The Longest Night (17 page)

They couldn't turn off their vehicles for fear of them not restarting, and eventually Paul's body became so used to the endless vibration he could hardly remember what it was like to be still.

He had never seen anything like the polar ice cap. It was a vast, glittering, lifeless world. The ground and sky were entirely white and blue, as if they were trapped in a Wedgwood plate. They were told to be on constant lookout for deep crevasses that angled through the snow, high-walled and plunging. The threat was frightening at first; numbing as time went on.

They didn't see Camp Century until they were almost on top of it. Its sloping entry ramp ran thirty feet down into the ice. Below them, they knew, were the mysterious tunnels, the barracks, and the nuclear reactor.

One vehicle after another turned off, down the line. They all climbed down. “Shit,” the man next to Paul said. Otherwise they quietly stared. They'd stay here, underground, for the next 150 days.

N
at was five miles outside town, at one in the morning, when the tire blew.

Paul had been gone a month, and she had taken to late-night drives: two or three times a week, nothing excessive, just enough to clear her head. She was too tired and queasy to take the girls many places during the day, but at night, when they slept like angels, the walls hemmed her in. So a week after Paul left—after putting the girls to bed, sacking out on the couch, and then waking uselessly at eleven
P.M.
, twitchy and restless—she'd had a moment of inspiration. She snuck into the girls' room and carried them one at a time, wrapped in their comforters, out to the car and laid them each across the backseat.

Liddie awoke for a moment and then, as soon as the car started, snuggled back down; Sam crawled up by the window and looked out, groggily amazed. Just having them outside the house—at this unexpected hour, on a little adventure—filled Nat with a swell of maternal fondness. Her girls were charming in their nightgowns, sleepy and pleasantly confused; they were such good sports.

She rolled down the driver's side window and the Fireflite rumbled quietly out of town, past the gleaming moonlit falls to the highway that stretched like an open book, straight and limitless. It was this immeasurable space all around her that called her outside. It was like the ocean: It begged people to come and gaze.

Her new routine was to drive thirty or so miles one way, just to get it out of her system, before turning back around. Four weeks in a row the drives couldn't have gone better; the girls even fell back to sleep as soon as she returned them to their beds. The relief of having cut loose, plus her cold, wind-stiffened skin, put Nat right out once she got home, too, and helped her through a few more days of sitting placidly, watching the girls play, tidying their messes and humming responses to their queries and requests.

And then, her little joyride went to hell. The highway was dark around her and her window was down and she could feel the smile playing on her face, captain of her little ship, until a sudden
thwack
rocked the car and it yanked across the road to the left, where it struck something—a large rock?—on the side of the road. The jolt felt huge and Nat clutched the wheel in terror, pulling the car back toward the center. A few shaky seconds later she realized that, thank God, she had corrected, and they were upright and not spinning and they hadn't tumbled off the road into the yawning blackness. But the car ground against the asphalt with a horrible racket.

“Mama!” Sam cried.

“Sam, you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You, too, Lid?” Nat called.

“She's still asleep!”

“How is that possible?” Nat almost laughed, but she was too wound up. She felt as if waves of ice water were coursing from her limbs. That jerk and wallop, forceful and totally unexpected, had shaken her. And now the front of the car seemed to be dragging against the road like a chastised beast. It made an awful metallic clatter, but there was nothing she could do, given the time of night and the isolation, but keep driving. A bitter, burning smell came up from somewhere inside the car.

They did make it home, the last half mile at a junky crawl. Nat thunked the Fireflite up near the curb and got out, her hands on her forehead. The right rear tire was shredded away with steel showing through, and she knew this was bad, very bad, and probably very expensive. She was a stupid woman. What had ever compelled her to adopt this bizarre habit? They could have been killed.

Sam climbed out of the car and stood beside her and said, “Daddy is not going to be happy about this.” Then she reached for Nat's hand and held it a moment, like a wise, straight-talking little priest, and Nat bent to kiss her in gratitude. She gathered Liddie and—feeling chastened, knowing she had deserved this for her folly—took the girls back into the house.

N
AT'S NEIGHBOR
C
HRISSIE KNOCKED
on the door the next morning at six-thirty, curlers in her hair, her tiny white dog standing beside her on the stoop as if it, too, demanded the answers to its questions: What had happened to Nat's car, and when on earth
had
it happened, because Chrissie was sure it was not like that when she went to bed, and goodness were Nat and the girls
all right
? Nat stumbled out replies—
We're fine; I'd just gone for a couple groceries when the tire blew—
while Chrissie jiggled her head in horror or sympathy and the tiny dog squatted to pee, its eyes fixed on Nat the whole time.

Nat sent Chrissie on her way, assuring her that she would be fine taking the bus until she could get the car fixed. An hour later another neighbor, Edna from down the street, came by, angling for new or different information. Nat figured she should be grateful for anybody visiting her at all, but she wished people would make social calls for reasons other than to interrogate her about her mistakes.

She started two or three letters to Paul over the next couple of days, planning to tell him about the car, but abandoned all of them. To write to him without mentioning it would be a sin of omission, so she found herself unable to write at all.

The girls' nearly constant requests and non sequiturs intensified when they were just stuck around the house. One afternoon Nat found herself glancing at the round wall clock so obsessively that she thought she might actually scream. And then she did. She let out one frayed, bizarre shriek and the girls, hopping around the living room, froze. Nat got up, fetched a dishcloth from the kitchen, and draped it over the clock face.

That night after she put Sam and Liddie to bed, she slumped onto the couch feeling the odd mix of wired and exhausted that she'd come to expect most evenings, and wondered what in the world to do with herself. Each night she was physically and mentally worn out but spiritually ready for some kind of part two, an aspect of the day that never came. For a short while the drives had almost filled that need. Music sometimes worked. But nothing worked quite enough.

Paul's deployment stretched before her like a test from the Bible. Why had he brought this upon them? She could still startle herself, thinking of him coming home with his puffed-up hand.
Punching his boss
—it was mortifying. She'd never worried that Paul had anything but their best interests at heart; if anything he was too responsible, too careful. Then he'd lost all self-control at the worst possible time. She didn't pity herself for the deployment (she was an army wife, if a newish one, and it was her job to bear up) but for the fact that it had been so avoidable. And on two days' notice! At least if she'd had advance warning, she might have forced herself to make some friends.

She
was
cultivating one acquaintance, another young army wife named Patrice whom she'd met at the playground. They were not, however, good enough friends that Nat could call her just to say, “Hello, I'm bored.” Perhaps she could couch a phone call in practical terms: “What would you do if your car had a blown-out tire?” or, maybe, “How long is it acceptable to keep from your husband that your car needs major repairs and it was your fault because you were, say, taking your daughters for drives in the desert at night, which were the only thing helping you not feel like a madwoman?”

She'd forgiven Paul, in spite of everything; she couldn't make herself feel angry anymore, not with all this space between them. She longed for the daily relief of his homecoming, how the girls' high beams of attention would swing from her to him for that brief and blessed time. She missed his short, unexpected laugh when the girls did something funny, or when one of her anecdotes struck home. She missed the warmth of him in bed, falling asleep with his hand on her back. He was the only one in Idaho who knew her at all, the only person on earth who did, maybe, and now he was gone, and his absence was like a suction in her chest.

She pushed herself off the couch and wandered into the kitchen, opened the junk drawer, and navigated its paper clips, pen caps, a bottle of clear nail polish. Her fingertips found a small rectangular scrap that had worked its way to the back: the business card from the young cowboy she'd met near the Palisades Reservoir. She trapped it and pulled it out, looking over the slanted handwriting with its skipping ballpoint ink. She'd been downtown many times over the intervening year but never on the back street where his repair shop was, on an auto row that trailed toward the train tracks and where she never had any business.

She wondered if Esrom still worked there, if he'd remember her. Maybe he would cut her a deal on car repairs. Even if he didn't, it might be nice to see him again.

Then again, maybe he wouldn't remember her at all, and she'd be embarrassed. This gave her pause. She examined the pale blue letters as if they might suddenly move and form a new instruction specific to her.

She walked over to the wall clock, lifting its absurd veil of towel to discover that it was only eight
P.M
. There was a chance one of the men was still in the shop; she was aimless enough to try. She paused for a moment with the receiver against her neck and dialed the number.

The phone rang five times and she nearly hung up, but then a young man's voice answered, slightly breathless. “Car shop,” he said.

Nat paused at this bare-bones greeting. “Hi!” she said. “I have, I need”—oh, for crying out loud—“There's a car here that needs repair.”

“All right,” the man said. “You can drive it on down any time and we'll take a look. Except on Sundays, we're closed. Otherwise, nine to five.”

“It doesn't drive,” Nat said.

“You need a tow? Sure. Let me take down your address.”

Nat recited it and then asked, before she could stop herself, “Is this by any chance Esrom?”

There was a brief, curious pause. “It is.”

“I think we met once, about this time last year. You gave me your card at a diner in Kirby, out near the Palisades Reservoir.”

After a moment, he laughed. “Well, I'm glad you called.”

This was a tremendous relief, and Nat could feel herself smiling. “Your friend said your shop was the best there is in Idaho Falls.”

“My friend says a lot of things. It's Nat, right?”

“It is! Gosh, you have a good memory.”

“I'll come out myself tomorrow morning. Aim for ten?”

“That'd be great. Thanks so much.” She hung up, still smiling, and felt the heaviness in her chest lift away. Now she had something on the calendar for the next day,
and
a solution to the problem with the car. It was almost silly how much this helped.

T
HE NEXT MORNING DAWNED
hot and bright, and Nat awoke early. She felt a twinge of anxiety, a mysterious motivation to get herself pulled together, and then she remembered the previous night's phone conversation. Esrom was coming over.

She hustled into the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, put on makeup. In her closet she rummaged until she found a halfway decent dress that still fit over her small hill of belly. (She
felt
noticeably pregnant, but no one had commented yet, not even her nosy neighbors, so she mustn't have been showing as much as she felt.) Buoyed, she went into the kitchen, boiled some eggs to devil, and baked a coffee cake.

“What is going on today?” Sam asked when she pattered in, rumpled and blinking. “Are we having a party?” Her eyes lit up. “Is Daddy coming home?”

“No, no,” Nat said, her face reddening. “Nothing special. Just a normal day.”

“Oh,” Sam said, looking disappointed.

“Well,” Nat said, “we have someone coming to look at the car today. That's one small thing that is happening.”

Sam's face lit up with joy: Any announcement filled her with extravagant expectations. “It's really nothing,” Nat said and, seeing that Sam could not be convinced, poured a bowl of Pep cereal to distract her.