The Blondes (24 page)

“Are you okay?”

She nodded and the wind took the smoke from her lips.

“That was close.”

She nodded again.

Cars roared past us, kicking up dust and lifting our hair.

Moira dug in her purse and took out the Salem package, extended it toward me. I gestured for her smoke instead and
she passed it to me. I took one drag and passed it back. Even that gave me a head rush, and I went and sat back in the car on her side with my legs hanging out. What can I say, my little fetal syndrome? I’m sorry, but I still thought you wouldn’t be happening.

I watched Moira’s back as she stood, leaning on the corner of the car, her elbow tight against her body and the cigarette held out. I looked down at my hands between my knees. They were shaking. I saw her pumps on the floor of the car. She was out there barefoot. I took the shoes to her. She tossed the cigarette butt into the gravel and toed the shoes on. We got in the car without saying anything more.

When we’d gone a little farther down the road, Moira said we should call in the accident. I told her someone probably already had. We’d passed a couple more cars that seemed to have pulled off like we had.

“What do you think went wrong?” she asked.

“He just lost control of his car,” I said, tightening my grip on the wheel. “You don’t careen around like that otherwise.”

“It was a woman,” Moira said.

“You saw her?”

“When you passed her. I mean, she was bald, but it was a woman.”

“You think …?” I didn’t finish the sentence. “Was anyone with her?” I asked instead.

Moira shook her head.

Given our shakeup, Moira and I rested too long over lunch and our day trip began to stretch into an epic. Soon it was late afternoon and I felt numb from the motion of the road. Erik Satie was pouring out of the car speakers from Moira’s iPod. She was turned away from me, toward the window. The sun was streaming in, and it was warm even though I had the fan on. She hadn’t said anything for a long stretch of freeway, so I thought she might have closed her eyes.

We passed a white Mustang parked on the side of the road. No one was in it and the passenger door was open. In my rear-view, the smooth sneer of its hood disappeared as we rounded a bend. I didn’t think much of it. I assumed someone had wanted to pee, let themselves out the safer side of the car, and climbed down in the ditch out of sight to do their business. But then we whipped past a guy jogging away from the car, up the mountain, in black jeans. He was on his cellphone.

“Hazel?” Moira said. Her head lifted. Her voice had a gravelly edge to it.

I was surprised she was awake and I glanced over at her. She turned, peering back over her shoulder. Then she said, “That was a nice car. Why would he leave the door open?”

“Maybe he lost something and he’s going back over the highway for it.”

But Moira told me to slow down.

The road was straight, and I couldn’t see anything up ahead, but the tone in her voice had me peering intently.

“He was a long way from his car to leave it like that,” she added.

I wasn’t going more than sixty when, a few miles farther up the road, we saw the woman. She was still quite a ways ahead of us, just a speck on the shoulder, and at first I thought she was a deer, because we’d seen signs for them and she was wearing brown. As we got closer, I slowed down even more. She had on a beige coat and a brown fedora, and she was on her hands and knees, her head down, the hat brim over her face. We heard a siren, and a state trooper’s car zoomed up on us from my left. Numbly, I steered over to the shoulder and brought our vehicle to a complete stop, about fifty yards back from the woman. The cruiser zigzagged in behind her and blocked our view.

Moira unbuckled her seat belt and strained forward in her seat, trying to see through the windows of the police car. The trooper got out. He stood there assessing the situation. He called something to the woman. I could hear both Moira’s and my breath overtop of the Satie, still playing from the dash. The trooper reached an arm back into his vehicle, tugged out his radio, and said something into it.

“She’s a blonde,” Moira speculated, but she wasn’t talking about the woman’s hair colour. She meant the disease.

I didn’t say anything.

The trooper planted the radio back in the car. Vehicles were still flying past in the left lane, but I had no intention of driving on yet. The trooper stood very still in the sun, staring out from beneath his hat. Then he leaned through his car window and pulled out a black shotgun, even though he still had his pistol on his hip.

I was watching him when I heard Moira say, “She’s on the road …” and I realized the woman had crawled out from the shoulder into the right-hand lane. We could see her now, up ahead of the trooper’s car, half-crouching, half-crawling. Her fedora was gone and the blonde bristles of her shorn head glinted in the sunlight. The trooper advanced, slowly, after her. His boots were black, his steps deliberate. The woman scrambled now, one back leg dragging. Horns bleated. Cars began swerving into the leftmost lane, some veering into what little shoulder there was, practically against the divider. The state trooper continued to walk calmly toward her. Maybe he was saying something, but we couldn’t hear. The woman staggered, spun, and lunged at him. In one smooth motion, he brought up the shotgun and sighted it on her. The blonde’s body twisted and jerked back, and at first I didn’t realize he’d shot her in the stomach. There was an awful wail, and I thought it was her. I don’t think I knew that it was me until Moira grabbed me by the shoulder. Knocked on her back, the woman scrabbled on the concrete as she tried to get up. Her head jerked up; her elbows still held her slightly off the pavement. The man stepped forward, shotgun in hand, and stood over her but didn’t fire again. Slowly, the woman flattened.

The trooper nudged her with his boot two or three times, then he turned and walked back to his car. He bent at the waist and his head and shoulders disappeared inside. When he emerged, the gun was gone and he had the radio again.

Moira began cursing. Then she punched me hard in the
shoulder and said, “Goddamn it, Hazel, go!” and I saw that the trooper had walked out into the right lane between us and the woman, and was directing traffic. He was slowing down the left lane and signalling us to pull back onto the freeway, motioning with a cone flashlight, which he must have retrieved from inside his vehicle. I grabbed the gear shift and hit the gas and the car revved and we tore out into the space he’d made for us. I looked back in my rear-view, but by then I could barely make out the woman in the road.

We were a couple miles on when Moira instructed me to pull over again. I think she yelled at me, actually. I brought the car to an abrupt stop on the side of the freeway and she got out and came around and jerked open my door. The next thing I knew I was on the passenger side and Moira was driving.

We were insured only for one driver but I didn’t think of that then. She had told me before that she didn’t have a licence, that she’d let it lapse, but I didn’t think of that either. She must have driven thirty or forty miles. She’d taken us past Binghamton, New York, and onto Highway 17. We were at a place called Endwell when I finally thought to mention the insurance and the license. At first she said it didn’t matter, but soon after that, she did take an off-ramp.

The sun was starting to sink. There was a hotel—a Super 8 or a Red Carpet Inn—and I said, “Let’s stop,” and Moira didn’t argue.

I’LL TELL YOU, MY LITTLE HAMSTER IN A WHEEL
, I thought I’d lose it that first morning here with Grace, when I went into the bathroom and saw Karl. I thought I’d really lose it.

I hadn’t noticed the photo the night before because it was dark and Grace had taken my glasses. But the next day I went into the bathroom, and there he was, framed on the wall in close-up: a beautiful lifelike print of him, wearing a brown cowboy hat, maybe the one from his office. He was looking at the photographer, a wistful smile on his face. His eyes full of secrets. When the time comes for me to show you a picture of your father, it will be that one.

Grace hid the photo one day not long after that. I made the mistake of commenting on it, asking if she was the photographer, and she took it and jammed it into the back of
the entertainment cabinet, probably while I was out getting us more wood for the stove. I found it again later, of course, and now it’s back up on the wall. She didn’t like sharing him, and that’s understandable. Except that she kept saying she didn’t care. I never had a sister, but I imagine that in some ways we were like two sisters arguing over an item of clothing.

Perhaps I should consider myself lucky that all Grace did was play mind games. I remember Grace setting down a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me and saying, “I can’t stand to fucking look at you in that garb.”

She swore a lot without thinking about it—probably from working in television. But at that time I didn’t understand that swearing was her habit, and the criticism struck me as being overly harsh. She hovered, appraising me.

“Those clothes are ass-ugly. You look like a bear in a circus.”

“I have—have some others,” I stammered.

“If they were better you’d have them on, wouldn’t you?” She folded her arms across the flat chest of her white housecoat. “What did your hair look like?” She cocked her head, her chin pointed at me and my bald head. “You must have had very beautiful hair …” The words sounded wistful. Her mouth pinched around the edges, showing her age. What she meant was: I must have had beautiful hair for her husband to make the mistake of sleeping with me.

I didn’t correct her. I didn’t tell her my hair had always been my worst feature.

“We’re going to have to do something about this situation”—she used her fork like a magician’s wand, waving
at my top half as if she could transform it—“if I’m going to have to look at you every day.”

“Are you letting me stay?” I’d barely slept all night between nightmares of her murdering me as if I were Sharon Tate. Although—it had occurred to me that she could just put me out in the snow and achieve the same result.

“Are you going to eat those, or shall I put them in the fridge with yesterday’s sandwich?” she asked. She picked up her own plate and ate her eggs leaning against the counter, as if she didn’t even want to sit at the same table with me. When we’d finished breakfast, she reached into her housecoat pocket and produced my glasses with the one remaining good lens now splintered. “I’m very sorry. You must have dropped them on the bedroom floor—I stepped on them this morning. I’m lucky I didn’t cut open my whole damn foot.”

Aloud, I surmised that without them I couldn’t very well drive away.

“You can borrow my fucking husband,” she said, scraping the plates, “but I would never let you borrow my car.”

Maybe she was grieving in her own way.

There were other little games Grace played to get back at me. That first day, she fixed the spigot on the shower so that it bled so little water I felt like I could have bathed more thoroughly underneath a water pistol. I know that she did this, because when
she
bathed, I could hear the water gush as if she had opened up the tap. I think she wanted to test whether I knew how to adjust the water pressure. I did. Karl had shown me. The next time, to get a better shower, I turned it partway, and before
I got out I reset it to where she’d had it. I didn’t dare open it all the way. Not at first. Although eventually I did. I guess I played some games too. I pretended I’d never been to the cottage before, when we both knew I had trespassed—in serious ways.

Other games included Grace moving the few possessions I had brought with me. Occasionally, like the glasses, things would turn up ruined. Other times, they’d simply find their way back into my bag as if they’d never been gone. My alarm clock, even though I had no real use for it, wound up taking a vacation of three days, and when it reappeared its hands no longer moved. Considering how small our space was, these acts worried me. I couldn’t figure out how or when they occurred, and it seemed that Grace was expending an awful lot of energy completing them in secrecy. I feared these little crimes against me would escalate; everything else seemed changeable and unpredictable, after all. That first night, when I’d thought she was beautiful, her skin had been white-almond, but after that, it turned more gold every day. Either she patted on more blush, or she was using the bronzer featured on the infomercial (
Break Out and Get Your Glow!
) on the flat-screen TV we watched only when Grace stamped it on, her long nail on the remote button.