The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  Edie touched her own head. “I’m not taking any chances.” She realized, embarrassed, that she was even still wearing her goggles, but her embarrassment didn’t motivate her to remove them.

  Anastasia winked and donned the hood. Her amber eyebrows were just visible. “These things are ridiculous.”

  “Better than the alternative,” Edie said.

  “Are they? I’m dubious. But I suppose they can’t hurt.”

  “So you must really want a baby,” Edie said, abruptly, unable to stop herself. “To be putting yourself through all that.”

  The sly smile fell off Anastasia’s face. “We’ve been trying for four years. It’s a fucking nightmare. So yeah, I guess I want one. My advice, if you think you ever want to do it, is do it now, while you’re young.”

  “I don’t want children,” Edie said. She ran water to wash her hands, thinking with a quiet fury about the unfairness of—well, everything. Everything.

  “Even better,” Anastasia said. “It’s a shitty world, anyway. See you on the bus.” She slipped out, and Edie cranked the paper towel dispenser, dazed, unaware until she’d done it that a pile had folded back on itself several times. Ripping the end loose, she dried her hands, remembering, for some reason, how excited her mother would always get when Edie took her out to Sunday supper, a treat they indulged in once or twice a month, depending on how good Edie’s tips had been. Her mother would spend the week up to the outing thinking through restaurant possibilities—did Edie think she’d want the Chinese buffet, or Positano’s, or maybe that cute café downtown, where they’d once gotten the handsome waiter who brought them free dessert? (They never got that waiter or free dessert again; that had been a singular day, a magic that would never repeat itself.) The meals themselves always pleased her; never did she complain about the food, about bad service. It was all delicious, all delightful. She luxuriated in it the way a child would, and sometimes Edie would be grumpy enough to feel annoyed at her, but mostly, her mother’s moods were infectious. Her mother had made Edie see the good in a shitty world.

  She trashed the damp mound of paper.

  Jesse was waiting just outside the door with his arms and ankles crossed, a pose of false calm that went rigid as soon as Edie exited. “What happened in there? You fall in?”

  “My stomach was bothering me,” Edie said, which was the right thing, because she knew he wouldn’t press her. Ten months of dating, and he still ran the shower whenever he had to use the bathroom for a number two.

  “You just had me worried is all.” He pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, their microsuits making rasping sounds against each other.

  “I’m fine,” Edie said. “Everything’s fine.”

  And that’s when the screaming started outside the restaurant.

  Five

  Marta’s husband’s sudden interest in legitimacy was not actually so sudden, in retrospect, but it took her by surprise nonetheless. Oddly, it troubled her. She wasn’t exactly thrilled with the turn her life had taken, as his wife—had never imagined, marrying him, that she was signing on to be the first lady of a crime boss—but in the world of Atlantic Zone’s dark underbelly, its secret economies, his power at least had its limits. So, too, did his ambition. If David wanted to be legit, he must be seeing his way around those limits.

  There were the parties he wanted her to host at the house, the dinners out to five-star restaurants where groups of four or six or eight, never more, perched around tables set on daises, or tucked into lavish back rooms. Men in fine suits. Silent, beautiful women in couture gowns. Marta knew who some of these men were. David’s dealings with politicians weren’t new; he’d long depended on greasing the right palms as a way to get the outer-zone contracts he needed for his business fronts, or to encourage legislation friendly to his business interests. But this public socializing was very new, and so, too, was David’s manner in these meetings. He was polite, deferential—even obsequious. She had never seen him listen so intently without asserting his own strong opinion. She had never seen him agree so readily. And when he did speak, the things that came out of his mouth bore little resemblance to what he said at home, when he was alone with her, or when she overheard him conferring with his most trusted inner circle. At the parties and dinners, he said things like, “Well, all the science points to this tick thing getting worse before it gets better,” and, “It’s clear that the smart funding is going to the Wall.” He said, “Now’s the time to circle the wagons, not spread out. Gulfers and Midwesterners are already attempting border crossings. We have to shut all of that down while we still can.” He nodded gravely when one suit bloviated at length about the importance of penalizing feticide like any first-degree murder, despite the fact that David had, Marta knew, taken care of a little problem Enzo got himself into out on the coast. He hadn’t told her about doing this, much less asked for her advice or permission; she’d overheard a conversation between father and son during the boys’ first Christmas vacation visit home from college. “You need to start wearing a goddamn raincoat,” David had said. “I’m not paying to get another girl flushed. Do you understand what I’m saying? Need I spell out for you the alternatives?”

  “No, Dad,” Enzo muttered. “I mean, yeah. I understand. You don’t have to spell out anything.”

  Was this when she started using the Salt? It was not long after, at any rate, when the boys packed their suitcases, lavished her with kisses and promises to call, and drove back to Wilmington to finish the academic year. Enzo, the younger twin (by three minutes), had once been hers, had told her everything: about his school crushes, the bullies, the embarrassing “sticky dreams,” about the times his father scared him or shamed him. They were coconspirators. And now, what did she know? Enzo hadn’t come to her with this problem. She couldn’t have fixed it for him if he had. But still. It wasn’t just that he’d had sex, or been careless, or even the abortion. It was that calm, cowed, No, Dad. He knew the alternatives. He accepted them, easily, as part of his reality, his privilege and burden as David Perrone’s son. Marta had, all these years, convinced herself that the boys had been shielded, protected. They didn’t know. They weren’t tainted. She was a fool.

  Now, at these dinners David wrote old-fashioned checks (required by law, for political donations over fifty thousand credits) in smiling, dramatic shows. And when he handed them over, he held them in his grasp for an overlong moment, still smiling, and extracted some promise: the golf game, the drink at the club, that weekend retreat to Casinolake. Driving home from these dinners, or closing the door on the last guest at their home, he would mostly sulk in brooding silence. Every now and then—over a final nightcap, or as he and Marta turned the sheets down on their bed—he’d let loose with some rant about “that fatass” or “that idiot,” or he’d say, “Deek’s wife’s aged about a decade since the last time I saw her” or “Wonder who Sagong thinks he’s fooling with that half-rate rejuv job.” Empty, bitter insults. If Marta asked questions—“Why are you having to deal with him?” or “What did you say it was he does at the magistrate’s office?”—he waved her off or ignored her entirely.

  Then there was Helle. A year ago David had introduced her to Marta as “new to my staff, a consultant.” More strange words out of his mouth: staff, consultant. The woman who extended a chiseled, long-fingered hand to Marta was fortyish, vaguely Nordic; she had bladelike cheekbones and dark blond hair, worn straight and cut blunt at the shoulders—broad, strong shoulders. Beautiful. Like a supermodel just past her prime. A lover, Marta assumed, put on the payroll as a way to keep her busy and flattered, or as a formal courtesy to Marta, so that her constant presence wouldn’t serve as an outright humiliation. But as the weeks passed, Marta wondered. Maybe Helle was a lover, but she wasn’t only that. She was doing actual work for David, though the nature of that work still wasn’t entirely clear. Helle spoke to David the way only a few of his capos did: firmly, even roughly, at tim
es. She got up in the middle of meals to take calls, came back, gave David a look: You’re going to want to hear this. It was revealed, offhandedly, that she had worked until recently on the president’s staff. The president’s. “As in Glenn Nichols?” Marta had asked David, perplexed. “That president?”

  David had shaken his head, exasperated. “Is there another?”

  But, like the situation with Enzo, Marta was the last to know, the last to put two and two together. Still the fool. This evidence all mounted, and it wasn’t until David announced the “legit” deal and Marta’s impending trip beyond the Wall that she started to understand what all of this might be building toward. David didn’t just want money. Or power. He wanted to be visible. He wanted a platform.

  On the morning she was to begin the OLE training camp, David sent for a car and offered, magnanimously, to accompany her on the ride. “It will be nice to have a little quiet time together.”

  Marta, warily, had agreed.

  The city, its familiar contours, rolled by outside her tinted window. It was early, not yet 6:00 a.m., and the streets were mostly empty in this posh area of town, and the only unshuttered businesses were the corner coffee shop, the Greek diner, and the bagel shop that David called “the Jews’”: Heading down to the Jews’ for a bagel and lox. Want anything? Today, they didn’t stop. Marta’s stomach was a cauldron of churning acid, and she popped another antacid, swallowing just enough water to get the pill past her throat. It slithered through her chest like a stone.

  “I know what’s running through your head right now.”

  “Do you?” Marta asked. She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

  “I do,” David said. He was looking at his tablet as he talked, scrolling past feeds with his thumb. The orange-gold band on his right hand, emerald nestled in its center, glimmered. “You’re thinking this is an exile. You’re being shipped off. Discarded. You’re thinking, ‘David isn’t taking care of me anymore.’ Am I right?”

  Marta shrugged. “Not exactly.”

  David ignored this. “The first thing you need to know is that David is still taking care of you. David will always take care of you. Trust me. OK?”

  Her forehead prickled with heat, and she reached into the open mouth of her purse to tweeze the edge of the plastic bag she’d brought. If she threw up, she’d blame the nerves. But don’t throw up, she told herself.

  “OK?” he repeated.

  She nodded, closing her eyes against another wave of nausea.

  “The second thing I want you to know, or think about, is this: I want you to see what you’re doing, what I’m asking of you, as something other than an exile. Don’t even see it as hiding out. It’s a mission. It’s a job you’re doing to help out your husband, for your sons’ sakes, and the implications of it could be huge for us.”

  Marta licked her dry lips and swallowed. “OK,” she said.

  “Now you’re just trying to placate me.” His light tone belied a strain of impatience. “I want you to really hear what I’m saying. This trip gets you out of town at a delicate time, and that’s good. But it also means that you can do an important job for me. I want you to watch Wes Feingold. I want you to come back and tell me what you think of him. His interests, his weaknesses. Whatever you can find out.”

  She could have laughed. “You seem to think I have special skills,” she said. “First I’m some kind of great outdoorswoman, and now I’m a spy.”

  “Well, you’re being silly now. Because you’re angry. And I understand that.” He was being nice. Studiously so. Marta had a sense, after almost thirty years, of how far she could push David without blowback, and she knew he wouldn’t want to start a fight with her now. Because he was so close to unloading her. Because he wanted something from her. “But you do have skills. You’re a warm person. People want to talk to you. Why do you think I bring you to all of these business dinners?”

  “Because I’m your wife?”

  David laughed. “Well, that’s no requirement. These guys bring girlfriends half the time, leave the wife at home.”

  Marta saw the threat as well as the flattery in what he said. “You could bring Helle.”

  “You think Helle’s my girlfriend?”

  Marta shrugged again. They had left the city now, were rolling past the first ring of housing complexes—old subdivisions, with names like the Estates at Mercy Glade and Timber Ridge Homes, now chopped into multitenant units—that extended west of Greensboro until petering out about a hundred kilometers from the border. Any closer, and the vibrations off the Wall would rattle your dental fillings. Or so Marta had heard. She’d never experienced this herself, had never driven even this far west of the city, but she supposed she soon would.

  “Helle has many gifts, but I wouldn’t count being warm and disarming among them. Also, she isn’t my girlfriend.”

  “What a relief,” Marta said flatly.

  He was silent, and she sneaked a glance his way. He’d set the tablet on his lap and was now giving her his full attention.

  “You’re a smart woman, Marta. What is it you think I’ve been doing this year? What do you think has been happening?”

  Marta pulled her hand from her purse, from the plastic bag she’d been tweezing, and picked at a nail. “You’ve set your sights on something. Something political.”

  “Not just something. Everything.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t do things halfway,” David said. “David Perrone goes all in.”

  A moment passed between them, one of those awkward moments where Marta thought and discarded as absurd the obvious thing, president, and then tried to think of what else might be “everything,” and as she did this mental work, and registered the expression on her husband’s face—this man she’d taken almost thirty years to unknow—she saw, finally, that president was it.

  “But . . . why?”

  “Because I want it,” David said. Then, almost as an afterthought: “I’d be good at it.”

  “What do you even believe in?” Marta asked.

  This question seemed to catch him off guard. He went back to his tablet, punched in a message with his thumbs, stabbed Send. “This would be good for us,” he said, still typing on his tablet. “For Sal and Enzo. I want them to inherit a legacy. Not just an estate. This is going to be it.”

  Marta shook her head in wonder. President?

  “So stick close to this Feingold kid. Be his friend. Be his mommy. Come back with something I can use, OK?”

  —

  It had been years since Marta had gone on a long drive, her childhood since she’d been on a bus, and she had forgotten the way it felt to be more than a few rows from the front seat, the gentle, almost imperceptible rocking of the cab, the bouncing of the shocks each time the bus topped even a gentle rise in the road. Then the vibration off the Wall, and the smell of the landfill, and the steady stream of chatter from Wes, who was a dear—really, she was happy to listen to his sorrows, David’s directive notwithstanding; flattered that he felt he could share them with her—but who was oblivious to her mounting nausea, so that Marta was almost grateful when that pop singer shamed him into silence with his silly song. The moment she was standing on solid ground again, she promised herself, she’d do better. But on the bus, sweat pricking at her temples and in the well of her clavicle, a finger of pain pressed into her sinuses, she wanted only silence.

  So when the bus finally did pull into the parking lot outside the old restaurant, she told Wes to go on in without her—she’d follow when she had a moment to gather herself—bypassed Andy and Tia and their offerings of food and drink, and retreated behind the cover of the bus, where the newly laid blacktop stopped and the lawn (mown sometime in the not so distant past) began. Alone, finally, she started heaving, vomiting only water, then nothing, and then she sat back on her bottom, in the grass, and wiped
her face with the sleeve of her microsuit, catching her breath.

  A few minutes later, Wes found her. “Marta? You OK?”

  She had rested her crossed arms on top of her knees, and her forehead against her forearms, and so she nodded down into the dark well her body had created. The gentle pressure of Wes’s palm resting on the crown of her head was soothing. “Just carsick,” she said. “I’m not off to a strong start, am I?”

  “You need to rest and get something in your stomach,” Wes said gently. “I’m surprised I’m not down there yakking with you. I’m a yakker, if you haven’t noticed.”

  She remembered, lips twitching into a small smile, his race out of the gymnasium that first day of their training. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t be wallowing down here on the ground.” She looked up and offered Wes her hand. “Give me a lift?”

  He pulled her to a stand, and they walked together back to the open expanse of the parking lot. “I know that Andy had some bottled waters along with the juice. Do you want one?”

  “Sure,” Marta said.

  “Just hold tight. I’ll be right back.”

  The irony, she would think later—and this was perhaps something to be grateful for—was that she was feeling good in this moment, almost as good as she’d felt a few hours ago, when she and Wes first boarded the bus. The nausea was gone. The air was fresh on her face. Her lower back and hips, which had been getting a little tight during the long drive, were warming up. She thought she might even have an appetite, finally.

  And then she felt it. The sensation. Unmistakable, as promised.