He hadn't stopped talking even to draw breath since she'd pulled that charge slip out of the jacket pocket, and what was the term for that? “Logorrhea.” Yes, another SAT word to drill her students with, but she didn't have any students, not anymore. She was wandering, again she was wandering, and she was thinking, unaccountably, of the talk fests they used to have in the dorm at Gallaudet, in Sign mainly, but with people speaking aloud too in a way that was all but unintelligible to a hearie, a kind of sing-along moan that underscored the signs. “Talk talk.” That was what happened when the deaf got together, a direct translation into English-they talked a lot, talked all the time, talked the way Bridger was talking now, only with their hands. Index finger of the four hand at the mouth, tapping, tapping to show the words coming out. “When deaf get together talk talk all the time.” Communication, the universal need. Information. Access. Escape from the prison of silence. Talk, talk, talk.
Bridger's hand was on her wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the tuna sandwich as it moved to her lips. “You're making those noises,” he said.
She looked around her. People were watching. She tried to suppress the impulse, but it was almost unconscious, autonomic, a reaction to stress that most deaf people shared: she was emitting, had been emitting, a soft high-pitched keening sound, as if she were a dolphin washed ashore, and it embarrassed her. Her own throat produced these noises, her own larynx, and she had no control over them. “Sorry,” she said, and signed it too, right hand, palm facing in, the slow circle over her heart.
“You're not listening,” he said.
“I am,” she lied.
He looked away in exasperation, his features pinched, eyes rolling upward, and that made her angry, but she didn't want to make a scene, or any more of a scene than she'd already made with her dolphin noises, so she wiped her face of expression and focused on him. What he was talking about, the gist of it anyway, was that they were both tired and incapable of making a decision at this point (“I'm not going back,” she interrupted him, “and that son of a bitch is not going to get away with this, I swear, even if I have to crawl on my belly-or my abdomen, my abdomen-from here to New York, I'm going to nail him, you hear me?”), and that they needed to check into a motel, get some rest and decide what to do in the morning, because they were just frustrating themselves driving around looking for nothing, for a car that was a hundred miles away by now.
“I found him before,” she countered. “Didn't I?”
“Yeah, I know-the deaf have some kind of ESP, right? And it “was” amazing, I admit it, but you don't really believe in all that, do you?”
“No,” she said.
“Because if you do, maybe you can tell me what this jerk is going to do next, maybe you can visualize it, picture him cruising down the open road with our money in his pockets, free money, everything free-he doesn't have to worry about looking for the cheapest motel in town, does he? No, he's going to stay at the Ritz Carlton, he's going to-”
She set the sandwich down so she could use her hands. “He's Frank Calabrese,” she said, finger-spelling it beneath the words, “and he's going back to New York. And you know what?”
He lifted his eyebrows, leaned in close on the twin props of his elbows so that his face was inches from hers. The waitress, probably nineteen or twenty but so petite and baby-faced she looked more like twelve, darted her eyes nervously at them, and Dana felt distracted. There was a TV mounted on the near wall, ghost figures going through their silent motions. She felt a wave of depression crash over her even as Bridger threw it back at her: “What?”
“There's nothing to discuss. I don't care if I have a hundred nights' sleep in a row, I'm not going to change my mind.” Then she closed her mouth, shot a withering glance round the restaurant, and used her hands exclusively: “Whether you come along or not, I'm going after him.”
They checked into the Gold Country Motel with her credit card-neither of Bridger's was good, both maxed out thanks to Frank Calabrese-and she showered and then stretched herself across the white slab of the queen-size bed and stared at the ceiling like a zombie while Bridger paced back and forth, one hand pinning the phone to his ear while the other swooped, plunged and snatched at the air to underline the specifics of his distress. First he dialed the credit card companies, and then the CRAs, and it seemed to take him forever. She couldn't sleep. Couldn't even close her eyes. Her head throbbed where she'd hit the windshield and she seemed to have irritated something in her left knee when she slammed her way into the car in the parking lot of the restaurant outside Sacramento. At Bridger's insistence they'd stopped at a drugstore and picked up a tube of Neosporin and a package of Band-Aid sport strips, and she'd spent ten minutes dabbing at the wound-it was a purple blotch, like a birthmark, with a crusted gash in the center of it-but it was superficial and it was already healing and she didn't really want to call even more attention to herself by walking around with a shining square flesh-colored patch stuck to her head, so she'd parted her hair and combed it over to at least partially hide the contusion.
At some point, exhausted, she did manage to fall asleep, and when she woke some indeterminate time later, she found Bridger lying unconscious beside her. He was on his back, his mouth open wide, and he was breathing with the ponderous tranquillity of the heavy snorer, though it was nothing to her. She remembered his warning her that he snored when they'd first started sleeping together-other people had complained about it (i. e., girlfriends), but she wouldn't complain, would she? He'd offered up the proposition with a smile and she'd given him the smile back and said that she was afraid she'd just have to tough it out.
She'd pulled the blinds for privacy when they'd checked in, but the spaces between the slats still showed the same insubstantial light she'd fallen asleep to, so unless she'd slept through the night and this was dawn she was looking at, it must have been eight or nine or so. Well past dinnertime. She felt her stomach rumble-“peristalsis,” and there was another word-and realized with a sudden keen apprehension that she was hungry. Starved, actually. She'd been too keyed up to eat much of the ten-dollar tuna sandwich and the last time she'd eaten before that was the previous night when they went out for fast food and left Frank Calabrese his window of opportunity to slip back into his garage-or maybe he'd been there all along, lying low. Plotting. Stealing. Working himself up for his big car-chase scene. The thought of him stuck in her mind like a dart-he was right there in her moment of waking, the last thing she thought about when she fell off to sleep and the first when she opened her eyes; before long she'd be dreaming about him.
She pushed herself up to a sitting position. The motel was so cheap there was no clock radio, with its LED display, to orient her-they'd scouted three other places before settling on this one, which was twelve dollars less with her Triple-A discount-and she wondered what she'd done with her watch. She'd taken it off, hadn't she, when she'd showered? That was the first thing she'd done, the minute the man behind the counter (bearded, with a turban and a nose ring clamped round a red stone, a garnet, or maybe it was just glass) had given them the key and she'd flung open the door and dumped her suitcase on the bed, because the whole business of the past two days had made her feel unclean, dirty right down to her bones, and at least the water had been hot. Now she let her feet find the floor and went into the bathroom to look for her watch, because the first rule of motels was that everything had to be put away at all times or you'd wind up leaving half of it behind. She was in her bra and panties, her clothes balled up on the wet linoleum of the bathroom floor, and there was her watch, on the cracked, vaguely white porcelain of the bathroom sink: eight forty-five. Her stomach stirred again, and as she strapped the watch round her wrist, she was already moving back into the room to wake Bridger.