She found it difficult to keep still. Home, work, eat, then everything again. Always the fidgety waiting for the next scheduled moment.
Martin was buying into it. She could tell.
She wasn't sure she was, despite a lingering sense of disloyalty.
She made calls. Meyer, Cooper, the assisted-living crew where Mac had helped out a while. His mother even, unpleasant as that turned out, but no real information anywhere. She began to grasp. The incident with the fourteen year old, where Martin had to call in some favors over some accusations, Mac hardly a dealer. Or child molester.
She located the school where Admiral Byrd's dog was buried. Ancient trees canopied the generously-dimensioned playground, the foot-packed dirt resembling a permanent winter beneath the shade. At twilight she was still there, starting at sounds and movements, straddling the swings and equipment.
A woman in her thirties wearing dress slacks and pumps, crawling into a plastic tunnel, a hiding place. Gayle recited this phrase aloud to herself.
Written in black marker, bold, regular cursive, on the interior where you could only see it lying on your back:
sex drugs n rock n roll
speed weed n birth control
ur born 2 pain and then u die
so screw the world n lets get high
A joke. With something real behind it. Like most jokes.
Or, a parody, and yet not. Or both, concurrently. To think of any potential elementary school child of hers, here, scrawling this, or just reading it. Being in a situation where it was possible to think it. And her, holding hands, offering at most shaky reassurance.
When? Where was the point she'd go past before becoming irrevocably convinced it wasn't, at root, true?
