Читать книгу Trip Through Your Wires - Sarah Layden - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Liberated from her pattern of work, home, sleep, repeat, Carey now understood how limited her looping path of the Circle City had been. She’d missed major changes. Indianapolis, solid predictable Midwest mid-sized burgers and fries, morphed daily into a different city. More alien than Mexico had been when she’d first arrived.

Free mornings sans time clock, she lingered over the newspaper, examining numbers on immigration figures and photos illustrating the “new diversity”: at the bus stop, uniformed Hispanic women in either the tight black pants associated with food service or looser, gray custodian’s jumpsuits. Dark-skinned men in tri-colored jerseys kicked soccer balls in the park. Legs short and quick, black cleats still clumped with Mexican soil.

Hispanic executives who’d been at their companies for years were now featured in profiles. Caucasian female news anchors carefully enunciated Sink-Oh Day My-Oh, wrapping their lipsticked mouths around names like Gutierrez and Almogordo. In broadcast school, they had painstakingly mastered the Midwestern non-accent, only to land squarely in the Midwest, where they now learned to pronounce Spanish. Everyone loved Maria Cortez on Channel Two—bilingual, lovely Maria, quick to translate rapid-fire Spanish.

But TV was one thing. In Walmart, you could sense the wariness over the unfamiliar Spanish chatter. Cagey Americans, unaware that they were just as loose-mouthed in English. Just as quick to a bargain, fingering a cheap sweater on a rack, convincing a daughter that it didn’t really look like it came from Walmart. English, Spanish—they were saying the same thing: Honey, cariña, nobody can tell.

Spanish, the language Carey loved, filled her ears. In the candy aisle at the Village Pantry, two boys fought in Spanish over how to spend their shared dollar. Alone in her car, she whispered phrases. “Dímelo. Quiero un Kit-Kat.” The language brought Ben back to her, and she felt bruised by the need to conjure him and the need to forget. Small moments—his green eyes grazing her body in a way no one had before or since, his calloused hand resting on her bare shoulder—made more delicious and painful because they would never happen again.

In a matter of days, the spacious Halpern house began to shrink by inches. Carey grew tired of pretending she had a job, of the pointless dressing up in clothes that chafed her soul. Again she claimed to call in sick, though no one had noticed or asked.

Nicole had agreed to meet her for lunch at Edna’s Diner on West 38th Street, a fixture in the African-American community. Back in high school, Nicole had a catchphrase: Wanna slum? And Carey would push aside her conscience to laugh. Slumming: two white teenage girls leaving their mostly-white subdivisions near 71st Street, driving four miles south to where gangs allegedly proliferated, unless the talk was high school bravado. 38th Street was lined with many of the same retail stores and restaurants as high-end 86th Street, north of their turf, but grittier. More litter, more bars. They were never asked to show identification at Ralph’s Spirits & Tobacco. Neon billboards advertised strip clubs and adult video stores, which neighbored doughnut shops and fabric stores. A gentlemen’s club sat isolated in a small field, with the back loading docks of Meijer on one side and Best Buy on the other. Wanna slum? Nicole would ask, and Carey always went. They’d occupy tables adjacent to blacks and Hispanics, but never mingled. This had been years ago, and they’d changed. But their shared history remained.

Nicole, in a cardigan and jeans over her black leotard, was scanning the menu when Carey slid into the booth across from her. She’d pulled her dark blond hair into a loose braid, and the line between her eyebrows deepened.

“I’ve only got an hour,” Nicole said.

“Hello to you, too. I’m fine, thanks. How’s your day?”

Nicole’s blue eyes softened. “Sorry. I’m so used to planning life around these classes. It’s a grind.” A grind, clearly, that she loved. Nicole, radiant and glowing, a supple-limbed dance teacher, a contributor. In high school, Carey had teased Nicole about her flamboyant arm gestures, or the health hazards of too much time spent in tights and leotards. Carey had run distance, endurance. Her arms pumped like thin pistons, biceps, trapezius, and triceps like hard fruit beneath her skin. In Mexico, Ben once had traced his finger down her arm, outlining the muscle, and whistled. On a good day, running had felt like flying.

Today she was conscious of the little fold of skin pouching over her jeans. And after showering, the wiggle of her upper arms as she applied lotion to a rash that had sprouted overnight.

Derek, the owner, stood tall behind the long lunch counter. He had taken over after his mother died. A decade later, some customers still complained Derek’s pies and pancakes weren’t as good. But business hadn’t slowed.

“Be with you in mere minutes,” he said.

Everyone knew Derek. He sponsored breakfasts for the Boys and Girls Clubs. He donated to charity auctions, and the year before hosted a well-publicized benefit for the family of a sixteen-year-old murder victim. He knew faces and orders but not names. “There’s the man,” he’d say by way of a greeting, pointing a long finger at a patron.

“Ladies,” he said. “Ms. Jenks, you know you want a slice of my boysenberry pie.”

Nicole blushed hotly. “Please, it’s Nicole,” she said. “And you remember Carey.”

“Who could forget Strawberry Pancakes?” Derek grinned. He was maybe five years older than them, solidly built.

“I’ll get your coffee,” he said, winking. Nicole’s eyes trailed after him.

Carey offered Nicole her napkin. “You’ve got a little drool going on,” she said.

“Shut up.”

“He knows your name.”

Nicole wouldn’t look at Carey. “His daughter takes beginning tap.”

“So he’s married.”

Now she glanced up quickly. “He doesn’t wear a ring.”

High school was years before, but Carey could still hear adolescent Nicole in her head: “Wanna slum?” Nicole often had declared, “So many black girls at Township get pregnant by junior year, you’d think it was a course requirement.” Gutlessly, Carey had said nothing.

“I heard he’s single,” Nicole said.

“What about Bob?” Carey asked, meaning Bob Kemper, who bartended at McAlestar’s.

“That movie was OK.” Nicole stared at the traffic out the plate glass window. At the next booth an older man in suspenders read the newspaper: Ben’s passport photo was printed on the front page. Carey was relieved when the man folded the paper and laid it down, out of sight.

Derek returned with his notepad. “So, Ni-cole,” Derek said. “Will it be waffles? Will it be pancakes? Don’t keep me in suspense.” He placed a palm over his heart and leaned down towards her.

“Chocolate-chip pancakes, please.” She smiled at him.

“Sweets for the sweet,” he said. “And for you, Strawberry?”

He did not call Carey by name. He did not lean down, swoonily awaiting a response.

“Chicken salad,” Carey said. “On wheat.”

“Huh,” he said, frowning as he wrote it down. He retreated behind the counter, and Nicole held up her palm to preempt Carey’s questions. They’d known each other long enough to converse wordlessly, but now the silence settled thickly around them. Carey couldn’t read it.

They were out of synch, a poorly dubbed movie. After Carey had been sent home from Mexico, mired in a swamp of grief, Nicole coaxed her back into the world. Or at least out drinking at McAlestar’s. In Chicago, they had spent days in requisite disappointing jobs, and nights in smoke-filled lounges. Bars with leather couches. Groping men they clutched, let inside. Brandon, who’d admired her eyes, slept with her, and never called again. A symbolically anonymous phase of Bills, three of them blending in her mind into one person, forgettable. But she remembered herself and Nicole, mascara-smeared, out for coffee on Sunday mornings, something to cut the gin breath, lighting cigarette after cigarette.

They kept it up for months, years, until one night Carey was sitting alone on the living room futon, between two men Nicole hadn’t wanted to invite over. Nicole had to work in the morning, a new job selling classified ads for the Tribune, and she went to her room. Carey did not sleep that night. She began going for coffee alone. In the mornings Nicole would watch her from their kitchen breakfast bar, until Carey would finally ask, “What?” Nicole would shrug her shoulders and busy herself with a magazine, which she now stacked neatly on their secondhand coffee table. “It’s just, when was the last time you had a second date?” she asked rhetorically. “Ben was your last boyfriend. Even if you won’t talk, Carey, he’s still gone.”

She’d edged up to that uncomfortable truth, and for three days, Carey could barely speak—to Nicole, or anyone. She stayed out of the apartment. She spent a lonesome evening at Navy Pier amid the garish lights and tourists and rides, wandering aimlessly or sitting alone on a bench. Recalling other benches where she’d waited, when the wrong man appeared.

Carey and Nicole would turn twenty-nine this year. They’d hung on to each other. Nicole either hadn’t heard the news about Ben’s passport, or didn’t care, and Carey said nothing. They made small-talk. Carey zoned out during Nicole’s convoluted explanation of the dance studio’s budget. When Carey mentioned the sickos she’d encountered in chat rooms, Nicole grimaced, implying that she, Carey, was a sicko by association. Derek saluted them when they left. “Until Tuesday, Ni-cole,” he said.

Outside the restaurant, Carey lit a cigarette and held out her pack.

Nicole shook her head. “I quit.”

“Since when?”

She shrugged, wrapping her cardigan more tightly, arm muscles outlined against thin cotton. “The kids will smell it.”

Carey paused briefly, looking up at the sky, which was largely blocked by a Hooters billboard. Carey dropped her barely-smoked cigarette on the ground, stamping her heel.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Nicole said, softening. “But thanks.”

“I aim to please,” Carey said.

“You do, don’t you.” Nicole studied her. “What’s the deal with work?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re not there today, and you’re wearing jeans.” Nicole flipped her braid over one shoulder, waiting. She might’ve looked at her watch. She might’ve been scratching her wrist.

“I got let go,” Carey said.

“Carey, no.” Nicole sounded sympathetic but not surprised. “What’ll you do now?”

“I don’t know, get another job?”

“You don’t have to be so sarcastic. Can you take me back to work? Bob dropped me here. My car’s in the shop.”

Carey unlocked the car and they got in. The interior smelled of smoke, less pungent than the inside of McAlestar’s bar. Bob’s bar.

“You quit smoking for Bob,” Carey said. “And Derek. Your men don’t smoke.”

Nicole’s blue eyes gleamed. “Can’t I quit for me? Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

Carey knew that the more she asked the less forthcoming Nicole would be. A characteristic they shared.

“Nope,” Carey said, shifting into gear and driving north on High School Road. In her peripheral vision, Nicole smiled her Cheshire cat smile. They were back in synch. One of those rare instances when the action and the talk line up perfectly on a screen.

•

They passed the vacant strip mall where the chain grocery store used to be. Tenants had fled once the store relocated to the Northside. At one end of the plaza, a small white banner hung over the door of the old frozen yogurt shop. It read “Bienvenido a Nuestra Tienda.” Colorful canned goods were stacked in the windows.

Years earlier, Carey’s mother had complained about the influx of Hispanic immigrants on the West side. “They can keep their restaurants,” she’d say, “as long as I’ve got the toehold in potpourri. Ladies who lunch pay out the nose for that stuff.” Some months before Carey’s study-abroad program in Mexico, she overheard her mother on the phone: “Maybe I should compete with them. Expand into a drive-thru. You want beans with that?” Her laughter pealed throughout the kitchen. Carey was certain that whichever friend was on the other end of the line was agreeing with her mother.

Carey tried to explain that the comments were inappropriate, but her mother claimed she was joking. Carey, a sociology major and Spanish minor, politely refrained from mentioning that Gwen Halpern was also a lady who lunched.

Now Carey pointed to the small Mexican grocery. “Looks new. Have you been?”

“Can’t you get that stuff at Kroger?” Nicole asked. “And cheaper?”

A mile later, the new strip mall appeared from nowhere. The flat buildings sprouted and sprawled, prolific as mushrooms.

Casa Colmo had gotten a new sign since her lunch days before. Now red-and-green chile peppers flanked the letters. Last time, she hadn’t noticed the cardboard sign in the window: Se Emplea. Now Hiring.

The shifting, weak sunlight highlighted the glass door’s floor-to-ceiling etching.

“You could work there.”

Carey had already turned on her blinker. Not because of Nicole’s suggestion. The etched glass drew her as if her car’s alignment had gone bad.

“I was kidding,” Nicole said.

“No, it’s a good idea.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“I’ll just be a minute. In and out. I promise.”

Nicole muttered an indecipherable complaint and pulled out her cell phone. Carey still didn’t have—or need—a cell phone.

The restaurant door’s wooden handle was smooth beneath her palm; she lingered over it. She could say the door was locked. She could appease Nicole and say she’d come back later. Somehow her hand moved of its own volition, the door opened, and she walked inside to a wave of fried tortillas, the upbeat trill of Tejano music. At a long table in the center of the room, ten or so Latinos folded new, laminated menus. They were laughing, speaking loudly. Only one woman sat at the table: the same woman from Carey’s last visit, holding court. Her long, blue-black hair fell across the shoulders of her tight red T-shirt. The men were teasing her, and she shook her head. “Tell them to stop, Juan,” she said in Spanish, turning to the waiter who had to be her brother. The almond-shaped eyes gave them away.

The mood was far cheerier than the other day, when Ben’s passport was featured on the noon news. Now, the musical words, the scent of tortillas emanating from the kitchen—Carey inhaled it all. This place four miles from her house was not just a Mexican restaurant. Somehow she continued to enter new versions of a city she thought she knew.

Strangely, she felt homesick.

The man with the dark hair falling in his eyes noticed Carey standing at the door. He nudged the man next to him, signaling a chain reaction of quiet around the table.

“Buenos tardes,” the floppy-haired man said in Spanish. He averted his eyes. The others just stared.

Carey said, “You’re hiring? Quiero trabajar.”

Spanglish. A few of the men snickered. The woman, perhaps a few years older than Carey, assessed her, and Carey became conscious of her jeans—stained on one thigh from a dollop of chicken salad at lunch—and her pilled black sweater. Her brown hair, shoulder-length and quickly blown dry, probably needed brushing. These things always occurred to her too late.

“Ha trabajado en un restaurante?” the woman asked.

“No, but you need someone who speaks English,” she said in slow Spanish. “Hardly anyone in this city speaks Spanish.”

Immediately she blushed. Of course, Mexicans in Indianapolis spoke Spanish. The city had a consulate, Maria Cortez at six and eleven. This table full of gaping men in front of her.

The woman crossed the room. She was a few inches shorter than Carey. She held out her hand. “Elena Morales,” she said, without any accent. “I speak English.”

Carey introduced herself, unsure of which language to choose.

“The church on the door—is it in Guanajuato?” Carey asked.

Elena appraised her. “Yes, the town of Dolores Hidalgo. Our home.”

“I love that place,” Carey said. “One of the most beautiful spots in Mexico.”

A flexible truth. She’d visited Dolores Hidalgo, a small town about an hour away from the city of Guanajuato, on a day trip with other students. At its center, Dolores Hidalgo had a lovely, colonial square, the magnificent church, and streets of shops selling pottery, clothing and trinkets. Tourism was its main industry. But the outlying lanes showed disrepair, the vegetable stands measly and swarmed with flies. The outskirts were rough farming areas, covered with nopales and rocky hillsides. She’d been examining the tables of ceramics and skeleton puppets when a man had called from across the street: Guera, I follow you. Guera meant blond but also meant white. He mirrored her for a full block, never crossing over. But he could’ve.

Now she used Dolores Hidalgo like a bargaining chip. So she’d been there a day, when she was twenty-one. So she hadn’t loved it. These were small matters.

Elena’s mouth softened into something like a smile. “Maybe, we could use you,” she conceded. “This is my parents’ restaurant. I can’t say yes or no until I talk to them.”

“Que dice, hermana?” the man she’d called Juan asked.

“Momento,” she told him, then turned to Carey. “My brother.”

“You look alike,” Carey said. Elena made a face.

Carey had never waited tables or worked in a restaurant, not even fast food. But she needed work. She needed to know what the whispers meant, even though she could translate: Yo lo conozco. I know him.

“Can I fill out an application?” Carey asked.

“Claro que si,” Elena said, retreating behind the cash register. Juan smiled, waved. The one with the dark hair in his eyes examined Carey’s plain black boots.

“Here you are.” Elena pushed a piece of white paper across the counter and handed Carey a pen. The woman had written:

Name/Nombre: _____________________________

Phone/Teléfono: ____________________________

Carey completed the makeshift application, thinking they’d never call. Or worse, that they would.

When she arrived home, her mother was hovering over the answering machine, looking puzzled. She glanced up at Carey, taking in her jeans and black sweater.

“It’s the temping service. They said your final pay sheet still needs to be signed. And that they’re mailing a severance of contract form.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“So, tell.” She pursed her lips, half concerned, half suspicious.

“The woman I replaced, Felicia? Who had cancer? She’s better!”

“So now you’re out of work. The agreement was you’d pay us back for helping with the credit cards.”

“I will.”

“Without a job?”

“I’m looking. I’ve got leads, maybe an interview.”

Now her mother smiled, surprised. “Well, then. You’re being proactive.”

Carey stood up straighter.

“Hey, what do you think about my hair?” Gwen brushed a few strands off her forehead. It looked the same as always. “What if I changed it? What if I went super short?”

“That might work,” Carey hedged. She imagined diet guru Susan Powter’s close-cropped hairdo. Gwen sniffed—Carey should have been more enthusiastic—and headed to the living room. When Carey heard the sound of the television, she pressed play on the answering machine, listening to the nasal voice. She deleted the message. They had her address; they’d send the forms.

She grabbed the cordless handset and slinked upstairs to her bedroom, positioning herself on the floor of her bedroom closet. Growing up, she’d had the whole second floor to herself; still, she often retreated to the closet for phone calls. Wrapped in two sets of walls, two kinds of dark.

Dialing Mike’s number felt like programming a time machine. He answered on the second ring. She pushed away the hem of her midnight blue prom dress, as if Mike could see her.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s Carey.”

He inhaled quickly. “Hi,” he said, a single syllable loaded with anxiety and excitement. Did she hear all that, or want to hear it?

“How are you?” he asked, just as she was saying, “It’s been a long time.” They finished tripping over each other, laughed, then fell silent.

“I’m glad you called,” he said finally. “I’ll be down in Indy, day after tomorrow. You free this weekend?”

“I could do Friday,” she said.

“I’m having dinner with the Williamsons. Ben’s parents.”

She resented his explication, and the possessiveness she felt. She knew who the Williamsons were. They had never invited her to dinner. All she said was, “I have to work Saturday.” A lie, albeit an optimistic one.

They agreed on meeting Sunday evening, and she suggested a bar in Broad Ripple. Her nails made tiny half moons in the flesh of her palms. She paused only a fraction of a second when he requested her email address. After Mexico, she’d cut him off, told him to stop writing, a decision she’d regretted yet could not undo.

“Hey, Carey?”

“Yes?” She stood and knocked her head against a tangle of wire hangers, the tinny clatter like wind chimes.

“What was that?” Mike asked.

“Nothing.” Just hiding in the closet. As you do in your late twenties.

“I’ve wanted to get in touch before, plenty of times,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m going to see you again.”

She could not let herself respond in kind. “So, see you Sunday.”

“Right,” he said. “Sure.”

They were both quiet for a moment. “You still there?” he asked. “Where’d you go?”

There were so many ways to answer that question. She merely apologized. “Gotta run,” she said. “My mom needs the phone.”

She hung up the phone and smacked her forehead with it. My mom needs the phone, she thought to herself. Because I live with my parents. And don’t have my own phone. Which is fantastic at age twenty-eight.

The answer to his question of her whereabouts was simple: she’d returned to that familiar retreat, the folds of her memory, to Mexico and the last time they’d laid eyes on one another.

Mike had come by the Alarcón house three times. She refused to see him. Ben had been shot and killed in an alleyway. Random violence, horrible, the Intercambio teachers said, skepticism tingeing their voices. Probably a robbery, said the old cop with the sad eyes, though Ben had little to steal. He worked as many shifts as he could get, and Carey assumed his money went toward bills. Besides pesos, he kept a superstitious nineteen dollars American in his wallet. He had a single credit card she’d never seen him use.

When the phone rang, she expected her host mother to summon her. Lupe, who pressed a wet washcloth to Carey’s forehead, who rocked her when she woke up screaming, who couldn’t watch when Bartolo had to restrain Carey’s flailing limbs with his soft jeweler’s hands.

She says nothing, Lupe had told other callers. She stares at the wall or the ceiling. No sleep. Yes, she eats a little toast or tortilla. But it comes back up, always. Her color is poor. Her eyes do not focus. Her body is sick, not just her heart.

The maid, Maria, had begun crossing herself in Carey’s presence. As if La Americana was possessed. Lupe admonished Maria in the hallway outside the bedroom: No. Está rota. She is broken.

Sometimes Carey rocked on the bed, but mostly she was still. She imagined a computer screen swept blank by the delete key. The Alarcóns might’ve felt punished, though they were not to blame. She would speak to them if they asked the right questions. But no one asked who she was before she came to Mexico, or who she was before Ben. An unrecognizable woman, now. Nobody asked why she’d stopped showering and picked her scalp until it bled. She let a scab form, then scraped the hard shell away. Unconsciously marking the place Ben had touched her, hidden beneath her long brown hair, a place no one could see.

When the phone rang that day, Carey silently lifted the receiver on the upstairs extension. It was Andrea Cunningham, who told Lupe about the weekend memorial service. Lupe spoke on the phone in a hushed voice, the small click click click of her polished nails tapping the plastic receiver. A nervous habit.

The Williamsons were flying in from Indianapolis. Ben’s parents had chosen Carey to give a reading. They were bringing a copy of scripture they thought Ben had liked, Andrea said.

Who did they think their son was? The Williamsons were Catholic, but Ben had never mentioned the Bible. Not once.

Carey managed to get dressed. She slipped out of the house and walked to the dorm, not seeing the vegetable merchants with their chiles and oblong green peppers spread on blankets along the sidewalk, not noticing the manic traffic. She climbed the steps to the fourth floor. Mike wasn’t there. At the front desk she asked the clerk for a key to Mike Gibley’s room. She explained vaguely, He asked me to get something for him. The clerk slid the key across the counter. A book, Carey added, but the man gazed beyond her to the street. The campus had been inhabited by zombies. The city, with so little crime, paused in shock over the American’s death. Es muy tranquilo, every Mexican resident and tourist had said of Guanajuato. Es tan hermoso.

Then there was a blank period of time, like erased tape. She remembered when Mike entered the room, where she waded through piles of ruined jeans and t-shirts. Her hands were stained with black from the fountain pen she’d cracked, spilling everywhere. His boxer shorts were snipped into pieces, and she’d plunged the scissors into the mattress. Only the blue handle was visible. It looked like a neatly tied bow. Five iron bars covered the screenless, open window. She held Mike’s laptop, still plugged into the wall socket, and she gave a violent tug to release it. The freed wires lay a few feet from where Mike stood at the door, his eyes widened.

“Please,” he said.

She raised the computer to the window’s vertical bars, perfectly spaced. Three days earlier, she’d stood in the same doorframe with him. For a split second, Mike’s eyes reached her. The pain of what they had shared. Mike suffered, too.

The brief damp rot of sadness passed, replaced by anger. Maybe Mike called her name, issuing a warning to calm down. She couldn’t remember. He lunged quickly across the room, stepping on the power cord. Carey released the machine. The laptop dangled for a moment before unplugging. The computer was only seven pounds of plastic and parts, and the crash was anticlimactic. Below, a handful of keyboard letters popped off and clattered into the gutter. Had she not been running out the door, down the stairs, and across the street, she might have paused over the cubes lying on the uneven stone. All consonants, no vowels. A word that made no sense.

They didn’t send her home for that, though they could have. Andrea Cunningham and Don Hernando spelled out her situation. There was the memorial service to attend. There were marvelous grief counselors working with the students. Maravilloso, they said, reminding her of an elementary Spanish textbook, of boy and girl characters in everyday situations.

She did not go to the counselors or the service. Perhaps the Williamsons were disappointed, perhaps not. They were Northsiders; her family lived on the West side. She and Ben had grown up in the same city yet never knew each other. Or rather, he had not known her. How maravilloso, she had first thought, to become involved with a man from her hometown. To become involved with this man, in Mexico of all places, in a city wedged between mountains. Her mind fast-forwarding: brunch at Edna’s, marriage a few years after graduation, a good story to tell their tall, green-eyed children. Now, thinking of home made her already-edgy stomach churn.

She did not want to return to Indianapolis and spot Ben’s mother in the cereal aisle at Kroger. She did not want his family looking her up. When Lupe and Andrea explained that the Williamsons not only wanted to meet but had asked her to read scripture at Ben’s memorial service, the movie projector in her mind sputtered to a stop. She knew she would regret her behavior. She knew skipping the service was like cutting a cord, even if she didn’t know what the cord connected to. She knew all this and still stayed away, eyes trained on her digital travel clock, ticking off the minutes until the end of the memorial mass at the Basilica.

It was not just about Ben’s parents. She did not want to see the body. She did not want to see Mike. If she could avoid seeing, if she could live with her eyes screwed tight, then it might be as if that night had never happened.