This pain also taught a hard lesson. It was like sticking her hand into hot charcoals, dousing it with salty water, and then back into the coals again. She shivered, the sweat rising in beads from her pores. It was a mercy that ten seconds after Didi began the task, Laura lost consciousness. When she awakened, Didi had finished the application of disinfectant and was completing the splint on Laura's ring finger, pulling it out straight and bandaging one of the sticks along Laura's palm and finger. Then it was the middle finger's turn.
When Didi touched it, Laura winced. 'Sorry,' Didi said. 'There's no other way.'
She began to pull the finger out straight, and Laura screamed behind the washrag.
Again Laura passed out, which was a blessing because Didi could do the work quickly, getting the splint into place and securing it with Band-Aids. She had just finished the index finger when Laura's eyelids fluttered. Laura spat the rag out, her face yellowish-white. 'Sick,' she gasped, and Didi rushed to get a trash can up to Laura's mouth.
The ordeal wasn't yet over. Didi splinted the thumb, another exercise in torment, and wrapped the hand with gauze bandages, the pressure again making Laura groan and sweat. 'You don't want to go through life with a claw, do you?' Didi asked as she cut the gauze and began a new layer. Laura breathed like a slow bellows, her eyes vacant and clouded with pain. 'Almost got it wrapped up,' Didi said. 'That's supposed to be funny.' It wasn't, really. In the morning the bandages would have to be changed, the wounds cleansed again, and they both knew it.
'Lucy,' Laura whispered as Didi finished the wrapping.
'What? Lucy who?'
'Lucy and Ethel.' She swallowed, her throat parched. 'When they were… wrapping the candies… and the candies started coming faster and faster off the conveyor belt. Did you see that one?'
'Oh, yeah! It's a scream!'
'Good show,' Laura said. Her hand was a seething mass of fire and anguish, but the healing process had begun. 'They don't… make 'em like that anymore.'
'I liked the one where Lucy was in Las Vegas and she had to walk down a staircase with that big headdress on. Remember? And the one where she puts too much yeast in the bread and it shoots out of the oven like a freight train. Those were great.' She cut the gauze and taped it down with a couple of Band-Aids. 'It always killed me when Lucy tried to get a part in one of Ricky's shows, and he blew up at her in Spanish.' Didi rested Laura's bandaged hand against the ice pack. 'I watched those with my mom and dad. We had a TV with a round screen, and the damned thing was always shorting out. I remember my dad on his knees trying to fix the set, and he said, 'Didi, the guy who can figure out how to keep these things working is going to make a lot of money.''
'Why?' Laura asked weakly.
'Why what?'
'Why did you join the Storm Front?'
Didi rolled the remainder of the gauze up and closed the box of Band-Aids. She put the scissors and the other items atop the room's cheap dresser. Beyond the window, Didi could hear the high waspish whine of the freezing wind. 'What do you expect me to say?' Didi finally asked when she saw Laura still watching her. 'That I was a bad kid? That I pulled the legs off grasshoppers and beat kittens with baseball bats? No, I didn't grow up like that. I was president of the home economics club in high school, and I made the honor roll every semester. I played piano for the youth choir at my church.' She shrugged. 'I wasn't a monster. The only thing was, I didn't know what was growing inside me.'
'What was that?'
'A yearning,' Didi said. 'To be different. To know things. To go places my folks only read about. See, you take Lucy: if you only watched shows like that on TV, night after night, soon you'd start thinking that's all the world had to offer. My folks were afraid of real life. They didn't want me out in it. They said I was going to make a fine wife for some local boy, that I'd live maybe three or four miles from their front door and raise a houseful of kids and we'd all get together for pot roast on Sundays.' Didi opened the curtains and looked out the window. Snowflakes spun before the light; the cars in the parking lot were frosted over. 'They were amazed when I said I wanted to go to college. When I said I wanted to go to college out of Iowa, it was the first day of a long cold war. They couldn't understand why I didn't want to stay put. I was a fool, they said. I was breaking their hearts. Well, I didn't understand this then, but they needed me between them or they wouldn't have any common ground. They didn't want me to grow up, and when I did… they didn't know me anymore. They didn't want to.' She let the curtains fall. 'So I guess part of why I left home was to find out what my folks were so afraid of.'
'Did you?'
'Yes, I did. Like any generation, they were terrified of the future. Terrified of being insignificant and forgotten.' She nodded. 'It's a deep terror, Laura. Sometimes I feel it. I never got married – oh, bourgeois disease! – and I never had a child. My time for that is over. When I die, no one's going to cry at my funeral. No one's going to know my story. I'll lie under weeds near a road where strangers pass, and no one will remember the sound of my voice, the color of my hair, or what I gave a damn about. That's why I've stayed with you, Laura. Do you understand?'
'No.'
'I want you to get your baby back,' Didi said, 'because I'm never going to have a child of my own. And if I can help you find David… that's kind of like he's mine, too, isn't it?'
'Yes,' Laura answered. She could feel herself drifting away from the world, on waves of raw pain. It was going to be a long, terrible night. 'Kind of.'
'It's good enough for me.' Didi got Laura a cup of water and gave her two aspirin. The fever sweat glistened on Laura's face again, and she groaned as her hand pulsed with white-hot agony. Didi drew a chair up beside the bed and sat there as Laura fought the pain as best she could. What was going to happen tomorrow, Didi didn't know. It depended on Laura: if she was well enough to travel, they ought to be heading west again as soon as possible. Didi got up after a while, and took the plastic bag out to the ice maker for a refill. While she was there, she found a newspaper vending machine, and used her last change to buy an Iowa City Journal. Back in the warm room, the smells of iodine and sickness thick in the air, Didi got Laura's hand situated on the ice pack and then sat down to read.
She found the story of the crash on I-80 on page three. The body, a male, remained unidentified. 'Not much left to work from,' the coroner had remarked. Except that the car, a late-model BMW, had a Georgia license plate. Didi realized that by now the tracing of the tag would be done and the FBI would know whose car it was. The police-beat reporters would smell a new scent on an old story, and pretty soon Laura's picture would start showing up in the papers again. And Mary Terror's picture, too. The death of Earl Van Diver might well make Mary and the baby front-page news once more.
Didi looked at Laura, who had fallen into an exhausted sleep. Any picture of the old Laura that appeared in a newspaper wouldn't resemble the woman who lay there, her face pinched with anguish and tough with determination. But if Mary and the baby were back prominently in the news, that meant more of a chance for someone to recognize her. And more of a chance that some Smokey with a macho complex might spot her, do something stupid, and get David killed.
She turned on the TV, keeping the volume low, and she watched the ten o'clock Iowa City newscast. Coverage of the wreck was there as well, and an interview with the milk tanker driver, a fat-cheeked man with a bloody bandage on his forehead and a glazed stare that said he'd had a peek into his own grave. 'I seen this van and the other car comin' and the highway patrol right behind 'em,' the driver explained in a quavering voice. 'Maybe doin' eighty, all three of 'em. The van was flyin' up on my tail and I tried to get over in the right lane and then wham the car hit my tanker and it was all she wrote.' The newscaster said the highway patrol and state police were searching for a dark green van with a Georgia license plate.
As Didi listened to the rest of the news, she picked up a notepad with Liberty Motor Lodge and a cracked bell printed across the top. With a motel pencil she wrote Mary Terror. Then Freestone, and three names she had memorized long ago: Nick Hudley, Keith Cavanaugh, Dean Walker. Beneath the third name she drew a circle, put two dots in it for eyes and the arc of a mouth: a Smiley Face, like the button she'd seen on Mary's sweater there at the lumberyard.
The troopers would be on the sniff for Mary's van. They'd be out in droves tomorrow. But they might also be looking for a stolen Oldsmobile Cutlass with a Playboy bunny decal on the rear windshield. It wouldn't hurt to scrape that damned thing off, do away with the hanging dice, and, while she was out in the cold dark, swap license plates
