“No More Daddies,” they shouted, “No More Mommies!” The wind stung her eyes. The cops came on their silent shuddering horses. She'd never felt more caught up and passionate in her life. And when the curtain opened on the play on that final night, the night of their triumph, the house was full to the rafters and she had to find a seat on the floor, everyone holding their breath in anticipation. It took her a moment to understand: this was no parade of mimes, no revival of “Death of a Salesman” or “The Glass Menagerie” in dumb show, but a new play, commissioned and written in their own language, the language of their new president. She exchanged a look with the girl sitting next to her, her roommate, Sarah, whose eyes flew back to the stage while her hands lay motionless in her lap, and she began to breathe again.
And now they wanted her to sit through “The Lion King?”
“No,” she said, “I think I'll just stay here and kill myself instead.”
“Come on,” Bridger said, and when he put a hand on her shoulder and ran it up the back of her neck, she pulled away from him. “It'll be fun.”
“You go,” she said.
Her mother's face hovered over her. “Lunch?” she offered. “Why don't we all just go to lunch then? What do you say?”
“No, really,” she said. “You go.”
On the day they picked up the car, the day she planned to sign over the insurance check to the man in the garage, retrieve her keys and then, no matter what Bridger or her mother or anyone else might have to say about it, go directly to Peck Wilson's house in the hope of spotting the Mercedes there in the driveway, the sun seemed to rise right up out of the front room of her mother's apartment, already riding high and scorching the earth by the time she and Bridger arrived, on foot and sweating, at Grand Central. Bridger had talked her into walking-for the exercise, of course, but there was no reason to be wasting money on cab fare when neither of them had a job and their credit was mutually shot. She bought three plastic bottles of water in the one-liter size while Bridger saw to the bagels in the brown paper bag and picked up the “Times” and the “Daily News” and then they settled into the Metro North car like reverse commuters. The other passengers looked bored and enervated, nobody talking, and that pleased her in an odd way, their silence layered over hers. She was imagining the other sounds-the rattling of the undercarriage, the hiss of the automatic doors-when Bridger tapped her on the arm and asked for one of the bottles of water.
She watched him unscrew the plastic cap and hold the bottle to his lips until he had to come up for air. The sweat stood out on his upper lip and his hair had thickened with it. “It's hot,” he mouthed. “Wow, it's hot.” He handed her half a bagel, neatly sliced in two. Outside, beyond the moving windows, the river looked as if it had just been refilled with pure clean tap water instead of the usual gray-green bilge. “You know those pictures of-?” he said, but she didn't catch the end of it. A place name, long word.
“What?”
“Afghanistan,” he said, spelling it out. “From the war, like, when was it-couple of years ago? Did you notice that every mujahedin carried three things into battle with him-a Kalashnikov rifle, a rocket launcher and a liter bottle of Evian, just like this?”
“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, it was funny. Just goes to show you what you value when you have nothing.”
“Right, you have nothing, no water, no trees, nothing but rocks. That's why you bomb the World Trade Center. That's why you carry weapons-so you can take what you want.”
“Like Peck Wilson.”
He gave her a look. The train lurched over a bad section of track, jolting the bagel he'd been gesturing with. She watched it float up against the backdrop of the Hudson, tightly clamped in the grip of his floating fingers. “I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”
“Do you think he has a gun?”
He shrugged. “He's an ex-con, isn't that what Frank Calabrese said?”
“So yes?”
“Which is all the more reason to stay away from him. I mean, look what it's got you, what it's got us-ruined credit, running all over the country, no money, no job, and now your car.”
“But we are going to drive by, right? Or maybe park around the block and just walk by in case he recognizes my car”-he was saying something but she wasn't watching-“just walk, that's all. And if we see him, or the car-the car would be the key-we call the police.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They've been real friendly and understanding, haven't they?”
She felt that burr of irritation again, couldn't help herself. She made an effort to control her voice, breathe in, breathe out. “I'm not giving up,” she said, and she had no idea what she sounded like. “Not now. Not when we're this close.”
It took him a minute. He turned his head to gaze out on the river and the distant fractured cliffs of the Palisades, then swung back to her, his eyes compact and hard. “That's all we're going to do,” he said. “Just walk.”
It was quarter past eleven when they arrived at the Peterskill station and it must have been a hundred already, or close to it. Bridger wanted to walk to the garage-“It's only like a mile,” he said, and she said, “No, it's more like two, two and a half.” The station was right on the water, but there was no breeze and the sun ricocheted up into their faces. Cars pulled in and out of the lot, moving with slow deliberation, their windshields glazed with light. A knot of people crept past them with their shoulders slumped, borne down under the weight of the heat and trailing suitcases and elastic children. To make it worse, something was rotten, something dead along the shore, and the reek of it was calibrated to a persistent smell of frying from the cafe adjoining the depot. For a long moment they both just stood there glaring at each other until finally she said, “We're taking a cab and I'm not going to argue about it.” And she couldn't help adding a little sting to it. “It's my money, anyway.”
At the garage, everybody was moving in slow motion, from the mechanics to the service manager who went over the bill with them to the secretary who typed it up and had Dana sign here and here and here. She and Bridger made a show of looking over the car, which had just come back from the body shop that very morning, and she wondered about a ripple effect in the paint you could only see in a certain light and from a certain angle, but the service manager assured her that there was nothing wrong and even produced a pristine high-quality cotton-fiber rag and buffed it for her. “You see?” he said. “What'd I tell you?” And while she watched his lips and face and understood what he was saying, she couldn't see any appreciable difference-the ripples were still there. But it was hot. Mortally hot. And she didn't say anything.
Bridger kept telling her to make sure everything felt right with the rear end and she put it in reverse and jerked back a few feet, nearly running over the once-white dog that lay comatose in the shade of the retaining wall, and then she was out on the street, feeling liberated. She had her car back. She was mobile. She could go anywhere she wanted, up the coast to Maine or back across the country to San Roque, or even down to Gallaudet, to show Bridger the campus where she'd spent something like nine years of her life. Or to that street where the moving van was, or had been-Peck Wilson's street.