Justin Cronin

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

“I’m sorry about that,” Curtis said. “I think my parents really like you, though.”

Beneath the pines they stopped to kiss, listening to the thunk of the basketball. Curtis’s face was soft—he had no beard at all—and when he kissed her, Mary often thought of things that seemed arbitrary: the gray undersides of spring rain clouds, a cat licking its paws, sheet music with notations penciled in the margins. This time she thought of a raisin, squashed on the steps of her grandmother’s porch by the weight of a tiny tennis shoe. At just that moment it began to snow.

“Well, here comes the winter,” Mary said. “You know, you should probably tell them not to like me too much.”

Mary in labor, dreaming of crows: she is on her knees, vomiting into the snow and corn stubble, and when she looks up she sees them—their glistening beaks and dark eyes on her, on the terrible thing she’s done. Her car idles on the side of the road behind her. At the clinic they told her she should not drive. A baby, she thinks; I am twenty-two and it was a baby.