bodies thrown with such turning and their stomachs rolling. When the car at last comes to rest, their minds lag behind and the world keeps spinning, as in childhood games of dizziness, until finally even that illusion ends and they are still. They are dead-still in the middle of the river, and everything is silent and dark and they are OK, they are all right.
Still holding hands. Holding their breaths. Hearts whopping in their chests. Finally they breathe—Holy shit, holy shit—and they see the look on each other’s face and they laugh then, breathily, helplessly, the laugh of fright and relief. The laugh of love for each other and for being alive!
Now what? one says, and the other says, Now we get out and walk back. We go back exactly the way the car came and we—
It’s a sound that stops her, a sound they feel as much as hear—a great deep pop in the floor of the world. A sound to stop the heart and freeze it all the way through. The great pop is followed by silence: nothing but the roar of silence in their ears, of listening so hard, but it doesn’t last—the ice pops again and the car shudders, it lists, and the girls let go of each other’s hand, Get out—now! and the ice is shattering, it’s exploding beneath them in blasts like gunshots, and the car is on the move once again, aslant to the axis of the far bank and slipping down beneath the plane of the ice as they struggle with the latches of the doors, and for just a moment, before the water comes flooding in through the driver’s-side door, there is the bizarre effect across the ice of one beam of light skimming the surface above while the other beam probes the same length of ice from below, underwater, revealing ice that moments ago looked so black and solid to be, in fact, bubbled and fissured and a terrible, ghostly translucent yellow.
And then the car begins to roll.
4
Rachel Young was in her chair in the living room, writing a letter to one of her two sons, when she heard about the accident. The other son, who still lived with her and who had worked all day, had gone upstairs to bed, and Rachel had the ten o’clock news on with the volume low, and she wasn’t paying much attention to it anyway; she was writing the letter to the son who lived now in New Mexico, just a few words catching him up, such as she wrote every month. In the old trunk under her feet were old photo albums and sheaves of yellowed letters tied up with string and a great hoard of hardback ledgers filled front to back with figures that meant little to her but that told the story of her grandfather’s life, from the neat, fluid hand of his youth to the shaky scratchings of old age. She was using one of the hardback ledgers for a writing surface, and each time she lifted it or set it down she smelled the farm—this farm—and her grandparents’ bodies, and the forever-hot kitchen where her grandfather sat over his figures, slurping coffee as thick and dark as tractor oil.
In the space between the chair and the trunk, beneath the bridge of her legs, slept the old dog, so that she would have to be careful when she stood.
Something on the TV caught her eye and made her look up. It was a young woman’s face, a photograph, a nice one, probably a high school graduation portrait, and Rachel’s first sinking thought was, Oh, no, as it always was when the news showed a pretty young woman’s picture so early in the broadcast. Her next thought was that she knew this girl, had definitely seen her before, and she picked up the remote and raised the volume in time to hear the girl’s name—Audrey Sutter—and she must have cried out then, for the dog raised his face and stared at her with his clouded eyes.
An accident, a slick road, the Lower Black Root River—Rachel’s own heart going cold even before she saw the footage of the frozen river, the jagged hole in the ice, the car already pulled out and taken away.
By the time the program went to commercial break she was out of her chair, the letter forgotten, and she was pacing before the TV, the old floorboards creaking and the old dog watching her. Her heart thudding.