The Stars Are Fire(26)
“Are there many missing persons?” Grace asks.
“In the beginning, we had twenty-seven, now we have two, including your husband. Do you have a photo of him?”
She did, but doesn’t now.
“Can you give me a description?”
“About five foot, eleven inches, normal weight, sandy hair, dark blue eyes, he’s twenty-nine. A scar on his chin. He was wearing brown pants and a brown jacket. He’d gone to help build a firebreak.”
“Yes, we know.” The cop removes a card. “When he comes back, you give us a call, so we can take his name off the list. He’s probably had a knock on the head, or someone has taken him in.” He pauses. “Or maybe the shock of the fire has temporarily addled him.”
The policeman doesn’t say what Grace knows he is thinking, that Gene is dead. Grace is thinking something else: He’s done a runner.
“The idea,” says Gladys, “is to ease off the clutch slowly and give it a little gas, then steadily increase the fuel until the car starts to move. You keep it in that gear—first gear—for probably three or four seconds, and when you get this sound, a higher revving of the motor, you ease into second by depressing the clutch and going straight down with the shift. And so on until third, the ‘hyphen’ over and up, and fourth, down here. It’s an H if you can picture it. You’ll get the hang of it.”
Gladys, in her purple coat and matching hat, offered at breakfast to teach Grace how to drive. Perhaps she’d seen Grace’s restlessness, her desire to get a job and support herself in Gene’s absence. Four women and two children in one house has at times been trying. Grace is quite sure that Gladys and Evelyn are lesbians, though she never had that thought before living with the two women. It’s in the way they brush the backs of their hands together in the kitchen, the tension in the evening, when they have to part in the hallway. Often both Gladys and Evelyn have their hands on the round ball finial at the end of the stairway railing as they delay leaving each other. Grace’s mother must know, too, though she’s never said a word to Grace. Does she often feel like a third wheel?
“So we’re moving,” continues Gladys, “but now, suppose I want to make a right turn? I roll down my window, stick my arm out, bend it at the elbow, and have the hand pointing straight up, like this. That tells any driver behind me that I’m going to slow down for the right turn. So now we down-clutch, from fourth to third—watch the shift—to second and possibly to first, though that’s seldom necessary. You want to give it a try?”
The night of Thanksgiving, Claire tries to climb onto her mother’s lap. Grace lifts her up and senses the fever in the child’s limbs even before she touches her forehead.
“Mother, come feel Claire.”
Her mother, dish towel over her wrist, puts the back of her hand to the child’s forehead. Grace notes her mother’s widening eyes. “She’s spiking a fever,” Marjorie says. “Let’s get her to bed.”
“On the sofa for now,” Grace insists. “I want to be able to watch her.”
Gladys appears with a roll of ice chips wrapped in a dish towel. “Put this on her forehead.”
“Mother, do you have any aspirin?”
“Yes, I might. Upstairs in my handbag.”
“She’s shivering.”
“Cover her with blankets so she can sweat it out.”
Grace thinks the instructions wrong, that her daughter’s temperature should be brought down, but her mother has had so much more experience than she with sick children that she does as her mother suggests. Evelyn agrees. Quilts are found to cover Claire.
Grace sits beside her daughter holding ice chips to her forehead. What infection has Claire picked up and where? She tries to recall all the places she has recently been with her. To the police station to deliver a photograph of Gene her mother had in an album. To Shaw’s for tins of pumpkin pie filling, and then to bring a pie to Matt and Joan.
Claire begins to shake, and Grace instinctively tries to hold her still. She watches with a mother’s horror as her daughter stiffens and goes limp with a froth of white on her lips. “Ohmylordwhatwasthat?”
“She’s had a seizure,” Gladys says. “This is serious.”
With one swift movement, Grace scoops up Claire, praying that the child won’t have another seizure en route. “We’ve got to get her to a doctor.”
With the overhead light on and Claire in a fetal position in the front seat, Grace reads the address of Dr. Franklin’s clinic and her mother’s hastily scrawled instructions as to how to get there. She drives through familiar wasteland and makes the turn onto Route 1. After several minutes, she sees a car coming to an intersection, downshifts, and presses on the brakes. Grace’s car slides into a slow skid. Helpless, Grace puts a hand on Claire, pushing her into the seat, and steers as best she can with her left hand, which is no help at all because the steering doesn’t seem to be working. Black ice. Grace spins across the highway, the other vehicle missing her by inches and honking, either in recognition of Grace’s harrowing near miss, or in anger at the almost accident.
She straightens the car and continues on, never letting the speedometer rise over 15. Because the dark is impenetrable, she has to stop and face the signposts with her headlights. After half an hour, she spots the road she’s looking for and follows that for a mile. She reaches the end and parks close to a Quonset hut, with only one other car in the parking lot. She gathers Claire and runs with her to the front door. After several loud bangs, a tall man in a white coat opens it.