I’d settle for saying that Irene just shows up one day a few weeks from now out of the clear blue sky, the way people sometimes seem to do in Lisa’s life. There she is now—an old woman, pulling up in an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, tires pleasantly crushing the stray unrenewed clumps of gravel along the long driveway. It’s summer, she’s wearing sunglasses. Sarah Jane hears the car drive up, hears the driver kill the motor: Lisa, who’s that? It’s my mother. She’s found me.
It’d even be OK if we had to learn that something has gone terribly wrong—that she gets arrested for shoplifting in Rapid City one year and takes a plea, and when the group moves on, they leave her behind; and so, after serving her thirty days in the county jail, she emerges directionless, no sense of where to go, afraid to see if the bridges she crossed to get here are still standing: and so she walks until she finds a church, Assemblies of God Rapid City, and they find a parishioner who’s willing to give her room and board until she can get back up on her feet; and then she calls home to Crescent, but the number’s been disconnected, because Peter and Lisa don’t live there any more. They left ages ago. They are driving around the country looking for Irene, following up on tips and rumors that never pan out. Lisa’s childhood is ruined; Peter can’t put himself back together; Irene can only guess at this from the message she’s hearing, The number you have called is not in service at this time, but her guess is good enough. She can’t call her parents; she can’t stand it; there is the possibility that they are both dead. It’s been seven years. She finds work at a drugstore, abandoned by the family she’s forsaken her husband and daughter for. She sleeps as long as she can at night. Just being awake feels hard most days. She tries to read her dog-eared Bible, but the connection is lost. She buries her memories under any worthless dirt she can find to pile on top of them: watching television, doing crosswords, working jigsaw puzzles from the Goodwill on a coffee table in her efficiency apartment.
None of this is true, or maybe some of it is. I don’t know. Irene Sample was never seen again. Several private detectives reported leads and rumors to Peter until his money ran out; once, Patricia Lumley saw a woman standing in the alley behind the post office and thought it was Irene, but she didn’t get out of her car to check. It could have been anybody, she told herself when she got home: and besides, wouldn’t Irene be much older by now? Of course she would. It had been years.
2
He nodded goodbye at Sarah Jane while backing down the long driveway, in what felt like the first moment of real substance since leaving the house that morning; everything from then to now had already begun to seem like a weightless vision. The exhilaration of the highway out from town; the blunt trauma of the flipped Citation in the ditch with Ezra’s unconscious body out in front of it; the dream of arrival at the Sample house, the return to the site of the crash: they all folded rapidly into one another, light fading down and back up between individual moments in a hurried preview of the familiar scene now growing smaller and more concentrated on the other side of the windshield. The cornfield to the left, that work shed at its edge. The empty driveway in the sun. The house down at the end. It all looked different with light on it, but there could be no doubt. He had seen it before.
The fuel indicator was nearly red by the time he got back to Story County. He pulled off the highway at a Casey’s in Colo to get gas; at the counter, paying, he saw the foil-wrapped hamburgers under the bright heat lamp, all that shiny false promise. He knew they would be dry, bland, barely worth eating, but he was suddenly ravenous. The huge bites he tore off with his teeth as he drove, burger in one hand and steering wheel in the other, felt like the most nourishing food he’d ever eaten, like something from the potluck at a wake. The point isn’t how healthy the food is, he thought to himself, crumpling the sad silver wrapper. The point is how hungry you are.
His father hadn’t come home from work yet. Jeremy went back to his bedroom, taking his shirt off and tossing it into a corner of the room as he entered. He felt like calling Stephanie to tell her what he’d learned; he imagined her excited voice on the other end, making plans for the next move, sorting through possibilities. It might restore a little light to the scene, breathe some air into it. But he wanted to lie down first, just for a minute; and, of course, as soon as he did, his body began to feel heavy, like an old tree. His thoughts grew less coherent, following an instinctive pattern of connection and reference as he drifted into a deep sleep—gathering, as he went, images of Stephanie’s maps and printouts, blue ink fresh on the paper spread out across the table at Gregory’s, brighter days of the fairly recent past.
*
“Where do you get them all?” Sarah Jane said. They were in the cellar; Lisa was hunched over an editing block at a worktable, razor in hand. She felt afraid asking; if their conversations approached this subject, it was only to circle it from a place high above, like a flock of starlings shading a field.