John Hawthorne stood where he had started the day, on the rise looking east from his high place in the San Gabriels. Something was waking inside him, something that had been asleep for a long time.

  His daughter. His Lana, whose name he did not speak aloud, whose face was still a child’s in his mind. She was out there somewhere, a long, long way away, waiting in a blue house by the ocean. He’d known her from the first sentence, the first word. I’m all tucked in . . . I’m all tucked in and ready for dreaming. Her voice, her soft, tired voice, so much like the voice of the little girl he had once known. Time was distance, and distance was time, and her voice had crumbled both in an instant, pulling down the years and miles between them, so that she might have been standing right next to him as her message played, whispering in his ear as she had on the night she’d left. I need you. My son needs you. His daughter, the child. His daughter, the woman. His daughter, the mother.

  His daughter.

  He got down on his knees. That unremembered, unforgotten night was suddenly close, very close. It was this night, it was the only night, it was the night that dwelled inside of him, where the season was always winter and the darkness never gave way to dawn. He closed his eyes, and he was there. He opened them, and he was there. Past and present, the child and the mother, together as one. He laid his hand flat on the ground, and it was both cold and warm to the touch, cold as it had been, warm as it still was, with the memory of the sun. Under the soil, bones creaked and groaned like branches in a bitter wind. It was time to put those bones to rest. He sat on his knees in the dark, and the ghost of that old lullaby tiptoed the air around him, heard but unsung:

  Good night, good night.

  The stars are out, the moon is bright.

  Good night, little one, sleep tight.

  John rose to his feet. He walked to the embankment’s edge and stared out over the desert’s wild carnival of lights, breathing in the changed landscape as he did the smoke that carried on the wind. Flashes and flickers described Victorville and Adelanto in a fevered dream. Buildings burned like scattered campfires. Roads that had once been clogged with rush-hour traffic were now graveyards crowded with steel tombstones. The I-15 throbbed and pulsed, purpling the sky. There would be people on the roads. Everywhere there was blacktop there would be people, stranded and wandering, wounded and desperate, breeding violence and death out of their fear.

  So he would take the back roads.

  He would move in the shadows, the black space between those fevery bright lines, and he would go to her. He would find that blue house on the Atlantic, and he would open its door. Whatever it took him. Wherever it took him. He would go to her.

  She had called, and he would answer.

  Standing on the rise, looking east from his high place in the San Gabriels, John Hawthorne spoke his daughter’s name.

  He spoke it as a promise.

  “Lana . . .”

  ???

  The night, which should now have been afternoon, deepened as clouds rafted over the mountains. There was nothing striking or unusual about the clouds. They were big feathered pillows, the kind that always seemed to be lazing around in the Southern Californian sky. But in the dark of that not-afternoon, those in Wrightwood who saw the clouds did not find it so easy to look away.

  Carla Vasquez, who drove the school bus that Mariah had seen rocking on its axles, was rocking again, this time on a swing in the playground of Wrightwood Elementary. She lived in Rialto, way down in San Bernardino Proper, and she was no fool: she knew she wasn’t getting home any time soon. Not that it mattered a great deal—she kept house alone, except for an outdoor cat that would get on fine without her. The swing’s chains whined inside their plastic tubes. Ice melt dripped down her neck, running from a plastic bag that was now mostly full of water. She’d gotten the ice in the teachers’ lounge, this cubbyhole room that always smelled like the latest thing to go bad in its refrigerator. Carla wasn’t allowed in the teachers’ lounge, strictly speaking, but the two geezers in there hadn’t seemed to care. They’d been engaged in some vigorous extracurricular activity on the couch (one of them had been on the couch, anyway), and they hadn’t even glanced over as Carla filled her bag at the machine and walked back out to nurse the lump on her noggin. The lump was there courtesy of that little pendejo Peter Casanova and a AA battery loaded into a slingshot. It had been dark on the bus, and loud, everyone shaking their seats and screaming to be let out. Carla had tried to keep the calm—she really had—but the district wasn’t picking up on the radio no matter how many times she tried. And the noise . . . the noise. Like an angry bee colony between her ears. Then a voice had risen above the rest, a cracking, exuberant voice crying “BOMBS AWAY!”, and a sharp white pain had exploded in the back of Carla’s skull, sending all the bees to sleep. But not Carla. No. She hadn’t gone to sleep. She’d gone back to catch the culprit, and catch the culprit she had. She’d found Peter’s slingshot wrapped in his grubby white fist and given him a good one in return. A few good ones, as a matter of fact. Too many good ones, if she was being completely honest. But kids needed to be taught accountability for their actions, and the job was clearly not getting done at Casa del Casanova. Carla stopped swinging as a shadow rolled over the playground. She looked up to discover a cloud. Perhaps it was the memory of that first shadow, the great and unthinkable one that had fallen over the bus on the way to school, or perhaps it was the ice water running down her neck, but she shivered as she watched the cloud pass on its slow, easterly course. She shivered, and she thought, Did I kill that little boy? Did I beat him dead?

  Charles Librook, one of the elderly lovebirds of Wrightwood Elementary teacher’s lounge, was out having a smoke break. Something had slipped inside his head. Was still slipping. It was a curiously physical sensation, like phlegm coming loose after a cough. Not a bad feeling, per se. Just a feeling. Charles taught (or had taught) the sixth grade, the only grade from K-6 worth the time in his estimation. Less shoe tying, less hand holding, more learning. That was, if you were able to separate the kids from their phones, something you’d think was tantamount to open-heart surgery from the way this generation reacted. Which was why he’d bought a rumpled witch hat— à la Hogwarts—for the kids to put their phones in. The Holding Hat, he called it, and those caught withholding from the Holding Hat had to wear the big shaggy thing like a dunce cap for one full hour, phones and all. Sad! Well, old Mr. HH had not needed to make an appearance this morning. The grand event of the day, the grand event of all days—the end of days, one might say—had taken place before Wrightwood’s little witches and wizards could arrive, and thank the cosmos for small favors. If school had been in session for the big moment, this place would have turned into a prison camp. Or an orphanage. Charles took a drag on his Salem and let the smoke unwind into the sky, which was sharing itself with a passing cloud. He would have smoked in the lounge if not for dear asthmatic Isaac, who had been a close friend for a long time but never this kind of friend . . . though Charles had wondered on occasion since his wife’s passing. He’d wondered quite a lot, to tell the truth. He continued to watch the cloud, feeling obscurely grateful for it. There was a peacefulness to the cloud, an easy, unbothered calm. Are you sure you’re smoking a cigarette, Chuck? Are you sure that isn’t a big fat dooby you’ve got pinched between your fingers? Because, my good fellow, you are high. Charles blinked in amazement. High he was. And why was that? Simple. You have someone waiting for you. Yes. Yes, that was it. He had someone waiting for him again, and that was a little thing, but a little thing can be enough to make everything all right. Charles flicked away his cigarette, thinking of Isaac on the couch, Isaac who had found him in the dark, and what was this strange tightening in his pants? No. It couldn’t be. Not already. Not for a withered old duck like Charles Librook, whose erections visited as rarely (and as briefly) as his relatives. “You know how the saying goes,” he said, turning back to the lounge with a soft, amused laugh. “Make hay while the sun shines.” He just hoped the television would stay off. Cheap thing must have gotten its wires crossed, because it kept turning on.

  Lisa Merrew, nine years old and wearing blue overalls over a lacy white sleeveless shirt (very boyladyish, as her mother had said that morning), was sitting on the doorstep of her dark house waiting for her parents to come home. All the houses on her cul-de-sac were dark and silent. In the beginning, crazy Mr. Maddox had been shooting guns in his backyard—ratatat, ratatat, ratatat—and the noise had made her want to wrap herself up and disappear, but as bad as it had been, it was better than no noise. No noise made her black little cul-de-sac feel like a DEAD END, two words that printed themselves on her mind in big, bold caps. Lampposts had flicked awake everywhere else in town, but here they remained unlit. The entry light wouldn’t turn on in Lisa’s house, either, so she assumed the power must’ve been knocked out on the whole block (something that had happened once during a thunderstorm). No way was she going inside to sit in the dark, all alone. At least out here there were stars—or there had been, until a stupid thieving cloud stole them all. Lisa hated that cloud, wanted to throw her phone at it, but if she did that, then her parents would have no way to reach her. She tried calling them again. No answer. No ring, even. It was like one of those movies where somebody drops a rock down a well and you never hear the rock hit bottom—just silence, and silence, and silence.

  Lisa turned on Snapchat, which seemed to be working well enough, and took a picture of herself sitting in front of her open door. The flash whitened her face, giving her a ghostly look. She captioned the photo—sitting here like what do I do—and then checked her friends’ stories. She didn’t have many friends on Snapchat because she wasn’t allowed to add people she didn’t know in real life, and the only ones posting now were her cousin Kaileen who lived in Los Angeles and her grownup stepbrother Joseph who went to school in Laverne. The videos that Kaileen posted were all shaky-scared and super-bright, full of fires and smoke and shooting sounds—like everyone in Los Angeles was crazy Mr. Maddox. Watching Kaileen’s videos reminded Lisa of being on the bus, and Lisa didn’t like thinking of the bus. When she thought of the bus, she saw the bus driver pushing Peter Casanova down into his seat and telling him, “I’ll teach you some accountability, young man,” as the other kids shoved open the doors and ran off screaming. The slingshot had been a mean thing to do, but if the bus driver had seen Peter as he did it . . . if she had seen how mixed up he was between sobbing and laughing, maybe she wouldn’t have hit him so much. At first they’d only been light slaps, but then they’d gotten harder and heavier, and by the time Lisa got to the front of the bus they’d begun to sound different. Crunchy. That was the word. Lisa looked up and imagined the bus driver marching toward her down the DEAD END, mumbling, “I’ll teach you some accountability, young lady.”

  Lisa shuddered. She clicked away from Kaileen’s story and checked on Joseph’s. His was quiet, but just as awful in its own way. He’d posted picture after picture, each one pitch black and captioned with the same question: where am I? As Lisa flipped through them, her hands began to tremble and she lost her grip on the phone. It slipped between her legs, and when she picked it back up, her finger bumped the camera button and her face appeared on the screen. Tears streaked her cheeks. Her chin wobbled. A soft blue light shone behind her. She got up. Turned. The living room flatscreen was on, and something about that was wrong, very wrong, but oh . . . a little TV sounded so right. Wiping her cheeks with her arm, Lisa went into the house.

  The clouds rolled in and in over Wrightwood.

  For Mac Landon, out barbequing steaks on the grill in an apron that said COOK LIKE A MAN, the clouds were a confirmation of some unadmitted fear. His wife and two young children were asleep in bed, snuggled around the iPad; he should have been glad they were resting— after this morning, they needed as much repose as they could get—but he wasn’t glad. God help him, he wasn’t. As he looked up at the cloud moving above, an odd but troubling thought passed darkly over his mind: what if they don’t wake up to eat?

  Several houses down from Mac’s cookout, a three-year-old named Danny Brown caught a whiff of steak through his cracked window and opened the front door to investigate. He was a sensitive boy, easily upset by change of any sort. He’d once burst into startled tears at the sight of his dad’s shaved mustache. Last week, when his babysitter dyed her hair black and cut it short, he’d hidden from her in the closet. He’d hidden from her again today, furious with her for turning off the sun so early, but now she was snoozing and he was hungry. He tiptoed down the steps. In his head was a clear picture of how a night sky was supposed to look—big and glittering, like a pirate rock, the kind that was ugly on the outside but full of secret treasure once you split it open.

  The sky wasn’t glittering, though. He took one confused look at the clouds overhead and ran back into the house, where he crawled onto the couch and buried his head in his babysitter’s lap. She didn’t move, but she was warm, and warm was exactly what she was supposed to be. Danny slept. Static hissed on the television.

  With seventy-seven years under her belt, Elizabeth Thorne liked to say she was just one seven short of a jackpot. In her old age, she’d learned not to fret too much about little things like impending doom. But these clouds filled her with a superstitious dread that even the darkening of the sky had not. She looked up from her rosewood table by the window, where she was playing solitaire, and thought, It’s not over yet. Whatever’s happening, it’s not over.

  The television flicked to life in Nicholas Krauter’s dark bedroom. Its glow fell over Matthew Krauter, who was holding his son under the covers, trying to warm a body that would never be warm again. Matthew blinked up at the screen. On it was a boy, who was standing very still. Standing and weeping, with moonlight for eyes. The boy’s tears left thick, shining tracks down his cheeks and chest, which was naked and starved and ghoulishly white—the chest of a Holocaust victim discarded into an open grave. The rest of him was just as naked, and that wasn’t right. Little boys weren’t supposed to be on TV without clothes, and they weren’t supposed to be so sad, either.

  Looking at the boy made Matthew feel bad, and he didn’t want to feel bad; he wanted to be alone with his son.

  “Go away,” he said. “Get out of here.”

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  The boy shook his head. If Matthew had still been capable of fear, he would have been afraid to discover that the child on the TV could hear him. But grief is a cannibal; it kills and eats all other emotions, and when it runs out of family members to feed on, it consumes itself and leaves nothing behind, for in the end not even grief can survive its own appetite.

  “I said go away!” Matthew shouted, sitting up and throwing his phone at the television.

  The screen cracked, but the boy remained, his weeping face fractured into jagged pieces. One of those pieces—his mouth—moved. The speakers crackled with static, and in the static a voice took shape. Matthew threw off the covers and jumped out of bed, dragging the television off its stand before the boy on the TV could form his first word. The set smashed onto the floor with a crunch, and the room became silent. Matthew turned back to the bed, but he didn’t make it there. His legs tangled around something soft, and he fell. He’d tripped over Nicholas’s green Billabong backpack—the one Nicholas had forgotten, the one he’d been coming home for. As Matthew took it in his arms, the final, tenuous thread holding his mind together snapped. His thoughts spun away like wild Ferris wheels, looping back to the note on the door. He was hurting. I helped him. If you want to talk, you know where I am. Matthew nodded. Yes. He wanted to talk. He wanted to ask John Hawthorne just how and why he had been with Nicholas in the first place, and what John had meant when he said he’d helped. It seemed to Matthew that John hadn’t helped his son one bit.

  Matthew got up. He slung Nicholas’s backpack over his shoulders without realizing he was doing so, then went to the bed and kissed Nicholas on the cheek. The denim jacket his boy had been wrapped inside was tangled in the sheets. Matthew picked the jacket up. John might want it back. It belonged to him, after all.

  The clouds rolled in as Matthew Krauter walked out to answer his neighbor’s invitation, and in the front yard of the Harding household, Peter Harding’s fixed grin began to slump. Clouds did not mesh with his idea of a beautiful morning. He dropped the gardening hose on the overflowing lawn and slogged to the house in his Birkenstocks. A short while later, he came out with a length of clothesline, which he tied to one of the rafters on the porch. As he climbed onto the patio table and looped the clothesline around his neck, his wife sipped at a glass that had been empty for some time. She gazed up at the sky and wondered if it was going to rain.

  She hoped so.

  California could use a break from the sun.

  ???

  Mariah had been lying when she told John she couldn’t sleep and had come out looking for him. Waking up was what she hadn’t been able to do, and she’d been searching for her father . . . or his voice, anyway. Sleep had taken her as soon as she’d shut her eyes, the sticky, membranous kind of slumber that clings like a loose second skin, and at some point she’d climbed out of bed confused and not quite conscious. She could not say what exactly had caused her to get up, except for the vague feeling that she’d lost something important, and that the room’s dark window was somehow responsible for that loss. If she looked out the window, she was sure she would see Musty’s doghouse in the backyard and Mr. Poulter’s house glowing poisonously through its curtain of Yucca trees. The line between childhood and adulthood had dimmed, and in that moment she wanted her father as she hadn’t since she was a little girl. But her phone was nowhere to be found (was in fact sitting on the Trotter’s bar, near the body of Rick Lot), so she’d gone into the living room to use the landline. She hadn’t considered what she was doing. Her simple, aching need to hear her father’s voice had overpowered all thought. Only when she was halfway through dialing his number did she remember: her father had been dead for over ten years. His drinking had undone his liver, which in turn had undone the rest of him, and fast, so fast, only a few months between the shunt and the grave. She’d set the phone gently in its cradle and stood there, blank on the inside, numb. Then she’d seen the light blinking on the answering machine, and she’d pressed the button, because pressing the button seemed like the natural thing to do. Pressing the button made sense.

  Now, nothing made sense.

  Least of all this twisting, fizzing knot in the pit of her stomach. Like morning sickness, but also like . . .

  Like excitement.

  Mariah sat on the couch in John’s borrowed clothes, waiting for him to return from his spot overlooking the desert. She knew about the spot because she’d found him there, standing by his dog’s grave, the last and only time she’d spent the night with him. She hadn’t taken him as the type to get attached to an animal, so it had come as a surprise to learn he spent his mornings out there with Theo. If she were being completely honest, her wanting for him had only grown at the discovery. A man who loved his dog, well, that was some good old-fashioned emotional manipulation right there. What chance did her soft little lady’s heart have?

  But never mind all that. That was the past. What mattered was that he’d gone outside to be alone, and she did not know what she was going to do when he came back. On the other hand, she did not have to guess what he was going to do. In many ways, he was a mystery to her, but there was one thing she was certain about: John Hawthorne was a man who understood a debt.

  Mariah stared at the answering machine, her toes curled in the carpet. That voice. That hauntingly soft woman’s voice, calling from a blue house by the ocean in Haverhill, Maine. I need you. My son needs you . . . oh but I’m tired, Daddy. Come and wake me. John had never spoken of a daughter before, which should have come as no surprise—until recently he hadn’t spoken of his father or brother, either. But this was different. This was what it was like to dig a hole in the desert, to feel your shovel cut through the initial rocky scab of dirt and plunge into warm, wet soil. A daughter. A daughter. Just how deep did John Hawthorne’s past go? How many secrets did he have?

  Mariah had no more time to dwell on it, because the back door slammed open at that moment. The John who walked into the house was a different man from the one who’d left after hearing the message. She didn’t see him—didn’t need to. She could feel the change in the air, crackling like an electrical charge. Purpose. Potential. The hairs on her forearms stood to attention. Her bare toes gripped onto the carpet. It’s such a long way, she thought, and I don’t even have shoes. She sat up straight and grabbed her knees. Where had that thought come from, and why did it feel like the answer to a question she hadn’t asked? The open space inside her, the place where the wind never stopped, was gusting more fiercely than ever before. She watched John leave the bedroom with a duffel bag. He carried it outside, then went down to the basement and brought up two more bags, also full, plus a case of bottled water and dried goods. Canned beans, canned vegetables, a Purina-sized sack of barley. Traveling food. Rambling food, as her good friend Robert Plant might have said. And oh, but she couldn’t help the tingle she felt at the thought of putting behind and going, blowing out the door and just going. The nausea of this morning, the great looming unknown of the night . . . these things were shadows dancing on the walls of her mind, frightening and uncertain, but in the midst of them was desire, desire like a candle flame fanned by secret wind. It had always been there, but it had taken the dark for her to see it. So what if she had no shoes? The world had no sun, and a world without sun was a world without time, for without the day there were no days and without days there were no weeks or months or years. No past. No future. Only now. Only the moment, this moment, and what a liberating, freeing thing, to never need to ask the time because the answer would always stay the same. It was time. No more tomorrows. No more excuses. It was time.

  John walked past her as if she were not there, and went into a small room with a reading lamp and a desk. He came out holding an atlas, and she observed wonderingly that he’d left the lamp on behind him. When John Hawthorne started forgetting to turn off lights, you knew big things were afoot.

  Are you sure? Is this really a road you want to take?

  Yes. Yes. God, yes.

  Or so she thought.

  Mariah got off the couch and followed John out of the house. The pickup’s keys had been snatched off their hook; seeing that they were gone tightened her chest, squeezed her stomach, took the breath out of her throat. John carried the first load across the driveway. His truck was a mean-looking thing. It had a grill like dungeon bars, and its black body was as bruised and dented as a battle-hardened knight’s armor. The original make was an F-250, but it had been repurposed for a dozen different jobs and refitted with new parts as necessary, from a supersized bed to a fresh-off-the-stove V8 engine. It was a mongrel of a truck, a Frankenstein’s monster bred to prowl the back roads.

  It had some prowling to do now.

  Mariah hoisted the water cases and marched them past John, who was returning for another load. He did not look at her, but he did not try to stop her either. She dropped the water in the truck. Halfway back to the house, she froze as the bushes on the hillside began to shake and snap violently. An unreasonable but nonetheless convincing thought fluttered through her mind, like a crow startled from its perch: the night was coming alive. It was coming alive to stop them from leaving. In that moment, if the stars themselves had started to laugh, she would not have been surprised. The clouds might have become grinning skulls, empty black sockets for eyes, and it would have been nothing less than what she expected.

  But it was only a man.

  He came stumbling out of the bushes like a drunk, except Mariah had seen many drunk men in her trade, and no amount of alcohol had ever done this. No. This was the work of sheer, simple sorrow. Not even Rick, with his torn mouth and his ruined, drooping left side, had looked as bad as this stranger, hunched and staggering under his heavy green backpack. An unbuttoned, dark blue denim jacket (John’s?) dangled loosely from his fist. He wore a blood-stained workingman’s shirt, and his slacks were full of thorns—pickers, Mariah thought distantly, my mom called those kinds of thorns pickers, and I never understood why. His calf-high white socks bristled with pickers, too. But his face had the most thorns of all, and not the kind that could be pulled out. It was stuck through, twisted and pinned up in random places. Mariah had not known so much pain could fit on one face. Or that a voice could stretch so far without tearing.

  “Joooooohhhhnnnnn. What did you do to my sonnnn?”

  John picked up the last of the food and started for the truck. The man grabbed for him, missed, and wobbled like a bike caught in the slipstream of a car. John walked past Mariah, who had not moved from the middle of the driveway. A palpable chill came off his body. He put the food in the truck and headed back to the house. The man clutched at John again, took his arm, and was dragged off his feet through the gravel. Losing his grip, he sprawled onto his stomach with a groan. The jacket slipped from his hand—it was John’s, no doubt about it. On the back was an enormous red blot with thin, wavy smears radiating out from its perimeter. A bloodstain like a child’s drawing of the sun.

  Mariah thought back to the blood that had been on John’s hands when he’d found her in the bar. Had that blood belonged to this man’s son? What had happened between them? What had led to this moment?

  “What did you do?” the man moaned, flopping over onto his back, turtling himself as he tried to stand. “What did you do?”

  John bent over for the two bags from the basement. That left only the duffel from his bedroom.

  The man started to rise. He was still getting up as John marched by him.

  “You said to come if I wanted to talk, John, and I want to talk.” He found his feet at last, but the way he wobbled suggested he might lose them again at any moment.

  A flood of pity washed over Mariah, and she understood two things at once, the sum of which nearly broke her heart. The first was that her own confusion was nothing next to this man’s. The second was that the man would not find whatever answers he had come to find. He claimed John had told him to come, and maybe that was true, but that had been before the message on the answering machine. The invitation was now closed.

  “You talk to me, John. You tell me what you were doing with my son. You tell me how you helped him.”

  Mariah watched, helpless, as John turned toward the house one last time and the man walked to meet him. This was it, the collision course, the conclusion to this strange, sad back-and-forth. It was coming, and nothing could stop it.

  Then the man surprised her by stopping himself. He wavered in his tracks, looking around as if he no longer quite knew where he was, and he said something peculiar—something that planted a seed of cold, irrational fear in Mariah’s stomach.

  “I couldn’t even sit with him. I couldn’t even sit with my Nicholas like I wanted to, because the boy on the TV wouldn’t leave us be.”

  “What boy?” Mariah asked.

  The man glanced at her, seeming to notice her for the first time. His head swiveled back to John Hawthorne, who continued to advance.

  “The sad boy,” the man said. “The crying boy.”

  He said nothing else.

  There was a movement, then a crunch. Behind John, the man sank to his knees and tipped onto his side, landing at Mariah’s feet. She heard his throat before she saw it; it emitted a choked, stuttering whistle, like air sucked through a crushed straw. His windpipe had been caved in below the Adam’s apple. Roses bloomed on his cheeks as he struggled to breathe. His lips shaped words he could no longer speak.

  John stopped beside him, holding the last duffel bag. He knelt down slowly and said, “I’m sorry, Matthew. I really am. But I don’t have time to talk, and nothing I could say would change what’s already been done. You want to know how I helped your son? Well, this is how. With this.” He drew a knife from his pocket and thumbed it open. Its handle was black and sandpapered. Blood crusted the blade. He laid the knife across Matthew’s open palm. “You think I’m cruel. Maybe you’re right. But sometimes cruelty is kind. I know what it’s like, living in an empty house, knowing it will stay that way. You don’t have to go back there again. You don’t have to face the night alone. I took the fight away for you. I stopped the hurt. Like I did for your son.”

  Matthew’s eyes wandered cloudily. His free hand pawed at the ground. Mariah sat down and took it. Held it. Matthew squeezed her fingers desperately, gratefully, in return. He rolled his heaving chest to the air, the green Billabong backpack scrunched beneath him. An orange pompom tassel hung from one of the zippers; try as she might, Mariah could not understand what it was doing there. It was the final surreal touch to a scene that was already so senseless. She stared at the tassel, which quivered each time Matthew drew a breath, and thought, what kind of journey begins in violence?

  The answer was simple.

  The kind that ends in violence.

  But hadn’t she known that from the start? Hadn’t she known, from the first red gush into Rick Lot’s shot glass, that any road taken by John Hawthorne was a road wet with blood? She sat and held the dying man’s hand, and for a moment they were both there with him, John on one side, Mariah on the other. The moment passed. John got up and walked to the truck. He threw the duffel bag in with the rest, paused as if to say something, and walked on without a word.

  She watched him get into the driver’s seat.

  Watched the brake lights turn on.

  Watched them slide away.

  ???

  John watched Mariah shrink in the rearview mirror.

  It was better this way.

  Better for both of them.

  ???

  Mariah listened to Matthew breathe and saw herself going home to her little house on the other side of Wrightwood. Saw herself sitting on the couch with all the lights turned on around her, holding back the night outside. Saw herself watching television, plugging her ears with sitcom laughter, covering her eyes with footage of the sun as her stomach got fat and the scratching at the back door grew louder and the town outside gasped and wheezed on its black deathbed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away from Matthew’s grip. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stay here.”

  He groped after her, but she was already up and running, across the driveway and through the house, out the back door and down the path, branches in her face, wind in her ears, running over the rocky ground, running on bare feet, running.

  ???

  John almost didn’t stop in time.

  He was coasting down the driveway and thinking of the road ahead, of Marshall and his one engine plane in Wyoming, when a shadow came scrambling down the embankment through the weeds. For an instant it was Nicholas he saw tearing down the grade, Nicholas in his striped shirt and cargo shorts, fleeing down the rise to his bike. Then Mariah fell into the headlights and John slammed on the brakes. If he’d been going any faster the grill would have had her for a meal.

  Mariah slammed her hands emphatically on the hood and shot him a look that said he was a son of a bitch and several dozen kinds of asshole besides. Hair hung over her face in wild strands. Her teeth bared in a panting grin. But it was good to see her.

  It was good.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said as she climbed in next to him. “It’s not safe where I’m going.”

  “Fuck you, John. Fuck you and drive.”

  John drove. As they passed the house where Roger Harding dangled from a noose fashioned out of clothesline, his feet swinging gently in their Birkenstocks, Melissa Harding smiled and waved them off.

  Their journey had begun.

  But theirs wasn’t the only one.

  Up the winding driveway, in the dark of a night that was still very young, Matthew Krauter’s hand closed around the knife that had killed his son.