She watched Bridger shift his weight from foot to foot. His face was drained of color, his upper lip and the flesh at the base of his nostrils drawn tight. He knocked again, waited, his head cocked and eyes lowered as if to concentrate his hearing. They exchanged looks, another moment elapsed, and then he signed, “I'm going to go around back,” and she felt strange all of a sudden, vulnerable, felt like a criminal herself, and darted a quick glance up and down the street. In the rain, and with nothing moving anywhere except the water in the gutters, she almost missed the figure on the porch next door. A faint rhythmic movement caught her eye and she looked up to see a woman there, a big-armed old woman in wire-frame glasses, tilting back and forth in a cane rocker and staring right at her. For an instant she was frozen-to shout out would be too obvious-and then, urgently, she was clapping her hands together to warn him. He swung round, his face blank. “There's somebody watching,” she signed.
Bridger looked in the wrong direction. He'd come down the steps now and was arrested there in the rain, his hair limp, the shirt she'd given him for his birthday-the retro look, broad vertical bands of gray and black with an outsized collar-hanging off him like a shower curtain. “Where?”
Her face was wet, water dripping from her nose. She felt ridiculous. The rain intensified, sweeping down the street in successive waves. “Over there,” on the porch, she signed, and then retreated for the car.
The interior of the car smelled as if it had been dredged up out of the ocean. There was mud on her shoes-a pair of Mary Janes in teal blue she'd picked up on sale two days ago-and her clothes clung wet to her skin. She felt a chill go through her and she slid into the driver's side and started the car to run the heater as Bridger, reduced by the rain and the layer of condensation frosting the windows, waved cheerily to the old woman and cut straight across the lawn, stepped over the line of low shrubs that divided the properties and stood just under the projecting roof of the porch to snap his jaws and wave his hands while the old woman snapped her jaws in return.
It took forever. Bridger was out there chattering away as if the skies were clear to the roof of the troposphere and the sun beaming down in all its glory, and the old lady, rocking in the shadow of her porch, chattered back. And what could they possibly find to talk about, the hearing? All this chattering. Peck Wilson: was he there or not? That was all that needed to be conveyed. She was frustrated, angry, shivering in her wet clothes as the heater, out of use since January, added its own furtive metallic reek to the mix. For a long while she stared out the window, first at Bridger, then at the house-an old place, two stories, with a mismatched addition and a stepped roof-where the man who'd invaded her life had played and worked and grown into the fullness of his thieving manhood.
She began chanting to herself, a little Poe, which always seemed to calm her-“And neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”-and then she felt the car rock and Bridger was sliding into the seat beside her. “Well?” she said.
“Her name's”-he finger-spelled it-“Alice.”
She was confused. “Whose? The old lady's?”
He swept both palms up over his face and into his hairline, then threw his head back and shook out the water like a diver emerging from a pool. “No,” he said, turning to face her. “Wilson's mother. Peck Wilson's mother. Her name's Alice.”
“Yes, but where is she?”
“The old lady-she was really nice, by the way-said she was away for the weekend, up at Saratoga or something. At the racetrack with her friend-not her son, her friend.”
“You didn't-”
“No,” he said. “I didn't tell her anything. I just wondered aloud, as a friendly neighbor, if she could tell me where Mrs. Wilson was because she was a friend of my mother's and my mother told me to look her up if I ever got to New York.” He shrugged, toweling his hair with a sweatshirt he snatched out of the tumble of dirty clothes on the backseat. “The usual bullshit. She was old, that's all.”
“And she believed you?”
Another shrug. “Does it really matter at this point?”
She gave him a long look, then dropped her eyes to put the car in gear. She was angry, frustrated, the whole thing boiling up in her-yes, it mattered, of course it mattered-and she accelerated too quickly, the back end shearing away from her on the slick roadway, everything out of kilter suddenly, and though she did manage to avoid the two parked cars on her right, the truck, the bright orange and white moving-truck with the U-Haul logo plastered along its gleaming steel midsection, was another story altogether.
Afterward, her most vivid recollection of the accident wasn't the way her car looked with its trunk radically compressed and jammed up under the belly of the truck as if some negligent giant had been at play with it, but standing there in the rain half a block from Peck Wilson's house-from the thief's house-while a joyless policewoman from the City of Peterskill Police Department tried to put her through the drunk test and Bridger waved his hands and flailed his lips at the bare-chested bodybuilder in shorts and flip-flops who'd rented the truck and left its front end projecting halfway across the street. “I'm not drunk,” she kept saying, “I'm deaf. Deaf. Don't you understand?” And the policewoman kept saying, “Spread your legs, hold out your arms, close your eyes, touch your nose.”
People had emerged from their houses up and down the block and gathered under umbrellas to savor the spectacle, barefooted little girls in shorts and summer dresses knotted behind the neck, their bulging mothers and smirking brothers, an old man in a straw hat. Dana wasn't hurt, nor was Bridger. Thankfully. But she'd been driving and she was the focus of attention, all those shallow shifting eyes judging her, the drunk-or no, worse than a drunk, a freak, a babbler, someone to instinctively shy away from. She knew what they were thinking, knew what they'd say over their hot dogs and coleslaw at dinner that night, a passing reference, the recollection of a little anomaly in an otherwise uniform day: “But she looked just like anybody else, pretty even-until she opened her mouth.”
The policewoman-she was of mid-height, Dana's age, with a rangy, asymmetric build, thick glasses in severe frames, eyes that could have been pretty with a little makeup-finally seemed to come round. Bridger had shifted his attention away from the man with the U-Haul and had stepped in to enlarge her understanding of what Dana was trying to communicate, while her partner, an older guy with fading eyes and hair the color of a lab rat's, hunched over his pad and began writing up the accident report. Dana watched them go back and forth, Bridger nearly as expressive as one of the deaf himself. “The truck isn't where it's supposed to be,” Bridger was saying. “They should never have parked it there in the first place.” The policewoman-Dana saw now that she had a nametag clipped above her breast pocket: “P. Runyon”-didn't seem particularly interested. To her it must have seemed an open-and-shut case, so routine it would have been a snooze but for the spice of the California plates and Dana herself-slick roads, excessive speed, the truck parked and locked and on the other side of the road nonetheless.