Iris waits as long as she can for the storm to let up, but it keeps coming. Even though it’s pouring, they have to leave if they’re going to get to the Villa Azzurra on time. So, weather be damned, she decides they’ll go.
Iris squeezes the steering wheel, craning forward to see the road better. Rain lashes the windshield, and the wipers panic to clear the water. Idiot, she thinks to herself. She steals a look at Sam, her gangly fourteen-year-old son, sunk into the passenger seat. Music pulses from his earbuds, sounding like a mix of heartbeat and distortion. His hood cowls his head, and all Iris can see are his lips moving monkishly.
Route 23A cuts through forested escarpment on both sides. Bullets of rain pelt the car and burst in little explosions on the black road. They pass a yellow sign that warns in silhouette of rock slides. The landscape on Sam’s side rises to a ledge of gray rock forested with dark hemlocks. Runoff pours down into a gravel trench alongside the road and gushes out of culvert pipes into a cascading creek on Iris’s side. She imagines rocks and trees coming loose and crashing down on the car. In her mind she turns out of the way but can’t help visualizing losing control of the turn: the car shoots across the opposite lane, hurtles off the side, and ends up bent and split open against the rocks in the creek. She blinks her eyes to erase the image of Sam being pulled wet and bloody out of the gashed car. Do other mothers imagine these things? She didn’t used to. They ride over a bump, and Iris hears the big metal garbage can bang in the back of the car. She looks at Sam. His head is bobbing rapid fire with the beat of his music. Iris taps his leg. Nothing. She taps him harder. Sam sits up and pulls his earbuds out.
