The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,141
now?”
“I think I have some general idea.”
“No, you don’t! You have no idea.”
Later, I understood that I reacted so strongly because what he’d just said and the new evidence he’d brought me suggested something I refused to think: that Barbara had eagerly, happily, severed everything that connected her to us. To me. It made me feel blotted out of existence. Not just who I was now, but the dual identity I’d had from the moment of my birth seventeen minutes after hers: Barbara-and-Elaine, “we.”
“Where are you going to look next?” I asked, my eyes daring him to suggest giving up the search.
“I think I’ll go get chummy with a few chorus girls. Chorus girls seem to appreciate my charm.” He gave me such a woeful grin, I had to laugh.
I had another drink, and we settled into the flirting and bantering of our previous dinners.
The flirting didn’t mean anything. Philip inhabited a different Los Angeles than I did, a city where people carried guns and had their first drink of the day before lunch, a place where the most ordinary conversations crackled with sexual innuendo. He flirted with me as instinctively, as insignificantly, as he breathed. I knew that.
But I was in a reckless mood. The war, the tension I’d been feeling with Paul, and now having to imagine Barbara running for her life—running from me. When Philip was driving me home after dinner, I pressed close to him and kissed him.
“Well,” he said. He turned onto a side street and pulled the car over to a curb.
He kissed me back. For a moment. Then he gently pushed me away.
“Can we go to your apartment?” I said. Despite the cocktails I’d had, I wasn’t drunk. I wanted to live in his Los Angeles, if only for that evening.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re not that kind of girl. You’d hate yourself in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“Then I’d hate myself in the morning.”
“Liar,” I teased. My fingers darted to his crotch, confirmed that he was hard.
He grabbed my wrist so tightly I yelped. “Cut it out. Go sit over there.” He directed me to the edge of the seat, next to the window.
In silence, he drove me home.
Philip was right. I wasn’t that kind of girl. I felt guilty for even thinking of cheating on Paul. And I dreaded seeing the detective the next time. Should I pretend nothing had happened? Apologize for acting like an idiot and blame it on too many drinks? I decided to take my cue from him; he had surely weathered awkward situations like this one. But weeks passed, and I didn’t hear from him. Finally, in late January, I called and reached him at his office. In a terse, uncomfortable conversation—had he been embarrassed, too?—he said he’d struck out with the chorus girls, and I could consider our trade completed.
I said goodbye to Barbara then. What else could I do? I was saying so many goodbyes in 1942. Paul enlisted in the army. All of the boys were going to war.
AN IMMENSITY OF SNOW COVERS THE PLAINS STRETCHING TO THE horizon on either side of the highway. The road itself looks clear, but the woman who rented us the Explorer at the Cody airport warned us about black ice.
“Highway surface’ll look fine, but there’s a coat of transparent ice on it,” she said. “Gotta keep testing your traction.”
The warning came too late. I’m out of control already: I’ve been lurching and careening as I booked flights and hotel rooms for Josh and me, aired out my wool coat, bought snow boots, and duplicated family photographs to bring. It’s all happened in just the past week since Josh brought me the information about Kay Thorne. I told myself I had to act quickly to get this trip in during Josh’s winter break … as if I were somehow orchestrating this headlong rush. In truth, it’s like falling down a flight of stairs.
I did that once; it must have been thirty years ago. One minute I was starting down the stairs from the bedroom, carrying a stack of files and thinking about the case I was working on; the next I was hurtling at a remarkable velocity yet with enough time to marvel at how fast a 130-pound woman could travel—and at my utter inability, despite kicking out at the railings, to stop. When I landed finally at the foot of the staircase, I lay still for a minute, amid a flurry of escaped papers, and scanned my body