Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

— We should get going, her mother said. Let’s finish this up and you can get your things. I’ll borrow some boots….

— We have to walk?

— The Williamses’ car is back up on Ferris Hill and your father has the Firebird.

The silence between Wendy and Elena was long and durable. Almost unbreachable.

— You don’t love Dad anymore, Wendy said. Elena gave this statement a respectful space. Then she said:

— That’s right.

Wendy would think about this moment a lot, later, and she would conclude that Elton John’s drummer, Nigel Olson, meant more to her than her parents’ marriage, and that her own heart had shrunk down, like the heart of the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Because she didn’t feel that much right then. She had learned well the parsimony her family had taught her.

— But you’re not gonna divorce him, are you?

— I don’t know the answer to that yet.

— Aw, Mom, you…

Lurching through this conversation, they rinsed dirty plates under cold water. This was the last of what they could share. Then Wendy left her mother to find her stuff — her poncho, her boots — up on Sandy’s bed. At the top of the stairs, she could hear Sandy and Mr. Williams. In the bathroom.

They were sitting on the bath mat, with an array of tools spread out before them, as though this were an operating amphitheater. Before them, through the tiles in the bathroom, a steady leak had developed. It wasn’t much more than a drip really, a drip that was collecting in the bathtub, but it spooked the Williams men nonetheless. It wasn’t coming from the showerhead, or from the tap. It was coming from the wall.

Sandy handed the tools to his father one by one. Wrench. Pliers. They were turning off the water at valves, behind the toilet. This had no effect on the leak. Beside them the radio chirped away about the storm and its swath of destruction. Then the announcers moved on to the subject of that 18 1/2-minute silence.

— We’re going to go, Wendy said.

The men of the Williams family didn’t look up.

— Come again, Jim Williams said. Always happy to see you, dear.

Wendy slipped out of the bathroom and gathered up her things, bundled herself up. Sandy’s bed was as carefully made up as if it had been the guest room, as if he weren’t a permanent resident in his own room. G. I. Joe hung listlessly above the closet.

And then, downstairs, just as she and her mother were buttoning their last buttons in the kitchen, there was a knock at the front door.

— Let me in, Janey Williams called. I don’t have my keys.

Another louder pounding. The sound was muffled.

Then Jim Williams on the staircase: worried, preoccupied, caught between a number of different reactions. Sandy stood right behind him, stalled on the eighth or ninth step, gripping the banister, his chin pressed down upon the tops of his hands. On the doorstep, Janey Williams was unraveled, disarranged, unhinged even. Wendy could tell. And this was before Mrs. Williams saw Wendy’s mom.

— Top of the morning, Janey said, as Wendy pulled back the door. Is the lady of the house at home? She placed a hand absently on Wendy’s head.

— We have a problem. Jim waved her in.

— What happened to the car, dammit? she said. And then she saw: Oh, so happy to see you, Elena, and so well put together. What’s going on? Why so many long faces?

— How did you get back? Jim Williams said, as he came down a couple of steps. His tone was detached. It was the tone that preceded a long, difficult conversation.

— Maria drove me up and around and down Ferris Hill. I passed the car. My car. What the hell did you do to it?

Jim Williams gripped his wrench as though he were making a point with it. Sandy looked down at the fuzz on the carpet and Wendy looked at her mother, who seemed to be staring vacantly at some empty region out in the yard. Upstairs there was the sound of a drip in the bathroom.

— Your car seems to be stuck on the road, too, your Firebird, Janey said to Elena. I hope Benjamin didn’t, you know, encounter… the legal authorities on his way down the hill.

— We wrecked the car, Elena whispered stupidly. Wendy watched her mother fumbling to deal with the situation. And she could guess now the way the map of the evening went, even if she couldn’t see all of it right in front of her. Some of it got put together by her, some by others. But the feeling of those stories was on her now. Those stories circulated around her. Maria Conrad returning home to find her son, Neil, getting his first blow job from Janey Williams, Janey actually crying while she was doing it, her salty bitterness falling on his pale pink erection — Neil too stupid in contentment to know the effect he had, or didn’t have, on her; Maria returning from Stephan Earle’s house, where Stephan had ejaculated prematurely and promptly fallen asleep after having called Maria by the wrong name — not her own, not even his wife’s name; Stephan Earle’s wife, Marie, stuck at breakfast with Dan Fuller when Chuck Spofford appeared, with his son in tow, to accuse Fuller of stealing his mistress; the logistics, the geometry of accommodation at the Gorman residence, the Sawyer residence, the Boyles’. All these cars trying to get around town behind all these other cars. Each with its freight of betrayal and lost opportunity. On top of everything else the storm. Wendy didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t old enough to think about it.

— Did you two have fun? Janey said.

— Oh, be quiet, Elena said. If you want to discuss this at least let’s do it in private. We don’t have to drag all this out in front of the kids. They already know enough as it is anyway.

— We’ve told them, sweetheart, Jim Williams said.

— You what? Janey said.

— Look, this isn’t all that important now. We have a couple of real problems, Jim Williams said. There’s a leak in the bathroom somewhere. I’m a little concerned about the… that the pipes may have burst. That’s big trouble. And—

— You’ll figure it out, Janey said.

Like Wendy, Sandy was paralyzed. Halted by the snowballing of points of view, by the partition and division of points of view. As Janey Williams swept by him and his dad on the stairs, in her wrinkled silk pajamas (draping her wool coat on the banister), she leaned to kiss Sandy on the forehead. She began to sob, choking, heaving sobs. Some women in New Canaan were beautiful when they cried: all sorrow was bound inside them like the bound feet of Asian women. Their tears cut delicate tracks in their pristine cheeks. Not so with Janey Williams. She coughed and gasped and hawked up more of what she was keeping down. Her nose was red and raw — Wendy could see — like her dad’s gin-blossomed nose. Janey tried to shout some invective as she cried but the flash flood was too heavy now, and the best she could do was struggle away from her family, struggle away from all that promise and kindness. On the way to her bedroom she paused — at Mike’s door.

She reached for the knob.

The trick buzzer sounded.

Janey swore. And then she turned the knob and found the bed empty.

— Where’s Mike? she called.

— That’s what I… Down with Ben, Jim said. We think.

— Why would he be down there? she called, hysteria creeping into the mix of her temper. Ben hates Mike. Don’t be stupid. Don’t tell me you didn’t even—

— Calm down, why don’t you.

Jim was turning the wrench over in his palm. But he didn’t move.

Janey was at the top of the stairs, frozen in latitudes of regret. They were all isolated in that foyer, all of them.

Then the ambulance pulled up in front of the house.

AN AMBULANCE of quaint, nostalgic design. An old American station wagon, in bright red, with a revolving yellow light on top. The light, rotating slowly, coming to a stop. Sunlight picking up the reflectors in the lamp and elsewhere on the ambulance. The sun reflecting on the limitless array of reflecting surfaces. The sun, the reflections of the sun, the fallen limbs of trees. A vast sweetshop of sugar-coated treats, some kid’s fantasy of a Christmas world of candies. Sweetmeats.