much. That was what made the place where the ducks were so nice—it was a wet, green place.
“What did you say, honey?” Mommy’s face was bending down over him.
“Thirsty,” he said in a frog’s croak. “I’m so thirsty, Mommy.” He remembered that he used to say “firsty” instead of “thirsty.” But some of the kids at daycamp had laughed at him and called him a baby, the same way they laughed at Randy Hofnager for saying “brefkust” when he meant “breakfast.” So he began to say it right, scolding himself fiercely inside whenever he forgot.
“Yes, I know. Mommy’s thirsty too.”
“I bet there’s water in the house.”
“Honey, we can’t go into the house. Not just yet. The bad dog’s in front of the car.”
“Where?” Tad got up on his knees and was surprised at the lightness that ran lazily through his head, like a slow-breaking wave. He put a hand on the dashboard to support himself, and the hand seemed on the end of an arm that was a mile long. “I don’t see him.” Even his voice was distant, echoey.
“Sit back down, Tad. You’re . . .”
She was still talking, and he could feel her sitting him back into the seat, but it was all distant. The words were coming to him over a long gray distance; it was foggy between him and her, as it had been foggy this morning . . . or yesterday morning . . . or on whatever morning it had been when his daddy left to go on his trip. But there was a bright place up ahead, so he left his mother to go to it. It was the duck place. Ducks and a pool and lilypads. Mommy’s voice became a faraway drone. Her beautiful face, so large, always there, so calm, so like the moon that sometimes looked in his window when he awoke late at night having to go peepee . . . that face became gray and lost definition. It melted into the gray mist. Her voice became the lazy sound of bees which were far too nice to sting, and lapping water.
Tad played with the ducks.
Donna dozed off, and when she woke up again all the shadows had blended with one another and the last of the light in the Camber driveway was the color of ashes. It was dusk. Somehow it had gotten around to dusk again and they were—unbelievably—still here. The sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked to her like a basketball that had been dipped in blood. She moved her tongue around in her mouth. Saliva that had clotted into a thick gum broke apart reluctantly and became more or less ordinary spit again. Her throat felt like flannel. She thought how wonderful it would be to lie under the garden faucet at home, turn the spigot on full, open her mouth, and just let the icy water cascade in. The image was powerful enough to make her shiver and break out in a skitter of gooseflesh, powerful enough to make her head ache.
Was the dog still in front of the car?
She looked, but of course there was no real way of telling. All she could see for sure was that it wasn’t in front of the barn.
She tapped the horn, but it only produced a rusty hoot and nothing changed. He could be anywhere. She ran her finger along the silver crack in her window and wondered what would happen if the dog hit the glass a few more times. Could it break through? She wouldn’t have believed so twenty-four hours before, but now she wasn’t so sure.
She looked at the door leading to Cambers’ porch again. It seemed farther away than it had before. That made her think of a concept they had discussed in a college psychology course. Idée fixe, the instructor, a prissy little man with a toothbrush mustache, had called it. If you get on a down escalator that isn’t moving, you’ll suddenly find it very hard to walk. That had amused her so much that she had eventually found a down escalator in Bloomingdale’s that was marked OUT OF ORDER and had walked down it. She had found to her further amusement that the prissy little associate professor was right—your legs just didn’t want to move. That had led her to try and imagine what would happen to your head if the stairs in your house suddenly started to move as you were walking down them.