Chapter 5: Last Time

I told her on the garage stairs, because I couldn't have told her in the house.

The house had the binder in it.

"I'm going to say this badly," I said.

"Then say it slowly," said Lucy.

She sat down on the third step with her elbows on her knees.

I sat on the bottom step, which put my eyes level with her sneakers.

"On Friday the seventeenth, a little after one, a freight train derails at the Harlan rail yard," I said. "Eight tanker cars split."

"Okay."

"What comes out is a gas. It's heavier than air, so it runs downhill and settles in the river valley."

"Okay," said Lucy again, in the voice she uses on a kid who says his dog ate the permission slip.

"It reaches us an hour after dark," I said. "It fills the town up to nine hundred feet."

"How do you know it's nine hundred?"

"I watched it from the lodge for nine days," I said.

She said nothing for a moment.

Above us a moth hit the porch light twice and gave up.

"Dad," she said carefully. "Did something happen? Did you see a doctor?"

"I haven't seen a doctor," I said.

"You've been laminating things since Monday."

"I know how it looks."

I had brought a visual aid.

It was a county elevation map from the planning office, laminated, with a line in red marker across it at nine hundred feet.

I held it up under the porch light.

Lucy took it and put her pen to the map without a word.

"Dell Street's at five-thirty," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Birch Street's five-sixty. The school's five-forty. Grandpa's lodge is eleven-eighty."

"Yes."

"So your van goes to the lodge," said Lucy, "and Dell Street, where I pick up eleven kids every morning, goes under."

"I know," I said.

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