by Matt Dean
Chapter 16
The drive from Charleston to Carolina Beach took four hours. In that time, Anna Grace spoke six words. For many miles, she sat in the passenger’s seat with her arms folded tightly across her chest. She reached into her pocket now and again for her phone, each time putting it back without looking at it, as if she’d momentarily forgotten and suddenly remembered to make the trip unbearable even for herself.
While they waited at a traffic light in Georgetown, Leland glanced over and saw that she’d dozed off with her head lolling sideways. He reached into the back seat for his jacket and rolled it into a cylinder. Lifting Anna Grace’s head, he wedged the makeshift pillow between her cheek and shoulder. Half an hour later, near Murrells Inlet, she woke and blinked away her sleep.
“Good nap?” he asked.
Anna Grace studied the bundled jacket. She touched her cheek. “My face is all creased now,” she said. Those were the six words.
As they passed over the Cape Fear River, she craned her neck to get a better look at the lift bridge, only so she could grimace at it. She thought it was ugly—he could see it on her face. Wilmington itself was ugly. Carolina Beach was seedy. The hotel wasn’t much to look at. The elevator was grubby. The decor in the room was garish. He could see it all on her face.
They had a third-floor room. An ocean view. Standing at the sliding glass doors, Leland looked out across the narrow balcony, the empty swimming pool, the wind-scalloped dunes, and the calm green Atlantic. Two paddle surfers in gleaming wetsuits, standing assuredly on a pair of longboards, paddled away from the shore. A large ship of some kind, a tanker or freighter, crossed the horizon. Seabirds dove through the bright air.
Anna Grace banged around behind him. He heard the chair knocking against the desk, her shoes dropping to the floor with a pair of thuds, the door of their room closing with a whoosh and a hollow ker-thunk.
Out on the low waves, the surfers tacked toward each other. Their boards flashed in the sun, uncannily, cleanly white. They passed, then turned again, each reversing course. They were slaloming, cutting a pair of overlapping sine curves across the water. He watched until the light dazzled his eyes and the surfers’ swooping motion made him feel slightly dizzy. It looked like fun. Even to go out alone would be fun, in spite of the November chill—not that Leland knew how to paddle surf.
The door slammed again. Anna Grace had come back. He turned from the window. She was empty-handed, and that puzzled him. He thought she’d gone for ice.
“What kind of a hotel has a bar,” she said, “but doesn’t keep it open?”
Leland stammered in reply. “It’s North Carolina,” he said eventually. “Maybe they can’t serve on a holiday. Why do you want a drink at one fifteen in the afternoon?”
“I don’t,” she said. “Obviously. I just happened to notice.” She rolled her tongue around in her mouth. “Did you pack toothpaste?”
He blinked at her. “Um,” he said. He went to the bed, where the suitcase lay open.
“I looked,” she said. “I didn’t see it.”
If she’d looked and hadn’t seen it, he thought, why ask? He stared at her. Words—what words to use? He said, “Hm.”
He dug through the bag of toiletries. A razor but no shaving cream. Toothbrushes but no toothpaste. Cotton balls shedding fluff. Publix-brand hand sanitizer. Baby oil in a travel-size bottle. He picked up an eyelash curler and absentmindedly opened and closed it. If the stiff, squeaky hinge were any indication, Anna Grace hadn’t touched the thing in ages.
He’d had such a simple plan in mind: Pack in secret, load the car while she slept, whisk her away, bask in the sea air, enjoy a few days free of worry and habit. Simple. Even if he’d started with the basest, mousiest kind of motive—a prehistoric flight response, a cowardly desperation to avoid Scott Cable—they could still enjoy themselves, couldn’t they? The weekend could be companionable, if not precisely romantic—couldn’t it?
When he turned, he found Anna Grace leaning against the dresser, her arms folded across her chest.
So.
Neither companionable nor romantic.
He must be the slowest-witted fool on earth, not to have foreseen precisely this outcome. His wife was a woman who had rules and expectations and routines. They’d never needed or used ice in a hotel room, not that he could recall, but she always sent him to fill the ice bucket right after checking in. At the end of a stay, just before checking out, she insisted on stripping the bed to make sure they hadn’t left anything hidden among the sheets. When she packed for herself, she had a particular way of rolling up her stockings, and it wasn’t the same way she used at home. How had he ever believed he could pack a suitcase for her? How had he ever convinced himself she’d appreciate, or even tolerate, a surprise getaway?
“I’ll go down to the desk and get some toothpaste,” he said.
“I went down already.”
“Ah.” Now he understood why she’d come back without an ice bucket. “And?”
“There’s just this crazy vending machine.”
“Vending machine?”
“The kind that usually has potato chips and candy bars in it, but this one has sewing kits, toothpaste, and shoe polish—stuff your husband might not have packed.”
“Why didn’t you get toothpaste, then?”
“I think it’d be complimentary in a decent hotel, don’t you?”
Leland took a breath. It was a decent hotel. It was a fine hotel, so new or so newly remodeled that the air smelled of paint and carpet adhesive.
“If it isn’t complimentary, we can buy it here, or we can drive down the road and buy it somewhere else.” He made motions with his hands—here, down the road, somewhere else.
“Fine.” She turned on her heel. “I’m going for a run.”
“What?”
Elbowing him aside, she rummaged through the suitcase—T-shirts and undershorts flying—and tossed her track suit onto the bed. “I’m going for a run,” she said again, slowly, as if to a non-native speaker. She peeled off her sweater and stepped out of her jeans. “Did you pack a Jogbra, by any chance?”
This time he answered by not answering.
“Leland. Goddammit. How do you think of the track suit but not the—” She threw her hands up in the air. “Never mind.” She slipped on a T-shirt—one of his, he noticed—and sat on the bed to put on her track pants.
“We have a reservation at five,” he said.
“So early?”
“We usually eat Thanksgiving dinner by two or three, and I didn’t figure we’d have a big lunch—and in fact we haven’t had lunch at all, right?—so I made a reservation at five. Do you see how it might not be the most insane thing a person ever did?”
Her eyes were darting around again, and he could only imagine what else he’d forgotten. But no, she found what she was looking for: her running shoes. They lay on their sides, sole to sole, under the desk. She grabbed them and untied the laces. “You know,” she said, “I can’t even talk to you while you’re like this.”
Without a word, Leland left the room and closed the door quietly behind him. He slumped against the jamb and slapped his hand against the wall. Now that he was alone, he could allow himself the tantrum, the full-on hissy fit, he badly wanted. But no. The bellowing and foot-stomping would have to wait after all: A housekeeper was trundling a cart down the hallway. He bit his tongue, literally, crushing the meat of it between his molars.
When the elevator came, he tumbled through the door, intending to beat his fists and possibly his forehead against the back wall, but a maintenance man in green coveralls already stood inside the compartment. A most happy fellow, too: He smiled and said “Howdy” and rocked jauntily on the balls of his feet. Leland grunted and tipped his chin by way of greeting.
In the lobby, the front desk clerk waved to him and called out, “Happy Thanksgiving, sir,” and Leland forced himself to unknot his fists so that he could wave back. He stabbed the tip of his tongue with
his eye teeth and hoped his wince of pain might pass for a smile. He shoved through the front door, whamming it hard with the heels of his hands, and scuttled across the parking lot.
Two windburned surfers, a man and a woman, loosed their boards from the top of an SUV. A pair of elderly couples shuffled, arm in arm and arm in arm, toward a rusted-out Buick. In time, Leland might take some comfort from the fact that other idiots had brought their wives to Carolina Beach in late November—he put that thought aside for later, that he wasn’t the only idiot—but at the moment, it constrained him to be among people. He felt close to bursting.
Finally, finally, when he got into his car, he let go. A wordless cry at first, then a string of expletives, then a series of arbitrary vowels. He battered the steering wheel with his fists. When his voice broke, he sat gasping for air, a thread of spittle hanging from his lip. He blotted his mouth with his sleeve.
Something flashed across the side mirror. He turned the rearview, panning it across the parking lot. Whatever or whoever he’d seen had disappeared, but it was enough to give him a sense of himself, of what he must look like, a fifty-year-old man shouting and drooling in the driver’s seat of a first-generation Prius. He started the car and sped away from the hotel and drove with no higher purpose or more elaborate plan than away, away, away.
