Last Resort Read Free Page B

life: two healthy, handsome, intelligent children and (perhaps even more important) Salty.
    It was Jenny who, when he had taken her to San Francisco at the end of his lecture series, had given a name to Reithrodontomys raviventris. Walking in a Bay Area park just after sunset on that first miraculous evening, Wilkie had spotted a rare salt marsh mouse and pointed it out to her. “Oh, Salty, you’re beautiful!” Jenny had cried as the warm wind swept musically through the pale winter reeds and her long pale reed-colored hair. And the tiny bright-eyed creature, as if understanding, had paused on his tuft of grass to exchange with her a look of mutual appreciation.
    It was not Jenny’s fault that her gifts had turned sour in the end: that Salty had become a media cartoon; or that Ellen and Billy, once so wholly satisfactory, had grown into flawed and problematic young adults. It was no one’s fault that Ellen should have inherited Wilkie’s strong will and his tendency to take control, so much less charming in a woman; or that Billy should have inherited Jenny’s physical slightness and her sensitivity to the opinions of others, so much less charming in a man. In his darkest moments Wilkie sometimes described Ellen to himself as a noisy, opinionated feminist and Billy as a sissy and a computer nerd.
    The way it seemed to Wilkie now, as he crouched in the cold draft, clenching and grinding his jaw against the pain in his hip, only two possible futures were open to him. Either he would give up, tell some doctor the truth about his symptoms, begin taking mind-altering painkilling drugs, and descend into a blurry, shameful last act of life. Or he would get out, while it was still possible.
    And it was, theoretically, possible. An accident on a field trip, for instance ... He would have to leave Convers for that: there were no mountain cliffs here, no lakes he could not easily swim across, even if he could discourage Jenny from accompanying him as she usually did. Perhaps an automobile smashup, one that wouldn’t injure other people? When the snows came, some night when the roads were dark and icy ... But if no one else was involved, there might be doubts about his intention. And how could he be sure that it would not end in a fate far worse than his slowly dwindling life: brain damage, a coma, paralysis?
    Upstairs Jenny was still awake. At last she slipped out of bed, pulled a long robin’s-egg blue robe over her lacy white cotton nightdress, and padded barefoot down the wide, chilly oak stairs.
    “I couldn’t sleep either,” she apologized. “Goodness, it’s cold in here.”
    “I hadn’t noticed,” Wilkie lied, watching his wife as she turned up the thermostat, thinking how graceful she was, how beautiful, with her pale, fine regular features and her silky pale-beige hair, still only lightly touched with silver, waterfalling over her shoulders.
    “Do you know, I was wondering,” Jenny began, perching on the arm of a wing chair. She paused, waiting for the go-ahead.
    “Yes?”
    “I was thinking about that awful cold I had for so many many weeks last year. I was wondering if we might go somewhere warm for a while this winter. It would be so nice to escape all the viruses that I know are on their way to Convers now, just looking for me.”
    Wilkie said nothing.
    “It doesn’t have to be abroad,” she added. “There are parts of America that don’t have winter.” She glanced at the silent television screen, which obligingly showed a weather map of the United States banded in rainbow colors, the wavy bottom strip a glowing red. Wilkie hardly saw it; instead he recalled a recent interview in a local TV studio where he had learned that what one sees on the screen is a lie, a construct: there is no real map projected behind the weatherman, only a blank wall toward which he gestures. That’s what I’m doing now, he had thought at the time, gesturing at a blank wall, while people imagine I see something