9
Geoff wasn’t ready to leave the party, but he took pity on me and gave me the keys to his car to look for Del. I was panicked, and furious with her for taking off.
“I’ll stay here with Annie,” he said. “She can give me a ride home tomorrow.”
I suspected it was the bourbon that made him so generous, but I would come to find out that he was often generous with his car. Before I drove off he leaned down to my window, provided simple directions—a few landmarks for finding my way home—and said, “Randy’s a good sort,” referring to the driver of the Firebird. “Don’t get all up in arms.”
I made it down the gravel drive to the main road, and then circled around town, past the diner, past a park with an old-fashioned bandstand, its intricate woodwork glowing white. The streets were dark but dotted with children walking in groups, their Halloween costumes disarming in my headlights—genies in chiffon and spangles, princesses in blue satin, the long dresses dragging around their shoes. As I drove past them some looked at me from behind their masks—creatures with fangs streaked with blood, monsters with distorted faces, even more friendly cartoonish characters—but their eyes darted, alive and frightening, behind the molded plastic, and I felt a sense of being lost in some strange, in-between world. I had the window rolled down, and I smelled wood smoke and burned pumpkin. My fury at Del compelled me to circle the grid of streets, and looking, in Geoff’s Volvo wagon, like a crazed housewife—desperate and near tears.
Del didn’t have a cell phone, and I didn’t know the town well enough to find her, although I could guess where she’d gone with the driver of the Firebird—some unmarked road leading to a lakeside, or up a rutted, abandoned cart path to some dark field to have sex. I could only hope that Randy was, as Geoff suggested, “a good sort,” and I gave up, finally, and found the main road out of the village, following Geoff’s directions back through the empty stretch of open land, past the garden store with its sheds for sale, its lawn statuary, its jewel-colored globes shimmering. Del wasn’t an innocent. She always went after what she wanted, while I waited behind, the cautious bystander, embarrassed by the virginity I kept a careful secret. “Sister,” Del would call me, after our great-aunt, and it annoyed me just to think about her saying it.
At my apartment I parked in front of the house, half-expecting Mary Rae to be standing under the elm, but the street was quiet, save a few bands of older trick-or-treaters who probably were planning some mischief. I had hoped to find Del at home, and the porch light was on, but the house rose, hulking and unfathomable over me, its windows all dark. I climbed the staircase and put the car keys under Geoff’s mat. Suzie, on the other side of Geoff’s door, poked her nose at the bottom, sniffing me out. My sweatshirt hadn’t been warm enough, and I was chilled. Inside my apartment I turned on the lamp, put on my warm coat, and lay down on the bed. We’d stopped folding it up every morning, and it had become a landing place for books and bags, a place where we lounged to read or talk. I must have fallen asleep, and I awoke when my cell rang. I answered expecting Del—a plea to come pick her up back at the party or at the local Viking Lanes. Instead, William’s voice filled the apartment, clear and deep.
“Is that you, Martha?” he said.
I sat upright, nervously, his voice ringing out of the phone as if he were beside me. “It’s you,” I said.
He laughed. “Yes, William, from the party.”
He said he was sorry for calling so late, and although I had no idea what time it was, I suspected it must have been past midnight. Del wasn’t home yet, and I was relieved to have the place to myself to talk. William said he was a bit of an insomniac, and he was going to try to wait until morning to call, but there wasn’t anything else of equal importance to do until then. He felt we were connected somehow—though he wasn’t sure why he felt it. My head swam, the confession so intimate I didn’t know what to say back. I couldn’t let silence be my only reply.
“Maybe there is something unexplainable at work,” I said, and instantly regretted it. “I’m just kidding,” I said, which was just as bad.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m not suggesting anything otherworldly.”
I leaned back onto the pillows on my bed. I didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs, but Del burst into the room.
“It’s snowing!” she said.
Out the window, in the streetlight, snow was whitening the branches of the elm. I was so unnerved by William’s call, I didn’t care where Del had been, what she’d done. I kept seeing his eyes on me at the party, and the way his cheeks reddened from the cold.