“Get what,” she said.
“The tapes,” Sarah Jane said, not impatiently. Lisa at her work was someone you might think you envied: her focus clear and steady, somehow removed from the object of its scrutiny. There were only the motions of the work, their total care, her steady hands.
“Some you make yourself,” she said, not looking up, “and some you already had.”
Sarah Jane laughed a small laugh. “‘You’?”
Lisa turned now to look over her shoulder; she, too, was smiling. “You know what I mean. Besides, who knows?” She reached for a tape atop a five-high stack, held it up: it was unlabeled. It might have been blank, but it could have been anything. “There’s so many of them now. Some of these could have been made by anybody.”
She turned back to the table to resume her cuts and splices; Sarah Jane could see the yellow grease pencil on the loose lengths of master tape. It was easier than she might have guessed, regarding the process while trying not to dwell on its ends. She didn’t like to think of the tapes shot on the property, the ones with identifiable signposts. But these others seemed benign. By themselves they were nothing: long static shots. It was kind of neat how different they felt when Lisa got done with them.
“But you made most of them,” she said, the dread returning, not meaning to be rude but wanting to help as much as she could.
“A fair number of them, yes,” Lisa said, again without looking up, absorbed in her labor. The soft spots in her armor were hard to see, but you meet a lot of lonely people working the counter at a video store. You wish you could do something for them. There might be some mutual benefit in it, who knows, if there were only some readily available point of contact.
There was no reason to press the point. She watched Lisa’s fingers nimbly working at the plastic sprockets and hinges, the warm quiet of the cellar returning. “Is there a specific word for the little thing you push in to make the housing open?” she asked when the moment had passed.
“The release lever,” Lisa said. “I used to have a printout of the schematic right on this wall.”
*
Even if you’re all grown up, the sound of a parent’s voice calling you awake from sleep can make you feel like a child—like there’s somebody who wants to make sure all’s well with you, who cares enough to ask.
It wasn’t dark yet—the days were getting longer—but it wouldn’t be long. Steve’s voice was gentle, coming in through the haze: “Hey, big man. Hey, big man.”
Jeremy opened his eyes but stayed put for the moment. “How long was I out,” he said.
Steve chuckled. “Well, I wasn’t here when you went down for your nap,” he said.
Jeremy sat up. “Nap,” he repeated, also laughing.
Steve spotted the shirt on the floor and saw the deep stain on the front. “Everything OK?” he said.
“It’s real bad,” Jeremy said, opening his dresser, grabbing the first shirt his hand landed on: Cyclones ’98. “Ezra went into a—his car went off the road.”
Steve’s eyes grew wide. “Where?”
“In Collins. Well, near Collins,” Jeremy corrected himself. “He’s in the hospital now. We called—he’s stable now, they say.”
“Who called?”
“Me and Sarah Jane.”
Steve looked like a schoolboy learning long division, trying to hold too many figures in his head. “Did she see the accident?” He’d reached the end of the obvious questions, but his need to know more was feral: by the time the paramedics pulled Linda from the ditch, she’d been there for hours, no witnesses to the crash, no way of knowing what her last moments had been like and only the pathologist’s estimation of when they’d finally come to pass.
“No, nothing like that,” Jeremy said. “She stays out in Collins sometimes, she was at her friend’s house when it happened.”
Steve took a quick measurement of the expression on his son’s face: he could see that there was more to know. But he knew his own limits. Once an overturned car came into the picture he had only so much time to get onto a different subject before his mind would start wandering to places best avoided. But Jeremy caught him looking, and then it was too late.
“It wasn’t like Mom’s, Dad,” Jeremy said. “He was out in front of the car when I found him. I think he went through the windshield. But there wasn’t—”
“Nothing on top of him,” Steve said, finishing the thought: no point in shrinking from it now. “OK. Thanks. You going to go to the hospital?”
“Maybe tomorrow,” said Jeremy. “Give the family a little time.”
“Good thinking,” said Steve.
“Guess I’ll get a shower,” said Jeremy, stretching.
“Fine,” said Steve, and then, impulsively, clumsily, worried that there wouldn’t be a better opportunity to say it: “Hey, big man: if it’s all right, I don’t want Shauna to know about any of this.”
Jeremy scratched the back of his head with both hands, head down. “Of course not,” he said. “She coming over?”