Page 17 of Roadrunner

“Oh, Alex. I’m so sorry.”

“I have to go. The police are going to be here any minute.”

“Call me the second you know anything. I mean it, Alex. The second.”

I promised her I would and hung up before either of us had to find something else to say. There wasn’t anything else. There was a phone in my hand, a garage full of wreckage behind me, and a husband somewhere on a table having his body opened up by strangers, and none of it fit into a sentence I knew how to finish.

I went upstairs and changed out of the sweatpants I’d worn to destroy two European sports cars and into something that wouldn’t look insane in a hospital waiting room. I don’t know why that mattered to me. It shouldn’t have. I stood in front of the closet for a full minute deciding between two identical black cardigans before I understood, distantly, that I was stalling.

There was some part of me did not want to arrive at that hospital at all.

I went anyway. I always went anyway. That was the entire architecture of my marriage.

The cruiser’s headlights swept the driveway at 1:47 by the clock on the microwave. I know because I stood in the kitchen and watched the numbers change three separate times, willing them to move faster and then, in the same breath, willing them to stop.

The officer who came to the door was young. Younger than me, maybe, though it was hard to tell in the dark with his hat brim throwing a shadow over half his face. He said my name like a question. I said yes. He said he was very sorry to be picking me up under these circumstances, and I thanked him, and neither of us said anything else true for the rest of the ride.

The back of a police car smells like vinyl and something chemical underneath it, a cleaning product trying to erase whoever rode there last. I sat with my hands folded in my lap and watched Monterey’s dark, fog-hung streets slide past the window—shuttered storefronts, a diner sign missing its S, the black shapes of cypress trees standing sentry against a sky with too many stars in it for a night this bad. I found myself doing math I had no business doing. Eighty miles an hour. No seatbelt. A windshield. I made myself stop before I got anywhere useful with those numbers.

“You holding up okay back there?” the officer asked, eyes finding mine in the rearview.

“I don’t know yet,” I said, which was the only honest thing I said to anyone that whole night.

The hospital’s emergency entrance came up too fast and not fast enough, sliding glass doors throwing yellow light across the pavement, a woman in scrubs jogging somewhere in my peripheral vision like every hospital in every movie I’d ever half-watched. The officer walked me as far as the intake desk and then peeled off with the relief of a man handing a difficult thing back to someone whose job it actually was.

“MacAfee,” I told the woman at the desk. “My husband. Joshua MacAfee. Someone called me. He’s in surgery.”

She typed for a moment too long. “Take a seat, hon. Someone will come find you.”

I did not take a seat. I stood at the window that looked into a hallway I wasn’t allowed past, and I watched gurneys and clipboards and the backs of people’s heads, and I thought, with a clarity that frightened me more than the accident itself had, that I felt nothing that resembled love. I felt afraid, the animal kind, the kind that doesn’t ask permission from your opinions about a person before it shows up. I felt guilty for how little else there was underneath it.

A surgeon in green scrubs finally came through a set of double doors almost an hour later, pulling his mask down to his throat, looking for someone, and I understood before he found me that the someone was me.

“Missus MacAfee.”

“Yes.”

“He’s out of surgery. He’s alive.” He let that sit a moment, the way people do when they know the next sentence is the one that matters. “I won’t lie to you. It was close, and it isn’t over. We’ll know more once he’s settled upstairs. I can take you back in a few minutes.”

“Thank you,” I said, hating it a little that I’d had to search for those words before I found them.

I called Martina from a plastic chair bolted to the waiting room wall and told her he was alive, and she cried, actual tears, for a man who had never once given her a reason to. I sat with the phone warm against my ear and watched the sliding doors open and close on people whose worst night this clearly wasn’t, and I waited to be taken back to whatever version of Joshua the surgeons had managed to save.

CHAPTER NINE

Alex

Then

A hint of sage rose off the table. I closed my eyes and let it fill up before it faded.

When I opened them, Riley was reaching across the table for the mashed potatoes.

“Arturo Panzolini.” His mother’s voice cracked like a whip, and the flat of a butter knife caught the back of his hand before he’d gotten two inches. “Ask someone to pass it. Don’t reach over the table, especially on a day like today. You weren’t raised in a barn.”

I fought not to smile. Riley rubbed the back of his hand with his thumb. “Yes, ma’am.”

I leaned toward him. “Your real name’s Arturo?” I whispered.