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Another silence followed, this one awestruck and wondering.
“Jesus. No wonder we didn’t last,” Lou said.
Three days later she was at Logan Airport at 6:00 A.M., standing at the window in the concourse to watch Wayne’s 727 taxi across the apron and up to the Jetway. Passengers emerged from the tunnel and streamed by her, hurrying in silent bunches, rolling carry-ons behind them. The crowd was thinning, and she was trying not to feel any anxiety—where the hell was he? Did Lou give her the right flight information? Wayne wasn’t even in her custody yet, and she was already f*cking up—when the kid strolled out, arms wrapped around his backpack as if it were his favorite teddy bear. He dropped it, and she hugged him, snuffled at his ear, gnawed at his neck until he laugh-shouted for Vic to let him go.
“Did you like flying?” she asked.
“I liked it so much I fell asleep when we took off and missed the whole thing. Ten minutes ago I was in Colorado, and now I’m here. Isn’t that insane? Going so far just all of a sudden like that?”
“It is. It’s completely insane,” she said.
Hooper was in a dog carrier the size of a baby’s crib, and it took both of them to wrestle him off the luggage carousel. Drool swung from the big Saint Bernard’s mouth. Inside the cage the remains of a phone book lay around his feet.
“What was that?” Vic asked. “Lunch?”
“He likes to chew on things when he’s nervous,” he said. “Same as you.”
They drove back to Linda’s house for turkey sandwiches. Hooper snacked on a can of wet food, one of the new pairs of flip-flops, and Vic’s tennis racket, still in the plastic wrap. Even with the windows open, the house smelled of cigarette ash, menthol, and blood. Vic couldn’t wait to go. She packed the swimsuits, her bristol boards and inks and watercolors, the dog, and the boy she loved but was afraid she didn’t know or deserve, and they hauled it north for the summer.
Vic McQueen Tries to Be a Mother, Part II, she thought.
The Triumph was waiting.
Lake Winnipesaukee
THE MORNING WAYNE FOUND THE TRIUMPH, VIC WAS DOWN ON THE dock with a couple of fishing rods she couldn’t untangle. She had discovered the rods in a closet in the cottage, rust-flecked relics of the eighties, the monofilament lines bunched up in a fist-size snarl. Vic thought she had seen a tackle box in the carriage house and sent Wayne to look for it.
She sat on the end of the dock, shoes and socks off, feet trailing in the water, to wrestle with the knot. When she was on coke—yeah, she had done that, too—she could’ve struggled with the knot for a happy hour, enjoying it as much as sex. She would’ve played that knot like Slash hammering out a guitar solo.
But after five minutes she quit. No point. There would be a knife in the tackle box. You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherf*cker loose.
Besides, the way the sun was flashing on the water hurt her eyes. Especially the left. Her left eye felt solid and heavy, as if it were made of lead instead of soft tissue.
Vic stretched out in the heat to wait for Wayne to return. She wanted to doze, but every time she drifted off, she twitched awake all of a sudden, hearing the crazygirl song in her head.
Vic had heard the crazygirl song for the first time when she was in the mental hospital in Denver, which was where she went after she burned the town house down. The crazygirl song had only four lines, but no one—not Bob Dylan, not John Lennon, not Byron or Keats—had ever strung together four lines of such insightful and emotionally direct verse.
No one sleeps a wink when I sing this song!
And I’m going to sing it all night long!
Vic wishes she could ride her f*cking bike away!
Might as well wish for a ride in Santa’s sleigh!
This song had woken her on her very first evening in the clinic. A woman was singing it somewhere in the lockdown. And she wasn’t just singing it to herself; she was serenading Vic directly.
The crazygirl scream-shouted her song three or four times a night, usually just when Vic was drifting off to sleep. Sometimes the crazygirl got to laughing so hard she couldn’t carry the tune all the way through to the end.
Vic did some screaming, too. She screamed for someone to shut that cunt up. Other people yelled, the whole ward would get to yelling, everyone screaming to be quiet, to let them sleep, to make it stop. Vic screamed herself hoarse, until the orderlies came in to hold her down and put the needle in her arm.
In the day Vic angrily searched the faces of the other patients, looking for signs of guilt and exhaustion. But all of them looked guilty and exhausted. In group-therapy sessions, she listened intently to the others, thinking the midnight singer would give herself away by having a hoarse voice. But they all sounded hoarse, from the difficult nights, the bad coffee, the cigarettes.
Eventually the evening came when Vic stopped hearing from the crazygirl with her crazy song. She thought they had moved her to another wing, finally showing some consideration for the other patients. Vic had been out of the hospital for half a year before she finally recognized the voice, knew who the crazygirl had been.
“Do we own the motorcycle in the garage?” Wayne asked. And then, before she had time to process the question, he said, “What are you singing?”
She hadn’t realized she was whispering it to herself until that very moment. It sounded much better in a soft voice than it did when Vic had been scream-laughing it in the loony bin.