She turns the wheelchair to face the door. Roddy presses a button and the door rolls back. The ramp slides out. Emily rides it down to the pavement. Roddy puts on the four-way flashers and gets out. They have debated the flashers at great length and have finally decided they have to take the risk. They can’t afford to miss her. Em is bad and Roddy isn’t in great shape himself. His hips hurt and his hands are stiff, but the real problem is his mind. It keeps drifting. It’s not Alzheimer’s, he refuses to believe that, but he’s definitely gotten muzzy. A fresh infusion of brains will put him right. And the rest will put Em right. Especially the Christmas elf’s liver, that’s the holy grail, the sacrament, but no part of the animal must be wasted. It isn’t just his motto; it’s his mantra.
8:06.
Bonnie has put the package of Ho Hos back, not without regret. She comes to the counter, billfold in hand. She carries it in her hip pocket, like a man.
“Why don’t you think again about those Ho Hos?” Emilio says as he rings her up. “You’re in good shape, they won’t hurt you.”
“Get thee behind me, Satan. My body is a temple.”
“If you say so,” Emilio replies. “At Jet Mart—this one, anyway—the customer is always right.”
They both laugh. Bonnie pockets her change, slides her backpack off one shoulder, and puts her bottle of soda inside. She plans to sip it while watching Ozark on Netflix. She zips the pack closed and shoulders it.
“Have a good night, Emilio.”
He gives her a thumbs-up.
8:07.
Bonnie puts on her helmet, mounts her bike, and pauses just long enough to adjust one of her pack’s straps. Not far down the hill, across from the part of the park known as the Thickets, Emily is piloting her wheelchair around the rear of the van. The pavement is cracked and uneven. Each time the wheelchair dips and sways there’s an explosion of pain in her lower back. She presses her lips together to keep from crying out, but she can’t help moaning.
“Flag her down!” It’s part whisper, part growl. “Don’t fail, Roddy, please don’t fail!”
Roddy has no intention of failing. If Bonnie won’t stop for him, he’ll kick her off her bike as she tries to pass by. Assuming, of course, that his hips are up to the task. What he would give to be fifty again! Even sixty!
He turns to Em and sees something he doesn’t like. The wheelchair’s guide-light is still on, shining down on the pavement. Hard to believe a wheelchair has a dead battery if the light is still working! And the girl is coming, speeding down the hill.
“Turn off the light!” he whispers. “Emily, turn off the goddam guide-light!”
She does, just in time. Because here’s the girl, their Christmas elf.
Roddy steps off the sidewalk, waving his arms. “Can you help us, please? We need help!”
Bonnie speeds past, and she’s too far into the street for him to even think about karate-kicking her off the bike. He has an instant to see all their planning going to waste, diminishing as the bike’s flashing red taillight diminishes downhill. But then the girl brakes, swerves, and comes back. He doesn’t know if it was him waving his arms, the four-way flashers, the desire to be a good Samaritan, or all three. He’s just relieved.
She pedals slowly, a little wary at first, but there’s more than enough light left in the day for her to see who was waving her down. “Professor Harris? What’s up? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Em. Her sciatica is very bad, and the battery in her wheelchair died. Is it possible you could help me get her inside? The ramp is on the other side. I want to take her home.”
“Bonnie?” Emily asks weakly. “Bonnie Dahl, is that you?”
“It is. Oh my God, Emily, I’m so sorry!”
Bonnie dismounts her bike and pushes down the kickstand. She hurries to Emily and bends over her. “What happened? Why did you stop here?”
A car passes. It slows; Roddy’s heart stops. Then it speeds up again.
Emily has no good answer for Bonnie’s question, so she just moans.
“We need to get her around to the other side,” Roddy repeats. “Can you help me push?”
He bends as if to take one of the wheelchair’s rear handles, but Bonnie hips him aside and grabs both. She turns the wheelchair and pushes it around the back of the van. Emily whimpers at each bounce and jounce. Roddy skirts the ramp, leans in the open driver’s side door, and kills the four-way flashers. That’s one less thing to worry about, he thinks.
“Should I call someone?” Bonnie asks. “My phone—”
“Just get me up the ramp,” Emily gasps. “I’ll be fine once I get home and take a muscle relaxant.”
Bonnie positions the wheelchair facing the ramp and takes a deep breath. She’d like to pull it back first and get a running start, but the pavement is too uneven. One hard push, she thinks. I’m strong enough, I can do this.
“Should I help?” Roddy asks, but he’s already moving behind Bonnie rather than toward the wheelchair’s handles. His hand dips into his pocket. He flips the small protective cap off the tip of the hypo with no trouble; he’s done this before, both in numerous practice runs and four times when it’s the real thing. The van blocks what’s happening here from the street and he has no reason to think everything won’t go well. They are almost home free.
“No, I can do it. Stay back.”
Bonnie bends like a runner in the starting blocks, gets a good grasp on the rubber handgrips, and pushes. Halfway up the ramp, just as she thinks she won’t be able to finish the job, the wheelchair’s motor hums to life. The guide-light comes on. At the same moment she feels a wasp sting the back of her neck.
Emily rolls into the van. Roddy expects Bonnie to collapse, just as the others did. He has every reason to expect that; he’s just injected 15 milligrams of Valium less than two inches from elf-girl’s cerebellum. Instead, she straightens up and turns around. Her hand goes to the back of her neck. For a moment Roddy thinks he’s given her a diluted dose, maybe even no dose at all, only water. It’s her eyes that convince him that isn’t true. A younger and much brawnier Roddy Harris, then an undergraduate, worked two summers in a Texas slaughterhouse—it was where he began to formulate his theories about the near-magical properties of flesh. Sometimes the bolt gun they used to put the cows down wouldn’t be fully charged, or would be aimed slightly off-target. When that happened, the cows looked like Bonnie Dahl does now, eyes floating in their sockets, faces slack with bewilderment.
“What… did you do? What…”
“Why won’t she go down?” Emily asks shrilly from the open van door.
“Be quiet,” he says. “She will.”
But instead of going down, Bonnie blunders toward the back of the van, arms held out for balance. And toward the street beyond, presumably. Roddy tries to grab her. She pushes him away with surprising strength. He stumbles backward, trips over a protruding lip of pavement, and lands on his ass. His hips howl. His teeth click together, catching a scrap of his tongue between them. Blood trickles into his mouth. In this fraught moment he enjoys the taste even though he knows his own blood is useless to him. Any blood without flesh is useless to him.
“She’s getting away!” Emily cries.
Roddy loves his wife, but in that moment he hates her, too. If there were people on the other side of Red Bank Avenue instead of tangled undergrowth, they would be coming out to see what all the ruckus was about.
He scrambles to his feet. Bonnie has veered away from the van and Red Bank Avenue. Now she’s blundering across the front of the abandoned repair shop, one hand sliding along the rusty roll-up door to keep from going down, taking a drunk’s big loose swaying strides. She makes it all the way to the end of the building before he can throw a forearm around her neck and yank her back. She still tries to fight him, twisting her head from side to side. Her bike helmet thuds against his shoulder. One of her earrings flies off. Roddy is too busy to notice; his hands are, as they say, full. Her vitality is nothing short of remarkable. Even now Roddy thinks he can’t wait to taste her.