her own sons’ voices, and Holly’s too, and she saw the girl once more in her purple Easter dress, running through Gordon’s woods, a bright spot of color searching for smaller spots of color, the poorly hidden eggs. Her squeals, her happiness!
But there were no children out this way—or none close enough to hear, unless it was the McVeigh kids, who lived in the house on the other side of the rented field, and unless the wind was just right. Which maybe it was.
She wiped her face with her fingertips and turned back to collect her tea from the desk, and it was then she saw it—the piece of metal on the desktop, next to his Big Dam Mug. It was a bolt. Placed upright on its hexagonal head. Heavy. Not old. Well cleaned but smelling of oil. She stood looking at it a while, her heart knocking dully in her chest, then returned it carefully to the desktop, exactly as she’d found it, so that it would be there when he came home.
69
She followed the county road out of town and it was the same road they’d been on that night and this time the station appeared on her right instead of her left and when she saw it in the early dusk, the bright square of window, the pumps standing in the garish light of the tin shelter, her heart broke freshly and she had to swallow down a sob, Oh, Caroline!
It wasn’t the woman with the soft pink face in the window when she pulled in, but a skinny man who stood bent at the waist and leaning on his elbows, his head hung down below his shoulders like a man in sorrow, and he did not look up. She parked to the side, away from the pumps and next to the only other vehicle in the lot, a white and dented pickup with blisters of rust around the wheelwells. She cut the engine and sat there with the windows down, and she could smell the river, the icy yellow water, the taste of it even. As if it had been this car and not the RAV4 that had gone under the ice and filled with the river and had been fished out again and drained and put back on its wheels again, There you go, miss, good as new, and—
Audrey?
Yes?
What are you doing?
Nothing.
Are you going buggy on me?
No.
Then get your ass in gear, girl. We haven’t got all night.
The skinny man had not moved and as she passed by the window she watched to see would he move at all, and just before she stepped out of view he flipped the page of a magazine and the bill of his cap followed the page and he was still again.
She stepped into the shadows where the shelter lights did not reach and she stood on the concrete as she’d stood that night, and she could smell the ladies’ room through the door to her back but she could not smell the boy. Could not smell the gas on his clothes or the beer and cigarettes on his breath or the grease on his hand when he put it over her mouth. Could not even smell the pepper spray. Beyond the concrete was a coarse terrain, barren but for yellow weeds and a solitary pine tree, and she took a few steps into that meaningless land, but it was hopeless; he could’ve thrown it any direction and he would’ve thrown it far, and would there be anything under its little wooden fingernails anyway, or would it be useless, like her memory?
He’s gone, isn’t he.
They’re both gone.
It figures.
Why?
Because there wasn’t anything to them in the first place. Faceless, useless boys. They run all over the world like rats.
I’m sorry.
Why are you sorry?
Because it isn’t fair.
Caroline laughed. Fair? Oh, Audrey!
She was out of the wind where she stood, but overhead the pine tree swayed and whispered, and she looked at it more closely and identified it as a white pine. She climbed it with her eyes—thirty, maybe forty feet tall—and remembered a young girl walking in the woods, looking for a tree just her height. A father going out to measure the tree year after year.
Audrey.
What?
Time to go.
She drove down the hill toward the trestle bridge and there was no ice or snow now, and the shoulder where they’d gone off the road into the ditch was a wet soft gravel and she pulled onto it and came to a