by Jamie Mason
The Long Trip was an anomaly Simon couldn’t diagram away. He didn’t even try. He simply canceled it out, willing his eyes not to roll at me, with the overly patient certainty that whatever it was, they wouldn’t let James Bond live on a tree-bordered cul-de-sac, with all the international secrets tucked in with the banana-bread recipes.
I said he was being naïve. He said I was being dramatic. She was fluent in four languages, proficient in another three. It explained away most everything. What remained was dismissed as either paranoid fantasy or just “her way.” It didn’t, however, go very far in accounting for Uncle Paul.
We always knew that Paul Rowland was no relation to us. He was just our mother’s boss for nearly her entire life, a man who was, and had always been, around often enough that he insisted on tagging himself more familiarly than was warranted. He said that “Mr. Rowland” was what everyone called his father, and that he would never stand on any ceremony that made him feel old. He was, however, more than happy to stand on a ceremony that made us address him as part of the family when we didn’t want to. As we crested into adulthood, Simon was never keen on talking about Paul’s influence on our mother and on the way our lives had spooled out. And it only got worse.
The Big Argument was on a Saturday. If I ever needed to account for why I tagged things with the days of the week, it could have been that it was a reflex, a hand-in-hand natural tendency to go with our family’s quirk of naming certain scenes in our shared history, using shorthand for referencing events that we didn’t want to discuss in detail. The Big Argument would take its place on the shelf with the Long Trip and the Business.
Simon was right out of the army, commended and discharged. We’d already had our welcome-home event with the neighbors and his friends, and this would have been our first dinner together, just the three of us, in my mother’s backyard at the cast-iron table that was nestled into the patio circle of dogwoods and irises, next to a lattice arch of climbing roses in new bloom. She called it the chapel. Dinner in the chapel was sacrosanct. No backing out. No balling up the plans.
Paul’s car was in the driveway. My teeth clenched automatically, but the scoffing sound at the back of my throat was something I’d practiced.
I heard their voices, indistinct but loud, through the open living-room window when I shut off my car’s engine. I slithered out of a tiny wedge of open angle, all that Paul had left me if I didn’t want to ding his door with mine. Paul’s ego, and the Cadillac he toted it around in, took up the whole middle of the driveway as if he owned the place. Their angry words rang clear through to the lower half of the street once I got out of my car.
Simon had already yelled his voice rough. “I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked me to do, you asshole.”
“I did you a favor,” said Paul. “And you’ll come to see that.”
“Paul,” my mother cut in. “You had no right. What were you thinking? Why would you even do such a thing? It wasn’t your place and you know it.”
I’d made it to the front door just as Paul made it to the other side. I pushed it open ahead of his reaching for the handle so that he looked about to shake my hand as the door swung wide. I could have sworn in court only that he was utterly composed, but you could feel a tremor of blood pressure in the air around him, a fury that hummed in his aura that his face didn’t do justice to, even if his color had gone over to rare-steak red in the jowls.
“Annette, whatever our arrangement has been, you’d do well to remember that I still don’t ask your permission or your forgiveness for the things I do. I know you know that in private, and I don’t appreciate you posing like you don’t know it right here standing in front of your son.”
He brushed past me with a tight nod. “Dee.”
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
It turned out to be the fallout from Paul’s cashing in on some sort of official favor to scuttle my brother’s application to the FBI.
In some ways, Simon had admired Paul, almost as a father he didn’t love but looked to for the occasional bit of good guidance. He certainly cared for Paul more than I ever had. The betrayal burned bright and long, Simon railing against Paul at every opportunity until even Simon got tired of hearing it. In this massive falling-out they didn’t speak for ages.
For years afterward, all the way up to her funeral, they avoided run-ins by simply following a rigid schedule of never visiting my mother at the same time. She was a wall, not just between the two of them, but between the specifics of their clash and me. There was no cajoling her into gossip. I never once got her to diagram the collision for me, but since the result gave me more Simon and less Paul, I stopped wondering about it as much as approving of the results.
5
Friday
The crossroads are looming less frequently now; each unfamiliar bend in the lane and unknown street sign is tugging at my attention more than ever for how rare they’re becoming along this wheeling spool of pavement. It just goes on and on. The last sign loomed up and passed, but it left its mark more than the others have, and now my heartbeat is booming into my eyes. Bowers Road. I don’t know Bowers Road. I’ve never been out here past the last of the industrial office parks, the rows of low, brick buildings that line up for acres, each with one strip of parking spaces and plain signage advertising a host of services less sought out by your average joe. Having never needed custom-stamped sheet metal or specialty bolts and screws, I’ve never given this sketched-in edge of the town a second thought.
Some spiritual people say there is no such thing as coincidence, and I guess I can’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg for my lack of spirituality, but I do believe in coincidence. I believe in it very much. I see it everywhere. I have to. Otherwise, I’d start to believe that the universe is adversarial. And I don’t need another opponent right now.
My husband’s name is Patrick Bowers Aldrich and of course it doesn’t mean anything that Bowers Road just crossed my path like a black cat. My mother-in-law, whose forebears have been all over this area for ages, ran through quite a number of remote family surnames to give each of her six children a unique middle name, so I suppose it’s possible that this Bowers and Patrick’s own Bowers are historically linked, but it doesn’t mean anything today. It doesn’t. Even if I am preoccupied with my husband more in fear than affection on this drive to Carlisle Inc.
But now I know I’ll see the road sign in my head, landmarked forever. It took less than a second to pass it, but the spindly reach of the crepe myrtle’s shadow at the corner of the crossroads, and the exclamation-point pattern of the fuzzy cattail weeds skirting around the signpost, have all been snapshotted into my memory against my will. I will remember this scene. I’ll remember the sign. I’m sure of it. And I don’t like that thought. The free association links up again, kicked off by the coincidence of Bowers Road—Patrick Bowers Aldrich, then Carlisle Inc., then the blue sedan, then the strange things that have been happening. The burglary at the yoga studio. Our house tossed over so stealthily that only I could tell. The insurance.
A cool, gray tentacle of premonition strokes the back of my neck.
Patrick Bowers Aldrich edges past my mother in my thoughts, nudges her back into the past, the only place she can be now. A pet saying of hers rings in the hollows of her absence: If clues waved flags and blew trumpets, baby girl, we’d all be Sherlock Holmes.
Something is not right and hasn’t been for some time. I miss her sorely. More than ever in this moment, I feel the leading edge of the storm in some inarticulate place in my gut. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to white-knuckle this one alone. No one knows I’m out here. I boarded up the windows without telling a soul, long before I knew for certain that my husband wasn’t what I’d always insisted that he was.
• • •
Everyone rebels against their upbringing, either honestly, right out in the open, or deep in their hearts while they pay lip service to their splendid childhoods. The midwife may cut the cord, but
each child has to walk away to become her own. Me? My choice of husband was my ultimate defiance.
Patrick Aldrich and I married straight out of college. Unless there was a Williams in the room (or once, there was a Zambrano, who played his heritage like a mob-movie joke—silk suits with pocket squares in high school, no less), my last name, Vess, had me at the end of every alphabetized queue. Right from freshman orientation, I noticed Patrick up front with the As and Bs, well scrubbed and well liked, but not too much of either.
I stalked him through the campus, learned his schedule, and then I pointedly crossed my path with his patterns to be seen when I wished to be seen. I asked him to be my date for the homecoming dance after only two engineered encounters—one in the library and one in the dining hall.
Patrick was good-looking in an apple-cheeked sort of way. Just by his alert struggle against slouching I knew there would be parties, but that they would end short of wild. His mildness made me bold. He looked to me like a smooth groove in a bumpy road. In his company, there was no need to fear the shadowed trails branching off the good path, those dangerous tangents that distracted the less vigilant people off their true courses and into weird lives. With Patrick, the sum of the parts meant there would be no toothy surprises lurking in the comfort of Grandma’s flannels.
We were an easily matched set. All throughout school our grade point averages hovered within a small decimal’s reach of the other’s, and we were both attractive enough to take a handsome photo when the occasion called for it without the loaded burden of the kind of beauty that causes traffic jams.
Patrick had grown up on a street where nothing ever happened, and I had grown up on a street where apparently nothing ever happened, which is usually good enough for the neighbors.
I made the first move, and also the second, and by subtracting the fear of rejection from Patrick’s world, I lit a fire in his ego.
He had two weaknesses that turned him mine so fast that it turned me his just as quickly for the adorable surprise of it all. I’d never known anyone so sweetly undone by a wink.
My mother had perfected the wink to an effortless one-note Morse code that could flash amusement, conspiracy, flirtation, or warning on her whim. I’d adopted a lower-volume version of it as a habit, but it hit Patrick in some sweet spot.
He’d pulled an instantly blushing double take when I reflexively winked on my way out of the library after our first conversation.
When I pulled away from our good-night kiss in the parking lot of my dorm after the homecoming formal, I guess I did it again.
“It kills me when you do that,” he’d said.
“When I do what?”
“That wink thing.”
“Oh, yeah?” I leaned in for another kiss and smiled against his straight, white teeth. “Why does it kill you?” I whispered onto his lips.
“I don’t know,” he murmured into our kiss, neither of us willing to back out of its tingle. “You look so sweet, and then you do that, and just for a second, you’re like a badass.”
I spluttered the heat out of the moment, giggling. My head dropped against his shoulder. “I’m a badass. Yeah, right.”
“Maybe just a little.” He laughed into my hair and I lifted my face against his cheek and discovered his second frailty when I kissed his ear. His low sigh sent a feathery chill down my neck.
I brushed my lips along the firm curve of his ear again, and his breath drew down to a soft moan. He pulled me over the armrest and we kissed to panting, twisting over the console at every need to breathe, hands in each other’s hair, sliding and pulling over our fancy clothes, dragging for better reach of every unfamiliar curve.
I stopped us before campus security surely would have, but that was that. We were together.
He glowed. My lighthouse, safe and sound, shone out from the crop of boys who laughed louder or punched harder or studied more seriously in excess than he did. In his shy pleasure at my endorsement, I felt generous instead of gently scheming. I’d made him happy and I had got what I wanted out of it, too—cake and eating it if there had ever been a diagram of the saying. And our gratitude for the other felt like love. In the blur of new achievement and fun and youth and plans and small dramas stoked hot on the promise of making up, I’d never be tempted to jump out of the mellow frying pan.
My roommates played at catch and release with the ready crop of bad boys and all the rowdy, sweet ones who were on campus, or already at work in the low rungs of the town. They paid the toll in binge sobbing and regrettable revenge hookups when it didn’t work out. Then they teased me for my single-mindedness and the Velcro hold I kept on the same guy from the start, but I insisted that the palette of love they thought was fanned out for all their choosing was an illusion. There were only two flavors: right and wrong.
I felt an advantage in my precocious wariness. I wasn’t going to wait around to get tricked. I watched us, my friends and myself, set free by milestone birthdays or diplomas and then straightaway disillusioned with the daily routine. We’d long been indoctrinated by singing princesses and pink things to gauge life by its sparkle: the maiden’s birthright. And while all that glitters is surely shiny, the business of spooling out twenty-four-hour days, 365 times each year, is a grind of many textures.
Today’s maidens, by and large, take the sudden turn from all the twinkling in stride and get on with things. In the dullest part of the day, however, they keep the secret close—that they would trade their crisp independence in a hurry for a semi-tame rogue who would thrash a swath through their boredom.
That’s how the daydream goes anyway, just like every other daydream—that unfocused longing to have something else. And it’s hardly the domain of maidens at all. Everyone does it.
I was no different, in a different sort of way. I tended the same garden of endless, vague demand—that the next moment needn’t be necessarily better, only that it be new. I wanted to be swept away, too—straight under a rug. Patrick was the best broom a girl like me could ask for.
We were still in our mortarboards and gowns when we picked up the invitations from the printer. Patrick’s parents were thrilled. Young love with strings attached was an Aldrich family tradition. Pat’s mother had dropped out of technical college to go full housewife at nineteen. Pat’s older brother had his first child at twenty. And the four younger Aldrich sisters, each two years apart, spanned both a middle school and a high school and considered wedding planning no different from angling for the perfect prom, even if the dresses were hand-me-downs.
But they were happy, all of them. Or at least they were smiling, doing every regular thing and doing it well. Pat’s mother taught me to make pie crust and bought us an electric skillet as a wedding present. I was at a loss at first, but the dull, square thing turned out to be tremendously useful. I used it a hell of a lot more than the crystal candy dish or the tablecloth that was simply too nice to go underneath supper.
Love is love when it’s electrifying, but what is it when it’s soothingly plain? As far as I could tell, it was ideal.
In our hearts, though, Patrick and I pulled out of rhythm. The edges of our wants didn’t match up as neatly as they should have. I wanted to plant myself in the picture of his plain pedigree, in his family’s pleasant, geraniums-in-the-flowerbox ordinariness. And he, unfortunately, was banking big deposits of hope that I had more of my mother in me than I let on. He was quite taken with her.
Ours being a college town, Patrick and I both lived at home and commuted to campus—Patrick to save money and I to be near her. I was always touching base, pinging home, perpetually nervous to spend too much time out of sight for fear of the rest of the proverb.
He and I did dinner and the movies. We studied and ate carryout. We made out in the car. But after any time spent at my house with my mother, he’d grow pensive, staring into my eyes, searching, waiting, as if he’d thrown a stone down a well.
I ignored this because my brother said that Patrick was a boring dork who would b
uild a picket fence, knock me up with 2.3 children, then buy a golden retriever. That sounded perfect to me.
My brother eventually got over not heading out to Quantico and falling into some urban FBI field office for thirty years and a gold watch. He became a cop at home. He stayed my best friend and my confidant. There’s never been anyone else like Simon. He had always been my conscience and the only one I ever talked to about my problems with life. It was only natural to carry it into our lives as adults. Simon alone understood where we came from. He was always the only one who ever knew I wasn’t crushingly normal. I told Simon everything automatically.
So there was a cold curiosity in feeling suddenly secretive in those months running up to our ruin.
6
Friday
I check the rearview mirror too much. I always have, but it’s got a lot worse in the last few months. Up until I was being followed, it was just a by-product of my mother’s instruction. I’ve always worn the vigilance she taught us as nerves. She wore it as custom-fitted armor.
I check the clock, then the mirror again. I’m making good time and there’s nothing behind me but a long tail of gray road stretched to the horizon, empty. If I’m paranoid, I’ve come by it honestly.
She had worked on us so that she would feel we were safe, but also in hopes that we would have bigger lives. She thought those who, given the same amount of time, didn’t dissect the moments as they sped past were doomed to a hazy picture of the world, a plain and normal sketch of it. But take a microscope to your small, diffuse view and suddenly a sharp vastness was yours—even in the middle of a parking lot or on the end of a lonely pier on the margin of a lake.
But her magic spells had side effects. She knew that. When Patrick and I had just moved out of our newlywed apartment, bureaucratically now all grown up with a mortgage that would chain us to fifty-five-hour workweeks for the foreseeable future, my mother brought me flowers from her garden and warned me of recruitment.
