maybe Bill. Certainly her family had believed it: Dad, Mom,
Gram. "Miscarriage" was the story they told, miscarriage was a
Catholic's story if ever there was one. Hey, Mary, what's the story,
they had sometimes sung when they skipped rope, feeling daring,
feeling sinful, the skirts of their uniforrns flipping up and down
over their scabby knees. That was at Our Lady of Angels, where
Sister Annunciata would spank your knuckles with her ruler if she
caught you gazing out the window during Sentence Time, where
Sister Dormatilla would tell you that a million years was but the
first tick of eternity's endless clock (and you could spend eternity
in Hell, most people did, it was easy). In Hell you would live
forever with your skin on fire and your bones roasting. Now she
was in Florida, now she was in a Crown Vic sitting next to her
husband, whose hand was still in her crotch; the dress would be
wrinkled but who cared if it got that look off his face, and why
wouldn't the feeling stop?
She thought of a mailbox with "Raglan" painted on the side and an
American-flag decal on the front, and although the name turned
out to be "Reagan" and the flag a Grateful Dead sticker; the box
was there. She thought of a small black dog trotting briskly along
the other side of the road, its head down, sniffling, and the small
black dog was there. She thought again of the billboard and, yes,
there it was: "Mother of Mercy Charities Help the Florida Hungry -
Won't You Help Us?"
Bill was pointing. "There-see? I think that's Palm House. No, not
where the billboard is, the other side. Why do they let people put
those things up out here, anyway?"
"I don't know." Her head itched. She scratched, and black dandruff
began falling past her eyes. She looked at her fingers and was
horrified to see dark smutches on the tips; it was as if someone had
just taken her fingerprints.
"Bill?" She raked her hand through her blond hair and this time the
flakes were bigger. She saw they were not flakes of skin but flakes
of paper. There was a face on one, peering out of the char like a
face peering out of a botched negative.
"Bill?"
"What? Wh-" Then a total change in his voice, and that frightened
her more than the way the car swerved. "Christ, honey, what's in
your hair?"
The face appeared to be Mother Teresa's. Or was that just because
she'd been thinking about Our Lady of Angels? Carol plucked it
from her dress, meaning to show it to Bill, and it crumbled
between her fingers before she could. She turned to him and saw
that his glasses were melted to his cheeks. One of his eyes had
popped from its socket and then split like a grape pumped full of
blood.
And I knew it, she thought. Even before I turned, I knew it. Because
I had that feeling.
A bird was crying in the trees. On the billboard, Mary held out her
hands. Carol tried to scream. Tried to scream.
"CAROL?"
It was Bill's voice, coming from a thousand miles away. Then his
hand - not pressing the folds of her dress into her crotch, but on her
shoulder.
"You O.K., babe?"
She opened her eyes to brilliant sunlight and her ears to the steady
hum of the Learjet's engines. And something else-pressure against
her eardrums. She looked from Bill's mildly concerned face to the
dial below the temperature gauge in the cabin and saw that it had
wound down to 28,000.
"Landing?" she said, sounding muzzy to herself "Already?"
"It's fast, huh?" Sounding pleased, as if he had flown it himself
instead of only paying for it. "Pilot says we'll be on the ground in
Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl."
"I had a nightmare."
He laughed-the plummy ain't-you-the-silly-billy laugh she had
come really to detest. "No nightmares allowed on your second
honeymoon, babe. What was it?"
"I don't remember," she said, and it was the truth. There were only
fragments: Bill with his glasses melted all over his face, and one of
the three or four forbidden skip rhymes they had sometimes
chanted back in fifth and sixth grade. This one had gone Hey there,
Mary, what's the story... and then something-something-
something. She couldn't come up with the rest. She could
remember Jangle-tangle jingle-bingle, I saw your daddy's great
big dingle, but she couldn't remember the one about Mary-
Mary helps the Florida sick, she thought, with no idea of what the
thought meant, and just then there was a beep as the pilot turned
the seatbelt light on. They had started their final descent. Let the
wild rumpus start, she thought, and tightened her belt.
"You really don't remember?" he asked, tightening his own. The
little jet ran through a cloud filled with bumps, one of the pilots in
the cockpit made a minor adjustment, and the ride smoothed out
again. "Because usually, just after you wake up, you can still
remember. Even the bad ones."
"I remember Sister Annunciata, from Our Lady of Angels.
Sentence Time."
"Now, that's a nightmare.
Ten minutes later the landing gear came down with a whine and a
thump. Five minutes after that they landed.
"They were supposed to bring the car right out to the plane," Bill
said, already starting up the Type A shit. This she didn't like, but at
least she didn't detest it the way she detested the plummy laugh
and his repertoire of patronizing looks. "I hope there hasn't been a
hitch."
There hasn't been, she thought, and the feeling swept over her full
force. I'm going to see it out the window on my side in just a
second or two. It's your total Florida vacation car, a great big white
goddam Cadillac, or maybe it's a Lincoln - And, yes, here it came,
proving what? Well, she supposed, it proved that sometimes when
you had deja vu what you thought was going to happen next really
did happen next. It wasn't a Caddy or a Lincoln after all, but a
Crown Victoria - what the gangsters in a Martin Scorsese film
would no doubt call a Crown Vic.
"Whoo," she said as he helped her down the steps and off the
plane. The hot sun made her feel dizzy.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, really. I've got deja' vu. Left over from my dream, I
guess. We've been here before, that kind of thing."
"It's being in a strange place, that's all," he said, and kissed her
cheek. "Come on, let the wild rumpus start."
They went to the car. Bill showed his driver's license to the young
woman who had driven it out. Carol saw him check out the hem of
her skirt, then sign the paper on her clipboard.
She's going to drop it, Carol thought. The feeling was now so
strong it was like being on an amusement-park ride that goes just a
little too fast; all at once you realize you're edging out of the Land
of Fun and into the Kingdom of Nausea. She'll drop it, and Bill
will say "Whoopsy-daisy" and pick it up for her, get an even closer
look at her legs.
But the Hertz woman didn't drop her clipboard. A white courtesy
van had appeared, to take her back to the Butler Aviation terminal.
She gave Bill a final smile-Carol she had ignored completely-and
opened the front passenger door. She stepped up, then slipped.
"Whoopsy-daisy, don't be crazy," Bill said, and took her elbow,
steadying her. She gave him a smile, he gave her well-turned legs a
goodbye look, and Carol stood by the growing pile of their luggage
and thought, Hey there, Mary...
"Mrs. Shelton?" It was the co-pilot. He had the last bag, the case
with Bill's laptop inside it, and he looked concerned. "Are you all