Alligator - Lisa Moore [58]
I’m sorry about your stepfather.
Then they heard a strange warble, like a bird they might have crushed under the roof. Something crushed and submerged and it took them both a moment to recognize the faint green light under the water on the roof of the van as the cell-phone. It made them giggle. It was still ringing.
Colleen wedged her feet against the dash and undid her seat belt and managed to work her way around the airbag so she was kneeling on the ceiling of the van in a foot of water.
She couldn’t open her door but Russell had kicked out the broken glass from the windshield on his side and she crawled out through there and stood wobbly-legged, bleeding from her nose with a tissue to her face. She tilted her head to stop the bleeding and the stars were bright. There was a dark shape standing against the trees and it took her a long time to believe it was a moose. She did not believe until she saw it turn and disappear into the trees and heard the swooshing branches. She suddenly remembered her knapsack. She’d lost her knapsack and everything was in it. The remaining sugar and her diary. Some money, her name, her phone number.
Russell said she needed to get to a hospital. He was worried about whiplash and concussion and God knows what injury and insurance and who was her guardian?
She had already got a car to stop and several other cars had pulled over and he was talking to a man who had been in the woods hunting and she told him goodbye and he said, Hey wait a minute. But she got in and waved goodbye. Of course, back in St. John’s, he’d made inquiries and she’d been caught.
MADELEINE
SHE’D TAKEN THE money from her producer’s fee, which means she personally will make nothing at all, nothing to speak of. But now there are skylights for the set. Guy is happy. She would not be shouted at in front of the crew, she told him, just as if he were a child. She was harsh with him behind the closed door of her office.
I will not have it, she’d said. Then she gave in about the bloody skylights and his face got pink. He kissed both her cheeks. He left her office in a great hurry and no sooner had he closed her door than he’d opened it again and came striding in and leaned over her desk, knocking an empty cup to the floor, kissed her on the mouth and left, slamming the door, rattling the frosted glass. She was exhausted and she had broken a sweat and figured she wouldn’t be around to spend the producer’s fee anyway.
Never mind about the fee, she thought. She’d been having nightmares about the sequence with the white stallions in the snow. Every night she was dreaming the editing suite, the horses galloping in reverse, disappearing altogether. The whole film eating itself up until there was nothing left.
How much easier things might have been if she hadn’t had a career. She thinks of it that way; the way women in eighteenth-century novels sit in drawing rooms and take up their embroidery. Some heroine slighted by a lover blushes fiercely, and takes up her sewing. She had taken up film and before film she was lost in the children.
She thinks of the suffocating, addictive sweetness of being a mother. How noble and foolhardy: to think she could care for two helpless beings. How enveloping it had all been, and over so quickly though it had felt interminable; the driving alone had taken a lifetime. She’d had to drive here and there in every weather, the birthday parties and Brownies and Cubs, swimming at Bowring Park, while Marty was at the office.
She thinks of the karate instructor. He is absolutely present to her; the cinematographer’s stubble had stung her chin. Every move the karate instructor made was fluid and effortless; his foot was strong and frankly erotic and the loose pyjamas were erotic and even the fluorescent light was erotic, and the quiet squeak from his bare foot on the tile was deeply, deeply erotic. She was exhausted from all the driving with the children.
I could have driven with my eyes closed, she thinks.
Thirty years ago when the children were young, she’d get