13

          The first thing Maggie was aware of was her open mouth. She licked her lips, then ran her tongue along her gum lines until they were moist again.

The second thing she was aware of was a soreness at the base of her neck. She sat up, rolled her shoulders forward and back, back and forward. She opened and closed her mouth, re-licked her lips.

It was quiet in the car and dark, and it took her a minute to realize she wasn’t in the driveway of Mark’s parents’ farm. In the early days, such things were possible. In the twelfth hour of the drive, Maggie could switch to the passenger seat, rest her head against the window for what she believed was merely a moment, then fall into a sleep so heavy, so deep that Mark would be unable to rouse her when they pulled into his parents’ gravel drive. He’d been forced more than once to leave her there, in the passenger seat, until she woke on her own, usually close to morning, the neighbors’ roosters her alarm. But this was before. This was long ago. This was back when sleep came fast and easy no matter where she was. They could pop in a video in the early days of their marriage, and she’d be out cold in ten minutes. Mark hadn’t been miffed by it. He’d been, in fact, overjoyed. He used to say how good it made him feel—that his wife found such comfort in their life together that she could sleep through anything. She’d always liked this assessment of her patterns. She’d been as captivated by the idea as he. But in this last year, sleep had turned obstinate; the silence of the bedroom and the dark of midnight had become something to dread. In reexamining her relationship with the dark, she’d stumbled accidently onto a question she hadn’t intended ever to consider: Did not the difficulty of sleep necessarily suggest a departure of the intense confidence she’d once had in her home life?

She cleared her throat.

This wasn’t the time to pursue such dreary considerations because she was not now in Mark’s parents’ gravel driveway, where she should have been. Instead, she was—she realized as her eyes adjusted—in a parking lot, in the passenger seat of their car, alone. Almost alone. Gerome was in the back, sleeping. She could hear him breathing.

The parking lot was unlit. She looked up and out the sunroof. Above the car—she could just barely make it out—was a streetlamp, but the streetlamp was dead.

She checked the door. Hers was unlocked. She sat up a little straighter and then checked the driver’s side and the backseat. Also unlocked. She didn’t want to panic, but she did want to scream. Anger, fear, fatigue: Who could say for sure what she was feeling. All of them? None of them? She was simultaneously filled up with and emptied out of emotions. She thought about hitting the glove compartment, but that would be a punishment only to her hand. And the thing she wanted to punish—the person who had abandoned her in an unlocked car in the middle of nowhere—was currently and conveniently MIA.

She did the next best thing to hitting and screaming. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and visualized her own skull exploding. She imagined little pieces of cranium sticking to the upholstery of the roof, sliding down the inside of the windshield. Protoplasmic fibers splattered against the rearview mirror. Chunks of cerebellum landed on the dashboard. Her medulla dangled limply from the passenger headrest. She stayed like this until she heard a tiny buzzing at the base of her brain, and then she released herself. Except, she wasn’t released. Because now her heartbeat was racing, which necessarily engaged her anxiety, and she found herself suddenly clawing at the lock button in a sloppy and erratic sort of way that reminded her out of nowhere of climbing up a pool ladder when, as a child, she’d once managed to convince herself—though she knew it to be a pure impossibility—that piranhas had materialized in the deep end.

She pushed the button. The sound of the doors sealing themselves against the night filled the car with a hollow thwunk. Gerome stirred, but nothing more.

In the glove compartment there was a tin candy box the size of a matchbook. In this tin candy box there was a mixture of square-shaped breath mints and circular yellow pills. She took a deep breath and exhaled the air slowly. She did not reach for the box. Her former therapist had trained her well enough so that she didn’t need to take one every time her nerves clicked on. Sometimes—like now—it was enough just to know they were there. Lemon-colored ellipsoids interspersed neatly with small white squares. It was enough just to imagine them and all the good they could do to her central nervous system if she so chose.

Also in the compartment was an emergency first-aid kit. Its contents were geared more toward animals than humans—large bandages, strong sedatives, at least one legal barbiturate—and not at all toward practical survival, which meant there wasn’t a flashlight, which was the only thing Maggie truly wanted at that moment.

She cracked her neck. She was starting to notice other things about her current situation. The car key, for starters, was not in the ignition—she felt for it, just to be sure—nor was it in the center console, and the car itself was warm. In fact, the car was very warm, and she was warm, and Gerome—now she heard it more distinctly—wasn’t just snoring; he was panting. Mark had left the two of them in an unlocked car, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a heat wave. It was possible he’d finally lost his mind.

She reached behind her seat and pulled out a half-filled water bottle. She took a sip and then poured a little into her cupped palm. She wiped it onto the fur under Gerome’s ear and then around his neck. Gerome moaned and flipped himself gently so that his belly was exposed. She poured a little bit more onto her hand—she dared Mark to say something about the leather; she just dared him—and then rubbed it along his abdomen. Gerome stretched, but still he made no move to stand. She put the back of her hand under his chin. His heartbeat was fast, but he was fine. This was simply a dog’s body’s way of cooling itself.

At least Gerome wasn’t dying back there. At least he wasn’t dead because—

And then for a half second—no, less than a half second, a nanosecond, a piece of time so fleeting there’s no way truly to prove it ever existed except through the memory of the thought—Maggie imagined the satisfaction she might feel if Gerome had a heat stroke and died. She imagined the permanent regret with which Mark would be forever saddled. She imagined the upper hand she would have for the rest of their lives. But then immediately—almost immediately, because the nanosecond exists and existed—she felt intense guilt for having used the fantasy of Gerome’s death as a way to inflict a make-believe punishment on her husband. Dear god, she was turning perverse. Maybe there was something irreversibly wrong with her.

She wanted to roll down a window or crack the door, but she couldn’t risk exposing herself. She leaned forward, cupped a hand to the windshield, and looked out. The parking lot was full of empty cars and trucks—or what she assumed were empty cars and trucks. Who knows? Maybe the lot was filled with women in similar situations—women lousy with despair, lousy with anxiety; women stifled by the heat and by their fear and by their own lousy husbands. Ha! If only there were other women in the night . . .

Imagine the things they could say to one another . . .

Imagine the stories they could tell . . .

Imagine the comfort they might feel to be so safely ensconced in such a large number of the same sex . . .

But there were no other women.

There were only cars and trucks. And they were all parked, just as theirs was, in what appeared to be a large paved ravine surrounded on all sides by tall dirt banks. Maggie gazed higher and, doing so, noticed that, in the distance, up and beyond the dirt walls, there was light. A muted glowing light. Pale and lemony, just like her pills.