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The waitress asks, “What’re yinz havin’?”
She keeps to main streets as she rides so she’s re-created in the mapping—security camera to security camera, traffic cams, dashboard cams, cams in everyone’s retinas who noticed the blonde as she passed. Railroad Street to Smallman through the Strip District to Lawrenceville. I follow. Faces in passing cars are only blurs—petals on a wet, black bough—impressions inadvertently captured in Peyton’s background and sculpted here as part of the environment. These faces unnerve me. Faceless. I feel like they try to catch my attention. I feel like they want me to notice them, to notice them
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She slumps instead of screams, collapsing to the trail like her lungs have been pulled from her. “I’m sorry,” I think I remember saying, stammering something, trying to comfort her but failing. I still don’t know why I said those words, and every time I think of them my chest tightens in nauseous self-recrimination. A jogger runs past without stopping and I wait until he’s long past and disappeared from view before speaking again. “Are you all right?” I ask her.
I shrink against the wall—irrelevant now that she’s here, all my troubles and all my desires suddenly the concern of a minor character that’s barely made the page.
house. I had to stop believing in God before I realized what it meant that we all bear the weight of the cross. I had to stop believing in God before I wanted to atone for what I’d done in His name—”
The screaming of that bridge as we cross—all I think of is my own child dying with Theresa, that I’m hearing our child among the others, but this is melodramatic, I know, hysterical, but still—my child burned in a concussion of fire, layers of skin, the system of her nerves and of her veins, her profile, hair and eyes, ten fingers and ten toes that I would have counted. Stop it, stop this.
