Chapter 7
SEVEN
For a moment, Will sits there, letting pure, unfiltered emotion caterwaul within him.
He learned to do this first as a child, knowing from bitter experience that he was better off keeping his feelings contained, but he really perfected it when he started working in a lab.
That’s what taught him that, for example, sometimes it’s four in the morning, and you’re neck-deep in a delicate experiment extremely critical to the completion of your thesis, and at exactly the wrong moment, your useless lab-mate Larry, who is exploring an utterly asinine theory about giving caffeine to worms, decides to start blasting death metal at earsplitting volumes.
At a time like that, a person might want to really snap , might want to shriek and scream and throw things and tell Larry to take his terrible music and his awful haircut and his stupid unethical jittery worms and get out of the lab before someone killed him.
But a person—or, at least, Will—couldn’t do things like that.
Will had to keep it together, and be a professional, and not get drummed out of a small, gossipy scientific community, which, from the earliest days and not exactly incorrectly, has always viewed Will as a bit of a weirdo.
It’s not that it was an unfair assessment, since Will had not exactly socialized much for the bulk of his academic career, finding more comfort in data and facts than he did amongst his peers.
And so he got good, very good, at letting the scream he wanted to release build up inside him, swell in his lungs and catch in his throat, make it all the way to knocking against the back of his teeth in eagerness to be let out…
only to grit his molars and swallow it, get on with the job.
He does it now, closing his eyes and letting the hysteria bubble and boil within him for as long as he can stand before pushing it down again. It’s almost cathartic. Almost.
It lets him get on with things, at least, and Will sighs as he opens his eyes, takes a deep breath, and looks around the car.
Nothing useful that he can see in the way of tools, and there hadn’t been any information about who to call in the event of a breakdown; Catherine Rose’s office set the car rental up for him, and had a driver drop it off the morning of Will’s departure.
He’d been a little excited about that, in spite of everything—the prospect of a driver bringing it by had made him anticipate something sleek and high-end—and he’d been more than a little let down by the sad, unpleasantly beige little sedan.
Will had felt guilty about that at the time, like he was turning up his nose at a privilege, a kindness. Just at this moment, however, he’s quite sure that he should have called Catherine back and insisted the driver return with something else.
There’s nothing for it now, though, and no helpful stickers or information vis-à-vis what to do if the car quits on you in the middle of a very unpleasant Saturday afternoon.
On the theory that it’s a practical option that delays him getting wet for at least another minute or two, Will checks the glove compartment, where there should be an owner’s manual.
He finds instead the manual for an entirely different vehicle in type, make and model, though it is, Will notes darkly, the same year as this car.
A mix-up at the rental place, probably; Will is beginning to think it might be less a rental place and more a really bad car thief with a lot of spare time on his hands.
Regardless, since Will is not actually sitting in a souped-up pickup truck that runs on diesel fuel, he dismisses the little booklet as useless to him and pulls out his phone, turns to the internet instead.
Service is bad and slow, so the only thing he’s able to get in response to his search query—“car dead why????”—is a half-loaded page of barely readable results. Still, the common theme is to check the battery, and Will decides this is good enough advice. How hard could a battery be to check?
Steeling himself, he gets out of the car.
The drenching effect is instantaneous. God, Will had forgotten about this, about the way it can rain here.
It’s not that it doesn’t pour in Chicago; it’s not called the Windy City for nothing, and is battered regularly with huge, terrifying storms, even weathers the occasional tornado.
But in Chicago, you are always surrounded by more Chicago , tall buildings slicing the sky down into little slivers.
If you got caught in the rain in the city, you could duck into a nearby store or restaurant, or under an awning, or hop in a cab, or hurry to the nearest spot to catch the train.
And so, no matter how hard it was coming down, there was a certain impermanence to the weather there, a sense that it was merely in the background.
But out here, with nothing for miles to cut even a single line through the arcing dome of the sky, there’s no background for the rain to fade into.
The storm that pelts furiously down onto Will’s head, plastering his hair to his scalp in seconds, is the foreground of the entire area around him, more urgently present than the farm or the town or even Will’s dead car.
Thunder claps directly overhead and Will starts, remembering suddenly, as though pulling it from a dust-covered box deep in his mental attic, how much time he spent during his youth out in weather like this.
He’d always hated it, to be cold and damp and miserable and know it didn’t matter, that he had to finish his chores or walk home, no matter the weather.
He hadn’t even noticed himself pack that away, but as he walks around to the front of the car and feels rain dripping down inside his collar and along the line of his back, he realizes he can’t remember the last time he let himself get caught in this kind of rain.
Has he been avoiding it subconsciously, then?
And if he has, then how much else is tucked away here on the family farm, under the floorboards in that old house, or hidden up in the rafters of the market, or buried down in the dirt amongst the apple trees’ roots?
Will is distracted from this disquieting thought when he attempts to open the hood of the car. He pulls; it doesn’t move. He pulls again; it doesn’t move. He pulls again, and this time something moves, but it’s something unfortunate, and it’s in Will’s back—the hood doesn’t budge.
He swears, steps away, and remembers very belatedly that you have to unlatch the hood of a car before it opens, so it doesn’t blow up in front of the windshield on the highway and kill you .
Swearing again at his stupidity, Will gets back into the car, soaking the front seat as he does, and spends several increasingly frustrating minutes looking for the latch release.
When he finally finds it, it’s in such an obvious place that Will does almost lose it and start screaming, but he strangles it back, barely, and gets out of the car again.
The hood opens this time. Will props it up as well as he can, and then, staring down into the guts of the car, runs up against his next problem.
Will doesn’t know how to check the battery. Will, to be perfectly honest, doesn’t even know which of these various intimidating metal and plastic shapes the battery is .
“Are you the battery?” he asks the large metal block in the center.
It doesn’t answer; he reaches out to touch it and then yanks his hand away hastily at the temperature.
Shaking it out, he mutters, “Okay, no, that was stupid, you are clearly the engine. Also, ow .” Will knows it’s not a great sign that he’s progressed to talking to the car, but he’s also reasonably sure it’s not a great sign that he can feel the rain starting to soak through his jacket and into the inner layers of his clothes, so.
Perhaps best, in such a circumstance, to simply accept things are not great and carry on.
“Okay,” he mutters to himself. “You’re a scientist. You have a PhD, for God’s sake; this is not that complicated.
Process of elimination. A battery has a positive and negative end, so you have to look for—there!
” Flush with his success, Will leans over what appears to be a plastic block with a positive and a negative symbol marked on either side.
The next step, however, eludes him. He stares down at the red and black plastic pieces on either side of the battery block, and starts, rather wretchedly, to laugh.
“Well,” he says, not noticing or caring about the edge of hysteria slipping into it.
“I’ve checked it! There it is! One battery!
It’s in there! Who needs a mechanic?” On the theory that perhaps it’s like a phone and just needs a factory reset, he tries pushing on both the plastic pieces on top of the box, hoping against hope that they’re buttons.
They are not buttons. They also are not knobs, although Will does twist them for a while, and have a bit of panic when the red one comes off in his hand, before realizing very belatedly that they are caps .
He stares down at the bare metal bolt the red cap revealed, removes the black one, and experiences, deep in the horror chamber that is his current mental landscape, a montage of every time he’s ever seen a pair of jumper cables in film or television.
They have alligator clips at the end, don’t they?
Like something might need to clamp on a bolt?