Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [21]
“She’s out all afternoon any time she can get a sitter,” Ian said. “She comes back perfumed and laughing and wearing clothes she can’t afford. That white knit dress. Haven’t you ever seen her white dress? Where’d she get it? How’d she pay for it? How come she married you quick as a flash and then had a baby just seven months later?”
“You’re talking about that dress with the kind of like crisscrossed middle,” Danny said.
“That’s the one.”
Danny started rubbing his right temple with his fingertips. When it didn’t seem he meant to say anything further, Ian got out of the car.
Inside the house, only the hall lamp was lit. His parents must still be at the Finches’. Beastie rose from the rug, yawning, and followed him up the stairs, which he climbed two steps at a time. He went directly to his room, fell to his knees in front of the closet, and rooted through the clutter for his gym shoes. Once he’d located the foil strip, he slid it into his rear pocket and stood up. Then he ducked into the bathroom. The biggest night of his life and he couldn’t even stop to shower. He wet his fingers at the sink and ran them through his hair. He bared his teeth to the mirror and debated whether to brush them.
In the street below, an engine roared up. What on earth? He drew aside the curtain and peered out. It was Danny’s Chevy, all right. The headlights were two yellow ribbons swinging away from the curb. The car took off abruptly, peeling rubber. Ian dropped the curtain. He turned to confront his own stunned face in the mirror.
Near the stone wall at the end of the block the brakes should have squealed, but instead the roaring sound grew louder. It grew until something had to happen, and then there was a gigantic, explosive, complicated crash and then a delicate tinkle and then silence. Ian went on staring into his own eyes. He couldn’t seem to look away. He couldn’t even blink, couldn’t move, because once he moved then time would start rolling forward again, and he already knew that nothing in his life would ever be the same.
2
The Department of Reality
When the baby woke from her afternoon nap, she made a noise like singing. “La!” she called. But the only ones who heard were Thomas and Agatha. They were coloring at the kitchen table. Their crayons slowed and they looked at each other. Then they looked toward their mother’s room. Nowadays their mother took naps too. She said it was the heat. She said if they would just let her be she would stay in bed from spring till fall, sleeping away this whole hot, muggy summer.
“La!” Daphne called again.
They couldn’t pick her up themselves because last week Thomas had dropped her. He’d been trying to feed her a bottle and she had somehow tumbled to the floor and bumped her head. After that their mother said neither one of them could hold her anymore, which wasn’t at all fair to Agatha. Agatha had turned seven this past April and she was big for her age besides. She would never have allowed Daphne to wiggle away like that.
Now Daphne was talking to herself in a questioning tone of voice, like, Where is everybody? Have they all gone off and left me?
Agatha’s page of the coloring book had an outline of an undressed man full of veins and arteries. You were supposed to color the veins blue and the arteries red. A tiny B and R started you off and from then on you were on your own, boy. Tough luck if you slipped over onto the wrong branch accidentally and started coloring the red parts blue. It was just about the most boring picture in the world but Agatha kept at it, even when the veins narrowed to black threads and she didn’t have a hope of staying inside the lines.
Thomas’s page was boring too, but at least there were more shapes to it. His undressed man had different organs—pipes and beans and balloony things. He got to do that page because the coloring book was his, but then he pretended the organs didn’t exist. He smeared over them every which way with