One sunny afternoon in April, not long after her release from the hospital, Susanna looked out the front window of her apartment and saw someone sitting behind the wheel of her car. She had been tidying up the living room, putting books away, straightening three-month-old New Yorkers on the coffee table. She had only glanced out the window as she stooped to snatch the television remote off the sill — how had it gotten there? — and return it to the top of the TV. Bent at the waist, her nose inches from the glass, she caught her breath at the sight of a figure — she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman — sitting with its hands on the wheel and its face turned away from her towards the passenger seat. Then she stood up straight, clutching the remote in both hands as though she might aim it at the car and make the figure vanish with a press of her thumb.
Oh great, she thought, you need this right now like you need . . . what? Like you need what?
The parking lot was long and narrow, an oblong of cracked and stained old asphalt that emptied onto Trowbridge Road. Her little blue Chevy Prizm was parked at right angles to the strip of matted brown lawn between the lot and the boarded-up restaurant next door, and next to the Prizm was the only other car in the lot in the middle of a weekday afternoon, a red Dodge that never moved from its spot. From the grass between their front bumpers rose a youngish maple, its shadow printed on the asphalt, sharp near the trunk, blurred at the tips of its branches. The upper reaches of the tree itself were fuzzed with new buds of a translucent green, while from the lowest limbs, just over the two cars, a few brown leaves still flapped like skeletal hands in the mild spring breeze. Crazed with crooked shadows, the Dodge’s sheen was dulled with a settled layer of grime and plastered here and there with dead leaves. From her own car a brilliant coin of sun glared in the rear window, making spots in Susanna’s eyes. She shifted her gaze back to the driver’s side window, hopeful that the figure she’d just seen was only the reflection of a tree limb in the glass. But then figure twisted in its seat, turning its back to her to face the passenger side more squarely.
She gasped and stepped back, squeezing the remote tightly in both hands. Then she drew a deep breath and said, “Right,” and she wheeled away from the window and stamped across the carpet. She flung open her apartment door, thumped in her bare heels down the cold concrete steps, and strode out onto the rough asphalt. This is stupid, she was thinking, even as grit pricked her bare soles. It was cold, and all she had on were a pair of exercise tights and a sweatshirt, and when was the last time she walked barefoot on pavement? When she was, what, fourteen? Go back upstairs, she thought, lock yourself in, call the cops, but she was also thinking, no, this is what got you into trouble, this is the pattern.
“Get mad at who you’re mad at,” Dr. Ghose had said, in his quiet, condescending singsong. “Direct your anger out, not in.”
So, the remote clutched to her chest, she marched right up to the side of her car, stooped to the driver’s side window, and lifted her other hand to rap smartly on the glass.
But the driver’s seat was empty. Susanna stooped a little lower to peer through both windows on this side. There was no one in the car.
She stood up straight and let her hands drop to her sides. She was uncertain if her skin was tightening and her toes going numb because she was afraid, or just because she was cold. Then the remote control slipped from her hand and clattered against the asphalt, and she snatched it up and dashed back across the parking lot and up the stairs, muttering “Idiot,” with each jarring impact of her heels.
Nice going, Nancy Drew, she thought as she scuffed the grit off her soles onto the doormat and slipped back into the warmth of her apartment. She was shaking, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t just from the cold, so she put the remote on the coffee table and sat crosslegged on the couch and closed her eyes and tried to find her center. But it didn’t help.
Now I’m seeing things, she thought in the dark behind her eyelids. This’ll wow Dr. Ghose.
* * *
Susanna had not driven her car since before her suicide attempt. When she added up the time — a week in intensive care while her wrists healed (three days of that in restraints, in a Nembutal fog), plus another six weeks or so in the psych facility — she realized hadn’t been behind the wheel for nearly two months. Tracy, her friend from work, came over three or four times a week and took Susanna out somewhere, to dinner, to a movie, to Meridian Mall, or even just for a drive out to Mason and back. After a couple of weeks of this, Susanna said one night, “Let’s take my car,” but Tracy only agreed if she could drive. Susanna sat uncomfortably in her own passenger seat, clasping her wrists in her lap to hide the scars. Check your mirrors, she wanted to say. Don’t ride the brakes. Use the damn turn signal. Not to mention that Tracy had shorter legs than Susanna, which meant that when Dr. Ghose finally gave Susanna permission to drive again, she’d have to move the seat back and readjust all the mirrors.
“It’s weird,” she said, “being a passenger in your own car.”
“I don’t mind driving.” Tracy hunched over the wheel like an old woman, even though she was younger than Susanna. “Anyway, you can’t just let it sit there, Suse. The battery’ll drain, the tires’ll go flat. If you don’t use the car, it’ll . . .”
“Die?” Susanna took a mildly malicious pleasure in watching Tracy go speechless and turn bright red. She felt bad, so she touched Tracy’s arm, then pulled her hand away. “It’s alright, Tracy.” She clutched her wrists again. “But please don’t call me ‘Suse.’”
* * *
During the first week back in her apartment Susanna had noticed the red car parked next to hers. It was a ten-year-old Dodge Shadow with Illinois plates whose tags had expired a year ago. The tacky grime on the trunk and hood was pocked with the dried impact of raindrops, and the dusty windshield with the paw prints of cats, or possibly raccoons. The car’s roof was printed with the stains of dead leaves. The side windows were nearly opaque with dirt made sticky by tree sap, and when Susanna finally got curious enough to cup her eyes and peer through them, she saw only empty seats and four items on the grey carpet of the foot wells: a pebbled plastic glass on its side on the front passenger’s carpet; a crumpled white sweatshirt with an unreadable logo behind the passenger seat; and behind the driver’s seat, a tiny souvenir football from the Chicago Bears and a quarter. Crumbling drifts of last autumn’s leaves had washed up against the Dodge’s softening tires. More leaves had piled up over the vent under the windshield wipers.
The car had begun to irritate her, since it always sat in the same place and never moved. It seemed to have been there all winter, before she’d gone into the hospital, but she wasn’t sure she remembered seeing it before. Of course, there was a lot of stuff she wasn’t sure she remembered from last fall, but now that she was home all day, for the time being, with little to do but read, watch TV, and stare out the window, it seemed to her that in the year she had lived in this building, she had never seen the car in another spot, never seen the car in motion, never seen anyone get in or out of the car. She wasn’t exactly sure the car had been there since she moved in, but she couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t.
She started asking her neighbors about it, when she ran into them at the mailbox or on the stairs. This required some plucking up of her nerve. Even before the hospital, she’d been the odd woman out in the building. Most of her neighbors were students at Michigan State, which meant she was at least twenty-five years older than most of them, and at least fifteen years older even than the Chinese grad student who lived just below her. Most of the kids in her building were renting their first apartment, while she was living in the only place she could afford after her house foreclosed. Every one of them seemed to radiate youthful vigor and heedless optimism like a wood stove, and it was very, very hard not to think that she was meeting them coming up the slope of life, while she was going down. The few she’d spoken to before she tried to kill herself probably remembered her only as a woman who reminded them of their moms, or even, oh god, their grandmothers. And if they hadn’t noticed her before, the red lights of the ambulance flashing in their windows and the police cruiser spitting staticky voices into a frigid January night had no doubt made an ineradicable first impression. Now they all knew who she was, whether she liked it or not.
Still, she didn’t cut herself or anybody else any slack in these recent encounters, but stood her ground and met each neighbor’s eyes with her hand at her throat. Each diffident boy she approached turned instantly and self-consciously solicitous, as if afraid that she might try to kill herself again right there in front of him, and the girls were energetic and cheerful, pitching their voices high as if Susanna was elderly and deaf as well as suicidal.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she’d say, “but do you know whose car that is under the tree?” And the boy or girl would gratefully turn away from her, wheeling his or her whole body to gaze across the parking lot.
“The Chevy?”
“No, that’s my car. I mean the one next to it.”
“The teal one? That’s mine . . .”
“No, the one right under the tree. The red car.” She’d force a smile and edge into her neighbor’s field of vision. “Illinois plates? Tires going flat?”
Her neighbor’s gaze would seem to blur, then he or she would blink at her and say, “I don’t know” or “I never really noticed it.” Or, “Why don’t you ask Allan?”
Allan was her landlord, a bluff, energetic, sixtysomething guy with the bandy legs and orangutan stoop of an old shortstop; he chugged along with knees bent and shoulders rolled forward as if he expected a grounder at any moment. He had a red face and a red bald spot enclosed by a monkish tonsure of white hair. This spring he was wearing a nylon windbreaker in dark Spartan green and scuffed running shoes and a shapeless pair of khakis cinched up under his pot belly. He talked too loud and took up too much space, and he was as skittish as a cat. Not long after Susanna came home from the hospital, he showed up one day, feigning solicitude — “Just checkin’ in, hon,” he said, as hearty as Ernie Harwell — and broadly hinted that she might be happier somewhere else, that perhaps the apartment held too painful a memory for her. Susanna was flustered to be interrupted in the middle of the DVD she was watching from her sofa — “A Streetcar Named Desire” — but she managed, not entirely deliberately, to balance helplessness with calculation — not unlike Blanche DuBois, in fact — wrapping herself in her comforter and wringing her hands in a way that displayed the still-red scars on her wrists (“Cut with the vein next time,” suggested one of her psych ward comrades, “not across.”). On the one hand, she managed to convey that her therapist — “Dr. Ghose?” — said that moving was one of the most stressful things there you could do, while on the other, she made it clear that her current employer, the Michigan Department of Transportation, was very generous with paid medical leave and that she’d have no problem meeting her financial responsibilities. She widened her eyes at Allan, knowing that to him, if not to the children who were her neighbors, she was an attractive younger woman. “You’re still the prettiest girl I know,” was the last thing her ex had ever said to her, before he took off to Texas and stuck her with their metastasizing mortgage.
“If I had to move right now,” she said to Allan now, Blanche-ing it a bit, the woman herself paused in mid-flutter on the screen across the room, “I don’t know what I’d do.” Allan started backing toward the door immediately, holding up his big-knuckled hands and saying, “Whoa, missy, that’s not what I meant.” After he was gone, and she unpaused Vivian Leigh, she was a little guilty at how pleased she was with herself.
So that now, when she saw him stumping across the parking lot and hurried out in her slippers to ask him about the abandoned car, he was as eager to please as a nine-year-old. Even so, he blinked across the lot the same way her neighbors had, as if he didn’t even see the Dodge.
“It’s not Brittney’s?”
“No, I asked her,” Susanna said, not certain which of her neighbors was Brittney.
“Well then, I sure don’t know,” he boomed. “I’ll check it out for you, though.”
But after a week she hadn’t heard back from him. Either he didn’t bother to check, or he’d forgotten, or he found out that it belonged to someone in the building and had forgotten to tell her. She thought about calling the police or even the Illinois authorities and reading them the license number, but she never did that, either. I’ve already called enough attention to myself, she decided, for one year.
Part Two
She decided not to mention the abandoned car, or the phantom in her own car, to her therapist. Dr. Ghose was a native of India, which perhaps accounted for what she took to be his barely disguised disdain at the trivial problems of Americans. As he watched her with a heavy-lidded gaze that reminded her of an unusually bored and pitiless Salman Rushdie, she could practically hear him say in his posh, post-colonial drawl, “Lost your job, your husband, and your house, you say? Try growing up in a village in Gujarat!” All he had to offer her were the same positive-thinking bromides that Tracy volunteered until Susanna asked her to stop: Put it behind you. Don’t internalize your rage. Find something else to occupy your mind. Pull your socks up, you silly bitch.
Yet still he asked her to come twice a week, and she didn’t think it was only because of whatever pittance he was getting from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. She decided that, despite his disdain, he must have settled on her as his chief informant for a research project about the inner life of the North American woman of a certain age, in return for which he regularly renewed her prescriptions for powerful antidepressants. After surprisingly little inner struggle, this arrangement began to seem like a fair exchange to Susanna. In the first session after she saw the figure in her car, he spent the entire fifty minutes asking a series of mostly irrelevant (to her) questions about her childlessness. “You have never had the desire to have children? You have never regretted not having children? Do the children of your peers evoke any response in you?” The real answers to these questions were simply, “No,” “Not once,” and “Not really,” but Susanna, happy to provide satisfaction in exchange for Paxil, vamped a bit for Dr. Ghose, even going so far as to invent a fictional child of a fictional friend who, one afternoon, had accidentally called Susanna “Mommy,” causing a fictional maternal pang in Susanna.
“And you did not probe this feeling any further? It did not cause you to reconsider your choice?”
“I’m forty-nine,” Susanna said, reflexively shaving a few years off her age even as she offered the doctor an artfully constructed mask of middle-age rue.
“Interesting,” said Dr. Ghose, rubbing his temple with his long middle finger.
Only at the end of the session, when he moved behind his desk to renew her prescription, did he rather absently ask if she were having any adverse reactions to the pills.
“Dry mouth?” he said. “Insomnia? Upset tummy?”
“Hallucinations,” Susanna said before she could stop herself. She was already sitting on the edge of her seat, with her bag perched on her knees. Tracy was waiting to take her home.
Dr. Ghose’s head jerked up, his pen stilled suddenly over the prescription pad. His eyes widened.
“I’m joking.” She pressed her lips together as if she were repressing a smile.
“Not very funny, Susanna.” The pen continued across the pad. Dr. Ghose looked up again as he tore off the top sheet. “Of course, you would tell me if you were having hallucinations.”
“Of course I would,” said Susanna.
* * *
And that, Susanna resolved, was the end of it: she had driven a stake through the heart of the figure in the car, turning it into a joke. She didn’t think about it again until one morning a few days after seeing Dr. Ghose, when she was hoisting the venetian blinds in her living room window. Her mind was still numbed with sleep — she hadn’t had her coffee yet — but the sight of someone sitting once again in the driver’s seat of her car jolted her wide awake. She stood in the window in her nightgown, chilled all over, her hand raised, the cord cutting into her palm. The rattle of the blinds faded and the living room emptied of sound all at once, enclosing her in an airless silence.
“There you are,” murmured Susanna, hanging onto the cord as if she might fall over. Now there were two figures in the car. Her apartment building was only two stories, and even in her second-storey window, she was not very far off the ground. She was looking into her Prizm from a shallow angle, with a clear view of the passenger seat, and there, turning to face the person in the driver’s seat, was another shadowy figure. Through the morning glare in her living room window and the long, bony shadow of the tree, Susanna could not make out any features of this new figure; all she could tell was that it had lifted its arm toward the driver. And the driver had turned slightly to face the passenger, without taking its hands from the steering wheel.
Susanna let go of the cord and the blinds crashed down, the vanes clattering against the glass. She drew a deep breath and pressed her hand to her mouth. Then she pried a gap in the vanes with her fingers and peered into the sunlight again. At the far end of the parking lot morning traffic crawled toward campus along Trowbridge Road, making the scene seem perfectly ordinary. But the figures were still there in her car, both of them; now the driver had taken its hands off the wheel, holding them palm outward between the seats, as if saying to the passenger, hold it right there, pal.
“Damn,” said Susanna. “Damn it all.”
She stalked into her bedroom and sat on her unmade bed and stubbed her feet into her running shoes and tied them tight. Then she started out, stopped, and went back to snatch her key ring off the dresser. Her car keys weren’t on it — Tracy had those — but she had her apartment key and a couple of work keys and the key to the house she’d lost in Okemos. The metal frame of the stairwell thrummed as she trotted down the concrete steps, and as she marched out into the early chill of the day, she worked the blades of the keys between her fingers the way they taught her in rape defense class, ready to gouge a piece out of some son-of-a-bitch if she had to. The low morning sun glared through the bare branches of the tree as she reached her car, and she hooked the fingers of one hand under the cold door latch and cocked the other, bristling with keys, over her shoulder.
But the door was still locked, and by jerking the handle Susanna only yanked herself up against the car. She staggered back, her fist full of keys still poised, and bent slowly to look in the window. The car was empty. She swung her gaze from the dash to the backseat, leaning to one side and then the other to peer around the headrests. No one was in the car; she could practically smell the chill, undisturbed dank of the Prizm’s interior.
She turned suddenly, grinding grit into the asphalt under her shoe. She wasn’t alone — the rush hour traffic was backed up at the light where Trowbridge met Harrison Road — but she felt like she was the only person in sight. She looked back up at the blank blinds in her living room window, and felt a sudden chill. What if the vanes were pried apart by fingers and she saw a pair of eyes peering down at her? But the blinds hung perfectly still, and the chill pierced her skin, reminding her that she was standing out in front of two lanes of commuters in her nightgown. She ran her hand through her uncombed hair, feeling itchy, like she always did before she showered. She glanced across her Prizm to the abandoned Dodge, narrowing her eyes to try to penetrate the grime on the window. Why can’t you be haunted? she thought. But all she saw in the window was her own slightly crazy reflection, so she groaned and started back across the parking lot in her nightgown and running shoes. Just outside the stairwell, a fat orange tabby sprawled on its side on top of a neighbor’s pickup truck, its chin pressed into the folds around its neck, its eyes half-closed, watching Susanna insolently.
“What are you looking at?” she snapped, and the cat skidded down the windshield and disappeared around the corner of the building.
* * *
After work that afternoon, Tracy came over to take Susanna to dinner. They watched the first half “Hardball” first — even though Susanna couldn’t stand Chris Matthews — to give the rush hour traffic a chance to thin out. Tracy sat all the way back in Susanna’s Ikea chair, her toes just brushing the carpet, and she stared out the window more than she watched the screen. Susanna silently debated mentioning to Tracy the figures she’d seen in her car, and decided against it. At seven-thirty, while Chris Matthews kept barking interruptions at some poor woman, Tracy scooped her keys into her palm and stood and said, “It won’t be too bad now. Let’s take your car. I’ll drive.”
They got right on the freeway at the end of Trowbridge and headed for the west side of Lansing. Tracy never took Susanna east, toward Okemos, probably for fear that mere proximity to her foreclosed home would drive her to slit her wrists again over supper.
Halfway to the restaurant — Bob Evans again — Susanna said, “Tracy, have you been sitting in my car?”
“I’m sitting in your car right now.”
Susanna rolled her eyes. “I know that, thank you. I mean . . . have you ever come over and sat in my car?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know.” Bad idea, Susanna thought. “Forget it.”
“Did you see someone sitting in your car?” Tracy took her eyes off the road to glance at Susanna.
“No. It was just a reflection or something.”
“Suse, did you see someone sitting in your car? Did you call the police?”
“Tracy, forget it. It was just a shadow or something. It was dark.” For God’s sake, don’t tell her it was broad daylight.
“Susanna!”
“Forget it. Will you watch the road, please?”
As a way to divert Tracy’s attention from the topic, Susanna suggested they go someplace other than Bob Evans, and despite some passive-aggressive grumbling from Tracy — “Will they have anything I like?” — they ended up at a Lebanese place Susanna knew of out on West Saginaw. The change of routine threw Tracy, and as she ventured warily into the brave new world of kafta kabobs and falafel, all she talked about during the meal was the strange food in front of her. “What’s this?” she asked, poking her fork into the hummus. Susanna was relieved, because as grateful as she tried to be for Tracy’s help, Susanna had never worked up the nerve to tell Tracy how uninterested she was in gossip about work. Emboldened by the little bit of control she’d wrested back, Susanna decided to try something else on the freeway back to her apartment.
“Dr. Ghose and I have been talking about getting my car keys back,” she said. It was a lie, and it wouldn’t be hard for Tracy to check.
“The one you have,” Susanna went on, before Tracy could speak, “is that a copy, or is it my actual key?”
Tracy pointedly watched the road. “He hasn’t said anything to me.” The arrangement was, Susanna had waived doctor-patient confidentiality on this one topic, and Dr. Ghose would let Tracy know when Susanna could have her key back.
“Well, we haven’t decided anything yet. It’s that at some point I’ll need it back.”
Tracy worked her jaw as if trying out phrases. “I’m happy to drive you anywhere, Suse.”
Don’t call me that. “What if I need to go somewhere?”
“Where? You’re not planning to come back to work yet, are you?”
“For crying out loud, Tracy, to the market. To the, to the video store.”
“Don’t you have Netflix?”
“For God’s sake, Tracy.”
“I can take you anywhere you want to go. I can bring you anything you need.”
“What if there’s an emergency? What if the dam breaks?”
“The dam? What dam?
“I don’t know. It’s a figure of speech.”
“I don’t know what dam you’re talking about.”
“Tracy, it’s my car.”
“Of course it is.” There was another long pause as Tracy worked her jaw again. “I just want you to be careful.”
“Why wouldn’t I be careful?”
“What about that woman in Grand Ledge?”
“What woman?”
“You know, the carjacking thing.”
“What carjacking thing?”
“Maybe you don’t know about it.” Tracy gave her a self-consciously mournful look. “It happened while you were in the hospital.”
Susanna threw up her hands.
“This woman in Grand Ledge was abducted?” Tracy said. “In broad daylight? Well, she was from Chicago, actually, but he took her right right out of the Meijer’s parking lot.”
“He? Who’s he?”
“The carjacker? You really didn’t see this? They had a surveillance video of some guy getting into her car.”
“What happened?”
“They never found her. Or her car.”
“What about the guy?”
“They never found him either. He was too far away from the camera to identify.” Tracy dropped her voice theatrically. “They’re pretty sure she’s…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Susanna. “I don’t need to hear it.” Now they were gliding off the freeway onto Trowbridge Road and slowing for the turn into her parking lot. “I still want my key back,” she said, sounding childishly sullen even to herself. Then, as Tracy started to pull into the usual parking space next to the Dodge, Susanna said sharply, “Hold it.” Tracy braked, and they both lurched forward against their seatbelts.
“Did I hit something?” Tracy squeezed the wheel with both hands.
“No. Just don’t park under the tree.” She pointed across the lot, to an empty spot right under her living room window. “Park there.”
“Why? Don’t you always park under the tree?”
“Tracy, please. Just do it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Tracy!”
“Alright.” Tracy cringed and swung into the spot and switched off the car. As she reached between the seats for her purse in the back seat, Susanna snatched the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car.
“Susanna!” Tracy leaned across the seat and looked out the passenger door at Susanna, then she opened her own door and struggled out, watching Susanna wide-eyed across the roof of the car. “I’m calling Dr. Ghose!”
“Tell him I said hi.” Susanna grimaced at the pressure on her fingernail as she pried apart Tracy’s ring to remove her key. When she had it, she tossed the ring of keys across the car. Tracy flinched and missed them, then stooped to pick up them up off the asphalt.
“Susanna, please,” she said as she stood up again.
Susanna slipped the ring into her purse, and she tried to stare Tracy down over the roof of the car, even though all she would see was Tracy’s silhouette against the headlights of cars on Trowbridge Road. Finally Tracy said, “Just promise me you won’t go anywhere after dark.”
Susanna sighed silently in relief and hoped that Tracy hadn’t noticed. “I thought you said the woman was taken in broad daylight.”
“Just promise me,” said Tracy.
Part Three
Before she went to bed that night, Susanna turned out all the lights in her apartment and opened the living room blinds. The restaurant next door had been closed since before Susanna moved in, but the shopping center beyond it still had a few active businesses, and its empty parking lot was lit by a sickly yellowish glare from the sodium lights. The light shined through the new leaves on the maple and gleamed in the hoods of the cars in the parking lot of her building, even the abandoned Dodge, but none of it seemed to reach across the parking lot to her Chevy. Her own car was full of shadows, but she could still make out the empty seats, the top of the dashboard, the empty cup holder that she never used. She left the blinds open and went to bed.
She was wakened in the middle of the night by a crashing thunderstorm. A particularly bright flash made her open her eyes, and a hollow rumble that shook the whole building made her sit up in bed. The green numbers of the clock on the dresser said three-twenty. She flung back the covers and jumped up, wide awake now, and she pried open her bedroom blinds. No rain was falling yet, but the maple tree was thrashing in a powerful wind. She went into the living room and edged up to the side of the window, clutching her elbows. The dark mass of limbs twisted and groaned against the glare of the lights next door. Then a brilliant flash bleached the parking lot, and for an instant every flailing leaf of the tree was etched in brilliant black and white. The thunder an instant later came up through Susanna’s bare feet, rattling the glass and making her jump.
As the lightning faded, she peered straight down into the windshield of the Prizm. Her car was full of light, but it wasn’t lightning, or the dome light. All around the car was darkness and wind, but inside, the car was full of daylight slanting at a steep angle, picking out the dust on the dashboard, throwing a bright crescent into each of the cup holders. Two figures sat in the car, the driver and the passenger. The line of the roof along the top of the windshield cut them off at their collarbones, so Susanna could not see their faces, but both figures were moving. The passenger gesticulated at the figure in the driver’s seat, and the driver lifted her hands off the wheel and seemed to be pounding her temples. The passenger flung himself back in his seat and pressed his palms against the dashboard. As he did, a white arm reached between the seats, out of the back seat, and Susanna gasped aloud. A third figure! she thought, unable to catch her breath.
Then lightning flashed again, and the windshield below was blanked out, the empty seats illuminated in the bleaching glare. Susanna threw her hand up over her eyes and recoiled from the window, but as the light died and thunder rattled the glass, she peeked between her fingers to see the windshield full of daylight again. The passenger was flailing in his seat, his hands still propped against the dash. The driver crossed her arms over her chest, clawing at her elbows.
“Oh, God,” moaned Susanna, and she stumbled through the dark to her bedroom and plunged her hand into her purse, feeling for her car key. To her astonishment, her fingers closed around it right away, and as another flash lit up her bedroom, even through the blinds, she saw herself in the mirror, white-skinned and wild-eyed, clutching the key in her fist.
“I’m scarier than you are!” she almost shouted as the lightning died and thunder rattled the windows, and she ground her heel into the carpet and marched to her apartment door, twisting the deadbolt open and yanking on the knob. The cold wind blowing up the stairwell caught the door and wrenched it out of her hand, but she pressed into the wind and started barefoot down the stairs. In the parking lot no rain was falling, but the wind blew her hair over her eyes and into her mouth and pressed her nightgown between her legs. Another flash blinded her momentarily, but in the dying light she pushed back her hair with one hand and slipped the key into the lock on the first try, hauling the door open against the wind and sliding behind the steering wheel. She yanked the door shut with a definitive thunk, and she sat panting behind the wheel with the key thrust like a blade between her thumb and forefinger. The wind battered the car, and she heard the oceanic rush of the tree behind her.
She looked at the empty passenger seat next to her, listening to the hoarse gasp of her own breath in the upholstered silence of car. She twisted around and looked into the backseat, at the limp seatbelts snaking across the seat.
“Okay,” she said, and she thrust the key into the ignition and started the car. She hesitated for a moment with her hand on the gearshift, then adjusted her mirrors, right, left, and center, from Tracy’s settings; she reached between her knees and slid the seat all the way back. Then, as fat raindrops began to slap against the windshield, she made a Y in the parking lot, reversing out of the spot under her window and pulling in again under the lashing tree, next to the grimy old Dodge. The pouring rain glazed the windows, blurring the view. She sat for a moment, watching the drops pucker the blur, then glanced once more at the passenger seat and into the back seat. No one was there. Then she shut off the engine, yanked up the parking brake, and opened the door. The wind nearly wrenched it out of her hands, and she was drenched immediately as she got out of the car, her nightgown plastered to her skin. As the rain sizzled against the asphalt and the roof of the car, she locked the door and lifted the latch to make sure it was locked, then lifted the latch again, just to be certain. Then she splashed across the parking lot and up the stairway, the wind pushing her from behind. Inside, she pushed the door shut against the wind, then stood pinching the soaking flannel away from her belly, dripping water on the carpet. She pressed her wet hair back from her forehead with both hands. The living room window blazed with light again, the floor rumbled. She went to the window and lowered the blinds without looking into the parking lot, the cord cutting into her palms. The blinds were still rattling as she stormed off to bed.
* * *
In the morning she hauled up the blinds again as soon as she got up. The sky was a scrubbed, windless blue. Morning sunlight slanted through the tree; fresh green leaves and a few leafy twigs lay among the glassy patches of water on the parking lot. Her car sat under the tree, in shadow. There was no one in it. Beside it, the Dodge seemed to be as grimy as ever, despite the storm.
Tracy called her at eight-thirty, right after she got to work, no doubt. “My lord, did that storm wake you up last night?”
“What storm?” Susanna said.
“You didn’t hear it?” Tracy said. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear it.”
“Slept like a baby. Like a log. Like a dead donkey.”
Tracy sort of laughed. She never could tell whether Susanna was being funny or not. Then, out of the blue, she said, “Hon, you didn’t take your car out after I dropped you off last night, did you?”
“No,” said Susanna.
“Really?”
“Oh wait, I did some street racing on Michigan Avenue. I kicked some frat boy’s ass.”
“You’re not ready yet, Suse. I worry about you.”
“Tracy, knock it off. I didn’t go anywhere.”
There was a long pause, and Susanna could hear Tracy breathing. She could hear other voices in the office.
“The car wasn’t parked this morning where we left it,” Tracy said.
This wasn’t a surprise to Susanna. She knew Tracy checked up on her; once or twice she’d even seen her Subaru creeping slowly by on Trowbridge Road. Even so, it made her angry.
“Jesus Christ, Tracy! I moved it last night, during the storm, okay? Is that all right with you?”
“I thought you said you slept through the storm.”
Susanna sighed.
“I’m going to have to tell Dr. Ghose.”
“Tell him whatever you want! It’s my fucking car!”
“And I’m coming by to drive you to see him this afternoon.”
“Did you hear what I said? I can drive myself.”
“I’ll be there at two fifteen.”
Susanna groaned. She was exhausted.
“Whatever,” she said.
* * *
“You seem more nervous than usual,” said Dr. Ghose.
As she sat with her legs crossed in his expensive but vulgar leather chair — Dr. Ghose had Hugh Hefner’s sense of décor — Susanna was suddenly aware that her toe of her shoe was jiggling in the air, so she stopped it. This, of course, only made her more self-conscious, so to cover it, she said, “I’m bored.”
Dr. Ghose arched his eyebrow. “Am I boring you?”“Wait a minute,” Susanna said. “What’s that mean, ‘more nervous than usual’?”
“Am I boring you?”
“I’ve had a bad couple of nights.”
“Bad. You mean . . . “
“Bad. I couldn’t sleep.”
Dr. Ghose massaged his temple with the tip of his middle finger. Now he looked bored. “That could be a side effect of the Paxil.”
“How about bad dreams?”
“What is it, then? Are you having insomnia or are you having bad dreams?”
“I can’t have both? I’m a complicated woman, Doc. I have a rich interior life.”
“Are you jousting with me, Susanna?”
Her leg was beginning to ache with the tension of holding it still, so to hell with it, she thought, and started jiggling her toe again.
“I took my car keys back from Tracy,” she said.
“I know.”
Susanna sighed. “Of course you do.”
“I don’t like the way you took them back. It shows misdirected hostility.”
Susanna shrugged.
“But it also indicates a yearning to take control again,” said Dr. Ghose, “to be in charge of your own life.”
“Either that,” said Susanna, “or I’m just tired of seeing other people behind the wheel of my car.”
Dr. Ghose frowned. Oops, she thought.
“How’s that working out?” said Dr. Ghose.
Susanna sighed, to cover her relief that he hadn’t picked up on what she’d just said. She gave him a grin and waggled her thumb toward the door, indicating Tracy in the waiting room on the other side, perched on the edge of her chair, sullen and triumphant. When Susanna had come down the stairs into her parking lot at two, Tracy was already parked next to her Prizm, watching Susanna come as she lowered her window. Before Tracy could speak, Susanna had handed her the keys.
“Sancho Panza’s waiting for me,” she said now.
But after the session, in the tense walk across the doctor’s parking lot to the car, Tracy silently handed Susanna her car key.
“You sure?” said Susanna.
Tracy looked heartbroken, and Susanna caught her trying not to glance back at the window of Dr. Ghose’s office.
“You drive,” Tracy said. “You’re ready.”
* * *
The following day, Susanna was unable to settle on anything all morning. She sat in her bathrobe, scowling at “The View” until she switched it off in a rage. “Do they really think we’re that stupid?” she yelled at the set. She picked up a book and then flung it down after only ten minutes in the Ikea chair. She vacuumed the living room carpet and quit when she came to the bedroom. She washed the plates in the sink, but not the silverware. She made herself a tuna sandwich for lunch and ate half of it.
Whatever she was doing — fuming at the TV, assaulting the carpet with the vacuum, banging her dishes in the sink — every few minutes she stopped and went to the window. Each time she saw no one in her car, and each time she got a little more frustrated, until she was groaning aloud as she turned away. At last she flopped on the couch and stared out the window. From the couch, all she could see was the top of the tree against the broad, blue sky. Ordinarily, it was a lovely, restful sight, the only really nice thing about her crummy apartment, and for the first few weeks after she got out of the hospital, Susanna had done little but lie and watch the way the light limned the bare branches. But now, as she lay tensely on the couch, the tree pleased her less and less, and after a few minutes it began to seem less peaceful and more brooding and watchful. Here and there she saw faces in the new leaves, patterns of light and shadow that formed open jaws and deep-set, dark eyes and aggressive cheekbones. One whole section of the tree, a lower quadrant, seemed fleetingly, as the light took it, to form the face of a giant, open-mouthed clown, all in green, lunging at her through the window. She groaned again and mashed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Then she jumped up and dropped the blinds, and she paced up and down the living room. “Oh brother,” she said to herself. “Oh brother.”
At last she went into the bedroom and changed into a sleeveless dress. She tried on three pairs of shoes before she settled on her sandals, and she stood at the sink in the bathroom and scrubbed her face. She brushed her hair and tied it back. She went back into the bedroom and stuffed her wallet and her keys and her sunglasses into her purse. She went back into the bathroom and put on some lipstick.
She went out to the living room window and hoisted the blinds. In the leafy afternoon shadow under the tree, she saw three figures in the car, all in motion. The driver waving her palms in the air, the passenger reaching between his knees, and the third figure, a grey silhouette in the rear window, lunging forward, between the seats.
“Ah!” breathed Susanna. She must have been tight, because she felt her shoulders relax and all her joints loosen. She turned away from the window and left the apartment, slapping down the stairs in her sandals, slapping across the cracks and stains in the parking lot. She knew the dress was too summery — the air still held a hint of winter, goosepimpling her upper arms — but to hell with it, she was going to dress for the day she wanted, not the day she had. She unlocked the Prizm and opened the door, but before she got in, she paused to look at her reflection in the dark, grimy window of the Dodge next to her.
“I want you gone by time I get back,” she told the car. “I’m tired of looking at you.” Then she slid into the warmth of her own car, behind the wheel. She put the key in the ignition and started the car; she punched heat and cranked up the blowers, feeling the musty air turn warm against her scrubbed cheeks. She looked once around the empty car, back and front, then tilted the rearview mirror to look at herself. “Where shall we go?” she said.
* * *
Following the path of least resistance, at first she drove automatically up the long, grassy trench of the freeway through downtown, pleasantly numbed by the deadening rhythm of her tires thumping over the joints in the road. She got off impulsively at Waverly Road and ended up at the Meijer’s on West Saginaw. The lot was half empty, but she parked a long way away from the store anyway, and told herself she was enjoying the walk in the brisk air. There had been surprisingly little traffic, she’d hit all the lights just right, nobody cut her off. I’m driving again, she thought, feeling light as a ballerina as she stepped into the glare of the supermarket.
She came out twenty minutes later with a lot of food she didn’t really need, a family pack of chicken parts, ten clinking bottles of lemon-flavored Perrier, the first tin of kippered herring she’d bought in fifteen years. She felt lightheaded, almost tipsy, and noted it with the diffident clarity of a drunk. It’s because I’m on my own, she told herself, I’m out and about on my own for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks. As if from a distance, she watched herself maneuver the squeaking shopping cart all the way across the half-empty lot in the brittle springtime sunlight, hauling it to a stop next to the passenger side of the car. She unlocked the front door and reached in to unlock the rear door. Lifting the straining plastic bags two at a time into the back seat, she thought, I’m fine, I’m in control. I can turn the world on with my smile.
She manhandled the cart toward the nearest cart corral and gave it a little shove, thinking gaily, go find your friends. She tipped her sunglasses onto her nose and strode, flip flops slapping, back to her car. Her arms were cold, but so what? I’m all by myself, I’m moving under my own steam. She unlocked the driver’s door, watching her bug-eyed reflection in the window. She slid behind the wheel, and as she slammed the door after her, the passenger door opened and a scruffy young man slid into the seat and pointed a handgun at her, keeping it low, down around his waist. She didn’t see his face at all, or what he was wearing, only the silvery pistol with its oily sheen and the cavernous black hole of its muzzle.
“Start the car,” said the man.
Part Four
She couldn’t think of a thing to say to him. She could scarcely breathe, at first. Once they left the parking lot, he told her to get on the freeway, and she managed to say, “Which way?” They were approaching a wide green sign that showed left for Lansing, right for Grand Rapids.
“Right,” he said. “North.”
She glanced at him as she pulled onto the ramp, and he nudged her in the ribs with the gun. “Watch the road,” he said. “Don’t look at me.”
All she’d seen was a gaunt young man with wide cheekbones and a blunt nose; she could smell him sweating. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him punch the heat and turn the blower on high. She merged into the northbound traffic ahead of a semi and gunned the accelerator to keep ahead of it, and the man nudged her again with the gun. “Not too fast,” he said.
The heat was blowing right in her face. She realized she was still wearing her purse over her shoulder and she lifted it off.
“What are you doing?” The man’s voice went up in pitch.
“Take it.” She dropped it in his lap. “There’s two hundred dollars in cash.” Actually, there wasn’t, and she wished she’d said five hundred. “There’s credit cards. I haven’t seen you yet.”
“Shut up.” She heard him push the purse to the floor. She reached over her shoulder and yanked on the seatbelt.
“What are you doing now?” His voice shot up in pitch again.
“I’m putting on my seatbelt,” she said. “If you don’t like it, shoot me.”
“Goddammit, don’t drive so fast.”
Susanna glanced at the speedometer; the needle hovered at eighty. She tried to take a deep breath, but her diaphragm was too tight. She eased back on the accelerator, but the needle stayed at eighty. Through the windshield she saw the trees on either side of the freeway gliding by. She watched the semi slip behind her. The engine of her little car was straining. I’m not here, she thought. This isn’t happening to me. I’m watching this on television.
“I mean it.” The man pushed the gun hard into her side. “Slow down.”
The AC button popped in of its own accord, and with surprising speed the blowers started pouring cool air into Susanna’s face. The man cursed and released the button, and it popped in again. The interior of the car was turning arctic, even colder than the air outside had been.
“Stop that,” he said. “How are you doing that?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
Cracked and patched pavement flashed under the hood of the car. At the last second Susanna swerved left out of the middle lane in front of another car, to avoid rear-ending a pickup truck. Squealing brakes and the blare of a horn dopplered away behind her. The grass of the median was streaking by just beyond her window. She took her foot completely off the gas and lay it gingerly on the brake pedal. She scarcely dared to take her eyes off the road, but she dropped them for an instant to the speedometer. Ninety, it said.
“I’ll do you a favor.” The young man’s voice climbed to a whine. “Pull over and let me out.”
They were coming up hard on a minivan in the left lane. The Prizm’s engine was roaring. Susanna pushed down on the brake pedal and nothing happened. She tried to swerve into the middle lane, but the wheel wouldn’t budge. The car jammed right up behind the minivan, inches away from its rear bumper, and the van swerved into the middle lane, horn blaring. The Chevy thundered past, its engine screaming, and Susanna heard horn after horn squalling behind her. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see what chaos she was leaving in her wake, and saw instead a woman with a white face sitting in her backseat.
“I’m putting down the gun.” The young man’s voice was trembling. “Look. Here it goes.” The pistol went clunk between his feet. “Stop the car.”
The speedometer needle trembled past a hundred miles per hour. Susanna felt as if she were floating in her seat, watching something happen far, far below. She didn’t even know her car could go this fast. She almost felt like laughing. A sign flashed by ordering them to merge right, the lane was ending, and the wheel lurched under Susanna’s grip; the car plunged across two lanes and back again as horns howled in its wake. Susanna stomped on the brake and nothing happened. The centerline strobed under the car. The cars and trucks on the other side of the median were as tiny and immobile as Matchbox toys, just sitting there. In the northbound lanes, cars dived onto the verge, and elephantine semis shuddered in the Chevy’s slipstream.
“I’m begging you, ma’am.” The man was yanking desperately at his shoulder belt, trying to jam the metal hook into the slot. “You’ll kill us both!”
The car shuddered, the wind battered the windshield. They had somehow rounded a curve without flying off the road and were streaking west now, past blurred grass and newly leafed trees. A bubble rose painfully up Susanna’s windpipe, and she took her hands off the wheel.
“You crazy bitch!” shouted the man. “What are you doing?” He lunged for the wheel and was jerked back into his seat as if someone had grabbed him by the collar.
Susanna squeezed her eyes shut and pounded her temples with her fists and screamed as loud as she could. She whirled on the carjacker and was pulled up short by her seatbelt. The young man, wild-eyed and shining with sweat, threw up his hands defensively. She spread her fingers wide in front of his face.
“Idiot!” she shouted. “It’s not me driving!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he cried from behind his hands. He was shuddering all over. “Then who’s driving?”
“It’s her,” Susanna said, and she dug her fingers into his jaw and twisted his face toward the white-faced woman in the backseat. The man screamed and struck Susanna’s hands away; he hauled the shoulder belt across his chest and jammed the hook into the slot. The steering wheel twisted on its own in front of Susanna, and the car thundered across the shoulder at ninety miles an hour, bounded through the fence beside the road, and charged across a grassy field toward a tall maple in full leaf. Susanna and the carjacker were bounced painfully against the ceiling and the doors, held down only by their shoulder belts. Suddenly the bouncing stopped, and the car was sailing clear off the ground, straight for the tree. The carjacker stiffened in his seat, his eyes rolling white; he ground his palms into the dash, bracing himself.
“I’m sorry!” he shrieked.
The trunk of the tree was impossibly close, every cranny and whorl of its bark etched in brilliant sunlight. A white arm reached between the seats and popped the button on the carjacker’s seatbelt. All the air was sucked out of Susanna as the hood of the car buckled against the tree and the airbag bloomed in her face, and at the last instant, she thought she felt a pair of arms, freezing and electric, slide around her from behind and clasp her to her seat.
Part Five
After Susanna was out of intensive care, Dr. Ghose admitted her into the psych facility again. He doubled the dosage of her antidepressants, and Susanna floated in a deadening, pinkish haze. She knew she had visitors, but she could never remember in what order they visited her. She remembered Tracy sitting by her bed, weeping and squeezing Susanna’s hand in both of hers. “I blame myself, Suse,” she said. “I never should have let you have the key.”
“What key?” Susanna remembered saying.
She also remembered Dr. Ghose sitting in the corner of the room, just beyond her toes. “The police believe the carjacker grabbed the wheel,” he said. “But I know better, Susanna.” He massaged his temple with his middle finger. “And so we start again from the beginning.”
She remembered a long, staccato session with a woman from the Michigan State Police.
“Your passenger didn’t make it, ma’am. You know him?”
“No.”
“You ever see him before?”
“No.”
“We found a gun in the wreckage. That yours?”
“No.”
“He threaten you with it?”
“Yes.”
“He make you drive that fast?”
“No.”
“You do it to scare him?”
“No.”
“He drive that car into the tree, or did you?”
“Wasn’t me.”
“I don’t understand, ma’am,” said the officer.
“Join the club,” said Susanna.
Then, another session, maybe earlier, maybe later, maybe another state police officer, maybe not.
“He mention anybody else to you?”
“No.”
“Woman from Grand Ledge, maybe?”
“No.”
“He didn’t say anything about her?”
“No.”
“Where she might be?”
“No.”
“Did he mention what he might have done with her car?”
“No.” Then, impulsively, Susanna said, “What kind of car did she drive?”
“Why do you ask?” said the officer.
“No reason.”
The officer consulted his notebook and said, “Ninety-six Dodge Shadow, fire-engine red. Illinois plates. That ring any bells?”
Susanna shook her head.
“Why’d you ask?” he said.
“No reason.”
At last, after four more weeks of listening to idiots whine in group, and hours of pointless conversation with Dr. Ghose — “You can fool the police, Susanna, but you can’t fool me” — Susanna let Tracy ferry her home and help her up the stairs. Tracy would gratefully have spent all afternoon with Susanna, but finally Susanna ushered her out and promised to call every day. When Tracy was gone, she sat on the couch and stared out the window at the tree floating in the breeze, and after an hour of that, she pushed herself up and hopped without her crutches to the window. She propped herself against it, her fingers splayed against the glass. The abandoned car was gone; a green pickup truck was parked in the shady spot under the tree. When she called Allan to ask him about the Dodge, he said he didn’t remember it. And when she asked her neighbors about the car, at the mailbox or on the stair, no one remembered there ever being a car like that in the parking lot at all.
