Amy and Isabelle (45 page)

Back in the car Amy and Isabelle looked at each other. Amy raised both eyebrows and drew her breath in sharply as she smiled, as though to say, “Okay, let’s go,” and for a moment they were united, as if they had both agreed to blast off in a rocket and it was countdown time. For years Isabelle would remember that moment and wish she had spoken, had told the girl she loved her and always would, because for Isabelle, as she pulled out onto the highway, it began to feel more and more that it was Amy who was blasting off, Amy who was leaving forever, that Isabelle was only there now to pilot the ship, deliver the girl into the lap of her family, of siblings, of relatives who were hers, not Isabelle’s.

They did not speak, but drove staring straight ahead.

Yes, Isabelle would remember this drive, the yellow leaves, the autumn goldenness. Long after Avery Clark had died of a heart attack sitting behind his desk in the fishbowl, long after Barbara Rawley had been arrested for shoplifting fourteen dollars’ worth of cosmetics from a local drugstore, years after Wally Brown had moved back in with Dottie, when Isabelle herself had been married to the kindly pharmacist for some time, she would remember this drive with Amy. It marked to her the endless days of Amy’s solitary childhood, and those endless hot days of that terrible summer. All that had once been endless would by then have ended, and Isabelle, at different places and moments in the years to come, would sometimes be surrounded by silence and find in herself only the repeated word “Amy.” “Amy,
Amy
”—for this was it, her heart’s call, her prayer. “Amy,” she would think, “Amy,” remembering this day’s chilly, golden air.