He drove past the highway on-ramp steadily. His imagination flared with the variables—smoke, fire, fumes—but he shook his head a couple of times to get his head clear, and it worked. You cultivate practical responses all your life precisely so that you’ll instinctively protect yourself if you should happen to meet a moment like this one, where, nagged by worry, you find yourself tempted to get on a dark highway at night and see who is or isn’t parked down a farmhouse driveway. You hold out for a better scenario: the next morning, say, when it’s light out, and the moon isn’t up. You hold out for the right time so as not to make things worse.
But the situation as it eventually revealed itself to him in the house did not align with his expectations, though it was elliptically consonant with what he’d pictured. Bracing yourself against the possibility of disaster came naturally to him; it seemed to run in the family, and in the families of most people he knew. Plan for colder winters, harder storms, road closures. In the unmanageable elements of the case before him, though, expectations had been lowered to the point of paranoia: he saw himself arriving at the property in Collins and walking unprotected into scenes of unspeakable devastation and loss, too late to help anyone, too much gone for any explanation-offering reassembly to ever be attempted.
As we know, the Collins house played a longer game. But the memory of his first vision proved hard to shake. And indeed, all the way down to the present day, Jeremy will sometimes find himself replaying the payoff he’d first imagined, that vivid, unrealized presentiment: of taking matters into his own hands and turning the CLOSED sign around before sundown. Driving to Collins. Heading down a gravel road, a cloud of dust rising from his back tires as he sped toward the titanic orange beacon of Lisa Sample’s house, now in flames, oil-black smoke ascending into the Iowa sky in a single furious spiraling column, the sound of the fire reaching him before he was physically near enough to hear it, the rumble and the roar.
8
The drive in from Collins took half an hour. She’d hoped to get to the store in time to open it herself; there’d be no chance of avoiding some kind of confrontation, she knew, but getting there first might establish a power dynamic, some system of domain: just being inside already when Jeremy reported for work, sitting behind the counter, scrolling through the overdues.
But she got caught behind a combine harvester on the surface streets out to 65 North, and it set her back a full fifteen minutes. Jeremy was already inside. She tried not to be nervous—they’d talked at least once a day on the phone—but there was no way he wasn’t going to ask, and she still hadn’t settled on an answer.
She fired the first volley as she came in through the door. “Everything all right?” she said.
Jeremy laughed. “Nobody’s been in yet,” he said. “Everything’s like usual. Are you in today?”
“I think so,” she said, her strategy presenting itself to her in the moment, naturally, like magic. “Haven’t been able to keep any food down. I’ll spare you the details. Just got a full breakfast down for the first time in days, anyway.”
Jeremy thought about his dad, about the partial conversations they’d been having at the dinner table the past two weeks, ever since Sarah Jane had stopped coming in; and thought also about the bigger picture he’d been trying to bring into focus, the story. What did his father think? His father thought the whole deal was a little weird, but probably nothing to worry about. “People can have things going on in their private lives,” he’d said one night over some pot roast. “You never really know. If it’s me, I just take the extra hours.”
“Gets pretty quiet when you’re putting in forty hours at Video Hut,” Jeremy’d said.
“I can imagine.” He’d helped himself to some more mashed potatoes. You think you’d get tired of them, but it takes longer than you’d think. “Did I mention how Bill Veatch is looking for help? Just if you wanted to get your hands a little dirtier, I guess. Needs somebody in receiving.”
“Full-time?”
“I think,” his father’d said. “Give him a call.”
But Jeremy wasn’t ready to call Bill Veatch yet. First he wanted to know why Sarah Jane wasn’t coming in to the store anymore; why she’d put him on opening duty almost daily for two straight weeks. Why Ezra had to pick up so many hours all of a sudden. Ezra didn’t usually get this much contact with the outside world; it made Jeremy feel obligated to protect him. On duty, they hardly ever exchanged more than a few sentences, but the governing silence between them was the regional grammar of comfort between like-minded men. They enjoyed each other’s company. Still, Jeremy thought kids like Ezra shouldn’t have to come all the way into town every day. It messed with the order of things.
“So just a flu bug or something?” he said, back in the present, in the incoming glare of the morning.
“I wonder,” she said, improvising now, enjoying it. “I remember my mom used to have all kinds of trouble after she started getting older.”
It was a powerful gambit. Talking about family health is a pastime almost as exalted as the noble art of who lives where now and how they got there. The cue was right there waiting for him to pick it up, if he wanted to: grandmothers, aunts, cousins. The path of no resistance was open. But he wanted to know, so he pressed forward.