Point Omega - Don Delillo [22]
In the market he moved along the shelves choosing items, tossing them in a basket. I did the same, we divided the store, moving quickly and capably and passing each other now and then in one of the aisles, avoiding eye contact.
On the way back I found myself engaged by the scribbled tar of repair work on the paved road. I was drowsy, staring straight ahead, and soon the spatter on the windshield seemed even more interesting than the tar. When we were off-road, on rubble, he reduced speed drastically and the easy bouncing nearly put me to sleep. My seat belt wasn’t fastened. He usually said “Seat belts” when he started the car. I sat up straight and rolled my shoulders. I looked at the grit under my fingernails. The rule of seat belts was meant for Jessie but she didn’t always comply. We went past a spindly creek bed and I wanted to pound the dashboard a few times, tom-tom-like, to get the blood pumping. But I just closed my eyes and sat there, nowhere, listening.
When we got back to the house she was gone.
From the kitchen he called her name. Then he went through the house looking. I wanted to tell him that she’d gone for a walk. But it would have sounded false. She didn’t do that here. She hadn’t done that since she’d arrived. I left the groceries on the kitchen counter and went outside to scan the immediate area, kicking through thorny bushes and ducking under mesquite snags. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. My rented car was where I’d left it. I checked the car’s interior and then tried to detect fresh tire marks on the sandy approach to the house and later we both stood on the deck looking intently into the stillness.
It was hard to think clearly. The enormity of it, all that empty country. She kept appearing in some inner field of vision, indistinct, like something I’d forgotten to say or do.
We went into the house again and looked more closely, room to room, finding her suitcase, poking through her closet, opening drawers in the bureau. We hardly spoke, did not speculate on what or where. Elster spoke but not to me, a few puzzled mutterings about her unpredictability. I crossed the hall to the bathroom that she and I shared. Toilet kit on the windowsill. No note taped to the mirror. I threw back the shower curtain, making more noise than I’d intended.
Then I thought of the shed, how had we forgotten the shed. I felt a strange brainless elation. I told Elster. The shed.
This was the first time we’d gone anywhere without her. She hadn’t wanted to come with us but we should have said something, and her father did, but we should have insisted, should have been unyielding.
All right it was not impossible, a long walk. The heat had diminished these past few days, there was cloud cover, even a breeze.
Maybe she didn’t want to spend another minute here and walked all the way out to the nearest paved road hoping to hitch a ride. This was hard to believe, that she might expect to reach San Diego and then get on a flight to New York, apparently carrying nothing, not even a wallet. The wallet was on her dresser with bills and change scattered around it, credit card in its slot.
I stood at the entrance to the shed. A hundred years of junk, this is what I saw, glass, rags, metal, wood, alone here, we’d left her, and the feeling in the body, the sheer deadness in my arms and shoulders, and not knowing what to say to him, and the chance, the faint prospect that we’d be standing on the deck in faded light and she’d come