“How is it?” Miriam asks with a yawn.

“Not awful.” Arthur reaches over and touches her hand. “You want to sleep?”

She is halfway there. “For a while, maybe.”

The highway from the motel heads due south, forming a lazy curve that traces the eastern foothills of the Green Mountains. Trees press close to the road; from time to time the forest opens on one side of the highway or the other, but it is too dark for Arthur to see anything, too slippery for him to permit himself anything more than a hasty sidelong glance. In the beams of his headlights the snow has thickened to a dense, whirling mass. A single car passes them in the oncoming lane, then another, then a third, all traveling with a conscientious slowness that neither suggests nor contains panic; it is not a night, yet, that makes people afraid. Arthur thinks about these other cars, where they have come from and where they may be headed; he thinks about Miriam, dozing now beside him, and his son and daughter, elsewhere, busy with their lives, and about the days when each of them was born; he thinks about Dora Auclaire, though as he does he realizes that he does not love her at all. He will never send his letter. He will destroy it, as soon as he can, and when next he sees her-on line at the grocery story, or at the clinic dropping off some papers-he will smile, perhaps say a harmless, genial word or two of greeting, and then go about his business in such a way that she knows, instantly, that all of it is over: the lunches, the looks, the promise, unfulfilled, of something more. He will never hold her hand again, nor imagine what it would be like to be alone with her. All of this he knows, but when he comes to a fork in the highway-the lone decision he must make between the college and the Massachusetts border-he completely fails to notice it, as he also fails to notice when he veers right instead of left. He doesn’t notice the change in the highway number, the road’s sudden, suggestive rise into the hills, or the sign that says, Scenic Route Ahead, its top edge dressed with a two-inch blade of snow. None of these. He will wash Dora Auclaire from his memory, as even now the silence of the car and the whirling cones of snow before him seem to wash away the very world, everything that has ever happened to him and everything that ever will-a dream of dreaming.

They have traveled just ten miles from the motel, but their journey is nearly done. The road veers sharply upward, descends into a hollow smothered by snowy trees, then rises again, ascending toward some unknown apex; at the top, as the car crests-the beams of his headlights vault into space-Arthur can see the sky again, a starless mass of stone, and then below him, the highway curving along a steep embankment. The dropoff is vast, a plunge into nothing; far below he detects an icy glint of river.

Perhaps he sees this. Perhaps, sleeping, he sees nothing at all.

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident-in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come-he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands-as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear. Silence, and his parents, and the snow: he inhabits this moment as if it were not imagined but remembered, with a vividness that seems to lodge in his bones, just as he feels, with his body, the moment when the car lifts on the ice and begins its long, languid arc toward the embankment. There is no guardrail, nothing for the car’s front end to strike, to impede its progress or in any way change the nature of the scene, its dreamlike silence. The total, parabolic energy of their vehicle-thirty-five hundred pounds of diesel-powered French station wagon, traveling at or about the legal speed limit of fifty miles per hour-is suddenly, amazingly, tractionless. It is unbounded, set loose from the earth, and though jealous gravity will soon assert itself, whisking his parents to the valley floor at a velocity sufficient to snap the chassis in two, for this moment they are free; they are as free as ghosts, as comets, they are streaking across the heavens; Arthur and Miriam, together at last.

He was nineteen years old, happy. He did not know yet that it was possible for his life to change, and that once it changed, it would never change back. An hour would pass before his parents were found, and that is the hour O’Neil returns to, every day: the car in the river, the river in the valley, the valley gone under the snow.

ORPHANS

July 1983

O’NEIL BURKE WAS twenty-three years old, a college graduate who had traveled to Europe, but by the time his sister came to get him at the hospital in Stamford, six hours after the accident, he felt as if his life had stopped. It was eight o’clock when Kay arrived, still in her suit from a day of work, a slim leather case under her arm; the wide glass doors of the emergency room sighed open on their hinges, and there she was at last. She stood a moment in the doorway, searching the room with narrowed eyes, until she found him parked in his wheelchair by the sign-in desk, his left leg encased in plaster of Paris from knee to toe.

“God, look at you.” Kay raked her fingers through his hair, clotted with knots of dried paint. She was a pretty woman who worked too hard-slender and brown haired like O’Neil, with a small nose and deep walnut eyes-and her tired face said: Now this. “Couldn’t they have cleaned you up a little?”

“That was extra.” O’Neil held up the magazine he had been reading, which was Business Week. In two hours, since the nurses had wheeled him back to the waiting area, he had read through the rack, everything from Highlights for Children to Modern Maturity. “Now,” he said, directing her attention to the article, “it says here that what we are experiencing is not so much a recession strictly speaking, as a period of contraction before an expansion. Does this make any sense to you?”

“You’ll have to ask Jack. O’Neil, what did they give you?”

He returned the magazine to the pile. “Some Demerol when I first got here. It made me throw up.”

“It can do that. Listen, honey. I hate to ask, but do you have any insurance?”

“A technical question,” O’Neil said, and paused for effect; the news was not good. “Technically, no.”

Kay paid for everything with her Master Charge, then pushed O’Neil’s wheelchair into the parking lot, where the orderly, a large black man named Donnelle, helped her drape O’Neil across the backseat of Kay’s Volvo. The light in the parking lot was evening light-the day had disappeared-and insects throbbed in the trees.

“Thanks for everything, Donnelle.” O’Neil leaned out the window so the two could shake hands; Donnelle met his hand with a firm grip.

“You mind that leg, now,” Donnelle said.

When they had pulled out of the lot, Kay lifted her eyes at O’Neil through the rearview mirror. “Please don’t pout, honey. I didn’t even get the message until forty minutes ago. I came as soon as I could.”

He had left messages for her everywhere: her office, the house, even the restaurant where she sometimes met Jack after work for dinner. “Oh, it’s all right,” O’Neil said after a moment. “Donnelle was good company.”

“I can stop somewhere if you’re hungry,” Kay offered.

O’Neil shook his head. “There was a candy machine at the hospital. Also, they gave me some codeine, after the Demerol wore off.”

In the front seat Kay sighed hopelessly. “What am I going to do with you?”