Sweet Lamb of Heaven (63)
It was a quiet and uneventful visit to Kay, who lay, much as you’d expect, motionless on a stainless-steel bed hooked up to machines. We had her to ourselves, as her parents had just gone to get lunch, a nurse told me. Kay’s face was a ghostly shell, but Lena sat beside her bravely and held her hand. She only cried later, as we were walking out. I’d told her Kay took too much medicine by mistake.
The private room didn’t bear much resemblance to the one I’d envisioned under hypnosis—no surprise there—but one thing struck me as we were leaving: a pile of knitting, two needles sticking out of it, on a low shelf on her beside table.
The yarn was blue-gray.
WE HAD a car accident today.
Or almost had an accident, I should say. We avoided an accident, but it was close.
We were maybe half an hour northeast of Boston on the freeway. It was my turn to drive and I was fiddling a bit with the radio when abruptly the car started weaving back and forth across the lanes, fishtailing. My right hand flew back to the wheel as I felt the loss of control in the pit of my stomach and tried to keep the car straight. I almost hit someone on my left but veered away just in time, and then the car almost crashed into a guardrail on our right.
In the end we veered away from that too, luckily, and somehow I steered us onto the first off-ramp, pulling over onto a wide shoulder without any more near-collisions.
It happened too fast for Lena—startled out of a nap by the car’s fishtailing motion—even to get frightened. When I’d pulled up the emergency brake I turned to look at her; she smiled at me uncertainly and rubbed her eyes.
Will and I got out and walked around the car: all four of the tires were flat.
The three of us rode in the tow truck to the car-repair place, where we hung around in a brown-tiled lounge area that smelled of disinfectant while they sprayed foam on the tires, performed some other tests. We were sure I’d driven over a spilled cargo of nails or other sharp objects—what else could have caused four same-time flats?—but finally they seemed to have exhausted their diagnostic tools.
Never seen anything like it, they said. There were no holes or slits, no punctures at all: the tires were perfectly good except for the fact that the treads on the rear ones were a bit too worn for comfort.
They wanted to sell us two new tires.
“Maybe these mechanics are in league with Ned too,” I said nervously. Lena was feeding coins into a vending machine, out of earshot, and I watched her as I spoke.
“I thought I was the paranoid one,” said Will. “Still. Maybe we should replace all four tires, huh?”
“I don’t want to be chickenshit,” I said. “But OK.”
Will drove after that while I tried to play a word game with Lena, thinking of animals whose names started with the last letter of the animal before. But she soon tired of it and asked to use my tablet for a game, making hairstyles on cartoon people whose faces looked like square potatoes.
When we got to his house I was relieved. I’d sat in the passenger seat with the muscles in my stomach clenched—sat forward the whole way, strained, unable to relax enough to lean back in the seat. The guy who’d installed the alarm system was waiting for us, his van idling in the driveway behind Will’s truck, now covered in drifts of hardened snow. Will warned me as we were driving into town, so I wouldn’t take fright, I guess—that’s what I’ve come to, apparently. I have to be warned about the presence of men in vans.
We all went up to the door, rubbing our gloved hands together in the cold, the installer chugging along beside us, a drunk-nosed man with a beard. He let us in and walked us through the system, whose electronic display looked out of place amid the weathered wood trim and old furniture. Lena was puzzled by the setup, asking why we needed to touch a display to come in. We hadn’t needed to before.
“It’s like Doug,” said Will. “Solly’s apartment building has a doorman to watch over it, right? But we don’t have Doug in my house so we’re using this little guy right here.” He rested his hand on the console.
She’d loved Doorman Doug, of course, who brought her puzzle books that featured the Mario Brothers, with a few of their yellowing pages scrawled over long ago by his now-teenage sons. Lena did not prefer the Mario Brothers. They were strangers to her.
But she liked Will’s explanation and named the alarm console New Doug.
ON OUR FOURTH afternoon back in Maine, while Will was off at the library, Lena wanted a nap; I was tired too so I lay down beside her on the double bed in Will’s guest room, which he’d given her for our time here. The walls, covered in antique wallpaper of faded but regal-looking lions, were festooned with her taped-up decorations, drawings she’d done of fairies and princesses, photos of Kay, Faneesha, Solly, herself standing with both Lindas beside her snow effigy, its head already half-melted.
I dozed off not long after she did and was only woken by a wrong smell. It was familiar, but still I took a minute to put a name to it: smoke. And it was too warm in the room, I realized—sweat had beaded on my forehead and under my arms.
Had I left something on the stove, maybe a kettle? I left Lena sleeping and started down the stairs.
But there was smoke at the bottom, enough of it to hide the view below, and a block of hot air hit me. I turned around again to get Lena—and where was my phone? Downstairs, damn it, somewhere past the smoke, I’d left it charging down there. Will’s landline was on the first floor too.