Lexicon

card. “I’ll be in the car.”
    • • •
    She phoned the owner of Tangled Threads, Mary, and said she needed to leave right away, her mother was dying. Mary’s voice flooded with sympathy and told Emily it was fine, take as much time as she needed. She said, “I didn’t know you were still in contact with your family.”
    “I wasn’t,” said Emily. “I just heard from them.”
    Then she drove to the hospital and waited. She could never tell where Harry would be, but the best place to wait was the emergency room. Sometimes she sat and read magazines alongside farmers with their hands wrapped in black towels and mothers with green children. The emergency room had glass double doors and when the paramedic van pulled up, the sun bouncing off its white hood, it was always thrilling, like winning a prize.
    But when she saw him, she burst into tears. It was unexpected and shocking and if that organization boy had been around to see it, who knew what would have happened. Harry came to her, alarmed, and she heard the lie fall out of her about a mother, cancer. She hugged him and inhaled him while she could.
    “Do you want me to come?”
    “No,” she said, grateful for the offer. “You can’t.”
    “How long will you be?” He shook his head. “You don’t know. It’s okay. Take your time.” He kissed her head. “But come back.”
    “I will,” she said, and as the words came out, she was surprised at how true they felt. “I will, I promise.”
    Eventually she pulled away. There were people watching, and the longer this went on, the harder it became, so when he offered to drive her to the house she refused. She had to walk away while she could. “I love you,” she said, and he smiled sadly, and in retrospect, it was very obvious, wasn’t it? She should have seen it coming. But love made people stupid, and she was so very much in love. The emergency room doors parted and she walked through them and the only thing that made this bearable was the conviction that she’d be back.
    • • •
    An hour later, she was in the black sedan, watching dust swallow Broken Hill in the side mirror. The boy brought the car up to ninety miles an hour and manipulated his phone with one hand. “Sleep, if you want,” he told her. “There’s a whole lot of nothing for the next eight hours.”
    This was true. But she couldn’t do it. The boy kept glancing at her and she curled up in the seat, putting her back to him. A while later, a car passed, heading in the opposite direction, gleaming on top and pancaked with dirt on the bottom. She watched it recede in the mirror. A minute later, there was another one just like it, then another.
    “Are there more of you?”
    “Hmm?” he said.
    “The cars,” she said.
    He shrugged. “Probably locals.”
    She slouched back down. A truck appeared on the road ahead, following the cars, a black eighteen-wheeler with no signage, hauling a steel container unlike any she’d ever seen, but this time she didn’t say anything.
    • • •
    The journey was thirty-four hours, long enough to develop a burning hate for the organization boy and everything he stood for. She was glad the first-class seats were like capsules, which gave her space to hide her misery. She didn’t know what had triggered the arrival of the boy, whether it was simply enough time passing for the organization to consider her suitably chastened, or they had been observing her, or something had happened, or what. But whichever it was, she would be expected to be in charge of her emotions.
    She deplaned, disoriented and bruised somewhere in the core of her body, into DC winter sunshine. A limo whisked her to a grand hotel, where the boy bid her farewell, and she slept for fourteen hours. She woke to a blinking red light on the bedside phone. She pressed for voice mail, thinking it might be Eliot, which would be frightening, or Yeats, which would be more so, but it was neither. Instead, a girl she didn’t know told her she was expected at a particular fashion store in thirty minutes. The girl ended her message without saying good-bye, as if she’d been cut off, although Emily knew she hadn’t been.
    She caught a cab downtown and tried on skirts and sheer shirts. In the mirror, she looked freakishly tan. “This will take more than a jacket,” said the man, who had introduced himself as a
personal style adviser
. “You’re a cavewoman in a suit, dear.”
    He forwarded her to a salon, where a bald man