Somebody Else in the Vehicle

   said the attorney-type into his cell phone. He wiped the wet from his face. "There must be. It's in the carpool lane." He listened, squinting, and motioned to Winnie: Stop. Don't open the car door yet. Already, other drivers were slowing down to rubberneck. "Where are we, Braintree, Quincy? On 93 north, anyway, a half mile beyond the junction with 128. Yes, I know enough not to move anyone, but I'm telling you, you'll have a hell of a time getting an ambulance through, what with rush hour -- there'll be a backup a mile long before you know it."

He listened again. Then, "Right. I'll look. Two or more, maybe."

Returning from a few quiet days on Cape Cod, Winifred Rudge had missed her turnoff west and gotten stuck on the JFK toward Boston. Woolgathering, nail biting, something. Focus was a problem. Late for her appointment, she'd considered the odds: in this weather, what were her chances of being ticketed for violating the diamond lane's two-riders-or-more rule? Limited. She'd risked it. So she'd been at the right place on the downgrade to see the whole thing, despite the poor visibility. She'd watched the top third of a white pine snap in the high winds. Even from a half mile away, she'd noticed how the wood flesh had sprung out in diagonal striations, like nougat against rain-blackened bark. The crown of the tree twisted, then tilted. The wind had caught under the tree's parasol limbs and carried it across three lanes of slow-moving traffic, flinging it onto the hood and the roof of a northbound Subaru in the carpool lane. The driver of the Subaru, four cars ahead of Winnie, had braked too hard and hydroplaned left against the Jersey barriers. The evasive action hadn't helped.

Winnie had managed to tamp her brakes and avoid adding to the collection of crumpled fenders and popped hoods. She had been the first out in the rain, the first to start poking through dark rafts of pine needles. Mr. Useful Cell Phone was next, having emerged from some vehicle behind her. He carried a ridiculous out-blown umbrella, and when he got off the phone with the 911 operator he hooked the umbrella handle around a good-size tree limb and tried to yank it away.

"They said don't touch the passengers," he yelled through the rain.

Afraid her voice would betray her panic, she didn't even like to answer, but to reassure him she managed to say, "I know that much." The smell of pine boughs, sap on her hands, water on her face. What was she scared of finding in that dark vehicle? But the prime virtue of weather is immediacy, and the wind tore away the spicy Christmas scent. In its place, a vegetable stink of cheap spilled gasoline. "We may have to get them out, do you smell that?" she shouted, and redoubled her efforts. They could use help; where were the other commuters? Just sitting in their cars, listening to hear themselves mentioned on the WGBH traffic report?

"Cars don't blow up like in the movies," he said, motioning her to take a position farther along the tree trunk. "Put your back against it and push; I'll pull. One. Two. Three." Thanks mostly to gravity they managed to dislodge the thing a foot or so, enough to reveal the windshield. It was still holding, though crazed into opacity with the impact. The driver, a fiftyish sack of a woman, was slanted against a net bag of volleyballs in the passenger seat. She didn't look lucky. The car had slammed up against the concrete barrier so tightly that both doors on the driver's side were blocked.

"Isn't there someone else?" said Winnie. "Didn't you say?"

"You know, I think that is gasoline. Maybe we better stand off."

Winnie made her way along the passenger side of the car, through branches double-jointed with rubbery muscle. The rear door was locked and the front door was locked. She peered through pine needles, around sports equipment. "There's a booster seat in the back," she yelled. "Break the window, can you?"

The umbrella handle wasn't strong enough. Winnie had nothing useful in her purse or her overnight bag. The cold rain made gluey boils on the windows. It was impossible to see in. "No car could catch on fire in a storm like this," she said. "Is that smoke, or just burned rubber from the brake pads?" But then another driver appeared, carrying a crowbar. "Smash the window," she told him.

"Hurry," said Cell Phone Man. "Do they automatically send fire engines, do you think?"

"Do it," she said. The newcomer, an older man in a Red Sox cap faded to pink, obliged. The window shattered, spraying glassy baby teeth. As she clawed for the recessed lock in the rear door, Winnie heard the mother begin to whimper. The door creaked open and more metal scraped. Winnie lurched and sloped herself in. The child strapped into the booster seat was too large for it. Her legs were thrown up in ungainly angles. "Maybe we can unlatch the whole contraption and drag it out," said Winnie, mostly to herself; she knew her voice wouldn't carry in the wind. She leaned over the child in the car's dark interior, into a hollow against which pine branches bunched on three sides. She fumbled for the buckle of the seat belt beneath the molded plastic frame of the booster. Then she gave up and pulled out, and slammed the door.

"I'll get it," said Red Sox Fan, massing up.

"They said leave everybody where they were," said Cell Phone, "you could snap a spine and do permanent damage."

"No spine in her," said Winnie. "It's a life-size Raggedy Ann doll, a decoy."

The emergency services arrived, and Winnie, valuing her privacy, shrank back. The fumes of the spilled gasoline followed her back to her car. She sat and bit a fingernail till she tore a cuticle, unwilling to talk to the police. To her surprise, the traffic began crawling again within fifteen minutes. The police never noticed that she was another illegal driver doing a solo run in the carpool lane.

And then, despite her missed exit, the snarl-up, the downpour, the rush hour, she wasn't late after all. Damn.

"Someone's been here before us," observed the older woman in the mulberry windcheater, pocketing the keys. She flopped her hand against the inside wall to knock a light switch. The air was stale, almost stiff. A few translucent panels overhead blinked, and then steadied. Winnie noted: It's your standard-issue meeting room. It proves the agency's fiscal prudence and general probity. A few tables with wood laminate, sticky with coffee rings. Fitted carpets of muddy rose, muddier in the high-traffic zones. Folding chairs pushed out of their congregational oval. As if whatever group that met here last night had cleared out with rude speed.

"Someone's been here, but not the cleaning crew," said the woman. "They don't pay me for housekeeping. Oh, well, come in, and we'll set ourselves up by ourselves." A veteran in the social work world, wearing one of those grandmotherly rain hats like a pleated plastic freezer bag. She wriggled out of her jacket, which was a bit snug, and she smiled sourly. Her nylon sleeves hissed as they slithered.

Other rectangles of light kicked on. Outside, obscured by the reflections flaring in the broad plate glass, a few more couples emerged from cars. Women huddling under the arms of their husbands, the human forms smudged into anonymity by the rain. The observable sky seethed in slow motion over Wellesley, Needham, and this patch of Newton.

Winnie, on edge because of the accident, because of the challenge of the day, hung back in the doorway for as long as she could. She pictured the Weather Channel's computer-graphic impression of the storm. Moisture trawled in from the Atlantic, unseasonable icebox Arctic air sucked down over the Great Lakes, a continental thumbprint of weather, fully a thousand miles broad. A thumbprint slowly twisting, as if to make the undermuscle of the world ache.

She harvested the details; that was what she was good at. That was all she was good at. Anyway, that was what she was there for, and no apologies. She noticed that, as more fluorescent tubes kicked on, everything became more manufactured, more present, the shadows cowed and blurred by multiple light sources. This Styrofoam coffee cup fallen on the carpet. This chair turned on its side, FF scrawled in Magic Marker on its seat.

By the moment the leader grew more cheery and despotic. She brisked about. Winnie and the other supplicants hung back: this wasn't their terrain, not yet. Over their chairs they hung their London Fog knockoffs, their L. L. Bean Polartec parkas, and, in one instance, a retro fox fur suffering from cross-eye. "A little bit of leftover Hurricane Gretl, they tell us," said the leader. She addressed the spatter against the windows. "You. Stop that. It's supposed to be too late in the season for you. So long. Scram."

Thunder blurted, a distant throat-clearing of one of the more cautious gods.

The leader was undaunted. She made her way past the bulletin boards shingled with curling color photographs. Hands on hips as she surveyed the detritus of discarded handouts, crumpled napkins, spilled sugar. "Look at this mess. A group of Forever Families having their quarterly meeting, I bet." In one corner, toddler-size furniture squatted on its thick limbs. The leader swooped, collecting things. She stepped on a stuffed monkey, and it complained with a microchip melody playing, inevitably, "It's a Small World, After All." Winnie turned away, busying herself with a small notebook and a pen.

"If you help yourself to that old coffee, be it on your own head," said the leader. "I'm telling you. Nobody even bothered to put the milk away overnight. Do they pay me to be the mother to the world? They do not. But I'll do a fresh pot in a minute. You, you can't listen to me? You can't wait? Go ahead. Be my guest."

The balding young man with his hand on the lever of the thermos said in an apologetic murmur, "Sorry. I'm groggy. I didn't sleep all night."

"Caffeine addiction. Let me take a note." This was only pretend terrorism, since the leader followed up with a pretzel of a smile. "Name tags, name tags?" she went on. "People, please, as I get the brew going, find your name tags, people. We're starting late, but that's okay: the rain, the traffic, we're not all here. I'm not all here. Name tags, people. Here's mine, I'm Mabel Quackenbush, or I was last time I checked."

Winnie frowned. Surely she'd been incognito in her application? She'd meant to be Dotty O'Malley, a favorite alter ego she adopted on bowling nights. But there was her badge, staring out at her amidst the Murrays, the Pellegrinos, the Spencer-Moscous:

Obediently W. Rudge slapped the gummy-backed label to her Tufts sweatshirt, but she arranged her drenched scarf to conceal her name. Then she took a place in the circle of chairs as near the back as she could. When they were all settled, the leader said, "I'm the Forever Families coordinator for today. Mabel Quackenbush, from the Providence office. We had twenty-three registrants. I don't know where everyone else is. If I could get here, anyone could. Believe me, I-95 was no treat thanks to Hurricane Whosie. I left at seven and we crawled." Mabel Quackenbush embroidered the uninteresting story of her journey. A warm-up and a stalling tactic, as new arrivals tiptoed in, shook the wet off their coats, and settled in their chairs.

Copyright © 2001 by Gregory Maguire