Nina stared at her for a long time, but JannaRose was looking down, trying to smooth her T-shirt over her stomach, and didn’t notice. Finally, Nina gave up. “So,” she said, “it would probably be good to find something to keep her mind off it.”
JannaRose wasn’t entirely distracted, though. “Like swimming?” she said.
Nina bristled. “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“I didn’t say it like anything.” JannaRose’s voice took on a flinty edge. “I just said it.”
Nina let it drop. It wasn’t that she didn’t realize that maybe it wasn’t the ideal solution. She realized it wasn’t whenever she said it to herself. Even when she said it to herself, it sounded like she was a moron.
Ed Oataway never did understand why his family car had featured so prominently in whatever happened with JannaRose and Dipshit Dolgoy’s idiot wife at the lot where the ice cream company parked its trucks. In fact, he’d never managed to figure out anything about what went on down there, and nobody was about to tell him. It was the same with D.S. Even Nina had eventually realized that the thing she herself originally thought was the point didn’t cover everything that actually happened that night. Not when she added it all together. And to be perfectly honest, she really hadn’t expected to accomplish anything. What she’d expected was the same as she expected with everything she ever did before: not much. There hadn’t been a day in her life when it occurred to her to expect very much of anything, and nothing had come along to cause her to think otherwise. Then here, by accident, she’d driven off toward the ice cream company, and what happened turned out to be as far from not accomplishing anything as was possible. It was so different from everything else she’d ever done that it got her started examining a lot of things about her life that up till then she’d thought were basically no use at all.
What happened in the ice cream company parking lot wasn’t really very hard to describe. On the other hand, it was terrifyingly complicated.
What happened was, she created an absolute shitstorm.
Ed Oataway’s family car was complicated enough to begin with. Ed had refined his trade to where he only stole cars from people who paid to have them stolen. They did this for insurance purposes. He liked the work. There was no competition, and obviously no one was interested in calling the cops in the middle of one of his daring daylight vehicular extractions, as he called them. This meant stress was non-existent. He collected a percentage of what the individual whose car he stole paid for the job, and he held on to the car until what he referred to as the parent organization hauled it away, he figured, for the international junk trade. It was a nice little business. And it was because of the stresslessness that he’d started considering whichever of these cars happened to be waiting for trans-shipment in front of his house to be the Oataway family car. So he didn’t mind if JannaRose used it to go buy potato chips for the kids’ supper. Neither did he mind if she got Nina to drive for her, since JannaRose didn’t have a licence and got nervous driving a car with such imprecise ownership.
The one available for the assault on the ice cream company was an old brown Pontiac that was in such terrible shape, it wouldn’t even begin to turn until the steering wheel got cranked a quarter of the way around. Nina said just keeping it in a straight line was like wrestling with somebody who was having a shit fit. All the way to the ice cream factory she kept wanting to grab JannaRose by the arm and yell, “Why would anybody steal this fuckin’ thing?” What kept her from doing it was that JannaRose was already so spooked by the feeling that something awful was going to happen that it would have really upset her. When Nina considered how nervous she was herself, she didn’t want to push things any farther than she secretly planned to push them.
“What are you doing?” JannaRose’s voice sounded quavery as they passed the parking lot full of ice cream trucks for the second time.
“I told you. Looking.” Nina hauled this way and that on the steering wheel and bounced off the curb a couple of times when she finally pulled over. She got out and tried the gate. It didn’t budge. Back in the car, she glared at the fence.
“I was just thinking,” JannaRose said.
Nina glared at JannaRose.
“I was just,” JannaRose said again, “thinking that here, wherever we are, in some part of town we’ve never been before — that if something happened. And we got killed and they stole all our stuff. How will anybody know it’s our bodies?”
Nina glared at the fence.
“They sometimes use dental records, don’t they?” JannaRose said. “I saw it on television.”
That was when Nina decided that for sure it wasn’t a scouting expedition. They were going to go ahead and do it. They might never get another chance.
“But,” JannaRose said, “if you haven’t been to the dentist in — I don’t know. I went once when I was little. One came to the school and looked at our teeth. She was a lady dentist. But,” she said, “what good will that do? I bet she didn’t even keep records.”
Nina decided something else, too. If they were going to do it, they better do it quick. JannaRose was getting freaky. Any minute she was going to start babbling about never seeing her kids again. About how she hadn’t kissed them goodbye.
“When was the last time you did?” JannaRose said.
“What?”
“Went to a dentist.”
“I don’t know, goddamn it!”
But she didn’t say it. Not like that. JannaRose would have blown to pieces right on the spot.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. She had to. It was the only way she could keep her voice under control.
For awhile they sat in silence. JannaRose thought they were both thinking about teeth, so it shocked her when Nina hammered her fist on the steering wheel and put the shift in drive.
“Now what’re you doing?”
Getting into that parking lot. She almost felt as if she had nothing to do with whatever was going to happen from here on. There wasn’t any actual plan. No Step One leading to Step Two leading to … Kaboom! Once again, some power way down inside her, so deep she’d only just discovered it, was in control. A force more potent than anything she’d ever known. She was perfectly capable of making herself stop breathing, except as soon as she stopped thinking about not breathing, she started breathing again. But she was doing this without thinking even slightly. Like she was just part of what was happening. If she didn’t do it, it would be as if she held her breath for so long that she died. And that was impossible.
“Why are you crashing into the gate?”
She wasn’t crashing into it. She was pushing it open.
The gate was built to swing open like a door, but the padlock refused to give. “Holy shit!” JannaRose watched the nose of the car press against the chain link. She watched the chain link stretch the way a balloon does when you press your finger into it. The frame of the gate started bending. “Holy shit!”
JannaRose’s voice sounded like it was a long way away. Nina dropped the shift into low and stomped on the gas.
The chain link just kept on bulging. Then the balloon burst. “Holy shit!” The car jumped forward. Metal fenceposts ripped out of the ground. The gate slumped flat under the Pontiac. Long sections of fence came down on either side, and the car screeched. Bucked. Jerked to a stop. Nina floored it. It wouldn’t back up, either. She tried rocking it, forward, back. The engine roared, metal squealed, otherwise nothing. It wasn’t going to move.
“Aw, for fuck’s sakes,” she said.
“Holy shit!” JannaRose kept saying it, over and over.
Nina opened the door and leaned way out, trying to see underneath. It was hard to do. Broken strands of chain link fencing