"Six," said Vivienne. "And I've driven it once already, in second gear, at fourteen miles an hour, and you never touched the wheel. I'll drive it the same way. Carefully." She took a breath. "Luc. Let me do this. Let somebody do something for you. Just once."
The static hissed. Out on the green, very faintly, the boom box was still playing.
"Keys are on the hook by the door," he said at last. "Low range. Keep it in second. Don't touch the brakes on the turns, brake before. Georgie knows the road. Over."
"I'm coming too," said Georgie, who already had her jacket on, and her cap, and was pulling the tow truck costume back over her shoulders by its suspenders. "For the light. So people can see us."
Vivienne opened her mouth to say no, and said, "Get in."
Later she would remember the drive up only in pieces, the way you remember a dream. The weight of the Bronco's clutch, like pushing against a door someone was holding shut. The snow coming at the windshield in the headlights like stars in a science fiction picture, so that she kept her eyes on the black line of the stone wall and nothing else. The chains singing on the road. Georgie in the passenger seat with the CB handset in one hand and the other hand braced on the dashboard, in her cardboard tow truck with the amber light on top going off-on-off and lighting up the inside of the cab, orange, dark, orange, dark, and Georgie's voice, absolutely steady, calling the road: "Okay, there's a bend coming. A big one. Left. Brake now. Now go. Okay. That was good. There's a culvert, stay in the middle. Okay. You're doing so good." And somewhere around the first switchback Georgie reached over without being asked and pushed a cassette into the Bronco's tape deck, and it was the tape, her tape, FOR #100, and the jangling guitar of the first song came up out of the speakers into the cab, and Vivienne, who had been holding her breath, let it out.
"This one's for when you're leaving," said Georgie. "But it works for going up mountains, too."
She drove it in second gear the whole way, at eleven miles an hour, with her knuckles white and her teeth together, and she braked before the bends and not in them, and she did not once touch the wall.
At the second switchback there were lights: the wrecker's amber beacon turning slowly against the stone wall where its front bumper had folded into it, and behind it the red taillights of a gray Saab tipped nose-down in the ditch, and in the space between them, standing in the snow with one arm held against his chest and the other raised, Luc Beaulieu. She saw his face in her headlights as she came around the bend. She would remember that most of all. He looked as though somebody had handed him something he had not let himself ask for in nine years.
The couple were from Greenwich, Connecticut. Their names were Martin and Juliet Winslow, and they had come up to see the leaves, late, because Juliet was not due for three weeks, and Juliet, it emerged as Vivienne and Luc between them got her out of the tipped Saab and into the back of the Bronco under every blanket the Bronco possessed, had been having pains since lunch and had not mentioned them, because she had wanted to see the view.
"I'm so sorry," she kept saying, between contractions. "I'm so sorry. I'm so stupid."
"You're not stupid," said Georgie, from the front seat, turned all the way around, her amber light going off-on-off on the ceiling. "I was born in a hallway. It's very common."
Luc got into the back with Juliet and held her hand with his good one. Martin got into the front with a face the color of skim milk. Vivienne turned the Bronco around on the switchback in a seven-point turn of such precision and such terror that Martin Winslow would describe it at dinner parties for years, and drove them down the mountain, in second gear, carefully, while Georgie called the road and the tape played and Juliet Winslow squeezed Luc's hand until he said something under his breath in what Vivienne was fairly sure was Italian.