Late One Night

27

Pat was a few miles up the blacktop, still nearly five miles from home, when he saw a set of headlights on high beams coming closer behind him. Soon they filled the van with their glare.

“Jeez, someone’s trying to blind me,” he said, and then he slowed down so the car would have to pass.

But it didn’t. It stayed right on his bumper, the lights so bright Missy had to shade her eyes with her hand.

“Some idiot,” she said. “A real bozo. Doesn’t he know how dangerous this is?”

Pat couldn’t pull off onto the shoulder because the little strip of pavement and grass before the road slanted off into a deep ditch was covered with a bank of snow from where the plow on the salt truck had pushed it. He put his window down and stuck his arm out to wave the car around him.

The cold air rushed into the van, and Missy shivered. Still the car stayed where it was.

Finally, Hannah’s quiet voice came from the back. “It’s Dad,” she said, merely stating that fact.

Pat put up the window and tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “Hang on,” he said. He tapped his brakes, and Ronnie’s Firebird braked hard and fell back a tad. Pat looked into the rearview mirror. “Maybe that’ll do the trick.”

But soon the headlights were close again and this time Missy could hear the roar of the Firebird’s engine.

“Here he comes,” Pat said, and he eased off the accelerator, letting the van coast along at forty miles per hour, hoping Ronnie would press on and soon he’d be around them and his taillights would be growing dimmer in the distance.

The Firebird, though, swung out into the left lane, and after all that brightness the van seemed so dark to Missy. She could look across Pat and see the Firebird pull even with the van.

Then Ronnie started to edge the Firebird across the center line. Pat steered as far to his right as he could, but the Firebird edged closer until its front fender scraped up against the van, and Missy felt it rock a little.

“Dear God,” she said.

And it was as if Ronnie had somehow heard her prayer. He slowed the Firebird. He steered it back to the left of center.

Pat saw his chance, and he pressed down on the van’s accelerator. He shot ahead, his headlight beams stretching out down the blacktop.

The Firebird fell back, and soon its headlights disappeared. It was dark again inside the van, and though Missy was trembling, she steeled herself and she told the girls everything was all right. That they were almost home, and everything was fine.

Ronnie watched the van pull away from him. He slowed to forty and then thirty-five, and finally he was creeping along at twenty miles per hour, watching the taillights of Pat’s van crest a hill. Ronnie kept his eyes on those taillights until the van went down the slope of the hill, and then he couldn’t see them anymore. His girls were in that van, and he understood now the danger he’d put them in when he’d bumped it.

He hadn’t meant to do it. At least he didn’t think he had. He’d only wanted the van to stop. He’d wanted to gather his girls into the Firebird and take them someplace where no one would ever be able to find them, and little by little all the bad things swirling around them would stop, and they’d be a family, happy forever. He feared he’d ruined any chance at that, but still he had to try.

At the next crossroads, he slowed and turned the Firebird around. He started back up the blacktop toward Goldengate. It was time to start facing facts, time to tell his own story, time to say exactly what was what.