Pauline comes up beside him. She’s gasping for breath. The only thing wilder than her hair are her eyes.

“Don’t look,” he says.

“What’s that smell? Phil, what’s that smell?”

“Burning gas and rubber,” he says, although that’s probably not the smell she’s talking about. “Don’t look. Go back and—do you have your cell phone?”

“Yes, of course I have it—”

“Go back and call 911. Don’t look at this. You don’t want to see this.”

He doesn’t want to see it either, but cannot look away. How many? He can see the bodies of at least three children and one adult—probably a woman, but he can’t be sure. Yet so many shoes … and all the clothes … he can see a DVD package …

“What if I can’t get through?” she asks.

He points to the smoke. Then to the three or four cars that are already pulling over. “Getting through won’t matter,” he says, “but try.”

She starts to go, then turns back. She’s crying. “Phil … how many?”

“I don’t know. A lot. Go on, Paulie. Some of them might still be alive.”

“You know better,” she says through her sobs. “Damn thing was going too fast.”

She begins trudging back up the hill. Halfway to the rest-area parking lot (more cars are pulling in now), a terrible idea crosses her mind and she looks back, sure she will see her old friend and lover lying in the grass himself, perhaps clutching his chest, perhaps unconscious. But he’s on his feet, cautiously circling the blazing left half of the van. As she watches, he takes off his natty sport jacket with the patches on the elbows. He kneels and covers something with it. Either a person or a part of a person. Then he goes on.

Climbing the hill, she thinks that all their efforts to make beauty out of words is an illusion. Or a joke played on children who have selfishly refused to grow up. Yes, probably that. Children like that, she thinks, deserve to be pranked.