Sunday afternoon. It had seemed a terrific place to raise kids, they
had both decided. So much they had wanted to do. So much.
She felt another wave of sobs climbing diligently toward the surface.
She sped up and turned on to a main road. In ten more minutes she was
looking at the red and yellow colors of the neighborhood McDonald’s. She
pulled into the drive-through and ordered a large coffee. As she
pressed the window button, she was staring into the freckled face of a
gangly teenage girl, her long, auburn hair tied back in a ponytail, who
would more than likely grow up into a lovely young woman, just as Amy
would. Sidney hoped the girl still had her father. It jolted her again
to think that Amy was now fatherless.
Within an hour she was headed west on Route 29, a narrow black strip of
road that split gentle rolling Virginia countryside as it cut a roughly
forty-five-degree angle through Virginia and on across the North
Carolina border. Sidney had traveled the road many times while she
attended law school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
It was a beautiful drive past long-silent Civil War battlefields and old
yet still functioning family farms. In the fall and spring the colors
of the foliage rivaled any painting she had ever seen. Names like
Brightwood, Locust Dale, Madison and Monrpe-lier flashed by on the road
signs, and Sidney thought back to the many trips she and Jason had taken
to Charlottesville to attend some function or other. Now no part of the
familiar road or countryside felt comforting.
The night swept on. Sidney looked at the dashboard clock and was
surprised to see it was nearing one in the morning. She accelerated and
the truck flew down the empty road. Outside, the temperature continued
to drop as she headed into higher elevations. Thick clouds had settled
in and the spread of her headlights was the only contrast to the
pitch-blackness. She turned up the truck’s heat even more and hit her
high beams.
An hour later, she glanced at the map resting next to her on the front
seat. Her turnoff was coming up. She held her body rigid as she drew
nearer to her destination. She started to count the miles on her
odometer.
At Ruckersville she headed west. She was now in Greene County,
Virginia, rustic and rural, far removed from the pace of life Sidney
knew and had thrived in. The county seat was the town of
Stan-dardsville, whose emotional climate Was now anything but, with an
impact crater and scorched earth appearing on television screens all
over the world.
Sidney finally pulled off the road and peered around to try to fix her
location. The darkness of the countryside enveloped her. She flicked
on the reading light and held the map close to her face. Getting her
bearings, she continued down the slash of road another mile until she
rounded a bend of partially naked slender elms, knotty maples and
towering oaks, after which the vista opened up to stark, fiat farmland.
At the end of the road, a police cruiser was parked near a rusted,
leaning mailbox. To the right of the mailbox was a dirt road that
snaked its way back, with full, well-tended evergreen hedges bordering
the dirt road on either side. In the distance the earth seemed to glow
like a huge phosphorous cave.
She had found the place.
In the swirl of the Explorer’s headlights, Sidney noticed that it was
lightly snowing. As she pulled up closer, the door of the police car
opened and a uniformed officer wearing a neon-orange all-weather slicker
stepped from the vehicle. He walked over to the Ford, pointed his
flashlight at the license plate and then swept it over the Explorer’s
exterior before its beam came to rest on the driver’s-side window.
Sidney took a deep breath, hit the window switch and the glass slowly
slid down.
The officer’s face appeared at her shoulder. His upper lip was
partially covered by a bushy mustache streaked with gray, the corners of
his eyes were heavily stacked with wrinkles. Even under the orange
raincoat, the bulky strength of his shoulders and chest were evident.