Instead you put the thing in your textbook. Knowing full well it was the one thing that could end your life. That could flush you down some dark and forever hole yourself.
Because, at the same time, in some new part of you that did not exist an hour ago, not even fifteen minutes ago, you knew that the same piece of cloth that might end you might also save you. If only you had the time to figure out how.
39
SHE SLEPT AND woke, slept and woke, through day and night, or many days and many nights. She might’ve been in the river again, but now there was heat—hours of heat that set her skin on fire, and then hours of cold so deep her jaw chattered, and she slept and woke and did not know one from the other because everything she saw in either state was equally vivid and equally unbelievable and equally ordinary. She saw glass beads swaying in a river of color and lights, and the colors smelled of fruits no one had ever tasted before and the lights played on the bare shoulders of three young women who stood on the bottom of a lake with their toes in warm sand and their hair rising and falling in cool passing currents of light. She saw a corona of light around dark curtains, the light pulsing and blooming like a living thing, and she saw the bedroom where she lay and it was not her bedroom and it was, and she knew everything she would find in the closet down to a pair of high black boots that zipped up the back and she knew if she got up and looked in the mirror she would see her new face, her new hair, and there was a silver brush on the desk and she knew how the brush would feel in her hand and how it would feel in her hair, and she felt a new heart beating in her chest and this heart broke just to feel all that it felt all at once, all its love and pain and want and fear all at once.
She saw the curtains open on their own and a figure appear in the dark of the glass and she saw this figure put its hands to its face and peer in through the air bubbles and the tiny cracks and when it stood she saw the soles of its boots as it walked off into the night. Pale hair moved in the water like silky smoke, and she smelled smoke, and her father was sitting with her, Here, Deputy, drink this, and he raised her head with his hand and tilted the cool water to her lips, then he cleared the hair from her forehead and said, You have to help him now, sweetheart, and she said, Help who, Daddy? but he was gone.
She saw the faces of boys she did not know all lined up in picture frames and they were all the same boy, and the images darkened and sank away until all she saw was their teeth like the grins of skulls. She watched a large bird like a hawk or an owl glide soundlessly across the ceiling. She saw a man and a woman dressed in black climb stone steps, their heads high but heavy, so heavy, and they walked into a great hall that was washed in every color, because the river of light flowed through the great hall too and they walked hand in hand down the aisle and they looked down on the girl who lay there and the girl’s hair shifted colors in the light, dark to light and back to dark again, as if the shadows of great fish or boats were passing over her.
She saw herself rise from the bed and walk through a wall of heat to the window and draw the curtains, the light so bright, and unlatch the window and raise it with pain shooting all through her and the air so cold flooding in and she saw the dark shapes of two men standing next to a truck and they were faced off and talking and she could hear every word they spoke as if the two men floated there outside the window, and as she listened she saw a man in a sheriff’s hat driving down a dark road and there was a girl sitting next to him but she could not see their faces and she was frightened, and then the car vanished and next she saw dogs, or wolves, running down the middle of the river chasing something she couldn’t see and the thing they chased howled and cried but the dogs themselves were silent as they ran, white smoke jetting from their snouts as from furnaces and no sound to them at all.
40
HE CARRIED THE tray back downstairs and set it on the kitchen table and stood looking at the glass of orange juice, the bowl of soup, the soda crackers. Then he sat down and crumbled the crackers into the bowl and ate the soup. It was just past noon. The house seemed strangely quiet and after a moment he realized it was because there was no fire in the woodburner, because he’d not built the fire, because the heat from the fire would keep the furnace from kicking in and blowing heat into the upstairs rooms, exactly as it was supposed to do.
A man could put a space heater up there and have his fire and his heated bedroom, both. Could, if he cared to burn the house down. That time the alarm went off in the middle of the night and it was the alarm in her room and he’d thrown open the door with his heart slamming and there she sat cross-legged on the floor with a candle on a cookie sheet, her eyes so wide, and she was blowing at the blackened feet of a Barbie doll like it was a birthday cake and you had to carry the doll dripping hot, pink plastic into the bathroom and put it under the tap, and when you got back she was facedown on her bed and the alarm still going until you stood on the chair and took it down and got the battery out, and only then did you hear her crying. And she would not turn over, she would not look at you and she was so small and she trembled and cried until her mother moved you away and scooped her up and held her sobbing against her chest as you stood there, as you did all you could think to do, which was to open the window and fan the air with the cookie sheet.
You frightened her, Gordon, Meredith telling him later. And Gordon saying, I frightened her? I frightened her?
There was the sound of car tires on the packed snow and the sound returned him to his kitchen—smoke gone, girl gone, wife gone—and he sat listening, frowning, thinking Doc Van Allen was back, had forgotten something. But when he went to the window it was not the light-blue Olds he saw coming to a stop in the drive but a dark-blue pickup. The sun was on the windshield and the driver sat with the truck idling, white clouds chugging from the tailpipe—rechecking his directions or his information, whatever it was, this dumb cluck, and Gordon standing at the window looking for the guy to turn the truck around and drive away again. Instead the exhaust clouds stopped and the driver’s door swung open and a young man stepped out in a billcap and shut the door again and faced the house, and although the young man’s face was half in shadow under the bill, Gordon knew him at once. Knew him by shape and by stance and by movement and by other signs he couldn’t name but that were as old as the young man was himself.
I will be God damned. I will be God damned. His heart pounding and all the blood going out of him.
The boy took a few steps toward the porch and stopped and came no farther. He’d seen Gordon in the window. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at Gordon and waiting.
Gordon stepped from the window and sat on the bench by the door and pulled on his boots, and every movement was strange, like déjà vu, and the side of his neck was beating and he fumbled with the laces as if his fingers were half-frozen and when he got them tied he held his hands before him to see if they were shaking but they were not, they were steady. He got into his jacket and opened the door and stepped into the winter brightness and the boy was still there—he was no trick of the eyes, no dream—and Gordon closed the door and went down the porchsteps, never once looking away from the boy and the boy never once looking away from him and all of it no trick, no dream. He walked up to the boy and stopped short of him and stood looking into his shadowed eyes, and the boy lifted a hand and tilted back the bill of the cap and returned his hand to his jacket pocket.