DWIGHT INSISTS on driving her back to her motel to rest. Surprisingly the time with him, however weird, wasn’t awful. Yet watching his car pull away, taking him back to work, she feels the old sense of relief. Her very bones are tired. Like spending the day on one of those moving airport walkways and only now, stepping onto solid ground, do you realize how hard it is to walk unaided on your own two feet; hard, but still easier than being with someone else.
The endless sunlight pours through the flat square windows of the motel room. Tiny flotsam of industrial carpet in the air. She draws the blinds and the room darkens, the air disappears. She sits down on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap. A minute passes like this: for once, she isn’t aware of thinking. She lies back and rests her head on the thin pillow. To hell with the wig, she thinks. She closes her eyes.
When she wakes, the sun is pressing around the blinds at a dying angle. It’s past five o’clock. She feels as though she’s been sleeping for days, as though a solid chunk of her life has fallen off and disintegrated while she slept. One moment you’re standing on a pier like some jaded high-school heartbreaker; the next you’re as good as ninety. One morning your child is in your womb; by evening he is forever outside you. And still the sun rises and falls.
On the cheap bedside table, her cellphone lies blank; no one has called while she slept. And it is the same day, Tuesday. She will have to find Sam soon, tonight or tomorrow, and take him back home, or the whole rickety scaffolding is going to collapse for good. Even so, she can’t imagine how she might protect him. Her son. He is unprotectable, and still she will have to figure a way. This is her job in life, or there is no job at all. A small hope breathes inside her that Dwight might be of some help, but it’s nothing she can count on.
Carefully, she gets to her feet. She goes into the bathroom and splashes water on her face and brushes her teeth. Looks at herself long and hard. Tries to arrange the borrowed hair where it sticks out awkwardly from her head, but soon gives up.