When we passed it I saw that it wasn't a convertible after all; the top had been sheared off, and lay on the other side of the road. An are of glass and chrome crossed the highway like a glittering river littered with flotsam and jetsam: a pair of sunglasses, a bright vinyl bag, a paperback book. At the trail's end was the pile of steel. I'd never seen such a badly wrecked car.
"Doesn't look like anybody walked away from that one," Loyd said.
I thought of Hallie walking out of the library that time, years ago, then remembering her sunglasses and turning back just before the marble façade fell down. She could just as well have died then. It made no difference now.
The luckiest person alive.
The ambulance pulled out right behind us, its warning lights alternating like crazy winking eyes. We quickly left it behind, though, and we weren't speeding by any means. Loyd saw me watching the ambulance and glanced up at the rear-view mirror. "They're not in much of a rush, are they?"
Just then, while we watched, the lights stopped flashing. I understood that I had just seen someone die. No reason to hurry anymore. My limbs flooded with despair and I didn't see how I was going to survive. I kept imagining what that little white car must have looked like half an hour ago, and the driver, some young woman listening to the radio, checking her hair in the mirror, preoccupied with this afternoon or tonight or whatever small errand had taken her out.
"Why does a person even get up in the morning?" I asked Loyd. "You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down 1-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it."
"Hallie knew exactly what she was doing. There wasn't anything stupid about her life."
I practically shouted at Loyd, "I'm not crying about Hallie right now. I'm crying about that person that just died in the ambulance."
He was quiet.
"Loyd, I don't know what I'm going to do." I was afraid the muscles in my chest might tear themselves apart. I thought senselessly of Doc Homer's discussion of liver tissue and heart tissue. As if it mattered what part of your body was the seat of emotion, all of it could be torn up, it was just flesh. Doc Homer didn't even know about this yet. I'd called, and we talked, and it was clear he didn't know what I was telling him. He talked about Hallie being kept after school. Maybe he never would understand, maybe his mind would just keep wandering down other happy trails. Loyd handed me his handkerchief and I tried to blow my nose.
"What would she want you to do?"
"She would be crying for a person in a damn ambulance that she didn't even know. Not me."
I saw lightning erupt in the dark clouds behind the Catalina Mountains. It was an impossible time of year for a lightning storm. I'd seen photographs of lightning frozen in its terrible splendor, ripping like a knife down the curtains of the sky. They say that to take those pictures you just open your camera on a dark night, in a storm, and if you're lucky you get a wonderful picture. You have no control.
"Hallie isn't dead," I said. "This is a dream." I laid my head back against the headrest and cried with my knucklebones against my mouth. Tears ran down to my collarbone and soaked my shirt and still I didn't wake up.
Chapter 25
25 Flight
Getting on the bus was the easiest thing in the world. I only took what I could carry. Emelina would send my trunk to Telluride.
I noticed the junkyard again on the way out of town. They should have had a sign there: Welcome to Grace. Farewell to Grace. Dead grass poked up through the rusted husks of big old cars that hunched on the ground like elephants, the great dying beasts of the African plain. It was early June, soon after the end of school. The land was matchstick-dry and I felt the same way, just that brittle, as if no amount of rain could saturate my outer layers and touch my core. I was a hard seed beyond germination. I would do fine in Telluride. Carlo had lined up a job for me as a model in a summer fine-arts school. I would sit still for solid hours while people tried for my skin tones.
Uda Dell and Mrs. Quintana, Doc's assistant for twenty-one years, were going to take shifts with Doc Homer. His office was closed for good, and everybody now drove over to New Mexico to be healed. There were no thunderclaps when it happened; all this time we'd thought he was indispensable. Uda and Mrs. Quintana revered him. I couldn't picture them feeding him, buttoning up his shirt, but I knew they would do those things. Somehow reverence can fashion itself into kindness, in a way that love sometimes can't. When I went up there to tell him goodbye, he was eating a soft-boiled egg and said he couldn't tarry, he was in a hurry to get to the hospital.