arrangement still worked, even with the shorter cycle of separation and reunions. Perhaps she would acclimate. Reassured, she fell into table talk and pleasant anticipation of the night to come.
After dinner she followed his red taillights along Route 30, the two-lane Lincoln Highway which still stretched all the way from New York to California. The darkness of country roads unnerved her. How had the first settlers walked west beneath endless tree cover? A pickup truck careened over the hill and shot past her too fast, its driver drunk or high. The thin pages of the local paper bore witness to plenty of desperation: hit and runs, driving under the influence, domestic abuse, bankruptcies.
Cresting the next hill, Daniel turned at the floodlit sign. Lincoln Motor Courts. Their headlights swept over half a dozen cottages, like playhouses or the Amish sheds for sale throughout the region. Vacancy! blinked pink neon cursive letters in the office window. A boxy Coke machine stood by the door.
Joy waited in her car, letting Daniel pick up the keys. She felt self-conscious arriving in two cars, uncomfortable at the prospect of scrutiny by whoever manned the desk in this out-of-the-way place. Two consenting adults owed no one any explanation, and no one cared, but she preferred to stay at bigger places like the restored resort hotel just outside of Bedford. However, Daniel insisted on paying for their lodging and Joy worried about cost, now they were seeing each other so often. At her suggestion, to economize, they were trying different places—without great success, so far. She had judged the bed and breakfast in town too cluttered with doilies, the small motel close to the lake bare and ugly, and the guest room upstairs from the bar at the Jean Bonnet noisy. These old-fashioned tourist cabins had been Daniel’s idea; Joy was dubious. She missed room service and spa massages. She missed quiet luxurious rooms at the end of long anonymous corridors.
So far neither had invited the other home, nor broached the possibility. It would mean double travel time for whoever visited. Explanations and introductions would be required, if Joy came to Pittsburgh. Anyway, it would be impossible to stay in Selma’s house, wrong to make love in Daniel’s marriage bed.
But Joy’s reluctance to welcome Daniel to her territory would be harder to excuse, if he asked. How to explain her satisfaction with the simple life she had constructed? How to explain its necessity? Not just because teaching, faculty politics, and the girls’ demands left her drained as a juice box discarded on the cafeteria table. More than that: she breathed most deeply and easily alone, unobserved. She craved quiet evenings to read, listen to NPR.
Joy occasionally accepted colleagues’ invitations to dinner but never reciprocated. The invitations grew rare. Joy did subscribe to the symphony with a colleague but enjoyed matinees at the movies or the theatre by herself, preferring to take in the show without worrying about a companion.
Joy feared that bringing Daniel too close would upset their homeostasis. She dreaded exceeding her capacity for intimacy.
Daniel tapped on her window.
He led the way around the horseshoe of cabins and unlocked their door. Joy stepped into unexpected warmth.
“I called and asked them to turn the heat on early.” He knew Joy hated the cold; he paid attention.
Rosy light from an old fashioned pink pressed glass shade on the overhead light fixture softened the room and its simple furnishings. Joy stretched with contentment. Later, making love in the close darkness, she couldn’t quite let herself go.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Just tired.”
“You know,” he whispered, “I miss you more, seeing you more. I’m like a lonely dog in a crate, when I’m at home.”
What to do if appetite generates appetite in one but not the other? What to do if one of us is a dog and one a cat? Stop overthinking, Joy told herself, curling against his warm back.
They drove in his car to the Lakeside Diner for breakfast. Joy finished first and went to the counter to have her thermos filled with coffee for later at the lake.
She returned to their booth. The stiff set of his shoulders alerted her, the cell phone on the table like a hand grenade.
“The home just called,” he said. “She has pneumonia.”
Every infection with Selma posed a potential crisis. And necessitated choosing whether to let nature take its course or to intervene. Daniel always chose treatment. Joy understood his futile determination sprang from love and guilt. And she respected his steadfastness, though it troubled her as well. Joy had never told him, but in Selma’s circumstances, she herself would rather be allowed to die.
Selma was forty-four and could survive for a very long time. Wouldn’t it be kinder to let pneumonia fill her lungs? Drowning couldn’t be any worse than the nebulous drift of a persistent vegetative state.
“You told them to start the IV?” Joy asked the rhetorical question. He always instructed the home to pump Selma full of drugs to keep her here, or half here, or wherever she lingered. Now he would leave, drive back to watch over his wife.
“Not yet. I said I’d call soon. I’m not sure.”
Startled, Joy tensed.
“Let’s go to the lake,” he said.
They parked in the deserted lot. Daniel retrieved his metal detector from the trunk; she slung her binoculars around her neck.
During warm weather they drove through the countryside, pursuing their respective hobbies. Daniel knocked on farmhouse doors, seeking out the owner in the barn if no one answered. Most granted permission for Daniel to wave his wand over their fields and the weedy margins beside the roads. He promised to show them what he found, to give right of first refusal. Daniel dug gently and meticulously refilled the small excavations. Once he found a button from the uniform of a Hessian soldier; the family didn’t want it. He turned it over to the historical society.
No one minded Joy’s birding. Occasionally a child tagged along. What do you do with the birds after you’ve seen them? Joy explained her life-list in the back of the Peterson’s guide.
When, as now, hunting season made fields and forests dangerous, they prospected for birds and treasures in the protected zone of parkland around the lake. Beach Closed proclaimed the sign. Canoes lay chained and padlocked under the eaves of the concession stand; a layer of rough ice covered the water. The sand the rangers carted in each summer crunched underfoot, riddled with frost crystals. Ordinarily she could have left him on the beach, headed into the woods, and taken the woods trail around the lake. She would have enjoyed finding him again, afterward, refreshed by the break in togetherness.
But this morning the clock ticked back in Pittsburgh; the sand ran through the hourglass. The woman Joy had never met lay in the room Joy had never visited.
He hadn’t turned the metal detector on. It lay on the sand like a discarded toy, an inert and powerless divining rod.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She exhaled a cloud of breath. “Do you want to call Monica?”
“I can’t put it on her. Or you, for that matter.”
Hunched against the wind he walked away. Joy almost followed but held back.
For once, she thought, Daniel needs to be alone.
He stopped by the stand of brittle phragmites and gazed at the lake.
Frozen drizzle stung her cheeks. Daniel needed her permission to give up. He might be able to let Selma go, and not blame himself too harshly, believing he’d done it for Joy, for the sake of their shared future. Joy could take the rap for him.
But what would happen to the two of them without Selma? Her absent presence held everything in balance, permitted Joy and Daniel’s relationship to persist; forestalled or at least obscured the likelihood of entropy, of conflict, deterioration, and disorder. Removing Selma would disrupt their closed system, expose Joy’s limited supply of energy and warmth.
He started back