Eli smiled, a real one this time, though it didn't reach his eyes for long. "She still corrects my torque specs."
They sat with that a while — two people who had both learned what it meant to keep vigil beside someone who might not come back. Miriam thought about the hospital corridors she'd walked in Da Nang, the chairs she'd slept in, the particular silence of waiting rooms. She recognized the look on Eli Thornton's face. She'd worn it herself, thirty years ago, when Amos's cough turned out to be something with a name.
What I can't figure, Eli said, staring into his mug, "is why she was on that stretch alone at dusk. She knew better. That road at night — she knew better."
Miriam thought about the skid marks again. About the fresh black paint the club had found. About a red Ford that wasn't hard to find twice.
Maybe she didn't have a choice about being there, Miriam said quietly.
Eli looked at her. Something passed between them — not quite an understanding, more like the beginning of one.
Maybe, he said.
They finished their coffee. Eli stood, and the rocking chair creaked in relief. At the top of the stairs he stopped.
Mrs. Vale — Miriam. The men I'm leaving — they'll stay on the road, out of your way. You won't hardly know they're there.
I'll know, Miriam said. "I know everything that happens within two miles of this house. It's a talent."
Yes, ma'am. He started down the stairs, then stopped again. "One more thing. That belt you used. The surgeon asked me to tell you — he said it was the best field tourniquet he'd seen in twenty years of trauma work. He said whoever put it on knew exactly what they were doing."
Miriam looked at him for a long moment.
Tell him Da Nang says hello, she said.
Eli nodded slowly, like a man filing something away. Then he walked down to his bike, and eight hundred engines came alive one by one, and the black wave rolled back toward the highway, leaving Miriam's driveway full of dust and her porch suddenly, impossibly quiet.
Barnaby sneezed.
Miriam picked up the two empty mugs.
Well, she said to the dog. "That was breakfast."
Jessie Thornton did not wake up.
The doctors in Ely said the coma was the brain's way of buying time, the body shutting doors so it could do repair work in the dark. They used words like stable and critical in the same sentence, which Miriam knew from Da Nang meant they didn't know yet. The club posted guards at the clinic — two men in the hallway at all hours, polite to the nurses, immovable to everyone else. Eli barely left the waiting room. He slept in a chair with his cut folded over his knees like a blanket.
Miriam went to see her once.
She stood in the doorway of the ICU with her hands clasped in front of her, looking at the young woman under the white blanket. Jessie looked smaller than she had in the ditch, which Miriam knew was a trick of clean sheets and beeping machines. Tubes ran into her arms. Her right leg was wrapped in enough bandage to look like a pillar. Her face was the color of old paper.
Miriam had seen a thousand faces like that. She had also seen a thousand faces like that open their eyes.
You hang on, Miriam said quietly. "You hear me? You hang on. Somebody did a lot of work to get you here."
She did not touch the girl's hand. She wanted to, but her own hands were shaking, and she didn't want the nurses to see.
In the waiting room she found Eli exactly where she'd expected — folded into a plastic chair, his cut across his knees, his chin on his chest. A nurse had put a blanket over his shoulders without waking him. Miriam stood there a moment, this seventy-one-year-old woman looking at a sixty-two-year-old man asleep like a child, and felt something move in her chest that she didn't have a name for.
She didn't wake him. On the way out she stopped at the nurses' station and wrote her landline number on a scrap of paper. "If anything changes," she told the nurse, "day or night, you call me. I don't care what time it is."
The nurse looked at the number, then at Miriam's face, and nodded like she'd been given an order by a superior officer. In a way, she had.
On the drive home, Miriam thought about the crash site.
She had left things out there. Amos's belt, still twisted around that sagebrush branch — the surgeons would have cut it off and thrown it away, but the branch, the memory of it, was out there. And her flannel overshirt, the one she'd packed into the wound. She'd had that shirt for fifteen years. It was stupid to care about a shirt when a girl was in a coma, and Miriam knew it was stupid, and she went back for it anyway.
That was the excuse she gave herself. The truth, which she did not say out loud even to Barnaby, was that something had been nagging at her since Eli's visit. The skid marks. She had looked at them for maybe three seconds before the chrome caught her eye. Three seconds, at dusk, through a dusty windshield. The club's boys had gone over the ditch at dawn and found truck paint. But Miriam had been a nurse, not a tracker — and yet she had spent eleven years reading this desert the way other people read newspapers. She wanted to see the road again with her eyes open.
She didn't go back the next day. Or the day after. The invasion saw to that.
It began the following morning. Miriam was weeding the strip of dirt she optimistically called a garden when a motorcycle rolled up her dirt road — not rumbling past, but stopping. A young prospect with a baby face climbed off, carrying a casserole dish covered in foil.
Ma'am, he said, like he was delivering a summons. "From Tiny's wife. She said to tell you it's tuna noodle and there's no shame in it."