CHAPTER ONE
Drive. Drive as fast as you can, as far away as you can. Drive until horses and hay bales wink by on the side of the road instead of industrial plazas and big box malls. Drive until the only radio station you can reach on the dial crackles in French. Drive until you can’t feel your fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, and when you wash your hands in the rest stop bathroom, you trace the faux-leather stitches branded into your palms. Drive until the blood on your hooded sweatshirt dries, and you can pretend it was only a nosebleed.
Drive even though it’s started to snow, and you never did put on your winter tires. Because skidding across two lanes of highway at a hundred kilometers an hour into the exposed bedrock of the Canadian Shield is better than anything waiting for you back in Toronto.
Just drive, until you can’t anymore.
CHAPTER TWO
The car breaks down half an hour outside of Sweetside. Literally. The sign at the side of Highway 11 tauntsSweetside 50. Sarah pops the hood in its shadow and swipes wet clumps of snow off her eyelashes, studying the hatchback’s steaming innards as if she knows what she’s looking at. Craggy slopes of rock topped with snow-capped conifers press in from both sides of the road, compacting her anxiety into diamond-hard edges. She’s a long way from Toronto’s glass and steel and concrete.
A tractor-trailer snarls past, shaking the little hatchback and sending Sarah stumbling from the highway’s gravelly shoulder into the ditch. “Stupid, stupid,” she mutters as she climbs back up, the near-frozen mud biting into the soles of her sneakers. Why did she think getting away would be easy?
A black and white cruiser pulls up behind the hatchback and parks. Bile rises in the back of Sarah’s throat. They can’t have found her already. She buttons up the neck of her peacoat with cold-numbed fingers and flips up the collar to hide her stained hoodie.
The officer who climbs out of the car is a tall, burly white man whose mask barely contains his greying beard. Sarah suddenly feels naked as the wind whips her bare cheeks. He looks her up and down. She guesses he’s cataloguing her surface traits: her hair’s severe black gloss, her skin extra pale and sallow from months spent indoors, and her eyes. It always comes down to the eyes. Ben once compared her to a Modigliani portrait, which wasn’t the compliment he thought it was.
“You’re far from home, miss,” the officer says, very loudly and slowly, having come to the usual conclusion.
Sarah forces a smile. “I was on my way to see my brother in Timmins.” She hopes the officer doesn’t expect her to prove this. Graham isn’t expecting her, and she’s not sure if he’d welcome visitors during a pandemic.
He blinks. “Can I see some ID?” he says, this time a little faster.
“It’s in the car.”
Sarah opens the passenger door of the hatchback with shaking hands, trying to remember everything her Black friends ever told her about being pulled over by the cops. “I’m getting my wallet,” she calls out over the hammering of her heart.
The officer, thankfully, doesn’t flinch when her hand disappears into the backpack on the front seat. Her fingers glance off the knife’s crusty handle, and she hastily pushes it beneath her water bottle and change of clothes.
She pulls out her wallet, places it on the roof of the car, and backs away. The officer opens the wallet, his eyebrows lifting at the amount of cash she’s carrying. “Sarah. That’s an unusual name.”
“Really?”
“Well, for you, eh?” he says, and Sarah fights to keep the smile on her face. “Where’re you from?”
“Toronto.”
He sniffs. “That’s just as bad.”
“As bad as what?”
“You know,” the officer says, and she does. “It’s not a good time to go visiting.”
“My brother lives by himself, and—and so do I.”
He places the wallet back on the roof of the car. “I’ll call you a tow truck.”
“Thank you.”
He looks her up and down again. “Don’t thank me yet,” he says, and unease shrinks her stomach into a knot.
The officer ambles back to his car and sits inside, bringing a cell phone to his ear. Sarah scoops up her wallet and drops it in the backpack.
The snow is either coming down heavier or blowing off the scraggly trees perched on the rocks. Sarah huddles on her hatchback’s passenger seat against the numbing cold and dread. There’s nothing she can do but wait for the outcome of a stranger’s phone call.
She continues to smile, in case the officer is watching.
She feels smaller than she’s ever felt before, dwarfed by the rock outcroppings and the grey highway that stretches on forever. When she’d started out, the highway had promised freedom. The unknown hadn’t seemed as vast and scary. She’d been excited to see so many trees. Sometimes, as she drove, sunlight would catch on a creek or pond, a glittering oasis tucked in the woods. And then the trees would spring up again, and the water would disappear like a daydream. Just a lovely secret revealed to drivers who happened to glance out the passenger window at the right place and time.
