3. the kind of debt no honest man could pay

She adjusts the baby on her hip, and avoids his eyes. "Are you kidding? No offense, honey, but why would this person tell you the 'truth,' if he knew it?" She? she wonders, idly. "And what makes him different from all the rest?"

"I'll ask him." She can hear the smile in his voice, and it only irritates her more.

"No, you won't," she says firmly. "You're not going. Not tonight."

"Why not?"

She busies herself with wresting the car keys from Fiona's perpetually grubby, inquisitive fingers. "I told you why not."

"A feeling, huh?" He comes up behind her, snakes his arms around her waist. "Since when," he asks, "do you believe in premonitions or weird feelings?"

"Better safe than sorry." She turns around, bounces Fiona. "Isn't that right, baby?"

Fi cackles in response.

"I don't want you to get hurt. Fiona doesn't want you to get hurt. You're not going," she repeats. "Just call the guy back, tell him you need something more to go on before you meet strangers in the middle of the night."

He sighs.

She studies his face. She's so tired of having this fight; she's tempted just to let him go.

"For us," she tries one last time. "Please?"

The baby reaches out, grabs his pointer finger, won't let go. She hands Fiona over to him, and feels only slightly guilty about using her daughter to guilt-trip her husband into staying home.

He says, "Okay."

The next day, they're all in the car, bundled up against the cold. In the backseat, Fi babbles happily in her carseat, and Jack idly complains about the noise, his forehead pressed against the window. She turns around to face him, ready to explain that it's normal, that it'll pass.

So she never sees it coming.

The impact of the collision propels the car off the road, down an incline, into a tree.

The baby shrieks as she drifts away. She tries to fight, to look at Rick, to ask about Jack, but she just can't. Honestly, it's so much easier to just give up.

The other driver, apparently unharmed, disappears.

It becomes the one event for which Rick never proposes a supernatural explanation. After all, if it had been a sign, or a warning, then he had put them all in danger. If it had been a sign or a warning, he couldn't persist in his dogged quest for answers.

So he remains silent on the issue.

He stops talking about his "leads" and his "sources," or stops telling her about them, and she likes to think that's because he understands that the four weeks she spends in a hospital bed are the only answer she'll ever need.

The first night she's back home, long after the kids have fallen asleep, he strokes her hair and waits for her to join in:

I met you several years ago, the times they were so strange, but I had a feeling
you looked into my eyes just once, an instant flashing by that we were stealing
another time you felt so bad, and I wasn't any help at all, as I recall

dark star, I see you in the morning, sleeping next to me
dark star, let the memory of the evening be the first thing that you think of
when you open up your smile and see me, dark star

("Dark Star," Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1977)

--

Notes:

the kind of debt no honest man could pay is an adapted line from The Band's version of "Atlantic City." Bruce Springsteen wrote the song, but The Band's version is highly superior.