Necessity Read Online Free PDF Page B

while to cool off, and then tackle some of the home study program Charlie Reid gave her—instruments, controls, regulations.…
    When she awakens it is past midnight and she sits up feeling sour and hung over. Exhaustion, she thinks. It isn’t the hard work of it all; it’s the strain—the tension of knowing she needs to make only one misstep and it all will be useless and they’ll come down on her like a falling safe.
    Desperately tired, she can’t get back to sleep.
    It occurs to her at some point in the endless drag of the night that never before has she known how dreadful it is to be truly alone. It’s all a blank slate now: no past, no friends—not even the prospect of friends. Nobody at all.
    Ellen, she thinks.
    But Ellen can’t help her fend off the terror; not now.
    She opens Charlie Reid’s spiral-bound primer and tries to memorize the rules of flying.

13 In the morning she sells the car for $800 cash on a small used-car lot two blocks from her motel. The dealer, a man with a sunburned bald head and an expression of wry bemusement, must be accustomed to buying cars for cash: he’s probably seen a hundred examples of the hopefuls who arrive in Las Vegas in their $20,000 Cadillacs and depart a few days later in $100,000 buses. Those big-spending high rollers must have their mundane $100 counterparts and this is precisely the impression she wants to leave: she wants to differ in no way from the multitude.
    According to the radio on the bald man’s desk the official temperature is 108° Fahrenheit—and it isn’t even eleven o’clock yet. The dealer sees her expression and says, “Wait till August, you want real heat.”
    When she signs the bill of sale she has to show identification; that is why she’s saved the old driver’s license. He glances at it, comparing signatures, but he’ll forget her name as soon as she leaves the shack and he files the papers away.
    She is curious whether he feels much pain in his red burned scalp but she doesn’t ask; she takes the cash and walks away, squinting behind her sunglasses.
    Back in the air-conditioned motel she plucks the blouse away from her fried skin and makes a little ceremony out of burning the old driver’s license and flushing the ashes away.
    Nothing left of the old life now except a ring of keys.
    At the cheap blond desk she begins to make a list on motel stationery: a list of all the things she knows about herself. It isn’t the first time she’s done it. The ostensible purpose is to check off the items she’s changed and to see what remains to be done. The actual purpose is to keep from going insane.
    At one of those political dinner parties last year a guest was the private detective whose specialty is skip-tracing. “Raymond Q. Seale,” his business card announces, and if you ask him what the Q stands for he replies, “Questing,” with an irritating smugness: a self-important little man slicked up in a tight suit. Phony smile and the sleazy artful manner of a cynic who insists that the world lives at his own gutter level. But she listened to him with interest; the pressures on her had kept increasing and by then she’d already begun to fantasize ways of escape.
    She recalls how annoyingly self-confident Seale was—but knowledgeable. “Your teen-agers run away from home. Twelve-year-olds sometimes. Or even younger. Half of them pregnant. They’re the hardest ones to find—no fingerprints on file, no credit records, no paper trail to identify them by.
    â€œGrownups run out on their bills, mostly. Sometimes they just get tired of their husbands or wives—sometimes the guy just doesn’t want to have to pay alimony.”
    She pictures him now—a mean man, amused by the misfortunes he’s describing. “We work for the bank to find the guy and repossess the car, or the parents ask us to find the runaway, or the