Lost Man's Lane: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

DRIVER’S EDUCATION

February 1999

I said, ‘What you wanna be?’ She said, ‘Alive’

OUTKAST

DA ART OF STORYTELLIN’, PART I

1

I GOT MY DRIVER’S license on February 11, 1999. This would be easy to remember even if I didn’t have the speeding ticket with the date on it.

But I do.

My mother drove me to the BMV that afternoon, which was a Thursday, and she talked about the weather the entire way there. It wasn’t idle small talk; she was a meteorologist, and that day was closing in on a February heat record in Bloomington, Indiana. We’d had snow only a few days earlier, but we drove to the BMV with the windows down, welcoming the 70-degree air like a gift, which is the way those days feel in a Midwestern winter, a jump start for your draining battery.

My personal battery was running high already—this day had been a long time in coming. If you didn’t take the formal driver’s education course, you needed to wait six additional months to apply for a driver’s license. This was the state’s way of bribing teenagers to take driver’s ed—and my mother’s way of buying time before releasing me to the world in a two-thousand-pound killing machine.

Finally, the wait was over.

I wasn’t worried about the written portion of the test, and while I expressed high confidence about the driving portion, let’s all admit that our heart rates picked up at the phrase parallel parking when we were sixteen. I took the driving portion first and passed without trouble. Even nailed the parallel parking—no small feat in the Oldsmobile Ninety Eight my mother had given me, which was the length of a hearse. On to the written test—twenty-five questions, multiple choice, fill-in-the-answer bubble on a separate Scantron sheet with a No. 2 pencil. I cruised through twenty-three before a male voice boomed out, It’s Miller Time!

I heard my mother’s laugh in response. Melodic, practiced, unsurprised. When you’re Monica Miller the meteorologist, you can’t go long before some dimwit producer decides to affix a famous beer slogan to your segments. People often recognized her, and they loved to indicate it by shouting out, It’s Miller Time! When you’re sixteen and this is the way the community responds to your mother’s presence, it’s not a great deal of fun.

Particularly when your mother is beautiful, and it’s mostly men shouting at her.

I didn’t bother to turn around at the exchange, so I never saw the cheerful citizen who recognized my mother, only heard him, and then my mother’s on-cue laugh, but the distraction was enough that when I filled in my test circle, I missed the twenty-fourth line entirely, and filled in the twenty-fifth blank on the accompanying Scantron sheet. I then dutifully answered the next question in the twenty-sixth line, stood, and handed my exam to the bored clerk.

You are allowed two mistakes out of the twenty-five questions, she intoned in a voice that said she could—and maybe did—recite this in her sleep. You may return no sooner than tomorrow to retake the examination.

Great—gives me extra time to figure out a way to cheat, I said, a remark designed to make her smile. It did not make her smile. She lined her answer key up beside my test and peered through the top halves of her bifocals as she scanned the results. Her red pen made little taps of contact with each correct answer, a nice, steady rhythm.

Slow ride, I hummed softly, take it easy…

The clerk’s red pen paused. Hovered above the test.

I leaned forward, frowning, and immediately saw the mistake. There was no answer to question twenty-four.

The clerk’s mouth twitched with a barely concealed evil smile.

Mr. Miller, she said, in a voice exponentially louder than she’d used previously, you have missed question twenty-four by failing to answer it.

I did answer it. I just got out of order.

You have also missed question twenty-five, she continued. And it is my duty to—

What happened was I filled in the wrong—

"It is my duty, she snapped, glaring at me over her glasses with a look that effectively severed my vocal cords, to inform you of the correct answer. Question twenty-five reads: ‘If you encounter a law enforcement officer whose command differs with the signal at an intersection, what do you do?’ "

The easiest question on the whole damn test. A question that half the kindergartners in the county would answer correctly.

The clerk smiled at me.

The correct answer, she said, still loud enough for the room, is option C: ‘Obey the command of the law enforcement officer.’ You selected option B: ‘Honk and proceed with caution.’

Laughter erupted. One man repeated my answer for his wife. Another woman snorted and clapped. I didn’t dare turn around to look at my mother. I stood there imagining the responses from my friends when I informed them that even after a six-month wait, I still didn’t have a driver’s license. I was so lost to my horror that it took me a second to realize the clerk was still speaking.

You have missed only two questions, which means you have passed the test. Please follow me over to the back of the room so we can get a photograph for your driver’s license, Marshall Miller.

I’d passed.

I also spent four years carrying a driver’s license photo in which my face was so red, it looked freshly sunburned.

When I finally looked at my mother, she was smiling that 100-watt, television-approved smile of hers.

Honk and proceed with caution, she said, and handed me the keys.

We laughed about it then, and we laughed even harder in the car on the drive home. If we’d had any idea how much of our lives would soon be lost to my interactions with law enforcement, we wouldn’t have cracked a smile.

I dropped my mother off at home, knowing that I wouldn’t see her again until breakfast the next morning. She’d been offered the prime-time broadcasts on numerous occasions when I was younger, declining them each time, but when I turned sixteen, she agreed to move from days to nights, guaranteeing a better paycheck and a larger audience—and requiring a hell of a lot of trust in her teenage son. I was determined not to screw it up. I was the only child of a single mother, and if you can make it to sixteen without disaster in that dynamic, you’re carrying at least a little bit of extra maturity. Extra concern, anyhow. I did not want to disappoint my mother.

I also genuinely did not believe that I would.

There’s no confidence like a sixteen-year-old’s confidence in the future.

I dropped her off in the driveway of our simple two-story colonial on its tidy lawn. We lived on Raintree Lane on the north side of town, west of what was then State Road 37 and is now Interstate 69. It was a neighborhood of modest but well-kept homes and mature trees and I appreciate it more now than I did then, but I suppose that’s true of a lot of things.

I made about a thousand assurances that I would be careful, gave my mother a one-armed hug without relinquishing control of the steering wheel, and then pulled out of the driveway, headed for the Cascades Golf Course, intending to hit a few buckets of balls at the driving range on this strangely warm day, but mostly ready to experience my freshly minted freedom. I put the windows down, and that unseasonable warm air flooded in. The ancient Oldsmobile didn’t have a CD player, so I had a Sony Discman resting on the bench seat beside me, connected to the stereo through an auxiliary cord that ran to the tape deck. Badass. With my mother out of the car, I turned the volume up on Tupac’s 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted. Badder-ass.

Beside the Discman rested not one, not two, but three massive binders of CDs, divided into three categories: rap mixes, rock mixes, and make-out mixes. The former two, unfortunately, saw more airplay than the last. I let the Oldsmobile’s speakers blast all the bass they could handle and bobbed my head in rhythm, and had Pac still been alive, he’d have no doubt laughed his ass off at me, but in that moment, alone behind the wheel, I didn’t care about the old car or the shitty stereo. I was a free man, no chaperone required.

Life was good.

I made it four miles before the colored lights came on behind me.

It was more frightening than it should have been, maybe. I’d never been pulled over; hell, I’d never been alone in a car. Police were the ultimate authority figures, like principals with guns.

In the adrenaline rush of the moment, I forgot a key rule from the BMV study guide: when one is pulled over by police, one is to pull off the road on the right-hand side. I opted instead for what struck me as the clearest area: the wide expanse of grass that ran between the road and the fairway of the thirteenth hole of the golf course. This required crossing a lane of oncoming traffic, a maneuver that I executed without so much as a turn signal.

The siren went on. A single, bleated chirp that chilled my blood.

On a normal day in February, the course would have been empty and even the driving range closed. Because we were chasing that heat record, it was busy, packed with cabin-fever sufferers taunted by new sets of Christmas clubs. Wonderful. I had an audience.

Four miles as a free man. A good run while it lasted.

I parked the car and waited while a muscled-up officer with a crew cut approached. The window was already down, and he leaned in and studied me, seeming torn between anger and exasperation. His stiff uniform shirt strained around his chiseled chest and arms as if determined to escape it. His name tag identified him as CPL. MADDOX.

Son, what in the hell were you doing, crossing over here?

It seemed safer for both of us, I said. This was up there with honk and proceed with caution in terms of poor answers.

Safer? On the wrong side of the road?

There was lots of room to park.

"Are you trying to tell me that I’m wrong, son?"

Not at all, sir, I’m just… the thing is, it’s a big car.

Does it steer itself?

Pardon?

Does it steer itself? His eyes were the same dark blue as his uniform shirt, which was pressed against pectoral muscles that looked like they belonged to a creature from Jurassic Park.

No, sir.

So let’s stop blaming the car for your decisions.

Yes, sir.

It is not a 500 Benz, he said without a hint of emotion.

No, sir. It’s an Oldsmobile.

Do you think the district attorney is really a ho?

My lips parted but I didn’t offer any words. I was stunned and confused—and then, oh-so-belatedly I realized my music was still playing. Tupac’s Picture Me Rollin’. Pac was describing his Mercedes and expounding on his theories about the personal lives of the law enforcement members who’d put him in custody.

I am going to jail, I thought as I punched the stereo power off just as Tupac offered a few words to the punk police. I wondered how handcuffs felt.

It’s a song, I said. I mean, not a… you know, the lyrics aren’t mine. They do not represent my views.

Oh. I was confused. The voice sounded exactly like yours.

When I looked at him this time, I thought I saw the barest hint of a smile. Then it vanished as he said, License and registration, please.

Shit.

I, uh… I only have this. I showed him my temporary license. The real one would be mailed. And now, no doubt, dropped directly into the garbage disposal by my mother.

Maddox eyed the temp. "You got this today."

Yes, sir.

Off to a heck of a start.

Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.

He lowered the temp license and fixed the steel-blue eyes on me again. Registration?

I found the registration, wondering how long it would take for my mother’s insurance rates to soar. Teenage males were more expensive to insure even without points on their licenses.

Please wait in the vehicle, Corporal Maddox said, and then he returned to his cruiser.

I wanted to punch something—mostly myself. I hated the tight-throated sensation and the rapid heartbeat and the echoing words of my ridiculous exchange with the state trooper. All of it so stupid. All of it something a kid would do. I did not feel like a kid either.

At least, I hadn’t until those colored lights had come on.

I looked in the sideview mirror, trying to make out what Maddox was doing. I deserved a ticket. But he’d smiled—almost—when he made that remark about confusing my voice for Tupac’s. Was he smiling like a jerk—or someone who’d give a kid a break?

The driver’s door of the cruiser swung open, and Maddox stepped out. It was only then that I realized someone else was in the car. Not another cop, but someone in the back, behind the grate. A blond-haired girl wearing a teal polo shirt with a white logo and script over the left breast. Her hair was tied up loosely in a bandana that matched the teal-and-white shirt. The combination was immediately familiar to me: the uniform of the Chocolate Goose, a local ice-cream shop that had been in business for generations and was a townie staple in summer. The logo on the polo shirt would show a version of the Mother Goose character, complete with reading glasses and a babushka and a chocolate ice-cream cone held jauntily in one wing. It was strange to see the outfit in February. The Chocolate Goose was strictly seasonal, opening on Memorial Day weekend and closing on Labor Day. The girl, who looked about my age but wasn’t familiar, seemed to stare directly at me as if searching my face in the mirror. She looked the way I felt: frustrated and foolish and a little frightened. Maybe more than a little.

Then Maddox swung the door shut, and my attention returned to him, the girl’s face relegated to a faint outline seen through dark glass.

Maddox approached, holding my license in his right hand and a ticket in his left.

Mr. Miller, Maddox said, passing me the license and registration, this is not an ideal day for you to receive a traffic ticket, is it?

No, sir.

Points on your license before you even get started. Not good.

He gazed down at the golf course, seeming to follow the descending slopes down to the dark wooded valley that traced Griffy Creek into the heart of downtown Bloomington. His big chest swelled. I wondered how much he could bench-press with those arms and that chest. I wondered if he was as intimidating to that girl in the back of his cruiser as he was to me.

What’s your father going to say when you show him this? he asked.

I didn’t answer. He shot me a hard look.

What’s he going to say, Mr. Miller?

He’s dead, I said.

I was afraid that he would ask how it had happened. It was hard to explain that I didn’t know. Harder to explain that he might not be dead at all. He was to me, though. That’s the way it feels with a father who bailed before you were born. Closer to dead than alive, but more hurtful than a dead man could ever be.

I see, Maddox said. He seemed to mull over something, and then he separated the two halves of the ticket—one original, one carbon copy on pale pink paper. He handed me the copy.

I clocked you at 39 in a 30, he said. That’s the first violation on the ticket. The second is for improper lane movement. These are lessons you shouldn’t have to learn the hard way.

I couldn’t come up with anything to say and didn’t see the point in trying. The consequences were already in hand, and that question about what my absent father would say sizzled in my brain, temporarily as troubling as the ticket itself.

"That copy is yours. This one is mine, property of Corporeal Maddox, until it is filed with the court."

He’d drawn his rank out in an odd Southern drawl, as if enjoying the flavor of it. I kept staring at the ticket. His thumb had left a grimy print on the bottom corner, probably from the carbon paper. It looked like ash, though. Appropriate, for the document that would burn my freedom down.

Sometimes, Maddox said, I forget to file them.

It was as if the ticket in my hand had gone from traffic citation to lottery winner. He was granting me mercy.

"Thank you," I said, looking up from the carbon-stained ticket.

For what?

His broad face was empty, the eyes still cool, but I was sure he knew exactly what I meant. He was giving me a break.

For the second chance. I won’t screw it up.

"Did I say you have a second chance? I said sometimes I forget to file paperwork with the court. I made no fucking promise of it. Where the fuck did you hear the words ‘second chance’?"

I was so shocked I couldn’t even begin to answer. I’d heard adults swear, but I’d never had an adult swear at me. Not like that.

You make assumptions, he said. That’s a dangerous way to live, Mr. Miller. It is a better way to die.

A better way to die?

I glanced at the golf course, this time hoping that I had an audience. Everyone had their backs to me, heads bowed over their balls or tilted to watch them in flight. I suddenly felt alone and afraid.

"Do you know what I hear when you say second chance?" Maddox snarled. For the first time, I was aware of the gun and baton on his belt.

No, sir. I managed to murmur this.

I hear a little prick who thinks the world owes him kindness.

A police officer had just called me a prick. No one was listening to us and there was no one I could call for help. I didn’t have a cell phone. I had only a few friends who did, and they weren’t with me. I was alone. The only person who was still paying attention to us was the girl in the back of the police car, and she was also alone—and worse off than me.

For now.

Maddox let the silence spread out like his massive shadow. He hadn’t asked a question, and I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t speak.

Driving a car down a road filled with strangers who are just trying to get home safe, he said at last, "is responsibility, Mr. Miller. Not a joke, not fun, not a privilege. It should feel damn serious to you. Nobody is promised a second chance at getting home safe. You will learn that."

The ticket was trembling in my hand now.

Go on your way, Maddox said. Now.

He turned and walked away. I sagged in the driver’s seat, the carbon copy in my hand. Right then, I didn’t care if he filed it or not. I felt as if I’d glimpsed the chasm between the kinds of consequences that existed in the world. There were tickets and there was violence.

He wouldn’t have hurt you, I told myself.

Right? No way a police officer would have hurt me. There were people not far away and…

What if there hadn’t been?

I looked in the mirror in time to see him settle back behind the wheel. In the half second before the driver’s door swung shut, I saw the girl in the back seat again.

She’d started to cry.

I would have remembered her face even if I never saw it on a MISSING poster.

2

I DIDN’T GO TO the driving range. I went home, watching the mirror the whole way, fearing another burst of colored lights.

I hear a little prick who thinks the world owes him kindness.

I was on my street when it occurred to me that I didn’t want my mother to see me, because I was returning way too quickly for her not to suspect trouble.

That was fine, though. My best friend in the world lived just down our street, tucked in the back of a cul-de-sac at the end of Raintree Lane. I’d known Kerri Flanders since the crib—literally. She lived four houses away, the only kid in my class on our street, and her parents had embraced my mother like family when she moved into the neighborhood. They weren’t much older than she was, but they always acted as if they were, as if a single mother were perpetually less wise than her married peers.

When we were in elementary school, Kerri and I were together from the moment we got off the bus. Summer was even better, when fireflies were chased and water balloons busted and bike brakes blared in protests of peeled rubber. She was the smartest kid in our class by a mile, and in a way I owe my career to Kerri—well, Kerri and a private investigator named Noah Storm. He played an essential role, but we’ll get to that.

My love of books is a gift from Kerri. She read everything, and when we were very young, I was motivated by a sense of envy—and stupidity—watching her churn through chapter books while I struggled through picture books. I’m sure my mother played a role, but to be honest, I don’t remember that. What I remember was Kerri sitting in a lawn chair with her feet swinging beneath the seat because she was too short to touch the ground, finishing Little House in the Big Woods and setting it on the grass with one hand while she plucked Little House on the Prairie out of the stack to her left. She was five years old then.

Even Kerri’s parents were perplexed by her intelligence, unsure of what exactly to do with her. At one point, the school suggested she should skip a grade. Jerry and Gwen Flanders resisted that, concerned about the social impact, probably, but also aware that Kerri wasn’t unhappy or bored, just brilliant. Her father accepted that with a laugh and a shrug the way some dads might acknowledge that their Little League player was a switch hitter. Proud, sure, but not motivated to push the kid because of a gift. Jerry was a good old boy, as townie as they came, a fourth-generation Bloomingtonian, and the third generation in his family to work as a tool and die maker at Otis Elevator. Also the last. Otis was one of several major manufacturing plants in Bloomington when I was born—along with RCA, General Electric, Thomson Consumer Electronics, and Westinghouse, those plants employed thousands—and not one remained by the time I graduated from college. I heard a lot of competing theories as to why the relentless rounds of closures were happening, but I was too young to understand. For a long time I thought NAFTA was a curse or a slur because I only heard it muttered by Jerry Flanders when he had a beer in his hand and a faraway look in his eyes.

When he was still employed by Otis, Kerri and I found it hilarious when he’d begin carrying on about the simple genius of the elevator. He played it for laughs back then, everything said dryly and with a wink. After the layoffs began, the winks stopped, and he spoke of the simple genius of the elevator with earnestness that made you uncomfortable.

The other plant shutdowns ultimately affected many more people, but the first round of layoffs at Otis stands out in my mind because it struck closest to home. We were two weeks into the fourth grade when Jerry was laid off. Kerri cried, and a kid named Danny Neely made fun of her tears at recess and I threw a handful of rocks into his freckled face and earned myself an afternoon in the principal’s office. On the bus ride home, Kerri kissed my cheek. Neither of us spoke. I was terrified that her family might move.

They didn’t move, but Jerry Flanders was on his sixth job in seven years. He kept bouncing around, avoiding any of the obvious choices, like Thomson, the massive television plant, or GE, where the world’s best-selling refrigerators were made. He couldn’t stop imagining doom for any of the large factories, so he was always moving on to the next small-time hustle. With each job change, a little more tension seeped into the house.

Gwen, Kerri’s mother, always said she was in academia, which means something to some people in a college town, but she was staff, not faculty, which I learned meant even more to some people in a college town, the kind who genuflect at the word tenure. Gwen was an administrator for event programming, a part of the campus infrastructure but not an academic.

She desperately wanted Kerri to be the real deal, a professor competitively courted by elite schools. It was Gwen’s decision to send Kerri to the gifted-and-talented program—GT, as we called it—which meant in fifth grade she was pulled out of our elementary school and bused with the high schoolers, sent off to a single classroom of Monroe County’s best and brightest.

That broke my ten-year-old heart.

It also made us closer friends, though. None of the classroom cliques infected our relationship, because we were still neighbors, still had the weekends and the summers. Those were special days. The gifted-and-talented program returned its refined minds in junior high, a day I’d learned to dread, aware by then of the vulnerability of our private friendship, afraid it wouldn’t stand up to the stress test. The cul-de-sac summers felt like a lost paradise. At thirteen, I was already nostalgic.

Our friendship held up, though. We were always closer out of school than in the building, but we didn’t pretend to be strangers. Different social circles, that’s all. Looking back, I think we realized that the friendship was better in a bubble and took steps to protect that without ever discussing it. As our social circles diverged, we found classes to take together, and no weekend passed without my dropping by Kerri’s house or vice versa. The only time it changed was when one of us began dating someone new; at that point, the other one drifted away to offer space and watch the result, like a basketball player clearing out for a teammate on a fast break. The depth of our friendship had been private for so long that it felt like the right kind of secret, and it was an unspoken understanding that whenever something significant happened, we returned to Raintree Lane to share it.

That’s how I ended up pulling into the driveway alongside Jerry Flanders’s battered Chevy S-10 on the day that I was called a prick by a police officer.

He opened the door when I pulled in, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt open over a 1992 Big Ten Champions shirt, a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of the flannel. The shirt made me wince—that team, starring Calbert Cheaney, Greg Graham, and Damon Bailey, should’ve won at least one national championship if not two, prevented from titles by fluke injuries and a referee named Ted Valentine. I’ll never forgive TV Teddy.

Jerry Flanders was a muscular guy with sandy hair and what seemed like an all-seasons sunburn. I loved Jerry, but after my encounter with Maddox, the sight of any authority figure rattled me, so I promptly put the Olds in park and shut the engine off. I saw him grinning as I stepped out of the car, and only then did I realize that in my effort to avoid coming close to his truck, I’d left the ass end of the Olds hanging into the street.

Go ahead and bring that old boat all the way up to the dock, Marshall.

Yes, sir. I climbed back behind the wheel, started the car, and nudged it up almost to the garage door of the split-level house. Jerry came down to the landing of the front steps and lit a cigarette. He was always trying to stop smoking, but that spring the effort wasn’t even getting lip service. He was drinking a lot more on the weekends too. I didn’t mind that; he was a funny drunk. When you’re sixteen, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. It takes a few years to see the whole.

Finally got the license, chief? he asked.

I did.

Parallel parked and everything?

No problems there. That wasn’t a lie, at least.

Well, congratulations. What a day for it, right? Feels like spring. He exhaled smoke and nodded at the house. She’s in the basement.

I thanked him and walked inside a house that was nearly as familiar as my own. Jerry and Gwen had a beautiful, manicured lawn, but inside, everything was chaotic and cluttered, as if they were unpacking from a move. I jogged down the steps to the basement, which was one of my favorite places on the planet, outfitted with a pool table, two leather-upholstered beanbag chairs, and a wall of stereo equipment featuring speakers that were nearly as tall as me. There was a small bedroom and a separate bathroom, and Kerri had moved from her childhood bedroom into the basement, an act of independence that her parents tolerated with shrugs and smiles.

She was curled up in one of the beanbags, dark brown hair bouncing to the chimes of the Smashing Pumpkins song Disarm as she worked on calculus homework. She was two full years ahead of me in math.

Did you remember to put it in neutral and rev the engine before the test like I told you? she asked without looking up.

No. But I’ve already been pulled over and called a prick by a police officer.

That got her attention. She stared up and pushed her hair back from her face. She had Jerry’s dark complexion and hair and Gwen’s petite build and fine-boned features, and when she laughed, her entire body got in on the act.

You’re serious?

Yep. I flopped into the beanbag beside her, feeling safe for the first time since I’d seen those colored lights. Except I hadn’t really felt in danger, had I? That was too extreme.

Then I remembered Maddox’s voice biting off the words: Where the fuck did you hear the words second chance?

I was scared, I told Kerri, the only person in the world I’d admit that to so readily, and then I told her the way it happened: how Maddox had loomed over me, biceps bulging, profanity popping; how alone and afraid the girl in the back of his car had looked.

She closed her math book and put the notebook on the floor and listened without saying a word, those dark, hyperfocused eyes of hers locked on me.

Are you going to report it? she asked when I was finished. She extended her slim, tan legs and crossed her feet at the ankles. Her calves were laced with scratches from trail running. Outside of practice, she refused to run on the track, much to the coach’s chagrin when she inevitably sprained another ankle.

Call the police on the police? That’s crazy.

They might not think so. It’s a bad look for them, having such an asshole out there. Getting the report might help. You know, for an internal affairs investigation.

Internal affairs? I laughed. I don’t think they’ve got that department in Bloomington.

Sure they do. There’s oversight. Someone’s in charge. Someone has to be, right? It’s an institution. There are checks and balances.

I gave that a grudging nod. He was a corporal, though. Pretty high up.

Well, there are higher ranks than corporal.

Yeah, I’ll find an admiral, right? Put something else on; I got sick of that album in seventh grade.

By which you mean put Nas on. Gag. She hit the remote and the disc changer hummed and clicked. Beyond the stereo, hanging above the door to Kerri’s bedroom, red light glowed from an exit sign. She’d found it at a yard sale and hung it above her bedroom door the day she moved into the basement, a way, she explained, of reminding her parents that she was growing up.

Visual cues are important prompts, she would say. At sixteen, each day I’m walking toward the exit. Jerry and Gwen would roll their eyes and grin.

The CD shifted and the intro of I Am… rippled through the speakers.

It’s so good, I said.

"It’s no Illmatic." She was goading me, but I couldn’t resist the bait.

It’s a progression. He’s not doing the same thing on repeat.

Eminem is better.

You’re high. He’s a character, not a rapper. All shock, no substance. I guarantee you, no one will remember Eminem in twenty years.

She smirked and we sat without speaking as Nas rapped on. The simple swagger—or rage—of hip-hop put a welcome, false confidence in my bloodstream, bravado that helped me forget the fear I’d felt when Maddox glared down at me.

Are you going to tell your mom? Kerri asked, and the bravado faded fast. Nobody rapped about running to their mother after a cop scared them.

Why would I do that?

He called you a prick! Cops are supposed to be observant, granted, so he’ll get credit for that, but it’s not the proper approach as a public servant.

I had to laugh at that.

It’s not worth it, I said. This will just make her wig out even more about me driving. I’ll end up right back on the bus.

Kerri nodded sympathetically. She knew how my mother felt about my driving. Did you get the two-thousand-pound-killing-machine lecture again before you left?

Not really. We were laughing about my test answer, and she was in a good mood.

What test answer? Kerri asked.

Damn it. Unforced error.

Marshall Miller, Kerri said, leaning forward, spotting the high-value secret with a practiced eye, you tell me this instant.

So I did, and by the time I finished, she was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes.

You actually guessed that. ‘Honk and proceed with caution.’ She could scarcely get the words out.

I didn’t guess it! I… selected it.

Now I was laughing too. When she repeated Honk and proceed with caution in the voice of someone saying a sacred prayer, as if she simply couldn’t believe how sweet it was, we both cracked up, and when Jerry poked his head in to ask what was so funny, Kerri insisted on telling him the story. Jerry had a beer, which should have stood out to me on a Monday afternoon, but it didn’t. It felt good, laughing with them. Maddox’s empty eyes and the frightened face of the girl in his back seat seemed far away.

When the song changed to I Gave You Power and Nas explained that he’d seen cold nights and bloody days, Jerry groaned and headed for the stairs.

I don’t need to hear that crap. Never mind the filthy lyrics; he’s ripping off Eric Gales.

It’s called sampling, I said.

It should be called felony theft, Jerry shot back.

Kerri waved him off. Get out of here, then. Radon doesn’t mitigate itself.

Not until I’m done with it, he said with mock seriousness, and then he was gone. I looked at Kerri quizzically.

Radon?

Some kind of poisonous gas that leaches up from limestone.

I know what it is. Why were you talking about it, though?

The humor left her eyes.

His new next job, she said. Sales for some company that installs pipes in your basement that, I don’t know, drain the radon? Wait, you don’t drain a gas. Use your brainbox, Kerri!

She was trying to recover her humor, but I knew her too well to miss the undercurrent of sadness. His new next job.

He quit the dealership? I asked.

She nodded wearily. "And my mother is going to be bullshit about that. Whatever. On to the next one."

Right.

There was an awkward beat of silence before she said, The good news is that radon, being a gas, rises. She lowered her voice and went wide-eyed, dramatic. And do you know what else rises, Marshall?

Elevators, I whispered. They’re simple genius, I tell you.

It sounds mean, laughing about Jerry’s beloved job, but the jokes were a comfort, a reminder of the good days when he’d been in on the joke. You can’t patch up a parent’s pain no matter how badly you want to, and if you absorb too much of it, you’ll drown alongside them. Part of being sixteen is laughing at things that hurt. Hell, it might be the most important part.

We would do a lot of laughing that year.

When we concluded with the simple-genius giggles, Kerri said, You didn’t recognize the girl in that cop’s car?

No. Couple years older than us, maybe? Not much. She was dressed like she’d just come from work at the Chocolate Goose.

They’re closed.

Exactly. That was weird. That’s what she was wearing, though. She looked frightened at first, and she was crying by the end.

Kerri was quiet, thinking about it. That would be so scary. Imagine being in the back of that guy’s car, with him swearing at you, and he’s wearing a gun and he has the steering wheel and you’ve got nothing, just along for the ride, and nobody even knows where you are.

Should I report Maddox’s behavior? Maybe. Or maybe I should suck it up and not be intimidated. I didn’t want to be the very thing he’d assumed I was: a scared kid with a mom to report to. I was about to articulate a version of this when there was a click and hum as the garage door started to rise. Kerri grimaced.

Your mom? I said.

Yeah. And guess who hasn’t heard about the lucrative world of radon mitigation yet?

Shit. Sorry. You want to hang at my house for a while? Mom will be in Indy.

I’m going to Jake’s.

Ah. Jake Crane was Kerri’s new boyfriend, who’d moved from Colorado the previous semester. He was a nationally ranked rock climber, making him instantly unique in Indiana. He was a senior and wore a lot of flannel and flip-flops and was unfailingly friendly—so authentically good-natured that nobody even busted his balls for it. The shredded rock-climbing physique probably helped with that. His father was a philosophy professor at IU, and Jake was like Kerri, a reader of everything. While I had no reason to dislike him, I couldn’t pretend I was rooting for him either. Kerri and I had never discussed the idea of dating and had never so much as kissed, as if we were both aware that it was the easiest way to screw up the longest friendship either of us had. At least Jake would graduate in a few months and go on his way.

Should I stay and say hi to your mom or just bail? I asked, rising.

Today you might want to duck and slide.

It was another inside joke, the same as simple genius, this one ripped from a Nas lyric and already turning into a regular phrase between us when someone needed to leave. If she wanted me out of the house, it was a clear sign of the blowup she expected when Gwen Flanders learned the news of Jerry’s latest job change. I gave her a fist bump and headed out. I was halfway up the stairs when she called after me.

Oh, crap, Marshall, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you!

Yeah? I looked back, saw her face was wide-eyed and concerned.

Honk and proceed with caution, okay? she said gravely.

I flipped her the bird as her laughter filled the basement once more.

Outside, the warm, humid air was fading with the oncoming night, a chill sliding in. A few fat raindrops fell like scouts. I ran for home ahead of the storm the way I had thousands of times before.

Marshall! Jerry Flanders barked.

I stopped short and turned back. Jerry was smoking another cigarette on the front steps, leaning against the wrought iron railing. He gave a wide grin and extended the cigarette in the direction of my car.

Oh, yeah. My car. I didn’t need to run up the street anymore.

Gotta get used to that! I said, and we both laughed as I crossed the lawn and slid behind the wheel. A few more raindrops plunked off the glass, and I searched for the windshield wiper controls. I still had to look for everything; nothing was reflex yet.

When I looked back up, Gwen Flanders faced Jerry on the top step, dressed in a black skirt and red blouse, pretty and professional. Her hands were turned palms up, and she was looking down at her husband with the obvious, weary bearing of someone waiting on an answer that was sure to disappoint.

I was glad to have the excuse to look in the rearview mirror as I backed up and headed for home.

My mother was gone, a premade meal waiting in the fridge. I sat at the table and stared at my copy of the traffic ticket, remembering the way Corporal Maddox had barked that he saw a little prick. His thumbprint was still visible on the bottom of the ticket. Now that I was indoors and under bright lights, it seemed even clearer, and even more like what I’d thought it was originally: ash. I held it up and to the light and frowned. It looked as if it had been singed, as if someone had held a match just beneath the paper.

I lowered the ticket and eyed the trash can. Would I need to keep my copy, or could I just show up at the county clerk’s office and pay it? I certainly didn’t want my mother to stumble across it, so I went into the living room and picked a DVD of a movie I knew she wouldn’t watch—The Rock with Nicolas Cage—and tucked the folded ticket inside the case. With any luck, I could burn it in a month.

I warmed my dinner up and ate alone at the kitchen table while I watched the evening news. My mother told me that I didn’t have to watch her, and I joked that I liked to see how frequently she was wrong with the forecast because it made my own grades look better, but the truth was that I liked to hear her voice in the empty house.

Kerri passed in the rain, honking twice as her Civic blew by, headed for Jake’s house. The Oldsmobile sat in the driveway in the rain while my mother told her TV audience that the near-record warmth in Indiana coincided with Pluto crossing Neptune’s orbit, making it the ninth-farthest planet from the sun after twenty years in eighth place. Some scientists, she said, wanted Pluto to be demoted from planet status entirely.

On February 11, between 11 a.m. and noon eastern time, the universe literally changed, she said with a broad smile.

I would reference this at breakfast, proof that I’d watched. She didn’t get home until after midnight, but she was always up by six to make breakfast before I left for school. It was many years before I realized how little sleep she got in those days.

A lot of the most important things occur to you too late.

We saw each other before 6 a.m., though, and by then we had a lot more to talk about than Pluto and the changing universe.

3

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of a weathered red barn with a high center beam and steep rooflines, one of a thousand along lonely Indiana highways, but there was a twist to this one—it had no doors.

The doorless barn stood alone in a field of dry summer grass browned beneath a withering sun. No one worked in the field; no driveway led in or out. It was the most isolated place I’d ever seen, and yet I walked toward it the way you must in a nightmare.

As I advanced, the building grew larger and larger and the sky behind it grew darker and darker. I crunched across the grass and reached the wall, then placed my palm on the worn wood. The relentless buzz of crickets or cicadas haunted the air. The barn wall was warm, though the sun was hidden by the storm clouds. A rasping sound came from the other side, and the wood shivered against my palm. I jerked my hand away.

The rasping sound continued, moving away from me now. I put my hand back to the barn wall and walked in sync with the sound. It moved quicker and quicker, and I chased it, walking at first, then at a half jog, then an all-out run. The wall was no longer warm to the touch but hot, like a grill lid. The weathered boards tore at my fingertips, splinters lancing my palm, but for some reason it seemed crucial to keep my hand up, to try to hold contact with whoever—or whatever—was on the other side of the doorless, windowless place.

Because they were trapped. I understood that much clearly.

Beyond the barn was a field of waist-high wheat whipped by warm winds, and the sky to the west roiled with dark clouds, a crimson sunset fading beneath the black cloud wall.