I

DORRIE

The Audi skids on a slick street. Black ice. Dorrie bends to sip hot chocolate from a Starbucks cup. Too hot, it burns her tongue, and she jerks the cup back, sloshing several drops across her coat. “Sorry!” She feels around his seat, wipes the spilled drink with her sleeve, glancing at Joe with his hands tight around the steering wheel. He looks angry, his jaw rigid in the disjointed, nearly absent light, the scraps from streetlights hazy and distorted as snow starts to fall sideways on the wind. She keeps her face a blank, determined not to break, no matter what he says. An actress since the age of five, she’s learned to handle almost everything that comes her way, or at least appear to. Even this.

She nearly hadn’t met him. She’d let his message go to voice mail—his un-Joe-like, desperate voice on the burner phone he’d bought her when he bought his own—insisting that she catch a train to Back Bay. Please, sweetheart. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t an emergency.

And then his text, That Starbucks on Boylston.

Fine, she’d texted him. You’re the boss.

She’d grabbed an old coat from the back of the hall closet— a heavy, ugly, too-large coat, discovered at Goodwill some years before, picked up as an afterthought and tossed on the pile of things her daughter had stacked on the counter. She’d meant to buy it for the coat drive at the school. But somehow it got lost in the closet. An extra, Samuel said, but no one ever wore it. Until tonight. She’d stuck one black leather glove in the pocket and felt through all her other coats for its mate but hadn’t found it. She always seems to have only one of things—gloves, socks, earrings. She’d scribbled Gone to grab a bite with Jeananne—Emergency and taped the note to the front door for Samuel and Lily. It was a lie, but at least Jeananne worked at the office. My boss called me back in, Dorrie might have written, which would have been the truth. Emergency, he said, she could have added for the urgency, but she’d felt safer with a lie.

She pulls her knitted hat over her ears to ward off the cruel Boston cold that jabs its way inside the front seat through tiny lines around the windows, unnoticed gaps at the doors. The hat is silly, blue-and-white striped, her daughter’s hat, Lily’s, frivolous and whimsical, the opposite of this outrageous coat that makes her feel as if she’s in a bad play. Still, it serves its purpose—enormous, heavy; it blocks the cold. And it disguises her, cloaks her betrayal. She reaches in her pocket, touching the one glove with the tips of her cold fingers. She takes it out, sets it on the seat beside her and silence hugs the car, crouches in the cracked leather of the seat. She rolls up her too-long, bulky sleeves and three bright bangle bracelets slide up her thin arm.

Joe sighs. She gazes at the side of his face, watches as he squints through the windshield at a road vague and fading, like a dream. Even with the car lurching, sliding, even with the gray murk that envelopes them, he seems preoccupied. He has been for weeks. Dorrie raises the hot chocolate to her lips, the cup from Starbucks, where earlier they’d sat and sipped their drinks, like strangers, barely speaking. His gait had been rigid as he’d squeezed past the inviting velvet chairs to simple wooden tables in the back. He’d looked distracted, rumpled, in his work clothes, his starched white shirt untucked in places, his heavy wool coat slightly atilt.

What? she’d said, but he’d just shaken his head. Not here. And she’d babbled on about the weather, the coffee, drowning out the voice at the back of her head—her mother’s voice, cautionary, clear, even after all these years.

She turns to look out the car window, seeing only a great swirl of white with the night behind it. She flinches, shrinking back against the seat as the car pitches forward. Her mother died in snow like this, when her car collided with a hurtling van. Killed instantly, she’d taken part of Dorrie’s father with her, changed him in some basic and essential way, left him sobbing, lost at the kitchen table, a wall phone swinging by his knees, the policeman’s words shooting through the mouthpiece like bullets. It was then that Dorrie learned to be an actress, a happy child, a smiling face stuck to her father’s thick black wall of grief.

Later, starring in a handful of her high school plays and summer theater, a short run at the Charles Playhouse, she’d found that acting was as natural to her as breathing. She nearly always gets the parts at her auditions and turned down the one understudy role she was offered. Ironic, because with Joe she’s only ever been an understudy. Understudyfork, her screen name when she e-mails him. Understudy for Karen.

She sets her drink in a cup holder on the console, glances around for the dropped lid, and sticks her hand over the hot chocolate. The car lurches along, sliding, as the tires seek out tracks imprinted on the icy road. “So.” She puts her palm down on the seat to steady herself. Her bracelets jangle and clang. She wishes now she’d listened to her mother.

“There isn’t any easy way to do this, Dorrie.” Joe doesn’t look at her. He stares through the windshield at the stormy night. “We have to stop seeing each other, at least for now,” and even though she’d sensed this was coming, for a second Dorrie can’t speak. She wants to cry, to scream, to grab the wheel.

“Karen?”

“No,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “It isn’t safe. For us.” He turns toward her, and even in the darkened car she sees his fear. It’s in his eyes—in the lines across his forehead. “Not now. I’ve started digging around, but until I figure out exactly what’s going on—”

“With what? Going on with what?” She turns to face him. She doesn’t shout. She takes a breath and then another and she musters all her acting skills to make her face a blank. Curious, nothing more. “I don’t understand.”

Joe shakes his head. “I know,” he says, and he speeds up. Too fast, she thinks. He stares back at the blur of road as he turns onto Newbury Street, and Dorrie glances toward the white-capped outdoor seating she can barely see, the banisters collecting snow. “It’s dangerous. For both of us. Believe me, if there was any other—”

Before he finishes, a bright light catches in the air and spreads out like a blanket as a car crosses over into their lane, swerves back, and disappears. Joe clutches the wheel. He brakes. The old Audi slides sideways as he struggles for control. “Jesus! I can’t—” Dorrie digs her nails into the seat and wills the car to stay on the road. She can’t breathe. The tires squeal, staining the air with an ugly shrieking sound that cuts the night in two. Before and after. Sliced clean like a melon. The car spins, pulling forward to the left, flying sideways. Dorrie grabs at air, grabs for Joe, her screams stopped in her throat as the car pitches finally off the road into a tree. Her airbag smacks her like a punch above the eye, the windshield crackles, her glove flies out through broken glass.

For a second there’s no sound. No place. No life. For a second the world stops on its axis and there is only snow and night stretched to its limit. A white hand reaches back inside the shattered window—a woman’s hand—her mother’s hand. A wisp of thick dark hair, a trick of light, a glittering shawl, her mother, who is always there when Dorrie needs her most. And then she knows. No, she whispers. No, Mama. Please, but her mother only nods and reaches for her daughter in the ruined car.

Blood lies splattered on the dashboard clock, three drops above the nine, four more across the twelve; hot chocolate stains the seats. Everything is strangely soft, the dark, falling fast and hard, a velvet curtain. Dorrie hears the sounds of her own breathing, quick, frantic, and then she hears thin sounds, strange hums and murmurs, real or not, inside her head or from rooms above the shops along the street, her mother’s voice whispering Leave! Leave, Dorrie! Sleet slams down sideways and a piece of newsprint dances in the air before it falls in through the broken window. One black glove lies faceup in a bank of snow.

The world snaps back in focus. Dorrie grabs her burner phone and shouts their whereabouts to 911. “Hurry!” she screams. “Please!”

She slides across the seat to Joe and even in her foggy, panicked state, she notices his airbag hasn’t opened. She touches his face. Blood seeps from his ear and trickles down his cheek. “Joe.” She tugs at his arm. “Just breathe,” she whispers. “Just breathe,” and suddenly he does—a gasp, a gurgling, drowning sound—but only once.

Leave, her mother says again, and this time when she reaches in the car, her fingers grasp the heavy coat and tug at the thick sleeve. Go, she says. I’ll take care of Joe, and Dorrie bends to kiss him this last time. He’s so cold. Everything is so cold. The wind howls in through fractured glass, and Dorrie slips across the seat to the passenger side. Blood oozes down her forehead and she touches it, feels the gummy heat of her insides. She bangs her elbow hard against the jammed door and slides onto the frozen ground. “I love you, Joe,” she says aloud and her words blow back to her.

She hesitates. Torn, before she turns away. She has no choice. To be found like this—with her—is the last thing Joe would want. He’d told her as much—the scandal, the embarrassment for Karen, for their sons. Dorrie tugs her knitted hat down over her forehead to hide the cut, to cover the blood, and her feet slip slightly on the icy ground as she backs up the dark street.

People spill from buildings, from apartments, bars, and restaurants. They dribble down from rented rooms, shouting, struggling into coats and pulling hats from pockets. The empty street buzzes with movement. Lights go on in buildings, silhouettes pass in front of windows, a closed shop opens suddenly, lighting up a mannequin with naked legs, a thin summer dress, ghoulish in the cold and death and dark. Large brick buildings loom like spectators around a grisly stage; tall windows come alive with winter coats on eerie faceless forms.

Voices bark. Sirens blare. People reach the sidewalks and hesitate, but only for a second, before they push on toward the car. When they are almost alongside her, Dorrie slips inside the crowd and moves with them toward the Audi, abandoned there against the tree. Snow collects on its roof, gathers in the broken windshield. But there’s something odd. She takes a small step forward. A siren screams around the corner. She backs away, still staring at the car, at the driver’s side, barely scratched.

When the ambulance and cops arrive, when the EMTs are there with Joe, when she hears one of them call to the others that he can’t get a pulse, and then call out again that Joe is gone, Dorrie turns and staggers through the mounds of dirty slush, the ugly, wicked ice. She stumbles down a street cramped with people, with EMTs and cops, their cars pulled up against the wide, snow-covered sidewalks; others sprawl across the slick roadway. Headlights blast light in sharp, rude waves that bounce off bits of glass and stone and metal, corners of signs, the hem of a skirt against a boot.

Dorrie rounds the corner, watching until the ambulance is nothing but a blur, its shriek a thin sound on the night. She stops in front of a closed bakery—she can see its vibrant bright red awning even through the snow, in the faint scattered light of a streetlamp. Vague outlines of pies fill the window, and she squeezes close beneath the awning, blotting out the pastries with her reflection, pokes at the knit hat, at the blood painting dark red lines across the rows of cheery blue.

She waits. And then she picks her way back along the slick sidewalk to Newbury. A car lurks on the other side of the street, its engine huffing in the snow. It has only one headlight. Bright, like a beacon. Blinding. She can hear the tow truck coming up from Berkeley, the straining, grinding gears, and then the large, rough shape of it bumbling up the street. She listens to the shouts, the “Over here!” and “Back in! Back in!” and “Hook it up!” The clanging, thudding sounds of Joe’s beloved Audi being chained. The one headlight from the lurking car winks as people cross in front of it, the make and model unclear in all the snow. She raises her hand to shade her eyes against the cloud of light as the car moves forward toward her and stops, catching her in its one blinding eye. Then, like a large and angry beast, it rolls out to the center of the street, turns, and grumbles off. A sedan, she thinks, dark—blue or black or gray. The taillights shed only a wobbly light. The tag is a blur.

She shivers. Joe is dead. She was there. She wants to lie across the stones of ice, to close her eyes and never open them again. But there is Lily. Her sweet Lily. She takes a deep breath, stares across the blinding snow. She’ll get through this; she hasn’t any choice. She didn’t die. She has to find a way to glue herself together somehow, soldier on. She has a daughter she adores, a husband, a job. She has a life. Flawed, to be sure. Huge, gaping shocking flaws, but she’ll do everything she can to hold on to it, even if that means walking away from a wrecked car, from this man she loved, even if it means putting on the most challenging performance of her life.

She glances at the lit shops, the slick street, and then she pulls her daughter’s ruined hat down tight over her hair and rushes toward the train. Frigid winds snap at her gashed forehead, so strong they nearly knock her down. She feels for her glove in her coat pocket, has a vague memory of it flying through the windshield.

She drops her burner phone in a trash can, but nearly right away she hears its ringtone echoing behind her. She turns around and takes a step back toward the bin.

At first the car is just a blob of light. And suddenly it’s coming toward her, swerving up from Arlington. The engine roars; the one bright headlight finds her in the haze, pins her in its sites as the car veers across three empty lanes, straight at her. The tires spin, whirring behind her as she runs across the street. Her feet in snow boots smash across crusts of snow. She slips and nearly falls, but she keeps running, moving—she keeps pushing forward, the knit cap plowing like a bullet through the night.