Karen Fowler - Black Glass

Except that she was stopped by the police instead. She was well beyond the city; she had been through several cities, and the sky had darkened. The landscape flattened and she fell into a drowsy rhythm in which she and the car were both passengers in a small, impellent world defined by her headlights. It was something of a shock to have to stop. She sat in her car while the police light rotated behind her, and at regular intervals she watched her hands turn red on the steering wheel. She had never been stopped by the police before. In the rearview mirror she could see the policeman talking to his radio. His door was slightly open; the light was on inside his car. He got out and came to talk to her. She turned her motor off. “Lady,” he said, and she wondered if policemen on television always called women lady because that was what real policemen did, or if he had learned this watching television just as she had. “Lady, you were flying. I clocked you at eighty.”

Eighty. Lily couldn’t help but be slightly impressed. She had been twenty-five miles per hour over the limit without even realizing she was speeding. It suggested she could handle even faster speeds. “Eighty,” she said contritely. “You know what I think I should do? I think I’ve been driving too long, and I think I should just find a place to stay tonight. I think that would be best. I mean, eighty. That’s too fast. Don’t you think?”

“I really do.” The policeman removed a pen from the pocket inside his jacket.

“I won’t do it again,” Lily told him. “Please don’t give me a ticket.”

“I could spare you the ticket,” the policeman said, “and I could read in the paper tomorrow that you smashed yourself into a retaining wall not fifteen miles from here. I don’t think I could live with myself. Give me your license. Just take it out of the wallet, please. Mattie Drake runs a little bed-and-breakfast place in Two Trees. You want the next exit and bear left. First right, first right again. Street dead-ends in Mattie’s driveway. There’s a sign on the lawn: MATTIE’S. Should be all lit up this time of night. It’s a nice place and doesn’t cost too much in the off season.” He handed Lily back her license and the ticket for her to sign. He took his copy. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he said, and in the silence she heard his boots scattering gravel from the shoulder of the road as he walked away.

She crumpled the ticket into the glove compartment and waited for him to leave. He shut off the rotating light, turned on the headlights, and outwaited her. He followed all the way to the next exit. So Lily had to take it.

She parked her car on the edge of Mattie’s lawn. Moths circled the lights on the sign and on the porch. A large white owl slid through the dusky air, transformed by the lights beneath it into something angelic. A cricket landed on the sleeve of her linen suit. The sprinklers went on suddenly; the watery hiss erased the hum of insects, but the pathway to the door remained dry. Lily stood on the lighted porch and rang the bell.

The woman who answered wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt. She had the angular hips of an older woman, but her hair showed very little gray, just a small patch right at the forehead. “Come in, darling,” she said. There was a faint southern softness in her voice. “You look tired. Do you want a room? Have you come to see the caves? I’m Mattie.”

“Yes, of course,” Lily told her. “I need a room. I met some people who were here last year. You really have to see these caves, they told me.”

“I’ll have Katherine pack you a lunch if you like,” Mattie offered. “It’s beautiful hiking weather. You won’t get nearly so hot as in the summer. You can go tomorrow.”

Lily borrowed the phone in the living room to call David. It sat on a small table between a glass ball with a single red rosebud frozen inside and a picture of the Virgin praying. The Virgin wore a blue mantilla and appeared to be suspended in a cloudless sky. The phone had a dial which Lily spun. She was so used to the tune their number made on the touch phone at work that she missed hearing it. She listened to the answering machine, heard her voice which sounded nothing like her voice, suggesting that she leave a message. “I’m in Two Trees at Mattie’s bed-and-breakfast,” she said. “I had this sudden impulse to see the caves. I may stay a couple of days. Will you call Harriet and tell her I won’t be in tomorrow? It’s real slow. There won’t be a problem.” She would have told David she missed him, but she ran out of time. She would have only said it out of politeness anyway. They had been married nine years. She would miss him later. She would begin to miss him when she began to miss herself. He might be missing her, too, just about then. It would be nice if all these things happened at the same time.

She took the key from Mattie, went upstairs, used the bathroom at the end of the hall, used someone else’s toothbrush, rinsing it out repeatedly afterward, unlocked her door, removed all her clothes, and cried until she fell asleep.

In the morning Lily lay in bed and watched the sun stretch over the quilt and onto the skin of her arms and her hands. She looked around the room. The bed was narrow and had a headpiece made of iron. A pattern of small pink flowers papered the walls. On the bookcase next to the bed a china lady held a china umbrella with one hand and extended the other, palm up, to see if the rain had stopped. There were books. Beauty’s Secret, one of them said on the spine. Lily opened it, but it turned out to be about horses.

A full-length mirror hung on the back of the bedroom door. Lily didn’t notice until the sunlight touched its surface, doubling in brightness. She rose and stood in front of it, backlit by the sunny window, frontlit by the mirror so that she could hardly see. She leaned in closer. Last night’s crying had left her eyes red and the lids swollen. She looked at herself for a long time, squinting and changing the angle. Who was she? There was absolutely no way to tell.

The smell of coffee came up the stairs and through the shut door. Lily found her clothes on the desk chair where she had left them. She put them on: stockings, a fuchsia blouse, an eggshell business suit, heels. She used the bathroom, someone else’s hairbrush as well as someone else’s toothbrush, and came downstairs.

“You can’t go hiking dressed like that,” Mattie told her, and of course Lily couldn’t. “You have nothing else? What size shoe do you wear? A six and a half? Six? Tiny little thing, aren’t you? Katherine might have something that will do.” She raised her voice. “Katherine? Katherine!”

Katherine came through the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, drying her hands on a dish towel. She was somewhat younger than Mattie though older than Lily, middle forties, perhaps, and heavier, a dark-skinned woman with straight black hair. On request she produced jeans for Lily, a sleeveless T-shirt, a red sweatshirt, gray socks, and sneakers. Everything was too big for Lily. Everything was wearable.

Mattie took her through the screen door and out the back porch after breakfast. Beyond the edge of Mattie’s sprinklers, the lawn stopped abruptly at a hill of sand and manzanita. Mattie had stowed a lunch and a canteen in a yellow day pack. She began to help Lily into it. “You go up,” Mattie said. “All the way up. And then down. You can see the trail from the other side of the fence. Watch for rattlers. You hiked much?” Lily was having trouble slipping her left arm under the second strap. It caught at the elbow, her arm pinned behind her. Mattie eased the pack off and began again.

“Oh, yes,” Lily assured her. “I’ve hiked a lot.” Mattie looked unconvinced. “I’m a rock climber,” said Lily. “That’s the kind of hiking I’m used to. Crampons and ropes and mallets. I don’t usually wear them on my back. I wear them on my belt. I take groups out. Librarians and schoolteachers and beauticians. You know.”