Free Moving Day: A Thriller by Jonathan Stone

the bounds, of the survivor’s story. And more than that, because it is unfinished. Because it continues—furtively, sickly, perversely—in his head, and in the bedroom’s blackness around him at night. No, he still can’t tell her. This kind of story, you can’t adequately tell until it is finished. So he is left alone with the story’s newly insistent fragments as the landscape slides by.

    On both sides of the highway, Pennsylvania’s steeply raked hills display broad swaths of forest. Surprisingly dense and unbroken and pristine, he thinks, for a main artery in the eastern United States. Only occasionally, a gas station plaza—its meaningless flags and pennants waving colorfully, vaguely carnivalesque—flies bright and fleeting by their windows, disappears evanescent, as the landscape melts into slanting green woods again.
    “I know you had nothing,” Rose says, and after a pause, “I know it has to do with that.”
    And unsaid:
I can’t know any more than that, because in all these years of marriage, after three children and a life together, you have never told it to me fully. You mythologize yourself, you gain psychological advantage, by not telling it, and I know this about you by now, and I think you are at least honest enough with yourself to know this, too, about yourself: that you are very much about psychological advantage, and that’s the main reason you don’t tell it. Not the pain of the past. No longer the pain of the past. The pain must be gone by now—must have healed somewhat by now.
    He knows she feels all this, feels it and senses it all in her slight resentments, accumulated into a small and still-manageable mound after fifty years. He wishes—he only wishes—that that were the truth about his past. It should have healed. That would be the natural human course, the standard human response.
    He is asking a lot now, he knows. Driving her into the unknown.
    The device on the dashboard blinks occasionally, silently. She regards it with some inseparable mix of mild abhorrence and prim, formal interest.
    “That’s a tracking device of some sort, isn’t it? From that ridiculous catalog. We’re following somebody, aren’t we?” she says. And, after only a slight pause, “Following it to our furniture.”
    She’s always been an intelligent woman.
    There is a long silence, which answers her definitively.

    A survivor, he has thought, has no identity. To others, yes. Ultraidentity. Sacred identity. Worthy of hallowed whispers and respect, respectfully pointed out at a benefit, a gala, a charity function, all in smooth black tie. Look how far he’s come. Imagine, from nothing to this. A survivor fills a chandeliered room—any room—with his brutal past. But to him, no, it doesn’t work the same way. To him, he has no past.
    So, to a survivor, other things must fill in for identity. Affiliations. Clubs and memberships. Responsibilities. Children. (Who are made too important—it is a hard burden for children to bear. He has observed the brutal toll on some survivors’ children, has eventually seen the subtle toll on his own, but it is a toll he seems unable to mitigate. Mitigation would be to change who he is or what has happened, and that can’t be done.)
    A survivor is caught in a world of surfaces. Like his daughter as an awkward preteen girl, he thinks, curled up with a fashion magazine. Minutely observing a luscious world, imagining herself vividly in it, but separated from it: a world that played across the page without her. The survivor knows nothing but glossy surface. Lives in glossy surface. Because nothing else in the present can ever be as real.
    He wants his possessions back. Because he wants back the part of his identity that his possessions helped to make.
    His possessions are part of his assimilation. An assimilation he hasn’t thought very deeply about, yet he senses now that it’s gone. In part because its important trappings are gone. And he’s tossed back. As if