Snowbound - Blake Crouch [12]
He watched his daughter through the cracked windshield. He could have watched her all afternoon. The truth was, he’d never expected her to reach her sixteenth year. For a long time, he’d dedicated himself to preparing for the worst-possible outcome, including plans to end himself when she was gone. But then something had happened. Or actually, not happened. She hadn’t died. She got sick several times a year. She’d been scary sick twice, but she always bounced back. The cocktail of meds and the chest physical therapy were working, and every day she was healthy felt like a sentence commuted, an execution stayed.
Now she was coming toward the truck, but as he slipped the key into the ignition, a woman intercepted his daughter on the sidewalk.
He sat up. His daughter had stopped, and she was talking to a tall woman in a navy skirt, white blouse, the matching jacket folded over her arm. His daughter shook her head. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He reached to open the door, but his daughter was on her own again, moving quickly toward the truck, the woman walking in the opposite direction. She pulled open the squeaky door and climbed inside.
“Hey, baby girl.” She’d picked out a new name, but he rarely said it, called her “baby girl” or “sweetie,” or nothing.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Who was that woman you were just talking to?”
“She didn’t say.”
“What’d she want?”
“Asked me my name, if I lived around here.”
He cranked the engine, the noisy truck now vibrating beneath them.
“Why’d she want to know that?”
“I don’t know. I blew her off, told her I had to go. You think she’s a cop?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I drive home?”
“Not today, honey.” He shifted into drive and pulled out into the street, cruising slowly past the school, looking for the woman who’d approached his daughter. “What color hair did she have?”
“Brown. She was pretty.” The upperclassmen were flooding out of the building now. They were taller. It made it difficult to spot the woman. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
She wasn’t there. Just a bunch of kids.
“You know we have to be very careful,” he said.
“Are we gonna leave again?”
“I don’t know yet, sweetie. Not tonight at least.” He spun the steering wheel, did a 180 in the street, and headed back up the hill, out of town, toward home.
TWELVE
The farmhouse stood in a grove of blue spruce, a mile and a half south of town. There was a little pasture out back, and the Mancos River formed the east border of the property. They could hear it from the house during spring runoff.
Now it was full-on dusk. Through the open windows, the night air swept in, carrying the scent of decaying leaves and sour apples and the odor of a dairy farm.
The girl got the pillows from the game closet while he queued up the DVD. They were near the end of Vertigo. Movies helped to make the therapy more bearable. They’d seen more than thirty Hitchcocks together this way. The man sat down behind his daughter and she leaned forward into a pillow and watched Jimmy Stewart kissing Kim Novak in the eerie green light of the hotel room.
With cupped hands, he began to pound on her back. After five minutes, he told her to cough. She switched positions, now lying on her side.
Not long after she was born, he and his wife had started calling her their “salty baby,” since whenever they kissed her forehead, they’d taste salt. His wife happened to mention this to the pediatrician, and he promptly ordered a sweat test, which came back positive. They had no idea, but overly salty sweat is a major indicator of cystic fibrosis.
The girl was diagnosed when she was two years old, and every day for the last fourteen years, the man had given his daughter CPT, chest physical therapy. The therapy broke up mucus in her lungs,