“Hey now.” Her dad’s voice is calm, but he looks shaken. “Hey now.” She presses her forehead into the steering wheel until it hurts. After a moment, he opens the door, and Angel almost cries out, afraid he’ll let whatever is out there into the truck. But he shuts the door. She listens to his steps outside. He opens the driver’s-side door. “Scoot over. I’m driving us home.”
“You can’t!” But she slides over and buckles herself in obediently. “You’ll go to jail,” she says, muted.
“No I won’t.” His tone is assured and calm, the voice of a father. He cranks the heat and adjusts the blowers so they hit Angel full-on.
She tries to relax her body, part by part, the way Brianna taught them in Guided Relaxation, but her rigid muscles won’t release. “Probably it was nothing. Just a coyote or something. Maybe a big rabbit.”
Her dad looks both ways down the long empty road and pulls back onto the hardtop. At the edge of the road, the shadows swing to avoid the headlights. He drives smoothly, his speed restrained.
“Close your eyes,” her dad tells her, and she does, feeling the warm sway and rumble pressing into her back as the truck carries her toward home.
She wakes to her dad shaking her. Angel lifts her head. The house is waiting for them, yellow light at her grandmother’s bedroom window.
“I’m tired.”
He laughs. “I know you are.” He gathers her purse and backpack, the stack of informative handouts and the free picture book about alligator pilots that each family got as a party favor. “I’ll get the door, you get the baby.”
Under the dim orange of the dome light, Angel blinks her sticky eyes and grapples with the straps. Connor’s eyes open and he squints up at her. His face is pinched and he begins to whimper.
“Oh, calm yourself,” she murmurs. “You’ll give yourself a stress disorder.” Her memory of whatever shot in front of the truck—a vague impression of light and speed and fur and sentience—hasn’t faded, but it no longer seems as terrifying. She can think about it later or not at all. She fusses with the plastic handle, trying to release the carrier from the base. When she tugs, the entire contraption shifts forward.
“Oh, god, Dad!” Angel cries. “Look.” In a flash, he’s at her side. She lifts her head, stricken. “Look what we did.”
Her dad follows her pointed finger to the seat belt that dangles against the back of the seat, the metal buckle glinting. Connor is strapped into his car seat, packed as snug as an egg in its carton, and the seat is snapped securely into the base, but the base itself rests loose on the bench. In a collision, Connor might have been pitched forward onto the truck floor, pinned beneath the immense weight of safety features.
“Oh,” her father breathes.
A wave of despair crests, but her father reaches past her to release the baby and settles him gently at his shoulder. Sinking back into sleep, Connor exhales long.
“He’s fine,” her father says firmly. “Look at him. We made a mistake, we both did, but he’s fine. We’re lucky we’re both such excellent drivers.”
“I could have killed him. I’m a horrible mother.”
“Listen.” He takes her chin and turns her face to him gently, a gesture he’s never, ever made. “It was a mistake. Every parent makes them. That don’t mean it’s okay, but we’re not gonna ever make this one again.”
July is hot, but Yolanda shivers in her sweater. Somehow she manages to schedule and attend all these appointments—chemo every other week, four hours at a time, plus scheduled labs—without arousing any suspicion in Amadeo or Angel. They’re so incurious, her offspring.
And Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, too, seems to believe her when she explains her days off as “a minor medical thing.” Monica searches her face, as if to check for signs of lying or plastic surgery. “Of course, Yo. Take care of yourself. Just make sure the agenda for the meeting with the governor is good to go.”