She skirts the edges of the store until she finds something she thinks Milo would like: a little tiger in a sweatshirt that says SEWANEE. A four-year-old has not yet outgrown stuffed animals, right? She starts to walk toward the registers with her purchase, but it comes to her that step one leads directly to step two, and her pace slows. Now that she has the gift for her brother, it will be time to go. “Let’s go, Margaret,” she’ll say heartily, and then she’ll help the old woman out to her car, and they’ll drive a little ways down the road. She asked this morning if they could walk there, and Margaret said, “Well, you could, but I’m afraid I can’t.”
That’s all that was said about the plan to see her mother. Another thing for which Zoe is grateful. Margaret isn’t pressuring her toward action, urging her on her way. Far from it. Margaret seems content to fuss over her, to treat her like an invited guest. She said she would make Zoe hot chocolate when she got back, which breaks Zoe’s heart a little, because it reminds her she’s not a child. Still, Margaret knows her intentions. Margaret knows who she is, and why she’s here, and so in her presence Zoe can’t help but know these things, too.
The girl at the cash register has lifted her head and spotted Zoe approaching, and so now she has to proceed, like a normal person would. She buys the tiger. But she isn’t ready for step two, which is delivery. She goes back to buy the hiking guide.
She chooses a hike almost at random and drives to the overlook where it starts. Green’s View, it’s called. There’s a car parked on the other side of the circle, engine running, some guy gazing out at the vista. Zoe wishes he weren’t there, but she can park right by the trail access, and though the guy might look at her, she doesn’t have to see him do it. Because of him she doesn’t pause to contemplate the view, lovely as it is, but goes ahead and starts picking her way down the steep and narrow trail. It takes her into a hollow of early wildflowers and enormous boulders, the boulders like castoffs from another planet. At the bottom she tilts her head back to gaze up at where she started; it seems impossibly far away. The trail winds on, and she follows it. Down here she has a blessed sense of being completely unobserved.
Up ahead, just off the trail, she notices a large piece of rusted metal. She’s puzzling over its nature and origin—there’s no access to this place except by trail—when she happens to look beyond it, back toward the bluff, and sees an entire car. Or the ruins of one. She’s not even surprised, the car so incongruous she can barely register belief in its existence. It’s upright on its wheels, its roof more or less intact, but the front is smashed so that it yawns like an unhinged jaw. The steering column stands to the side, stuck into the earth, a circle on a pole. It looks like a flower. She clambers up rocks toward the car, and then sees beyond it a second one. This one landed upside-down, rests there in pitiful permanent exposure of its rusty undercarriage. Next to it a strip of red metal. Bright red. Why do some things keep their color, while others get worn away? The car on its wheels has the low-slung look of a seventies hot rod. Inside it the front seat is visible, retaining its pale upholstery.
There is no way for these cars to have come here except in a plunge off the cliff. Glorious or horrifying, depending on the director and the score. Or maybe comical, if the cars were empty. She sees no bloodstains on the seats. Surely even if a body had been extracted long ago, there would still be stains. She looks up again at the top of the cliff. It must be several hundred feet up. Maybe some drunk college kids pushed the cars off the edge, then scrambled carelessly down the trail, slipping and sliding and laughing at their flirtation with peril, to see what they had done. Maybe this is even the most likely scenario. Or the cars might have nothing to do with each other, the second leaping years after the first. Still she imagines one fleeing, the other in pursuit, faster and faster toward the edge of the world, until both of them flew off.
The Ordinary
Milo and Ben play with cars on the floor—smashing them together, saying ow, ow, ow—while Jennifer and Megan sit at Jennifer’s table over tea, syrup-coated plates pushed to the side. Jennifer made French toast. Sebastian is shooting a wedding and will be gone all day and late into the evening; Megan as usual has ungovernable stacks of unfinished work. Jennifer offered to take Ben for part of the day so Megan could catch up, but Megan’s guilt wouldn’t allow this. Brunch was the compromise. Jennifer isn’t solving Megan’s problems but distracting her from them, which sometimes is enough. And she thinks in an hour or so, if the boys are still playing well together, she might persuade Megan to go get some work done, because she really is overwhelmed, poor thing, and Jennifer would like to help. She worries about Megan. She feels for her a deep tenderness that extends often to Ben and, at times, to Sebastian. She would like to be an agent of good to them. She would like Milo to grow up with a friend he can’t remember not knowing, as close as he’ll come to a sibling. And she’s happy to have settled, herself, into friendship. With Megan she doesn’t feel like she has to guard against her own tenderness. Megan won’t use it against her.