Whirling up a cloud of dust, the Expedition rotated on the wide shoulder of the highway. Gravel tattooed the undercarriage: a fierce ponk-plink-crack as unnerving as machine-gun fire. Spinning into the glare of approaching headlights, Jilly inhaled a lung-stretching breath with the desperate greediness for life of a condemned woman hearing the thin whistle of a descending guillotine blade. She shrieked as they came around to their starting position, and she failed to use a polite synonym for feces as they spun yet another 120 degrees and jolted to a stop facing northwest.
Here the eastbound and westbound lanes of the interstate were separated by a sixty-foot-wide median without a guardrail, relying solely on a center swale to prevent out-of-control vehicles from crossing easily into oncoming traffic. The instant that the SUV rocked to a stop, as Jilly sucked in another here-comes-the-death-blow breath deep enough to sustain her during an underwater swim across the English Channel, Dylan abandoned the brake pedal for the accelerator and drove down the slope, diagonally crossing the median.
‘What’re you doing?’ she demanded.
He was extraordinarily focused, as she’d never seen him before, concentrating more intensely on the descent into the shallow swale than he had on the sight of her blazing Coupe DeVille, than he had concentrated on self-battered Shep in the backseat confessional. Bruin big, he filled his half of the front seat to overflowing. Even in normal circumstances – or in as normal as any circumstances under which Jilly had known him – he hulked over the steering wheel, but now he hulked more aggressively than before, head thrust toward the windshield, face screwed into a bearish scowl, stare fixed on the bright swaths that the headlights cut through the dark depression into which he piloted the SUV.
He failed to answer her question. His mouth hung open as if in astonishment, as though he couldn’t quite believe that he had put the Expedition through a controlled spin or that he was barreling across the median toward the westbound lanes.
All right, he wasn’t barreling yet, but the truck continued to accelerate as it reached the low point of the swale. If they crossed the declivity and hit the rising slope at the wrong angle and at too high a speed, the SUV would roll because rolling was something that SUVs did well when they were badly driven and when the terrain was, like this, composed of shifting sand and loose shale.
She shouted – ‘Don’t!’ – but he did. As the Expedition churned across the crumbling face of the upgrade, Jilly jammed her feet harder against the dashboard, wondering where the impact air bag might be stowed, dreading what would happen if the bag was in the dashboard and if it exploded around her feet, wondering whether it would jam her knees into her face, whether it would rupture around her shoes and spew skin-peeling hot gas at high pressure across her entire body. Those grotesque images and worse flashed through her mind, instead of the standard replay of her life to date (with the Looney Tunes soundtrack that would have been most appropriate), but she couldn’t block them, so she held fast to the seat and to the assist bar and shouted – ‘Don’t!’ – again to no avail.
Riddling the night behind them with twin barrages of tire-cast shale and sand, Dylan forced the Expedition up the northern incline of the median at an oblique angle, putting the vehicle to the ultimate roll test. Judging by the relentlessness with which gravity pulled Jilly toward the driver, just one more degree of tilt would tumble the SUV back into the swale.
Repeatedly as they ascended, four-wheel drive seemed to be at least two wheels shy of an adequate number to maintain traction. The truck lurched, rocked, but finally topped the rise onto the shoulder of the westbound lanes.
Dylan checked the rearview mirror, glanced at the side mirror, and rocketed into a gap in traffic, heading back the way they had come. Toward town. Toward the motel where the Coupe DeVille no doubt still smoldered. Into the trouble they had been trying to outrun.
Jilly had the crazy notion that the dangerous crossing of the median had been motivated by Shep’s reminder – ‘Fries not flies’ – that he had not eaten dinner. The older brother’s impressively deep commitment to the younger was admirable to a point, but a return to that burger bistro under these circumstances represented a colossal leap from the high ground of responsible stewardship into a swamp of reckless devotion.