Already thinking about the next time. Rose petals okay?
Rose petals? For what? For her? She quickly established that HOTEL had written that last text, not Joel. She scrolled down.
Checking out at seven. Will you be at the desk?
That was Joel. Oh, okay. She touched the red rose at the top of the screen to check the number. It was a 612 area code. So this must be the hotel Joel stayed at in Minnesota when he traveled for business. He was heading a team that was marketing a new hotel concept within a larger hotel chain. That made sense. He went to that hotel at least once a month, sometimes more.
She kept scrolling.
HOTEL: Not scheduled to be but I’ll come in anyway. Should I come up to your room?
Joel: I’ll call you.
That’s a little weird, Hannah thought.
HOTEL: Eagerly awaiting your arrival.
Joel: I eagerly await my arrival too.
HOTEL: Eleven days is a long time.
Joel: Trying to move it up a day.
Hannah moved faster and faster through the texts. Some seemed like extremely normal texts from a hotel—Your room will be ready at 3:00; Room service will arrive by 8:00—but others, well, they seemed a little personal. Was she being crazy? She worried about tons of things—that her kids would get away from Monica when they were crossing the street; that Richard was slowly losing his amazing mind; that their son, Lincoln, would go down a dark, anxiety-riddled path that never led to anyplace good; that a devastating hurricane would be named after one of them, forever marring that name—but she never worried about Joel. She got out of that text stream and shut down the phone. She had a distinct feeling that she didn’t want to know—whatever it was, she didn’t want it. When she eased the phone back toward Joel, she was shocked to see he was wide awake and looking at her. The phone slipped out of her hand, and he reached to grab it, catching it awkwardly. They were both breathing so heavily they could hear it in the silence of the train car. Crazy words ran through her head—before and after, affair, betrayal—all words she did not want to say out loud. Joel looked like he was going to say something, but she shushed him under the guise of the quiet-car rules. She would figure this out, and then they would talk. This made no sense at all.
“Hannah,” Joel said full out, not trying to keep his voice down at all, not honoring her unspoken request to save it for later.
“Don’t,” she said, also at full volume, which might as well have been yelling in the quiet car.
“Hannah,” he said again, looking paler and paler as the seconds ticked by. “I never meant—I should have—I—I’m sorry.”
Hannah looked at him sharply. If he was sorry, that meant there was something to be sorry about. This was exactly where she didn’t want this conversation to go. She wanted it to go something like, Oh, you saw those texts from Hotel? Those were really from Dave; we were goofing around.
Joel continued to look at her, continued to appear to be about to keep talking, but he didn’t. This was why she never worried about Joel. He was so tuned in to her, aware of what she needed before she even knew it half the time. Someone like that was not going to betray anyone, was he?
“About what?” she finally asked, louder than normal volume. It really was yelling at that point. “Who is Hotel?”
He kept staring at her. He almost looked unable to speak, like something was physically wrong. But she wasn’t going to give that to him. She wasn’t going to ask if he was okay.
“Who is Hotel?” she asked again, even louder this time.
“It’s the quiet car,” a tiny voice said from four seats back.
“I know it’s the quiet car,” Hannah said. “Believe me, I know.”
“Come on,” Joel said, coming out of his stupor, collecting his things. “Let’s go to the next car.”
“I don’t want to,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you.”
She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to know. She felt—well, the best word for it was cold, like she had slipped into a freezing lake, and every time she moved, it felt more real and more uncomfortable. She had thought they had made it through those dangerous years when so many of their friends had been splitting up after discovering infidelities or realizing that they really didn’t like each other. Some of those breakups had made sense, and some had been completely shocking. If half of all marriages ended in divorce, she often thought, then half of all marriages stayed intact. She’d been certain they were in the second half—the half that was lucky, the half that didn’t have to set up two households and figure out a schedule for the kids. Had she been wrong?
“Who is Hotel?” she said again. Screw the quiet car.
“Hotel is Tara,” he said quietly. “I’m so—”
“No,” she said, putting up her hand. She did not want to hear it. “No,” she said firmly.
He turned in his seat so he was facing forward. She could still hear him breathing. He looked even paler. She glanced past him and out the window. They were in North Philadelphia. They were almost home.
Hannah and Joel observed the rules of the quiet car for the next fifteen minutes as the train eased its way into 30th Street Station. They had already talked about taking an Uber home. It was later than they’d thought it would be—the ceremony had gone over, and they’d had to take a later train.
They didn’t talk while they got off the train, took the escalator up into the cavernous station, and walked toward the exit. They stood there. Had he called the Uber? She didn’t want to ask. Usually they might discuss which type of Uber to take. She always wanted to take the fancier Black, and he always wanted to save money by taking an X, but she didn’t want to speak. She didn’t want to hear him say he was sorry.
The Uber came, an X, and they got in. She looked out as they drove through the streets, at all the things she usually loved, the places that meant she was home, as they headed south toward Castle Avenue. When they crossed Washington, she decided she would deal with this tomorrow. It wasn’t like she could get a divorce tonight, right? Well, there was probably some divorce lawyer you could call at all hours, but she wasn’t sure how to find him or her. Was that where this was going to go? Was there a choice once you discovered something like this? Don’t get ahead of yourself, she chanted in her mind. Don’t get ahead of yourself. She thought of Kim and how awful the last year had been for her, how she felt so much for her but always put herself in that different category. Nothing about where Kim was now—officially divorced, lonely, and with the kids only half the week—looked better. She felt a sudden tickle in her throat and coughed. The more she thought about it, the harder it was to not cough. She coughed again, checking to see if there was a bottle of water there for her, as there would be in an Uber Black, something to wash all this away, but there wasn’t. She cleared her throat. Joel looked at her, and she waved him off.
As they got closer, Hannah heard sirens. For a second she was glad someone else was having a crisis; then she scolded herself. That was not good karma. She glanced at Joel. He responded, turning toward her.
“I’m so—” he started.
“No,” she said again.
“This block?” the Uber driver asked, slowing on 13th Street instead of turning onto Castle Avenue.
“Yes,” Joel said.
“Can I leave you here?” he asked. “Looks like something’s going on down there.”
That was when Hannah realized the sirens she’d heard had been heading here. There were two fire trucks and three police cars on the usually quiet street. She could see neighbors out on the stoops and porches. The car was still inching along, but she opened the door, and the driver slammed on the brakes. They were jolted forward and back, and Hannah was out, leaving Joel to deal with the bags and the plaque. That was the least he could do.
Their house was toward the middle of the block, on the north side of the street, and she kept looking ahead to see where the problem was. She saw her neighbor Simon first. He was older, lived al
one, and often opened his window to yell at someone who wasn’t parking efficiently.
“Hey, what’s going on?” she said to him, not quite stopping as she moved by him but hoping for a quick answer. She could see Joel now with everything over his shoulder and in his arms, looking concerned, shutting the door with his foot, and then having to do it again.
“Smoke,” Simon said. “At the Kingdans’.”
“Yikes,” she said, still moving. The Kingdans were their next-door neighbors, and they shared a wall. The houses on the north side of Castle Avenue were twins, different from the usual row homes of Philadelphia. The south side of the street had the more typical row houses.
She could see the Kingdans’ door was open, and there was smoke, not so much thick smoke but the sort of smoke you might see coming off a barbecue. A fireman was knocking on Hannah’s door, and she ran the few feet to meet him.
“That’s me,” she said, breathless. “My kids are in there.”
The door opened, and Monica looked out, confused.
“An alarm just started going off in here,” she said. “I was just about to call someone—911, I guess.”
Hannah wanted to say something snarky—911, she guessed? Was that even a question? Who else was she going to call?
The fireman went inside, Hannah was right behind him and Joel behind her. He piled everything from his arms onto the table near the front door.
“I think it’s the smoke alarm,” Hannah said.
“No,” Joel said quickly, leaning over to steady the plaque, which was threatening to slip down a teetering pile of mail. “That’s carbon monoxide.”
“Okay, we need to get everyone out,” the fireman said.
They scattered. Monica grabbed Lincoln, who was on the couch reading, and took him out the door. Joel and Hannah ran upstairs, and then Joel backed off, letting Hannah go for Ridley. She met him back at the top of the stairs, and Joel waited so Hannah could go first. They were all out the door in seconds, it seemed. By then more people were out; the block was full of neighbors. Smoke was still coming from the Kingdans’, but there were no flames that Hannah could see. There were so many alarms going off in all the different houses it was hard to know where to turn. Ridley’s eyes were wide, and she was looking around. Monica had put Lincoln down and was holding his hand, leaning over and talking to him.
“Where’s Stinker?” Ridley asked. She was five and loved her stuffed skunk more than she loved pretty much any of them.
Hannah had no choice but to talk to Joel.
“We left Stinker inside,” she said, pointing into their now apparently off-limits house.
“On it,” Joel said, as she’d known he would. He waited until the fireman’s back was turned, then sprinted in the open door, up the stairs, and back down in what seemed like under a minute with the scraggly black-and-white stuffed animal. Ridley reached out and grabbed it.
Joel walked over to one of the police officers. Hannah had the strangest feeling of comfort from his taking charge and horror that he was likely not hers in the same way anymore. Was that really going to be true? Maybe not. She hadn’t heard about it yet. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. It was just like her to jump to conclusions.
“What do you think, Officer?” Joel asked in his jovial way.
“Not sure,” the police officer said distractedly.
“We have two kids,” Joel said warmly. “I’m just trying to get a sense of what we should do.”
“Can you hang tight for a few minutes?” the officer said. “I should know more soon.”
“Yes, of course, thank you,” Joel said.
They watched as firemen went in and out of their house and the houses next to theirs, moving from east to west. A bunch of Lincoln’s friends came out in their pajamas, and they stood together, mesmerized. One mom approached a firefighter and asked if the kids could have a tour of the truck.
“Not while we’re in the middle of an active scene, ma’am,” Hannah heard him say.
“My house is okay,” Simon called. “I got the all clear. Everyone is welcome.”
Hannah looked to Joel with raised eyebrows before she remembered. She looked away.
“Let’s head over,” Joel said, not even trying to meet her gaze. “It’s really hot out here.”
CHAPTER TWO
They traipsed down to Simon’s. Hannah didn’t want to be there; she wanted to be home. No, that wasn’t right, either—she wanted to be at home before she saw the texts. She wanted it to be yesterday or last week. But that wasn’t even right, she realized, because if something was going on, it had been happening yesterday and last week. A whole new level of fear settled in just as they reached Simon’s door.
The kids gathered together around the food Simon had put out, and Hannah and Joel just stood there.
“We might have to find a hotel for the night,” he said.
Hotel.
“How could you?” she said under her breath, forgetting her decision to wait until tomorrow to deal with it. She sounded loud in Simon’s living room. She knew she should be careful. She didn’t need everyone to know their business. But at the mention of the word hotel, she couldn’t hold back anymore. “What were you thinking?”
He looked at her and nodded, as if to say, Okay, so we are going to talk about this now. His cheeks were pink, but behind that he looked a little green. His still-thick dark hair fell over his forehead. He took a deep breath.
“Anything I say will sound like a cliché, but it’s all true. I didn’t ever mean for it to happen. I didn’t go looking for it. It’s over. It’s been over for a while now. I just couldn’t do it. I missed you when I was with her. I don’t, I didn’t, love her.”
“It’s over? You didn’t love her?” she repeated, still too loud. But nobody was paying any attention to them. “What exactly is over? And really, you’re throwing the word love into this?”
“No, not love, of course not,” he said quickly. “I will never, ever understand why I did it, why I let it happen, how I let it happen. She was always there, she was so—forceful. And then one night—it was in May—I had way too much to drink, and . . .”
Hannah put up her hand. She wasn’t ready for this. He kept talking anyway.
“And then I came home to you, and I was sick, literally, and when I went back, I was like, I don’t know, like, unable to do anything, unable to see clearly, in some sort of trance. I was—look, I don’t want to make excuses, but I want to somehow explain that when I was there, with her, those few times, I convinced myself she was separate from this.”
When he said the word this, he looked around, at the kids, at her. He pointed his right arm toward the door and the block.
“Separate?” Hannah hissed, remembering that week in May. He really had been sick, barely getting off the couch. In fact, he had slept on the couch all week, saying he was too weak to go up the stairs. And she had felt sorry for him! “Like when you agreed to forsake all others when we got married, she wasn’t included in that? She was separate?”
“Well, no,” Joel said. Something strange crossed his face, and he looked around, slowly at first but then more frantically. Hannah thought he was looking for the kids; they had moved from standing over the table to sitting on the couch, but they were clearly there, impossible to miss. He ran out the open door and vomited all over the porch, messy vomit. He stood there, his hands on his thighs, bent over, breathing hard. Hannah knew she should go to him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move her feet. She watched as he bent even closer to the ground and vomited again. Another neighbor, Helene, came up behind him and talked quietly to him, and then a police officer was there. Hannah moved closer to the door.
“How long were you inside your house?” the officer asked.
“Not long,” Joel managed. “Not long at all.”
He leaned over and vomited for the third time. Hannah watched the officer look up and around, and she had to go over.
“I’m his wife,” she said, and it s
ounded so different from how it would have sounded even just an hour ago.
“I’m concerned he took in some carbon monoxide. He should get checked out. We can take him to the ER.”
“No, he didn’t,” Hannah said, trying not to sound annoyed. A normal wife would be concerned. But she wasn’t a normal wife. Not anymore. “We were in there for almost the exact same amount of time—he might have been in there a minute or two longer—and I’m fine.”
“You can’t play around with this, ma’am,” he said before talking into his walkie-talkie. And then someone else was there, ready to lead Joel away. “It affects everyone in different ways.”
“Wait!” Hannah said and looked for Monica. She spotted her and jogged over. “Joel threw up, we’re going to the ER. I really think he’s fine, but they’re insisting because of the carbon monoxide. Can you stay here with the kids?” It was all crazy, leaving her with them. What if they had to evacuate the entire block? What would Monica do then?
Helene came up next to them. “You go with Joel,” she said. “I’ll make sure they’re okay. If we have to go somewhere, we’ll all go together. I’ll stay in touch.”
“Mommy?” Lincoln whined. He was next to her, by her leg. She hadn’t even seen him move toward her. “I don’t want you to go.”
“Oh, sweetie, it’s okay,” she said, kneeling down and hugging him. She still had the impulse to make sure he had Dune, his beloved stuffed black bear, but when he’d turned eight a few months ago, he had cast him off. It was mostly a relief since they were constantly worrying about where the bear was. Said bear, if anyone was wondering, was currently jammed in Lincoln’s closet under all his shoes, which Lincoln said Dune liked because his back was itchy. Thinking of that now made Hannah realize he wasn’t done with him yet, not even close, and she wished she had thought of Dune when Ridley had mentioned Stinker, but clearly it was way too late for that now. “Daddy felt a little sick. He’s okay, but we just want to make sure, so we’re going to take a quick trip to see the doctor. We’ll be back soon.”
Beside Herself Page 2
