“I’m sorry I hit you,” Arnie said. He sounded close to tears. “I was just… I was…”
“Sure, man, I know.” He clapped Arnie on the shoulder. “No harm, no foul. Girl, are you all right?”
“Yes,” Leigh said. Her breath was coming evenly now. Her heart was slowing down. Only her legs were bad; they were so much helpless rubber. My God, she thought. I could be dead now. If we hadn’t picked that guy up, and we almost didn’t—
It occurred to her that she was lucky to be alive. This cliché struck her forcibly with a stupid, undeniable power that made her feel faint. She began to cry harder. When Arnie led her back toward the car, she came with him, her head on his shoulder.
“Well,” the hitchhiker said uncertainly, “I’ll be off.”
“Wait,” Leigh said. “What’s your name? You saved my life, I’d like to know your name.”
“Barry Gottfried,” the hitchhiker said. “At your service.” Again he swept off an imaginary hat.
“Leigh Cabot,” she said. “This is Arnie Cunningham. Thank you again.”
“For sure,” Arnie added, but Leigh heard no real thanks in his voice—only that shakiness. He handed her into the car and suddenly the smell assaulted her, attacked her: nothing mild this time, much more than just a whiff underneath. It was the smell of rot and decomposition, high and noxious. She felt a mad fright invade her brain and she thought: It is the smell of her fury—
The world slipped sideways in front of her. She leaned out of the car and threw up.
Then everything there was went grey for a little while.
Are you sure you’re all right?” Arnie asked her for what seemed to be the hundredth time. It would also have to be for one of the last, Leigh realized with some relief. She felt very, very tired. There was a dull, throbbing pain in her chest and another one at her temples.
“I’m fine now.”
“Good. Good.”
He moved irresolutely, as if wanting to go but not sure it would be right yet; perhaps not until he had asked his seemingly eternal question at least once more. They were standing in front of the Cabot house. Oblongs of yellow light spilled from the windows and lay smoothly on the fresh and unmarked snow. Christine stood at the curb, idling, showing parking lights.
“You scared me when you fainted like that,” Arnie said.
“I didn’t faint… I only got fogged in for a few minutes.”
“Well, you scared me. I love you, you know.”
She looked at him gravel. “Do you?”
“Of course I do! Leigh, you know I do!”
She drew in a deep breath. She was tired, but it had to be said, and said right now. Because if she didn’t say it now, what had happened would seem completely ridiculous by morninglight—or maybe more than ridiculous; by morninglight the idea would likely seen mad. A smell that came and went like the “mouldering stench” in a Gothic horror story? Dashboard instruments that turned into eyes? And most of all the insane feeling that the car had actually tried to kill her?
By tomorrow, even the fact that she had almost choked to death would be nothing but a vague ache in her chest and the conviction that it had been nothing, really, not a close call at all.
Except it was all true, and Arnie knew it was—yes, some part of him did—and it had to be said now.
“Yes, I think you do love me,” she said slowly. She looked at him steadily. “But I won’t go anywhere with you again in that car. And if you really love me, you’ll get rid of it.” The expression of shock on his face was so large and so sudden that she might have struck him in the face.
“What—what are you talking about, Leigh?”
Was it shock that had caused that slapped expression? Or was some of it guilt?
“You heard what I said. I don’t think you’ll get rid of it—I don’t know if you even can anymore—but if you want to go someplace with me, Arnie, we go on the bus. Or thumb a ride. Or fly. But I’m never going to ride in your car again. It’s a death-trap.”
There. She had said it; it was out.
Now the shock on his face was turning to anger—the blind, obdurate sort of anger she had seen on his face so frequently lately. Not just over the big things, but over the little ones as well—a woman going through a traffic light on the yellow, a cop who held up traffic just before it was their turn to go—but it came to her now with all the force of a revelation that his anger, corrosive and so unlike the rest of Arnie’s personality, was always associated with the car. With Christine.
“If you love me you’ll get rid of it,” he repeated. “You know who you sound like?”
“No, Arnie.”
“My mother, that’s who you sound like.”
“I’m sorry.” She would not allow herself to be drawn, neither would she defend herself with words or end it by just going into the house. She might have been able to if she didn’t feel anything for him, but she did. Her original impressions—that behind the quiet shyness Arnie Cunningham was good and decent and kind (and maybe sexy as well)—had not changed much. It was the car, that was all. That was the change. It was like watching a strong mind slowly give way under the influence of some evil, corroding, addictive drug.
Arnie ran his hands through his snow-dusted hair, a characteristic gesture of bewilderment and anger. “You had a bad choking spell in the car, okay, I can understand that you don’t feel great about it. But it was the hamburger, Leigh, that’s all. Or maybe not even that. Maybe you were trying to talk while you were chewing or inhaled at just the wrong second or something. You might as well blame Ronald McDonald. People choke on their food every now and then that’s all. Sometimes they die. You didn’t. Thank God for that. But to blame my car—!”
Yes, it all sounded perfectly plausible. And was. Except that something was going on behind Arnie’s grey eyes. A frantic something that was not precisely a lie, but… rationalization? A wilful turning away from the truth?
“Arnie,” she said, “I’m tired and my chest hurts and I’ve got a headache and I think I’ve only got the strength to say this once. Will you listen?”
“If it’s about Christine, you’re wasting your breath,” he said, and that stubborn, mulish look was on his face again. “It’s crazy to blame her and you know it is.”
“Yes, I know it’s crazy, and I know I’m wasting my breath,” Leigh said. “But I’m asking you to listen.”
“I’ll listen.”
She took a deep breath, ignoring the pull in her chest. She looked at Christine, idling a plume of white vapour into the thickly falling snow, then looked hastily away. Now it was the parking lights that looked like eyes: the yellow eyes of a lynx.
“When I choked… when I was choking… the instrument panel… the lights on it changed. They changed. They were… no, I won’t go that far, but they looked like eyes.”
He laughed, a short bark in the cold air. In the house a curtain was pulled aside, someone looked out, and then the curtain dropped back again.
“If that hitchhiker… that Gottfried fellow… if he hadn’t been there, I would have died, Arnie. I would have died.” She searched his eyes with her own and pushed ahead. Once, she told herself. I only have to say this once. “You told me that you worked in the cafeteria at LHS your first three years. I’ve seen the Heimlich Manoeuvre poster on the door to the kitchen. You must have seen it too. But you didn’t try that on me, Arnie. You were getting ready to clap me on the back. That doesn’t work. I had a job in a restaurant back in Massachusetts, and the first thing they teach you, even before they teach you the Heimlich Manoeuvre, is that clapping a choking victim on the back doesn’t work.”
“What are you saying?” he asked in a thin, out-of-breath voice.