Dumb, dumb girl, she said in the dark, dreamily, and Gordon said nothing.
Then he said, You should of told your parents. You should of told the police, what in the hell were you thinking?—his heart pounding, his voice rising, until she switched on the lamp and said to him, Gordon, Gordon, as if to wake him from a dream, and he was up on his elbows and she was a frightened forty-year-old woman, and then she understood—Oh, Gordon, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that story… Because his own daughter was sixteen and would get drunk, would get high. Would get rides home in cars he’d never seen before and would never see again, and every night that she wasn’t home by midnight was the longest night of his life and he was all alone in this and had no idea what he was doing, only that he was doing it all wrong.
Anyway it wasn’t long after that night—the night of the story—that whatever it was between him and Eileen Lindeman ended, just ended, like a bulb burning out. And the next time she called him, a year or two later, it was a busted pipe spraying water into her basement, she didn’t know who else to call, and he’d done the job and that was all. Like none of it had ever happened.
Which was how he came to be in her house again today, easing his head around her bedroom doorjamb and saying, over the TV, “Eileen—?”
She sat in the same white reading chair with her bare feet up on the footrest. Only the feet were bare; otherwise she was dressed as she’d been when she let him in, the black pants and green sweater she’d worn to work. A glass of wine on the small table there, its shadow dark red on the white tabletop. The big white bed neat and smooth. The six o’clock news was on the TV and when he looked finally at her face he saw the stains under her eyes—dark streaks on her cheekbones like big fallen eyelashes.
“You all right?” he said, and she looked at him strangely, wet-eyed, and turned back to the TV.
It was a story about an accident, the night before: two young women in a car, just across the border in Iowa. Slick roads. The Lower Black Root River. College girls. One of the girls was local. He knew who she was. He knew her father. Everyone did, of course; he was the county sheriff, or had been, and hearing his name in the news again—or his daughter’s name—opened a crack of memory, of old misery, in Gordon’s heart.
Eileen pushed up out of the chair and stood holding the back of it with one hand, as if she needed to. “I heard about this at work,” she said, “but they hadn’t said any names.” With her free hand she wiped at her face and then wiped her fingers on the back side of her slacks. Then she raised this hand toward him, as if to touch him. “Gordon, I’m so sorry. It’s so awful…”
But he’d turned back to the TV.
It was a series of clips from the scene: a shot of the river from above, from a bridge maybe, a shot of the broken ice, beams of light crossing like swords over the ragged hole. A woman’s voice reporting from off camera: “As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time from law enforcement.” A shot of the car: a small SUV being reeled up the bank as if by an off-screen fisherman, the car coming along on its back, wheels up. One girl in the hospital up in Rochester, the other still missing. He watched until the report ended and a commercial replaced it.
Around the edges of the screen the room had gone all black. The sound he heard was like water rushing through copper pipes, a pressure like small hammers beating on the eyeballs. It was the old blackness, the old rage, and in the center of the blackness was an image of himself, on his knees as he so often was but now like a man at prayer, the big Stillson wrench raised two-handed, raised high, and swung down on the offered skull. The cracking, crushing blow. No more thoughts or feelings or memories forever, just the pink wet stew of bone and brains.
Slowly, the blackness receded, his heart pounding on but less wildly. His fists at his sides opening again.
Her hand was on his arm—for how long?
He raised his hand so that hers fell away, and looked at his watch.
“One hour,” he said.
Eileen Lindeman standing close, searching his face. “One hour—?”
“Downstairs. One hour.”
She was trying to hold his eyes but he wouldn’t. Gordon looking instead at the room beyond her, the big bed, neatly made in white with white pillows at its head. A bed like any bed. Or a staging of a bed, with matching furnishings, as in a department store.
“Of course,” she said, “of course.” And she led him out of the bedroom so she could find her purse and pay him what she owed him.
3
The nose of the car drops over the edge of the bank and the world pitches, and their own weight rolls forward through their bodies as at the top of a roller coaster just before the drop—the deep human fear of falling, the plunging heart, and there’s no stopping it and no getting out and nothing to do but hold on. And down they go, fast and easy in the snow, toboggan-smooth, hand in hand, their grips so tight, the grips of girls much younger, girls who will not be separated, their faces forward, watching the surface of the river, the black glistening ice as it rushes up toward them, larger and larger, until there’s nothing in the windshield but the ice, dark and wide as an ocean and they are going to it, they are going to strike it nose-first with the car and they can imagine that, the sudden ending of forward motion as the car meets the plane of the ice, but after that they cannot imagine, they have never been here before and there is no way to know what will happen next except to go through it, and this is the most terrifying thing: the understanding, within those few plunging seconds, that there is no time to figure it out, to prepare—it is here, and the physics that rule the world cannot be altered, and time cannot be stopped, and no one can be called upon to help them, and they are all alone in the instant of experience and the car will strike the frozen river and that is that.
But then, incredibly—it doesn’t. At the last moment the bank levels out, or the snow grows more deep, or some other variable they cannot account for lifts the nose of the car, and the impact is jarring but brief, and all at once the car sits upright on its wheels and they are spinning out onto the ice as they’d spun on the sleety road, the world once again turning round and round, headlights sweeping the perimeter like a haywire lighthouse, the beams selecting out of the darkness trees and bridge and bank and trees and bridge and bank, the bank of their descent farther away with each turn, their bodies thrown with such turning and their stomachs rolling. When the car at last comes to rest, their minds lag behind and the world keeps spinning, as in childhood games of dizziness, until finally even that illusion ends and they are still. They are dead-still in the middle of the river, and everything is silent and dark and they are OK, they are all right.
Still holding hands. Holding their breaths. Hearts whopping in their chests. Finally they breathe—Holy shit, holy shit—and they see the look on each other’s face and they laugh then, breathily, helplessly, the laugh of fright and relief. The laugh of love for each other and for being alive!
Now what? one says, and the other says, Now we get out and walk back. We go back exactly the way the car came and we—
It’s a sound that stops her, a sound they feel as much as hear—a great deep pop in the floor of the world. A sound to stop the heart and freeze it all the way through. The great pop is followed by silence: nothing but the roar of silence in their ears, of listening so hard, but it doesn’t last—the ice pops again and the car shudders, it lists, and the girls let go of each other’s hand, Get out—now! and the ice is shattering, it’s exploding beneath them in blasts like gunshots, and the car is on the move once again, aslant to the axis of the far bank and slipping down beneath the plane of the ice as they struggle with the latches of the doors, and for just a moment, before the water comes flooding in through the driver’s-side door, there is the bizarre effect across the ice of one beam of light skimming the surface above while the other beam probes the same length of ice from below, underwater, revealing ice that moments ago looked so black and solid to be, in fact, bubbled and fissured and a terrible, ghostly translucent yellow.