Unbury Carol(31)

And yet Dwight’s labored breathing was no match for the hoarse wheezing she heard inside the coma.

“You had to tell James Moxie? What’d you tell him for? Attention? Were you flirting? Did you want him to feel bad for you?”

His words pelleted the coma like globs of black tar. Angry rain in Howltown.

“Hell’s heaven, Carol.” Pacing. Pacing. Breathing hard. “He’s on his way here! An outlaw! Hell’s heaven, Carol. What can I do? What should I do?”

Even now Dwight was asking for her help.

Even in his plan to murder her, Carol had to do the dying first.

Again she felt the blue electricity through her nerves: anger, terror, shock, and a leviathan sadness she hadn’t imagined possible. Dwight had always argued that Carol went under following stressful events; was it possible that now, given what she was forced to accept, this betrayal, that she would fall farther, deeper than she’d ever been before?

How long would Carol stay under this time?

No!

She screamed the word without parting her lips, but the two letters were swallowed fast by the impenetrable darkness that propelled her.

And yet, no was certainly better than yes.

Oh, to open her eyes right now.

Right now!

You say it takes two to four days, John Bowie once said. That means some falls are twice as long as others. That means you’re not going to the same place every time. Does this mean something? Is there a finish line, a landing, after all?

Carol couldn’t help but imagine him as she’d last seen him, barefoot and unboxed at the bottom of a grave. Yet this dead version of John still sat in that wicker chair on the Everses’ front porch, folded in on himself, running a coin along the knuckles of his hand as he thought of ways to help her.

“He’s coming,” Dwight said, and his voice was much closer now, the syllables grotesque. “Will he kill me? Will he? Oh, Carol.” Closer yet. As if he was kneeling beside her. Carol heard tears in his voice. “Please don’t let him kill me. Please don’t. Carol!” She heard a flat dull thud and hoped he’d hit the slab and not her defenseless body. Then Dwight started laughing. And the sound of it, in the coma, was the sound of a dying hyena, an animal left to starve. “I’ve hired someone, Carol. Yes. I’ve hired someone to stop him from coming.”

More of the blue electricity that she only felt but could not see. The flaming nerves that did nothing to illuminate the darkness she fell through.

Moxie is going to get killed, she thought. Then, as if she had to think it whether or not she wanted to: For you.

John Bowie spoke up again, his dead throat spouting philosophy still.

I’m close, he’d once said, with a glass of whiskey in one hand, a playing card in the other. There’s a solution to this and I’m close to figuring it out.

But he never did figure it out. Not exactly. And Carol couldn’t fault him.

Even Hattie couldn’t help.

What if I actually dropped you from a great height as you’re falling…a safety net far below. Maybe the two falls would somehow cancel each other out…

So many wild theories. So many times Carol’s mother and her best friend tried to help.

Help! Carol tried to yell, but she knew that any help would have to come from within the coma. Any help would have to come from herself.

As Dwight paced, he continued to speak, revealing everything. Carol understood that, if she were to wake, if she were to open her eyes right now, Dwight would have no choice but to kill her with his own hands. As his shoes kept anxious rhythm on the storm room floor, Carol could hear Hattie at work, too. Her mother’s perpetual tinkering. The time she built the back-mattress so that Carol would never fall flat to the floor. The time she constructed the helmet out of birch. To the rain of her husband’s selfish tears, Carol heard Hattie working.

Then, as Dwight inhaled and exhaled the fear of an outlaw on his way, John spoke up as he did the day he thought he figured it out.

He’d sat up fast in the wicker chair and snapped his fingers.

Hey, hey, he said. If you feel the wind against your face, it’s obviously blowing…up. And yet…you’re falling…down. There was a sparkle in his beautiful eyes that day, magnified by his glasses. Might this mean you’re not moving at all? Might you be…sitting still? And if so…doesn’t that sound more manageable? A falling woman is in a much worse predicament than one sitting still. Think about it, Carol. What can you do in there?

Carol remembered how they walked through the gardens and talked about that until the sun rose above Harrows. She remembered, too, how they reached no conclusion, how John felt defeated for having, as he said, come so close to figuring it out.

But now, as Dwight continued to pace, as deep-blue volts continued to course through her blood and body, Carol thought maybe she and John had figured it out after all.

What can a woman do who is stuck, facedown, neither falling nor rising after all?

Roll over, Carol thought. Then, incredibly, she laughed. Despite the horrors, the betrayal, the knowledge of a heinous husband and a former lover at a disadvantage, Moxie, not knowing he was being tracked, Carol found space enough to laugh.

Roll over.

Of all the words she and John Bowie exchanged, never had they mentioned these two.

Her brief laughter was condors taking flight, vanishing into the folds of Howltown, where, Carol knew, they would find no food and starve.