Intersections Read online

  It's the last time Tori is allowed to go with her Dad. It's the last time she sees him until much later when she's seventeen and living on her own. He shows up outside of her apartment, the one in the bad part of town, with a crumpled piece of paper and a fistful of dirty fives and tens he insists she take even though she doesn't want to.

  "I haven't been around the way I should've," Dad says then. "And I won't be around the way you need me to be. But take this money, you hear me? And if you do need me, you can come find me here."

  2

  The truck's horn blasted. The baby screamed. Tori didn't, only because she had no air, no breath to scream. All she could do was gasp and brace herself.

  The impact was worse even than she'd anticipated. In the minute and a half between first seeing the headlights and when the truck hit them, she'd somehow imagined death as a sudden silence. Instead, it was the shriek and clash of metal and glass, the squealing of tires and over and over again and that blasting, blaring horn. Incredibly, although there was no way she should've even had time to think of it, her brain filtered memories of a story in a book her father had given her about an ancient sea creature calling to what it believed was its lost love. That's how the truck horn sounded to her. Long and loud and bleating, full of despair.

  The entire station wagon shuddered, sliding on the ice. The rig must've clipped the front bumper, shoving the car into the ditch along the side of the road. Glass shattered. The truck kept going.

  In seconds, everything was dark and quiet again. Crushed against Tori's chest, the baby wasn't even crying anymore. She needed light, but the car had stalled, the dashboard's gleam had gone out, and here in the middle of fucking nowhere there weren't any street lamps. She rocked the baby, trying to keep herself calm. Trying to see if anything hurt, but shit, everything already hurt and she couldn't tell if any of it was new aches or pains or bruises.

  The truck had hit them and kept going. What kind of asshole did that? Tori pressed her lips together to keep herself from sobbing out loud, trying to convince herself they were lucky the truck had only dinged them instead of crushing them.

  She needed to figure out how bad the damage was. She needed to get her car out of this ditch. She had to get to her dad's house, to get the baby settled. Take a long shower. Sleep in a real bed, or at least just lie in one while the baby endlessly nursed and slept and shit and screamed.

  She needed...goddamn it. She needed so many things, and then she couldn't hold back the tears any longer because damn, it had been one tough fuck of a year.

  Lots of times in her life Tori had kept herself from weeping because tears solved nothing, but now she couldn't stop herself from sobbing. Three harsh bursts of grief tore out of her before she covered her mouth with both hands, forcing herself to stop. The inside temperature of the car had dropped several degrees since the engine had cut out. They might freeze to death in here before morning, if she didn't get it started again. And in order to do that, she had to stop blubbering and get into the front seat.

  The thought of trying to heave her tortured, battered body over the bench seat was too much. She'd have to go outside again. Tori settled the baby, still wide awake but content at least for now, back into the car seat and fumbled the latches closed. The diaper would need changing soon, if not already, but she was no good at it with full light and four extra hands. She wasn't about to attempt that in the dark. She got out of the car, slipping again on the ice and plunging into snow up to her hip. Instant, freezing wetness. She was not going to give up or give in, though. She couldn't do that. For the first time in her life, Tori had someone else to think about besides herself.

  Outside the car, she paused for a moment to look up, up, at the stygian void of the night sky, unbroken even by a single star. The wind nibbled at her as though searching for the perfect place to take a bite. Her skin stung instantly in the frigid air, but for those few seconds, Tori let herself appreciate the enormity of that blackness. You could lose yourself in a night like this, and how many times had she wished to be lost? A lot. Not any more, she told herself fiercely. She couldn't ever let herself be lost again.

  There, through the trees, a light. Steady and warm, welcoming. A house, probably. Some people lived out here in the middle of nowhere, though usually they were closer to the road. Well, it wasn't like she had any idea of where she was, actually. She'd been following a crumpled and faded handwritten list of directions her father had given her five years ago, long before she'd ever thought she would need them.

  The sudden chatter of her teeth forced her to yank open the driver's side door and get back behind the wheel. The car had canted sideways, front tires in the ditch, but the station wagon was huge and heavy and had fought its way through mud and snow several times before when other, lesser vehicles would've been stuck. She thought she'd be able to back it out, if only she could maybe rock it a little.

  She couldn't.

  Patience, Tori counseled herself silently, with teeth gritted to keep them from chattering. Hands gripped so tight on the wheel they'd gone numb. The slow, steady and grinding burn between her legs had flared and faded, but she desperately needed to get to a restroom and change her supplies. Nobody had told her giving birth would turn her lady bits into something Frankenstein's monster would've screamed and run from.

  She almost gave up when the station wagon stalled, but she cranked the key again and pumped the gas pedal gently, the way her father had taught her to do so she wouldn't flood the engine. When she did, the single working headlight brightened, then dimmed as something in the engine squeaked and complained. She rocked in her seat, though of course that did nothing to help move the car and only sent more ripples of pain through her.

  The car was stuck; there was nothing she could do about it. She had no phone, not even a burner that she could've used to dial 911. She had a small backpack of samples and supplies they'd given her in the hospital and little more than that. She’d stopped at a rest area and bought cheeseburgers, fries, soft pretzels, withered hotdogs from a rolling cooker. She’d eaten all of it in the past few hours as she drove. All she had left was a box of granola bars and two bottles of water. She had no gloves. No winter boots or hat. The baby had some blankets, but no snowsuit. Tori also had a couple of stretched out bungee cords and several of those metallic emergency blankets along with a couple of thin plastic ponchos, all of them folded into small squares that once opened would be impossible to return to their former shape. The old station wagon was not equipped with a first aid kit, and if there was a pair of jumper cables or a jack and a spare tire somewhere in the back, she'd have been surprised. Dad had warned her never to get on the road without being fully prepared, and she'd done a shit job of following his advice.

  They were going to die out here. Frozen. There was a half tank of gas in this behemoth, but the car burned gas like kindling and even the meager heat coming out of the heater would be gone in a few hours. By morning they'd be dead.

  And would that be such a horrid thing? She glanced in the rearview mirror, although all she could see was the dark lump of the car seat. The baby had fallen silent. At last sleeping? For a few minutes, at least.

  She could slip outside and stuff something into the tailpipe. Keep the car running. Then they'd both fall asleep and simply never wake up. It would be a mercy and not selfishness, wouldn't it? The baby would never have to struggle through life the way Tori had. Failing at everything. Being used. Let down. Abandoned, over and over again.

  Dozing, Tori let herself droop forward until her head pressed the steering wheel. It was not a comfortable position. She would be so much better off if she stretched herself out along the front seat. The chill gust of air blowing now against her ankles wouldn't be so bad, then. She could grab a few minutes of rest, surely she could just....do...that….

  Tori jerked awake, her muscles screaming in protest at the sudden tension. She thought she'd heard a voice. A low, muttering rumble, a male voice, words indistinct. Not quite a shout. T