Chapter 4 - The County Road
The summer sun outside hit my face like a physical weight, blinding me after the dim, shadowed gloom of the barn.
The gravel driveway stretched two hundred yards down to the county road—a long, white ribbon of crushed limestone heating in the ninety-degree heat, flanked on both sides by eight-foot-tall walls of green corn.
Near the farmhouse, Thomas was standing by the open door of his red Ford pickup, holding a cell phone to his ear, his face flushed and greasy with sweat.
When he saw me hobble out of the barn doors on my crutches, his jaw dropped, and he lowered the phone half an inch.
"Eleanor?" he called out, his voice hesitant, almost afraid. "Where are you going? The ambulance is coming—"
"I know," I said, not slowing my pace as I hopped past the hood of his truck. "It's coming for Caleb."
"Eleanor, wait!" Thomas took three steps toward me, reaching out a hand. "You can't walk down the county road on that leg! It's two miles to the highway! Let me drive you—"
I stopped, swung myself around on my crutches, and pointed the rubber tip of my right crutch straight at his chest.
"Touch me," I whispered, "and I will use this steel pipe to tear your other eye open."
Thomas froze.
He looked at my face—at the dark, dried blood smeared across my cheek, at the cold, dead certainty in my eyes—and he took two steps backward, lifting his hands in surrender.
"I didn't... I didn't want them to lock you in there, Eleanor," he stammered, his voice trembling. "Mom said... Caleb said it was just to calm you down—"
"You put my crutches on the hay bales, Thomas," I said, turning back toward the lane. "You walked away while I was sitting in my own blood. Don't ever speak my name again."
I swung myself forward onto the crushed stone of the driveway.
Every hop on my left foot sent a sharp shockwave through my spine, rattling my cracked ribs and making the baby inside me shift nervously against my pelvic bone. The fiberglass cast on my right leg dragged through the loose gravel, leaving a jagged track in the white dust behind me.
Behind me, near the house, I heard the back screen door slam open.
Hannah ran out onto the gravel, her hair wild, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen from crying. She was carrying my leather purse in one hand and her own set of car keys in the other.
"Ellie!" she shouted, running down the lane toward me, her sneakers kicking up tiny clouds of dust. "Ellie, get in my car!"
I stopped near the wooden mailbox at the end of the driveway, leaning my shoulder against the weathered cedar post to take the weight off my arms.
Hannah sprinted up to me, panting heavily, her face pale and covered in tears. She held out my purse and unlocked the passenger door of her grey Honda Civic parked near the fence line.
"Get in," she begged, opening the door and pulling the seat back as far as it would go. "I have my keys. I'm taking you to the county hospital in Crawfordsville right now."
I looked at her—at the small, quiet girl who twenty minutes ago had summoned the courage to defy her mother and steal my water bottle from her brother's grip.
"Are you sure about this, Hannah?" I asked softly, my hand resting on the hot roof of her car. "If you drive me away from this farm, your mother will never let you come back."
Hannah looked back down the long gravel driveway toward the farmhouse, where Thomas was still standing by his truck, looking small and helpless in the afternoon sun.
She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her wrist, her jaw setting into a line that looked remarkably like her mother's—except there was no cruelty in it, only a quiet, desperate steel.
"Good," Hannah said. "I don't ever want to come back."
She helped me lift my plaster-bound leg into the passenger footwell, placing a soft fleece jacket under my heel to cushion the vibration of the road. She closed the door gently, ran around to the driver's side, and jumped behind the wheel.
As she put the car in reverse and backed out onto the county road, the high, piercing wail of a siren echoed across the cornfields in the distance.
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The county ambulance was coming down State Road 32, its red lights flashing through the heat shimmer on the horizon.
Hannah didn't look at the flashing lights. She shifted into drive, slammed her foot onto the accelerator, and sped away down the asphalt, turning her back on the Vance farm forever.
