anything to do with it.
The cop said he’d seen deer get hit by cars and thrown a hundred feet. This was probably a truck, moving at high speed, hitting the deer just as it was trying to jump from harm’s way, causing the animal to fly up into the wires.
“The driver didn’t stop?” Dani asked.
“He might not have noticed. Coulda walked back and not found what he hit. Who’d think to look up?”
She watched again as a fireman, using a small power saw, cut through the dead deer’s antlers, and then the carcass fell to the ground.
“Fresh one for the wolf sanctuary,” the cop said, referring to a nearby wildlife rescue operation where all the local roadkill went.
Once the fire truck blocking the road moved, Dani was allowed to proceed. When she got home, she opened a can of chicken and rice soup and heated it in a pan—her mother’s “recipe.” She missed her parents. They belonged in this big old house where she now lived without them.
She changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, washed her face, drank a glass of warm milk, and went to bed. When she tried to read the instructions to program her new clock radio, she concluded that the manual had been written by someone for whom the English language was a second if not a third tongue. What happened to the good old days, when a radio was just a radio and a clock was just a clock?
Finally she set the alarm for seven and instructed the clock, she hoped, to wake her to the sound of a spring thunderstorm.
As she closed her eyes, she thought of the deer hanging from the power lines. It was the sort of thing that might give a person nightmares, but she knew from a lecture on dream analysis in med school that it was uncommon to dream of something you saw the same day you saw it. Usually it took about a week.
She fell asleep, but instead of waking at seven, she sat up in the middle of the night, thinking she’d left the water running somewhere. The clock read 2:13.
Rising slowly to a fuller state of consciousness, Dani remembered her dream. She’d seen her mother standing under a tropical waterfall . . . then the water had turned to blood.
She remembered the dream from the night before, her father holding a stone.
It occurred to her that she’d woken the night before at the very same time: 2:13. Weird.
She sat up in bed, found the remote, turned on the television, and channel-surfed, watching as many different shows as she could to drive the disturbing image from her consciousness. The news channels told of oil spills and environmental catastrophes, local crimes and tragic car accidents. She turned the television off and picked up Moby Dick .
“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe , ” Melville wrote of the whiteness of the whale, “and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depth of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning . . . ?”
But it wasn’t the color white or the lack of all color that kept Dani awake. It was the vivid red of the blood that fell on her mother’s head, and the feeling she had that she was the cause of it.
9 .
Tommy had two reasons to go see his friend Carl. One was because he wanted to do anything he could to help Liam. The other was that he saw helping to solve the mystery as a way to score points with Dani. He wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted to do that. Perhaps just to dig himself out of the hole he was in and get back to zero.
Carl Thorstein was one of the most learned men Tommy knew. They’d met at the local gas station, where they’d both stopped to fill the tanks of their motorcycles. Talking about Harleys and Indian Aces and 1952 Black Vincents had quickly led to friendship and talk of deeper things.
The cop said he’d seen deer get hit by cars and thrown a hundred feet. This was probably a truck, moving at high speed, hitting the deer just as it was trying to jump from harm’s way, causing the animal to fly up into the wires.
“The driver didn’t stop?” Dani asked.
“He might not have noticed. Coulda walked back and not found what he hit. Who’d think to look up?”
She watched again as a fireman, using a small power saw, cut through the dead deer’s antlers, and then the carcass fell to the ground.
“Fresh one for the wolf sanctuary,” the cop said, referring to a nearby wildlife rescue operation where all the local roadkill went.
Once the fire truck blocking the road moved, Dani was allowed to proceed. When she got home, she opened a can of chicken and rice soup and heated it in a pan—her mother’s “recipe.” She missed her parents. They belonged in this big old house where she now lived without them.
She changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, washed her face, drank a glass of warm milk, and went to bed. When she tried to read the instructions to program her new clock radio, she concluded that the manual had been written by someone for whom the English language was a second if not a third tongue. What happened to the good old days, when a radio was just a radio and a clock was just a clock?
Finally she set the alarm for seven and instructed the clock, she hoped, to wake her to the sound of a spring thunderstorm.
As she closed her eyes, she thought of the deer hanging from the power lines. It was the sort of thing that might give a person nightmares, but she knew from a lecture on dream analysis in med school that it was uncommon to dream of something you saw the same day you saw it. Usually it took about a week.
She fell asleep, but instead of waking at seven, she sat up in the middle of the night, thinking she’d left the water running somewhere. The clock read 2:13.
Rising slowly to a fuller state of consciousness, Dani remembered her dream. She’d seen her mother standing under a tropical waterfall . . . then the water had turned to blood.
She remembered the dream from the night before, her father holding a stone.
It occurred to her that she’d woken the night before at the very same time: 2:13. Weird.
She sat up in bed, found the remote, turned on the television, and channel-surfed, watching as many different shows as she could to drive the disturbing image from her consciousness. The news channels told of oil spills and environmental catastrophes, local crimes and tragic car accidents. She turned the television off and picked up Moby Dick .
“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe , ” Melville wrote of the whiteness of the whale, “and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depth of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning . . . ?”
But it wasn’t the color white or the lack of all color that kept Dani awake. It was the vivid red of the blood that fell on her mother’s head, and the feeling she had that she was the cause of it.
9 .
Tommy had two reasons to go see his friend Carl. One was because he wanted to do anything he could to help Liam. The other was that he saw helping to solve the mystery as a way to score points with Dani. He wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted to do that. Perhaps just to dig himself out of the hole he was in and get back to zero.
Carl Thorstein was one of the most learned men Tommy knew. They’d met at the local gas station, where they’d both stopped to fill the tanks of their motorcycles. Talking about Harleys and Indian Aces and 1952 Black Vincents had quickly led to friendship and talk of deeper things.
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