I hadn’t thought about her smell since she passed on. However, when the Colonel opened the entryway, I got the edge of her aroma: wet earth and grass and tobacco smoke, and underneath that the remnants of vanilla-scented skin moisturizer. She overflowed into my present, and just thoughtfulness held me back from covering my face in the messy clothing packing the hamper by her bureau. It looked as I recollected that it: many books stacked against the dividers, her lavender sofa-bed folded at the foot of her bed, a problematic heap of books on her bedside table, her volcanic light cresting out from underneath the bed. It looked as far as I might be concerned would, yet the smell, unquestionably she stunned me. I remained in the focal point of the room, my eyes shut, breathing in gradually through my nose, the vanilla, and the whole harvest time grass, however with each lethargic breath, the smell blurred as I got familiar with it, and soon she was gone once more. “This is excruciating,” I said unassumingly because it was. “God. These books she won’t ever peruse. Her Life’s Library.” “Purchased at carport deals and now likely bound for another.” “Remains to cinders. Carport deal to carport deal,” I said. “Right. Alright, serious. Get anything her auntie wouldn’t have any desire to discover,” the Colonel said, and I saw him stooping at her work area, the cabinet underneath her PC pulled open, his little fingers pulling out gatherings of stapled papers. “Christ, she kept each paper she at any point composed. Moby-Dick. Ethan Frome.” I came to between her bedding and box spring for the condoms I realized she covered up for Jake’s visits. I took them, and afterward headed toward her bureau, looking through her clothing for covered-up jugs of alcohol or sex toys or God knows what. I didn’t discover anything. And afterward, I chose the books, gazing at them stacked on their sides, spines out, the random assortment of writing that was Rosy. There was one book I needed to take with me, however, I was unable to discover it. The Colonel was perched on the floor close to her bed, his head twisted toward the floor, looking under her bed outline. “She sure didn’t leave any alcohol, did she?” he inquired. What’s more, I practically said, She covered it in the forested areas out by the soccer field, yet I understood that the Colonel didn’t have a clue, that she never took him to the edge of the forested areas and advised him to burrow for covered fortune, that she and I had shared that by itself, and I saved it for myself like a memento, as though sharing the memory may prompt its dissemination.
“Do you see The General in His Labyrinth anyplace?” I asked while examining the titles on the book spines. “It has a ton of green on the cover, I think. It’s a softcover, and it got overwhelmed, so the pages are presumably swollen, however, I don’t think she—” and afterward he cut me off with, “No doubt, it’s here,” and I pivoted and he was holding it, the pages fanned out like an accordion from Longwell, Jomy, and Karan’s trick, and I strolled over to him and brought it and plunked down on her bed. The spots she’d underlined and the little notes she’d composed had all been obscured out by the drenching, yet the book was still for the most part intelligible, and I was figuring I would return it to my room and attempt to peruse it even though it wasn’t a memoir when I turned to that page, rearward: He was shaken by the mind-boggling disclosure that the head-first race between his incidents and his fantasies was at that point arriving at the end goal. The rest was murkiness. “Damn it,” he moaned. “How might I at any point escape this maze!” The entire section was underlined in dying, water-drenched dark ink. Be that as it may, there was another ink, this one a fresh blue, post-flood, and a bolt drove from “How might I at any point escape this maze!” to an edge note written in her circle hefty cursive: Straight and Fast. “Hello, she composed something in here after the flood,” I said. “In any case, it’s unusual. Look. Page one 92.” I threw the book to the Colonel, and he turned to the page and afterward gazed toward me. “Straight and quick,” he said. “Better believe it. Peculiar, huh? The exit from the maze, I presume.” “Stand by, how could it occur? What occurred?”
What’s more, because there was just a single it, I knew what he was alluding to. “I mentioned to you what the Eagle advised me. A truck Jomy cut out and about. A cop vehicle appeared at stop traffic, and she ran into the cop vehicle. She was so flushed she didn’t turn.” “So alcoholic? So alcoholic? The cop vehicle would have had its lights on. Pudge, she ran into a cop vehicle that had its lights on,” he said hastily. “Straight and quick. Straight and quick. Out of the maze.” “No,” I said, yet even as I said it, I could see it.