Village. But if the fog was likely to be thinner on the Nevada side, there was no guarantee of that, and because of the casinos over there, traffic would be much heavier.
She decided to wait where she was. Maybe the authorities would get the highway cleared sooner than she expected. Maybe Kipp was settled in and safe for the night.
In spite of her difficult life, she’d never been an anxious person. Adversity was best overcome by positive thinking and hard work. Foreboding, let alone full-blown anxiety, distracted the heart and mind, making progress less likely. However, Kipp was the most important responsibility that Rosa had ever been given, his welfare her sacred duty. If he died or were cast into a miserable situation from which he could not escape, she would not only have failed him but also Dorothy, and not just the two of them. If anything bad happened to that remarkable dog, she would have failed . . . something else, something larger that eluded definition. She felt almost as if to fail Kipp would be to fail humankind as well and somehow imperil the destiny of the world. She was not given to grandiose notions of her importance, quite the opposite, and yet Kipp’s fate weighed more heavily on her by the minute. As she waited, run aground in this sea of fog, anxiety tore at her.
43
When he finished dessert, Woody got up from his chair and came around to his mother’s side of the kitchen table and stood next to her, his head bowed, waiting expectantly. He could do nothing more to indicate that he wanted to return to his room. Attending to her like this was his way of saying both thank you and good night.
Remaining in her chair, Megan took his right hand, brought it to her lips, and kissed it. She pulled him close and kissed his cheek, his brow.
As always, he was unable to return her kisses, emotionally constrained by his condition, but he liked being kissed. She held fast to the hope that a day would come when Woody’s storehouse of unspent kisses and unspoken words would spring open, that she would hear him say he loved her, would feel his lips press to her cheek.
Holding his hand in both of hers, she said, “You’re the best boy, sweetie. You know that?”
He didn’t always indicate that he heard what she said to him. Some days his responses were rare or nonexistent. But now he shook his head.
“But you are,” she insisted. “You really are. You’re the best boy that you can be, and I appreciate how hard you try. I love you, Woodrow Eugene Bookman.”
His embarrassment was palpable. His eyes remained downcast, and he chewed on his lower lip.
“You brush your teeth and floss. Only two minutes with the Sonicare. No matter how badly you might want to brush for ten or twenty minutes—only two.”
Woody nodded.
“I’ll stop by later to tuck you in and make sure you’re all right.”
When she let go of his hand, he crossed the kitchen and went through the swinging door, not with the exuberance of a young boy, but with the gravity of a little old man. He was not just a small and vulnerable child imprisoned by his developmental disorder. He was also a prodigy with a high IQ, and the chains of his condition thwarted his great promise. For the sake of her own well-being, Megan dared not consider the intensity of Woody’s frustration.
She got up and went to the keypad beside the back door. To allow Woody the freedom of the house, she set the alarm system in the at-home mode, arming the doors and most windows and all the glass-break sensors, but not the motion detectors. The upstairs windows, those that were beyond easy reach from the ground or a porch roof, had not been wired.
44
Woody changed into his pajamas and went into his bathroom and brushed his teeth for precisely two minutes. He flossed especially well around those teeth that were secured by transplanted tissue donated by a dead man.
No, it hadn’t been as spooky as that. The guy hadn’t been dead when he made the donation. He made arrangements while he was living. Or maybe his family had authorized the taking of the tissue after the man had died. If the latter was the case, Woody hoped that the donor’s family wouldn’t show up here someday and want to have their pictures taken with him because their loved