Page 80 of The Fundamentals

“I want that,” she broke in. “A lot.”

“If he’s dead, then it’s over,” I said. “I need this to be over. I want to live another life, with Bowie.”

The phone was quiet and I figured this call had dropped, too, but then my sister spoke. “Then I’ll come. I’m not doing anything else tonight. Don’t leave the building until you see my BMW.”

I waited for Aubin like she’d said, guided by a lifetime of following her rules as well as the idea that I really, really didn’t want to be the dumb girl in the movie anymore. When I saw her red car approaching, I still waited until it stopped and I saw her hand gesturing to me from the driver’s seat. I looked up and down the sidewalk and ran to hop in.

“Where’s your guard?” she asked me.

I tilted the mirror as she raced through the empty streets, but I didn’t see a car following us. “I don’t know. Back there somewhere, or maybe he’s asleep. No one expected me to be leaving right now.” I studied at my sister, who still managed to look beautiful even at this time of the night. “Why did you come?”

She didn’t answer at first and then she said, “I don’t know. I guess that I didn’t want you to do something stupid.”

“You know what I was thinking about while I was waiting for your car?” I asked.

“Were you talking to yourself as you stood there?”

“Probably I was mumbling, but I try not do that as much anymore. I want to live in the present and enjoy it.”

“You probably have more to enjoy now,” Aubin said.

“Now that I have Bowie,” I agreed.

“Yeah, I knew that it was a love thing on your side,” my sister told me. “You might as well have pinned a sign to your shirt.” She paused. “Well? What was the thing you were thinking about?”

“I was remembering when Dad and I had the boat accident.”

“You mean when he got drunk and took his little daughter out in a leaking wooden boat in the middle of the night, not wearing life jackets? I remember that, too.”

“You were fifteen,” I said. “You swam out and got me, and then you went again and got him. You saved both of us.”

“I was going to leave Dad, but you were crying a lot,” she answered. “What made you think of that?”

“It was just one of the times that made you a hero to me,” I said. “I wanted to be just like—”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that you want to be like me, ok? I’m not someone to emulate. Just be you, Sissy.”

I’d been trying to do that all my life, without much success. “I don’t know what’s going on with you.”

She wasn’t going to tell me, either, and we rode for a while in silence.

“I thought you were an adult back then, like you were totally grown up, but you were the same age that I was when I met Ward,” I mentioned. “I thought I was an adult at fifteen, too, but I was so young and I made so many bad decisions.”

“Someone can make bad decisions at any age,” she said. “If we’re making one right now and this is some kind of trick, I’m going to run him down with the car and then bill his parents for the front-end damage. I also have pepper spray and a knife, in case your bodyguard isn’t armed.” But we drove further and further, and there was still no car behind us. I tried to text the number that Bowie had given me, but we were already out of service.

“Did you tell your husband about this?” my sister asked, breaking the silence.

“He’s at the hotel with the team and they don’t have their phones. I have an emergency number but no, I didn’t use it. I can tell him what happened tomorrow after the game.”

“You’re going to have to do a lot of work to cover the circles under your eyes before you go on the field,” she noted. “I have good concealer in my bag.” She directed me to get it and put it in mine, and then we were quiet again until we arrived at the farm.

The big gate that led into Diane’s property was wide open, and I’d never seen it like that. Aubin slowed down and we both looked at it through the windshield. “Is there another way out of this place if they try to trap us in?” she asked.

“We’d have to run and climb the fence. It goes all the way around the property.” I felt my foot, wondering how far I could make it. Aubin was in great shape, of course, and I had no doubt that she could outpace Ward and everyone else in his family.

“We’ll use the pepper spray first,” she said, and slowly drove in. It was a long way to the house, up and down a few rolling hills and through the rows of cherry trees that were only dark shadows at this time of night. My sister was leaning forward and I realized that I was, too, trying to catch any movement ahead of us.

“There.” She stopped the BMW. “There’s a car.”

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