Lori opens the compartment in the center console and takes out a stack of CDs. She chooses the most relaxing music she can find: a New Age orchestral album with a snowy horse on the cover. As the synthesizer arrangement drifts through the car, Lori tries to relax her eyes. The vehicles on Cannonfield are passing less frequently now. With a moment’s preparation, it will be easy to join them. The music is beautiful, transcendent. As she stares at the trees ahead of her, they impress her as meaningfully sublime. These are the kinds of trees the old artists painted, worshipfully, in a time when America promised different kinds of riches. One tree is at a slant, its trunk bowing to a neighbor. Another is tall against the sky: a horse’s head. These trees have stood, frozen in their God-given poses, for years, decades, centuries, overlooking this same thoroughfare. Lori considers this. These same trees have watched horses pass over dirt, then cars over asphalt. And, today, they watch what must be a curious sight—a woman alone in a silver-gray Lexus, paralyzed.
It is now well past seven. Maybe they’re at the party now. They’d be there with kebabs, Mitch standing firm beside Mason, being strong for his sake, holding the same warming beer bottle. If he could just stand like this long enough, he would have done what he needed to do; he would have gone to the party. Then he and Mason could go home, and they would find Lori waiting for them, apologetic, embarrassed, with a story to tell. Then they would get into bed, he and Lori, and pull the blanket up around them and go on together to the next day. Saturday. September.
It feels good to sit like this. One more moment won’t make much difference now, and it’s such a rare pleasure to simply enjoy music, to be still. What, after all, is the rush? There’s the party, yes, but otherwise, what? The next chapter of her life hardly beckons seductively. Lori imagines the likely content of the years to come, the long hours at her parents’ bedsides, the beginning of physical ailments of her own. There will be sporadic, rushed visits from her children as they enter their futures like swimmers shoving off a pool wall. Is this all that life promises at its far end? She blinks her eyes at the thought of such imminent, unpopulated years. She will, she supposes, have to do what every underutilized, terrified woman has done throughout history: find volunteer opportunities, become an involved elder citizen, vigorously resist the twilight slide to oblivion.
For the moment, however, she is still relevant. After some span of time, Mitch and Mason will set out to look for her. They will, eventually, call the police. The certainty of this gladdens her. She allows herself, from the safety of her unmoving car, to imagine their fear of her death. They would not mention it aloud, of course, but it would be in the kitchen with them as they sit at the table, unspeaking. Wrenching scenarios would play out in their minds, each ending with her permanent absence from their lives. Perhaps it’s wrong to derive a flowering kind of warmth from this idea. All Lori knows is that, for the span of her unexpected absence tonight, she will be prominent in the minds of her husband and son, and perhaps that is all right. Let them wait. Let them think deliberately of her for this one extended moment before time begins again and she is thrust into the dark.
The trees have gone black. The CD ends, and the car fills with the crude ticking of the hazard signal. Lori touches a button and begins the music again. From time to time, a car rolls up behind her and passes incuriously. There is little traffic on Cannonfield now, but she thinks only abstractly of making her turn. She just wants to stay for another moment. Every so often, she tells herself, we need to stop and sit. There should be pauses between chapters, white space on the printed page. Even a wave of water needs an instant of suspension before crashing down.
Lori’s right foot aches. It’s like a brick on the brake, unattached to her body. She closes her eyes for a moment, looks at the faint, conjured faces of her husband and sons, then opens her eyes again to the wall of darkened trees. The stop sign, too, has gone dim, its authority muted. Lori gazes at its letters, aglow in the dusk, until they become strange and lose meaning. She puts the car in park and, just like that, removes her foot from the brake. It feels light, grateful, hers again. She just wants to be quiet for another moment. If she could just be quiet for a moment, she would see a space between cars and slide into it. She would go home.
But for now, she turns off the ignition. Her stomach rumbles audibly. It’s been hours, she realizes, since she last ate. Ah, but here are the cookies. No one will notice if the box is one or two short of a dozen. Lori loosens the red string and withdraws a jelly cookie, its red blotch like a stoplight. She eats three of these, then reclines her seat. From here, she stares up through the car’s moon roof. Moon roof, she whispers to herself. Moon roof. Mitch had paid extra for this feature at the dealership, though Lori was never sure of its benefit. Now, its value is clear. Through the rectangle of engineered glass she sees a neatly framed portion of sky, a handful of static stars.