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They started walking toward the front of the basement, moving faster now. Even at a more rapid pace, the room felt four hundred times as large as it had when the lights were on.
“So how can you not know if you want to get married?” she asked. “You’re almost thirty. It seems like you would have figured it out by now.”
“You sound like my sister.”
“Oh, don’t turn this into a woman thing. It’s a human thing. Do you want to find someone to marry? Do you want to reproduce? These are not complicated questions.” She reached the light switches and flicked them all off.
“Well, I’m not going to say ‘No, not ever,’ because I try not to do that these days.”
“Why’s that?”
“You never know what’s gonna happen in life. Sometimes you win the lottery. Sometimes tragedy knocks you on your ass with no warning.”
A raw note in his voice.
“So expect the unexpected?”
“I try to. But I don’t see myself getting married from where I’m standing right now.”
“Because …”
“You know what you said, about your worst fear? I guess that’s mine. I can’t take the idea of letting people down. Whenever I think about getting married, even in the abstract, I imagine myself making the wrong choice and then seeing it all fall apart ten years down the road. I guess I’m old-fashioned, you know? I think it should last forever. But I want to know it’s forever, and that I wouldn’t ever flake out on my family. Get careless or distracted and fuck it up.”
“Nobody can know that.”
“I know.”
“So you’re just not going to do it? That’s your solution?”
“So far, bunny.”
“You promised not to call me ‘bunny.’ ” She reached the opening at the bottom of the staircase.
“See what I mean? Careless. I fuck a lot of things up.”
And then he more or less flung himself up the steps, and she followed him at a sprint, because she needed the burning pain in her lungs to dispel the unsettling loneliness that had come over her.
Chapter Six
When Tony finally emerged through the door at the top of the stairs, he wanted to sink to his knees and weep with happiness. He’d never been quite so pleased to see daylight—even this strange, faded, greenish-blue daylight brought by the storm.
Amber skirted around him and headed straight for the phone. He walked to the front windows on wobbly legs to look out at the parking lot.
He could still breathe. Everything was fine. Thank God for her, though. If she hadn’t been down there with him, he probably would have come up and risked getting carried off to Oz rather than sit in all that darkness.
The parking lot was trashed, leaf litter and small branches strewn all over and rain still pouring down. Something caught his eye off to the back end of the lot, where both he and Amber had parked. A big branch down off the oak tree, right on top of her little yellow car.
“Hey, Amber?”
He turned to look at her, but she was holding up her finger, phone pressed to her ear.
“Good. Glad to hear it. Yeah, I already said I’m fine. I’ll be home in a while. I have to check out the center first.”
“Amber, you’re going to want to take a look at this.”
She glanced at him, but her eyes weren’t really focusing. “I have to go, Mom. All right. Uh-huh.”
How was it possible that she could look so different now? Same slim figure in khakis and a blue polo shirt. Same long, dark hair up in a ponytail. Same whistle around her neck, same sweet, round face.
