Chapter 12: Black Ice

Rupert told it with his eyes on the floor, in a flat voice that never rose.

"It was Carl's thirty-first birthday. Three years ago in January."

"We were at his parents' cabin on the north shore, eight of us, and I'd had two whiskeys."

"Two," I said.

"Two. Maybe three. I've gone over it so many times I can't tell anymore."

"Go on."

"Marcy had stayed home with the boy. Carl was sober, because he was always the one who drove. He held out his hand for my keys at eleven."

"I said no."

"Why?"

"Because it was my car. Because it was our tradition, that I drove him home on his birthday, and I didn't want to be the guy who couldn't."

He pressed his fingers into his eyes.

"He said, 'Gar, you're drunk, give me the keys.' I laughed at him. I got in the driver's seat, and he got in the other side."

"And the road?" Cal said from the doorway.

"Route 9, at the bend before the cemetery. There was black ice."

"I never saw it."

He stopped.

The clock on my grandmother's mantel ticked in the silence.

"The car went into the pines on his side," Rupert said. "I woke up in the snow. He didn't."

I said nothing.

There was nothing in me to say.

"A trooper got there in twenty minutes," he said. "I was sitting in the road with blood in my eye. Marcy got there before the ambulance."

"How?"

"Carl had called her from the cabin before we left, to say we were on our way. She saw the lights from the end of her street."

"She drove up the road and found you?"

"She found the car. And she knelt next to me in the snow and said, very quietly, 'Who was driving?'"

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