Free Hot Springs by Geoffrey Becker

a cop. Accidents. That’s all I know when I see on the news that a storm’s coming.”
    “Any idea what one of these places might go for?” Landis asked.
    “Nope. But I’m sure you’ll be happy. Nice and quiet up here. You got the mountains, after all. There has been some trouble with bears getting into people’s trash. That’s something to think about. Well, all right then.” He tipped his hat and got back into his cruiser.
    As Landis watched him pull past, he wondered what Bernice was doing right now. I’m lucky , he’d told her more than once, and this was possibly true, if mostly in a bullet-dodging sense.
    When he’d moved in with Pam, it had been a halfhearted decision, entered into under the influence of the better part of a bottle of Southern Comfort and the surprising news—whispered to him as he buried his face in a pillow to go to sleep—that she was pregnant. A lie, almost certainly, he now understood. He’d heard a few years ago
that she was married, and he hoped it wasn’t just the settlement from the accident that had made her attractive to someone. He hoped it was real love she’d found. They’d both been young then, just twenty-two and twenty-three. He could still see her face, the cross-stitching on it like train tracks, could still hear her slurred voice as she struggled, even weeks after waking from her three-week sleep, to wrap her tongue around the simplest, most familiar sounds. “Landish,” she’d say, her grin now lopsided. “Landish, let’s party.” And he’d done that, watching her shaky hands roll huge, unwieldy joints that rained embers onto the cluttered coffee table in her apartment over a corner grocery in Trenton, Born to Run turned up so loud the dishes rattled in the kitchen sink. He did it for nearly a month—as well as the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning. He found her the lawyer, and dealt with her parents, who clearly suspected his motives, thought he was hanging around waiting for an insurance payday. He drove her to physical therapy, speech therapy.
    He’d driven her down to see the car, which was at a wrecking yard near Toms River, a few miles from the spot on the parkway where she’d been hit by a stock trader who’d had three martinis and was heading back to his beach house.
    “I don’t remember it at all,” she’d said.
    “The accident?”
    She shook her head, closed her eyes with concentration the way she did now when she was having trouble getting out a word or phrase, then brightened as it moved to her lips. “The car.”
    It was a Honda Accord, but it didn’t look much like anything anymore. There was still a pair of plastic sunglasses tucked under what remained of the windshield. He took a photo for her.
    That weekend while she was visiting her parents—he’d claimed a bad stomach—he packed his things. He had a distant cousin in
Denver who owned some commercial properties and had offered him work. In the note he left, he’d tried to make it sound like a sacrifice on his part, not simple abandonment—he was encouraging her to party, and it was messing up her recovery. Giving her space was the best thing he could do for her. He was even leaving her his stereo system.
    Born to run.
    The job in Denver hadn’t panned out, but Landis had found other gigs—construction, handyman work, whatever people were willing to pay him for—and had eventually moved down to the Springs because he felt it was time for a change, and because it was closer to actual mountains.
    From the strange-looking church, he heard the sound of someone practicing the organ, although he couldn’t tell what the song was.
    No one had ever said a word to him about a baby, not Pam’s parents, who looked at him with obvious distaste when he’d shuffled into her hospital room to stare at her, not any of the various doctors he’d gotten to stop for a moment to talk, even though he had no family status. He wondered what she’d have done, eventually, had things gone