Thirst (3 page)

“Six days?” he said.

“Yup. I was cooking spaghetti and meatballs on the grill. That was in a snowstorm.”

“The repair crews better get here soon,” he said.

“At least they got good weather to work in.”

Even in the dark, Eddie smiled to be neighborly. He put the beer to his mouth and drank off about half of it in a gulp. His
knee ached in a serious way, but he didn’t care about it then. There was a drunkenness to the way the night had come down so thick and black. The air swirled above them loosely on a breeze. Eddie felt his mind begin to pitch. He sat down on the grass.

“I had to run home,” he told Patty. He stretched himself out and the top of his head touched the fence. He kept his knee bent and it felt better.

“You okay down there?” Patty asked.

“Yeah. How about Mike Jr.? He get home from daycare?”

“Wore himself out riding his bike,” she said.

“No training wheels?”

“Not since he took them off last weekend.”

“That’s good.” Eddie looked at the sky. “He’s a little athlete.” He got the sense the stars were swirling toward a single point, as if going down a drain—that even the air resting on his face was pulling in that direction. “A good athlete can make friends for life,” he said.

Patty was silent, as if contemplating the idea of her son in the future.

“Hey,” she said after a moment, “make sure not to flush.”

Eddie’s imagination had leaked into the starlight. It was only he who’d been contemplating Mike Jr. all grown up; Patty was thinking about the water in his toilets.

“Was the water out in oh-eight, too?” he asked.

“The water, nah. Must be something else. They’ll send people for it.”

“The water company knows when they have problems with the pipes,” Eddie said. “They have sensors that can tell when one’s about to break.”

“Yeah, I heard of that.”

“It has to be something with one of those big water mains. I saw on the news that they’re over seventy years old. There’s only so much patching up the county can do.”

He stopped to listen to the air. There was no sound of the peepers in the trees. Just a thrum in his ears.

“You have enough to drink in there?” he said.

“Sure. I have a gallon of milk I just bought … I’ve got prune juice, not that anyone but me would drink it. I’ve got a little wine spritzer in case me and Mike Sr. feel like celebrating.”

Eddie stared up at the sky.

“Poor Mike Sr.,” she said. “He’s got bladder problems. Probably ready to piss himself by now. Oh, well. He’ll have to use a Big Gulp cup.”

Eddie didn’t want to think of Laura peeing into a Big Gulp cup. Wherever she was stuck, it was closer to the city—farther south than he had been, running through that suburban no-man’s-land—and she could at least leave her car and get to a restaurant or grocery store or one of the gas stations.

He tried to think of other things instead.

In college, he’d taken an English seminar. Dammit, if he could only remember one thing, he’d remember that line from Dickens. It was about Wenman or something.
Wemmick.

That was the character’s name.

The professor had been reading passages. He could still see him standing on the stage of the lecture hall. Eddie had been up high in the seats, alone.

“Wemmick,” the professor had read, “had such a slit for a mouth that he didn’t so much
eat
his food as
post it
.” He’d paused
after that and let the hall fill with shuffling. Fat and gray-bearded, the professor had been, with a pleased expression on his face. “The magic of literary description,” he’d said. “Close your eyes.” And Eddie had closed them. “Now. Picture Wemmick. Do you see him?” Eyes closed, Eddie had nodded. He had seen the man.

“What color shirt is he wearing?” the professor trumpeted. “Does he have on pants? How thick is his hair?”

Eddie hadn’t been able to answer. Each attribute he’d given—a red sweater, for instance, or a shining, bald head—was false; it was not Wemmick. In his mind, Wemmick’s shirt was both there and not there. Wemmick’s entire body—even his mouth, which could not have possibly looked like a post office slot—existed without dimension.

When he pictured Laura stuck out there in traffic, the lanes had no depth, no beginning or end. The cars around her were both there and not there—a catastrophe and nothing.

He went inside and lay down on the bed. His clock radio had a battery backup and was illuminated to 9:33. The numbers cast the room in dull blue. When he closed his eyes, he could see the boy in the woods so distinctly that he snapped them back open. It took Eddie a moment to recognize the room. The clock read 1:07.

“Laura?” he called.

He ran a palm over the sheet next to him and felt her absence there.

In the kitchen, he saw through the window that there were no cars in his driveway and only Patty’s car next door. He tried the sink again, and again there was nothing. He sipped from the apple juice in the fridge and allowed his mind to continue buzzing.

His neck was stiff, and he rubbed his thumb into it. Then he went outside into the warm night. She’d have come around from the east on the Beltway, up six miles on 295 from her office in the city. She’d have been on her way out around the same time he’d left his car.

He walked back onto the street, the way he’d come through the neighborhood earlier. Someone had started a fire in a little pit and sparks popped in the air. As he got closer, he heard the murmur of voices. One of them laughed, and others joined in. They had a grill going. He could smell the meat. They were making burgers past one in the morning.

He did not want to be called over. He did not want to be stopped and asked to have a beer with these people. He jogged up the street, passing by their yard on the opposite sidewalk, and didn’t turn his head to look at them.

At the dead stoplight, he went right, back onto Route 29. It was called Colesville Road here, and Eddie crossed over to walk on the grassy median, which had been mown close to the ground. The road was empty, but up ahead was the intersection with University Avenue, and he could see where cars had come in on the eastbound lanes and were stopped.

There were restaurants ahead: a burrito place and a Peruvian chicken shack. A gourmet pastry shop. He’d bought Laura’s birthday cake there last winter. People stood in front of the chicken shack speaking Spanish. Peruvian chicken, but all the Spanish speakers here were from El Salvador. The
Post
had done a piece on how terrible the gang violence was down there. If you had a certain kind of tattoo, you could never go back.

He jogged left at the intersection for University. Cars were parked three lanes across going toward the ramp for the Beltway and as far back as he could see down the eastbound lanes. In the other direction—the direction Laura would be coming home—the lanes were empty. The other accidents, wherever they were, must have cut off the exits leaving the Beltway.

The median ended and there was no sidewalk. He could have moved much more easily up the deserted westbound lanes, but their emptiness was like a prohibition keeping him away.

He jogged between the cars. Though he knew that none of them could have been Laura’s, and that it would only make him crazy to look inside their windows, he looked inside them anyway. Seats had been reclined all the way back, and people were sleeping or at least closing their eyes. Others came out from the woods and opened their doors, illuminating interiors. Farther up, people were sitting on their hoods and whispering like stargazers.

There was a woman standing up ahead, leaning against her side mirror. She wore a white dress. Maybe that’s why he ran to her—glowing in the dark the way she was.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Stretching my legs.”

Eddie was shocked by her voice—that she’d responded to him at all, that she wasn’t an illusion.

“What
can
we do?” she said as Eddie stared at her. “Unless you got news, you can go back to your friends.” She jutted her chin to a car somewhere behind him.

“I’m not here with my friends,” Eddie said. “I’m new.”

“
New
? I swear to God, this is the worst emergency I’ve ever been in.”

“I mean, I just got here.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve been here all night.” When she looked at him, her face softened, as if she felt she’d been unfair. “A lady up there has sodas in her trunk,” she said, “but they’re probably gone by now.”

“What’s happening?”

“Beltway’s jammed. This is all jammed. I haven’t seen one cop the whole time. I heard sirens about three hours ago, but that’s all.”

“People are just sleeping in their cars?”

“What are they gonna do? Walk home? We got trees right here. You don’t have toilet paper, do you? If you got toilet paper, you’ll be a hero.”

“No,” Eddie said.

“A few of these idiots were playing their radios before. Probably drained the batteries.”

“How will you get home?”

“Same way as you. Wait it out. You think they’re gonna fire everyone who doesn’t make it to work in the morning? I’d like to see them try.”

Eddie walked ahead. A few boys were kicking a soccer ball in the pull-off. They were good players, juggling it on their feet before passing. Someone’s headlights were lighting them up and dust swirled in a dramatic way.

The on-ramp was only one exit away, and when he came to it, cars had filled it up two across. A truck had run into the wall at an angle, and in the space between the wall and the truck’s tailgate, the nose of an Audi had shoved in between. Eddie
turned sideways and had to brush against the grit on the door to get past. No one was inside any of the cars on the ramp. It rose and turned sharply, and beneath him, Eddie could see a long stretch of the Beltway. Traffic stood still in both directions, and dome lights blinked on and off as doors opened and closed. Laura drove a blue Civic, but it was impossible to tell what color was which from where he stood. He knew its shape—compact, wedgelike, too sporty for her. They’d bought it used from a lot.

He walked down the ramp as it twisted and leveled off again with the Beltway, and crossed the median into the westbound lanes where Laura would be coming from. People were walking through the cars—maybe walking home into the city. It would take them all night from here. He looked for the Civic. There were a few he passed, and he looked inside them, but they weren’t hers. People pushed by him in the space between driver’s-side and passenger doors. A father held his child at his chest. Eddie thought about calling Laura’s name, but no one else was talking. The strange silence acted on him like a rule. It made him feel deaf. He began looking into the windows of all the small cars he passed.

He walked for half an hour, maybe more. Suddenly, he felt the pavement shiver beneath him, and then the breath of a runner’s body so close that he stumbled, catching himself against the hood of a car. The heels of his hands made a muted
pock.
A second and a third person ran by. He looked at the backs of their heads. Laura had jet-black hair, and so he looked for heads that were only barely visible in the darkness.

The highway rose in the distance, and headlights shone at its apex. As he approached, he saw a clog of people standing
there, the headlights crisscrossing to illuminate them. Even in the relative calm of where he stood, the crowd charged the air with current. It was like walking toward an electrical storm. Eddie thought to turn around, but didn’t.

He walked. The group seemed to be standing together just to keep from falling over—their limbs hanging dopily with fatigue.

Somewhere down the hill behind him, a door slammed. The sound was like a bag popping in the night. Eddie imagined a boy grinning and holding the blown-out plastic. Another pop and another. The bleating of interior alarms—keys still in ignitions. Someone shouted, but Eddie couldn’t make out the words. Closer, doors opened with a rhythmic clicking. He turned to look down the hill behind him where car interiors illuminated and extinguished like fireflies, more and more of them in the night.

People were coming up behind him—jostling him into the crowd ahead. He was caught in the center lane and had to shoulder his way through the bodies to get to the side of the road, where a woman was encircled. She was sitting on a bucket. A man was grabbing at the long bottle of water she held, but she hung on with both hands.

“That wasn’t even
two
!” the man yelled.

The woman yanked and rose a little off the bucket. She swayed back and forth.

Someone in the crowd was responding to a question, or simply narrating the event. “She wants to charge five dollars for three sips,” he said.

“Just give it to him,” came a voice. “He’s thirsty. He’s got a kid.”

“
I’m
thirsty.”

The woman didn’t respond. The skin around her eyes and nose looked like old newspaper. She gripped her lips against her teeth and tugged on the bottle. The man grabbed her by the arm and pulled her off the bucket, and she landed on the road. She wasn’t there for more than a second before Eddie’s view was obstructed by bodies lunging for the bottle, and she was lost in them.

“Laura!” he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted into the riot. “Laura Gardner!

Glass broke behind him and someone yelled, “He’s got a hammer
.
” Then a hand was on his shoulder, pressing him forward, and a flash of pain went off inside his knee where it banged into a fender. He grabbed at the person behind him, but whoever it was had disappeared into the crowd.

The Beltway became a bridge up ahead, and he could see the dark well of space that opened up beside it, how the trees there were skeletal and sloped down into the chasm. He pushed himself to the edge of the highway, lifting his leg up and over the guardrail. On the other side, the woods were quiet. The noise of people cramming over the bridge was already distant.

He went into the trees and sat in the dirt. Branches broke behind him and there were footsteps in the leaves. He crawled to where the land dipped, and as he got closer to the edge, he looked into the sky and saw the stars. The trees overhead were leafless.