Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  “I don’t bake pies or cookies,” I say. “And with all due respect, I don’t need to get religion.”

  Pastor Clive smiles and sits back, his fingers strumming on the armrest of the couch. “That’s the other funny thing about Jesus,” he says. “He’s got a way of showing you you’re wrong.”

  The storm comes out of nowhere. It’s not completely unexpected, in late November, but it is not the light dusting that the weathermen have forecast. Instead, when I open the bar door and slip on the ice that’s built up on the threshold, the snow is falling like a white curtain.

  I duck back inside and tell the bartender to give me another beer. There’s no point in heading out now; I might as well ride out the storm.

  There’s no one else at the bar tonight; on a Tuesday when the roads are slick, most people choose to stay in. The bartender gives me the television remote, and I find a basketball game on ESPN. We cheer on the Celtics, and they go into overtime, and eventually choke. “Boston teams,” the bartender says, “they’ll break your heart every time.”

  “Think I’m gonna pack it in early tonight,” the bartender says. By now, there’s nearly eight inches on the ground. “You all right getting home?”

  “I’m the plow guy,” I say. “So I’d better be.”

  My Dodge Ram’s got an Access plow, and thanks to flyers I’ve printed up on Reid’s Mac, I have a handful of clients who expect me to come and make the driveway passable before it’s time to leave for work in the morning. During a good storm, like this one, I won’t sleep at night—I’ll just plow till it’s over. This is the first big nor’easter of the season, and I could use the influx of cash it will bring.

  My breath fogs the windshield of the truck when I get inside. I turn up the defroster and see the red devil lights of the bartender’s Prius skidding out of the parking lot. Then I put the truck into gear and head in the direction of my first client.

  It’s slippery, but it’s nothing I haven’t driven in before. I turn on the radio—the voice of John freaking Tesh fills the truck cab. Did you know that it takes twenty minutes for your stomach to relay the message to your brain that you’re full?

  “No, I didn’t,” I say out loud.

  I can’t use my high beams because of the volume of snow, so I almost miss the bend in the road. My back wheels start to spin, and I turn in to the skid. With my heart still pounding, I take my foot off the accelerator and move slower, my tires cutting into the accumulation and packing it down beneath the truck.

  After a few minutes, the world looks different. Whitewashed, with humps and towers that look like sleeping giants. The landmarks are missing. I’m not sure I’m in the right place. I’m not sure I really know where I am, actually.

  I blink and rub my eyes, flick on my high beams . . . but nothing changes.

  Now, I’m starting to panic. I reach for my phone, which has a GPS application on it somewhere, to see where I’ve taken a wrong turn. But while I’m fumbling around in the console, the truck hits a patch of black ice and starts to do a 360.

  There’s someone standing in the road.

  Her dark hair is flying around her face, and she’s hunched over against the cold. I manage to jam my foot on the brake and steer hard to the right, desperately trying to turn the truck before it hits her. But the tires aren’t responding on the ice, and I look up, panicked, at the same time she makes eye contact with me.

  It’s Zoe.

  “Nooooo,” I scream. I lift up my arm as if I can brace myself for the inevitable crash, and then there is a sickening shriek of metal and the wallop of the air bag as the truck somersaults through the very spot where she was standing.

  When I come to, I’m covered in the diamond dust of crushed glass, I’m hanging upside down, and I can’t move my legs.

  God help me. Please, God. Help. Me.

  It is perfectly silent, except for the soft strike of snow against the upholstery. I don’t know how long I’ve been knocked out, but it doesn’t look like dawn’s coming anytime soon. I could freeze to death, trapped here. I could become another one of those snowy white mounds, an accident no one even knows happened until it’s too late.

  Oh, God, I think. I’m going to die.

  And right after that: No one will miss me.

  The truth hurts, more than the burning in my left leg and the throb of my skull and the metal digging into my shoulder. I could disappear from this world, and it would probably be a better place.

  I hear the crunch of tires, and see a beam of headlights illuminating the road above me. “Hey!” I yell, as loud as I can. “Hey, I’m here! Help!”

  The headlights pass by me, and then I hear a car door slam. The policeman’s boots kick up snow as he runs down the embankment toward the overturned truck. “I’ve called for an ambulance,” he says.

  “The girl,” I rasp. “Where is she?”

  “Was there another passenger in this truck?”

  “Not . . . inside. Truck hit her . . .”

  He runs up the embankment, and I watch him shine a floodlight. I want to speak. But I am wicked dizzy, and when I try to talk, I throw up.

  Maybe it’s hours and maybe it’s minutes, but a fireman is sawing through the seat belt that’s kept me alive, and another one is using the Jaws of Life to cut the truck into pieces. There are voices all around me:

  Get him onto a backboard . . .

  Compound fracture ...

  ... tachycardic ...

  The policeman is suddenly in front of me again. “We looked all over. The truck didn’t hit anyone,” he says. “Just a tree. And if you hadn’t turned where you did and gone off the road, you’d be at the bottom of a cliff right now. You’re a lucky guy.”

  The rush of relief I feel comes in sobs. I start crying so hard that I cannot breathe; I cannot stop. Did I hallucinate Zoe because I was drunk? Or was I drunk because I keep hallucinating Zoe?

  The snow strikes me in the face, a thousand tiny needles, as I am moved from the wreckage to an ambulance. My nose is running and there is blood in my eyes.

  Suddenly, I don’t want to be this person anymore. I don’t want to pretend I’m fooling the world when I’m not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I’m not doing a very good job myself.

  The ambulance grumbles to life as the EMT hooks me up to another monitor and then starts an IV. My leg feels like it is on fire every time the driver brakes.

  “My leg . . .”

  “Is probably broken, Mr. Baxter,” the EMT says. I wonder how she knows my name, and then realize she is reading it off my license. “We’re taking you to the hospital. Is there someone you want me to call?”

  Not Zoe, not anymore. Reid will need to know, but right now, I don’t want to think about the look in his eyes when he realizes I’ve been drinking and driving. And I probably need a lawyer, too.

  “My pastor,” I say. “Clive Lincoln.”

  I am nervous, but Liddy and Reid stand on either side of me with smiles so wide on their faces that you’d think I’d cured cancer, or figured out world peace, instead of just coming to the Eternal Glory Church to give my testimony about finding Jesus.

  It couldn’t have been more transparent for me if the answers had been tattooed on my face: the lowest of lows for me was that crash. Zoe’s apparition had been Jesus’s way of coming into my life. If I hadn’t seen her there, I’d be dead now. But instead I swerved. I swerved right into His open arms.

  When Clive had come to me at the hospital, I was drugged with painkillers and had a brand-new cast on my left leg and stitches in my scalp and my shoulder. I hadn’t stopped crying since they’d loaded me into that ambulance. The pastor sat down on the edge of my bed and reached for my hand. “Let the Devil out, son,” Clive said. “Make room for Christ.”

  I don’t think I can explain what happened after that. It was simply as if someone flipped a switch in me, and there wasn’t any hurt anymore. I felt like I was floating off the bed, and would have, if that cotton blanket hadn