Free No Book but the World: A Novel by Leah Hager Cohen Page B

gravel crescent calling, “June, June!” in an imprecatory tone. “June, please. Let them . . . Don’t inter—” but here he halted both speech and stride, and it was comical, really, the way he stood there sodden and slowly folded his arms, as if in a futile bid for dignity, over his round chest.
    What had stopped him was the fact that June had finished. She’d distributed her whole armload of warm things, with nary a complaint from any of us kids—even the oldest, mustache-sporting Gann had accepted a long mustard-colored scarf. Neel stood there in his defeat, some yards off, trying to make a joke of it by fully embracing the ludicrous figure he must have realized he cut: stout and soaked, with rivulets streaming past his bushy white eyebrows and making him squint. He gestured ironically toward June. “My sweet helpmeet,” he said, biting off the end consonant theatrically.
    Laughter exploded among us kids. Freddy, at my elbow, positively brayed. I did not understand the joke any more than he must have, any more than the others must have—even the older ones, I think, couldn’t have known precisely what was funny—but it seemed necessary to laugh, and a giddy carillon of sound rippled up and down the line. We recognized the feel of comedy, the rhythm of a punch line, the well-oiled choreography of a pratfall, which is what Neel effectively turned it into, never mind that he remained planted where he stood, upright, heedless of the freezing rain.
    June laughed, too, softly, or maybe she only smiled, an inward, chastened smile. I was standing near enough to hear the drops pattering off the waterproof poncho; alone among us she was dressed to repel the weather.
    An ache welled in my throat. I understood its origins no better than I’d understood why I’d been laughing moments before, but I reached suddenly for one of June’s bare hands, and squeezed it in my own now gloved one.
    •   •   •
    O N THE ROAD TO C RITERION, I descend around a curve and a white wing of water rushes at me, beats violently against the windshield and driver’s-side window. I must have gathered more speed than I meant to, coming downhill, hurtling toward my appointment with Bayard Charles, toward the promise of getting one step closer to Fred, and sliced too fast straight through this deep puddle that has responded by rising up as a mad swan. I lose control; the back wheels pull to the right and the rest of the car follows, skidding sideways onto the shoulder and then off the shoulder, scraping up for screeching yards against a wall of banked earth. All the rhythm instruments, still in their duffel bag in the backseat, join in the fracas with great clattering and rattling before I manage to bring the car to a stop.
    In the seconds that took, my shirt has become soaked. My top lip is damp with sweat, my hair sticking to my neck. The air bag didn’t inflate, so the impact couldn’t have been that severe, but my heart feels woozy as a candy heart dissolving in liquid. The wipers are still going, all out of tempo with time, which is suspended in a bubble of stillness. I assess. I feel unnaturally high in my seat, thrust toward a brightening overhead; the rain is lessening. Is that true? Yes, the downpour is thinner now, and pale breaks striate the clouds. My sense of elevation is real, too, I realize, a function of the rear right side of the car’s canting low, either because the wheel has sunk into the wet ground there or because the tire has gone flat. As my heart reincorporates into something more solid, I mentally scan my body. I locate only two, anomalous complaints: my throat hurts, for no reason I can fathom except my esophageal muscles must have clenched in fear, and my left knee throbs for reasons I can’t make sense of at all; it’s as if it got banged against the door, but the impact was all on the right side of the car.
    Dennis
, I think, wanting him here. And then:
Fred.
With a crumpling realization.
What am I