The Passage Read Free

glass hit the wall with a hollow thud and fell to the floor, unbroken.She closed her eyes, holding Amy tight, knowing what would come. For a moment the sound of the glass rolling on the floor seemed to be the only thing in the room. She could feel Bill’s anger rising off him like waves of heat.
    —
You just see what the world has in store for you, Jeanette. You remember I said that
.
    Then his footsteps carried him out of the room and he was gone.
    She paid the oil man what she could and turned the thermostat down to fifty, to make it last.
See, Amy honey, it’s like a big camping trip we’re on
, she said as she stuffed the little girl’s hands into mittens and wedged a hat onto her head.
There now, it’s not so cold, not really. It’s like an adventure
. They slept together under a pile of old quilts, the room so icy their breath fogged the air over their faces. She took a job at night, cleaning up at the high school, leaving Amy with a neighbor lady, but when the woman took sick and had to go into the hospital, Jeanette had to leave Amy alone. She explained to Amy what to do: stay in bed, don’t answer the door, just close your eyes and I’ll be home before you know it. She’d make sure Amy was asleep before creeping out the door, then stride quickly down the snow-crusted drive to where she’d parked her car, away from the house, so Amy wouldn’t hear it turning over.
    But then she made the mistake one night of telling someone about this, another woman on the work crew, when the two of them had stepped out for a smoke. Jeanette had never liked smoking at all and didn’t want to spend the money, but the cigarettes helped her stay awake, and without a smoke break there was nothing to look forward to, just more toilets to scrub and halls to be mopped. She told the woman, whose name was Alice, not to tell anyone, she knew she could get in trouble leaving Amy alone like that, but of course that’s just what Alice did; she went straight to the superintendent, who fired Jeanette on the spot.
Leaving a child like that ain’t right
, he told her in his office by the boilers, a room no bigger than ten feet square with a dented metal desk and an old easy chair with the plush popping out and a calendar on the wall that wasn’t even the right year; the air was always so hot and close in there Jeanette could barely breathe. He said,
You count your lucky stars I’m not calling the county on you
. She wondered when she’d become someone a person could say this to and not be wrong. He’d been nice enough to her until then, and maybe she could have made him understand the situation, that without the money from cleaning she didn’t know what she’d do, but she was too tired to find the words. She took her last check and drove home in her crappy old car, the Kia she’dbought in high school when it was already six years old and falling apart so fast she could practically see the nuts and bolts bouncing on the pavement in her rearview mirror; and when she stopped at the Quick Mart to buy a pack of Capris and then the engine wouldn’t start up again, she started to cry. She couldn’t make herself stop crying for half an hour.
    The problem was the battery; a new one cost her eighty-three dollars at Sears, but by then she’d missed a week of work and lost her job at the Box, too. She had just enough money left to leave, packing up their things in a couple of grocery sacks and the cartons Bill had left behind.
    No one ever knew what became of them. The house sat empty; the pipes froze and split like bursting fruit. When spring came, the water poured from them for days and days until the utility company, realizing nobody was paying the bill, sent a couple of men to turn it off. The mice moved in, and when an upstairs window was broken in a summer thunderstorm, the swallows; they built their nests in the bedroom where Jeanette and Amy had slept in the cold, and soon the house was filled with the sound and smell of birds.
    In