Mira tried to warm up the car before they pulled out of the parking lot. But even as the fan blew hard, nothing but cold air came out. Beside her, Perry was shivering. In the cold electric light from the Dientz sign, Mira could see that he had his eyes squeezed shut. Could he be shivering in his sleep?
Ted had turned off the lights inside the funeral parlor, but his Cadillac was still parked beside them. He was still inside. Mira imagined him scrolling through more photos on his computer—his before and after images of the many disfigured corpses he’d brought back from the dead.
She didn’t blame him. If she had such a talent, she would be proud of herself as well.
She pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the freeway without speaking, and after a few minutes, Perry stopped shivering and seemed to have fallen asleep.
The drive back in the blizzard was slow and treacherous, and at every exit Mira thought, We should pull over. We should get off. There were no cars behind them, none ahead of them, none passing in the oncoming lanes, as far as she could see, as Jeff Blackhawk’s car rattled around them, and Mira became more and more vividly aware in the silence of the sound of the slick road just under their feet. Jeff’s car gave one only the slimmest illusion of being anything other than what you were: a soft and vulnerable vessel traveling at great speeds over hard ground.
The car warmed a little, anyway—if from nothing but their body heat and breath—and Mira hoped Perry could stay warm enough to sleep until they got back. It had been wrong, she knew, to bring him here. To encourage or include him in any of this. All of this had gone far beyond what she needed for a book. This had turned into something in which, if she’d really felt she had to take it on (for research purposes? to find Nicole Werner?), she should never have involved a student.
But Perry had been so eager, and he had not seemed to Mira to be what she would have called “troubled” or “impressionable.” In her years of teaching, Mira’d had many brilliant, troubled students—their brilliance fueled by brief intensities, always ready and willing to follow someone else’s lead. They were the kinds of young people who could easily have been seduced by their professors, or inducted into cults, or recruited to build bombs in townhouses for the revolution. But Perry Edwards had seemed different—although perhaps no less vulnerable for it. He had not reminded her of any of those students. If he reminded her of someone, Mira realized, it was herself.
When Ted Dientz had called up the final photo of the dead girl in all her blazing gigabytes, Mira thought instantly of her mother in the pantry that day, so radiantly alive. That image of her mother was with her always, wasn’t it? It was a kind of stubbornness. There was never a day that went by that Mira did not feel that if she could just go back to that childhood house at that moment, she would find her mother still there—shining and crying and studying the cans on the pantry shelf, alphabetizing them as she wrapped her brilliant white wings around her, getting ready to fly away.
Perry had that kind of stubbornness. Another word for it might have been faith. He believed in something, and he saw it. He would be, she knew, an academic. A scholar. A researcher. He would never be able to leave well enough alone, even when it would clearly be better to do so. She’d seen that about him during the very first sessions of the seminar, and already been reminded of herself at that age—how the other students would be headed off to the bars, but how she wanted, herself, to be bent over something dusty in some study room, inventing questions to answer.
Mira rested a hand on his shoulder as she took the exit toward campus. He didn’t stir. She vowed to herself that she would talk to him seriously about his academic pursuits, soon. Degrees and programs and courses of study. Soon she’d have to wake him, but not now. Now her only job was to drive them safely to the next stop. Through the whiteout, as he slept on.