side of her slacks. Then she raised this hand toward him, as if to touch him. “Gordon, I’m so sorry. It’s so awful . . .”
But he’d turned back to the TV.
It was a series of clips from the scene: a shot of the river from above, from a bridge maybe, a shot of the broken ice, beams of light crossing like swords over the ragged hole. A woman’s voice reporting from off camera: “As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time from law enforcement.” A shot of the car: a small SUV being reeled up the bank as if by an off-screen fisherman, the car coming along on its back, wheels up. One girl in the hospital up in Rochester, the other still missing. He watched until the report ended and a commercial replaced it.
Around the edges of the screen the room had gone all black. The sound he heard was like water rushing through copper pipes, a pressure like small hammers beating on the eyeballs. It was the old blackness, the old rage, and in the center of the blackness was an image of himself, on his knees as he so often was but now like a man at prayer, the big Stillson wrench raised two-handed, raised high, and swung down on the offered skull. The cracking, crushing blow. No more thoughts or feelings or memories forever, just the pink wet stew of bone and brains.
Slowly, the blackness receded, his heart pounding on but less wildly. His fists at his sides opening again.
Her hand was on his arm—for how long?
He raised his hand so that hers fell away, and looked at his watch.
“One hour,” he said.
Eileen Lindeman standing close, searching his face. “One hour—?”
“Downstairs. One hour.”
She was trying to hold his eyes but he wouldn’t. Gordon looking instead at the room beyond her, the big bed, neatly made in white with white pillows at its head. A bed like any bed. Or a staging of a bed, with matching furnishings, as in a department store.
“Of course,” she said, “of course.” And she led him out of the bedroom so she could find her purse and pay him what she owed him.
3
The nose of the car drops over the edge of the bank and the world pitches, and their own weight rolls forward through their bodies as at the top of a roller coaster just before the drop—the deep human fear of falling, the plunging heart, and there’s no stopping it and no getting out and nothing to do but hold on. And down they go, fast and easy in the snow, toboggan-smooth, hand in hand, their grips so tight, the grips of girls much younger, girls who will not be separated, their faces forward, watching the surface of the river, the black glistening ice as it rushes up toward them, larger and larger, until there’s nothing in the windshield but the ice, dark and wide as an ocean and they are going to it, they are going to strike it nose-first with the car and they can imagine that, the sudden ending of forward motion as the car meets the plane of the ice, but after that they cannot imagine, they have never been here before and there is no way to know what will happen next except to go through it, and this is the most terrifying thing: the understanding, within those few plunging seconds, that there is no time to figure it out, to prepare—it is here, and the physics that rule the world cannot be altered, and time cannot be stopped, and no one can be called upon to help them, and they are all alone in the instant of experience and the car will strike the frozen river and that is that.
But then, incredibly—it doesn’t. At the last moment the bank levels out, or the snow grows more deep, or some other variable they cannot account for lifts the nose of the car, and the impact is jarring but brief, and all at once the car sits upright on its wheels and they are spinning out onto the ice as they’d spun on the sleety road, the world once again turning round and round, headlights sweeping the perimeter like a haywire lighthouse, the beams selecting out of the darkness trees and bridge and bank and trees and bridge and bank, the bank of their descent farther away with each turn, their