Chapter 16: The Audio

Raymond's hand closed over mine before I could press it.

"Not with her in my lap," he said.

He was right.

I carried Lily up the stairs and tucked her in with her whale.

She mumbled the last line of the song into the pillow and was gone again.

I stood in her doorway a long time.

When I came back down, it was three in the morning.

Rafael had pulled the blinds on the front window.

Raymond had set the phone flat on the counter between three coffee cups.

I pressed it anyway.

At first it was only tires, wind and a slow song on the radio with a lot of horns.

Then a woman laughed.

It was a high, loose laugh, the kind you only do after the third glass.

I'd heard it at my own dinner table on Mondays for a year.

"Your daddy's car drives like a boat," Vivian said, and laughed again.

A man's voice answered.

"Ti. Slow down."

Raymond closed his eyes.

"Ti. The light."

"It's never red for us, baby."

The engine roared.

Then there was a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.

A heavy, soft thud.

Then glass, cracking, sharp and high, like ice on a pond.

Vivian screamed.

"My eyes! Daniel, my eyes, I can't see!"

The engine kept going.

"Did I hit something? Daniel, did I hit somebody?"

Then a blast of radio horns.

Then my husband's voice, perfectly calm.

The voice he used for waiters and wire transfers.

"Keep driving."

"There's somebody in the..."

"Keep driving, Ti. Don't look back. Keep driving."

The clip ended.

The little gray button turned back into a triangle.

I looked down at my hands on the counter.

My mother had been lying in the road, with lemon pound cake all over Fulton Street, and he had told her to keep driving.

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