NOS4A2(127)
She had on the same cutoffs she’d been wearing yesterday, a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt from The Rising Tour, had no helmet, no jacket. She didn’t even know if the keys were in the bike or if they were sitting amid Lou’s change on the bed.
Back in the bedroom, she heard someone crash into a door.
“Be cool!” Lou shouted. “Dude, like, seriously!”
The lake was a flat silver sheet, reflecting the sky. It looked like melted chrome. The air was swollen with a sullen, liquid weight.
She had the backyard to herself. Two sunburned men in shorts and straw hats were fishing in an aluminum boat about a hundred yards offshore. One of them lifted a hand in a wave, as if he found the sight of a woman exiting her house by way of a back window a perfectly common sight.
Vic let herself into the carriage house through the side door.
The Triumph leaned on its kickstand. The key was in it.
The barn-style doors of the carriage house were open, and Vic could see down the driveway to where the media had assembled to record the statement she was never going to make. A small copse of cameras had been planted at the bottom of the drive, pointed toward an array of microphones at the corner of the yard. Bundles of cable snaked back in the direction of the news vans, parked to the left. There was no easy way to turn left and weave through those vans, but the road remained open to the right, heading north.
In the carriage house, she could not hear the commotion back in the cottage. The room contained the smothered quiet of a too-hot afternoon in high summer. It was the time of day of naps, stillness, dogs sleeping under porches. It was too hot even for flies.
Vic put her leg over the saddle, turned the key to the ON position. The headlight flicked to life, a good sign.
Bike still isn’t right, she remembered. It wasn’t going to start. She knew that. When Tabitha Hutter came into the carriage house, Vic would be frantically jumping up and down on the kickstart, dry-humping the saddle. Hutter already thought Vic was crazy; that pretty picture would confirm her suspicions.
She rose up and came down on the starter with all her weight, and the Triumph blammed to life with a roar that blew leaves and grit across the floor and shook the glass in the windows.
Vic put it into first and released the clutch, and the Triumph slipped out of the carriage house.
As she rolled out into the day, she glanced to the right, had a brief view of the backyard. Tabitha Hutter stood halfway to the carriage house, flushed, a strand of curly hair pasted to her cheek. She had not drawn her gun, and she did not draw it now. She did not even call out, just stood there and watched Vic go. Vic nodded to her, as if they had struck an agreement, and Vic was grateful to Hutter for holding up her end. In another moment Vic had left her behind.
There was two feet of space between the edge of the yard and that bristling islet of cameras, and Vic aimed herself at it. But as she neared the road, a man stepped into the gap, pointing his camera at her. He held it at waist level, was staring at a monitor that folded out from the side. He kept his gaze on his little viewscreen, even though it had to be showing him a life-threatening visual: four hundred pounds of rolling iron, piloted by a madwoman, coming right down the hill at him. He wasn’t going to move—not in time.
Vic planted her foot on the brake. It sighed and did nothing.
Bike still isn’t right.
Something flapped against the inside of her left thigh, and she looked down and saw a length of black plastic tubing hanging free. It was the line for the rear brake. It wasn’t attached to anything.
There was no room to get past the yahoo with the camera, not without leaving the driveway. She gave the Triumph throttle, banged it into second gear, speeding up.
An invisible hand made of hot air pressed back against her chest. It was like accelerating into an open oven.
Her front tire went up onto the grass. The rest of the bike followed. The cameraman seemed to hear the Triumph at last, the earth-shaking growl of the engine, and jerked his head up just in time to see her buzz by him, close enough to slap his face. He reared back so rapidly he threw himself off balance, began to topple over.
Vic blasted past. Her slipstream spun him like a top, and he fell into the road, helplessly tossing his camera as he went down. It made an expensive-sounding crunch hitting the blacktop.
As she came off the lawn and into the road, the back tire tore off the top layer of grass, just exactly the way she used to peel dried Elmer’s glue off her palms in third-grade arts and crafts. The Triumph lurched to one side, and she felt she was about to drop it, smashing her leg beneath it.
But her right hand remembered what to do, and she gave the bike more throttle still, and the engine thundered, and it popped out of the turn like a cork that has been pushed underwater and released. The rubber found the road, and the Triumph leaped away from the cameras, the microphones, Tabitha Hutter, Lou, her cottage, sanity.
The House of Sleep
WAYNE COULD NOT SLEEP AND HAD NOTHING WITH WHICH TO DISTRACT his mind. He wanted to throw up, but his stomach was empty. He wanted out of the car but could see no way to manage it.
He had an idea to pull out one of the wooden drawers and beat it against a window, hoping to smash it. But of course the drawers wouldn’t open when he tugged on them. He made a fist and threw all his weight into a tremendous haymaker, hit one of the windows with as much force as he could muster. A shivery, stinging jolt of pain shot up his knuckles and into his wrist.