James Hayes was eighty one and still drove his own car every day, still backed out of his driveway with the slow ceremony of a man performing a rite, still checked every mirror twice before changing lanes and once more after, as if the road might have rearranged itself in the meantime.
They came around a bend into a small town she did not know the name of, the kind of town that seemed assembled from the same few pieces: a diner, a gas station, a brick building with a flag out front, houses set back behind thin lawns. The speed limit dropped suddenly, the way it always did in such places, the sign appearing almost as an afterthought beside the road. Sarah lifted her foot before she reached it. The car settled from fifty to thirty without a sound of protest, the needle falling smoothly, her hands steady on the wheel.
Her father noticed at once. He always noticed. "You still slow before the sign," he said, and there was approval in it, the quiet kind he gave sparingly, the kind that had once been the whole currency of her childhood.
"I learned from somebody," she said.
He snorted, which was his version of a laugh. "You learned from somebody who told you seventeen thousand things about driving, and you remember perhaps four of them."
"I remember the ones that matter," she said.
They drove on through the town at the lawful pace, past diner windows and parked cars. It was the sort of drive that should have asked nothing of her. Then, in the mirror, she saw it: a patrol car, dark paint, light bar on the roof, pulling out from a side street two cars behind them and settling into the lane.
Something old tightened in her chest. It was not a thought. It was older than thought, a reflex laid down years earlier on a different highway in a different state, in a silver rental car with a Washington plate and a sheriff waiting behind a billboard. Her shoulders went still. Her breathing changed. Her eyes went to the mirror and stayed there, counting the distance, watching for the flash that would turn an ordinary afternoon into something else.
The patrol car followed for half a block. Then it slowed, signaled, and turned away down a cross street, its lights dark the whole time. No siren. No stop. No reason given and none needed, because nothing had happened. The car was gone before she had finished exhaling.
Her father had watched her face, not the mirror. He knew her the way only a parent can, the way that reads a change in breathing as clearly as a sentence. "Are you all right?" he asked.
She thought about the question honestly. She was not all right in the simple sense, the sense of a person who had never been slapped in a booking room or watched a red phone ring on a wall. Some part of her would always tighten at the sight of a patrol car in the mirror. She knew that now and had stopped pretending otherwise. But she was driving her own car on an ordinary road, her father beside her, the speed limit obeyed, the afternoon intact, and the car behind her had simply turned away.
She smiled, and the smile was real, even if it arrived a second later than it once would have. "Eventually," she said, "I will be."
He nodded, satisfied, and looked back out at the road. "Good," he said. "That is the right answer. Eventually is honest. People who say they are fine right away are usually lying to somebody, mostly themselves."
They drove on. The town thinned out behind them. The road opened again into fields and the low autumn light, and her father began telling her, for what she was fairly certain was the four hundredth time, about the correct way to approach a four way stop when the other driver is clearly confused. She listened, and corrected him once, and let him correct her back, and thought that this, too, was a kind of peace: not the absence of the old tightening, but the knowledge that it would pass, and that the road went on past it, mile after mile, toward home.
Chapter Twenty Seven
A Letter With No Return Address
The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, mixed in with the ordinary mail: a bill, a catalog she would throw away, a card from a former colleague. It had no return address. The handwriting on the front was careful and unfamiliar, the letters formed slowly, as if the writer had taken time with each one. Sarah knew whose hand it was before she opened it.