“Oh, yeah, right, bonus chicken.” Sandy squeezes his arm.
They’re nice to listen to, these two; they’re like a little show, a mild comedy. Their pleasure in each other combines with the twilight and the misting rain to create a kind of anesthetizing fog, and I lean my head back and exhale, just listening to them talk, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing like kids. They hang out all day, they tell me, smoke cigarettes, fool around, drink beer, eat chicken. They both grew up here, as it happens, right here in Rotary, Ohio, went to prom together at Cross-County High School, but they hadn’t resided here as adults. Billy had lived “just about everywhere,” he’d done a little time, was out on parole—“still on it, officially,” he says, and snorts. Sandy for her part had gone to a two-year college in Cincinnati, married a “world-class dingleberry,” got divorced, ended up waitressing at some diner outside Lexington.
They got back in touch in the early days of the threat, back in late spring or early summer of last year, when the odds of impact were low but rising fast; low but high enough to start looking up lost loves and missed opportunities. “We found each other,” says Billy. “Facebook and that shit.” Summer burned away into fall, the odds inching up and up and up. The world started to slip and tremble, Billy and Sandy wrote each other funny e-mails about hooking up again, seeing the world out together.
“But by the time the damn thing got to be a hundred percent, the stupid Internet was gone.” Billy tosses his hair. “And I had never gotten her damn phone number—what a bonehead, right?”
“Yep,” says Sandy. “Course, I never got his, either.”
He grins at her, and she grins back, tilts her head, drinks her beer. He’s telling the story and she’s popping in now and then, adding detail, gently correcting, stroking his sweaty biceps. I am aware of an insistent internal voice telling me to keep moving on, stay on target, find a sledgehammer and get back to that garage—but I find I’m rooted in place, my back planted against the RV, my knees drawn up, slow-drinking that same first beer, watching the sunset color the tops of the trees. Houdini’s head a furry white teddy bear in my lap.
“So basically I said, screw it,” Billy says. “I fired up the Pirate and drove down to find her. And can I tell you something—sorry, man, what …”
“Henry,” I say. “Or—Hank.”
“Hank,” says Sandy, as if she was the one who asked. “I like that. Crazy part is, I was all packed. I was waiting for him.”
“You fucking believe it? She was waiting for me. Says she knew I’d be coming to find her.”
“I did,” she says, nods firmly, a mild drunk smile in her eyes. “I just knew.”
They shake their heads at their mutual good fortune, clink the long glass necks of their beers. I watch their small movements, Billy making a little ashtray out of tinfoil and tapping his cigarette into it, Sandy doing a modified, seated version of the Robot to some old-school beatbox hip-hop number coming from the speakers on the RV.
I close my eyes for a minute and drift in and out of a doze. On some level, of course, I am aware that my illogical insistence on certain ideas regarding my sister—in particular my dogged belief not only that she is alive, but that I will find her and bring her home to a city that doesn’t even exist anymore—that all of this magical thinking has extended itself, grown outward like the halo of light around a candle. If Nico has managed to stay alive by clinging to her crazy idea that the asteroid crisis is avertable, that the threat can be eliminated, then maybe she’s right. Maybe the whole thing isn’t going to happen.
Nico’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.
I blink awake after a minute or two, shake a crick out of my neck, and get out my notebook and get to work.
No, Billy and Sandy have no sledgehammer. No gas-powered jackhammer or drill. What they’ve got is fuel, enough to keep the RV running another couple days, just for the tunes; they’ve got beer and they’ve got chicken and that’s about it.
Then I figure, what the heck, and I reach into my pocket and take out the yearbook picture from the plastic Concord Public Library sleeve and unfold it carefully, because it is beginning to crumble around the edges.
No, they haven’t seen her. They haven’t seen many people at all, and definitely no adult version of this high-school girl with the glasses and black T-shirt and the wry expression. No one like that around here at all.
3.