She turned abruptly to Dana and said something. What was it? Insurance? Yes, she had insurance-she fumbled through the glove box, her hands trembling, and finally produced the papers-and no, she didn't need to go to the hospital, she was perfectly all right, thank you. P. Runyon didn't seem satisfied. She stalked around in the rain, the water beading on the polished uppers of her standard-issue shoes, alternately glaring at Dana and turning her back on her to sweep the onlookers as if to assure them that things were in hand here, despite appearances, and that they'd all better look out and take a step back or they'd wind up with their cars stuffed under a truck too.
Then it was the tow truck, the crowd dissipating and the patrol car slithering off down the street, a spate of small talk in the solid high cab of the truck and finally the garage with its ancient chemical smells and the once-white shepherd-mix curled up on the floor. The repair estimate? No way to tell yet, but it looked as if the rear axle stub was broken-“Do you see that,” the service manager asked, pointing to where her car crouched against a low wall covered with ivy, “the way the wheels are canted like that?”-and of course there was going to be some fairly extensive body work, both back fenders, trunk, bumper, replace the rear window. By the time it was over, by the time they took a cab to the train station and caught the next southbound train and she was pressed safely up against the window and looking out on the pocked gray hide of the river, it felt as if a week had passed in the course of a single day-and it would be a whole lot longer than that, two and a half weeks, to be exact, before she would get her car back. “And that's night and day,” the service manager told Bridger over the phone at her mother's while Bridger cupped the receiver and translated, “night and day. A real rush job. Because I know how anxious the little lady must be to get back to California.”
In the interval, she tried to relax. Here was an opportunity to spend some time with her mother, work on her book, think things out-and if she was going to teach again she'd better clean up her CV and start making some inquiries, too late at this juncture for a hearing position, and certainly not at the college level, but there were deaf schools in Riverside and Berkeley she might try. If she did want to stay on the coast. She wasn't so sure anymore, wasn't sure about anything. Two months ago she was in love, blissfully involved in her research and her book, secure in her job at the San Roque School and beginning to feel the pull of the environment-mojitos on an outdoor patio in January, a bugless summer, the incalculable gift of the vernal light as it glanced off the stucco walls and red tile roofs of the buildings on campus and rode out to sharpen over the waves. Now she didn't know. Now she was living with her mother, without a car or a job. It scared her how quickly everything had turned against her.
She was being paid through the end of the summer and she'd been issued new credit cards, so she was all right there, at least for a while. Her credit was still a mess, though-she couldn't begin to imagine the depth and breadth of the heap of threatening letters and demand-payment notices piling up in one of those heavy plastic mail carriers in the back room of the San Roque post office, each one of which would have to be addressed at some point. The onus was on her, whether that was her signature on the credit card slip or not-and what did they care? They wanted their money. Period. The victims' assistance woman had gone into dark mode when she talked about the greed of the banks and credit card companies-“Easy Credit, Instant Credit, No Refusamos Crédito”-and how pretty soon everybody would have to have some sort of implant, like the ones they inserted up under the napes of cats and dogs, to prove their identity. Bridger had said, “Just like “1984,”” and the woman gave them a blank look.
But the mail. The mail was a problem. They'd left San Roque in such a hurry she hadn't really planned beyond the moment and so she'd put a four-week vacation hold on her mail delivery. She supposed she should have it forwarded, but that would be a kind of defeat, a giving-in to her mother and the easy way out-and she really didn't want to deal with the mess of her finances. The mail was nothing but bad news, and right now-on a muggy Tuesday afternoon a week after the accident, as she sat at the desk in the spare room of her mother's overstuffed claustrophobe's nightmare of an apartment and fiddled with the knobs on the air conditioner, hoping for just a degree or two of refrigeration-she wanted to focus on other things. Like her book. The laptop was propped open before her, giving back the words she'd dredged up out of herself, the imposture they represented, the incremental silent means of recasting her own uncertain self in Victor's image, in Itard's, but they were old words that slipped and elided and clashed like mortal enemies till she couldn't look at them. ““Wild Child,”” she said aloud, just to feel the buzz of the words on her lips. ““Wild Child,” by Dana Halter,” she said, as if it were an incantation. She repeated herself over and over again, but it was no use. Because in her mind, a husky deep contrarian voice kept saying, “Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson.”
She felt the door open behind her, her old trick, and turned to see her mother and Bridger standing there in the doorway, looking apologetic. “Can we come in?” her mother signed clumsily.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, grandly waving them in. She felt a quick sharp stab of embarrassment. Had they stood there listening? Had they knocked? Had they heard her rehearsing the name of her book? And her own name? Had she said “Peck Wilson” aloud?
“Almost done?” Bridger signed. His face was soft, open, and she could have read his expression as loving and supportive, but he wasn't fooling her. This was a guilty look, edged with alarm, a look complicit with her mother's-they “had” heard. An irrational anger started up in her: her own lover, her own mother.
“Yes,” she said. “Or no, not really. I'm just getting nowhere, that's all. Spinning my wheels, right?” And what was that, a racing term? Or was it when you were stuck in the snow or the mud? “Why, what's the plan?”
Her mother had taken to Bridger in a way Dana would have found gratifying under other circumstances, making it her sworn duty to show him every tourist site in the city, from the Statue of Liberty to MoMA to the American Indian Museum, Ground Zero and Grant's Tomb. She'd even taken him on the Circle Line tour around the Battery and up the East River, through the lively corrugations of Spuyten Duyvil and back down the Hudson on the West Side while Dana was-ostensibly-working. Her mother's smile strained till it blew up in her face. “I don't know,” she said, “we were just thinking we might go to a matinee, something light-a musical, maybe. Bridger's never been to a show and it would be a shame if he-”
“We don't have to go,” he said, slumping his shoulders and fixing his smile, and of course what he meant was that they did have to go or he would never get over it. “Can you handle it?”
“What do you mean 'can I handle it'? It's not a revival of “Children of a Lesser God,” is it?”
They both laughed. But these were strained laughs-she could tell by the way their eyes flashed at each other like those kissing fish in an aquarium. “We were thinking maybe “The Lion King,”” he said. “Or “Rent,” if we can get into it.”
““Equus,”” she said. “What about “Equus?”” She was being cruel, but she couldn't help herself. She was remembering the first time she'd ever seen the National Theater of the Deaf, when she was a freshman at Gallaudet, the year Deaf Power came into its own and swept the university. For the first time in Gallaudet's history, all the way back to its founding in 1864, a deaf president was installed after the entire student body took to the streets to protest the naming of yet another hearing chief executive. They marched in the streets for a week, chanting “Down with Paternalism!” and “We Are Not Children!”