NOS4A2(51)

In retrospect Vic was only surprised she didn’t go crazy sooner. She was surprised that more young mothers didn’t lose it. When your tits had become canteens and the soundtrack of your life was hysterical tears and mad laughter, how could anyone expect you to remain sane?

She had a single occasional escape hatch. Whenever it snowed, she left Wayne with Lou, borrowed the tow truck, and said she was going into town for an espresso and a magazine. It was something to tell them. Vic didn’t want to let them in on the truth. What she was actually going to do felt like a curiously private, possibly even shameful, personal matter.

So it happened one day, all of them trapped inside together: Wayne was banging on a toy xylophone with a spoon, Lou was burning pancakes, the TV was blaring Dora the f*cking Explorer. Vic let herself into the yard for a smoke. It was blue outside, and the snow fell hissing in the trees, and by the time she had smoked her American Spirit down far enough to burn her fingers, she knew she needed a ride in the tow.

She borrowed the keys from Lou, put on a Colorado Avalanche hoodie, and crossed to the garage, locked up on that frozen blue Sunday morning. Inside, it smelled of metal and spilled oil, an odor very like blood. Wayne had that smell on him, all the time, and she hated it. The boy, Bruce Wayne Carmody—Bruce to his paternal grandparents, Wayne to Vic, and The Bat to Lou—spent most of the day cooing to himself in the safe enclosure of a tire meant for a monster truck. It was what they had instead of a playpen. Her baby’s father was a man who owned only two pairs of underwear and had a tattoo of the Joker on his hip. It was something, going over all the things that had led her to this place of high rock, endless snows, and hopelessness. She could not quite work out how she had found her way here. She used to be so good at finding the place she wanted to go.

In the garage she paused, one foot on the running board of the truck. Lou had picked up a job, painting a motorcycle for a pal. He had just finished putting a coat of dull black primer on the gas tank. The gas tank looked like a weapon now, like a bomb.

On the floor, beside the bike, was a sheet of transfer paper with a flaming skull on it and the words HARD CORE written below. Vic took one glance at what Lou had painted on the transfer paper and knew he was going to f*ck up the job. And it was a curious thing: Something about the crudity of his illustration, its obvious failings, made her feel almost ill with love for him. Ill—and guilty. Even then some part of her already knew she was going to leave him someday. Even then some part of her felt that Lou—Lou and Wayne both—deserved better than Vic McQueen.

The highway switchbacked for two miles down to Gunbarrel, where there were coffeehouses, candle shops, and a spa that did cream-cheese facials. But Vic got less than halfway there before turning off the highway onto a dirt side road that dropped through the pines into deep lumber country.

She flicked on the headlights and buried the gas pedal. It felt like plunging off a cliff. It felt like suicide.

The big Ford crashed through brush, banged through ruts, tipped over ledges. She drove at unsafe speeds, slewing around corners and throwing snow and rocks.

She was looking for something. Vic stared intently into the headlights, which cut a hole in the falling snow, a white passageway. The snow flurried past, as if she were driving through a tunnel of static.

Vic felt that it was close, the Shorter Way Bridge, waiting just beyond the farthest reach of the headlights. She felt it was a matter of speed. If she could just go fast enough, she could force it back into existence, leap off the rutted logging road and onto the old boards of the bridge. But she never dared push the truck beyond the speed at which she could control it, and she never reached the Shorter Way.

Maybe if she had her bike back. Maybe if it were summer.

Maybe if she were not stupid enough to have had a baby. She hated that she’d had the baby. Now she was f*cked. She loved Wayne too much to press the pedal to the floor and go flying into the darkness.

She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.

Maybe she could not bring forth the bridge because there was nothing left to find. Maybe she had found everything the world had to offer her: a notion very like despair.

It was no good being a mother. She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future.

The lumber road dead-ended at a gravel pit, which was where she turned back. As was often the case, she drove back toward the highway with a headache.

No. Not a headache. It wasn’t a pain in her head. It was a pain in her left eye. A slow, soft throb.

She drove back to the garage, singing along to Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain understood what it tasted like to lose your magic bridge, the transport to the things you needed. It tasted like a gunbarrel—like Gunbarrel, Colorado, perhaps.

She parked in the garage and sat behind the wheel in the cold, watching her breath smoke. She might’ve sat there forever if the phone hadn’t rung.

It was on the wall, right outside the door to the office Lou never used. It was old enough to have a rotary dial—like the phone in Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House. Its ring was harsh and brassy.