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just walks.
      "I'll catch a ride somewhere ahead," she says, talking to nobody except the black turkey buzzards orbiting overhead on breathy vectors of hot air rising off the roads. Seeing her, they probably think she's going to drop dead here at some point. They'll pick her bones the moment she hits the ground.
      She doesn't intend to offer them the satisfaction. Ugly birds. Bald so they have no problem plunging their shriveled dagger-like heads into the gooey meat of a rotting beast. You were a vulture once , she thinks. You will be again .
      Sweat shellacs her brow. Drips in her eyes. Stings.
      To the left and right, trees. Mostly pine. Thin, wispyneedled. Stuck up out of the sand, sometimes whispering in the wind. Power lines overhead like strings of black licorice. Sometimes a house – a mini-mansion here, a rat-hole there. Then back to the pines and their slanting shadows.
      Evening twilight starts to bleed night-blood. Sun down, moon up. Soon she sees the pitch pines – stunted and twisted trees that grow here in the dead sandy soil, trees that thrive thanks to the occasional forest fires that burn through, killing the underbrush so that the pines live on, unmitigated by their scrubby competitors.
      Pitch pines mean she's in the Pine Barrens. A long stretch of nowhere. Home to the Pineys – the weird off-the-grid inhabitants of this trackless waste. Home too to the mythical Jersey Devil, a donkey-headed chupacabra type with bat wings and a witch mother, at least if you believe the stories.
      As night officially takes hold and the cars traveling this route die back, Miriam thinks she might just wander off the road and into the trees where the Pineys or the Devil may take her.
      And yet, she keeps on walking.
      It was a year ago that she was tortured in a small cabin here in the Barrens.
      Her legs ache. Tongue dry. Feet bottoms burning. Old calluses reawakening.
      She has a bottle of water. She takes a sip. Then another. Then it's gone.
       How many sips has she been taking?
      Shit.
      She thinks finally, maybe it's time. Time to hitchhike. Time to commit to this old life, commit to her lack of commitment. She knows that most of these cars will just take her back to the island, though. Irony of ironies. Like trying to pull yourself out of quicksand and only sinking deeper.
      Still, she puts out her thumb as the dark road glows in the light of headlights coming from behind her. Whoever it is, fine. Fate shall play its role. Kindly grandmother? Stoned sorority girls? Jack Torrance from The Shining ?
      Fate has other ideas. Twisted as the pygmy pines.
      The rumble of an engine strikes a too-familiar chord. She looks back: the headlights are big, bright, two searing suns fast approaching, burning away the night.
      Brakes engage. A hydraulic squeal.
      Part of her is saying no, no, no, NO.
      But between every no is a yes .
      "Miriam?" Louis's voice calls over the truck engine.
      She's torn like tissue paper: Her muscles want to run, but her bones want to go to him. The tug-of-war ends when she just sits down. Drops like a puppet with its strings cut, down into the weeds next to the highway.
      Eventually she hears the door open, the door close, and then Louis Darling stands behind her, a massive shape – comforting and scary all in a single measure, warm and soft like a bear, but she knows that he could twist her head off like the bloom on a Black-Eyed Susan.
      "Come on," he says. And he urges her up and into the truck.
      To her own surprise, she goes.

SEVEN
    Coffee and Cigarettes
     
    "I'm not going back to that fucking trailer," she says, sitting in the passenger seat. The truck rumbles along.
      Just the cab. No trailer. Everything inside the Mack looks new. Because that's how Louis keeps it. It stinks of Armor-All and pine scent and, yes, that lingering Old Spice odor.
      "Okay," he answers. In that one word, the soft Southern drawl – the