A waitress passed carrying a tray of tiny hamburgers. “No smoking, sir,” she said.
“Give me one of those, honey pie,” he said. His eyes darted around the room. “So what are you up to?” he said.
“I’m married, living in Inland Empire. I have two kids. I repair home appliances,” she said.
“Well, hurray for you,” he said. He drained his drink and crushed the plastic glass with his foot. “Vance needs another drink,” he said, and he thundered back to the bar.
She stood, watching him walk away.
Johnny the Weatherman pushed by her.
“Move,” he growled.
“Hey,” she said. He had always moved slightly off-center, like someone had pushed him, but now he stumbled to the center of the room with a surprising aggressiveness. He stood, watching the crowd swirl around him for a moment. Then he shoved his hand into his red sports jacket and brought out a gun.
She blinked. The gun looked like a toy. She noticed that his hand gripped the handle in a way that seemed too comfortable; she stepped back.
“What’s the weather?” Johnny yelled. “Hey! What’s the weather?”
He pulled the trigger, and the bullets zoomed up and hit the ceiling, their explosions trembling through her throat.
A waiter scuttled toward the kitchen, holding his hand protectively over miniature quiches. Classmates hit the floor.
“Did it rain in Ohio?” Johnny yelled. His face was slick with sweat. Anna crouched on the maroon carpet. It was a movement new but also oddly familiar, as though she’d been secretly figuring out how to do it for years.
He began to shoot. She touched her thighs and arms and realized, with surprise, how deeply she loved her body. A wineglass exploded on the floor beside her foot. She cried out and pressed her face into the musty carpet. She saw Warren Vance hunched under a table. The flat carpet bristled against her face.
The bullets were still coming. When would they stop? The wounded cried out for help. Others crawled away, like animals, in their finery. Some bent to help others, and some fled; Anna’s mind was gray, static, and she did not know where to go. She saw Warren crawl up from under the table, and he caught her gaze. His head nodded toward a side door. There was a way out. He turned and stumbled down the hallway, and she scrambled up, kicked off her maroon fake-suede heels, and ran after him. She rushed down a bare beige corridor, the linoleum cold on her bare feet, past the hotel kitchen, the oddly domestic sounds of pans clattering and water rushing into a sink; she ran, the sound of screams fading behind her, pushing through the side doors into the parking lot, and she kept going until she got to the edge of it and then stood there, in the black night. Below her, traffic streamed down on the highway. The light glowed, a pale mist, off the speeding cars.
Sirens sounded. Emergency personnel leapt out of red trucks. Her clothes held the odor of champagne and smoke, of a celebration, not a crime. She walked to her car, past the sign in the parking lot: GO OTTERS! WELCOME CLASS OF ’84. Her classmates stumbled out of the hotel, clutching key rings imprinted with photos of themselves as young people; they stood around weeping or fled into the night. She did not realize she was trembling until her hand could not fit the key through the lock in the car. The night air was light and cool on her arms. She looked around for Warren Vance. She wanted, urgently, to run to him, to kiss him, to thank him for showing her the right door. She walked slowly around the parking lot, looking, but he was gone.
SHE DROVE HOME, TWO HOURS DEEP INTO THE INLAND EMPIRE where she lived. Her family resided in a community splashed onto an area that should have remained desert — pale stucco houses pushed aside rattlesnakes and coyotes, and the newly made streets burned with a glaring heat. It was late, and on the freeway she passed a man shaving in his car with his interior lights on, a pickup truck full of drunken teenagers, a driver of an oil rig listening to Italian opera. Everyone drove with a giddy foolishness, obeying the traffic rules. She had to think carefully to remember to grip the steering wheel, to press the gas. Was she, in fact, alive? How did she know? Had she, in fact, been hit by a bullet, and was she now dying on her way home? Then she realized she could not be shot because they could not afford to fix her. She pressed the hard, ridged pedals with her bare feet. The dampness of the vinyl steering wheel came off on her hands.
It was almost midnight when she returned. She opened the door quietly and crept upstairs. Everyone was awake. She heard the monotone voice of her husband reading to the children. For a moment, unnoticed, she watched. Her husband appeared to be reading nursery rhymes to the stale air. The girl, who was just two, was wearing a pink ball gown, and her face was smeared with red lollipop. She was climbing to the top of her brother’s bunk bed and diving off it into a single pillow. The boy had emptied hundreds of cards he was collecting — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! baseball and football heroes, idolatry of all persuasions — into the middle of his room and was organizing them feverishly. The children were so tired they looked drunk.
Her husband’s family had divorced bitterly when he was seven, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother, and he had become a social worker, to help others with their sorrow. She and Howard had met when she installed a dryer for him, and he had, like the others, asked for her ID. “Anna,” he read, matter-of-factly; she had not realized until then that the suspicion of her customers caused her pain. She would stand at the door, and the homeowner would look at her, as though she were wearing a costume of a repairperson and that she could not do what she did, and a part of her enjoyed tricking them, seeing their expressions turn from concern to relief. But with Howard, there was no suspicion. He told her about his clients, who were struggling with prison and bankruptcy and child care and runaway teenagers; she listened to how he helped them with small steps: getting a driver’s license, a new apartment, an order of restraint. Sometimes these steps moved his clients along, sometimes they did not, but she loved the way he looked into the chaos and tried, with a form or a phone call, to find a way out.
They were married; one child came into their home, then another. The children sat in their pink and blue onesies, smiling, toothless, but she was aware that the hats with the puppy ears, the outfits decorated with trains and cats and roses were useful in distracting parents from noticing the darkness; from the breathless, gasping love the children elicited and that made the parents sit up in the middle of the night, listening. They were always listening; there was always a simmering fear.
SO HERE THEY WERE, IN THEIR LATE THIRTIES, PERPLEXED BUT TRYING to get on with it, and recently, the girl had developed a problem going to sleep. It seemed sparked by nothing: the sight of a witch on a video, an awareness of the end of herself as a baby. She now refused to go to sleep at night. She rejected all offerings of comfort — toys, juice, songs — and stood in the dark light, screaming.
“We have to just let her cry,” she had told him one night.
“How?” he said to her, to anyone who advised him to do this. “It’s how she tells us how she feels.” Recently, he had turned thirty-nine, the age his parents had been when they divorced. Now, every night, he crawled into the little girl’s bedroom. He lay on the carpet while the girl fell asleep in her bed. For months, Anna had woken alone in their bed to find him curled up on the carpet of their daughter’s room; he said he wanted the child to wake up to his face, as though to the sun.
But it was ruining him. He staggered up at dawn and sat at the kitchen table; when he left the house one morning, he drove the car into a tree. Then he began loaning money to his clients, for groceries, for textbooks. He waited for them to pay him. They waited. The girl stood in her crib and screamed.