As Good As Gone (9781616206000) (26 page)

Then toward her house she runs, and the motion reminds her exactly of another time when she lifted her legs and pumped her arms with the same frustrating feeling of not being able to move fast enough. She had been on playground duty during the lunch hour when she looked out toward the swings and jungle gym just in time to see a little girl topple backward from the top of the slide. Beverly raced across the playground to the child, although she knew—she
knew
—the girl could not have survived the fall (but she did, and with no injury worse than a broken ankle). Beverly runs now with the same certainty—that someone's life is in jeopardy. She just isn't sure whose.

Her keys are not hanging on the hook next to the door leading to the garage, and that can only mean that Adam has once again taken her car. Nevertheless, she jerks open the door to verify that her car is gone. And it is. The garage is empty.

Adam's Chevrolet is parked at the curb, but that probably won't help her—even if she could find his keys, she'd no doubt be getting behind the wheel of a car with an empty gas tank, the usual reason for him to take her car.

Beverly stands in her kitchen with her palms to her temples, wishing that by pressing hard on the outside of her head she could stop the whirl of thoughts on the inside. Should she call the police, give them a description of Calvin Sidey and his truck, and say that he must be stopped and saved from himself? Should she phone Brenda Cady and warn her to leave her house immediately, that she and her boyfriend and possibly even her children are in imminent danger? Should Beverly call Gladstone's one taxi and have him take her to Brenda Cady's address, hoping that whatever Calvin has in mind to do he might talk before doing it? The absurdity of that thought propels Beverly into action.

She hurries down the stairs to the basement, and this time the sight of the mess Adam lives in does not merely irritate her; it fills her with despair. How can she hope to find car keys among the dirty clothes, scattered books and papers, twisted sheets and bedclothes? She can't help but compare this scene with the spartan order of Calvin's makeshift basement bedroom.

Thoughts like this, to say nothing of a mother's disappointment with her son, are, however, a luxury she can't afford, not now. She's on her way to search through the pockets of a pair of jeans Adam has worn recently when her eye falls on the only neatness in the room—a stack of paper beside the typewriter. This must be Adam's novel. But more important is the set of keys serving as a paperweight for the manuscript pages.

Beverly is up the stairs and heading for Adam's car when she realizes that she read more than the words
Chapter One.
Embedded in her consciousness is Adam's first sentence: “The stranger rode into town with a grudge and a gun, a Colt .44 with a bullet in every chamber.” She can't criticize her son for taking her car, but she's exasperated with his prose. You don't need
gun
and
Colt .44
, do you? And
a bullet in every chamber
—wouldn't that be understood? Or is he trying for some special emphasis? The economy and alliteration of
grudge
and
gun
is good though, she has to admit.

Adam has left the car parked in the sun, and the interior is so hot Beverly can only touch the steering wheel with her fingertips. She starts the car, and just as she suspected and feared, the needle is on
E
. The Texaco station is on the way to Brenda Cady's. If she gets that far without running out of gas, she can stop and ask for a dollar's worth of gas and hope those extra minutes won't mean the difference between life and death.

THIRTY

While the minutes and hours creep along, and Marjorie imagines where Bill might be along the road to Gladstone, she keeps berating herself for not sending him on his way with a very specific instruction. She doubts that her husband will know to do this on his own, and she's certain that her father-­in-­law will not. As eager as Bill was to get going, she should have detained him for a moment longer and said, Hold her. When you see Ann, before you say a word to her, before you ask her what happened or how she's doing,
hold her tight.
You might look at her and see a woman, but she's still girl enough to need her father's arms around her . . . almost as much as she needs her mother's.

And then Marjorie has to face a hard truth and a harder admonishment: If she had not chosen this operation—yes, chosen, she chose it—she would have been there to comfort her daughter herself. Although Ann is strong enough, healthy enough, to recover from her injuries and any fright she might have received, she'll still want, though she might not consciously know of this desire, to have her mother at her bedside. God knows, there were times in the past when Marjorie needed hers, but that was not to be. Indeed, Marjorie couldn't even reveal to her mother how anguished she, Marjorie, was. When Tully died, Marjorie's mother was relieved, even if she didn't say this out loud; the worst day of Marjorie's life was an occasion for quiet rejoicing for her mother and father, and Marjorie knew it. The thought that Mrs. Randolph might have put her arms around her daughter and tried to console her in her grief would be laughable if it weren't so sad.

Visiting hours arrive, and Carole, almost as though she knows her sister needs to be distracted from her worry and guilt, enters Marjorie's room. Carole is carrying a paper bag that she sets down on the nightstand. Marjorie asked Carole for cigarettes and lip balm, but the bag obviously holds something else.

Carole reaches carefully inside and lifts out first one then another tall Dixie cup. Carole's fingers leave prints in the frost that coats the waxy containers.

“Milk shakes!” Carole announces in a triumphant whisper. “From Dunn's Dairy—they have the best ice cream in Missoula. I thought you deserved something extra special for all you've been through.”

She unwraps a straw and sticks it in one of the shakes and hands it to Marjorie. “They're both chocolate. And I practically broke the sound barrier driving here, so they'd still be nice and thick.”

Marjorie takes the cup, although she has no particular interest in or appetite for a milk shake. But this is typical of Carole, who often hides her own enthusiasms by pretending they belong to others. When Marjorie and Bill drove up to Carole and Milo's, Marjorie noticed that the house had recently been painted a pale lavender. But as hideous as the color was, Marjorie recognized it as a shade Carole had been fond of since childhood. Yet the first thing Carole said when she greeted Bill and Marjorie was, “Well, what do you think of the color? I wasn't sure, but Milo insisted.” And even more than the color of lilacs, Carole loves ice cream in any of its forms.

Marjorie draws on her straw, but the first sensation of the cold, creamy paste hitting the roof of her mouth is too much, and she has to put her cup down.

“You don't like it?” Carole asks. She has already taken the lid off her cup.

“It's delicious,” Marjorie says, but leaves her milk shake on the tray.

The sisters do not converse while Carole works expertly on her milk shake, using her straw like a spoon and lifting up one dripping, carefully balanced mouthful after another. Finally, the cold must get to her as well, and she slows down. “You know what I was remembering on my way over here today?”

Marjorie shakes her head, a maneuver she performs with caution.

“I was thinking about Grandpa's funeral in North Dakota and how we got such a late start coming back.”

“Mm-­mh. What about it?” She doesn't mean to sound brusque, but she wishes Carole would leave. If Marjorie confesses that she's having difficulty concentrating on anything but Ann's accident and Bill's journey back to Gladstone, Carole will simply offer the advice that Marjorie won't be able to take: Just think about something else.

“Do you remember where we stopped to eat?” She doesn't wait for Marjorie's answer. “It was at a supper club just outside that town—what was it? Valley City? The restaurant was up on a hill, I remember, and it was the first time in my life I ate prime rib.”

Yes, that's her sister all right, thinks Marjorie. Of all the firsts that can be experienced in a life, how many people recall the first time they ate a particular cut of beef?

“What do you think was going on with Mom and Dad on that trip?” Carole asks. “I mean, we
never
stopped for a meal when we traveled. It was always a packed lunch of an apple and summer sausage sandwiches. I bet Dad paid more for our supper that night than he paid for any meal in his life. Do you think he inherited something? Could we have been celebrating that night?”

“I'd find it hard to believe that Grandpa died with much of anything to his name,” Marjorie says. “They sold the farm years before and were living in that dingy little apartment.”

“I suppose. But do you remember anything about Mom and Dad that night? How they were acting? If they said something about the occasion?”

Marjorie does have a memory of that night, but it has nothing to do with her parents or their demeanor . . . There was a bar connected to the dining area, and to get to the restroom you had to pass through the bar's smoke and undergo the scrutiny of a group of rowdy businessmen. When Marjorie walked past them the first time, they fell silent, and Marjorie felt their eyes on her. She was only sixteen, but she had grown accustomed to the way men stared at her. To the funeral she had worn a dress handed down from a cousin, and though it was navy blue and buttoned to the throat, Marjorie remembers that it felt tight. On her way back from the restroom, she heard one of the men say, “Slow down, miss. Stay a while.” She kept walking, and another man made a clicking noise with his tongue. She was not offended, but neither was she flattered, and not until she was back at the table, back in the company of Carole and her father and mother did it occur to Marjorie that those men had not known she was with her family. Neither did they know her age or that the expression on her face was the lingering remnant of a sulk she had been in since they left Gladstone.

Marjorie was in love with Tully Heckaman, and she hadn't wanted to leave him, not even for a couple days, not even for her grandfather's funeral. Neither her parents nor Carole knew yet that she had been dating Tully, much less that only a few days earlier she had let him touch her bare breasts—her own “first” to remember. They certainly couldn't know that just thinking about his touch was almost enough to bring back the sensation, a tingling Marjorie likened to the sun's heat pooling on her bare skin. Oh, so much of her life then was secret and unknown—not only to strangers, like those men in the bar, but even to the people closest to her, her family seated around the table.

“To tell you the truth,” Marjorie says to her sister, “I don't remember that night at all. I mean, I know we went to the funeral. I know that as a fact, but there's nothing to go with it. It's like the images, whatever they were, have been snipped out of my head.”

Carole stops slurping her milk shake, and worry replaces her look of pleasure.

“The doctor said it could happen,” Marjorie explains. “That I might have some memory loss as a result of the, you know, the surgery.”

She's not lying. Memory loss is one of the side effects, whether permanent or temporary, that Dr. Carlson told her she might undergo. And though Marjorie's memories are intact, as far as she can tell, she has decided—and the decision is fresher than her milk shake—that she'll use the doctor's words to her advantage. If Marjorie is ever questioned about something in the past that she doesn't wish to share—her relationship with Tully Heckaman, for example—she will claim that she doesn't remember what her interrogator, whether it's Carole or Bill or one of her children or a complete stranger, is asking about. A simple shrug might allow her not only to hoard her history but also to keep a part of her secret self inviolable.

“And that's happened?” Carole asks, continuing to look at her sister with concern. “You've lost your memory?”

Marjorie has done too good a job with her deception. Now she feels sorry for Carole and has to console her. “Well, not
all
my memories.”

“What don't you remember?”

Before Marjorie can answer, Carole realizes the absurdity of her question. “Of course—you can't remember what you can't remember!”

At that, they both laugh, and for a moment Marjorie
does
forget. But only for a moment. In the next instant, Marjorie's concern about Ann returns, hitting her as suddenly as an ice cream headache.

THE HIGHWAY DROPS DOWN
out of the hill country. The land flattens. The pines give way to a few scattered stands of hardwoods, but soon they vanish too. Now there's nothing but mile after mile of grassland—bluestem, bluejoint, blue grama, so-­called—yet the only blue available to sight is the sky's, a pure and topless blue that seems to rise all the way to God.

On the wall of his office, Bill Sidey has a calendar given to him by his insurance agent, and every month features a different photograph of the Montana landscape. As he speeds toward Gladstone, Bill thinks of how false is the picture that depicts a scene similar to the one he's driving through.

The photograph is contained, limited, but if this landscape conveys anything at all it is boundlessness. And while a picture can give the impression of space, it can't communicate what time means to this country. You can walk, run, ride, drive, even fly over this region, and your journey will seem to go on and on and on, world without end.

Ahead, on a hill, and not a hill really but only a little lift in the land, as if the earth drew a breath and swelled, there's a ranch. From down here on the highway the ranch house and outbuildings look like parts from a children's game, pieces to be moved around a board, though Bill knows it's quite possible the actual structures have hunkered on that hilltop for a hundred years, and the inhabitants have watched other generations arrive and depart, with only failure to separate their coming from their going. Or maybe the ranch has only been there a few years, the spot chosen for no reason so much as its distance from other human beings.

No matter how long they've been there, the people who live out here believe that whatever life demands of them they can meet it on their own. And perhaps they can. But Bill Sidey knows he's not cut from that cloth. The infinite sky that inspires certainty in some people breeds doubt in him, and he's never been sure what the truth of human endeavor is: Are we meant to do it on our own or with the help of others? He wishes he could arrive at an answer before he enters the Gladstone city limits.