I kept telling myself things would get better as the kids got older. But now they’re older. And it turned out, our marriage got too broken to fix.
And now we’re stuck together in this car. For hours. It’s become the most awkward car ride in the history of the world. I would give anything to get out of it. Occasionally, I hear some conversation from the back, but for the most part, we are all deathly silent. I am having trouble envisioning anything I could say that won’t result in a fight between me and Noah, and I don’t want to have another fight with him in front of everyone.
At this point, I just want to get the week over with so I can tell him it’s over. Hopefully, he won’t hire a hitman to take me out, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
For the last half hour, the road we’re on has become progressively more narrow and isolated. I don’t think we’ve seen another car in twenty minutes. The pavement here is cracked and unkempt. My minivan’s tires snap fallen branches in the road and lurch on the uneven ground.
“Turn left onto Appleton Road,” the GPS voice instructs us.
Noah hits the brakes just as we come across the sign for Appleton Road. It’s a tiny road that goes one way. The pavement has been uneven up until now, but this road is entirely unpaved. Noah hesitates with his foot on the brake.
“This is the turn here,” Warner speaks up.
“Right.” Noah taps his fingers against the wheel. He’s anxious about going down this road. Unlike Jack, he’s no former Boy Scout. We’ve never been camping together in all our years of marriage. “Okay.”
Noah turns down Appleton Road, and immediately, the ride gets a lot rougher. There are no other cars around—it’s just us and the wilderness. I hold onto my seat as we make our way down this uneven path. But we’re close now. It’s not too much further to the inn.
And then the picture on the GPS freezes.
Noah keeps his eyes on the road as he taps the screen. Up on top, the words appear: Searching for signal…
“Damn,” he mutters under his breath.
“I’ve got the map,” Warner speaks up.
I hear him shuffling through his duffel bag. I pull my phone out of my purse—there’s no signal there either. I feel about as uneasy as Noah looks. I don’t feel any more comfortable with the wilderness than he does. I can’t wait to get to the inn and have WiFi access.
I wish I had called the kids back when we were on the main road. I had been thinking I would call them when we got to the inn, but now I wish I hadn’t waited. Even though I gave Penny a heads-up, I imagine Emma being worried.
“All right,” Warner says, “there’s going to be a fork in the road coming up, and you need to go left.”
“Right,” Noah says.
“No, he said left,” I say.
“I know he said left,” Noah snaps at me. “I was saying ‘right,’ like I got it.”
I swallow hard. “Okay. I was just making sure. I didn’t mean to…”
“Could you just… Just don’t talk to me, Claire. I need to focus.”
Noah presses his fingers against his eyeballs under his glasses, then focuses his attention back on the road. We come to the fork, and he slows to a complete halt. The road diverges in two directions, but the right path seems much better paved. The left is more narrow and has branches hanging down everywhere. The sun is still in the sky, but the left path looks dark and foreboding. If there’s a monster out here in the woods, it’s definitely on the left.
“Are you sure we’re supposed to go left?” Noah says.
Warner looks up from the map. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” he recites in that rich baritone. “And I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Noah crinkles his nose. “What the…” he mutters under his breath.
I clasp my hand over my mouth to suppress a giggle, and for a split second, Noah looks proud of himself for making me laugh. For that half a second, it’s almost like the old days again, before we hated each other. When we could share an emotion without even having to exchange words.
“Warner is quoting that poem,” Lindsay says. “You know. The one by Robert Frost?” She shoots her boyfriend a loving look. “He’s very well-read.”
“Yes, I know it,” Noah says tightly. “But what the hell does that have to do with how to get to the inn?”
“You take the path on the left,” Warner explains. “It may be less traveled, but it’s the correct path.”