high school football star and the life of the party (as long as the party was in a bar with his lifelong friends), was not the type of man to be easily persuaded. They lived together, took care of each other. What more did she want?
Marriage,
she’d informed him.
Commitment.
To this, Evan would always chuckle and ask what more commitment there was than a man forking over his paycheck every two weeks. It was then that she realized this approach wasn’t going to get her anywhere with him.

Like a sailor tacking for new wind, she decided on a different approach: she lied and told him she was pregnant.
You really want to be responsible for bringing a bastard kid into the world?
That did the trick. They went down to the courthouse the following week and got hitched. It seemed Evan Quedentock could be caught after all; she just had to put the right bait in the right trap.

A week or so after they got married, she had summoned some tears by spraying perfume in her face. She thought she’d done an admirable job telling him she had lost the baby. At the news, Evan had seemed both relieved and a bit disappointed (the latter emotion a surprising revelation to Maggie since she knew Evan, much like her, had no great desire to have children). He had comforted her in his clumsy, brutish way, and that had been the end of it. Fifteen years later, they were still married.

Fifteen years…

Tom was one of Evan’s friends and had been over to the house countless times. The flirtatiousness between them had always been of the innocuous variety, or so Maggie had thought. She had flirted with men in the past but never adulterously. So how had the situation with Tom gotten so goddamn out of hand? Tom had been over at the house one night, drinking too much with Evan. Under the pretense of using the bathroom, he’d followed her into the house while Evan remained on the back porch. Yet he hadn’t used the bathroom; he’d followed her into the kitchen, his shirt partially unbuttoned, and leaned against the refrigerator while they talked in quick, glib, declarative sentences. It wasn’t that he was drop-dead gorgeous or even roguishly handsome—Tom Schuler was a bit too skinny and his face was patchy with old acne scars—but that did not seem to matter to Maggie. For whatever reason, she felt a flutter of uneasiness while he talked to her, his eyes drinking her in. And she found that she
liked
this uneasiness.

Tom had left their house that evening with Maggie’s cell phone number, along with some indistinct promise in his eyes. Later that evening, she had lain awake in bed, staring at the misaligned panels of moonlight playing across the ceiling as Evan snored like an old hunting dog beside her. She wondered what Evan would think if he knew she’d given Tom Schuler her cell phone number. Moreover—and this was the forbidden part, yet at the same time, the part that elicited some childlike glee within her—she wondered what Evan would do if she were to have an affair with Tom Schuler and he found out.

That childlike glee was gone now. Sitting behind the wheel of her husband’s car, cleaning up the smeared streamers of makeup from her face, she felt as obvious as a beacon of light on a darkened coast. Terror enveloped her when she realized that there would be no way to hide the smell of sex from her husband once she got home. Would he leave her? Would he hit her? On both counts, she thought maybe he would.

Tonight’s rendezvous at Crossroads was the culmination of a monthlong game of cat and mouse. Tom had pursued her with regularity, calling her whenever he knew Evan was at work, trying to convince her to meet him for a drink. A few times she promised she would but later backed out, sending him vague texts that suggested conflicting schedules and last-minute chores. If Tom was ever dissuaded by her continual misdirection, he never let on.

Finally, when he proposed they have a few drinks at Crossroads while Evan was on the late shift—strictly platonic, he had assured her—she had agreed. Of course, she did not put any stock in his promise of chastity, and while she was uncertain what her intentions were up until she was taking her clothes off in the downstairs hallway of his house, she had showered, shaved, groomed with meticulous dedication, and spritzed herself with expensive perfume. She had selected her tightest pair of jeans and a loose-fitting blouse that revealed her tanned and freckled cleavage. Just one drink, she’d promised herself, knowing damn well she was a liar before she ever got in the car and drove out to Crossroads on Melville Street.

Maggie reapplied her makeup then ran a brush through her hair. She spied a bottle of perfume on the floor beneath the accelerator, which she scooped up and administered liberally to her neck, hair, shoulders, and breasts. When she finished, she dug her cell phone out of her purse and deleted the call log. To her knowledge, Evan had never snooped through her phone, but she wasn’t about to leave it up to chance.

After she replaced all her fallen cosmetics back in her purse, fixed her hair, and sat behind the wheel staring blankly off into the darkness for some undisclosed amount of time, a warm serenity seemed to overtake her. After a few more minutes, she felt calm enough to drive. Her plan was to get back to the house, take a shower, and crawl into bed before Evan got home from the night shift. With any luck, she could pull it off as though the affair had never happened.

She dropped the gearshift to Drive, readjusted the rearview mirror, then pulled slowly back out onto Full Hill Road. She drove slowly, the car’s headlights cleaving through the muddy darkness. She hated this stretch of Full Hill Road—hated, as a matter of fact, all the wooded roadways that snaked out of downtown and wound up into the rocky foothills of the mountains. Maggie Quedentock did not like to feel like she was alone.

Pressing the accelerator closer to the floor, the Pontiac advanced to a rough gallop, the black woods on either side of the road a smudgy blur. More calmly now, Maggie switched the radio back on and surfed through the stations until she found an old Beach Boys number. It soothed her. When she glanced up at her reflection again in the rearview mirror, she was pleasantly surprised to find a timorous smile on her face.

Something darted out into the road. Maggie saw it only peripherally—the slight, colorless approximation of a person—before she struck it with the car. Simultaneously slamming on the brakes and spinning the steering wheel, the car shuddered then fishtailed. The acrid stench of burning rubber filled her nose.

The car finally came to a stop in the middle of the road. Having achieved a complete 180-degree spin, the vehicle’s headlights now illuminated the road in the direction that she had come. The reek of scorched rubber was hot and suffocating. Shaking, Maggie looked over one shoulder and peered out the dark rectangle of the Pontiac’s rear window. Aside from the few feet of asphalt illuminated in the blood-red glow of the brake lights, the world beyond was pitch-black. For all Maggie knew, she could have been staring off into space.

My God, I felt the fucking impact. If I live to be one hundred, I will never forget what that felt like…what it sounded like…

She fumbled with her seat belt and managed to get it undone. Her heart strumming like a banjo, she opened the car door and staggered dazedly out onto the roadway. She braced herself for the horror of what must surely lay several feet or yards down the road, though she was too terrified to move away from the pool of warm light that issued out of the open car door.

“Hello?” Her voice held the paper-thin quality of an AM radio broadcast.

Something moved in the center of the roadway. Maggie’s body went cold. As her eyes adjusted to the lightlessness, she could see the crumbled form of a small human body, a pair of bare legs folded up into a fetal position. The figure was whitish-blue beneath the glow of the moon, though the tapered swell of its thighs radiated with the sickly red light of the Pontiac’s taillights.

As she watched, the figure’s legs parted. She heard—or thought she heard—a wet, guttural clicking coming from the shape. Even now, with its undeniably human form, Maggie was struggling to convince herself that what she had hit had been a deer or a dog or any such careless, brainless animal that had wandered stupidly out onto the road in the middle of the night…

It’s not a person, it can’t be, that is a fucking whitetail deer, a goddamn stray dog, that is not a person, it isn’t, it’s too fucking small to even…

It was small because it was a
child.
There would be no convincing herself otherwise.

The figure dragged itself across the pavement toward the cusp of the trees, retreating from out of the taillights’ glow. Maggie saw one tiny white foot—five distinct toes splayed—scrabble for purchase on the roadway. The child was injured, probably severely, and she wanted to go to it and attend to it and make sure there wasn’t something she could do to help it, but fear rooted her firmly in place. She was powerless to move.

The bleating of a car horn followed by the blinding dazzle of high beams caused Maggie to scream. She spun around to see a pair of headlights engulfed in a cloud of exhaust barreling toward her. She heard the approaching vehicle’s brakes squeal. The headlights jounced as the vehicle jerked to a sudden stop.

“Help me!” she screamed, frightened by the fear and panic she heard in her voice. She raced toward the driver’s side of the vehicle just as the door popped open. “Please! I need help!”

“Calm down, calm down.” Even in her hysterical state, she could see that the driver was Cal Cordrick. He had a John Deere cap tugged down low on his scalp with a large brass fishhook clipped to the brim and a few days’ growth at his chin. He reached out and placed one hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “That you, Maggie? Maggie Quedentock?”

“Jesus, Cal! Thank God you’re here! I hit—”

“You all right?”

“I hit someone! He’s in the road!”

Cal peered over her shoulder, presumably to examine the queer positioning of the Pontiac in the center of the road. Then he looked back at her, his eyes small and pink and wet, like the leaky yet soulful eyes of hound. Nervously, he rubbed one thumb up and down his prickly chin. “Stay here,” he said, shoving past her.

She turned and watched him walk slowly past the Pontiac. He paused only for a moment to peer into the open door then kept going. To the darkness, Maggie heard him call out, “Is anyone out there? Hello? Anyone need help?” When no answer came, he kicked into a slight jog, his footfalls hollow-sounding on the pavement, until he disappeared into the blackness. Only the sound of his boot heels assured Maggie of his existence.

Cal Cordrick’s footfalls stopped.

Maggie felt something leap in her chest. Silently to herself she counted to ten…or at least planned to; by the time she reached six, she could no longer control her fear. Too easily she could imagine the darkness as an actual living creature, a creature that had just devoured poor Cal Cordrick whole, just as it had seemingly devoured the child she’d hit.

“Cal!” she shrieked, the timbre of her voice shattering the silence. “Cal! Cal Cordrick!”

Nothing…nothing…

“Cal!”

Cal’s shape reemerged from the darkness, though for one horrific second she thought the figure was that of the person she’d struck with her car. Maybe it wasn’t the darkness that was alive after all. Maybe it was the thing she’d hit that had devoured Cal and was now coming back for her.