She knew it was the last because this time, as the car came to a halt, and Tammy slumped in her seat, her consciousness decided to forsake the pain of her broken bones (of which there were many) or the sound of Maxine’s screaming (of which there was much) and just go away into the reassuring gloom of Aunt Jessica’s house.
“Why did you not come when I called?” Aunt Jessica demanded. Kindly though she was, she didn’t like to be disobeyed.
Tammy looked at the woman through her eleven-year-old’s eyes, and fumbled for an answer to the old lady’s question. But nothing she could say to Jessica would make any sense, now would it? Canyon, car, angel, crash. How could she possibly understand?
Anyway, Aunt Jessica didn’t really want an answer. She had her niece inside the house where she wanted her, and that was all that was really important. Tammy walked down the hallway, into this brown comfortable memory, and let Aunt Jessica close the door behind her, so that the screaming and the raining glass and the world turned upside down could be forgotten, and she could go wash her hands before sitting down to a plate of Aunt Jessica’s special meatloaf.
ELEVEN
It was night in Coldheart Canyon, and though it was the wrong season for the Santa Anas proper to be blowing, the wind that came up about a quarter to midnight was warm for a night in early spring. It carried away the smell of burned rubber and spilled gasoline; it even took away the stench of the vodka-laced vomit Maxine had ejected. With the vodka out of her system, she found she could think a little better. With trembling fingers she unfastened her seat-belt and fell through the open door, out of the seat in which she’d been hanging and on to the grass.
She lay there for a long time, alternately sobbing and being stern with herself. Luckily-if this can be said to be luck-she’d had two previous experiences with car wrecks, the second of which had been substantially worse than this one, in that it had happened on the 101 in the middle of the morning rush, and involved nineteen vehicles and eight fatalities (one of them a passenger in the same stretch limo in which Maxine had been travelling). She had suffered a hairline skull fracture, a dislocated shoulder, and back problems that her chiropractor had blithely announced would be with her for the rest of her life.
Unless she was very much mistaken, she was not in anything like as bad a condition after this little fun-ride as she’d been on that occasion. Shaken up, yes; dizzy, sick and a little hysterical, certainly. But when she finally crawled away from the car, and got to her feet, she was pleased to discover that she could stand up quite well, and that nothing hurt with that piercing hurt that suggested something had been broken or punctured.
“You must have had an angel watching over you.”
She looked round at the wit who’d spoken. It was Todd. He was close to the car, trying to wrench open the door on the driver’s side.
“Is Tammy still in there?” Maxine said.
“Yeah. I’m afraid she is.”
“How does she look?”
“How the hell do I know?” Todd remarked. “It’s too dark to see.”
Yes, it was dark. And though that wasn’t good for finding out how Tammy was doing, it did suggest the absence of their pursuer.
“It’s still here,” Todd said, “Just in case you were wondering.”
“Where?”
He pointed up. Maxine followed his finger. The angel’s light brightened the high branches of a nearby pine. It wasn’t as steady as it had been up at the house. In fact, it was fluttering nervously, which made Maxine picture a flock of luminous birds up there, all shaking out their feathers after a rainstorm, and hopping from bough to bough in their agitated state.
“Hey you!” Maxine yelled up at the light, too frustrated and angry to care about the protocol of what she was doing. “Tammy could be bleeding to death in there. How about a hand down here?”
“I don’t think it’s interested in helping anyone but me. I had to beg it to let me get you two sorted out before it … you know … came and took me.”