VERNON SLIPS BACK TO HIS HIDING PLACE IN THE HOSPITAL parking lot. He has driven here on another thought of laying the boy at the door of the emergency room. And going on his way. Going hack to the cottage, doing his school work, returning to his life. Taking his chances.
He sits in the dark car, though, looking over the tops of cars. It is quiet; visiting horns are over.
A car is entering then. Pulling into the lot, it parks in the crowd of cars close to the building. Vernon watches. He feels distant, even absent. Nothing happens to the car for a moment, until a man emerges, closes the door—no sound comes to Vernon, as if there is an overall drone of generators—and walks away, into the overlapping buildings. Vernon feels he has a vantage point, all at once, on existence itself, here in his hiding place.
A woman is coming from one of the buildings. She is on a sidewalk, where she pauses under a floodlight. She wears a dark coat and does not appear to have on white stockings or white shoes, like so many others. She slips into a car in the main concentration of cars, and in a moment, soundlessly, the car’s exhaust lifts into the darkness. Her headlights come on; as she pulls around to drive away, another car is entering.
“Wake up,” Vernon whispers to the boy, as he looks at him.
Then it comes to him that he doesn’t really want the boy to wake up. If the boy would join him, and make a game of imagining why people are coming and going from the hospital, it would be wonderful. It would be all he ever wanted.
But he won’t, Vernon thinks. Not now or ever.
He settles back and looks up through the windshield as if it were a skylight. No stars are visible. Low clouds look pink in the darkness as they reflect light from below. A capability is in him, he sees, and he is merely waiting. He is merely waiting. It has come to this.