T. Boyle - Talk Talk

Looking back on it, what remained most vivid in her mind wasn't the way the storm broke almost at the instant the train lurched to a stop, as if the weather were adhering to a timetable too, or how many people appeared out of nowhere with their tennis rackets and backpacks and fishing rods to swarm the platform, but the expression on her mother's face. At first, what with the sudden press of people, Dana didn't see her there in the crowd and wondered if she'd got the right train. The initial random drops of rain had surprised her, spattering her shoulders and running two cold fingers along the base of her neck where she'd put her hair up, and she'd moved in under the long narrow metal canopy that ran the length of the platform and everyone else moved in too. Then she felt the air concuss and glanced up to see the water falling in metallic sheets from both sides of the canopy. She felt something else too, a sudden chill, the sixth sense of the deaf, and she was about to turn around, to look over her shoulder and confront whatever it was, real or imaginary, when she spotted her mother. There she was, squeezing between two men with suitcases, coming toward her, overdressed in slacks and heels and a turquoise blouse cinched at the waist with a trailing scarf. And she had that expression on her face.

Her mother wasn't there to comfort her, not with that face, or at least not until she'd let her disapproval and disappointment and heartbreak be felt and acknowledged, because here was her daughter, her highly educated deaf daughter whom she'd taught to be responsible and independent, in trouble again, her clothes dirty, her knees bandaged like a child's and her fiancé-if he still was her fiancé-in the hospital. Beaten up-or no, beaten down-because of her. Because she wouldn't listen. That was the expression on her mother's face, that was what she saw in that sliver of a moment as her mother compacted her shoulders to move between the two men jockeying for position with their suitcases and the rain fell in sheets and the earth gave off its immemorial saturate smell. But then it all changed-her mother's mouth dropped open and her eyes leapt out at her-and Dana was hit from behind, hard, a shoulder digging into hers as if someone had stumbled into her, and she caught her balance and swung round and there he was. For an instant, the rain sheeting down, her mother on the periphery, everyone on the platform arrested in mid-stride, she stared into his face, so close she could smell the raw ammoniac charge of his breath and the sweat bleeding through a lingering taint of aftershave. He was right there, right in her face, and there was nowhere to run now. A tremor coursed through her. She tried to swallow but couldn't. She saw the thin whip of the slash on his cheek, the unshaved stubble, the thrust of his chin and the two strips of muscle wadded in his clenched jaws. He didn't say a word. Didn't move. Just breathed his ammoniac breath and let his eyes burn into her.

He didn't know what he was doing, he really didn't. It was as if he'd been disconnected, as if someone had pulled the plug on him and the laptop of his brain was running on auxiliary power, the battery getting weaker and the connections ever harder to make. He hadn't been to prison, hadn't lived underground for the past three years, hadn't been tutored by Sandman or developed his street smarts or learned anything at all. She moved, he moved: that was all he knew. And when the yellow Volvo turned right out of the hospital lot and rolled down Route 202 into the heart of town and bore left on Division and headed for his mother's house, he followed.

They were two blocks away when the Volvo, without signaling, suddenly nosed in at the curb up ahead. He saw the black Jetta then, parked across the street in a line of cars, and he let the forward momentum of the SUV carry him on past to the corner and then back around the block. “No hurry,” he told himself, and he realized he was talking aloud-and how pathetic was that? But he repeated himself, as if his voice were coming from the radio, as if everything he was thinking was being broadcast to the world and people were crowding into rooms and standing in doorways to hear him, “No hurry at all.” When he came down the street a minute later she was standing there on the pavement, leaning into the driver's side window, her T-shirt hiked up in back so that he could see the smooth run of her lower back and the flare of her hips, and he flicked his signal and slid in behind a panel truck. He was blocking somebody's driveway, but that wouldn't matter because any minute now she was going to get in that Jetta-alone-and everything would fall into place. He backed up five feet and eased out just enough to be able to see round the truck. He left the car running, in gear.

They were talking, the two of them, back and forth, and now she was using her hands, parting words, goodbye, and he saw the other woman tug at her shirt and pull her back to slip her something. What was it: drugs? A cigarette? Some deaf thing? Maybe it was a hearing aid, maybe that was it. But no, she was putting her hair up in one of those flexible bands, snaring the mass of it in both hands and flicking back her head the way Natalia did, the way Natalia used to, the characteristic gesture, the dip and fall. And then another goodbye and she crossed the street and got into her car as the other woman pulled away. What he'd thought was that she'd be trapped there, that it would be nothing to pull up beside her and block her in and do what he had to do, but he didn't move. She was studying herself in the mirror, both her arms Ved above her head, doing something with her hair, smoothing and adjusting it beneath the tight clench of the band, and he watched, transfixed, thinking of Natalia, of Gina, her slim pale arms moving in unison as the car gently rocked and she dug out her lipstick and her eyeliner and made herself up as if she were going out on a date. Which, in a way, she was.

That was a hard thought. And she was a bitch, never forget that. But there was something in the way she exposed herself so unconsciously-the way all women did-looking for beauty in a compact or a tube of lipstick, needing it, needing to be beautiful and admired for it and reaching always for grace, that hit him with the force of revelation and he let the car idle beneath him till she put the Jetta in gear and pulled out into the street and he had to duck down out of her line of sight as she wheeled past with her shining eyes and the drawn bow of her composed and glistening mouth. When she got to the end of the block, he swung a U-turn and followed in her wake.

It wasn't hard to catch up to her. She drove like somebody twice her age, utterly oblivious, crowding the middle of the street one minute and weaving toward the curb the next. Riding the brake. Going too fast round the curves and too slow on the straightaways. He put the sun visor down and kept four or five car lengths between them-he wouldn't want her to recognize him, not yet-but he could have been right on her bumper and she wouldn't have known the difference. She never glanced in the rearview, not once, except to adjust her makeup and watch herself compress her lips and run the tip of a finger along the fringe of her eyelashes. But where was she going? Back to the hospital?

The light was red up ahead and she drifted to a stop and flicked on her left-turn signal. He slowed, then pulled over to let the car behind him pass, and all the while he could feel that wire dangling loose inside him, that slow fade to nothing. The second car nosed in behind her at the light, father, mother, three kids in the back, the mother's hair wet and hanging thin as tinsel round her collar. There was a rumble of thunder. The sky closed in. Both his hands were on the wheel, but he couldn't feel a thing. When the light changed, he let the car carry him back out into traffic and he hit the left-turn signal and followed her down the hill toward the train station, wondering if that was where she was going and if it was, where he could trap her.