“Yeah, sounds like.”
“So I guess I should hang up.”
“Whatever you think,” he says. “I’m just taking this all in.”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Okay, I’m hanging up.” And she does. She hadn’t thought she would.
She’s halfway down the stairs when her pulse starts pounding in her throat. She lies down on the sofa, closes her eyes and instantly gets an image of a hospital corridor: a nurse enters left, looks at a clock on the wall, exits right. Holly’s never been in such a hospital. Her eyes fly open: she’s in the living room in South Norwalk. If she’d been traveling out of body, could she have got back this fast? Then it comes to her: this must be the rehab unit where Seth’s mother died. She didn’t travel there, that’s insane; it was an image beamed to her by Seth’s mother from wherever she is now. As a warning. A warning against getting old and paralyzed and dependent, with all your deeds past remedy.
Holly wakes up hearing Seth’s key in the lock, and tries to sit up, but the tiny will inside her can’t move the big body. Her hands can’t make fists.
“You okay?” he says. He unwinds his scarf, then roughs up his hair and snow flies out.
“Is it snowing?”
“Yeah, it’s beautiful. You should take a little walk. It’s falling through the streetlights.” He flutters his fingers down. She closes her eyes again and hears him open the hall closet. A jingling of coat hangers. “So where’s the Emperor of Ice Cream?”
“Up taking a nap, I think. I’m going to nap a little more, too, okay?”
“Will you be able to sleep tonight?”
She doesn’t answer. What conceivable business is it of his?
She hears him walk into the kitchen. A beer-top pops, the refrigerator door closes with a whump and she opens her eyes, needing to latch onto something real. The antique clock on the mantel says, as always, 8:25—according to Seth, the most esthetically pleasing time. The clock’s one of his family treasures: a tall French-polished box with a glass door whose bottom panel is a painting of a pointy-roofed mill and water water-falling over the mill wheel. Seth’s father used to tell him it was the mill of God, grinding slow but exceeding fine. Seth laughs about it now, but Holly knows that in olden times they made everything mean something; a picture of a mill wheel on a clock could very well have been their code for, like, Get to work because God’s coming to grind you up.
Seth comes out of the kitchen and starts up the stairs when somebody hollers, “Look out below!” He freezes, looks up, drops his beer can (which goes tumbling end over end, beer pulsing out) and jumps aside as the wheelchair, his father in the seat — gripping the armrests, eyes wild — comes bumping and leaping down the stairs, then flies off the last step and rolls to the front door.
Seth says, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
His father gets out of the wheelchair, stately with drink. “Look what I found,” he says. “Chariot of the Gods. I’ll pay for banging up your stairwell, no need to worry about that aspect. You cannot imagine”—he puts his hand on his chest—“what that was like.”
“Are you all right?” Seth says.
Holly sits up and paws around on the floor for her running shoes.
“I shouldn’t think so,” says Van. “Good God, who in their right mind would do such a thing?”
“I’m going out,” Holly says. “To whom it may concern.”
“Say again?” says Seth.
“I’ll call you.”
“Wait, you’re just — I don’t get what’s going on here.”
“You can deal with this. That way you’ll really have something to hold against me. I mean”—and she can’t help laughing—“it’s the least I can do.”
The streets have a dusting of snow, tinted a sick pink by the streetlights, with black stripes from passing car wheels. But the snowfall has stopped: a beautiful sight she’s missed out on. She sees that she’s heading for 95, and understands that at the entrance she’ll choose 95 South, bound for New York.
She stops at the drive-up cash machine and gets a hundred dollars; the receipt says she’s now down to $537.33. Then she drives around behind the bank building, parks under the featureless back wall and feels in her kangaroo pocket. Still there: now how’s she going to do this? She unzips her purse, finds a ballpoint pen and unscrews the two pieces, picks up a Diet Coke can from the floor and pushes in the cigarette lighter. She turns the can upside down (a last trickle wetting her knee) and lays the bud on the concave bottom. If a police cruiser comes back here to check out the suspicious car, she’s fucked. The lighter pops out and she touches the orange end to the bud. When it starts smoldering she picks up the bottom part of the pen, puts the threaded end between her lips, poises the little hole over the bud and sucks, focusing the smoke into a narrow, tornado-like rope, twisting up the barrel and into her lungs. She coughs out a cloud of piney smoke, gets her breath, goes at it again.
On 95 she eases her way into the leftmost lane and makes the needle inch up a hair above 70, then a hair above that. She hits PLAY on the CD changer, a soprano starts up, she peels the Post-It with her list off the glove-compartment door and holds it up in her line of vision. Disc One? Okay, Joan Sutherland. Whom she has yet to figure out a thing for. Holly concentrates as the voice navigates its own upper reaches; essentially, Joan Sutherland sounds shrieky, though you don’t want that to be your formulation. In fact, it’s Holly who’s about to shriek, in the midst of what’s starting to feel like a major mistake: trucks all around, their wheels higher than her roof, their brutal chrome radiators higher still. Their rush and roar drowns the music, and everything feels motionless, as if she could open the door, step out and stroll around. She’d better try to take this seriously. There’s a sign for a service area: two miles. Surely she can make it two more miles.
She parks next to a silver minivan that’s taken a handicap spot, then follows footprints and a pair of bicycle tracks across the snow-dusted blacktop. What kind of parents would allow their kids to ride bikes in a service area on a snowy night? If she ever — but really, let’s not even get into that. She wishes she could see falling snow.
Inside the doors it’s suddenly so warm that she shivers reflexively. She’s got bare ankles and a cotton sweatshirt. McDonald’s to the right; rest rooms and phones to the left. She punches in Mitchell’s number, then her credit card number. But it’s Seth who says “Yellow?” How could he possibly have got there ahead of her? Wait, how could he even have found out? But of course she’s called home by mistake.
“Holly?”
She cradles the receiver, then feels a rush and her heart thumping, as after a near fender-bender. What this little slip means is that Seth is her true love. Or (b) that she’s even more self-destructive than she realized.
She prefers (b). And if nothing else, she can be stubborn. When her heart stops pounding she’ll call Mitchell. No, first she’ll go in and wash her face, which feels like it’s coated with gray film.
Holly sticks her hands under the automated faucet for her little ration of water. How’s this formulation? That late capitalism tries to make you feel at the same time degraded and magically powerfuclass="underline" water at my mental command! Lately she’s been favoring that expression, “late capitalism,” except how could anybody know it’s late rather than still early? She pumps liquid soap into her palm and again holds her hands under the faucet in supplication, but the machine knows it’s her asking for seconds, so she moves to the next sink, which duly mistakes her for someone else.