Christine

She opened the fridge, saw a six-pack of Coke sitting in there next to Daddy’s beer, and thought: Get thee behind me, Satan. Then she grabbed a can anyway. Never mind what it did to her complexion. She wasn’t going with anyone now. If she broke out, so what?

The empty house made her uneasy. It never had before; she had always felt pleased and absurdly competent when they left her alone—a holdover from childhood days, no doubt. The house had always seemed comforting to her. But now the sounds of the kitchen, of the rising wind outside, even the scuff of her slippers on the linoleum those sounds seemed sinister, even frightening. If things had worked out differently, Arnie could have been here with her. Her folks, especially her mother, had liked him. At first. Now, of course, after what had happened, her mother would probably wash her mouth out with soap if she knew Leigh was even thinking of him. But she did think of him. Too much of the time. Wondering why he had changed. Wondering how he was taking the breakup. Wondering if he was okay.

The wind rose to a shriek and then fell off a little, reminding her—for no reason, of course—of a car’s engine reving and then failing off.

Won’t come back from Dead Man’s” Curve, her mind whispered strangely, and for no reason at all (of course) she went to the sink and poured her Coke down the drain and wondered if she was going to cry, or throw up, or what.

She realized with dawning surprise that she was in a state of low terror.

For no reason at all.

Of course.

At least her parents had left the car in the garage (cars, she had cars on the brain). She didn’t like to think of her dad trying to drive home from the Stewarts” in this, half-soused from three or four martinis (except that he always called them martoonis, with typical adult kittenishness). It was only three blocks, and the two of them had left the house bundled up and giggling, looking like a couple of large children on their way to make a snowman. The walk home would sober them up. It would be good for them. It would be good for them if…

The wind rose again—gunning around the eaves and then falling off—and she suddenly saw her mother an father walking up the street through clouds of blowing snow, holding onto each other to keep from falling on their drunken, lovable asses, laughing. Daddy maybe goosing Mom through her snowpants. The way he sometimes goosed her when he got a buzz on was also something that had always irritated Leigh precisely because it seemed such a juvenile thing for a grown man to do. But of course she loved them both. Her love was a part of the irritation, and her occasional exasperation with them was very much a part of her love.

They were walking together through a snow as thick as heavy smoke and then two huge green eyes opened in the white behind them, seeming to float… eyes that looked terribly like the circles of the dashboard instruments she had seen as she was choking to death… and they were growing… stalking her helpless, laughing, squiffy parents.

She drew a harsh breath and went back into the living room. She approached the telephone, almost touched it, then veered away and went back to the window, looking out into the white and cupping her elbows in the palms of her hands.

What had she been about to do? Call them? Tell them she was alone in the house and had gotten thinking about Arnie’s old and somehow slinking car, his steel girlfriend Christine, and that she wanted them to come home because she was scared for them and herself? Was that what she was going to do?

Cute, Leigh. Cute.

The ploughed blacktop of the street was disappearing under new snow, but slowly; it had only just begun to snow really hard, and the wind periodically tried to clear the street with strong gusts that sent membranes of powder twisting and rising to merge with the whitish-grey sky of the stormy afternoon like slowly twisting smoke-ghosts…

Oh, but the terror was there, it was real, and something was going to happen. She knew it. She had been shocked to hear that Arnie had been arrested for smuggling, but that reaction had been nowhere as strong as the sick fear she had felt when she opened the paper on an earlier day and saw what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, that day when her first crazy, terrible, and somehow certain thought had been. Christine.

And now the premonition of some new piece of black work hung heavily on her, and she couldn’t get rid of it, it was crazy, Arnie had been in Philadelphia at a chess tourney, she had asked around that day, that was all there was to it and she would not think about this anymore she would turn on all the radios the TV fill the house up with sound not think about that car that smelled like the grave that car that had tried to kill her murder her.

“Oh damn,” she whispered. “Can’t you quit?”

Her arms, sculpted rigidly in gooseflesh.