Chapter 22

Sunday, April 14

Every time Holly drives Route 73, she thinks of her father. He died somewhere along this stretch of freeway. She was in the car when it flipped, but she has no memory of the accident, let alone where it occurred. Ever since that retreat to Peru, where she found enough peace and acceptance to move forward with her life, Holly has avoided looking into the crash. But that is changing. Haunted by her DMT-induced visions, she decided this morning that she couldn’t hide from the accident any longer.

Shortly after she woke up, she sat down at her laptop and typed “Route 73” and “Martin Danvers” into the search bar. A list of articles immediately popped up. Holly was relieved to learn that her dad had been pronounced dead at the scene. That he hadn’t suffered. And it was surreal to read the stories about her unconscious, sixteen-year-old self being extracted from the car and rushed to a local trauma center. More disturbing were the photos of the wreckage: the family’s wood-paneled station wagon, overturned off the side of the freeway with the driver’s side hood crushed in. But those horrible images also gave Holly a vital clue. In the background of one of them, she spotted a sign for the Pacific Ridge Trailhead and used it to pinpoint the location of the crash site.

Now, as her GPS informs her that the spot is two hundred fifty feet ahead on her right, Holly feels queasy. There are no markers of any kind, but based on the nearby trail sign, she knows she’s at the right place. Her palms are slick on the steering wheel and her pulse pounds in her ears as she slows to a stop on the side of the freeway and forces herself to climb out of the car.

Holly glances around at the uninspiring shrubs, trees, and dirt lining both sides of the freeway and the median itself. Cars fly by, and she can feel the ground shake whenever a truck roars past. The road is bone-straight with clear sightlines for miles. The reports never mentioned any weather issues on the evening of the accident. In fact, none of them gave a reason for the single car accident beyond “authorities believe speed or reckless driving might have contributed.”

But that makes no sense to Holly. She remembers her father as a safe driver. It was her mom who used to terrify her behind the wheel. Perpetually late, her mother made up time by speeding and running stale yellow lights.

It has been at least two or three months since Holly’s last conversation with her mom. They don’t speak often, which was true even before her mother moved to South Carolina with her new husband. They weren’t especially close before the accident—Holly was always a daddy’s girl—and afterwards, her mom just shut down. She wasn’t emotionally available for her daughter. But in retrospect, Holly understands. Her mom lacked the capacity to deal with that kind of trauma and instead soon lost herself in a relationship with a new man. To have expected otherwise from her mother would have been like expecting a tone-deaf person to sing an aria. Still, Holly doubts she would have survived losing the most important person in her life were it not for the steadfast support of her grandparents, especially Walter.

Holly forces herself to focus on the day of the accident. She has a flickering recollection—not for the first time—of being upset about something, but she can’t summon anything specific.

Where the hell were we going that evening, Dad?

She stares down at the ditch beside her, wondering if this patch of dirt is the spot where the car ended up after flipping three times. Where her father’s heart stopped beating.

Holly has the vaguest recollection of screaming. Something tells her that she was in tears before impact. Were we fighting?

She squeezes her eyes shut to block out other distractions. But hard as she concentrates, nothing more surfaces.

As Holly opens her eyes again, she wonders if she is doing what she did after Elaine’s death. Maybe Aaron is right. Maybe she is just desperate to make sense of the senseless.

The mental image of Elaine slumped in her chair, blood on her arm and syringe at her foot, comes to mind. It still doesn’t add up for Holly. Elaine was an activist. One who had found a new cause to champion in her delusional belief that she was being abused by her therapist. What happened after the tribe confronted her? Why would the needle-phobic Elaine choose that evening of all times to start injecting opioids? And why is bubbly and ebullient JJ the only one so troubled by the group’s intervention?

Holly kicks at the dirt in frustration. Lately, all she seems to do is generate questions without answers.

She takes one final look around the hills before getting back into her car.

Before she drives away, she asks aloud, “What happened here, Dad?”