McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [100]
“Well, I guess we’ll see you tomorrow,” she said cheerily.
“What do you mean?”
“When you come and get me in the morning, so we can go get Janna.”
“But I thought I might stay here tonight.”
“Oh, Courtney, I couldn’t ask you to do that. Your parents will be missing you so much in the next three weeks, before school starts, I really think you should let them have a last night with you.” She was at the loom, and kept her face down, her voice without guile.
“I have most of my stuff here, now.”
“That was foresighted of you. But I’m sure you could find a toothbrush and pajamas. I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and continued working.
Hurt, and making sure Suze knew it, Courtney flounced into the car and drove off.
When she had gone, Suze poured herself a stiff drink and went out onto the porch, wanting to scream. She wanted to walk away down the road, never to look back. Wanted to get roaring drunk, take off for the Amazon in a canoe, leap out of a plane without checking to see if she had her chute on. Tomorrow the earth would sigh and settle onto her the combined weight of an invalid lover she barely knew, a good Christian girl with head-nurse fantasies, and a pair of dying eyes.
Pressures all, and as her only release, the knowledge of digging in the night, ten thousand gallons of missing water, and a remembered conversation concerning the exorbitant seasonal cost of electricity.
She swallowed the last of her drink, feeling the pounding of anticipation in her veins, thinking, Tomorrow the weight comes, but by God, I still have tonight.
That night, Suze went for a walk in the woods.
In her early days and weeks here, Janna had taken Suze on countless “blind walks,” as if those remnants of the touchy-feely days would make an actual blind woman feel better. The odd thing was, they did. The first few were terrifying: It was one thing to jump out of a plane able to see the ground below, quite another to step onto a moon-dappled path surrounded by vague shapes and incomprehensible motion. But somehow Janna had known that although she had to bully Suze out the door for their first five-minute outing along the drive, by the end of the week Suze would relish the challenge of setting off into the night with only three senses to guide her. The feel of the ground underfoot, the smell of the air, the sounds of creatures and the trees themselves guided her into an intoxicating foreign country. By the end of the second week, she was leading Janna.
She didn’t know how far she’d go tonight, but following the stream, how lost could she get?
She armed herself with the big flashlight; as she was headed out the door, she paused and went back, tucking one of the tall spools of black warp thread into the waist pack with the light. If she had to leave the stream, she could always lay an Ariadne’s thread through the trees. At the door, she picked up the thin, flexible stripped branch she sometimes used as a cane, and stepped off the porch to the ground.
The full moon created a pale smear in her vision and a sense of texture to the night, as if she were entering one of her black-on-black hangings. It was distracting; she closed her eyes to concentrate on memory, and after a minute, found the drive in her mind. She set confidently off, her feet locating the defining patches of gravel here and soil there, her nostrils finding the tang of eucalyptus and the approach of the stream, until she was through the curve and standing on the misplaced oak leaves over the intruder’s pipe. Apprehension bubbled in her chest, and she waited: The old Suze Blackstock wouldn’t have panicked; would the new one? But the apprehension warmed her, like buckling on her helmet as the wind battered her body, like looking upward for her first sight of