She parked and went into the back of the camper. Lawrence’s body was still there, with the book in its lap. “Well, that’s that, then. I can’t move it alone,” she said.

“Just push it off the chair,” Lawrence said.

“I can’t!” She stood there, staring. “I’ve got to have a cigarette,” she thought. She went outside, lit up, and looked out at the park and the woods and the benches and breathed the cool night air. Then, sure that she’d cleared her mind, she went back inside. It was all a dream: Lawrence wasn’t dead, and he’d be in his body where he was supposed to be.

She went back inside. The body was still there. How bad was her mind? She had no way of knowing. All right, then! She yanked Lawrence’s body down, dragged it the length of the trailer, down the steps, and over to the bench. Katydids were calling. She got a stone in one of her platform shoes, and had to take it off. It was much more difficult to tug the body up, but she did, until it sat nicely on the green bench, looking out across the fields to the woods.

“Admirable,” Lawrence said. Then, to Seven, “Will you stay around to help her out? She’s going to need help, you know. I hear someone calling me, and I have the feeling—” With that, Lawrence disappeared and Seven couldn’t see him any longer. Lydia never had.

She got back in the camper, stared out at Lawrence’s old-man body, and wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She started up the motor, left the state park, and just kept on driving. The road seemed real. Nothing else. At the same time, some inner, usually quiet part of her was alert, and talking mentally. This part was usually masked by her conscious thoughts, but there were great holes in her usual consciousness, through which these inner reasonings came. She was retreating, and had been for some time: that much was clear. The trip cross-country was to help her shake loose from her normal surroundings, for they held her … kept her oriented.

She was finished with orientation. She didn’t want to relate any more. Lawrence hadn’t wanted to reach sixty either (a milepost that hadn’t bothered her a bit), and he hadn’t. But she didn’t want to go quickly, suddenly, like that. She’d go slowly, step by step, mental slip by mental slip, she thought; retreat easily, so imperceptibly that she, herself, could forget what she was doing. Like mental sleeping pills.

Lydia was only half-aware of these thoughts, even now. The picture of Lawrence’s body on its bench kept coming into her mind. She blocked it out and kept driving. In the morning she fed Greenacre and Tuckie and Mr. George, and ate breakfast at the side of the road.