Bright Young Women(21)
“Do you need help?” he asks me in a sugared voice that I just know is fake. “With your car? I’m a mechanic.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.” I realize I am thanking the man who might kill me, and I am ablaze suddenly at this indignity. I think about what you’re supposed to do if a shark attacks you, something I read up on a long time ago, worried I might need it. I almost lived in the coastal town that boasts the second-highest rate of deadly attacks against humans. If you’re bitten, you’re supposed to dig your nails into its eyes, its gills. You’re supposed to fight back and prove you’re not prey.
“Go away,” I tell this fuzzy stranger. “I’m calling the police.” I hold up my phone and show him that I’ve pressed send on the 911 call.
The man laughs. “That won’t never go through out here.”
I look at the screen and see that the call is indeed stuck.
“That’s why I offered to help,” he says in this singsong way that knots up my throat. But then he turns and begins to cross the highway, and I see that he was coming from the other direction and parked along the center strip, and that’s why I didn’t see or hear him approach. Maybe he really did think I was having car trouble. Maybe he really was a mechanic. Or maybe he was a bull shark and I just managed to fight him off.
I get behind the wheel and burn rubber getting back onto the road. I slap at the media deck of the rental car until the music finally shuts off. I need to concentrate. I drive the rest of the way in silence, and my hands don’t stop shaking, not even when I arrive safely in Tallahassee. Janet emailed right before takeoff to tell me that she’d called down to let them know I was coming, and that the man who is threatening to kill me is still very much alive.
Day 1
In the morning, I carried one of those delicate porcelain cups out to the screened porch and listened to the frogs and shorebirds, singing Disney-like in the cold. The reason I knew what a shorebird sounded like still depresses me, but I’ll get to that in time.
Though I was clearheaded for the first time in twenty-eight hours, the problem was the sheer volume of my thoughts. I was making a mental list of the things I needed to pick up at the Northwood Mall before we went to see Jill and Eileen at Tallahassee Memorial. Flowers, maybe a soft blanket for the hard hospital bed. Yellow for Eileen, blue for Jill. I’d noticed they wore a lot of those respective colors. I was thinking about what Bernadette had told me with her face turned away in shame, and I was thinking about Denise and all the people she encountered in her daily life. The woman who sold Denise the multivitamin that made her hair healthy and strong and the family with the dog Denise sometimes walked for a little extra cash and the saleswoman at Denise’s favorite clothing store in Tallahassee who always set things aside she thought Denise would like. I was wondering who would tell all these people that Denise was dead and if it should be me.
“May I join you?”
Mrs. McCall stood at the threshold, wearing a cream-colored sweater over a blue collared shirt, pearl bulbs in her ears. She carried a slender book in one hand and a large Styrofoam tumbler of coffee in the other, the handle of a spoon poking out. I would have given anything to trade her my dainty porcelain cup, which had one last cold sip remaining.
I stood formally. “Good morning, Mrs. McCall.”
She flapped the book at me. Sit. “Did you sleep?”
“I did,” I said, though my head was pounding with the distinct lack of it. “The room is very comfortable. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“You’re good at that.” She lowered herself into the rocking chair. “Instilling confidence in people that what you are saying is true even when it’s not. Some people call that lying.”
I held my breath, wondering if I was about to get my wrist slapped in the very singular way Southern women have. With a wink and a lash.
“Those people ought to examine their diction.” She stirred her coffee with the spoon, arched an eyebrow—didn’t I agree?
I exhaled. “You asked if I had slept, not if I slept well.”
Mrs. McCall raised her Styrofoam cup to that. For a moment, we listened to the song of a shorebird we could not see.
“I thought about you all last night,” she said, gazing out at the sun-blanched scrubland. “About what advice I have to offer you.” She handed me the book. A Statistician’s Guide to Black Swan Events. “Do you know what that is?” she asked while I traced the simple font with my thumb.
I had only ever heard of the term black swan in connection with the ballet. I shook my head.
“A black swan event is a highly improbable event but also one that, upon closer examination, was predictable. The sinking of the Titanic is an example of one; so is World War One. These are outcomes that are referred to as outliers on an economist’s model.”
I studied the cover of the book sadly and remembered Mrs. McCall’s sigh from the night before, when she first saw us on her front stoop. I’d thought I detected a measure of inevitability. That something was happening out there in the world, a force hurtling with Newtonian aim toward the object of us.
“But not all black swan events are bad,” Mrs. McCall added. “Some people use the models to play the stock market and get filthy rich.” She blew the surface of her coffee with pursed peach lips, took a slow, careful sip. “The point is that nothing can be predicted, really, and so you want to be sure to expose yourself to luck too. Things can go catastrophically wrong, but they can also go so right as to be profoundly transformative.”