Tuesday morning, when Lars showed up at Montana Gag, there were six police cars parked in the lot, their lights flashing, and as many cops walking around inside. He pretended to try the door of the Chinese place, which he knew was closed. Walking back to his car, he shook his head theatrically and thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Sooner or later they would need to ask him questions, and Lars was content to let them track him down on their own time.
Out of a job.
When he got home, he padded around the apartment in his stocking feet, trying to decide if he should empty his savings, buy a car, and drive back to Wisconsin. It was probably a bad idea, though that had not always been an effective deterrent for him. Already he could see the confusion of emotions on his mother’s face: joy at seeing him, coupled with the horror of realizing he would not be leaving. When he picked up the phone, he wasn’t sure who he would call. It turned out to be Toth.
He answered, still asleep, on the first ring.
“Huh?”
“Toth, it’s Lars.” When he heard nothing from the other end, he added, “I’m sorry to wake you up.”
“‘Sokay.”
In truth, this was something he needed to do, but had been putting off. Over the weekend he’d bumped into Toth and his roommate, Tim, at the Safeway. They were buying provisions for a camping trip that Lars had not been invited on. This simultaneously insulted him and filled him with pity; Toth didn’t really like Tim, who was a hippie music teacher at the alternative elementary school and was always listening to tapes of himself playing guitar. At the store, a plastic bulk bag of peanuts dangling from his fist, Toth told Lars that he would have invited him “if I didn’t think you’d be hanging around with your girlfriend all weekend.” At this Tim snorted, and the expression of triumphant scorn on Toth’s face faded away.
“What are you doing today?” Lars asked him now.
“Jesus,” he said. “It still feels like yesterday.”
“Maybe you ought to come over.”
Toth paused, still breathing with the slowed rhythm of sleep. “Why’s that?”
“To talk.” And when he didn’t answer; “I’ll make you breakfast.”
“French toast,” Toth said.
“Okay, French toast.”
“Okay. I’m on my way.”
He arrived in half an hour, just as Lars was finishing the food, got plates and forks out for them and set them on the table.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
They ate, made small talk. Lars told him about the police cars and his feint to the Chinese place. Toth talked about his terrible weekend with Tim. “Man, the guy eats,” he said. “He ate peanuts and crackers all fucking night. I didn’t sleep.”
Afterward, they went outside to walk off the food, and ended up on a path down by the river, mostly obscured from view by trees and shrubs.
“I didn’t know this trail was here,” Toth told him.
“Not a lot of people know. Homeless guys.” He broke off a branch that was sticking into the path. “I used to come down here with Megan sometimes.” He didn’t want to walk ahead, where there was a small curved bank of flat rocks around which the roots of cottonwood trees grew. The roots described the edges of an open circle of water, where eddies carved a deep pool. He and Megan had tried to make love there, but found nowhere dry to lie down, and the rocks hurt them. They had finally given up. Lars remembered that Megan had lost a ring along here somewhere, and he automatically scanned the weeds for the glint of metal. But there was nothing.
“Here,” he said, and pointed to a little clearing where a low, forgotten bench rotted at the water’s edge. Once Toth had collected enough round stones to toss into the river, they sat there.
“I’m really sorry,” Lars said.
Toth tossed the first rock, and the water shuddered beneath it. Then he shrugged it off.
Lars said, “I miss you, and I’m really sorry.”
“So what’s up with this Christine?” This very simple, nothing betrayed in the tone.
“She’s a friend.”
“Okay…”
“It’s nothing romantic,” Lars said. “She’s too sick for that. And I’m not ready. You have to know that.” He looked up at Toth, who was still staring at the spot where the rock fell. Suddenly he pushed the others off his lap, and they knocked against each other on the ground.
“I guess.”
“I know it seems like a big deal to you.” He touched Toth’s shoulder, then withdrew. “It is, kind of. She needed…we both needed somebody who’s not so much better off.”
“I’m not good enough for that?”
“You remind me of her.”
Toth turned to him. “You remind me of her too.”
For a few minutes they watched the water pass. In midstream, just downstream from a boulder that jutted from the water like an iceberg, a fish jumped. As if it were a signal to him, Toth said, “There’s something you don’t know, man.”
“I don’t know?”
“I don’t think you know.” He looked Lars in the eye. “No, you don’t.”
He felt a chill. “What.”
Toth frowned suddenly, a reflex to precede tears, but the tears didn’t come. “I was in love with her. With Megan.” He kicked the pile of rocks and they scattered. “Nothing ever happened or anything, I just loved her. Like, romantically.”
Lars said, “No, I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know how it…yeah, I do. She treated me so nice. That’s stupid. I mean, nobody bothered to get to know me like that. I could say whatever to her, and she’d know what I meant. That kind of thing.” He shoved his thumb and forefinger up under his glasses and pressed them to the inside corners of his eyes. “And then, I pretty much knew you weren’t going to break up, I mean, she wanted to marry you…”
“She did?” Another spike through his throat. He swallowed around it.
“Well, yeah.” Toth looked at him strangely, apparently astonished that he hadn’t known.
“Did she know?” Lars managed. “About you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Since when?”
“Since about eight months ago. We, the three of us, went to the Kwik Stop for beer, and I was in the front seat and she was in the back, and you ran in alone, and I just told her. I talked the whole time you were in there, and I just told her everything, how I felt and all, and I never looked back to see her reaction and she didn’t say anything, and then you came out and we drove off. And you didn’t notice a thing, I guess.”
“I don’t remember this at all.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Toth took his glasses off, folded them up and dropped them into his pocket. It was an old man’s gesture, and it made Lars deeply sad.
“I couldn’t help it,” Toth said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
After that there was nothing more to say. They both seemed to realize this at once, and in time stood. On the way back to Lars’s apartment, they talked about seeing a movie—a matinee somewhere.
But when they walked in, Lars’s message machine was blinking. It was Christine’s mother. They had found a kidney for her.
* * *
This is what had happened:
A group of teenagers, two boys and two girls, had spent the night camping illegally on a remote stretch of eastern Washington river. They got drunk, and were still drunk when they woke the next morning, when they drove their Ford Bronco into the water. One of the girls in the front seat hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and cracked her head on the windshield. She stayed conscious and climbed out, but her friends, ironically, all wearing seat belts, drowned. The survivor stumbled back along the dirt road they had taken the night before, until she encountered a group of picnickers, who drove her to the nearest town. As the picnickers’ car pulled into the hospital parking lot, she suddenly screamed, “Oh my God!” and keeled over dead of a brain hemorrhage.
Of the three people within helicopter distance ahead of Christine in priority, none shared the dead girl’s blood type. Christine did. The kidney was being removed from the girl’s body when Christine’s doctor called. She had been eating lunch, and when she hung up the phone she went to the bathroom, threw up half her sandwich, brushed her teeth and walked across the parking lot with her mother to the hospital.
Lars and Toth got all this information from Amanda Stull, who was sitting on a wheelchair that had been left in the hall outside Christine’s hospital room. Christine was inside, undergoing rests in preparation for surgery; Amanda Stull was frantic. “I called all of Christine’s brothers,” she said. “Dennis and Leslie are coming, and Samuel…“And she switched off, as if the thought of these children, scattered as they were across America, almost out of reach, was too much for her to take.
She looked older here than she had in the trailer, where Lars had met her; her hair was an icy steel gray that seemed perfectly in place in the hospital, and it added to the already strong impression that she was emphatically and inconsolably nervous. Her eyes shone from the stone of her head like two glinting coins; her cheeks sagged under the weight of incipient jowls. Her hands were wrapped around the chair’s push rims as if she might, at any moment, need to go careening down the hall in search of help.
Lars and Toth moved quietly away from her and waited near the elevators. “How long do you think it’s going to be?” Toth asked him. They had been here twenty minutes, hoping to see her before surgery.
“Can’t be much longer. How much can they do to her?”
Down the hall, there was a noise: Christine’s door had opened and her mother was launching herself from the wheelchair. As they watched, she disappeared inside.
Lars tried to recall when he had last been in a hospital. The memory that returned most easily to him was of his father’s illness, though there had been other visits since then. He remembered his grandfather’s bypass surgery, which had been a failure; the operating doctor came out of surgery and told them that his arteries had been like wet paper towels. In high school, his soccer coach had broken his ankle when, running along the sideline after a play, he stepped in the water bucket and fell. And Megan’s strep throat, which Student Health had refused to treat because of a filing error regarding her tuition bill. He brought her to the emergency room here, where they sat for two hours before anyone would see them. She lay across two waiting room seats, her head in his lap. Her forehead burned, and it radiated the scorched scent of a baked potato, and he brushed hairs from her face and read aloud to her from a copy of Highlights for Children, which neither of them had seen for years.
He wondered how these doctors and nurses, how anyone on the staff of the hospital, could stand to work in a place where everyone is angry or miserable, watching the lives of their loved ones drain away.
He thought: I took such good care of her. And in the end for nothing.
After a few minutes, a nurse came out to find them. She led them back to Christine’s room and through the door, where her mother sat opposite them, mashing her daughter’s hand in her own. Everything in the room was beige. Behind Amanda Stull hung a beige curtain. Lars could see the wheels and frame of another bed underneath it, and the feet of a man and woman, presumably doctors or nurses. Christine’s head poked out from under her sheets, looking slightly waxen in the fluorescent light, but all in all she looked healthy and alert, more so anyway than she often was out of the hospital. Lars told her so.
“Well Jesus, it’s pretty damned exciting, don’t you think?” she said, her voice quieter, less sure than usual.
“I guess so.”
She pointed at Toth, smiling. “Who’s the kook?”
“I’m Toth,” he said. “Lars’s friend.” He stuck out his hand and she took it.
“Christine. Lars told me about you.” She looked down at herself, and gestured to her body underneath the white sheets. “Sorry I can’t get up and show you around.”
Toth looked flustered. “Oh, that’s…I mean—”
“We came as soon as we could,” Lars said. “They had us waiting outside…”
“They were sticking things in me.” She made a dismissive wave with her free hand. “Business as usual. Did Mom tell you about the kids who drove their truck into the river?”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head. “This kidney was cleaning out some kid’s blood a few hours ago.”
“Jesus,” Toth whispered.
“Yeah,” she said, and to Lars’s utter astonishment, she began to cry. Her mother reached out, and with great and trembling gentleness ran her fingers over Christine’s forehead. She whispered, “It’s okay, baby,” and Christine nodded.
“Christine,” Lars said. “Do you want—”
“No, no, stay.” She wiped her face with her free hand. “It’s just, that poor girl had to watch them go down. I’m going to think about her every time I pee.”
“Are you afraid?” Lars asked.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a perfect match, baby,” her mother told her. “They said so. It couldn’t be better.”
“Yeah, I know.”
The curtain behind Christine’s mother parted, and two nurses, a man and a woman, stepped out. “Excuse us,” the man said. Lars caught a glimpse, as the curtain fell closed, of a still figure under sheets. No sounds came from the other bed, only the low hum of some machinery—a monitor perhaps. They were all silent for a moment, suddenly aware of this presence they had forgotten, until Christine spoke again.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve been totally confident about this transplant ever since all this started. Why shouldn’t I be, right?” She swallowed hard, looked at her mother and back to Lars. “But now…they’re gonna cut part of me out and put something else in? How can that work?” Her face tightened. “How can that be anything but the most ridiculous bullshit?”
* * *
Before they left Christine asked him to make a couple of calls. “The Alpha chicks,” she said. “Just call up the house, okay? It’s in the phone book.”
“Okay.”
“I know you probably think they’re stupid, but they’re good to me.”
“I don’t think anybody’s stupid.”
“It’s in the yellow pages. ADT, under ‘Fraternities and Sororities.’” She paused. “As if sororities don’t deserve their own listing.”
“Got it.”
“Come here,” she said. Lars wasn’t sure what she meant. He raised his eyebrows, questioning. “Here,” she said, and waved him close.
When he leaned over, she touched the back of his neck and kissed him once, on the lips. He let it happen. Her lips, her fingers, were a little cold. It felt good.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Good luck.”
“Don’t tell me. Tell the surgeon.”
He smiled at Amanda Stull, who managed a thin smile in return, and looked once more at Christine before he took hold of Toth’s shoulder and walked with him out into the hall.
* * *
Lars called the sorority from the lobby. “I’m Lars Cowgill,” he told the girl who answered. “Christine Stull’s friend.”
“Really?” she said. He heard her whispering something to someone else.
“She wanted me to call you. She got a kidney. They’re putting it in now.”
There was a pause. “Oh my God!” the girl said. Lars told them how long it would take—six hours—and about the accident that brought her the kidney.
“So do we come down there? Will they let us see her afterward?”
“I don’t know,” Lars said, and he wondered when he would next see her. Possibly never. Don’t think that.
There was no use staying at the hospital. Lars looked at his watch: twelve-fifteen. It would be evening when she came out. Would she wake up before the day’s end? He felt his blood scraping along the inside of his veins. It was as if he’d been poisoned.
In the lobby, they passed by a vending machine full of starchy junk food: pretzels, snack mix, potato chips. Lars was drawn to it. Just the thing to soak up the toxins. He pulled a dollar out of his wallet and fed it into the machine. The machine spit it out, over and over again. He felt something electric and uncontrollable creeping into his limbs, and he stepped back, panting. The machine ejected his wrinkled dollar onto the floor.
“I have one,” Toth said. He unfolded a crisp bill from his pocket and stepped toward the machine. “What do you want?”
His mouth was dry and sour. “Snack-’Ems.”
“You got it.” Toth fed his dollar in without incident and punched the appropriate buttons. A package cascaded down into the tray, and Toth pulled it out. He handed it to Lars, along with the crumpled bill.
“Thanks.”
On the sidewalk, Lars ripped the bag open and ate. His body sucked the salt out of the food, and he shuddered as it coursed through him. They had biked here when they heard the message, and now they were faced with either returning home, where Lars emphatically did not want to be, or spending the afternoon hanging around downtown, sitting in cafés, waiting to come back to the hospital.
To the south, beyond the river, green clouds churned over the foothills. Somewhere within driving distance it would rain. It was the kind of sky that, in Wisconsin, would make people start thinking tornado. Lars remembered once, as a child, watching tornado clouds just before they gave birth to a funnel: he was in the parking lot of a shopping center in Madison with his mother when the sirens started (and before that, he now remembered, when he was even younger, he had thought those sirens were the tornadoes themselves, pulsing in the air like giant revving engines). He and his mother were standing, loaded down with bags, on opposite sides of the car. They looked up and saw, seemingly close enough to touch, two clouds passing one another at the same elevation. They clung briefly, the strands of each trailing off in the opposite direction as they parted. It was not something that was supposed to happen; Lars knew this without understanding why. It filled him with excitement and fear. And when he looked at his mother—he would not be afraid, he decided, if she wasn’t—he saw her head tipped back and her mouth open, laughing, and she said, “Lars, if only your father could see.”
Every kind of weather, for Lars, evoked a complicated layer cake of emotions, based on everything he’d felt on similar days. Sunny, dry, and cold meant the embarrassed anticipation of opening presents at his fifth birthday party, the one his parents had thrown for him at the skating rink; it meant the impending sense of both defeat and relief in the last seconds of the final soccer game of his freshman season in high school; it meant the crystal diode radio he had made in sixth grade with Matt Acheson, and the wire-hanger antenna they had strung in a tree in his backyard. And this weather, today’s weather, meant that afternoon with his mother, when they had gone Christmas shopping early, because it would be the first Christmas without Dad. And now the mingled pain of both loss and worry, each for a different woman, one who was gone from the world and the other struggling to stay in it.
He had eaten the Snack-’Ems down to the crumbs and hadn’t offered Toth any. “Sorry,” he said.
“You needed them.”
He thought again of the amazement and terror of watching those clouds passing above him, and he wondered what the crash had been like for Paul and his wife, if they had actually seen it go down, or if they only heard and felt it. Did it take a few stunned seconds to understand what was happening, what had happened?
“What?” Toth said.
“What what?” Lars’s jaws were tight, and he brought his hand to his cheek.
“You sighed.”
He looked at his friend, who was still waiting for some explanation. “It’s been on my mind awhile, I suppose.”
“What?”
“The wreckage. I mean, it’s right there, isn’t it.”
“Of the plane?” Toth rumpled his face as if from a bad smell.
“I got this idea I should go look at it. I decided not to, but now I don’t know.” His heart was racing, and in spite of himself he looked at his wrist. His watch wasn’t there. He could see it lying next to the dish rack by the kitchen sink, the last place he’d taken it off.
“I do,” Toth said. “Forget it.”
Lars’s hands were tingling, and he shook them to dispel the needles. “I think I have to go. There isn’t much time.”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
“I do.” His hands were shaking on their own now. He felt like someone who is compelled to take five, six, seven showers each day, someone who has to fill in all the e’s and o’s in the newspaper. Suddenly the six hours that Christine would be in surgery seemed like a strange and urgent window of opportunity for him: it was as if doing this awful thing, which had for so long eluded his capability, would put something of Megan to rest. Lars was aware that this was not rational—even now, in the wake of the crash, he still found himself occasionally gripped by the impulse to call his father on the phone, something he had never done in his life—but he had finally lost much of his fear. The hospital breathed out its stale air behind him. This is where it would have ended up anyway, right? With one of them dying and the other doomed to watch it happen? Lars had never thought that Megan would want to marry him, and for this failure he got to live through her death early. Proposing might have kept her in Marshall for the summer; almost anything could have, and this was the fact that he had been avoiding, along with the fact of the wreckage, still out there, quietly rusting. He pictured a dripping glade, the scraps of plane scattered around it like the remains of a chicken. Not a battlefield, a cemetery. He turned to Toth.
“So are you coming or not?”
Toth squinted, as if against bright sunlight, though there was none. “I don’t think so, Lars.”
“Then I’ll see you around, I guess.”
He spun and headed for the Safeway, where they had locked their bikes. It was a sudden, impulsive exit, and blood pounded in his head from the sheer impoliteness of it. It occurred to him on the way that he didn’t strictly know where the crash was, and he hoped he could make it that far and back before they closed Christine’s body, the new and foreign kidney pulsing inside her.
He passed the bike rack and walked into the Safeway lobby, where the pay phones were. He looked up Paul in the book: 21540 Valley Road.
For a moment his conviction waned, and he slumped against the booth, feeling tired. He watched people walk in and out of Safeway, half-hoping somebody he knew would show up and he could bail out. There was a checkout clerk he often encountered, coming in for his shift, and a chubby man, burdened with bags, leaving with his red-haired teenage daughter, who Lars thought he knew. Then he remembered: Montana Gag. She and her boyfriend used to come in, looking for Greg. Briefly, Lars suffered under the weight of a despairing wish to be her: to buy groceries with her father, to eat dinner in front of the TV, to dip carelessly into the stash of weed stuffed into a hole in her box spring and drink in the smoke from her bed, the open window admitting cool night. He watched the girl and her father get into a car and drive away. And then, there in the lobby with him, was Toth.
“Okay, I’m in,” he said. A bicycle helmet dangled from one hand.
Lars pulled himself from the phone booth and looked his friend in the eye. “Good,” he said.
* * *
The ride up the valley was long and windy, and darkened by the threat of rain. Cedar Avenue widened and followed the tracks, where freight cars clanked into each other like thunderheads, and cars and trucks raced past them, freed from the speed limits of town. Lars was exhausted before they even reached the exit to Valley Road, but seeing the green and white sign gave him new energy, and he rounded the corner at a smooth coast, a breeze at his back. It had taken them only half an hour so far. Once onto Valley, he and Toth were able to talk, as trees broke the wind and the traffic was light. But they didn’t. Their mission retained some kind of sacredness, despite the bikes.
Soon, as the road evened out into a gradual climb, Lars was able to set his breath and motion into a smooth rhythm, and he let the scenery distract him. It had been a long time since he’d come up here; he and Megan went cross-country skiing one weekend in the woods. They passed the last convenience store and gas station, rode through wide meadows on which planned communities had been built along perfect curving paved streets. They came upon small ranches with sport utility vehicles in the driveways, and these petered out, leaving only trees and large log houses, set far back on the edges of hills. Soon there were posted signs—“SALMON NATIONAL WILDERNESS: NO HUNTING, BY ORDER OF MONTANA FISH & GAME”—and he heard Toth’s voice, small behind him: “You think we’re about there?”
Lars coasted to a stop, and listened as Toth did the same. Silence fell around them. “I suppose.”
“They can’t live in the wilderness, right?”
“I don’t know.” He scanned the horizon, then saw, up ahead, a gray metal mailbox, its flag hanging loose at its side. Across the two-lane from it was a dirt road, brown tracks fountaining out to the left and right.
“There?”
“Maybe.” He straightened on the bike and started pedaling again, his muscles popping in protest.
The mailbox had the street number scrawled on it in black magic marker. There was no name. They crossed the road and stashed their bikes in the trees, out of sight from passing cars. The dirt road was heavily rutted and just wide enough for two cars to pass with great care. Water pooled in the tire tracks. They walked in silence, listening to the distant sounds of machinery.
“What is that?” Toth was asking.
“I don’t know.”
They rounded a corner and found themselves in a wide arc of churned-up grass, half-buried in drying mud. Off to the right, a piece of yellow plastic tape was tied to a tree and flapped in the breeze; nearby there was a dirt road, wider than the one they’d just been walking on, cut far back into the forest. It looked crudely new. From over a rise at the end of the road came a white pickup, driving slowly, and as it neared them Lars could see its tires bouncing over chunks of debris that lay in its way. Two men sat in it, both wearing caps. Lars was sure the men would stop and ask them to leave, but the driver simply raised two fingers in solemn greeting and nodded hello. Something rattled in the bed, beneath a large blue tarp.
Lars gazed out over the truck’s path. “Down there,” he said to nobody.
“Are you sure about this?”
He turned and looked at his friend, possibly for the first time since they left the hospital. Toth’s eyes were weary and rimed with dried sweat, and his glasses sat far down on his nose, like a crotchety librarian’s. Seeing Toth, his chest rising and falling, his lips slightly parted to let the air in, Lars had the distinct sensation of falling from a great height, and closed his eyes against hitting the ground. He felt dizzy, filled with the overabundance of life around him: the trees, the dirt, this panting, sweating Toth. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They walked, side by side, down the road. Most of it was littered with pine needles and small rocks, and occasionally they passed a deep divot, where a tree must certainly have been. Here, the soil was exposed to the air and was darker than the ground that surrounded it; they avoided stepping into it, as if it were cursed. Another truck came over a rise and they moved out of its way.
And then they were standing at the bottom of the rise. Beyond it they could see the upper halves of trees, swaying gently. From behind them, there was sun. Toth went up it first, and stood at the top, perfectly still. Then he turned his head back to Lars, and in his face the wreck was reflected, as if in a shallow pool of water. A gulf opened up between them, Toth’s expression, his thin body, unfamiliar to Lars now that he had seen. Toth extended his hand.
“Come on.”
“All right,” Lars said, and he climbed to the top of the rise.
The wreck was distant, but clear; gleaming metal attended to by yellow machines. People wearing blue baseball caps bent, examined things, wrote on papers flapping from clipboards. Things were lifted into pickups; a wheel loader scraped at the ground around a large piece of half-embedded airplane. Lars and Toth walked toward it slowly, letting the details accumulate gradually the closer they came. The entire scene was less like a wreck than an archaeological dig, every item from the teetering tail section to the sheared wing to the massive bent fuselage exhumed and examined with care, even reverence. There was something like elation in the air, the collective sense of chaos being brought back into line, and Lars felt himself moved by it, by the workers’ absorption in the task. And Megan, he was surprised to notice, was nowhere to be found. He stopped walking.
“Lars?”
“No closer than this,” he said. Because his sense—that this place was far from death, was more like a spot where Megan had waited for him, then given up, finally, and left—this sense, certainly, encompassed loneliness and loss, but not despair. Any closer and he might be set back again, sure to grieve without relief. But this sadness had some consolation to it, like reaching out and taking an offered prize. He did this, took what was offered and held it.
They stood a minute more, then turned back.
* * *
Though they had not been gone six hours—the sun was bright and high as they returned, and shadows still short on the ground—they returned to the hospital waiting room to find Amanda Stull pacing by the swinging doors to the operating rooms. Nearby an orderly sat behind a desk, watching over her. And in the chairs and couches arranged along the walls, big-haired girls in anxious poses. Sorority sisters.
“Mrs. Stull?”
She whirled upon Lars as if to grab him by the shirtfront, but when she recognized him she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, gathering restraint. Lars felt himself flinch. “I’m sorry.”
“I thought you might be the doctor.”
“Any word?” Around them, the sorority sisters watched, their eyes wide.
“Somebody came out. It went okay. Or it’s going. They’re…closing.” It seemed a great effort for her to say the word. “It’s in there, anyway.”
“Good.” And for the moment, that was all that mattered: that a bad thing had been removed and a better thing put in its place.
Amanda Stull turned and peered through the door’s porthole, and when Lars moved away he found that the girls had stood up behind him, six, seven of them, and were watching him and Toth, waiting for them to speak, to explain themselves in light of Christine’s dramatic and anomalous life. Lars didn’t have any explanation. He smiled, and nervously, a few of them did too. Then he held out his hands to them, and they took hold.