Certain that the doors and windows were secure, Joanna insisted on searching the house for pistols, shotguns, rifles. Liam O’Hara was a details guy, a consider-all-the-risks guy, so maybe he had tucked guns away in certain rooms, in recognition of the fact that the nearest sheriff’s substation was miles away. To her frustration and distress, they found no firearms.
Wyatt understood that, for Joanna, this day had been alike to the day when his father had thrown him down the basement stairs. The confrontation with Jimmy in the Alvarez house had overturned so much that she’d believed. Her father had been a murderer, her mother a victim. The secret friend of her childhood wasn’t who he’d presented himself to be; the magic that made the relationship so special was now revealed to be not magic at all, but instead the function of an inhuman and evidently sinister technology. She felt as helpless now as perhaps she had felt the day her mother died, the day her father perished, the day she’d been uprooted from Rustling Willows and sent to live in Santa Fe.
As adults, we’re not much less helpless than children, Wyatt thought, though we can hold a job and pay our way. The bogeyman is still there, the thing under the bed, the worse thing in the bedroom closet at night, the even worse thing in the cellar, in the attic, except now it has names like Cancer and Stroke and Aneurysm and the Unknown. You pretend you’re in control, that you’ve put behind you the helplessness you endured in childhood. Then shit happens, and you come to a moment like this, unable to avoid facing the truth that your control over your life is limited. You’re not the absolute master of your fate. In reluctant recognition of your helplessness, functioning on the edge of panic, you look haunted, frantic, as fragile as crystal—the way Joanna looks now, as no doubt so do I.
They had Wyatt’s pistol, but Joanna wanted to find and bring together items to facilitate another line of defense, beginning with a bucket and a quantity of gasoline from the SUV in the garage. However, they were unable to find any length of tubing that could be used as a siphon. Instead, they resorted to bottles of vodka and brandy and other flammable potables from Liam’s bar, and they gathered half a dozen dish towels from the kitchen. When they had collected those things, she ransacked the kitchen drawers until she turned up two long wooden spoons and a spurtle that could serve as the handles of torches. In another drawer, Wyatt found butane matches with long flexible steel necks. They cut the towels and knotted strips to the wooden implements, as if it made sense that a rampaging bear could not be controlled by the hidden master of animals if its fur was on fire. But maybe it did make sense—by the logic of the condemned.
Alone with this woman in remote Rustling Willows, in the shadow of an otherworldly threat as marrow-freezing as the worst childhood fantasies, Wyatt thought it meaningful that lies shaped her youth no less than different lies shaped his. As a consequence, they were both lonely and emotionally adrift in adulthood. Now, as they sought to allay their sense of helplessness with efforts that were perhaps as pointless as they were desperate, he dared to wonder if they had been brought here by a series of incredible coincidences so that they might, together, at last put an end to their loneliness. If synchronicity was more than mere coincidence, if it was evidence of meaning, then maybe they were meant to survive this night.
Oh, yes, and elephants can fly, Mickey Mouse lives in perpetual happiness with Minnie, Donald Duck will always have Daisy, and the prince will never fail to find the foot that fits the glass slipper.
In the living room, they placed two armchairs against a wall and sat facing the big living room windows. Nothing could take them unaware from behind. Beyond the window was darkness and all the creatures of the night.
He put the pistol on the cushion, against his thigh.
Beside her chair stood the plastic bucket into which she had emptied two bottles of liquor. Other bottles were close at hand if time enough passed to suggest that too much of the alcohol content had evaporated. Beside the bucket were the three torches, dry at the moment, and Joanna held one of the butane matches.
The makeshift torches and the culinary nature of the fuel lent a grotesque—if not even absurd—note to their preparations. Wyatt would have felt more confident if they possessed gasoline; but even if they could have obtained it, gasoline might prove too explosive in these close quarters. On a few occasions in restaurants, he’d enjoyed cherries flambé, and the flames had been impressive. One of these torches might blaze fiercely enough to ignite the coat of a grizzly bear. Desperate circumstances required that even grotesque measures be embraced if they were all you had.