Another Place You've Never Been

by Rebecca Kauffman

  “I’m only gonna say it once,” Tracy said after the newlyweds had moved on to the next table. “I think Chris could do better.”

  “She’s all right,” Tom shrugged.

  Tracy had an iced tea in front of her. She took a Sweet’N Low packet from a little glass box and shook it by its corner before tearing into it. “I liked that last girl he was with a lot more.”

  Amelia wondered what Tracy thought of Tom’s last girlfriend.

  Amelia slipped out to the lobby to call her mother at nine o’clock.

  Everything had gone just fine, her mother said, Casey was already asleep.

  “I wanted to say ‘night,” Amelia said.

  “I can wake her if you want me to.”

  “Nah.” Amelia curled the cord around her index finger.

  “How’s the party?”

  “It’s good,” Amelia said. “Did it take her a while to fall asleep?”

  “Nope, we didn’t even make it through all the books you left.”

  “Oh . . .” Amelia licked a spot of whipped cream from the outside of her hand. “I was afraid she might have trouble. Did she eat enough for dinner?”

  “She ate plenty. Everything’s fine, quit your worrying and we’ll see you in the morning.”

  Amelia hung up the phone and stepped outside. A few of the groomsmen were smoking cigarettes by the dumpster. Their ties were loose and one of them was wearing aviator sunglasses on a chain around his neck. The wooded area beyond the lot was winking with fireflies. A mile or two up the shore, Amelia could make out the eight enormous white wind turbines that powered half of Lackawanna. She’d never before seen all of the windmills completely still, their limbs at rest in odd angles to one another. The air purred with nocturnal insects.

  Inside, Tom said, “Everything OK?”

  “She had some trouble getting to sleep without me, but . . . I think everything’s good.”

  Tom looked at Tracy. “She always does this.”

  “What do I do?” Amelia said.

  “What does she do?” Tracy said.

  “You worry.”

  “Oh.” Amelia smiled softly, bravely.

  At midnight, the three of them retrieved their overnight bags from the coat check and split a cab downtown.

  “Are you staying at the Embassy Suites too?” Amelia said.

  “No,” Tracy said. “My friend lives a block or two away, I’ll crash at her place.”

  When Tracy got out of the cab, Tom said, “She’s a hoot, isn’t she? I knew you’d love her.”

  “She sure likes to make people squirm.”

  “You’re the only one that’s squirming.” Tom poked Amelia in the side.

  There were two identical beach paintings in their hotel room. One hung over the bed, and the other above the desk, where a phone book sat next to a pad of stationary and a wire cup of navy pens. Two thin terrycloth robes were folded neatly on the luggage rack.

  Amelia went into the bathroom. Her hair was heavy with product so she pulled it back into a ponytail. She wrestled her dress off over her head and looked at herself in the full-body mirror. She didn’t take off her heels. She adjusted her breasts within her bra so they were symmetrical.

  They had been dating for several months, but since Tom had roommates and Amelia had her daughter, the only sex they’d had so far was brief and silent and in broad daylight. Tom had always touched her with the utmost caution and restraint, and Amelia wondered what it was about her that seemed so breakable. She wondered how he described her to his friends. She thought of the girl she’d accidentally encountered on a magazine in Tom’s desk once when he was out of the room. She tried to arrange that girl’s slinky, daring expression on her own face, but it didn’t sit right.

  When she peeked around the bathroom door, she saw that Tom was lying on the bed with his legs crossed and a sports show on mute. She stepped out of the bathroom with one slow, long stride. She had trouble keeping her balance on one heel and fought the surge of nervous, little-girl laughter that pumped in her chest.

  “Look at you,” Tom said, digging his fists into the bed and sitting up straight.

  He ran his warm nose along her collarbone. She sighed in a small, urgent voice. The hotel phone on the bedside table rang. Tom made a face at it and turned back to Amelia. He worked at the clasp of her bra.

  The phone rang again, and a moment later, a third time.

  Tom said, “Come on,” as he pulled away from Amelia to answer the phone. “Uh-huh,” he said into the receiver, his hands on Amelia’s hips, shoulder cradling the phone to his ear. “Uh-huh, OK, no problem.” He hung up the phone.

  “Tracy’s friend isn’t home and she’s locked out of the place,” he said, bringing his hands to his lap. He sighed. “She’s downstairs in the lobby with a six-pack.”

  Amelia looked down at the comforter and ran her finger in a slow circle over the pattern.

  “Sorry, hon,” he said. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t stay long. I just feel bad, she’s got no place to go, her mom isn’t answering her calls...”

  “No, of course,” Amelia said. “Of course.”

  She wiggled back into her dress and needed his help with the zipper.

  Tracy arranged herself across the pillows at the head of the bed, her tanned legs tossed out over the comforter. She had a black scab on her knee. She pulled the Coors Lights from a crinkled deli bag and handed one to both of them.

  “Hey, you have something here,” Tracy said, leaning toward Amelia and pointing at the bridge of her own nose.

  Amelia flushed immediately and covered her face with her whole palm. “It’s a skin thing,” she said. “A condition. From when I was pregnant.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Tracy said. “I noticed it earlier, it looks different in this light.”

  Tom cleared his throat and put his hand on Amelia’s knee.

  “How’d you come up with Cassie, anyway?” Tracy said.

  “What?”

  “Your daughter. Is she named after somebody?”

  “It’s Casey,” Tom corrected her before Amelia could.

  “No, it’s not a family name or anything.” Amelia’s dress felt hot and tight. “I just like it.”

  Tracy took a sip of her beer. “I hate Florida,” she announced. “I’ve got like no friends.”

  “You should move back here,” Tom nodded emphatically.

  Tracy drank three beers by herself while she talked about how lonely she was in Tallahassee, how much she missed Buffalo. How much she’d like to see her father, if only she could afford to go up to Michigan.

  Amelia wondered how this girl rationalized and spoke so easily around what seemed obvious; that her parents were bad parents who made no effort to see or look after her. Tracy spoke about these things openly and with a casual thoughtlessness, as though she might bare her entire soul by accident, although she never shed a tear. Amelia was starting to recognize the gulf between people with parents like her own, parents who worried, and people with parents like these. She wished she was home with her own mother and her own daughter.

  “How’s your mom, anyway, Trace?” Tom said. “I haven’t seen her in a while. Why wasn’t she at the wedding?”

  “She probably overslept,” Tracy said. “She forgot to pick me up at the airport Friday. I had to take a forty-dollar cab.”

  “Geez,” Tom said.

  Tracy sank back into the pillows. The overhead light was off and a single lamp made the room soft and gold. She put her arms in the air and swayed them back and forth to the music of the commercial on TV. Her hair had collected sweat at the tips and it was heavy across her forehead. Amelia pulled the rubber band from her own hair and put it around her wrist. She wondered how bad the ponytail crease was.

  Tracy picked up the phone at the bedside table and held it to her face. “Should we order a bottle of wine from room service, or what?” She nodded at the beer between her legs. “This is the last one.”

  Tom squinted at the digital clock.r />
  “Come on, Tommy,” Tracy twisted and untwisted the cord between her fingers. “When’s the last time we hung out?” She puffed out her bottom lip and blinked fast.

  Tom sighed. He didn’t look at Amelia. “All right,” he said to Tracy. “Cool your jets. All right, all right. Get the cheapest red.”

  Amelia went to the bathroom while Tracy made the call. When she turned off the faucet, she noticed that it was silent in the other room except for the low hum and game-show voices on the TV. She went to the wall and pressed her face against it. The tile was cool on her cheek. She didn’t breathe. The wall sounded vast and lonesome at her ear, like a conch shell.

  Amelia’s own cousin Ray was four years older than her and they had kissed on the mouth once at Christmas when she was ten. He’d acted like he wanted to do more but she couldn’t stop laughing, which made him mad.

  Amelia opened the door. Tom was stretched on his back across the foot of the bed and his eyes were closed, his fingers crossed at his chest.

  “I’m gonna get a cab,” Amelia whispered to Tracy. “I think Casey’s probably having trouble sleeping, she always does when I’m not there.”

  Tracy’s mouth sagged open with a yawn. Her dress was hiked up around her waist and she held the beer between her thighs, right against her crotch.

  “It’s none of my business . . .” Tracy said. “But I think you’ve gotta toughen a kid up, you know? Or they’ll turn out too soft.” She stared at the scab on her knee then peeled up the corner of it with her fingernail.

  Amelia picked up her purse.

  “I’m serious,” Tracy continued. “I think sometimes a kid just has to learn stuff the hard way.” She ran her index finger around the lip of her beer. “My mom always says how when I was little, she’d let me bawl for hours and hours every single night, alone in my crib, so I’d learn to put myself to sleep. And eventually I did.”

  Amelia thought about what Tracy had said earlier. She pictured Tracy at the airport on Friday, and wondered how long Tracy had sat waiting for her mother to pick her up before realizing that she wasn’t coming.

  Tracy pulled the bottle out from between her legs and it squeaked across her skin. She finished the beer in one swallow. She blinked slowly and only one of her eyes reopened. “Later,” she said, saluting Amelia slowly with two fingers.

  Amelia gave Tracy a little wave and crept across the room barefoot with her bag over one shoulder and the straps of her shoes dangling from her index finger.

  Tom stirred when she opened the door. “Are you leaving?” he lifted his chin half an inch to scowl at Amelia, then he turned to Tracy.

  “She always does this,” he said.

  THE SPLASH ZONE

  SeaWorld of Aurora, Ohio, was a bright, dusty, screaming place. Charlie was wearing a visor with tiny silver dolphins embedded in the cobalt blue foam. Jim suspected it was a gift from his ex-wife Laura’s new boyfriend, who she had described as “imaginative.” Jim hadn’t met the guy.

  Jim and Charlie stared at a three-dimensional map of the place, which offered auditory descriptions of each exhibit if you pressed the corresponding button. Hard plastic sea creatures blinked and vibrated and spoke if you turned them like a knob; a penguin, a walrus, an otter whose head looked gnawed on. Jim and Charlie listened to them all and double-checked the times of the Shamu show, which Charlie wanted to save for last. He wanted to get there at least half an hour, no, maybe a whole hour early so they would be guaranteed seats in the Splash Zone.

  Jim didn’t particularly want to be in the Splash Zone. He didn’t have towels in the car to protect his leather seats for the long drive home. He couldn’t really afford that car but had gotten a good deal since he worked at the dealership. He was also irritated to note that Charlie, like his mother, was already becoming a stickler on time. Laura had been a tyrant when it came to punctuality. Even before they were married, she would get all silent and uppity with Jim if he kept her waiting so much as five minutes.

  He asked Charlie where he wanted to start.

  “Sharks,” Charlie said, then he scowled up at his father. “Dad, you didn’t even notice.” He threw his head back and jutted his lower jaw out into the sunshine.

  “Lost your first tooth, did you?” Jim said.

  “Wanna feel it?” Charlie grabbed Jim’s index finger and put it into his mouth. It was hot and airless in there. Charlie guided the tip of his father’s finger to the empty space.

  “Did it hurt?” Jim asked. He pulled his finger out of Charlie’s mouth and wiped it on his thigh.

  “No,” Charlie said, “but it bled a ton.”

  On their way to the shark tank, they passed a girl handing out water-soluble tattoos from a little blue pail. She was wearing way too much makeup for eleven o’clock in the morning, and a shirt that sat precariously on the corners of her slim shoulders. Jim wondered about the logistics of a bra, the likelihood that she was wearing one.

  “You want one of those tattoos?” he asked Charlie.

  The girl had a black spike through her eyebrow and she itched her face around it while Charlie sifted through the bucket. Jim couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her. She looked vaguely hungover, like she probably didn’t want to talk weather, or whales. Her arms were as skinny and shapeless as noodles.

  Charlie settled on a Shamu tattoo, and Jim knelt to apply it. He was instantly pained by the familiar soupy smell of their house that clung to Charlie’s shirt. The studio loft where Jim now lived by himself smelled inky and hygienic, like a place with too many rules. He peeled off the thin cover of the tattoo, licked his thumb, and smoothed the colored print over Charlie’s cheek. He held it there for a few seconds, palming Charlie’s skull in order to press the thing on nice and tight. He listened to a far-off megaphone crackle and broadcast an Australian guy going on about conservation.

  Charlie examined his reflection in a nearby soda machine.

  “Cool. Very cool. I want you to have one too,” he said, so Jim got a second tattoo and applied it to his own cheek.

  The shark tank surrounded a long, narrow viewing tunnel with glass lining the sides and overhead. An eerie, hollow drone played over the intercom—it was like stepping inside one of those sea-shells you hold up to your ear. The lighting was a cool and dark artificial green.

  Sharks drifted by on both sides and loomed above them, looking bored and smug and well fed. A toddler shrieked and pounded the glass right in front of a tiger shark. The thing didn’t give a shit.

  Midway through the tunnel, they reached a massive jawbone mounted on a stainless-steel base. The bone was at least three feet across and gaping open nearly as tall as it was wide. Gleaming silver screws held it together at the corner hinges. The bone was yellowy gray, like an old baseball. The largest center teeth were as big as spearheads. Jim watched another dad put his head through the jawbone and make terrible faces like he was getting eaten, while his kids on either side of him squealed and pulled on his arms. Charlie was watching too, looking like he wanted to be in on the fun.

  A freckled girl with a long blond braid stood next to the jawbone, holding a stack of pamphlets on the great white’s status as an endangered species. She wore a light blue polo shirt with a shark embroidered on the collar. She brushed her cheek gently with the loose end of her braid.

  Jim stepped forward to take a closer look at the bone and he noticed an empty spot along the bottom row of teeth. He ran his finger along that smooth pocket.

  “Look here,” Jim said to Charlie, “he’s missing one just like you. Hey, did you put that tooth under your pillow?”

  “Nah, I don’t believe in fairies,” Charlie said.

  “What’d you do with it?” Jim absently stroked the jawbone then placed his whole palm over it.

  “Kevin has it.”

  Jim stared at his son.

  “Mom’s new friend Kevin,” Charlie explained.

  “Yeah, I know who Kevin is,” Jim said. “What the hell sort of business does Kevin have wit
h your tooth?”

  “We were at his house when it came out. I was eating a granola bar.” Charlie’s voice shrank with each word. “He cleaned the blood off and put it in a little bowl. It’s in my room there.”

  Jim pictured Charlie’s tooth, tiny and perfect like a little pearl sliced in half, the root as delicate as an eggshell.

  He thought of the small wooden box where he’d kept all of his own baby teeth when he was a boy. The inside of the box was lined with burgundy velvet. Sometimes, he remembered, he’d take his teeth out of that box and arrange them on the floor in the shape of a jaw, to try and recreate the skeleton of his own mouth in the carpet before him.

  Then Jim pictured the tooth sitting in this bowl in Kevin’s house. Kevin’s house, where Charlie evidently had his own bedroom. Kevin’s house, where Kevin was doing God only knew what sorts of imaginative things to Jim’s ex-wife at that very moment.

  “Sir,” the girl in the polo shirt stepped toward Jim and gave him an ominous look. “Sir, you can’t touch that,” she said. She pointed at a small bronze plaque that read “Please Do Not Touch.”

  Jim looked down and realized he was gripping the shark’s jaw in a hard fist like he was about to rip the whole thing off the steel base. He didn’t let go. A woman standing nearby moved slowly to position herself between Jim and her stroller. A plushy Cleveland Browns throw blanket covered the contents of the stroller entirely.

  Jim wondered how much force it would take to free the jawbone. He wondered how thick the glass of the tank was—how hard it would be to fill that whole tunnel with a rush of rancid salted water and confused sharks. He felt his own face cycling through a series of wild and careless expressions. He was slick and cool with sweat.

  “Sir, please let go of that bone,” the girl said. She was scared now. Her voice sounded like something small getting the life squeezed out of it.