Massachusetts Turnpike

The Massachusetts Turnpike is the setting of the final drive in which Laurie deliberately crashes the family minivan, killing Jacob Barber. The westbound highway first appears as a familiar route through routine traffic; over the course of the ride, speed and lane position turn it into the approach to a bridge abutment. The collision gives the road a decisive narrative role: it carries mother and son from an uneasy journey toward a school interview to the irreversible end of Jacob’s life.

Setting and Final Journey

After turning onto the turnpike and heading west, Laurie and Jacob ride in near silence. They have spoken only a few labored words, and the strain between them reflects the loss of Laurie’s trust in her son after the family’s return from Jamaica. Jacob gives his mother space; neither of them breaks the quiet. The road thus carries not just the minivan but the distance that has opened between them.

Their destination is an interview at a private school in Natick. The family expects Jacob to be rejected repeatedly and eventually homeschooled, but the town requires that other options be exhausted before it will cover homeschooling under a special-education plan. For Jacob, the interview is another occasion to feel unwanted: he suspects schools invite him only to look at the notorious teenager they imagine him to be. The routine purpose of the drive makes its eventual violence all the more stark.

Jacob asks Laurie to turn on the radio. She briefly puts on WBUR, then switches it off; news of the wider world continuing as usual is painful to hear. A few minutes later, Laurie drives with tears on her face and her hands clenched around the wheel. Jacob, absorbed in his own thoughts, does not notice. The stream of cars ahead remains in view between the front seats, while mother and son travel through the same landscape without sharing what each is experiencing.

Acceleration and Collision

Laurie signals, moves into the sparse right lane, and steadily accelerates: 76, 77, 78, 79, 80. Jacob is not wearing his seat belt, although he is often careless about it and Laurie would ordinarily have told him to buckle up. This time she does not. As the minivan passes 85 miles per hour, Jacob remarks, without real concern, that she is going a little fast. Laurie replies that she is.

The vehicle is a Honda Odyssey, heavy despite its name and equipped with a powerful engine. At ordinary highway speeds it feels stable, but above 90 miles per hour it begins to shudder and its wheels start to lose contact with the road. That detail makes the danger physical and incremental: the car’s apparent steadiness gives way as its speed rises beyond the point at which it can safely hold the pavement.

Jacob asks what Laurie is doing and warns that it is dangerous. She tells him she loves him, then adds that she loves him and his father. He presses back against the seat and reaches for the seat belt, still trying to explain her calm and the speed as a mechanical problem, a rush to avoid lateness, or a moment of distraction. His confusion persists even as the van moves into the breakdown lane. It descends a slight hill and continues accelerating through 96, 97, and 98 miles per hour.

Laurie drives the minivan directly toward a concrete bridge abutment built into the side of a hill. A Jersey barrier should have guided the vehicle away from a direct impact, but the speed and angle defeat that protection: the barrier lifts the right-side wheels, and the minivan skitters up it, vaults from the top, and rolls almost upside down. Laurie loses control but never releases the steering wheel. The turnpike’s roadside infrastructure, meant to channel traffic safely, becomes part of the sequence that carries the vehicle into its catastrophic flip.

Narrative Significance

The drive is narrated retrospectively by Andrew Barber, who says he was not present but imagines Jacob’s last moments repeatedly and dreams of them. His account moves between specific details of the ride and the life Jacob might have lived: growing into adulthood, finding work, considering law school, and eventually confronting the legacy of his grandfather, Bloody Billy Barber. These unrealized possibilities make the highway’s ending more than a crash scene; they measure the future erased in the seconds before impact.

At the moment the airborne minivan rolls, Andrew imagines Jacob thinking of the father who held him as a baby and understanding that he was loved, whatever had happened and whatever Jacob might have done. The final drive therefore holds together the book’s unresolved tensions: Laurie’s destructive action, Jacob’s bewilderment, Andrew’s continuing love, and the narrator’s inability to escape an event he did not witness. The Massachusetts Turnpike is not developed as a general portrait of a place; it matters here as a specific route whose ordinary westbound traffic becomes the setting and mechanism of a family tragedy.