Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore

about desperately and landed on a switch and threw it, and she woke up in a beautiful manic frenzy, seeming like the old Pat, saying, “I feel like I’ve been asleep for years,” and she would stay like that for days on end, insomniac and babbling and reminiscing, painting her paintings, then she’d crash again, passive and mute. She was on disability leave and had a student living with her full-time who took care of her.
    “Maybe we all drink too much gin,” I said.
    For a moment there was just silence. “Are you referring to the accident?” said Isabel accusingly. It was a car crash that had severed her arm. A surgeon and his team of residents had sewn it back on, but the arm had bled continually through the skin grafts and was painful—the first dance afterward before an audience, a solo performed with much spinning and swinging from a rope, had flung specks of blood to the stage floor—and after a year, and a small ineffectual codeine habit, she’d gone back to the same surgeon and asked him to remove it, the whole arm, she was done, she had tried.
    “No, no,” I said. “I’m not referring to anything.”
    “So hey, come on, come on!” said Pat. The switch seemed to have been thrown in her.
    “Robin’s waiting.”
    “What do I bring?”
    “Bring?” Pat and Isabel burst out laughing. “You’re kidding, right?” Pat said.
    “She’s kidding,” said Isabel. She felt the sleeve of my orange sweater, which I was still wearing. “Hey. This color looks nice on you. Where did you get this?”
    “I forget.”
    “Yeah, so do I!” said Pat, and she and Isabel burst into fits of hilarity again.
    I put on shoes, grabbed a jacket, and left with them.
    Isabel drove, one-armed, to Robin’s. When we arrived the house was completely dark, but the streetlights showed once more the witchy strangeness of the place. Because she wrote plays based on fairy tales, Robin had planted in the yard, rather haphazardly,the trees and shrubs that figured most prominently in the tales: apple, juniper, hazelnut, and rosebushes. Unfortunately, our latitude was not the best gardening zone for these. Even braced and trussed, they had struggled, jagged and leggy; at this time of year, when they were leafless and bent, one couldn’t say for sure whether they were even alive. Spring would tell.
    Why would a man focus on her garage when there was this crazed landscaping with which to judge her? Make your excuses: no jury would convict.
    Though why would a man focus on anything but her?
    We parked in the driveway, where Robin’s own car was still parked, her garage no doubt locked—even in the dark one could see the boxes stacked against the single garage window that faced the street.
    “The key’s under the mat,” said Isabel, though I didn’t know this and wondered how she did. Pat found the key, unlocked the door, and we all went in. “Don’t turn on the lights,” Isabel added.
    “I know,” whispered Pat, though
I
didn’t know.
    “Why can’t we turn on the lights?” I asked, also in a whisper. The door closed behind us and we stood there in the quiet, pitch-black house.
    “The police,” said Pat.
    “No, not the police,” said Isabel.
    “Then what?”
    “Never mind. Just give it a minute and our eyes will adjust.” We stood there listening to our own breathing. We didn’t move, so as not to trip over anything.
    And then on the opposite side of the room a small light flicked on from somewhere at the end of the far hallway; wecould not see down it, but out stepped Robin, looking pretty much the same, though she had a white cotton scarf wrapped and knotted around her neck. Against the white, her teeth had a fluorescent ocher sheen, but otherwise she looked regal and appraising, and she smiled at all of us, including me—though more tentatively, I thought, at me. Then she put her finger to her lips and shook her head, so we didn’t speak. She walked toward us.
    “You came” were her first hushed words,