Everything's Eventual

   Lost the baby, had a miscarriage—they all believed that except maybe Bill. Certainly her family had believed it: Dad, Mom, Gram. 'Miscarriage' was the story they told, miscarriage was a Catholic's story if ever there was one. Hey, Mary, what's the story, they had sometimes sung when they skipped rope, feeling daring, feeling sinful, the skirts of their uniforms flipping up and down over their scabby knees. That was at Our Lady of Angels, where Sister Annunciata would spank your knuckles with her ruler if she caught you gazing out the window during Sentence Time, where Sister Dormatilla would tell you that a million years was but the first tick of eternity's endless clock (and you could spend eternity in Hell, most people did, it was easy). In Hell you would live forever with your skin on fire and your bones roasting. Now she was in Florida, now she was in a Crown Vic sitting next to her husband, whose hand was still in her crotch; the dress would be wrinkled but who cared if it got that look off his face, and why wouldn't the feeling stop?

   She thought of a mailbox with RAGLAN painted on the side and an American-flag decal on the front, and although the name turned out to be Reagan and the flag a Grateful Dead sticker, the box was there. She thought of a small black dog trotting briskly along the other side of the road, its head down, sniffling, and the small black dog was there. She thought again of the billboard and, yes, there it was: MOTHER OF MERCY CHARITIES HELP THE FLORIDA HUNGRY—WON'T YOU HELP US?

   Bill was pointing. 'There—see? I think that's Palm House. No, not where the billboard is, the other side. Why do they let people put those things up out here, anyway?'

   'I don't know.' Her head itched. She scratched, and black dandruff began falling past her eyes. She looked at her fingers and was horrified to see dark smutches on the tips; it was as if someone had just taken her fingerprints.

   'Bill?' She raked her hand through her blond hair and this time the flakes were bigger. She saw they were not flakes of skin but flakes of paper. There was a face on one, peering out of the char like a face peering out of a botched negative.

   'Bill?'

   'What? Wh—' Then a total change in his voice, and that fright

ened her more than the way the car swerved. 'Christ, honey, what's in your hair?'

   The face appeared to be Mother Teresa's. Or was that just because she'd been thinking about Our Lady of Angels? Carol plucked it from her dress, meaning to show it to Bill, and it crumbled between her fingers before she could. She turned to him and saw that his glasses were melted to his cheeks. One of his eyes had popped from its socket and then split like a grape pumped full of blood.

   And I knew it, she thought. Even before I turned, I knew it. Because I had that feeling.

   A bird was crying in the trees. On the billboard, Mary held out her hands. Carol tried to scream. Tried to scream.

'Carol?'

   It was Bill's voice, coming from a thousand miles away. Then his hand—not pressing the folds of her dress into her crotch, but on her shoulder.

   'You okay, babe?'

   She opened her eyes to brilliant sunlight and her ears to the steady hum of the Learjet's engines. And something else—pressure against her eardrums. She looked from Bill's mildly concerned face to the dial below the temperature gauge in the cabin and saw that it had wound down to twenty-eight thousand.

   'Landing?' she said, sounding muzzy to herself. 'Already?'

   'It's fast, huh?' Sounding pleased, as if he had flown it himself instead of only paying for it. 'Pilot says we'll be on the ground in Fort Myers in twenty minutes. You took a hell of a jump, girl.'

   'I had a nightmare.'

   He laughed—the plummy ain't-you-the-silly-billy laugh she had come really to detest. 'No nightmares allowed on your second honeymoon, babe. What was it?'

   'I don't remember,' she said, and it was the truth. There were only fragments: Bill with his glasses melted all over his face, and one of the three or four forbidden skip rhymes they had sometimes chanted back in fifth and sixth grade. This one had gone Hey there, Mary, what's the story . . . and then something-something-something. She couldn't come up with the rest. She could remember Jangle-tangle jingle-bingle, I saw daddy's great big dingle, but she couldn't remember the one about Mary.

   Mary helps the Florida sick, she thought, with no idea of what the thought meant, and just then there was a beep as the pilot turned the seat-belt light on. They had started their final descent. Let the wild rumpus start, she thought, and tightened her belt.

   'You really don't remember?' he asked, tightening his own. The little jet ran through a cloud filled with bumps, one of the pilots in the cockpit made a minor adjustment, and the ride smoothed out again. 'Because usually, just after you wake up, you can still remember. Even the bad ones.'

   'I remember Sister Annunciata, from Our Lady of Angels. Sentence Time.'

   'Now, that's a nightmare.'

   Ten minutes later the landing gear came down with a whine and a thump. Five minutes after that they landed.

   'They were supposed to bring the car right out to the plane,' Bill said, already starting up the Type A shit. This she didn't like, but at least she didn't detest it the way she detested the plummy laugh and his repertoire of patronizing looks. 'I hope there hasn't been a hitch.'

   There hasn't been, she thought, and the feeling swept over her full force. I'm going to see it out the window on my side in just a second or two. It's your total Florida vacation car, a great big white goddam Cadillac, or maybe it's a Lincoln—

   And, yes, here it came, proving what? Well, she supposed, it proved that sometimes when you had deja vu what you thought was going to happen next really did. It wasn't a Caddy or a Lincoln after all, but a Crown Victoria—what the gangsters in a Martin Scorsese film would doubtless call a Crown Vic.

   'Whoo,' she said as he helped her down the steps and off the plane. The hot sun made her feel dizzy.

   'What's wrong?'

   'Nothing, really. I've got deja vu. Left over from my dream, I guess. We've been here before, that kind of thing.'

   'It's being in a strange place, that's all,' he said, and kissed her cheek. 'Come on, let the wild rumpus start.'

   They went to the car. Bill showed his driver's license to the young woman who had driven it out. Carol saw him check out the hem of her skirt, then sign the paper on her clipboard.

   She's going to drop it, Carol thought. The feeling was now so strong it was like being on an amusement-park ride that goes just a little too fast; all at once you realize you're edging out of the Land of Fun and into the Kingdom of Nausea. She'll drop it, and Bill will say 'Whoopsydaisy' and pick it up for her, get an even closer look at her legs.

   But the Hertz woman didn't drop her clipboard. A white courtesy van had appeared, to take her back to the Butler Aviation terminal. She gave Bill a final smile—Carol she had ignored completely—and opened the front passenger door. She stepped up, then slipped. 'Whoopsy-daisy, don't be crazy,' Bill said, and took her elbow, steadying her. She gave him a smile, he gave her well-turned legs a goodbye look, and Carol stood by the growing pile of their luggage and thought, Hey there, Mary . . .

   'Mrs. Shelton?' It was the co-pilot. He had the last bag, the case with Bill's laptop inside it, and he looked concerned. 'Are you all right? You're very pale.'

   Bill heard and turned away from the departing white van, his face worried. If her strongest feelings about Bill were her only feelings about Bill, now that they were twenty-five years on, she would have left him when she found