“Of course.” Tom rolled his eyes.
Melissa got into the back, squeezed in the middle between Libby and Danny as they hopped in on either side. Gwen slid into the front seat like an oily queen. Her feet were up on the dash before they even pulled out of the parking lot. She was still wearing Libby’s shoes.
“That was one smoking gentleman,” said Gwen. “I don’t know how I missed that one.”
“You dodged a bullet,” said Tom. He pulled onto the main road. He would’ve scuttled a hundred ships to keep that guy away from his sister.
“You didn’t let him pay for dinner, did you?” said Tom.
Gwen put her hand to her chest. “What kind of WASP do you take me for?”
With each passing car Tom lifted four fingers from the steering wheel in an automatic island wave.
“They can’t see you in the dark,” said Gwen, her feet now pressed to the windshield.
“That doesn’t mean I should be rude,” said Tom. Really he couldn’t stop if he wanted to. It usually took him an hour on Route 1 on his way home to stop waving to every passing car. It was a locational Pavlovian response. Car, wave, car, wave. Gwen unrolled her window and turned up the music.
Tom needed the windows up, the AC on. He wanted to feel the cold swirl around his feet. He wanted to retreat from his skin, deep into his body to get away from the cold. The island would recede, and he would be somewhere deeply internal, sterile, the inside of a conference room in a distant hotel, fluorescent lights and wall-to-wall carpeting.
All that flubbering wind drowned out their words. Tom put up all the windows.
“I’ve got the AC on,” he said. He wanted their words. He wanted to push Jeremy Aldridge’s face back under the surface.
His name is Jeremy. He’s a good swimmer. No.
“Dan, have you talked to Gwen and Libby about last semester?” Let Danny fall on his sword. I’m sorry, but please, Dan, just this once.
“Did you know,” said Danny, “that alligators can decide if their babies will be boys or girls? They look around at their alligator community and see what gender they need more of, and boom, they make more of that gender. Reptile genetic modification.” Danny slapped the back of Gwen’s headrest for emphasis. He was practically in Melissa’s lap.
Tom wanted to apologize to him. I know it’s not fair to put you on the spot until we’ve made arrangements, decided how to proceed with school. But . . .
“Clearly, they need to lobby Congress,” said Gwen. She turned to face Danny. “Can’t you see it, an alligator in a three-piece suit lumbering down the aisle to the Senate floor.”
Suddenly they were deep in a world of genetically modified, super smart reptiles running for office.
Tom’s knuckles hurt from gripping the steering wheel, and he flexed the fingers on one hand and then the next. Why had Melissa sent him up a day early? Or was she just putting off the inevitable? Or was she getting him out of their house? Was he going to lose both homes this year? He only wanted this one gone. This house had to be sold. Had to be. Get the fuck out of my house, Jeremy.
It was dark as they drove empty sections of North Haven Road, with the dotted yellow line and the dim arc of headlights ahead, then lost around a curve. Tom looked over at Gwen. She leaned her head against the glass and watched the sky as they drove. He hoped she would fall asleep; she always looked happy when she slept. Instead Gwen gave the constellations her own names: Perseus, King of the Druids; Androcles sitting in the mouth of his lion; Isis holding the severed head of a missionary. She begged Tom to turn off the headlights, just for a second.
“We can stop,” was his completely reasonable, in fact, accommodating, solution. No, not good enough, never quite close enough to the edge for Gwen. Danny agreed with Gwen.
“Light speed in the darkness,” said Danny in a guttural death-metal growl.
“Nocturnal birds in a dark forest,” said Gwen, going Goth. She rambled, and it made Tom tired, made him acutely aware that he did the driving while she sat there with her feet on the dash, singing along to the radio. He reminded her that without headlights there would appear to be no road.
“Yes! Does the road exist if the lights are off? It’s a philosophical exercise,” said Gwen.
Yet again his sister, his thirty-six-year-old sister, was demonstrating the mental development of an adolescent. Even at twenty-one, even being of an entirely different generation than the two of them, Danny usually, this past semester notwithstanding, had more sense than she did. But still Tom tried. On the next straightaway he gave her five seconds of what Danny called “Total Blackout.” But he saw a car stopped by the side of the road at the bottom of a rise, and as it pulled back onto the road, Tom flipped the headlights back on, and the expansive sky and boundless forest closed in on them again into a narrow tunnel of night driving, black and white.
And in that tunnel on the side of the road, they saw it.
The deer was huge and reclining, as if in some medieval tapestry, head held high, legs folded primly. But the backdrop was not a flat expanse of flowers curling in on themselves, just blackness. The deer was panting, mouth agape, tongue lolling pink. Red. It was in Technicolor. It stared straight at the aurora of their lights with the glossy green eyes of the night forest. There was a huge gash on its hindquarter that moved from its knee over its hip to its belly. Her belly. As full and taut as a horse’s. The torn red flesh and white of sinews looked wet and utterly wrong.
Tom jerked the wheel slightly but recovered quickly when he realized the thing wasn’t going to move.
“Poor thing,” said Melissa.
He kept driving. His neck itched. His ears popped. He didn’t think of the road or the car or the deer. He thought of the first time he saw Kerry asleep in her incubator, looking more like a wild thing than a baby, curled up under the nurse’s hand. Her eyes fused shut, covered in down, sleeping in a box like a newborn puppy. He thought of Libby, who was the baby until Danny came along. Libby, years before, all feather-limbed and barely in double digits, sinking fast to the bottom of the cove. Things about to die.
“Gwen, call 911,” he instructed.
“Stop the car, Tom,” she said.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“Stop the car.”
Tom drove past the doe. A muffled noise came from the backseat.
“Stop the goddamn car, Tom.” She said it quietly, sitting forward in her seat, no seat belt, facing him, one arm stretched along the dashboard, her hand close to the wheel.
“It would be dangerous and pointless for us to stop.” He looked at her. Her eyes were like the deer’s, not wild with fear but black and unyielding.
Danny pulled himself forward between the front seats. “I’m gonna throw up.”