The Moment Between

by Nicole Baart

  The passengers of flight 842 from Denver moved as one through the silent airport, and Abigail let herself be swept along. She had just spent three hours trying to sleep, and she hadn’t achieved even a moment of rest. Now she was beyond weary and incapable of doing anything but following.

  Clutching the soft, supple strap of her attaché, Abigail tried to conjure up some of the excitement that she knew she should be feeling. She was close! According to the map that she had printed from MapQuest, Tyler was 136 miles away. Or 218.8 kilometers if she felt like measuring it according to the standard of her destination. True, in Florida Tyler had lived less than a twenty-minute drive from Abigail. But this was different. Then she hadn’t known who he was or what he meant to her. Now, with nothing but an international border and a relatively short drive between them, Abigail knew she should be frantic with anticipation.

  Instead, she was exhausted. And afraid.

  The thought hit Abigail so hard she actually let out a stifled gasp.

  “You okay?” An elderly gentleman with a houndstooth cap mistook her muffled cry and put a steadying hand beneath her elbow.

  “I tripped,” Abigail heard herself say. “I’m fine.” She tried to smile her thanks.

  He smiled back uncertainly before turning to step on the underground train that would take them to the baggage claim.

  Abigail followed the crowd to the silver carousel. She stood there for a couple minutes, watching the bags drop gracelessly off the edge of the conveyor belt and begin their slow rotation around the oval track, before she remembered that she hadn’t checked any luggage and her bags were already in her hands. Nothing was stopping her from walking across the threshold of those sliding doors and facing everything she knew she had to face.

  But she wasn’t quite ready to face anything, and her subconscious noted this fact by refusing to recall which rental car agency she had booked her car with. Avis? Advantage? Dollar? They all looked the same, lined up in a neat row against the wall between the air-lock doors that opened onto Seattle, Washington. Abigail studied them until she felt silly just standing there, and she hesitantly approached the nearest counter to ring the summons bell. She had to start somewhere.

  A young clerk emerged disheveled and bleary-eyed from the back room.

  “Abigail Bennett,” she said in response to his tacit query. Abigail fully expected him to check his computer and roll his eyes, sending her away in aggravation because she interrupted his late night nap. Instead, the scruffy-haired attendant slipped her some paperwork to sign and initial, then offered her a ticket for the underground car claim.

  When Abigail traveled for work, she rode in austere luxury sedans with uniformed drivers and muted, leather interiors filled with classical music. In contrast, the electric metallic orange Kia Spectra that the parking garage attendant led her to was a bit of a shock, but she had tried to be frugal when she booked the compact car; after all, she was traveling alone and had no need for a large vehicle. Frugality was the same excuse she had used when arranging her flight to Seattle instead of Vancouver. She just couldn’t stomach the five hundred dollar price tag difference or the inflated cost of rental cars across the border. Abigail didn’t have to worry about money, but her Midwestern upbringing refused to let her squander it.

  However, the Kia was a bit more economical—not to mention garish—than she had intended to be, and Abigail thought about requesting another car before she was left alone in the dreary parking garage. But the overwhelming residue of exhaust fumes hung in the air, and it was simply too much work to do anything other than climb into the little car and drive away.

  The West Coast air that nipped at Abigail in the underground garage crept through the cracks in the car doors and around the windshield the second she emerged into the dark night. It was drizzling slightly; the sky was thick with wet that seemed intentionally positioned to make sure there wasn’t a single pinprick refuge of air that was not damp.

  Abigail cranked the heater in her car and still managed to shiver uncontrollably. After Florida, the Pacific Northwest was almost oppressive in its soggy chill. Though it was probably near sixty degrees outside, the cool hung against the exposed skin at Abigail’s neck like a mist of perfume that would not evaporate.

  I-5 was slick and busier than Abigail would have anticipated for one o’clock in the morning. Trucks churned up the thin sheet of water on the asphalt and dispersed it in a burst of gray to hover like a fine cloud around all eighteen wheels. Abigail tried to avoid the trucks, but whenever she switched lanes, she was sure she could feel the wheels of the Kia hydroplane and skim across the surface of the road before settling safely between the dotted lines again.

  Abigail had planned on driving straight into Canada. She figured the border crossing would be empty at this time of night and she’d sail through into her destination before finding a place to sleep. But the road and the rain were slowly eroding that haphazard plan. By the time the lights of downtown Seattle hovered in the distance, iridescent and wavering between the veil of drops, Abigail was looking for a roadside hotel.

  If she couldn’t see the hotel from the road, she refused to stop. Abigail was quite good with directions and perfectly capable of being on her own, but for some reason the interstate felt safe—she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she lost it she would not find her way back, and she would vanish in this place of inexhaustible, sodden night. Even as she thought it, Abigail laughed at herself. How ridiculous was this? How childlike and simple were her nocturnal fears? She had never been afraid of the dark; she convinced herself that there was no reason to be afraid now.

  And yet Abigail drove past a dozen signs for lodging. It wasn’t until she had reached the far outskirts of Everett that she finally saw a Holiday Inn immediately accessible from the highway. She turned onto the off-ramp in relief.

  By the time Abigail had secured a room, her head was throbbing and her body so chilled that her skin was clammy and her muscles were tight from shivering. Grabbing her room key from the desk clerk, she double-checked that the doors of the Kia were locked, even though she had left nothing inside it to steal. Then she mounted the wide steps to the second floor and found room 238.

  A hot shower did much to disperse the cold, until Abigail stepped out into the humid bathroom and found that the cool air could reach her even here. She crawled into bed with wet hair still wrapped in a towel and bundled the blankets around her body, tangling herself into the sheets so that every inch of her skin was covered with the scratchy cloth.

  Abigail lay in the semidarkness and found herself staring at the long lines of light foursquare around the window. She forced her eyes closed but realized that the numbers of the alarm clock were imprinting themselves in fluorescent green against the backs of her eyelids. Rolling over with a frustrated grunt, she squeezed her eyes shut yet again and willed herself to sleep. But it was useless. Abigail flung back the blankets, sat up straight, and opened the nightstand drawer.

  It was there. A neat, brick-colored book with a two-handled jar emitting a small, careful flame. Abigail didn’t open it, but she carried it to the desk, fumbling around in her attaché for the letter.

  The edges of the letter were ragged and worn, torn and thin from being handled so much. She had read it maybe a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. Abigail had memorized it the moment she read it, but there was something powerful about holding it anyway. She bristled, touching the paper now. But she wanted to sleep, so instead of flicking on the light to scan the words one more time, Abigail slid the folded note into the cover of the Bible and put them both in her bag.

  She hoped the Gideons would forgive her for her theft.

  †

  Abigail finally slept hard and deep, a solid and utterly dreamless sleep except for the vague and fleeting feeling that something was missing. It was less a dream than a sensation that evaporated as she faltered between sleep and wakefulness. Though the alarm clock assured her that she had over seven hours of rest behind her, Abig
ail woke to find herself still tired and crawling out from beneath the weight of something intangibly heavy. She didn’t know what to do other than take another shower.

  Checkout time was noon, and Abigail loitered in her room until five minutes before the lenient deadline. She wanted to leave, but she couldn’t go back to the Kia and the road that held so much uncertainty and not a single definable promise. Now, at the moment when what she longed for was close enough to touch, Abigail was positively frozen. She hated herself for her immobility even as she longed to drive back to Sea-Tac and hop on the first flight home.

  So Abigail procrastinated. She snuck to the little kitchen near the reception desk and took a stale muffin that she dawdled over one crumb at a time. She agonized over the thin line of her charcoal eyeliner. She even finger-fluffed her curls to the point of frizz and had to soak her hair in the sink and start all over again.

  At one point, Abigail went to her bag and retrieved the book that she had already claimed as her own. She held it in her hands, enjoying the weight of it, the familiar feel in her fingers. It felt right somehow, yet she had to acknowledge that she had left her own Bible behind in Florida. The abandonment had been intentional, and she couldn’t quite understand why she wanted the book in her hands now. Abigail rubbed her thumbs across the cover and wondered how many people, if any, had picked it up as it lay inert and unassuming in the top drawer of the nightstand. A part of her wanted to open it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

  When Abigail finally left the safe harbor of the Holiday Inn, she drove as hard and as fast as she had slept. She pointed her car north and put as many miles between herself and the road home as she could.

  The clouds that blanketed the sky the night before had been blown inland by a stiff breeze off the ocean, and the midday light was warm and bright as it glared off the hood of Abigail’s car. The sun was behind her as she drove, and the moist fog was a collection of gossamer shawls amidst the sweeping arcs of the jewel-toned mountains.

  Abigail had never been to the Pacific Northwest, and she found it haunting and magical, illusory and almost fragile, as if she could reach out and dispel the fantasy with a touch of her finger like an interruption on the clear surface of a deep, cold lake. It was all merely a reflection.

  But when she pulled over at a rest stop to stretch her legs, the cedars were decidedly solid and the air was infused with the earthy scents of moss and decay, wood and stone. Dressed in jeans and a designer T-shirt with a belted jacket, Abigail found that she wanted to tie up her coat when she stood in the shade and discard it in the sunshine. The air was so crisp, clean, and unfettered by the same sticky-hot humidity she had become accustomed to that it stung her lungs, and she drank it in greedy, gulping mouthfuls.

  It did much to calm her soul, the weather, the unexpected fairy tale of landscape. In some ways it seemed to affirm Abigail’s self-appointed mission, and she found herself believing in her own intentions much more than she had only hours before.

  The map she had printed out afforded her two different ways to enter the country, and Abigail opted to stay on I-5 and access Canada via the Peace Arch crossing. It was the touristy border crossing, awash with color from fuchsia rhododendron bushes and clumps of splattered paint–colored pansies that had yet to overrun their border beds. To her right, perfectly manicured lawns and gardens rolled over soft hills. To her left, Birch Bay sparkled in the sunlight with an almost-cheerful abandon.

  As she wound through the lush landscape and past the whitewashed arch between the two countries, Abigail couldn’t help but feel the consequence of what she was doing. Crossing a border felt significant somehow. Here were the markers that divided peoples and nations, ideologies and accents. Here was the place where the vigilantly drawn lines that kept everything neat and orderly converged. And Abigail was blurring the separation.

  But so were twenty cars ahead of her and another few dozen headed the opposite direction, going south on their way into the States. Abigail chided herself for being melodramatic, then focused on locating her passport.

  What would she say to the border guard? I’m traveling for business. That was a blatant lie. Though Abigail was a rather accomplished liar when she needed to be, she couldn’t stomach the thought of lying to a man in uniform, a man with a gun at his hip. Okay, then: I’m visiting a friend. He’d probably ask for a name and address. Abigail had those things but didn’t want to disclose them. I’m looking for someone. It was the closest approximation to the truth. She could work with that.

  Abigail practiced being vague as she watched the taillights in front of her slowly approach the covered vestibule where a handful of stern-faced roving officers studied each and every car through dark sunglasses. When they walked past her car, she debated: make eye contact and smile or pretend that she was engrossed in the pages of her nearly empty passport? She decided anonymity was key and so was the truth . . . or at least a watered-down version of it.

  But when the young guard walked up to her open window and asked her, “Business or pleasure?” she couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say.

  So she ended up doing exactly what she had promised herself she wouldn’t do. She lied. “I’m here for pleasure.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Surrey.”

  “How long do you plan to stay?”

  Abigail thought quickly. She had rented the Kia for three weeks. What was a reasonable time frame? “A couple weeks.”

  At this, the guard looked up from Abigail’s passport and studied her. “Pretty open-ended trip. Where are you staying?”

  The question seemed loaded. But the answer came easily to her; the falsified address was a few streets over from Gia’s Bakery and European Deli on the map she had printed off. The names of her imaginary Canadian friends she stole from her parents, with her mother’s maiden named tagged hastily and convincingly onto the end. “Louis and Melody Van Bemmel,” Abigail said without blinking.

  The border official downright warmed up at this point, obviously convinced that Abigail was not a national threat, and advised her to obtain a visitor record if she decided to stay in-country any longer. “You can’t work and you can’t vote,” he said, actually smiling. “Other than that, welcome to Canada. Enjoy your stay.”

  Abigail thanked him and pulled away, completely unaware until the checkpoint was behind her of how her heart had filled her chest as if swollen against a rib cage far too small to contain it. She breathed deeply until everything began to fit as it should and she felt something akin to normal.

  Then, pressing the pedal of the Kia all the way to the floor, she accelerated to merge with the traffic speeding up Highway 99. She knew from her map that it wound through the heart of Vancouver and beyond, finally merging with the Sea-to-Sky Highway and coiling deeper still until it nestled taciturn and snug among the mountains of Whistler and Blackcomb. Though her destination didn’t take her nearly so far, Abigail was seized with the desire to keep driving. She could drive until she ran out of road. She wouldn’t look back.

  †

  When Abby was born, Lou spent a whole lot of time looking back. Deep down, in a place where he only admitted even bits of the whole to himself, he secretly resented her for stealing Melody’s love and attention and making it her own. He didn’t understand the new feel of their marital unity—the way two had become one, then, inexplicably, three. What had been unbroken and full in its perfection was suddenly disjointed, divided and distant, as Melody became a rapturous mother and he a reluctant father to this infant intruder. Lou couldn’t help feeling like he had lost everything he loved to Abby.

  But when Hailey deigned to grace his life, Lou began to believe in a different sort of loss. He couldn’t explain it, couldn’t qualify it or even begin to unravel what it meant, but he would give himself freely, gladly, to this tiny baby with her feather white hair and eyes like the thinnest chip of blue blown glass. She only made his love for his wife more real. Hailey was the reincarnatio
n of the whole that he and Melody had achieved the day they said their marriage vows.

  Maybe it was because Hailey was so small, so fine. When Lou held her in the delivery room while they worked on Melody, she quivered in his hands and peered everywhere but at him. She cried a little, as if calling for someone just out of earshot, but she also sneaked peeks at Lou, and it seemed to him that she was wondering if he could provide what she needed.

  “I will,” he said. And he meant, Yes, whatever you need, whatever you want, to the best of my ability and until the day I die.

  But maybe Lou loved Hailey because she reminded him in some elusive way of the woman he fell in love with in a diner. Or he adored her because she was beautiful and coy and nearly ethereal in her delicacy and grace. Maybe he was just finally ready for everything he had not been prepared for when Abby became his firstborn. Whatever the rationale, it was surely not rational, because every single principle Lou had ever held to be true became irrelevant to the point of absurdity. The whole world tipped on its axis and spun recklessly, delightfully out of control.

  †

  While Lou exulted in the dawn of his universe, Abby agonized over where she fit into hers. Though she tried to rewrite it a hundred different ways, it all came back to the same incident, the same few hours that left nothing unchanged. It seemed that everything hinged irrevocably on the night Hailey was born.

  Years later, when Abby both loved and hated her sister, when she knew that Hailey was beloved and that she herself was neither unloved nor truly loved, when she hung in the balance between where everything was muted and lifeless and infuriating, Abby tried to console herself by imagining that Hailey was born of magic and moondust. Or more accurately comet dust. Who could do anything but love unconditionally such a consecrated child? How could she not do the same?