The road began to dim. Then he remembered headlights. He pulled the silver plug and the road ahead glittered. The dotted lines came fast on his left and he tried not to let them distract him. The sky, which had been a vast dome with deep purple clouds, was now close and black and indistinguishable from the land.
Within minutes the dark eroded his exuberance.
“Ma!” he said and got no response. He had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen, that this was how death happened to everyone: a few hours of joy and then you’re snuffed out for good.
An eighteen-wheeler passed on his left, buffeting the Dodge with its wind. The car was flimsy, no longer the haven it had been all day. He felt himself growing younger. He needed to eat, to pee, to sleep. He needed to be taken care of now. But in the backseat his mother just rolled over.
NINE
FOR A LONG TIME SHE HUNG ACROSS WALT’S BACK, HIS PACE SLOW AND rhythmic. They didn’t speak. She was drunk and he was dead. He placed her on a small sofa. Her face stuck to the cushion. My legs are too long, she cried, but he had gone. She smiled and nodded at a policeman. It was one of the few things her mother had taught her, to smile and nod at the police. But never seek them out, never call that kind of attention to yourself, no matter what has happened. She taught her that, too.
All the chairs were being taken out of her classroom. Students she didn’t recognize hoisted them, seats down, on their heads and carried them off. She made a barrier with her arms and legs in the doorway but they passed right through her. Fran passed through, too, reading aloud from a yellow sheet of paper, though there was only one word on it: Mom. All the while there was this tugging at her mind that she had forgotten something, but when she strained to remember, the feeling disappeared. For a long stretch of time she dreamt only of the word blunt, the b and the u and the n, a sort of visual onomatopoeia, she decided, over and over.
There was pain in her hip, her shoulder; her lungs were sore and she could only take in shallow breaths. She smelled grass. She was in her bedroom with the fading buttercup wallpaper and her mother was handing her a book. “I just got it out of the library. It’s about a woman who gets—” Vida knew what she was going to say next and lunged, smashing her hand against something hard.
She is walking down an unfamiliar street, searching for clues to where she is. Ahead is a sign but everything is blurred. She hears a voice, a Cockney accent. She’s in London. London! But she can’t see it, and she’s waited so long to get here. Someone takes her arm. It is Carol. Carol who finally read all her notes has forgiven her. They are walking swiftly now, through a huge house full of people. Carol leads her upstairs and down a corridor to a long narrow room. She shoves her in and shuts the door. Her vision clears. In the window a boy is hanging from a necktie. It is Peter. The thing she’s been trying to remember. She is flooded with the pleasure of remembering. Peter. He is dead, but she has remembered him.
“Poor Tess,” someone says behind her.
“Tess? That’s not Tess. That’s my son, Angel.”
She is aware, occasionally, of a door slamming, of a shoulder beneath her, of darkness but not silence. For a few minutes at a time she is lucid. She is in the backseat of a car, her car. She recognizes the roof, the pinpricked vinyl. She remembers Walt’s grave, the countertop at O’Shea’s. Someone must be driving her home from there. Her heart races. When he stops the car he will expect something for his trouble. She returns eagerly to the buttercup wallpaper, the thin curtains rolling in the breeze. She is on her stomach reading. It is a Saturday and no one is home but her and there is a big bowl of peanuts on the table beside her. She eats them one by one, sucking off the salt first, then biting gently so it splits, then letting the halves nestle in either side of her mouth before chewing. It is morning and she can stay up here all day. Downstairs a door slams. He is on her before she registers his feet on the stairs, his weight pressing the air out of her chest, his arms knocking the book from her fingers. She has no air to scream with. She is overwhelmed by the familiarity of the act, the belt, the grunts, the blood in her mouth, as if it has happened not once before but hundreds of times. It is not anger or sadness or fear that she feels, just a habitual acquiescence. Yes, this is what happens to me, her body seems to be saying. When he is done he thanks her. She is not surprised by the voice or the thin ponytail resting on the collar of his jacket as he turns to go.
TEN
APRIL WASN’T SURE WHAT AT FIRST CAUGHT HER EYE. USUALLY SHE WAITED for the customers to see her, need her attention, and she liked to toy with them, dragging her eyes slowly up off her magazine to their eager faces. But these two she was watching even before they came through her door. The driver got out first, scanned the street, then opened the back. He leaned in all the way and April expected him to bring out some sort of jacket or bag, but instead it was an old woman, stooped and shoeless. They stopped outside the door, admiring the ribbons. April was in charge of tying fresh bows, twenty-five of them, every morning and replacing the ripped, faded, or stained ones. She hoped Billy Hughes, who’d never eaten here as far as she could remember, had seen a picture of her work. Could they get mail over there? Probably not.
The old lady raised her hand and ran it down every ribbon like a child. April almost called out to her to stop but then wondered if the woman was retarded and let her finish. They finally pushed through, the young fellow struggling a bit to keep the woman upright and the door open. She’d been all wrong about their ages. The driver was a mere boy, and April didn’t know a state in the union that let fourteen-year-olds drive. And then the old lady: she wasn’t much over forty, a good deal younger than April. She could tell by the hair. Nothing stiff or brittle about it. It was young hair, even if the face was a bit trashed.
“Y’all two?”
The boy seemed confused by the question. April held up two menus and pointed to a booth. He nodded, and followed on behind her.
She heard him whisper at her back, “Is it all right that she has no shoes?”
There was something special about this boy. The way he tipped his head up to her when he ordered, the way he maintained eye contact even though it seemed to pain him.
“I’m losing my marbles,” April muttered as she threaded the order up into the rod on the other side of the window.
“You just figuring that out now?” Dave said, snapping up the ticket, then groaning about the onion rings.
April went back to her perch at the register. She could see the boy’s profile from there. He was talking but the woman wasn’t talking back. She was bent over her cup of coffee, her hair everywhere, the barrette in back useless. She was a sight. When he gave up, his eyes drifted around the restaurant, though his mind seemed caught somewhere else entirely.