Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [58]
They left as soon as Coop returned, and drove deep into Nevada, into the desert. They stopped whenever they were hungry or tired, sometimes at night, sometimes during the blazing afternoons. She bought a Polaroid camera and took a picture wherever they stopped. She thought it would help him remember the present. She balanced the camera on the hood of her car, set the timer, then ran to where he was, and waited for the click to release them from their pose. The extra seconds felt long, falsely intimate, their eyes half closed because of the bright sunlight around them.
Do you remember how to drive?
It looks easy.
Yeah, sure. You can deal cards, you can drive.
They climbed out to switch seats. In the driver’s seat he twisted the rearview mirror so he could see his bruised face, the marks of iodine, then repositioned it to look behind him, as if he could now clearly see where he had come from. She leaned against the passenger door and watched him handle the clutch and the gearshift with ease. She was fifteen years old again, and he was teaching her to drive.
She began to think where they should go. A danger had focussed itself on Coop, and she did not know whether it was only Tahoe that was unsafe for him. She had no knowledge of the extent of his world. She remembered Vea’s remark about randomness and made Coop double back, and they entered California and went north through the old gold towns. She bought a local map and discovered a place called Hass, nestled in the hills. They arrived there in the afternoon and checked in to a two-storey brick hotel. There was one room available, so they shared it. When Coop removed his shirt, she saw that the bruises on his chest and arms were now an ugly yellow. He had not complained of pain since they’d left Tahoe. She recalled the Absorbine horse liniment that she and Anna used to rub on each other as kids, its smell—cowboy perfume, they called it. Claire gave Coop the bed and took the sofa. They were silent and separate in the attempted darkness of the hotel room, knowing that outside it was still bright daylight.
You okay?
Yeah.
The hum of the drive was still in her body.
So tell me about yourself, Anna. How do we know each other?
She was silent.
You knew I could drive.
What?
You said I knew how to drive.
Well, yes, most people do.
I was a gambler.
Yes, you said that, the day we met.
There was a pause, and Claire tried to slip him back, into the past. Do you remember the day with the fox?
The fox …
Then they were silent. He must have fallen asleep. Coop’s ‘How do we know each other?’ burned in her. Anna and Coop and Claire. The three of them, she had always believed, made up a three-panelled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the others. Those screens made more sense to her than single-framed paintings from the West that existed without context. Their lives, surely, remained linked, wherever they were. Coop had been adopted into the family in much the same way that she had been taken from the hospital in Santa Rosa and brought home beside Anna. An orphan and a changeling … they had evolved, intimate as siblings, from that moment. She’d lived one of her essential lives with Coop, and she could never dismantle herself from him.
She went over in the dark to his bed and saw his face; it was sallow in the shut-away afternoon light. Once more he opened his eyes and looked at her, looked, she thought, at nothing. His lips were dry. There was no water in the room. No tap. The shower was down the hall. She spat onto her fingers and rubbed them over his lips and saw him trying to swallow. He took her wrist before she could withdraw it, and held it for a moment. Anna, he said. No, she said. No, not Anna.
Claire went back to the sofa and sat across from him in the dark, trying to retrieve any other details he’d mentioned that day when they had met in