A photo. A family photo. I almost said the words aloud.
I was overjoyed, my heart punching my chest, but as I walked away the joy grew damp with dread. I looked for Cal, hoping he needed me for something. I wanted to go to the party but hoped to have a reason not to. I was afraid of what I would do, and I was afraid I wouldn’t do anything at all.
I found Cal making out with a woman. She looked like someone’s mother, and also a businesswoman. I wondered what I’d be mailing back to her the next day. I called Cal’s name, and he broke away from her.
“Bevie!” He sounded delighted. “Look, you go home. I’ve got a ride.”
“Do you need me to pick up the girls? I could stay with them.”
The girls. As though they were mine, too.
“No,” Cal said. “The bitch on wheels has them tonight.”
I walked away, but slowly. What if earlier, when we were walking from the car, I’d reached out and held his hand? What if we’d played the role of parents, even if only for one night?
But one thing in my life I was realistic about was this: I couldn’t make a move on Cal. I would have to quit a job I badly needed. I knew, too, that Cal was self-centered, had been a bad husband, and wasn’t that good of a father. And, no matter how dysfunctional our relationship already was, neither of us had anything else that was stable.
So I left Cal with the woman and went to the party.
* * *
The after party was at a motel off I-80. Beastific had booked a few rooms on the top floor. People wound their way in and out of rooms with doors propped open. Music blared and people mingled close to one another. I picked my way through plastic cups and wafting cigarette smoke, looking for Hadrian. I was curious to know how much the motel would charge their credit card for damages when all was said and done.
I went out on one of the balconies and watched cars go by, their headlights straining to cut through the dark. I swayed against the railing, suddenly dizzy from the height and from the beer I’d been handed upon entry.
I felt a gust of air behind me. Someone had slid open the glass door. I turned to see Hadrian, who was flanked by two girls who looked to be in their twenties. I looked at the blond one with her lips near Hadrian’s earlobe and saw Caroline. The sulking one behind her could be Maggie in ten years. What I felt when I looked at them wasn’t rivalry but a hope that Hadrian wouldn’t use them—and in that sense I wanted to take him from them, because I’d already been used, and when one got to be my age, being used was at least a little bit of excitement.
“Hey,” Hadrian said, unsnaking his arm from the brunette’s waist so he could snap a lighter beneath the cigarette that dangled from his lips. “Did your daughter make it?”
“She isn’t coming.” I looked away as I said it, into the distance, as though I might recognize her in a car speeding by on the highway.
I turned back toward him. Beyond his shoulder I could see my coat on the bed where I’d left it. I could grab it and flee. My eyes lingered on it: a camel coat, made from a nice buttery fabric, a Christmas gift from Cal the year before. I’d found it tucked under my desk in a ribbon-tied box while the rest of the office received a bottle of cheap red wine.
But I couldn’t leave without talking to Hadrian, without bringing him to recognize me. I wanted to stop thinking of each day as something to be gotten out of the way, and this night was one of the most important of my life so far, a night I would remember forever, and I didn’t want to have to revise the memory later on, to scratch out the silence and write in words I hadn’t said.
“We need to talk alone.”
In a moment of boldness I looked pointedly at the girls, who raised their eyebrows but complied because I was old enough to be their mother. They slid shut the door, muffling the sounds of the party.
Hadrian was uncomfortable, I could tell. He looked at the retreating backs of the girls regretfully, and I knew he’d only come out here to look for a younger version of me. He flicked ash from his cigarette and gestured toward the cars as though I’d only told him to stay with me so I could show him the view.
“So,” he said, “what’s up?”
I didn’t say anything more, not right away. I put my hand on his arm, though, to keep him from going inside. What if I hadn’t asked him to prom, hadn’t gotten pregnant? How much of my life had been shaped by the decisions I had made with this man years ago? Here with me seemed to be not all the people I could’ve been, but all the people I hadn’t been. Hadrian probably wasn’t worth my obsession—as I wasn’t worth his—but I wanted to be sure so I backed him against the railing and kissed him.
His lips didn’t feel familiar. I didn’t recall their shape from years ago, but I wanted more of them all the same. My nerves leaped, fiery, when he returned the kiss and touched my neck. He dropped his beer on the ground—I felt it splash my leg—so he could grab my ass.
He put his mouth on my neck. “You might be older than those two girls combined,” he said, laughing.
I pulled away. “We’re the same age, you asshole,” I said.
He looked surprised. Maybe he thought he looked younger. Maybe his career depended on it. The shows, the parties, the angst of his music. I laughed at him. He laughed, too, except he had no clue why we were laughing.
He took my hand. I was so close to getting what I’d come for, which if not his recognition was his attention, but I caught sight of a red windbreaker I recognized. A man was wandering the lot below with his phone in his palm, its rectangle screen glowing in the dark.
It was Robert. Robert had found me.
My stare drew his attention. He looked up at me and waved.
I could turn my back on him, pull Hadrian into the party and through the crowd until we found a quiet corner, but the sight of my husband brought me, just by an inch, back to the reality of my life. The uncertainty of it. An urge to confront Robert, as I hadn’t the night before, swelled in me.
“Do you know him?” Hadrian asked.
“I do,” I said. “I have to go talk to him.”
I paused.
“Come with me.”
Hadrian looked down at the parking lot, at Robert looking up at us, and then back at me and I saw in his eyes that the spell, whatever it had been, was broken.
“No,” he said. “You do your thing. Come and find me after.”
I looked at him. I smiled. “I’m not going to find you after,” I said. “But will you do me one favor first?”
Before he agreed I kissed him again so Robert could see.
When we parted, I cupped his cheek in my palm. “Goodbye, Beast,” I said. “Do you remember prom night?”
Hadrian stepped away from me, leaving my hand to cup the air. His eyes searched my face, and I smiled. I was leaving a piece of myself with him; maybe now he would remember me. The baby, though—my baby was my secret, and I would never tell anyone.
In the moonlight these two men looked at me. I knew that using Hadrian wouldn’t make me feel less used myself. It wouldn’t make me any younger, and it wouldn’t make Robert feel ashamed. Still, I would have liked to sleep with him again. I would’ve liked to send Robert home knowing Hadrian would be good in bed, better than before, and that morning was far away. But part of being an adult was letting passing fantasies blow away, wasn’t it, even if I’d already taken the first step toward making a mistake?
* * *
The motel doors slid open and Robert stood looking stricken. I closed the distance between us.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
Robert looked at the balcony, but Hadrian had gone. Slowly, Robert turned his phone around to show me the screen. A map with a pulsing blue dot stared back at me. I looked closer. The dot was in the parking lot of the motel.
I was the dot.
“I installed this app on our phones,” Robert said. “GPS tracker. You can track me too—here, give me your phone, I’ll show you . . .”
But I held up my hand.
My person
, my money, my privacy: my husband had manipulated all of it. Maybe he thought the app was harmless, but he hadn’t bothered to tell me about it. As with the credit card, I hadn’t bothered to look. But I was waking up.
Robert brought his phone to his chest. “Beverly,” he asked. “Who was that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It matters,” Robert said.
“No. It would’ve at one time. But not anymore. I’m sorry, Robert, but I can’t trust you.”
My car was parked in the back of the lot, and I said nothing more as I walked away. My heels clacked on the concrete, I fished for my keys, and when I was in the car with the engine roaring, I opened the window and flung my phone from it so Robert couldn’t track me. I cherished the feeling of being free.
* * *
I was surprised to find Cal at the hotel bar where hours earlier we’d shared a meal. I’d planned to go alone for a drink and then sleep on the couch by the receptionist’s desk at my office. I thought Cal would be with the woman from the show, but he sat hunched over a vodka on the rocks. The TV stared down at him, beaming a basketball game over the bar, to which Cal paid no attention.
I’d lost my beautiful camel coat, and there wouldn’t be another one.
“Your night didn’t work out the way you’d hoped either?” I said.
He looked up at me and I saw relief seep into his face, as though it were a spill he’d sopped up with a napkin. “Oh, Bev,” he said. “I’m happy to see you.”
He hugged me, still holding his glass, which sweated on my back. I ordered a drink over his shoulder, and we sat on the high stools, embracing, surrounded by empty tables and plastic plants. Cal began to shake with silent sobs, and this time, instead of pulling him away from his tears, I ran my hands in circles over his back and let him cry.
“Starting tomorrow,” he said, “things will change. No more forged loss runs, no more lies.”
“Okay,” I said.
“No more close calls with the DOI. We’ll do things right going forward.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” I said. “Or I’m leaving.”
I meant it, too. I didn’t want to commit fraud anymore. I wanted to be proud of what I did for a living.
Countergirls
Karen shoveled the dead cat from the road and carried it, balanced on the spade, down the hill to the dock. Beneath the slatted wood, the river ran smoothly. She tilted the cat inside a canvas shopping bag she’d filled with rocks and, with a heave to give the bundle some air, tossed it into the river. The cat sank. In the distance, the dam hummed.
The cat had been one of twelve or so, although Karen could no longer remember which ones had come from which litters. Her older daughter, Venus, had fed them all the first year they appeared under the deck and then waited through winter to see the next batches of bleary-eyed little things. Karen eventually foreclosed on this joy: she spent an entire summer capturing each and every one and taking it to the shelter to be fixed. The vet tech came to recognize her.
If Venus had been upset then about her truncated lineage of cats, she would certainly be devastated over Pie à la Mode—her favorite of them all and, even Karen had to admit, the friendliest. It was the only one that would poke its head past a door left ajar, nearly open to the idea of being domesticated.
But Venus lived in a women’s shelter now and wouldn’t be home until the weekend, an agreement they’d all worked out with Karen’s husband, Warren, whom Venus called Fake Dad. Karen’s younger daughter, Maille, seemed to like Warren just fine, though she saw him less frequently than Venus did. Maille was six when her father died of a hospital infection after heart surgery. She claimed not to remember much about him. In fact, Maille started calling Warren Dad (showing no emotion that indicated either love or sarcasm) so soon after Karen’s remarriage that it had made even Karen uncomfortable.
Warren reciprocated both girls’ feelings: he liked Maille all right but didn’t seem interested in treating Venus like family. Soon after he and Karen married, Venus had shown up in California, a bedraggled grad school dropout whose scoliosis kept her taking pills. With nowhere to live, she took the basement bedroom that had once been Warren’s son’s. Warren had put up with her for two years, but a few weeks ago he’d reached the end of his patience. Venus had to go, he said.
The shelter was her only option. Now Venus called Karen every evening, asking when she could come home.
Tonight, Karen decided, she would say nothing about the cat. But she would have to keep the phone away from Warren, who would definitely blab. He liked to rattle the chain link that separated Karen from Venus, a usually voiceless tension that indicated they each disapproved of the way the other was living her life.
Karen took the broom that was propped against the dock railing and swept some leaves into the water. The dam’s sloped wall was brushed with pink evening light. The first mosquitoes popped out of nowhere. All of this was Warren’s: the house on the Stanislaus River not far from Yosemite, the cell phone plan, the rickety motorboat they took downriver where Warren would try to show off and run the boat into the churning water beneath the dam. Every time, the boat was battered back to calmer waters. Whenever the battery died, which it did often because Warren was always burning it out this way, Warren claimed it was Karen’s job to change it.
She hated the boat. Her first husband, Charlie, would never have asked her to be responsible for his hobbies in her old life, the one in Michigan that seemed about to dissolve like tissue paper stirred up in water. Seventeen years had passed since Charlie died, and Karen was forgetting things about him, as though her memories were coins, and she stood tossing them into a fountain. He was there in her children, of course, but they had been alive for many years without him. Although the two girls had followed Karen to California after college, Venus then Maille, they weren’t hers and Charlie’s, not anymore. Venus, lost to the endless refills the doctors gave her. And Maille, to the internet.
More specifically, to a man on the internet. Her lovely daughter, who’d never had trouble finding boys, had done the exact thing Karen had: met a man online, then gone and married him. In Karen’s own case, she felt she’d done right. She’d been fifty-two, with dwindling options. At least she and Warren had gone to Las Vegas. Maille called her mother from Reno.
Pie à la Mode had sunk from sight. The boat creaked in the water. The river smelled of mud and algae. The first fat drops of rain splattered on Karen’s arm as she walked back up the hill to the house. The other cats had all scattered. The four hummingbird feeders were empty—although they usually were now, one bully hummingbird having scared the rest off.
Right inside the house was a small den, cozy, with too much furniture. Warren had lit the potbellied stove. Karen went to the kitchen and prodded slices of candied orange rind from a sheet of wax paper on the counter where they’d been drying all day. Not just Venus would be home that weekend but Maille, too, and a few of her friends. An informal celebration of her marriage, though her new husband, Maille said, could not come. Warren, upon learning this, had asked if he could also skip the dinner.
Warren didn’t seem to understand how Karen’s old life had worked, its loudness, how for so long it had been full only of girls. Nothing about it particularly agreed with him: the long phone calls, the constant need to see her daughters, her rich cooking. A stick of butter in every meal.
“Venus called,” Warren said, walking into the kitchen.
“You didn’t!” Karen said.
“Pie à la Road.”
“Warren!”
Warren and she got along when it was just the two of them. It was the moment someone else arrived that they became strangers.
Outside, birds swooped into the yard, making big parabolas. The rain had grown hard enough to knock insects from their flight and in the grass was a feast.
* * *
Even though Venus was shaken up over the cat and already furious with Karen for having to live in the shelter,
she couldn’t demand much. She had no car, a flimsy bank account, and a college degree she seemed to have forgotten about. She claimed that the Piercing Pagoda—the last job she’d held, a kiosk in the mall back in Michigan—didn’t care how much schooling she had, as long as she could punch holes in girls’ ears. (As it turned out, she couldn’t: she lost the job after one shift for bringing a baggie of apple slices, a needle, and a lighter, insisting the gun was bad for the cartilage.) But Karen saw her point: Would it be better to meet the expectations for someone who had only finished high school, or fall short of those for a college graduate?
Karen herself had struggled through night classes while working the Clinique counter. She’d been a little glad when Venus lost the Pagoda job, afraid she and her daughters were cursed to work at kiosks. Countergirls. At Clinique, Karen’s uniform was a white lab coat, and it had made her feel like a complete fraud. With clients, she overcompensated, rouging the women until they looked like they had rosacea. At least, that was the way one woman had put it, to which Karen had replied, “That, or I just gave you the best orgasm of your life!”
At the end of that shift, Karen was put on probation, under close watch by her manager as she gave women quizzes to determine their nightly moisturizing routines. Still, things more or less worked out for her, even if it had taken longer than she might have liked. She loved Warren, and their house on the river, and the fact that her daughters lived nearby. She didn’t have a job of her own but had stopped feeling disappointed with herself because of it. It was Venus’s expiring potential that worried Karen. Karen had spent her own youth being naughty and had avoided ruin, shaping up like most people, but Venus had gone bad late in the game, after a spotless high school and undergraduate record. After college, during her first year at the School of Public Health, she’d dated a heroin addict recently released from two years in Jackson prison, whom Karen loved to blame. Suddenly, it wasn’t just him hanging around Venus but all of his friends, too. It shocked Karen, how you couldn’t know just one heroin addict. They came in twos, threes. They brought their friends from rehab, and those friends had girlfriends, and those girlfriends had roommates, and so on. They all decided together that it was safe to start drinking again, that they could stick to alcohol and forget the rest. And Venus, with her painkiller buzz, had fit right in.
If the Body Allows It Page 3
