The Music of Chance Read Free

to Boston with him, but he could not muster a single argument in his own defense. He wanted to be selfish, to stand on his rights, but his nerve kept failing him, and at last he gave in to the obvious truth. To wrench Juliette away from all this would do her more harm than good.
    When he told Donna what he was thinking, she tried to talk him out of it, using many of the same arguments she had thrown at him twelve years before when he told her he was planning to quit college: Don’t be rash, give it a little more time, don’t burn your bridges behind you. She was wearing that worried big-sister look he had seen on her all through his childhood, and even now, three or four lifetimes later, he knew that she was the one person in the world he could trust. They wound up talking late into the night, sitting in the kitchen long after Ray and the kids had gone to bed, but for all of Donna’s passion and good sense, it turned out just as it had twelve years before: Nashe wore her down until she started to cry, and then he got his way.
    His one concession to her was that he would set up a trust fund for Juliette. Donna sensed that he was about to do something crazy (she told him as much that night), and before he ran through the entire inheritance, she wanted him to set aside a part of it, to put it in a place where it couldn’t be touched. The following morning, Nashe spent two hours with the manager of the Northfield Bank and made the necessary arrangements. He hung around for the rest of that day and part of the next, and then he packed his bags and loaded up the trunk of his car. It was a hot afternoon in late July, and the whole family came out onto the front lawn to see him off. One after the other, he hugged and kissed the children, andwhen Juliette’s turn came at the end, he hid his eyes from her by picking her up and crushing his face into her neck. Be a good girl, he said. Don’t forget that Daddy loves you.
    He had told them he was planning to go back to Massachusetts, but as it happened, he soon found himself traveling in the opposite direction. That was because he missed the ramp to the freeway—a common enough mistake—but instead of driving the extra twenty miles that would have put him back on course, he impulsively went up the next ramp, knowing full well that he had just committed himself to the wrong road. It was a sudden, unpremeditated decision, but in the brief time that elapsed between the two ramps, Nashe understood that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same. He had said Boston, but that was only because he had to tell them something, and Boston was the first word that entered his head. For the fact was that no one was expecting to see him there for another two weeks, and with so much time at his disposal, why bother to go back? It was a dizzying prospect—to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. He could go anywhere he wanted, he could do anything he felt like doing, and not a single person in the world would care. As long as he did not turn back, he could just as well have been invisible.
    He drove for seven straight hours, paused momentarily to fill up the tank with gas, and then continued for another six hours until exhaustion finally got the better of him. He was in north-central Wyoming by then, and dawn was just beginning to lift over the horizon. He checked into a motel, slept solidly for eight or nine hours, and then walked over to the diner next door and put away a meal of steak and eggs from the twenty-four-hour breakfast menu. By late afternoon, he was back in the car, and once again he drove clear through the night, not stopping until he had gone halfway through New Mexico. After that second night, Nashe realized that he was no longer in control of himself, that he hadfallen into the grip of some baffling, overpowering force. He was like a crazed animal, careening blindly from one nowhere to the next, but no matter how