“You want me to stop at that gas station?”
Now her eyes were bright with fury. “If you so much as
I asked her what she thought she was going to get at the gas station.
“Candy bars,” she said. “Oh, God. Just the thought of them . . .”
When we approached the station, she gave me a dead-level look of warning.
“I could use some gas,” I told her, and turned in.
She had her hand on the door handle before I pulled up to the self-serve tanks. By the time I stopped, she already had a leg out the door. I watched her moving toward the low, white, cement-block building, where the attendant sat behind his counter. Willy was walking as fast as she could. As I looked on, she stopped moving so abruptly she almost lost her balance. She appeared to be staring at her right hand, which her body blocked me from seeing. Then she bent over to get a closer look.
With the violence of a released force, Willy whirled around, held out her arm, and yelled, “Look!” For a second or two, the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand were transparent, and the last two fingers looked hazy and opaque. Then, without transition, her hand became solid again. Willy lowered it slowly, glancing from it to me—she had seen something in my response, and I would have to account for it—before she turned around again and walked, at nothing like her earlier velocity, into the station.
Gasoline pumped into the Town Car, and the numbers on the dial rolled upward.
In a couple of minutes, Willy popped out of the station empty-handed and came trotting toward me. Panic shone in her eyes. “Can you give me some money, Tim? Like twenty bucks? Please?”
I fished a twenty out of my pants pocket. She took it from me, then leaned forward and in a low, urgent voice said, “We’re going to talk about what happened to my hand. We both saw that, so it wasn’t some kind of optical illusion.
“Right,” I said.
She sprinted off, no longer able to concern herself with an abstraction like dignity, and I went back to pumping gas. When the tank was full, I moved toward the little white box of the station, expecting to see Willy come through the door carrying a bag containing twenty dollars’ worth of candy bars. She still had not emerged by the time I reached the entrance, and I didn’t see her at the counter when I walked in. The boy at the cash register had H. R. Giger tattoos on his arms and short, dyed-blond hair that he wanted to look artificially colored. Willy was puttering around in the aisles at the back of the store. The boy took his eyes off her to register my entrance.
“Hey, dude,” he said. “Is that girl with you?”
“Yes,” I said, and went to the counter to hand over a credit card.
“Planning on a long trip?”
At the back of the store, Willy ducked out of sight. I heard the rustle of bags. Her head popped up above the top shelf, and my heart thumped in my chest at this sudden vision—Willy’s floating head. In spite of everything, all my love for her, which had been a bit subsumed under both concern and a kind of mild irritation, returned to me. She said, “I need more money. Come back here, Tim.” At least I had a name again.
She was trying to keep a grip on about a dozen loose candy bars, individual Reese’s Pieces, a container of Fiddle Faddle, bags of peanut M&M’s, and larger bags of potato chips. My arrival in her aisle caused a lot of Hershey’s bars to slither out of her grasp and land on the floor. Her hands seemed reassuringly solid, but her temperament was sizzling toward hysteria. “Shit!” she whispered to me, once again ducking out of sight of the attendant. “I’m so hungry I can’t hang on to this stuff.”
“Eat one now,” I said. “Save the wrapper, and we’ll pay for it later.” As I spoke, I started unwrapping one of the Hershey’s bars that had fallen to the floor. Before I finished, she tore it from my hands. The end of the bar disappeared into her mouth, and she bit off about three inches of almonds and milk chocolate.
“Oh, boy,” she said. She chewed with her eyes closed, and I could see some of the hysteria leave her. It was like watching her pulse slow down. “Dark chocolate would be better, but this is really, really okay.”
“I’ll get a basket,” I said, and in a moment was back beside her, tossing candy and junk food into a plastic supermarket basket. Willy squatted on her haunches, taking giant, irregular bites out of the Hershey bar almost faster than she could chew.
“Get me two more Score bars,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “Those little deals are wicked, wicked good.”
“We should get some real food in you,” I said.
“Yeah, I need a meal. But for some reason, this crap is what I need most right now. That
“Do you guys need any help?” the boy called out.
Up at the counter, I unloaded the basket under the increasingly skeptical eyes of the tattooed boy. He dug one hand into his bleached hair and shook his head, half-smiling. I signed a MasterCard slip for $73.37, a nice palindromic number.
Willy was looking at me with a stony intensity that promised a serious interrogation as soon as we got back in the car, and I asked the boy about the nearest town that had both a decent restaurant and a library.
“A library?” Willy interrupted the boy’s response.
“Before we can talk, I have to show you something.” I folded the credit card slip into my wallet and picked up our bag.
“In a book?”
“In an atlas.”
“You still want to know about the library?” the boy asked. “Just stay on 224 out there all the way to Willard. Like the rat movie. It has a library, and you could eat at Chicago Station. They’re famous for their pies.”
“Ahh, pies,” Willy said.
Off we go to Willard, which turned out to be a lot nicer than I’d expected. Willard is the sort of place people would retire to, if they had any sense. Like all small cities, it’s on a human scale, and there is more to it than you at first imagine. The streets are spotless, the shop windows shine, and the people say hello to strangers. The only problem in Willard, by which I also mean the drive to Willard, was Willy Patrick. She gobbled down three candy bars in a row—another Hershey’s bar, a Mounds bar, and an Oh Henry!—while all but holding up a finger to let me know I wasn’t getting off the hook this time. Then she tossed the wrappers into the seat well, took out a packet of M&M’s, and while peeling it open said, “Now talk to me, lover boy. No games and no kidding around.”
“I thought that Hershey’s bar at the gas station made you feel better,” I said.
“It did, but it wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. Don’t worry about me getting sick, or anything. I
Her eyes narrowed; she aimed a finger at my chest. “And after that I guess I’LL START TO DISAPPEAR! I GUESS PIECES OF ME WILL SUDDENLY BE TRANSPARENT!”
She rammed four or five M&M’s into her mouth and chewed them furiously. A trickle of chocolate drool slipped down the left side of her chin. She smeared it away while keeping her eyes fixed on mine. She swallowed. “I looked at you, and you
I took a deep breath and hoped we would soon be driving into Willard. “I did see it once before. Back in Restitution, when you were shifting into the front seat. All of a sudden, I could see through the top part of your right hand. I’m pretty sure Mr. Davy saw the same thing a little bit earlier.”
“And you didn’t
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” I said.
She shook her head in disgust. “I just realized something—you’re weak. That’s why you didn’t tell me. You were afraid.”
“It kind of took me by surprise,” I said.
“Me, too! Don’t you think I would have
