“So why are you guys here?”
“My cousin took early retirement after some work-related stress,” she said briskly. “Down in Orlando, where she lives. She’s on her own, mostly, her ex-husband lives in Vancouver, the sons have grown up and left the nest. I get a long winter break. The two of us have been close since we were ten. I brought her up to make her take a breather.”
“But why here?” I asked. “Specifically?”
Main Linda cocked her head.
“Our family used to have a house in the area. Not on the beach, inland. Came up every summer. We shared the place with the cousins. There was a candy store, we walked there every Saturday. Jawbreakers. Gobstoppers. You remember those? Giant round hard candies you could barely fit in your mouth, started out black and you went through all the colors as they shrank? Disgusting actually, kids taking the things out of their mouths all the time to look at the different rainbow hues, then sticking them in again. Filthy. Dyed tongues. Saliva. Yeah, we loved it though. Also, there were those Atomic Fireballs.”
“We had those.”
“Naming a candy after a nuclear mushroom cloud. Only in America, right?”
“Yeah. What I meant, though, was how did you choose this particular motel?”
“Liked Don from the beginning. And heck, the price was right,” said Main Linda. “I’m cheap as crap. Always have been, always will be.”
“Good to know,” I said, but I was disappointed in my weak powers of detection. People revealed little to me, and I couldn’t even tell whether they meant to be evasive or were just uninterested in detail.
Maybe Don opened up his motel to those in need. But why disguise it?
I was at a dead end, I realized, falling silent as I sat in Main Linda’s heated passenger seat, and how did you get out of a dead end? You had no choice. All you could do was give up, turn around and drive the other way, drive back where you’d come from.
I mean I don’t want to leave the motel or the town, I want to keep my date with the librarian, for instance, a prospect that pleases me out of keeping with its likely outcome. But the sense I have of failing to understand the motel’s gathering has started to disrupt my sleep: I lie awake nights distracted by my ongoing failure to grasp why these people are here. Maybe there’s nothing to fathom in the first place but maybe there is, and the uncertainty doesn’t sit well with me.
And I’m not so sure anymore I need to be hiding us. Increasingly my past interpretations strike me as arbitrary and I pick through them, second-guessing.
There’s a chance I could stand up to Ned, I thought, sitting in the car, a chance he couldn’t make Lena and me do anything we didn’t want to do. Maybe I’m just a coward, I thought, hunkering here, as I was a coward about divorcing him. The line between cowardice and caution was blurred to me.
For a moment, Ned started to look less like a threat than an inconvenience and the future seemed almost simple.
Sitting in Main Linda’s car I lapsed into a daydream of peaceful retreat—retreat to my parents’ house, their quiet street where snow fell in pristine layers over the lawns. Only the few residents of the block drove down that street in winter, only the neighbors’ footsteps marred the sidewalk; the snow lay pure and gently curved on the bushes and old trees of the neat gardens. There would be no cold cement catwalk stretching between the bedroom and dining room, as there was here—no questions to speak of, either, beyond the mundane questions of the design and order of days.
I didn’t relish the part where I, fully grown, would be choosing to live in my parents’ house again, but they would be good to me and I could help my mother with my father, when she needed me. In that way I could do my part. We would stay there and Lena would go to school; I could get a new job, though I’d long since fallen off the tenure track—a community college might have me, or maybe a private high school. I could almost believe in a return to routine, an end to stealth.
I felt the wings of the normal touch my shoulders, ready to settle on me with a bland, insulating protection. I felt hopeful.
“Here you go, dear,” said Main Linda, and I saw we were already at the auto shop. There weren’t many cars in the lot: Saturday. “You want me to wait here till you make sure your car’s ready?”
“No, that’s fine,” I said.
“You sure? It’s no problem.”
“That’s OK. I’ve wasted enough of your time already. He said it was all done. You go ahead, Linda, and thanks so much. I’ll see you back at the motel.”
I regret those words.
4
IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE
B.Q. WASN’T IN THE OFFICE; BEEFY JOHN WAS ALONE. HE HUNG UP the phone as I went in stamping slush off my boots, shuffling them back and forth on the black rubber mat and making the electronic doorbell chime.