Past Marty, Paige pulled to the curb. She threw open the door and got
out of the BMW, leaving the headlights on and the engine running.
As she ran to the kids, she heard herself saying, “Thank God, thank God,
thank God, thank God.” She couldn’t stop saying it even when she
crouched and swept both girls into her arms at the same time, as if on
some level she believed that the two words had magic power and that her
children would suddenly vanish from her embrace if she stopped chanting
the mantra.
The girls hugged her fiercely. Charlotte buried her face against her
mother’s neck. Emily’s eyes were huge.
Marty dropped to his knees beside them. He kept touching the kids,
especially their faces, as if he was having difficulty believing that
their skin was still warm and their eyes lively, astonished to see that
breath still steamed from them. He repeatedly said, “Are you all right,
are you hurt, are you all right?” The only injury he could find was a
minor abrasion on Charlotte’s left palm, incurred when she’d plunged
from the Buick and landed on her hands and knees.
The only major and troubling difference in the girls was their unusual
constraint. They were so subdued that they seemed meek, as if they had
just been severely chastised. The brief experience with the kidnapper
had left them frightened and withdrawn. Their usual self confidence
might not return for some time, might never be as strong as it had once
been. For that reason alone Paige wanted to make the man in the Buick
suffer.
Along the block, a couple of people had come out on their front porches
to see what the commotion was about–now that the shooting had stopped.
Others were at their windows.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Rising to his feet, Marty said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“The police are coming,” Paige said.
“That’s what I mean.”
“But they–”
“They’ll be as bad as last time, worse.”
He picked up Charlotte and hurried with her to the BMW as the sirens
swelled louder.
Chips of glass are lodged in his left eye. For the most part, the
tempered window had dissolved in a gummy mass. It had not cut his face.
But tiny shards are embedded deep in the tender ocular tissues, and the
pain is devastating. Every movement of the eye works the glass deeper,
does more damage.
Because his eye twitches when the worst needle-sharp pains stitch
through it, he keeps blinking involuntarily, although it is torture to
do so. To stop the blinking, he holds the fingers of his left hand
against his closed eyelid, applying only the gentlest pressure. As much
as possible, he drives with just his right hand.
Sometimes he has to let the eye twitch unattended because he
needs to use the left hand to drive. With the right, he tears open
one of the candy bars and crams it into his mouth as fast as he can
chew.
His metabolic furnace demands fuel.
A bullet crease marks his forehead above the same eye. The furrow is as
wide as his index finger and a little more than an inch long. To the
bone. At first it bled freely. Now the clotting blood oozes thickly
over his eyebrow and seeps between the fingers that he holds to the
eyelid.
If the bullet had been one inch to the left, it would have taken him in
the temple and drilled into his brain, jamming splinters of bone in
front of it.
He fears head wounds. He is not confident that he can recover from
brain damage either as entirely or as swiftly as from other injuries.
Maybe he can’t recover from it at all.
Half blind, he drives cautiously. With only one eye he has lost depth
perception. The rain-pooled streets are treacherous.
The police now have a description of the Buick, perhaps even the license
number. They will be looking for it, routinely if not actively, and the
damage along the driver’s side will make it easier to spot.
He is in no condition to steal another car at this time. He’s not only
half blind but still shaky from the gunshot wounds that he suffered