Mary and O'Neil Page 0,30
the snowy air; the dry wind of the heater and the hours of silence ahead. He imagines his wife asleep beside him, her body half turned in her seat and wrapped with the old blanket they keep in the car, a sweater or coat used to prop her head against the chilly window; he imagines arriving home in darkness, first into town, its streets quiet under all that new snow with no one about, not even the plows yet, and then the house itself. It is midnight, it is one, it is after two—who knows how long the drive will take? He will wait until the car is stopped and the engine is extinguished before he awakens her, to give her the present of their safe arrival. She stirs, rubbing her eyes. Are we . . . ? she asks. And, How long was I . . . ?
In front of their motel room he puts his arm around her waist and gives it a squeeze. “Come on,” he says.
Their bags are already in the Peugeot; the only thing left to do is return the key. Arthur takes it to the office, where he finds the manager sitting behind the counter, smoking and watching a hockey game on a black-and-white television with aluminum foil crimped to the antenna. The picture is so bad, Arthur thinks, that watching it must be like listening to the radio. He places the key on the counter.
“We’ve decided to take off early,” Arthur says, feeling that he should say something. “To get ahead of the weather.”
The manager rises and accepts the key without comment, depositing it into a drawer under the counter. The carelessness of the gesture suggests to Arthur that it doesn’t matter which key is which; perhaps they are all the same.
“I guess we’ll be off now.”
The manager, already back in his chair—green vinyl, with cigarette burns cut into its wooden arms—looks up, as if truly noticing Arthur for the first time.
“Right.” He takes a long, distracted drag off his cigarette and taps it into a beanbag ashtray on the table beside him. “They say it could get bad.”
“I was thinking that if we left right now, we could beat it.”
The manager gives a thoughtful nod, then returns his gaze to the TV screen. “There’s a theory,” he says.
Leaving the lot for the highway, Arthur finds that the driving is surprisingly good. Already an inch has fallen, but the snow is dry, and the road lightly traveled; there has been no chance yet for the snow to melt and then refreeze as ice. He is mindful of the speedometer, keeping the car at just over forty miles per hour, but when he looks at it a moment later, he finds their speed has drifted upward to fifty. He taps the brakes; the wheels bite soundly.
“How is it?” Miriam asks with a yawn.
“Not awful.” Arthur reaches over and touches her hand. “You want to sleep?”
She is halfway there. “For a while, maybe.”
The highway from the motel heads due south, forming a lazy curve that traces the eastern foothills of the Green Mountains. Trees press close to the road; from time to time the forest opens on one side of the highway or the other, but it is too dark for Arthur to see anything, too slippery for him to permit himself anything more than a hasty sidelong glance. In the beams of his headlights the snow has thickened to a dense, whirling mass. A single car passes them in the oncoming lane, then another, then a third, all traveling with a conscientious slowness that neither suggests nor contains panic; it is not a night, yet, that makes people afraid. Arthur thinks about these other cars, where they have come from and where they may be headed; he thinks about Miriam, dozing now beside him, and his son and daughter, elsewhere, busy with their lives, and about the days when each of them was born; he thinks about Dora Auclaire, though as he does he realizes that he does not love her at all. He will never send his letter. He will destroy it, as soon as he can, and when next he sees her—on line at the grocery story, or at the clinic dropping off some papers—he will smile, perhaps say a harmless, genial word or two of greeting, and then go about his business in such a way that she knows, instantly, that all of it is over: the lunches, the looks, the