Cheating at Solitaire(47)

It was the middle of the afternoon, and cold. There was a television at the end of the corridor, but she didn’t like to listen to it. All the news seemed to be about her, even on the music channels. Love in the real world wasn’t like love in music, either. In music, two people were compelled to have each other. They couldn’t stop touching each other. They couldn’t leave each other alone. Everything was obsession, and if you were in love you couldn’t concentrate on anything else, like making dinner, or going to the movies. In real life, nobody was obsessed with another person unless he was a stalker, and the stalkers were all bad. Lots of them were armed.

Arrow was lying on the cot with the blankets pulled up over her. It was one of the things she missed, the good cotton sheets she had on her bed back home, and the mattress that she could sink into. Still, this was what she liked doing best. She could let herself go half to sleep, not really out of it, but not really here, either. She could remember things or not, as she wanted to. She thought about things that didn’t bother her, or that did, but not in the wrong way. She thought about Stewart Gordon, who actually had come to visit her, twice, and brought oranges and chocolate bars both times. She thought about that woman whose house she had fallen into on the night… the night… she didn’t have to give the night a name. The woman made her uneasy in the same way Stewart Gordon did, but she didn’t know what way that was, so there was no use trying to understand it. Instead, she just remembered the house, and all the bookshelves, and all the books. There were books everywhere, and when there was music on it was classical, which Arrow didn’t understand either. It didn’t make sense to her that people should be different from one another. Some differences made sense—men and women were different, for instance—but others made no sense. It seemed to Arrow that things should be either Good or Bad, and not just Good or Bad for her and maybe different for somebody else. Or something. She got confused. Classical music was boring, and people didn’t like it, except that that woman did, and maybe Stewart Gordon did, too. There were museums full of paintings that people went to see, and bookstores full of books, and none of it made any sense at all. Maybe it made sense when you got older.

The trick was this, very simply: she could not allow herself to talk to anybody about anything, not even her lawyers. She could smile and hesitate and make out that she didn’t really know what had happened. It even helped that that was about half true. She couldn’t tell them anything else, because if she did… if she did…

Nothing would connect anymore. Nothing. The night of the accident, with Mark’s truck falling down the hill or whatever it was. The ocean. The woman with her books and her tea. The Other Thing. The music. The movie. The cats. The woman had a cat. Stewart Gordon had a cat. In ancient Egypt, cats were sacred. If she was ever reincarnated, she wanted to come back as a cat. She didn’t know where Egypt was, exactly. She thought it must be in Europe somewhere, because everything that was really old seemed to be.

Down at the other end of the hall, the afternoon guard was playing solitaire on her computer and talking on her cell phone. Arrow’s cell had a window, with steel mesh in it to keep prisoners from escaping. Since Arrow didn’t want to escape, she didn’t mind. She could see through the window to a patch of sky, which was bright blue and brightly lit. It was a beautiful cold day. One of these days, somebody would come and get her out and she would have to do something about things, but that day wasn’t now, and she was glad it wasn’t.

If she could make herself sleep for the next six months, she could avoid this whole mess altogether. Somebody would sort it out without her, and she wouldn’t have to answer questions about anything at all.

3

For Jack Bullard, most of the island of Margaret’s Harbor was off-limits in his spare time. He suspected that it was off-limits for most of the other year-round people, too, and for the same reason. There was too much of the island where he didn’t feel he fit. In season, that meant that all the places were filled with people who talked in a way, and dressed in a way, and moved in a way that made him feel like a big ox with bad manners. Off season, the effect was a little more subtle, and a little less sane. It was as if they’d left the smell of themselves around, the summer people had. It was like they were cats marking territory, and this particular terri-tory would be forever theirs.

Standing outside on the short stretch of pavement in front of the Oscartown Inn, Jack looked at the vans lining the other side of the street and reminded himself that this off-season, the cats’ territory had been violated. There were other cats in town now, and they were nothing like the pedigreed ones that usually occupied this place. Then the metaphorseemed so trite, and so corny, that Jack felt ashamed of himself. What did it mean that you couldn’t find good words to explain what you were living through?