Universal Harvester(38)

When the shock ebbed a little, she started picking up tapes from the highway; there were dozens. She put them one at a time into a tote bag until it was full, then carried it back to her car and traded it out for an empty one. Jeremy scowled as he helped her scour the highway and the shoulder, but didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have known where to begin.

“They’re just—they’re everywhere,” she said at one point, her voice the only sound for miles.

When she’d recovered as many as she could find, and then spent ten fruitless minutes searching for more, she stood for a moment at the roadside, sizing up what remained of Ezra’s old Citation. It was upside down; she could have crawled in through the missing door and scoured the interior, but there was no way of checking the trunk.

“Better get going,” she said with audible reluctance.

“I guess,” said Jeremy. “We should maybe call the hospital.”

“Here,” she said, retrieving a cell phone from her pocket. “There’s no phone back at the house.”

He accepted it while fixing her with a harder look than he liked having to give anybody, because he’d already seen the army-green rotary phone attached to the wall of the kitchen, and he knew the telephone wires running all down State Highway 65 weren’t just there for show.

“It says there’s no service,” he said, holding the phone at arm’s length with the screen facing away from him so she could see it. In the future, cell phones like the one Sarah Jane handed Jeremy would be referred to as “burners”: cheap phones, often purchased without a contract at a department store, to be used for a very short period of time and then thrown away.

“Should we check a little farther down the road?” she said.

“You have to let me use your phone,” he said, knowing what he had to say next, resenting it. “I saw it, it’s right there in the kitchen.”

She stared blankly past him, as if there were a figure emerging from the fields across the highway, and drew in a deep, even breath through her nostrils, trying not to let it show.

“Of course it is,” she said at last, not meeting his gaze. “What am I thinking, of course there is, let’s just go.”

It was a mile and three quarters back to the Collins house; the rain started up after a minute or so. If it rains, and you’ve been worrying out loud about whether it might rain later, then that’s a good omen. The corners of Sarah Jane’s mouth turned up slightly, involuntarily.

To Jeremy she looked ominous; this morning had been awful. “It’s none of my business,” he said, finally, against the grain of a lifetime of social conditioning, “but why are you—you know—your house is back in Nevada, do you even live there any more, I don’t know.” He had done his best not to make it sound like he was prying. Still, he looked over at her from the passenger’s side, checking her face for clues.

When she spoke, it seemed clear she’d practiced her response. “I met a friend who needs a little help,” she said, her eyes never leaving the road.

“All right, but Ezra—”

There were no cars coming from either direction. Even the smallest breezes breach the quiet a little on these roads away from town.

“He’s just a kid.”

Her expression did not change. “My friend needs all the help she can get,” she said lightly, as if it were something already asked and answered. It takes a crew to raise a building. Everyone needs a little help sometimes.

*

It would be great to tell you that you’re going to see Irene Sample again—that we’ve shifted our focus in order to make her return all the more joyous and conflicted, that she’s going to call Collins from someplace far away, maybe today, and say she’s all right, that her life has been a journey through good times and bad; that she’ll say “I can’t explain it, I can hardly believe it myself” while her daughter, grown now, sobs aloud, stifling her cries with her free hand, finally calming herself enough to tell her aged mother to come visit, come visit, she’ll pay for the ticket, she’ll drive up to get her if she has to: Where is she? It would be my sad duty then to tell you about how the line goes dead as Lisa is unburdening herself, the dial tone breaking in to alert her that for some indeterminate stretch of time she has been talking to herself, or to no one, or to the birds in the field she sees through the window from her place by the wall phone in the kitchen. I wouldn’t like that—following Lisa out onto the front porch where the gourd bird feeder colonized by wasps is now gone, replaced by a hummingbird feeder—which is tidier, sure, but birds nest in the gourds, they lay eggs that hatch, it’s wondrous. And what does she say to Jeremy and Sarah Jane when they return from surveying the scene of the accident? How can she explain?

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.