'What? Wh-' Then a total change in his voice, and that frightened
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 O.K., 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 28,000.
'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 your 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 seatbelt 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.
