Since We Fell

9 The Sparrow

Rachel and Brian Delacroix crossed paths again six months after their last e-mail contact, in the spring, at a bar in the South End.

He ended up there because it was a few blocks from his apartment and that night, the first of the year to hint of summer, the streets smelled damp and hopeful. She went to the bar because she’d gotten divorced that afternoon and needed to feel brave. She worried her fear of people was metastasizing and she wanted to get on top of it, to prove to herself she was in command of her own neuroses. It was May, and she’d barely left the house since early winter.

She’d go out for groceries but only when the supermarket was at its emptiest. Seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning was ideal, the pallets of shrink-wrapped stock still waiting in the middle of the aisles, the dairy guys talking smack to the deli guys, the cashiers putting their purses away and yawning into cardboard cups of Dunkin’s, bitching about the commute, the weather, their impossible kids, their impossible husbands.

When she needed her hair cut, she always scheduled the last appointment of the day. Same for the rare manicure or pedicure. Most other wants could be satisfied online. Soon, what started as a choice — staying out of the public eye to avoid scrutiny or its bedfellow, judgment — grew into a habit that bordered on addiction. Before Sebastian officially left her, he’d been sleeping in the guest room for months; prior to that, he’d slept on his boat in the South River, a tidal flat that emptied into Massachusetts Bay. It was fitting — Sebastian had probably never loved her, probably never loved any human being, but, man, he loved that boat. Once he was gone, though, her primary motivation for leaving the house — to escape him and all his toxic disregard — was neutralized.

But spring hit, and she could hear voices, unhurried and pleasant, return to the street along with the shouts of children, the clack of stroller wheels along the sidewalk, the squeak and snap of screen doors. The house she’d purchased with Sebastian was thirty miles south of Boston in Marshfield. It was a seaside town, though their house sat a full mile inland, which was fine because Rachel wasn’t a fan of the ocean. Sebastian, of course, loved the sea, had even taught her to scuba dive back in the early days of their courtship. When she finally admitted to him that she hated being submerged in liquid as potential predators watched her from the depths, instead of being flattered she’d temporarily conquered her fear to make him happy, he accused her of pretending to love the things he loved in order to “trap” him. She’d retorted that one only trapped things one wanted to eat and she’d lost her appetite for him a long time ago. It was a nasty thing to say, but when a relationship collapsed with the speed and severity of hers and Sebastian’s, nasty became the norm. Once the divorce was final, they would put the house on the market and split any profit to be had, and she’d need to find another place.

Which was fine. She missed the city, had never taken to having to drive everywhere. And if her notoriety was difficult to escape in the city, it was impossible in a small town, where gazes came steeped in gradations of provincialism. Just a couple of weeks back, she’d been caught out in the open while pumping gas; she hadn’t realized until she pulled in with a bone-dry tank that the station was self-serve only. Three high school girls, reality-TV-ready in their push-up bras, yoga pants, satiny blowouts, and diamond-cut cheekbones, exited the Food Mart on their way to a boy in a skintight thermal sweatshirt and distressed jeans, who pumped gas into a pristine Lexus SUV. As soon as they noticed Rachel, the trio started whispering and shoving each other. When she looked over, one of them reddened and dropped her gaze but the other two doubled down. The dark-haired one with the peach highlights mimed someone guzzling from a bottle and her honey-blond partner-in-bitch screwed up her features into a pantomime of helpless weeping, then wrung her hands in the air as if freeing them of seaweed.

The third one said, “Guys, stop,” but it came out half lament, half giggle, and then the laughter broke from all their pretty-ugly mouths like Friday-night Kahlúa vomit.

Rachel hadn’t left the house since. She almost ran out of food. She did run out of wine. Then vodka. She ran out of sites to surf and shows to watch. Then Sebastian called to remind her the divorce hearing was scheduled for that Tuesday, May 17, at three-thirty.

She made herself presentable and drove into the city. She realized only after she’d gotten on Route 3 heading north that it had been six months since she’d driven on a highway. The other cars raced and revved and swarmed. Their bodies gleamed like knives in the harsh sunlight. They engulfed her, stabbing at the air, surging and stabbing and braking, red taillights flashing like furious eyes. Great, Rachel thought as the anxiety found her throat and her skin and the roots of her hair, now I’m afraid of driving.

She managed to make it into the city, and it felt like she was getting away with something because she shouldn’t have been on the road, not feeling this vulnerable, this hysterical. But she made it. And no one was the wiser. She left the garage and walked across the street and appeared at the appointed time at Suffolk Probate and Family Court on New Chardon Street.

The proceedings were a lot like the marriage and a lot like Sebastian — perfunctory and bloodless. After it was over and their union was, as far as the Commonwealth was concerned, legally dissolved, she turned to share a look with her newly minted ex-husband, a look if not of two soldiers who’d found a modicum of victory in walking off the battlefield with their limbs intact at least one of common decency. But Sebastian wasn’t across the aisle any longer. He was already halfway out of the courtroom, his back to her, head up, strides long and purposeful. And once he was through the doors, the rest of the people in the courtroom were looking at her with pity or revulsion.

That’s who I’ve become, she thought, a creature below contempt.

Her car was parked in the garage across the street, and from there it was two right turns and a merge onto 93 South to head home. But she thought of all those cars merging and speeding, tapping their brakes and switching lanes with violent jerks of the wheel, and she turned west into the city instead and drove over Beacon Hill, through Back Bay and farther on until she reached the South End. She felt okay during the drive. Only once, when she thought a Nissan was going to pass her on the right as she approached an intersection, did her palms sweat. After a few minutes of driving around, she found the rarest of all things for this neighborhood, a parking spot, and pulled into it. She sat there and reminded herself to breathe. She waved on two cars that mistook her for someone who was about to depart, not someone who’d just arrived.

“Turn off your fucking engine, then,” the driver of the second car yelled, and left a burnt-rubber vapor in his wake that smelled like a smoker’s burp.

She left her car and wandered the neighborhood, not entirely aimless but close, remembering that somewhere around here was a bar where she’d once spent a happy night. That was when she was still in print journalism with the Globe. Rumors had circulated that the series she’d written on the Mary Ellen McCormack housing project might be nominated for a Pulitzer. It wasn’t (though she did win the Horace Greeley Award and the PEN/Winship for excellence in investigative journalism), but she didn’t care in the end; she knew she’d done good work, and back then, that was enough. It was an old-man bar with a red door called Kenneally’s Tap, tucked on one of the last ungentrified blocks in the neighborhood, if she remembered correctly, the name itself a throwback to a time before all Irish bars had to sound vaguely literary, like St. James’s Gate, Elysian Fields, the Isle of Statues.

She eventually found the red door on a block she hadn’t initially recognized because its Toyotas and Volvos had been replaced with Benzes and Range Rover Sports, and the functional bars on the windows had been replaced by filigreed ones with more substantial aesthetic appeal. Kenneally’s was still there, but its menu was posted out front now, and they’d gotten rid of the mozzarella sticks and the deep-fried chicken poppers and replaced them with pork cheeks and braised kale.

She walked straight to a free chair in the far corner near the waitstaff station, and when the bartender found her, she ordered a vodka-rocks and asked if he had the day’s paper lying around. She wore a gray hoodie over a white V-neck T-shirt and dark blue jeans. The flats on her feet were black, scuffed, and as forgettable as the rest of her ensemble. It didn’t matter. For all the talk of progress, of equal footing, of a post-sexist generation, a woman still couldn’t sit alone at a bar and have a drink without drawing stares. She kept her head down and read the Globe and sipped her vodka and tried to keep the addled sparrow in her chest from flapping its wings.

The bar wasn’t more than a quarter full, which was good, but the clientele was a lot younger than she’d counted on, which wasn’t. The old-timers she’d expected to find had been reduced to a quartet of geezers who sat at a scarred table near the back room and slipped out for frequent smoke breaks. It had been naïve to think that here, in the trendiest of all Boston neighborhoods, the shot-’n’-a-beer crowd could have held the line against the single-malt cohort.

Old-timers who embraced day drinking and swilled PBRs and ’Gansett tall boys without an irony chaser rarely watched the six o’clock news. The younger crowd didn’t watch it either, at least not in real time, but they might DVR it or stream it through their laptops later. And they certainly accessed YouTube on a regular basis. When the clip of Rachel’s meltdown went viral last fall, there were eighty thousand hits in the first twelve hours. Within twenty-four, there were seven memes and a video mash-up of Rachel blinking, sweating, stuttering, and hyperventilating, backed by a remix of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love.” That’s how it had played out — a drunk reporter loses control during a live report from a Port-au-Prince ghetto. Within thirty-six hours of the incident, the video had two hundred and seventy thousand hits.

Her few friends told Rachel she likely overestimated the number of people who recognized her in public. They assured her that the very nature of the viral age, its need for constant replenishment of content, ensured that the video, while watched by many, was remembered by few.

It was fair to assume, however, that half the people in the bar under thirty-five had seen it. They may have been stoned or drunk at the time, which raised the possibility they’d see the single woman at the bar in the baseball cap reading the newspaper and make no connection. But then again, maybe a few of them had been sober and possessed strong memories.

With a few swift upticks of her gaze, she got a sense of the other people at the bar itself: two office women sipping martinis with an added splash of something pink; five male brokers who pounded beers and fist-bumped over whatever game was on the TV above them; a mixed-sex group of techies in their late twenties who managed to keep their shoulders hunched even when they drank; and a well-dressed and well-groomed couple in their early thirties, the male clearly drunk, the woman clearly disgusted and a little afraid. Those two were the nearest to Rachel — four seats to her right — and at one point one of those seats half toppled into another two, the front pair of legs rising off the floor. The woman said, “Jesus, enough,” and it was in her voice as it had been in her eyes, the fear and disgust. When the guy said, “Fuckin’ calm yourself, you spoiled fuckin’—” Rachel accidentally caught his eye, then his girlfriend’s, and they all pretended it didn’t happen as he righted the chair.

She neared the end of her drink and decided this had been a bad idea. Her fear of particular people — i.e., people who’d seen her have an unrestrained panic attack on the six o’clock news — had blinded her to her terror of people in general, an ever-burgeoning phobia she was only now beginning to suspect the breadth of. She should have run back to the house after court. She never should have sat at a bar. Jesus. The sparrow flapped its wings. Not too spastically, not frantically, not yet. But the tempo was increasing. She was aware of her heart dangling in her chest, suspended from cords of blood. The eyes of the bar were on her, and in the garble of a group of voices behind her, she was nearly positive she heard someone whisper, “That reporter.”

She put a ten-dollar bill on the bar, relieved she had one, because she couldn’t imagine waiting for change. Couldn’t sit in this seat a second longer. Her throat closed. Her vision blurred at the edges. The air looked as if it had been smelted. She went to stand, but the bartender placed a drink in front of her.

“A gentleman sent this over with his ‘respect.’”

The group of suit-clad guys across the bar watched the game. They gave off a former-frat-boy-rapist vibe. Early to mid-thirties, the five of them, two going fleshy, all with eyes that were too small and too bright at the same time. The tallest of them gave her a chin tilt of recognition and raised his glass.

She said to the bartender, “Him?”

The bartender looked over his shoulder. “No. Not the group. Another guy.” He scanned the bar. “He must have hit the head.”

“Well, tell him thank you, but—”

Shit. Now the drunken boyfriend who’d knocked over the chair was approaching, pointing at her like he was a game-show host and she’d just won a dinette set. His disgusted and frightened girlfriend was nowhere to be seen. The closer he got, the less good-looking he was. It wasn’t that he wasn’t fit or didn’t have a luxurious tousle of dark hair and full lips draped over a white, wholesome smile, or that he didn’t move with a certain style, because all of that was part of the package. As are the eyes, as rich and brown as English toffee, but, oh my, Rachel, what lies behind them — what lies in them — is cruelty. Self-impressed, unreflective cruelty.

You have seen this look before. In Felix Browner. In Josué Dacelus. In projects and high-rises. In self-satisfied predators.

“Hey, sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“My girlfriend. My now ex-girlfriend, and that’s been a long time coming. She’s got a thing for drama. Everything’s drama.”

“I think she was just worried you’d had too much to drink.”

Why are you even talking, Rachel? Walk away.

He opened his arms wide. “Some people when they have an extra one or two, they get mean, ya know? That’s a problem drunk. Me? I get happy. I’m just a happy guy looking to make friends and have a fun night. I don’t see how that can be a problem.”

“Well, good luck. I gotta—”

He pointed at her drink. “You gotta finish that. Be a crime to let it go to waste.” He held out his hand. “I’m Lander.”

“Actually, I’m good.”

He dropped his hand and turned his head to the bartender. “A Patrón Silver, my good man.” He turned back to her. “Why were you watching us?”

“I wasn’t watching you.”

The bartender brought his drink.

He took a sip. “But you were. I caught your eye.”

“You guys were getting a little loud and I looked up.”

“We were loud?” He smirked.

“Yes.”

“Offended your sense of proprietary, did it?”

“No.” She didn’t correct his malapropism, but she did fail to stifle a sigh.

“Am I boring you?”

“No, you seem like a nice guy, but I’ve got to go.”

He gave her a big friendly smile. “No, you don’t. Have that drink.”

The bird was starting to flap hard now, its head and beak rising to the base of her throat.

“I’m going to go. Thank you.” She slung her bag over her shoulder.

He said, “You’re the woman on the news.”

She didn’t feel like living through the five or ten minutes it would take to deny it and then redeny it and then ultimately give him his due, and yet she still played dumb. “What woman?”

“The one who flipped out.” He glanced at the drink in front of her that she still hadn’t touched. “Were you drunk? Or high? Which was it? Come on. You can tell me.”

She gave him a tight smile and went to move past him.

Lander said, “Hey, hey, hey,” and put his chest between her and the door. “I just want to know...” He took one step back and squinted at her. “Just want to know what you were thinking. I mean, I want to be friends.”

“I’d like to go.” She gestured with her right hand for him to step aside.

He reared his head back, curled his lower lip, and mimicked her gesture. “I’m just asking a question. People put their trust in you.” He tapped a single finger off her shoulder. “I know, I know, I know, you think I’m drunk and maybe, you know, maybe I am. But what I’m saying is important. I’m a fun guy, I’m a nice guy, my friends think I’m hilarious. I got three sisters. Thing is, point is here, that you think like it’s okay to start throwing back the sauce on the job because you probably got a net to land in if it backfires. Am I right? Some doctor or venture capitalist hubby who...” He lost the thought, then caught it again, splayed his pink fingers against the base of his pink throat. “I can’t do that. I gotta go make the money. I bet you got some sugar daddy pays for your Pilates and your Lex and the lunches where you hang with your homegirls and shit all over everything he does for you. Have that drink, bitch. Somebody bought it for you. Show some respect.”

He wavered in front of her. She wondered what she’d do if he touched her shoulder again. Nobody was moving in the bar. No one was saying anything. No one was trying to help. They were all just watching the show.

“I’d like to go,” she repeated and took a step toward the door.

He put that single finger on her shoulder again. “One more minute. Have a drink with me. With us.” He waved at the bar. “Don’t make us feel like you think bad of me. You don’t think bad of me, right? I’m just a guy in the street. I’m just a regular dude. I’m just—”

“Rachel!” Brian Delacroix materialized by Lander’s left shoulder, slid past his hip, and was suddenly standing beside her. “I’m so sorry. I got hung up.” He gave Lander a distant smile before turning back to her. “Look, we’re late, I’m sorry. Doors were at eight. We gotta go.” He took her vodka off the bar and downed it in one easy swallow.

Brian wore a navy blue suit, white shirt with the top button undone, black tie loosened and slightly askew. He remained quite handsome but not in the way that made you think he’d hold up the bathroom every morning. His look was more rugged, his face just on the right side of craggy, his smile a bit crooked, his wavy black hair not fully tamed. Weathered skin, crow’s-feet around the eyes, strong chin and nose. His blue eyes were open and amused, as if he were perpetually surprised to find himself in situations such as these.

“You look spectacular, by the way,” he said. “Again, sorry I got held up. No excuse.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Lander squinted at his own drink for a moment. “Okay?”

This could easily be a scam perpetuated by the both of them. Lander played the wolf, she was the unwitting sheep, and the part of the shepherd was played by Brian Delacroix. She hadn’t forgotten that weird vibe he’d given off that day at the Athenaeum and found their just happening to find each other on the day of her divorce a bit too coincidental.

She decided not to play along. She held up her hands. “Guys, I think I’m just gonna—”

But Lander didn’t hear her because he pushed Brian. “Yo, bro, you need to step off.”

Brian gave her an amused cock of the eyebrow when Lander called him “bro.” She had to work at it to keep her own smile from breaking out.

He turned to Lander. “Dude, I would, but I can’t. I know, I know, you’re disappointed, but, hey, you didn’t know she was waiting on me. You’re a fun guy, though, I can tell. And the night’s young.” He indicated the bartender. “Tom knows me. Right, Tom?”

Tom said, “I do indeed.”

“So — what’s your name?”

“Lander.”

“Cool name.”

“Thanks.”

“Honey,” he said to Rachel, “why don’t you pull the car around?”

Rachel heard herself say, “Sure.”

“Lander,” he said, but he met Rachel’s eyes and flicked his own toward the door, “your money’s no good here tonight. Whatever you imbibe, Tom will put it on my tab.” He flicked his eyes at her again, a little bit more insistently, and this time she moved. “You want to buy a round for those girls over there by the pool table? That’s on me too. The one in the green flannel and the black jeans has been looking at you since I came through the door...”

She made the door and didn’t glance back, though she wanted to. But the last look she’d caught on Lander’s face was of a dog waiting, head cocked, for either a treat or a command. In under a minute, Brian Delacroix had taken ownership of him.

She couldn’t find her car. She walked block after block. She cut east, then west, turned north, retraced her steps south. Somewhere in this collection of wrought-iron fences and railings and chocolate or redbrick townhouses was a light gray 2010 Prius.

It was Brian’s voice, she decided as she headed up a side street toward the lights of Copley Square. It was warm, confident, and smooth, but not huckster-smooth. It was the voice of a friend you’d been hoping to meet your whole life or a caring uncle who’d left your life too soon but had now returned. It was the voice of home, but not home the reality, home as a construct, home as an ideal.

A few minutes later, that voice entered the air behind her: “I won’t take it personally if you think I’m a stalker and pick up your pace. I won’t. I’ll stay planted to this spot and never see you again.”

She stopped. Turned. Saw him standing back at the mouth of the alley she’d crossed thirty seconds before. He stood under the streetlight with his hands clasped in front of him, and he didn’t move. He’d added a raincoat over the suit.

“But if you’re open to a little more of the evening, I’ll stay ten paces back and follow you wherever you’ll let me buy you a drink.”

She looked at him for a long time, long enough for her to notice that the sparrow had stopped flapping in her chest and the base of her throat had come unblocked. She felt as calm as she’d felt since she was last safe behind closed doors in her own home.

“Make it five paces,” she said.

10 Lights Up

They walked through the South End, and soon she realized why he wore the raincoat. There was a mist in the air so thin she didn’t notice it until her hair was damp and her forehead was wet. She raised her hood above her head, but of course it was damp now too.

“Did you send over the vodka?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Honestly?”

“No, inauthentically.”

He chuckled. “Because I had to use the bathroom and I wanted to make sure you’d still be there when I got out.”

“Why not just walk up to me?”

“Nerves. It’s not like you’ve seemed elated the times I’ve initiated contact over the years.”

She slowed then and he caught up.

“I did like getting your e-mails,” she said.

“Odd. You didn’t respond like it.”

“It’s been a complicated decade for me.” She gave him a smile that felt hesitant but hopeful.

He removed his raincoat and draped it over her shoulders.

“I’m not taking your coat,” she said.

“I know you’re not. I’m lending it to you.”

“I don’t need it.”

He stepped back, got a look at her. “Fine. Give it back.”

She smiled, rolled her eyes. “Well, if you insist.”

They walked on, their footsteps the only sound for a full block.

“Where are you taking us?” he said.

“I was hoping the RR still exists.”

“It does. One block up, two over.”

She nodded. “Why do they call it that? There are no tracks near it.”

“The underground railroad. They used to run most of the slaves out through that block. This building here” — he pointed at a redbrick mansion tucked between a row house and what had once been a church — “was where Edgar Ross set up the first black-run printing press in the early 1800s.”

She shot him a sidelong glance. “Aren’t we a font?”

“I like history.” He gave her a shrug that was somehow cute on a big man.

“Left here.”

They turned left. The street was older and quieter. A lot of the garages or garage apartments had been livery stables at one time. The windows were thick and leaded. The trees looked as old as the Constitution.

“I liked your hard news stories better than the soft ones, by the way.”

She chuckled. “You didn’t feel sufficiently informed when I did that story on the cat that barked?”

He snapped his fingers. “Promise me it’s archived.”

They heard a metallic pop and the street turned black. Every light — in the houses, in the streetlamps, in the small office building at the end of the street — snapped off.

They could see each other, if barely, in the pewter gloaming cast by the tall buildings that fringed the neighborhood, but this near-dark was alien and carried with it the arrival of the postponable truth that all urban dwellers kept tucked on high shelves — we are unprepared for most forms of survival. At least those that don’t come with amenities.

They continued up the street with a bit of wonder. The hairs on her skin were alive in a way they hadn’t been five minutes ago. Her hearing was sharper. All her pores were wide open. Her scalp was cold, damp, adrenalized.

Haiti had felt like this. Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, Jacmel. In some neighborhoods they were still waiting for the lights to come back on.

A woman stepped out of a building on the corner. She held a candle in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and as she swept the flashlight across their torsos, Rachel made out the sign above her head and realized they were at the RR bar.

“Oh, hey!” The woman waved the flashlight up and down and the light anointed them before rejoining their bodies at the knees. “What’re you two doing out in this?”

“Looking for her car,” he said. “Then we just decided to look for your bar, then this happened.”

He raised his hands to the dark, and there was another metallic groan, and the lights came back on.

They blinked into the soft shafts of neon cast by the beer sign in the window and the bar sign above the door.

“Nice trick,” the bartender said. “You do birthday parties?”

She opened the door for them and they went inside. It was as Rachel remembered, maybe even better, the lights a little lower, the smell of old beer soaked into black rubber replaced with the faintest hint of hickory. Tom Waits on the jukebox when they came through the door, fading as they ordered their drinks, and replaced by Radiohead from the Pablo Honey era. Tom Waits she could place in his proper context because most of his best music pre-dated her. But it was often a shock, however predictable, however mild, to realize there were people legally drinking in bars who’d been in diapers when Radiohead was part of her college-years soundtrack. We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.

There was no one else in the bar but them and Gail, the bartender.

Halfway through their first drinks, Rachel said to Brian, “Tell me about the last time I saw you.”

His eyes narrowed in confusion.

“You were with an antiquities dealer.”

He snapped his fingers. “Jack Ahern, right? Was that Jack?”

“It was.”

“We were heading to lunch, ran into you up at the top of Beacon Hill.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “those are the facts. But I’m after the vibe. You were off that day, m’ man, couldn’t get rid of me quick enough.”

He was nodding. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“You admit it?”

“Hell, yeah.” He turned on his seat, choosing his words. “Jack was an investor in a small subsidiary I was creating at the time. Nothing big, just a company that makes high-end wood floors and shutters. Jack’s also a self-appointed moralist, very fifteenth century in that regard, Lutheran fundamentalist or Calvinist fundamentalist, I can’t remember which.”

“I get them confused too.”

He shot her a wry grin. “Anyway, I was married then.”

She took a long pull on her drink. “Married?”

“Yeah. Heading for divorce but married in that moment. And I’m a salesman, I was selling that marriage to my moralistic client.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“Then I see you crossing the street toward me and I know if I don’t get ahead of it, he’s gonna see it, so I got all hyper like I do when I’m really nervous and I bungled the whole fucking thing.”

“You said ‘get ahead of it.’ What’s ‘it’?”

He cocked his head and then his eyebrow at her. “Do I really have to say the words?”

“It’s your explanation, my friend.”

“‘It’ would be my attraction to you, Rachel. My ex used to get on me about it — ‘Are you watching your girlfriend on the news again?’ My friends could see it. I’m damn sure Jack Ahern would have picked up on it if my tongue was hanging out in the middle of Beacon Street. I mean, Jesus, ever since Chicopee. Come on.”

“You come on. I didn’t know about this.”

“Oh, well, yeah. I guess, why would you?”

“You could’ve mentioned it.”

“In an e-mail? That you’d be reading with that picture-perfect husband of yours?”

“He was anything but.”

“I didn’t know that at the time. Plus, I was married.”

“What happened to her?”

“She left. Went back to Canada.”

“So we’re both divorced.”

He nodded and raised his glass. “To that.”

She clinked his glass, drained her own, and they ordered two more.

She said, “Tell me something you don’t like about yourself.”

“I don’t like? I thought the point was to show off your best self in the early going.”

“The early going of what?”

“Meeting someone.”

“Dating? Are we calling this a date?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way yet.”

“You’ve got your drink, I’ve got mine, we’re turned toward each other, trying to ascertain if we enjoy each other’s company enough to do it again.”

“That does sound like a date.” He held up a finger. “Unless it’s like an NFL preseason game to a date.”

“MLB spring training to a date,” she said. “Wait, what do they call the preseason in the NBA?”

“The preseason.”

“I know, but what do they call it?”

“That’s what they call it.”

“You sure? Seems unoriginal.”

“And yet there it is.”

“And how about the NHL?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“But you’re Canadian.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “but I’m not very good at it.”

They both laughed for no other reason but that her mother’s first stage — the spark — had been reached. Somewhere from the walk along cobblestones on a block so quiet the only sounds were the echoes of their footsteps to the smell of his damp raincoat collar under her chin to the two-minute blackout to the birthing of them as a duo as they crossed the threshold into the bar and Tom Waits growled softly through a fading chorus to right now, bantering over a vodka and a scotch respectively, they’d crossed a second threshold — leaving behind who they’d been before their attraction had been certified mutual and moving forward with that attraction taken as a given.

“What don’t I like about myself ?”

She nodded.

He lifted his drink and rattled the cubes softly from one side of the glass to the other. The playfulness left his face and was replaced by something sad and bewildered though not bitter. She liked that lack of bitterness immediately. She’d grown up in a house of bitterness and then, when she was sure it would never touch her again, she married it. She’d had her fill.

Brian said, “You know when you’re a kid and you don’t get picked for the team, or someone you like doesn’t like you back, or your parents reject or marginalize you not because of something you did but because they were fucked up and toxic?”

“Yes and yes and yes. I can’t wait to see where you’re going with this.”

Now he took a drink. “I think of those times — and there are lots of them in a childhood; they accrue — and I realize that I always believed to my core that they were right. I wasn’t worthy of the team, I wasn’t fit to be liked back, my family rejected me because I deserved to be rejected.” He put his glass on the bar. “What I don’t like about myself is that sometimes I don’t really like myself.”

“And no matter how much good you do,” she said, “no matter how great a friend you are, how great a wife or husband, how great a humanitarian, nothing, I mean, nothing—”

“Nothing,” he said.

“—will ever make up for what a piece of shit you really are.”

He gave her a broad and beautiful smile. “I see you’ve spent time in my head.”

“Ha.” She shook her head. “Just mine.”

They said nothing for a minute. They finished their drinks, ordered two more.

“And yet,” she said, “you project confidence amazingly well. You handled that d-bag in the bar like you were his hypnotist.”

“He was an idiot. Idiots are easy to outwit. That’s why they’re idiots.”

“How do I know you weren’t in on it together?”

“In on what?”

“You know,” she said, “he makes me feel scared, you come to my rescue.”

“But I got you out of there and I stayed behind.”

“If he was in on it with you, you could have been out that door five seconds after me and followed me.”

He opened his mouth and then closed it. He nodded. “That’s a good point. Are you often approached this elaborately?”

“Not that I know of.”

“It would take an awful lot of work on my part. Wasn’t that guy with a girlfriend at one point? They were fighting?”

She nodded.

“So I would have had to — let me order this correctly — known you were coming to the bar tonight, hired a friend to pretend he was there with a girlfriend, start a fight with her, get her to leave, then approach you and be belligerent, all so I could step in and buy you the time you needed to leave so I could then—”

“Okay, okay.”

“—run across the bar the moment you left it, slip out the door behind you, and follow you through the city on empty, quiet streets in hard-heeled shoes.”

“Okay, I said. Okay.” She gestured at his suit, his white shirt, his handsome raincoat. “You’re just very put together so I’m trying to wrap my head around the part where you don’t really like yourself. Because you, my friend, exude confidence.”

“In a dickish way?”

“Actually, no.” She shook her head.

“Most times I am confident,” he said. “The rational adult me? He’s got his shit squared away. There’s just this tiny splinter-me that can be accessed at midnight in a dark bar by a woman who asks what I don’t like about myself.” He turned fully toward her again and waited. “Speaking of which...”

She cleared her throat because for a moment she feared she’d tear up. She could feel it threatening, and it was embarrassing. She’d covered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on an island already racked by poverty beyond most humans’ ability to imagine. She’d spent a month in a housing project walking solely on her knees in order to duplicate the perspective of a child in the same circumstances. She once climbed to the canopy of a tree, two hundred feet above the ground in the Brazilian rain forest, and slept there overnight. And today, she’d barely managed to drive thirty miles from the suburbs to the city without cracking up.

“I got divorced today,” she said. “I lost my job — no, correct that, my career — six months ago, as you well know, because I had a panic attack on the air. I’ve grown terrified of people, not particular people, but in general, which is worse. I’ve spent the last few months a virtual shut-in. And honestly? I can’t wait to get back to it. Brian, there’s nothing I like about myself.”

He said nothing for a minute. Just looked at her. It wasn’t an intense stare, didn’t feel like a come-on or a challenge. It was an open look, forgiving, uncolored by judgment. It was impossible for her to characterize until she realized it was the look of a friend.

She noticed the song then. It had been playing for maybe half a minute. Lenny Welch, one of the earliest but most enduring one-hit wonders, singing “Since I Fell for You.”

Brian’s head was cocked to it, his gaze gone to another place. “This played on the radio once when I was a kid at this lake we’d go to. All the adults were funny that day, a blast to be around. Took me years to realize they were all high. I couldn’t understand why they kept sharing the same cigarette. Anyway, they danced by the lake to this, a bunch of stoned Canucks in nylon bathing suits.”

Where did it come from, what she said next? Could that impulse be traced? Or was it simply chemical? Neurons firing away, biology trumping intellect.

“Wanna dance?”

“Love to.” He took her hand and they found the small dance floor just past the bar itself in a dark room lit only by the glow of the jukebox.

Their first dance then. The first time their palms and chests touched. The first time she was close enough to smell what she would always identify as Brian’s essential smell — a hint of smoke entwined with the smell of his unscented shampoo and a vaguely woodsy musk to his flesh.

“I sent you the drink because I didn’t want you to leave the bar.”

“Because you had to go to the bathroom, I know.”

“No, I went to the bathroom because right after I sent the drink, I freaked out. I just, I dunno, whew, I just didn’t want to see you look at me like some fucking stalker. So I went to the bathroom to, I dunno, cringe? I just went in there and stood with my back against the wall and called myself stupid about ten times.”

“You did not.”

“I did. I swear. When I used to watch you on the news, you were honest. You didn’t editorialize, you didn’t wink at the camera or wear your biases on your sleeve. I trusted what you said. You did your job with integrity. And that came through.”

“Even with the cat that barked?”

His face grew serious though his tone remained light. “Don’t minimize what I’m saying about you. I go through a day, sometimes a week, where everyone lies to me, everyone’s trying to play me. From the car salesman, to the vendors, from my doctor trying to upsell me drugs because he’s trying to fuck the pharmaceutical rep, to the airlines and the hotels and the women in the hotel bars. I would get back from a trip, and I would turn on Channel 6 and you — you — wouldn’t lie to me. That meant something. Some days, particularly after my marriage blew up and I was alone all the time, that meant everything.”

She didn’t know what to say. She was unaccustomed to compliments lately and unfamiliar with trust.

“Thanks,” she managed and looked at the floor.

“This is one sad song,” he said after a bit.

“It is.”

“You want to stop?”

“No.” She loved the press of his palm at the small of her back. It made her feel like she’d never fall. Never be hurt. Never lose. Never be abandoned again. “No, let’s keep going.”

11 Appetites

The beginning of their love affair injected her with a false sense of calm. She almost convinced herself the panic attacks were a thing of the past, even though their most recent onset had been the most acute.

Her and Brian’s first official date was a cup of coffee the morning after they met. Too buzzed to drive the night before, Rachel had splurged on a river-view room at the Westin Copley Square. It had been over a year since she’d stayed in a hotel; in the elevator, she’d imagined ordering a snack from room service and watching a movie on-demand, but she fell asleep somewhere between kicking off her shoes and pulling back the bedspread. At ten the next morning, she met Brian at Stephanie’s on Newbury. Tendrils of vodka still shivered in her blood and in the mild gumminess of her brain. Brian, on the other hand, looked great. He was actually better looking in daylight than in bar light. She asked him about his job and he told her it paid the bills and let him indulge his love of travel.

“There’s gotta be more to it than that.”

“Not actually.” He chuckled. “Here’s what I do, day in, day out — I negotiate terms with lumber suppliers based on whether there’s a lot of lumber this month or a little. Was there a drought in Australia or did the rainy season last too long in the Philippines? Those factors change the price of lumber, which changes the price of — where do we start? — that napkin, this tablecloth, that sugar packet. I’m falling asleep talking about it.” He took a sip of coffee. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Will you ever go back to journalism?”

“I doubt anyone would hire me.”

“If they would? Say someone who never saw that video?”

“And where would I find them?”

“I hear Chad has terrible Internet service.”

“Chad?”

“Chad.”

She said, “Well, if I can ever get on a plane again, I’ll take a run at the news stations in...”

“N’Djamena.”

“Capital of Chad, yes.”

“On the tip of your tongue, I’m sure.”

“It was.”

“No, I know.”

“I would’ve gotten it.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“Not with your mouth maybe,” she said, “but with your eyes.”

“Yours are remarkable, by the way.”

“My eyes.”

“And your mouth.”

“You can hang with me anytime.”

“That’s the plan.” His face grew a bit somber. “Did you ever think you might not have to go as far as Chad?”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder if you’re as recognizable as you think.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I was on the news five nights a week in this city for almost three years.”

“You were,” he said. “But what’s the viewership? About five percent of a city of two million? So that’s a hundred thousand people. Spread out over however many square miles make up the greater metro area. I bet if you polled everyone in this restaurant, only one or two would recognize you and maybe only because we asked and made them take a second look.”

She said, “I can’t decide if you’re trying to make me feel better or worse.”

“Better,” he said. “Always better. I’m trying to get you to see, Rachel, that, yeah, a few people remember that video and a smaller percentage of those connect it to you when they see you out in public, but it’s a shrinking demographic and it shrinks further every day. We live in a world of disposable memory. Nothing’s built to last, not even shame.”

She crinkled her nose at him. “You talk pretty.”

“You are pretty.”

“Awwwww.”

Second date was a dinner on the South Shore near her place. Third date was back in Boston, another dinner, and afterward they made out like high school kids, her back against a lamp pole. It started to rain, not the soft mist of the night they’d met but a pelting that coincided with a plummet into raw cold, as if winter was taking one last desperate bite out of them.

“Let’s get you to your car.” He tucked her under his raincoat. She could hear the drops hitting the outside of the coat like small stones, but everything remained dry except her ankles.

They passed a small park where a homeless man lay on a bench. He stared out at the street as if he were trying to spot something he’d lost there. He’d covered himself in newspaper, but his head shook persistently in the wet. His lips quivered.

“It’s a mean spring,” the man said.

“And almost June too,” Brian said.

“Supposed to clear by midnight.” Rachel felt anxious and guilty about owning a bed, a car, a roof.

The man gave that news a hopeful pursing of his lips and closed his eyes.

In her car, she got the heat turned on and rubbed her hands together. Brian leaned into the open window for a short kiss that turned into a long one and the rain battered her roof.

“Let me drive you home,” she said.

“It’s ten blocks in the wrong direction. The coat’ll keep me dry.”

“You don’t have a hat.”

“Ye of little faith.” He stepped back from the car and produced a Blue Jays ball cap from his coat pocket. When he put it on, he curved the bill with a snap of his fingers and saluted her with a cocked grin. “Drive careful. Call me when you get home.”

“One more.” She crooked a finger at him.

He leaned into the car one more time, kissed her, and she could smell the faintest hint of sweat from the underside of his cap brim and taste scotch on his tongue and she pulled hard on the lapels of his coat and deepened the kiss.

He walked back the way they’d come. She turned on her wipers and went to pull away from the curb, but her windows had fogged up. She turned on the defrost and sat watching the glass clear before she pulled onto the street. At the next corner, she was about to turn right when she looked to her left and saw Brian. He stood in the small park. He’d removed his coat to lay it over the homeless man.

He stepped out of the park, turning his shirt collar up against the rain, and ran up the street toward his home.

Her mother, of course, had a whole chapter devoted to what Rachel had just witnessed: “The Act That Causes the Leap.”

Their fourth date, he made dinner at his apartment. While he was loading the dishwasher, she removed her T-shirt and bra and came to him in the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of tattered boyfriend jeans. He turned just as she reached him and his eyes widened and he said, “Oh.”

She felt in complete control, which of course she wasn’t, and free enough to dictate the terms of their bodies’ first engagement. That night they started in the kitchen but finished in his bed. Started round two in the bathtub and finished on the counter between the his-and-her sinks. Then went for the trifecta in the bedroom again and did surprisingly well, although there was nothing left to come out of Brian at the end but a shudder.

Throughout that summer, the giving of the body went spectacularly well. The giving of everything else, however, was a slower process. Particularly once the panic attacks returned. For the most part, they descended when Brian was out of town. Unfortunately, the first rule of accepting him as her boyfriend was accepting that he was out of town a lot. Most of his trips were quick two-nighters to Canada, Washington State and Oregon, twice a year to Maine. But others — to Russia, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, and India — took much longer.

Sometimes when he was first gone, it felt good to return to herself. She didn’t need to see herself in terms of being half of a couple. She’d wake up the morning after he’d left and feel ninety percent Rachel Childs. Then she’d look out the window and fear the world and remember that ninety percent of herself was still at least forty percent more than she liked.

By the second afternoon, the thought of going outside came laden with barely suppressed hysteria swaddled in more manageable everyday dread.

What she saw when she pictured the outside world was what she felt when she dared enter it — that it came at her like a storm cloud. Encircled her. Took bites of her. Inserted itself into her body like a straw and sucked her dry. In return, it gave her nothing. It thwarted all her attempts to engage it in kind, to be rewarded for her attempts to be a part of it. It sucked her up into its swirl, spun her, and then spit her out of its maelstrom before moving on to its next victim.

While Brian was in Toronto, she froze in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Boylston. For two hours she couldn’t move from the small counter that looked out onto the street.

While Brian was legging back from Hamburg one morning, she got into a cab on Beacon Street. They’d driven four blocks when she realized she’d entrusted a complete stranger with carrying her safely across the city for money. She had him pull over, overtipped him, and got out of the cab. She stood on the sidewalk, and everything was too bright, too sharp. Her hearing was too acute, as if the ear canals had been cored; she could hear three people on the far side of Mass Ave talking about their dogs. A woman, ten feet below on the river path, berated her child in Arabic. A plane landed at Logan. Another took off. And she could hear it. Could hear the cars honking on Mass Ave, and cars idling on Beacon and revving their engines on Storrow Drive.

Luckily there was a trash barrel nearby. She took four steps and threw up in it.

As she walked back toward the apartment she shared with Brian, the people she passed stared brazenly at her with contempt and disgust and something that she could only identify as appetite. They contemplated nipping her as she passed.

A Scientologist accosted her at the next block, shoved a pamphlet in her hand, and asked if she’d like to take a personality test, she sure looked like she could use some good news, ma’am, might learn things about herself that would—

She wasn’t ever positive but suspected she might have thrown up on him. Back at the apartment she found specks of vomit on her shoes, but when she’d puked into the big barrel she’d been certain it had been all net.

She removed her clothes and took a twenty-minute shower. When Brian came home that night she was still in her robe and almost to the bottom of a bottle of pinot grigio. He made his own drink, single malt with a single cube of ice, and sat with her in the window seat overlooking the Charles and let her talk it out. When she finished, the disgust she’d expected to see in his face — the disgust that surely would have lived in Sebastian’s — wasn’t there. Instead, she saw only... What was that?

Good Lord.

Empathy.

Is that what it looks like? she thought.

He used the tips of his fingers to brush her wet bangs back and kissed her forehead. He poured her more wine.

He chuckled. “You really puked on a Scientologist?”

“It’s not funny.”

“But, babe, it is. It really is.” He clinked his glass off hers and drank.

She laughed, but then the laugh died and she thought of who she’d once been — in the housing projects, in the prowl cars on ride-alongs, in the halls of power, in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and that endless night in the squatters camp in Léogâne — and she couldn’t connect that Rachel with this one.

“I’m so ashamed.” She looked at this man who was better than any she’d ever known, certainly kinder, certainly more patient, and the tears came, which only deepened her shame.

“Ashamed of what?” he said. “You are not weak. You hear me?”

“I can’t even walk out the fucking door,” she whispered. “I can’t even get in a fucking cab.”

“You’ll see someone,” he said. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll heal. In the meantime, where would you want to go?” His arm swept the apartment. “What’s better than here? We’ve got books, a full fridge, an Xbox.”

She dropped her forehead against his chest. “I love you.”

“I love you too. We can even do the wedding here.”

She took her head off his chest, looked in his eyes. He nodded.

They got married in a church. It was a few blocks away. Only their closest friends attended — on her side, Melissa, Eugenie, and Danny Marotta, her cameraman in Haiti; on his side, his business partner, Caleb, Caleb’s wife, Haya, a stunning Japanese immigrant who was still struggling to learn English, and Tom, the bartender from the bar where they’d met. No Jeremy James this time to walk her down the aisle; she hadn’t heard from him in two years. As for Brian, when she’d asked if he wanted his family there, he shook his head and a darkness settled on him like an overcoat.

“I do business with them,” he said. “I do not love them. I do not share the beautiful things in my life with them.”

When he spoke of his family Brian didn’t use contractions. He spoke slowly and precisely.

She said, “But they’re your family.”

He shook his head. “You’re my family.”

After the wedding, they all went for drinks at the Bristol Lounge. Later, she and Brian walked home through the Common and the Public Garden, and she’d never felt better in her life.

As they waited out a light to cross Beacon Street, however, Rachel saw two dead girls standing in the middle of the overpass that led to the Esplanade. The one in the faded red T-shirt and the jean shorts was Esther. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widdy. The two girls stepped up onto the overpass guardrail. Traffic streamed off Storrow Drive and flowed below them as they dove headfirst from the rail and vanished before they hit the pavement.

She didn’t tell Brian. She made it back to the apartment without another hitch and they drank some champagne. They made love and had some more champagne and lay in bed and watched a harvest moon rise over the city.

She saw the two girls fall from the overpass and vanish. She catalogued all the people who had vanished from her life, not just the big ones, but the small, everyday ones, and she experienced a sudden grasp of what she feared most out in the world — that they’d all vanish on her one day, everyone. She’d turn a corner and the wide avenues would be empty, the cars abandoned. Everyone would have snuck out some galactic back door while she paused to blink, and she would be the only person alive.

It was an absurd thought, something a child with a martyr complex would marinate in. Yet it felt elemental to understanding the core of her fears. She looked at her newly minted husband. His blinking lids had grown heavy with sex and champagne and the gravity of the day. She knew in that moment that she’d married him for entirely different reasons than she’d married Sebastian. She’d married Sebastian because subconsciously she’d known that if he ever left her, she wouldn’t give much of a shit. But she married Brian because although he left her in small ways — enough that she could trust the imperfection of that model — he’d never leave her in the big ones.

“What’re you thinking about?” Brian asked. “You seem sad.”

“I’m not,” she lied. “I’m happy,” she said, because it was also true.

It was eighteen months before she left the apartment again.

12 The Necklace

The weekend before he left for London, fast approaching their second wedding anniversary, Brian and Rachel rode the elevator down from the fifteenth floor and left their building. It was raining — it had done nothing but rain that week — but the rain wasn’t heavy, more like a mist she’d barely notice until the wet found her bones, similar to the weather the night they’d met. Brian took her hand and led her up to Mass Ave. He wouldn’t tell her where they were going, only that she was ready for it. She could handle it.

Rachel had left the condo a dozen times over the last six months, but she had done so when the environment was at its most controllable — early mornings and weekday evenings, often in the coldest weather. She went to the supermarket but, as before, only in the early morning hours of a weekday, and she always stayed in on weekends.

But here she was, out and about in Back Bay late on a Saturday morning. Despite the weather, Mass Ave was crowded. So were the cross streets, Newbury in particular. The Masshole fans of Red Sox Nation were out in force, the team trying to squeeze in at least one home game in a week when the rest had been rained out. So Mass Ave was teeming with red or blue T-shirts and red or blue ball caps and the people who wore them: studly young frat-boy types in jeans and flip-flops already hitting the bars; middle-aged men and women with competing beer guts; kids darting in and out of the fray along the sidewalks, a quartet of them sword fighting with toy bats. Cars sat in traffic so long the drivers turned off the engines. Horns beeped and horns bayed and jaywalkers weaved through it all, one guy shouting, “Ti-tle town, ti-tle town!” every time he slapped a trunk. Beyond the sports fans — obnoxious or otherwise — were the yuppies and buppies and the urban hipsters so recently graduated from Berklee College of Music or BU to a daunting lack of prospects. Farther down Newbury would be the trophy wives with their duck lips and their purse dogs, sighing at every slip in customer service before demanding to see someone’s manager. It had been so long since Rachel had risked entering a crowd that she’d somehow forgotten how overwhelming it could be.

“Breathe,” Brian said. “Just breathe.”

“Exhaust fumes?” she said as they crossed Mass Ave.

“Sure. Builds character.”

It was when they reached the far sidewalk that she realized what he had in mind. He turned them toward the Hynes Convention Center subway stop.

“Whoa.” She clamped her free hand over his wrist.

He turned with the tug, looked into her face. Smiled. “You can do this.”

“No, I can not.”

“You can,” he said softly. “Look at me, honey. Look at me.”

She looked into his eyes. There was a part of Brian that could inspire or grate, depending on her mood, a can-do attitude that bordered on evangelical. He preferred music and movies and books that, in one way or another, reaffirmed the status quo or at least the idea that good things come to good people. But he was no naïf, either. He held enough empathy and wisdom in those blue eyes for a man twice his age. Brian saw the bad in the world, he just chose to believe he could dodge it through force of will.

“You win,” he’d said more times than she could count, “by refusing to lose.”

To which she’d replied, more than once, “You lose by refusing to lose too.”

But she needed that part of him now, that mix of Vince Lombardi and self-help guru, that relentlessly upbeat (sometimes just relentless) attitude that her cynical self would have deemed far too predictably American were her husband not Canadian. She needed Brian to out-Brian himself now, and he did.

He held up their entwined hands. “I will not let go.”

“Shit.” She heard the suppressed hysteria in her voice even as she smiled, even as she knew she was going to do it.

“I will not,” he repeated, “let go.”

And the next thing she knew, she was on the escalator. No modern wide escalator, this. The escalator at Hynes was narrow, black, and steep. Definitely not up to current code. She feared that if she leaned forward for any reason, she’d bring herself, Brian, and everyone in front of them tumbling to the bottom. She kept her chin and head up, spine straight, as they descended. The lights dimmed until the descent felt like part of some primitive ritual, one of fertility perhaps or birth. Behind her were strangers. In front of her were strangers. Faces and motives shrouded in the dim light. Hearts beating like the tick of a bomb.

“How you doing?” Brian asked.

She squeezed his hand. “Hanging in there.”

A single drop of sweat left her hair by the temple and slid behind her left ear. It found the back of her neck and rode the line of it into her blouse where it dissolved against her spine.

She’d last suffered a panic attack on the same elevator she and Brian had taken down from their condo this morning. That had been seven months ago. No, eight, she realized with some pride. Eight, she thought, and squeezed her husband’s hand again.

They reached the platform. The crowd wasn’t too thick once it cleared the narrow escalator. She and Brian walked a quarter way down the inbound side of the platform and she was surprised to discover her hands were dry. Through most of her twenties and early thirties she’d traveled extensively. Descending into a dark tunnel with hordes of strangers to board a tube packed with even more strangers hadn’t even registered on the threat scale back then. Same thing with going to concerts and sporting events and movie theaters. Even in the tent cities and refugee camps of Haiti, she’d had no issues with panic. She’d had plenty of other issues over there and immediately upon her return — alcohol, Oxycontin, and Ativan sprang immediately to mind — but not panic.

“Hey,” Brian said, “you with me?”

She chuckled. “I think that’s my question for you.”

“Oh, I’m here,” he said. “I am right here.”

They found a bench built into a wall that sported a map of the MBTA routes — green line, red line, blue line, orange, and silver, crisscrossing like veins before branching out on their own.

She kept both her hands in his now and their knees touched. People would look and see an attractive couple, clearly connected.

“You’re always here,” she said to him. “Except—”

“When I’m not,” he finished for her, and they both chuckled.

“When you’re not,” she agreed.

“That’s just travel, though, babe. You can come with me anytime.”

She gave that a roll of her eyes. “I’m not certain I can get on this train. I’m sure not getting on a plane.”

“You’ll get on this train.”

“Yeah? Makes you so sure?”

“Because you’re stronger now. And you’re safe.”

“Safe, uh?” She looked out at the platform and then back at his hands, his knees.

“Yes. Safe.”

She looked at him as the train blew into the station hard enough for the air to muss Brian’s unruly hair even further.

“You ready?”

“I don’t know.”

They stood.

“You are.”

“You keep saying that.”

They waited for the exiting passengers and then stepped to the threshold where the car met the platform.

“We go on together,” he said.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

“Want to wait for the next one?”

The platform was empty. Everyone was on.

“We can wait for it,” he said.

The doors started to close with a whoosh and she jumped on, pulling Brian with her. The doors snapped back as they passed between them, but then they were in the car, a pair of old white ladies giving them annoyed looks, a young Hispanic boy with a violin case on his lap giving them a curious one.

The car lurched. The train headed into the tunnel.

“You did it,” Brian said.

“I did it.” She kissed him. “Wow.”

The car lurched again, this time as it maneuvered into a turn, the wheels screech-clacking. They were fifty feet underground traveling twenty-five miles an hour in a metal can along tracks that were over a hundred years old.

I am down here in the deep dark, she thought.

She looked at her husband. He was looking up at one of the ads above the doors, his strong chin tilted up with his gaze.

And I am less afraid than I would have imagined.

They rode the train to Lechmere, the last stop. They walked in the mist into East Cambridge and had lunch at a chain restaurant on the ground floor of the Galleria Mall. She hadn’t been in a mall for as long as she hadn’t been on the subway, and as they waited for the check, she realized the mall wasn’t an accident.

“You want me to stroll through this mall?” she said.

He was all innocent surprise. “Why, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Uh-huh. This mall of all malls? It’ll be filled with teenagers and noise.”

“Yup.” He handed the waiter his credit card on the small black tray.

“Oh dear,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“And if I said the subway was enough daredevil shit for one day?” she asked.

“Then I would respect that.”

And he would, she knew. He would. If asked what she loved most about her husband, she might have to say his patience. It appeared, at least when it came to her affliction, bottomless. For the first couple of months after her last attack, the one on the elevator, she took the stairs up to their apartment on the fifteenth floor. And when he was in town, Brian wouldn’t hear of her doing it alone. He’d huff and puff up those stairs with her.

“On the bright side,” he said once, when they paused to rest between ten and eleven, their faces sheened with perspiration, “we almost bought that unit on the twenty-second floor in that place on Huntington.” He lowered his head, took a deep breath. “I don’t know if it would have led to divorce, but we’d definitely be in mediation.”

She could still hear the echoes of their laughter in the stairwell — light and weary, threads of it rising toward the roof. He’d taken her hand and led her up the final five flights. They’d taken a shower together and then lay on the bed naked and let the ceiling fan dry what the towels hadn’t. They didn’t make love right away, just lay there holding hands and chuckling at the absurdity of their situation. And that’s how Brian looked at it — as a situation, an act of God foisted upon them, so beyond their power to change it that to try would be like trying to change the weather. Unlike Sebastian, as well as some of her friends, Brian never presumed that the panic attacks were within Rachel’s control. She didn’t have them because she was weak or self-indulgent or prone to drama; she had them because they afflicted her, like any malady of the body — the flu, a cold, meningitis.

When they did make love, it was as the last of the day bled out into the dusk beyond the bedroom window. The river turned purple and then black, and making love with Brian felt, as it sometimes did when they were connecting on every level, like they were drifting over thresholds of bone and slipping through walls of blood, like they were fusing.

That day became a standout that she would string together with other standouts, one after the other, for eight months, until she could look back on the state of her marriage and realize there had been far more superior days than inferior ones. She began to feel safer, sure enough of herself that one day three months ago, without warning anyone — Brian, her friends Melissa and Eugenie, her shrink, Jane — she took the elevator again.

And now here she was in a mall, riding down an escalator into a maelstrom of bodies. Teenagers mostly, as she’d predicted, on a Saturday of all days, and a rainy one, the kind of day mall managers prayed for. She could feel eyes on them — real or imagined, she had no idea — and the press of bodies as they passed and she could hear so many disparate voices, so many snatches of conversation—

“... said you ’fronting now, Poot...”

“... pick up, pick up...”

“... and, like, I’m expected to just drop everything? Because he happens...”

“... not if you don’t like it, of course not...”

“... Olivia has one and she’s not even eleven yet.”

She was surprised at how calmly she took in all these souls hurtling toward her, past her, and streaming on tiers above and below her with their aggressive need for goods and services, for the itchy satisfactions to be found in acquisition for its own sake, for human connection and disconnection in equal measure (before she quit counting, she noted twenty couples where one was ignoring the other to talk on a cell phone), for someone, anyone, to tell them why they did it, why they were here, what separated them from insects moving underground right now in colonies that bore a remarkable resemblance to the three-tiered mall in which they found themselves wandering, roving, stalking on a Saturday afternoon.

Normally, it was just this type of thinking that preceded a panic attack. It started with a tickle in the center of her chest. The tickle quickly became a piston. Her mouth would turn Saharan. The piston would transform into the sparrow, imprisoned and panicked. It would flap its wings — whomph, whomph, whomph, whomph — in the hollowed-out core of her, and sweat would sluice down the sides of her neck and pop on her forehead. Breathing would feel like a luxury with an expiration date.

But not today. Not even close.

Soon she even gave into the pleasures of a mall, bought herself a couple of blouses, a candle, some overly expensive conditioner. A necklace in the window of a jewelry store caught both their eyes. They didn’t even speak about it for the first minute, just exchanged glances. It was two necklaces, actually, a smaller one within a larger, strings of black onyx bead balls, the chains white gold. Not expensive, not even close, probably not even something she’d pass on to a daughter, should she and Brian ever have one, and yet...

“What’s the pull?” she asked Brian. “What do we like about this?”

Brian looked at her for a long time, trying to sort through it himself. “Maybe because it’s a pair?”

He slipped it around her neck in the store. Had a little trouble with the clasp — it was too tight but the salesman assured them that was normal; it would loosen with use — but then the beads draped themselves over her blouse, just below her throat.

Outside the jeweler, he ran his palms along hers.

“Dry as a bone,” he said.

She nodded, her eyes wide.

“Come on.” He led her to a photo booth under the escalators. He inserted the required coins and pulled her into the booth with him, made her laugh by feeling her breasts up as she was pulling the curtain closed behind them. When the flashbulb flashed within the booth, she pressed her cheek to his and they made goofy faces, sticking out their tongues or blowing kisses at the lens.

When they were done, they looked at the strip of four panels and the photos were as silly as she’d expected, their heads half out of frame in the first two.

“I want you to sit for another strip,” he said. “Just you.”

“What?”

“Please,” he said, suddenly somber.

“Okay...”

“I want to mark this day. I want you to look in that lens with pride.”

She felt silly in the booth alone, could hear him out there inserting the coins. But she felt a sense of accomplishment too; he was right on that. A year ago, she couldn’t imagine walking out the front door. And now she was in a jam-packed mall.

She stared at the lens.

I am still afraid. But I am not terrified. And I am not alone.

When she came out of the booth, he showed her the strip and she liked what she saw. She looked a little tough actually, not the kind of woman you’d fuck with.

“Every time you see these pictures or you wear that necklace,” Brian said, “remember how strong you are.”

She looked around the mall. “This was all you, babe.”

He took her hand and kissed the knuckles. “I just nudged.”

She felt like weeping. She didn’t know why at first, but then it hit her.

He knew her.

He knew her, this man she’d married, this man she’d committed herself to walking through this life with. He knew her.

And — wonder of wonders — he was still here.

13 Refraction

Monday morning, a few hours after Brian left for the airport, Rachel tried to return to work on the book. She’d been writing it for the better part of a year but still wasn’t even certain what genre it fell into. It had started as straight journalism, an account of her experiences in Haiti, but once she realized it was impossible to write the account without inserting herself into the narrative, the book morphed into something resembling memoir. While she hadn’t yet attempted a chapter that detailed her on-camera breakdown, she knew she’d have to give it context once she did. Which led to a chapter about her mother, which led to another chapter about the seventy-three Jameses, which led to an overhaul of the entire first part of the book. At this point, she had no idea where the book was going and no idea how she’d get there even if she did, but most days she loved writing it. Other days, it fought her to a draw before her second cup of coffee. Today was one of those days.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein, but she began to suspect both the good and the bad parts of the process were connected to the fact that she was writing without a map. No plan at all, really. She fell quite naturally, it seemed, into a more free-flowing approach than she ever would have allowed herself as a journalist and gave herself over to something she didn’t quite understand, something that, at the moment, spoke in cadence more than structure.

She wouldn’t show the book to Brian, but she did discuss it with him. He was, as always, unfailingly supportive, though she wondered if, once or twice, she caught a patronizing glint in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite believe the book was more than a dalliance, a hobby that would never turn into something whole and finite.

“What are you going to call it?” he asked her one night.

“Transience,” she told him.

That’s as close as she could get, thus far, to a unifying theme. Her life and the lives of those she’d most memorably encountered seemed marked by a state of never quite taking root. Of floating. Of spiraling helplessly toward the void.

That morning, she wrote a few pages about her days with the Globe, but it felt dry and, worse, rote, so she cashed in early and took a long shower and got dressed for her lunch date with Melissa.

She crossed the Back Bay in the steady rain — the endless rain, the omnipresent rain, “Biblical rain,” Brian had said last night, “Noah rain.” It wasn’t quite that bad, but it had been wet for eight days now. Lakes and ponds upstate were overflowing into roadways, turning some streets into tributaries. In two cases, cars had been carried off. Over the weekend, a commercial jet had slid off a runway. No injuries reported. Those in a ten-car pileup on 95 hadn’t been so lucky.

She needn’t worry as much as some — she didn’t fly, she rarely drove (it had been two years since the last time), and she and Brian lived high above street level. Brian flew, though, all the time. Brian drove.

She met Melissa at the Oak Room in the Copley Plaza Hotel. The Oak Room wasn’t called the Oak Room anymore. Since Rachel’s meltdown, it’d had a facelift and, after decades as the Oak Room, became OAK Long Bar + Kitchen, but Rachel, Melissa, and pretty much everyone they knew still called it the Oak Room.

She hadn’t been to Copley Square by herself in a couple of years. At the onset of her last prolonged spate of panic attacks, the buildings that surrounded the square — the Old South Church, the Boston Public Library Main Branch, Trinity Church, the Fairmont, the Westin, and the towering Hancock with its mirrored blue windows reflecting the square back on itself — had one day given her the impression they were leaning in, not buildings anymore so much as walls, great walls built to pen her in. This was doubly unfortunate because she’d always admired Copley for its role as a representative hybrid of old and new Boston, the old represented by the beaux-arts classicism and lustrous limestone of the BPL and the Fairmont and, of course, Trinity Church, with its clay roof and heavy arches, the new by the icy functionality and hard, sleek lines of the Westin and the Hancock Tower, structures that gave the impression of aggressive indifference to both history and its sob sister, nostalgia. But for almost two years, she’d walked around it, not through it.

Walking into the square for the first time since her wedding day, Rachel had expected palpitations, accelerant in the blood. Yet as she walked up the burgundy carpet under the Fairmont awning, she felt only the slightest uptick in her heart rate before it reset itself almost immediately to normal. Maybe it was the rain that calmed her. With an umbrella over her head, she was just another near-spectral being in dark clothes hidden beneath a cowl of plastic moving through a city of near-spectral beings in dark clothes hidden beneath cowls of plastic. In this kind of rain and murk, she imagined murders were likelier to go unsolved and affairs unpunished.

“Mmmm,” Melissa said when she mentioned this to her. “Thinking of an affair, are we?”

“God no. I can barely get out of the house.”

“Bullshit. You’re here. You took the T around town this weekend, gallivanted through a mall.” She reached out and pinched Rachel’s cheek. “Such a big girl now, aren’t we?”

Rachel swatted her hand and Melissa sat back and laughed a hair too loud. Rachel had eaten a large salad and slow-sipped a glass of white wine, but Melissa, on her day off, barely touched her meal and was downing Bellinis as if prosecco would be outlawed at the stroke of midnight. It made her sharper, funnier, but louder too, and Rachel knew from past experience how quick the humor could turn into self-loathing, the sharpness could dim, but the loud would just get louder. A couple of times, Rachel had noticed other patrons looking their way, though that could have nothing to do with Melissa’s volume and everything to do with Rachel.

Melissa took a sip of her drink, Rachel noting with some relief that the sips were smaller now. Melissa had been Rachel’s producer on dozens of stories at 6 but not, as luck would have it, on any of the Haiti stories. When Rachel suffered her meltdown in Cité Soleil, Melissa was on her honeymoon on Maui. The marriage had lasted less than two years, but Melissa still had her job, which she’d always loved far more than Ted. So, as she’d say with a bright, bitter smile and two thumbs-up, win-win.

“So if you were to have an affair with someone in this room, who would it be?”

Rachel gave the room a quick sweep. “No one.”

Melissa craned her head, staring openly at the room. “It is pretty grim pickings. But, wait, not even that guy in the corner?”

Rachel said, “With the half-fedora and the soul patch?”

“Yeah. He’s all right.”

“I don’t want to have an affair with ‘all right.’ I don’t want to have an affair at all. But if I did, it would be with the be-all and end-all.”

“And what would he look like?”

“Beats me. I’m not the one looking for a man.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the tall dark stranger. You’re already married to him.”

Rachel cocked her head at that.

Melissa mimicked the gesture. “I don’t know the guy.” She splayed her fingers against her chest. “Whenever I talk to your admittedly handsome, admittedly charming, admittedly funny and intelligent groom there, I always get the feeling after he walks away that he said absolutely nothing.”

“I’ve seen you guys talk for half an hour.”

“And yet... I know nothing about him.”

“He’s from British Columbia. He’s—”

“I know his bio,” Melissa said. “I just don’t know Brian. All that charm and eye contact and questions about me and my hopes and dreams is so beautifully packaged, I’m continually surprised to wake up the next day and realize he made sure all I did was talk about myself.”

“But you like talking about yourself.”

“I love talking about myself, but that’s not the point.”

“Oh, you have one?”

“Bitch, I do.”

“Bitch, spit it out.”

They smiled across the table at each other. It was like working together again.

“I just wonder if anyone knows Brian.”

“Me included?” Rachel laughed.

“Forget it.”

“That’s your implication.”

“I said forget it.”

“And I asked if you’re including me in the list of people who don’t know my husband.”

Melissa shook her head and asked Rachel about the book she was writing.

“I’m having trouble giving it shape.”

“What shape?” Melissa asked with a breezy dismissiveness. “There was an earthquake in Haiti, then a cholera outbreak, then a hurricane. And you were there for all of it.”

“When you put it that way,” Rachel said, “it sounds exactly like disaster porn. Which is what I fear most.”

Melissa waved that off, which was usually what she did when Rachel ventured into a topic Melissa didn’t understand or didn’t want to.

Times like these, Rachel wondered why she continued to hang out with Melissa. She embraced the shallow the way others searched for the profound and she could reduce any attempt at complexity to a target of casual scorn. But the last few years had stripped Rachel of almost all her friends, and it scared her to think she’d one day wake up with none at all. So she half listened to Melissa prattle on about her own work, about the latest round of who’s-fucking-whom at WCJR, both figuratively and literally.

Rachel interjected “Wow” and “No way” and “That’s hilarious” where expected, but part of her remained back at the comments Melissa had made about Brian, and her irritation continued to rise. She’d woken this morning in a great mood. All she’d wanted since was to keep that mood alive. She just wanted to stay happy for a day. And not the bullshit, shiny happy of a beauty pageant contestant or a religious fanatic, just the hard-earned happiness of a self-aware human being who’d worked on her fears over the weekend with her loving, if often preoccupied, husband.

Tomorrow she’d allow all the doubts back in. Tomorrow she’d open herself up to the spiritual termites of minor despair and ennui. But today, on this miserable, soupy day, she wanted to remain not miserable. But it seemed like Melissa was determined to hurl ice water on her glow.

When Melissa went to order another round, Rachel begged off with claims of a hair appointment on Newbury Street. She could tell Melissa didn’t believe her, but she didn’t much care. The rain had softened outside to a light drizzle and she wanted to walk in it through the Public Garden to the Charles and then follow the river until she crossed the footbridge to Clarendon and walked back to her building. She wanted to smell the soaked soil and wet asphalt in equal measure. In Back Bay, in this kind of weather, it was easy to imagine Paris or London or Madrid, to feel part of a larger continuum.

Melissa stayed behind for “one last drink” and they exchanged kisses on the cheek before Rachel left. She turned right and headed down St. James. Walking the length of the hotel, she could see it reflected in the Hancock Tower, could see herself there as well, to the far left of the left pane of glass, part of a mirrored triptych. The left pane was dominated by the sidewalk and Rachel walking along the edge of it, a short line of cabs to her left just peeking into frame. The middle pane reflected a canted version of the grand old hotel, and the third pane showed the tiny street in between the hotel and the Hancock. It was such a small street that most would assume it was an alley if they noticed it all. It was used primarily, if not exclusively, by delivery trucks. A laundry truck was backed up to a pair of double doors at the rear of the hotel, a black Suburban idled at the back of the Hancock, its exhaust mingling with the exhaust of a sewer grate, the rain turning silver as it fell through the smoke.

Brian walked out of the Hancock and opened the back door of the SUV. It looked like Brian anyway, but it couldn’t be. Brian was in the air, over the middle of the Atlantic by now, legging toward London.

But it was Brian — same jawline, just beginning to widen slightly as he approached forty, same lock of black hair falling over his forehead, same soft copper trench coat over black pullover that he’d left the house in this morning.

She went to call his name but something in the set of his face stopped her. He wore a look she’d never seen before; it was somehow heartless and hunted at the same time. This couldn’t, she told herself, be the same face that watches me sleep at night. He climbed into the SUV — this watery, refracted reflection of her husband. Rachel reached the corner just as the reflected SUV transformed into the actual one. It passed her, its windows black, and turned onto St. James. She pivoted in place, her mouth open but no words leaving it, and watched it cross into the middle lane, pass through the traffic light at Dartmouth, and descend the on-ramp for the Mass Pike. She lost it there to the dark tunnel and the traffic merging behind it.

She stood on the sidewalk for a long time. The rain grew heavy again. It pelted her umbrella and rebounded off the sidewalk into her ankles and calves.

“Brian,” she finally said.

She repeated his name, though this time it was no longer a statement but a question.

14 Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont

She took the direct route back to the condo. She reminded herself that the world was filled with people who looked near identical to others. She didn’t even know how precise the resemblance was; she’d seen a reflection. A reflection that was refracted off mirrored glass in the rain. If she’d had a moment to get a clear view, if he’d paused at the car door and she’d come around the corner in time to look directly at him, she probably would have seen him for the stranger he was. He wouldn’t have had the barely perceptible bump halfway up the bridge of his nose. Or his lips would have been thinner, his eyes brown, not blue. He wouldn’t have had Brian’s smattering of pockmarks below the cheekbones, pockmarks so faded you could only see them if you were close enough to kiss them. This stranger might have smiled with hesitation at the woman staring so blatantly at him in the rain, wondered if perhaps there was something wrong with her. Maybe recognition would have dawned on his not-quite-Brian’s face and he’d have thought, “It’s that woman from Channel 6 who had the freak-out on-air a while back.” Or maybe he wouldn’t have noticed her at all. He’d simply have gotten into the car and been driven off. Which ultimately is what happened.

The fact was, Brian did have a double. They’d been talking about him for years: Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont.

When he was a freshman at Brown, people would tell Brian there was another kid his age, a pizza delivery guy, who looked just like him. It got to the point where Brian had to see for himself. One day he stood on the sidewalk outside the pizza parlor until he saw his twin step out from behind the counter carrying a stack of pizza boxes in a red leather thermal bag. Brian stepped aside as Scott walked out of the shop and got into a white van with DOM’S PIZZA stenciled on the door and drove off into Federal Hill to deliver his pies. Brian couldn’t explain why, but he never introduced himself to Scott. Instead, by his own admission, he “kinda” began stalking him.

“Kinda,” she said when he told her.

“I know. I know. But if you could have seen the resemblance you would have understood how fucking eerie it was. The idea of introducing myself to myself? It was just too weird.”

“But he wasn’t yourself. He was Scott—”

“—Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont, yes.” Brian would often refer to him that way, as if somehow the full description made Scott a little less real, a bit more like a character in a comedy sketch. Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont.

“I took a bunch of pictures of him.”

“You what?”

“Right?” he said. “I told you it was definitely stalking.”

“You said it was kinda stalking.”

“Used a zoom lens. I used to stand in front of my bathroom mirror in Providence and hold the pictures up beside my face — full-on, left profile, right profile, chin down, chin up. And, I swear, the only difference was that his forehead was maybe a tenth of an inch taller and he didn’t have this bump.”

The bump on the bridge of Brian’s nose was the result of a fifth-grade hockey injury that relocated some of the cartilage there. It was only visible in profile, never head-on, and even then one had to be looking for it.

Christmas, his sophomore year, Brian followed Scott Pfeiffer home to Grafton, Vermont.

“Your family didn’t miss you on Christmas?” she asked.

“Not that I ever heard.” He spoke in that flat tone — dead tone, would be the less charitable description — he used whenever he discussed his family.

Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont, had the kind of life Brian probably never would have coveted if he hadn’t seen it up close. Scott was working full-time at Dom’s Pizza to put himself through Johnson & Wales, where he was majoring in restaurant management, while Brian majored in international finance at Brown, lived off a trust annuity from his grandparents, and had no idea what his tuition was, only that his parents must have paid it on time because he never heard otherwise.

Scott’s father, Bob Pfeiffer, was the butcher at the local supermarket, and his mother, Sally, was the town crossing guard. They also served as the treasurer and vice-president, respectively, of the Windham County Rotary Club. And once a year they drove two hours to Saratoga Springs, New York, and stayed in the same motel where they’d spent their honeymoon.

“How much do you know about these people?” Rachel asked.

“You learn a lot when you stalk someone.”

He used to watch the family and pray for a scandal. “Incest,” he admitted, “or for Bob to get caught grabbing some undercover cop’s Johnson in a public restroom. I would have taken embezzlement, though I don’t know what you’d embezzle from a supermarket meat locker. Steaks, I guess.”

“Why would you pray for that?”

“They were too perfect. I mean, they lived in this cute fucking colonial right on the town common. White, of course, picket fence, wraparound porch with, yes, an actual porch swing. They sat out there on Christmas Eve in their sweaters, brought out little space heaters, and sat drinking hot chocolates. Told each other stories. Laughed. At one point the daughter, she was like ten, sang a Christmas carol and they all applauded. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Sounds sweet.”

“It was hideous. Because if someone can be that happy? That perfect? What’s that say about the rest of us?”

“But there are people out there like that,” she said.

“Where?” he said. “I never met them. You?”

She opened her mouth and then closed it. Of course she hadn’t, but why did she think she had? She’d always thought of herself as a fairly skeptical, if not downright cynical, person. And after Haiti, she would have sworn she’d been stripped of the last vestiges of sentimentality or romanticism. But buried somewhere deep in her brain lay the belief that perfect, happy — and perfectly happy — people walked this earth.

No such beast, her mother had often reminded her. Happiness, her mother used to say, was an hourglass with a crack in it.

“But you said yourself,” she said to Brian, “they were happy.”

“They certainly seemed to be.”

“But then...”

He smiled. Triumphantly but with a whiff of despair. “Bob always stopped off at this little Scottish pub on the way home. One day I sat beside him. He gave me this huge double take, of course, and told me how much I resembled his son. I acted surprised. Acted surprised again when the bartender said the same thing. Bob bought me a drink, I bought Bob a drink, and so on. He asked me who I was, so I told him. Told him I went to school at Fordham, not Brown, but otherwise I stuck pretty close to the truth. Bob told me he wasn’t a big fan of New York City. Too much crime, too many immigrants. By the third drink, ‘immigrants’ became ‘wetbacks’ and ‘towel heads.’ By the fifth drink, he was on about the ‘niggers’ and the ‘fags.’ Oh, and the dykes. Hated lesbians, our Bob did. Said if his daughter ever turned into one he’d, lemme see if I get this quote right, superglue her cunt. Turned out Bob had fascinating ideas on corporal punishment that he’d been employing for years, first on Scott and then on Nannette, that was the daughter’s name. Once ol’ Bob got talking, he couldn’t stop. At one point, I realized that everything that had left his mouth for fifteen minutes was repulsive. Bob was a scared-shitless coward of a monster hiding behind his impeccable blandness.”

“Whatever happened to Scott?”

Brian shrugged. “He never went back to school. Probably lack of finances. Last I checked, and this was fifteen years ago, he was working at one of the Grafton B&Bs.”

“And you never introduced yourself?”

“God no.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Once I was sure his life was no better than mine, I lost all interest.”

So, coincidence of coincidences, Rachel had just come across Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont. Maybe he was in town for a food and beverage services conference. Maybe he’d made something of himself, owned a small chain of quality inns across New England. She wished the best for Scott, after all. Even though she’d never met him, he’d become part of the fabric of her memory and she hoped his life worked out.

But how could they both be wearing the same clothes?

That was the detail she couldn’t dismiss no matter how hard she tried. Accepting that Brian’s double or near double had happened to be in the same city of two million was easy enough, she supposed, but to swallow that both men wore a thin copper-colored raincoat over a black cotton pullover with the collar turned up, a white T-shirt, and midnight blue jeans, that required the kind of faith religions were founded on.

Wait, she asked herself as she turned up Commonwealth toward her building, how did you see the blue jeans? There was an SUV between you and his legs.

The same way she’d seen the rest of him, she realized — reflected in the glass. She’d first seen his face, the coat and pullover. Then, as the confusion set in, she’d caught the back of him as he stepped into the car, ducking his head under the doorframe, pulling the flap of the coat in after him. In the moment, she hadn’t realized she’d seen all that, but on the walk home, it reassembled for her. So, yes, the Refracted Man (or Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont) had been wearing the same color jeans Brian had left the house in. Same jeans, same coat, same sweater, same color T-shirt.

In the apartment, she half talked herself out of it again. Coincidences did happen in this life. She dried her hair and went into the spare bedroom he often used as his home office. She called his cell. It went directly to voice mail. Made sense. He was either still in the air or had just landed. Made perfect sense.

An ash-blond desk sat before a window that looked out across the river at MIT and Cambridge. They were high enough that on a clear day they could make out Arlington and parts of Medford if they put in the effort. Now, though, behind the sheets of rain, it was an impressionist painting, the buildings retaining their shapes but stripped of all specificity. Normally Brian’s laptop sat here, but of course he’d taken it on his trip with him. She put her own laptop there and considered her options. She tried his cell a second time. Voice mail.

His primary credit cards, an Amex and a mileage-plus Visa, were business cards. The records were at his offices, which were through the soup and across the river in Cambridge, just on the edge of Harvard Square.

The statements on their personal credit cards, however, were easily accessible. She brought the one for the Mastercard up on her screen. She went back three months and found nothing out of the ordinary, so she went back six. All ordinary purchases. What had she been expecting to find? If she did find some irregularity, the inexplicable purchase, the mystery website, would it turn out to be clear evidence he was in Copley Square early this afternoon when he was supposed to be in London? Or would it just turn out to be proof he surfed porn sites or that her last birthday present hadn’t been tucked away a month early as he’d claimed but had actually been purchased in a mad scramble that morning?

She didn’t even find that.

She went to the British Airways site and checked arrival information on Flight 422, Logan to Heathrow.

That was fifteen minutes from now.

She checked their ATM statements and found no large cash withdrawals. With some guilt she realized the last time he’d used the card had been as a point-of-sale purchase — the necklace he’d bought her at the mall.

She looked at her cell, willing it to vibrate, for “Brian” to show up in the caller ID. Somehow he’d clear this whole thing up. She’d finish the phone call laughing at her own paranoia.

Wait. Cell phone records. Of course. She didn’t have his — his cell phone was provided by his company and therefore a business expense — but she had her own. She spun in the chair once and set to tapping away on the keyboard. In a little over a minute, she had her cell records dating back a year. She called up the iCal and matched dates he’d been out of town against her records.

And there they all were — incoming calls from his cell phone when he’d been in Nome, Seattle, Portland. But they didn’t tell her anything. He could have made those calls from anywhere. So she scrolled to another week — God, that black icy week in January — incoming calls from Brian when he’d been in (or claimed to have been in) Moscow, Belgrade, Minsk. And there in the fifth column of the bill were the international long-distance charges she’d accrued for answering those calls. Not small charges either (Why was she getting charged for answering her phone? She needed a new provider), but sizable ones. Ones that correlated with calls made from the other side of the world.

As she clicked back over to the British Airways site, her phone vibrated. Brian.

“Hey,” she said.

An elongated hiss followed by two soft pops.

And then his voice. “Hey, babe.”

“Hey,” she said again.

“I’m—”

“Where are—?”

“What?”

“—you?”

“I’m in the customs line. And my phone’s about to die.”

Her relief at hearing his voice was immediately replaced with irritation. “They didn’t have an outlet in first class? On British Airways?”

“They did but mine didn’t work. You okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sure?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I dunno. You just sound... tight.”

“Must be the connection.”

He didn’t say anything for a bit. And then: “Okay.”

“How’s the customs line?”

“Massive. I’m taking a guess but I’m pretty sure a Swiss Air flight and an Emirates flight arrived the same time as us.”

Another bit of dead air.

“So,” she said, “I met with Melissa today.”

“Yeah?”

“And after? I was walking on—”

She heard a series of beep-clicks.

“Phone’s dying, babe. I’m really sorry. Call you from the ho—”

The line went dead.

Had it sounded like customs in the background? What did customs sound like? It had been a while since she’d been out of the country. She tried to picture it. She was pretty sure a ding went off when a checkpoint became open. But she couldn’t remember if it was a soft ding or a loud one. Either way, she hadn’t heard any dings during their conversation. But if the line was long enough, and Brian was still at the back of it, maybe he wasn’t close enough to the checkpoints for the dings to be heard.

What else had she heard? Just a general hubbub. No distinct conversations. Plenty of people didn’t talk in lines, particularly after a long flight. They were too tired. Too knackered, as Brian sometimes said with a faux British accent.

She stared out the window through the rain at the Monet version of the Charles and Cambridge beyond. Not all its shapes were foreign to her. Downriver she could discern the spiky amorphous sprawl of the Stata Center, a complex of brightly colored aluminum and titanium buildings that called to mind an implosion. Usually she abhorred modern architecture, but she had an inexplicable fondness for the Stata. Something about its haphazard lunacy seemed inspired. Back upriver, she could identify the dome of the main building at MIT, and farther still, the spire of the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard.

She’d had lunch in the Yard a few times with Brian. It was just a few blocks from his office and he’d met her there their first summer together, sometimes with burgers from Charlie’s Kitchen or pizza from Pinocchio’s. His office was about as unassuming as they came, six rooms on the third floor of a nondescript three-story brick building on Winthrop Street that looked as if it belonged in an old mill town like Brockton or Waltham far more than in the backyard of one of the most elite universities in the world. A small gold plate outside the main door identified it as Delacroix Timber Ltd. She’d been there three times, maybe four, and outside of Brian and his junior partner, Caleb, she couldn’t name the other employees or recall much about them except that they were young and cute, males and females, with the avid eyes of the ambitious. Interns mostly, Brian had told her, hoping to prove their mettle and get promoted to a paying position on the mother ship in Vancouver.

Brian Delacroix’s break from his family had always been a personal one, he explained to Rachel, never a professional one. He liked the lumber business. He was good at it. When his uncle, who’d run the U.S. operation from offices on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, dropped dead of a stroke while walking his dog through Central Park one night, Brian — never a source of disappointment to his family, just one of confusion — stepped into the role. After a year, he found Manhattan to be too much — “You can’t turn it off,” he’d say — and moved the operation to Cambridge.

She looked at the clock in the upper right corner of her laptop: 4:02 P.M. There’d still be someone at the office. Caleb, at the very least, who worked like a madman. Rachel could pop over, tell Caleb Brian had left something behind in his office and asked her to retrieve it. Once there, she could hop on his computer or take a peek through the credit card statements in his files. Make sure everything added up.

Was it a crime to suddenly and wholly mistrust your husband? She wondered this as she tried to hail a cab on Commonwealth.

It wasn’t a crime or even a sin, but it didn’t speak to a rock-solid foundation in their marriage, either. How could she mistrust him this fast, after she’d been singing his praises just this afternoon to Melissa? Their marriage, unlike those of so many of their friends, was strong.

Wasn’t it?

What was a strong marriage? What was a good marriage? She knew terrible people who had wonderful marriages, glued together somehow in their terribleness. And she knew fine, fine people who’d stood before God and all their friends to profess their undying love to each other only to toss that love on a slag heap a few years later. In the end, no matter how good they were — or thought they were — usually all that remained of the love they’d so publicly professed was vitriol, regret, and a kind of awed dismay at how dark the roads they’d ventured down became by the end.

A marriage, her mother often said, was only as strong as your next fight.

Rachel didn’t believe that. Or didn’t want to. Not when it came to her and Brian. When it came to her and Sebastian, that had definitely been true, but she and Sebastian were a disaster from the start. She and Brian were anything but.

Yet in the absence of a logical reason why she would stumble across a man who looked like her husband and was dressed identically slipping out of the back of a building in Boston when her husband was supposed to be on a flight to London, she had to go with the only rational answer — that the man exiting the Hancock early this afternoon had been Brian. Which meant he wasn’t in London. Which meant he was lying.

She flagged down a cab.

15 Wet

I don’t want him to be lying, she thought as the cab crossed the BU bridge and rounded the rotary to turn onto Memorial Drive. I don’t want to believe any of this. I want to feel exactly as I did this weekend — in love and in trust.

But what is my alternative? Pretend I didn’t see him?

This wouldn’t be the first time you saw something that wasn’t there.

Those times were different.

How?

They just were.

The cabdriver never said a word during the drive. She glanced at his hack license. Sanjay Seth. He looked sullen in the photo, one step short of scowling. She didn’t know this man and yet she allowed him to transport her, just as she allowed strangers to prepare her food and go through her trash and give her a body scan and fly a plane. And she hoped they didn’t fly that plane into a mountain or poison her food just because they were having a bad day. Or, in the case of this cab, she hoped he wouldn’t accelerate and drive her to a remote spot at the back of a failed industrial park and climb in the backseat, telling her just what he thought of women who didn’t say “Please.” The last time she’d taken a cab, this line of thinking had compelled her to abort the ride, but this time she pressed her fists into the sides of her thighs and kept them there. She maintained a steady inhale and exhale that was neither too deep nor too shallow and looked out the window at the rain and told herself she’d get through this just like she got through the subway ride and the mall.

When they neared Harvard Square, she asked Sanjay Seth to pull over at the corner of JFK and Winthrop because Winthrop was a one-way heading in the wrong direction. She didn’t feel like waiting while the cab slogged through 4:50 traffic for another five or ten minutes to come around the block just so he could get her a hundred feet closer.

As she approached the building, Caleb Perloff exited it. He tugged on the door to make sure it had locked behind him, his raincoat and Sox ball cap as wet as everyone else’s in the city, and then turned to see her standing on the sidewalk below him.

She could tell by the look on his face that he couldn’t put the two together — Rachel here on the other side of the river in Cambridge, outside their offices, when Brian was overseas.

She felt ridiculous. What possible explanation could she have for standing here? She’d had the cab ride over to think about it and she hadn’t managed to come up with one viable reason she’d need access to her husband’s office.

“So this is where it all happens,” she tried.

Caleb shot her that wry smile of his. “This is the spot.” He craned his head to look up at the building and then back at her. “Did you know that the price of timber went down one-tenth of one cent yesterday in Andhra Pradesh?”

“I did not, no.”

“But on the other side of the world, in Mato Grasso—”

“That’s where again?”

“Brazil.” He rolled the r as he came down the steps toward her. “In Mato Grasso, the price rose half a cent. And all signs point to it continuing to rise over the next month.”

“But in India?”

“We get that tenth of a cent discount.” He shrugged. “But it’s also kinda volatile right now. And shipping costs are higher. So who do we make a deal with?”

“That’s a dilemma,” she admitted.

“And what about all the timber we export?”

“Another wrinkle.”

“Can’t just let it rot.”

“Couldn’t do that.”

“Let the bugs get to it. The rain.”

“Heavens. The rain.”

He held his hand up to it, a soft drizzle at the moment. “Actually, it’s been dry in BC this past month. Odd. Dry there, wet here. Usually works the other way.” He cocked his head at her.

She cocked hers at him.

“Brings you by, Rachel?”

She never knew how much Brian had told anyone about her condition. He’d said he didn’t mention it, but she figured he had to tell someone, if only after a few drinks. They had to wonder at some point why Rachel hadn’t been able to join them at this party or that, why she’d skipped out on the Fourth of July fireworks with everyone last year at the Esplanade, why they rarely saw her out at the bars. Someone as bright as Caleb would have realized at some point that the only time he saw Rachel was in controlled environments (usually the condo) with small groups. But did Caleb know she hadn’t driven a car in two years? Hadn’t taken the subway in almost as long prior to this past Saturday? Did he know she once froze in the food court of the Prudential Center Mall, that she’d had to sit, surrounded by well-meaning security personnel, short of breath and certain she’d pass out, until Brian arrived to take her home?

“I was shopping in the ’hood.” She gestured toward the square.

He looked at her empty hands.

“Couldn’t find a thing,” she said. “Turned into a browse day.” She squinted through the mist at the building behind him. “Thought I’d take a look at the competition for my husband’s attentions.”

He smiled. “Want to come up?”

“I’ll just pop into his office to...”

“He left something in his drawer that he...”

“So this is his command center. Mind if I just hang out here for a bit? You can close the door behind you.”

“Did you remodel?” she said.

“Nope.”

“Then there’s nothing I need to see. Just thought I’d stroll by before I headed home.”

He nodded as if it all made perfect sense. “Want to share a cab?”

“That’d be great.”

They walked back up Winthrop and crossed JFK. It was close to five and the traffic heading into Harvard Square had clotted. To catch a cab heading out of the square, their best chance was to walk a block to the Charles Hotel. But what had been a flat pewter sky just a minute before had turned swollen and black.

“That’s not good,” Caleb said.

“I wouldn’t think so, no.”

They came to the end of Winthrop and could see from there that the cab stand in front of the Charles was empty. The traffic snaking toward the river was as bad as, if not worse than, the traffic heading into the square.

The black above rumbled. A few miles to the west, a bolt of lightning split the sky.

“A drink?” Caleb said.

“Or two,” she said as the sky opened. “Jesus.”

The umbrellas were poor protection once the wind kicked in. The rain fell with weight and clatter, the drops exploding off the pavement as they ran back up Winthrop. It sliced in from the right and the left, the front and the back.

“Grendel’s or Shay’s?” Caleb said.

She could see Shay’s on the other side of JFK. Close, but still another fifty yards in the rain. And if traffic moved, they’d have to work their way to a crosswalk. Grendel’s, on the other hand, was just to their left.

“Grendel’s.”

“Good choice. We’re too old for Shay’s anyway.”

In the vestibule, they added their umbrellas to the dozen or so already leaning against the wall. They removed their coats and Caleb took off his Sox cap, which had soaked through. His brown hair was cut so tight to his scalp he freed it of moisture by swiping his palm across it. They found a place to hang their coats by the hostess stand and were led to a table. Grendel’s Den was a basement-level place and they ordered their first round as shoes of every variety ran past on the cobblestones outside. Soon the rain had grown so heavy no one ran past.

Grendel’s had been around so long that not only could Rachel recall being turned away from the door with a fake ID in the nineties, but her mother had recalled frequenting the place in the early seventies. It catered mostly to Harvard students and faculty. Out-of-towners tended to wander in only on summer days when management placed tables out front by the green.

The waitress brought a wine for Rachel and a bourbon for Caleb and left menus. Caleb used his napkin to blot his face and neck dry.

They both chuckled a few times without saying anything. It could be years before they saw rain like this again.

“How’s the baby?” she asked.

He beamed. “She’s magical. I mean, for the first ninety days, their eyes don’t really lock onto anything besides the breast and the mother’s face, so I was starting to feel left out. But on that ninety-first day? AB looked right at me and I was a goner.”

Caleb and Haya had named their six-month-old Annabelle but Caleb had been referring to her as AB since the second week of her life.

“Well” — Caleb raised his glass — “cheers.”

She met his glass with her own. “To dodging pneumonia.”

“We hope,” he said.

They drank.

“How’s Haya?”

“She’s good.” Caleb nodded. “Real good. Loves being a mom.”

“How’s her English coming?”

“She watches a ton of TV. It really helps. You can have a solid conversation with her now if you have a little patience. She’s very... deliberate about choosing her words.”

Caleb had returned from a trip to Japan with Haya. He spoke halting Japanese; she spoke barely any English. They were married within three months. Brian didn’t like it. Caleb wasn’t the settling-down type, he’d say. And what were they going to talk about over the dinner table?

Rachel had to admit that it colored her opinion of Caleb when he introduced her to the luminous, mostly mute, subservient woman with the kind of face and body that could launch a thousand wet dreams. What else had bound him to her, if not that and that alone? And was the master-servant vibe she got when she saw them together an outgrowth of some hidden he-man fantasy he’d always secretly pursued? Or was Rachel just being bitchy because it hadn’t escaped her notice that while Caleb had married a woman who didn’t speak English, his partner Brian had married a shut-in?

When she brought that up to Brian, he said, “It’s different with us.”

“How?”

“You’re not a shut-in.”

“I beg to differ.”

“You’re just going through a phase. You’ll rebound. But him? Having a kid? The fuck’s that all about? He is a kid.”

“Why’s it bother you so much?”

“It doesn’t bother me ‘so much,’” he said. “It’s just not the right time in his life.”

“How did they meet?” she said.

“You know the story. He went to Japan on a deal and came back with her. Didn’t come back with the deal, by the way. He got undercut by some—”

“But how does he just ‘come back’ with a Japanese citizen? I mean, there are immigration laws designed to keep people from just popping into our country and deciding to stay.”

“Not if she’s here on a legal visa and he marries her.”

“But it doesn’t strike you as odd? She meets him over there and just decides to chuck her life aside and join him in America, a country she’s never seen where people speak a language she doesn’t know?”

He gave it some thought. “You’ve got a point. What’s your theory then?”

“Internet-order bride?”

“Don’t they all come from the Philippines and Vietnam?”

“Not all.”

“Huh.” Brian said. “Internet-order bride. The more I think of it, I wouldn’t put it past him. We’re back to my point — Caleb’s not mature enough for marriage. So he picks someone he barely knows who can barely communicate.”

“Love’s love,” she said, throwing one of his own preferred bromides back at him.

He grimaced. “Love’s love until you toss kids into the mix. Then it becomes a business partnership with guaranteed economic instability.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a point, but she did wonder if he was talking about himself in those moments, about his fears regarding the fragility of their own relationship and the potential calamity that could be wrought by bringing a child into it.

An icy thought slid through her before she could stop it: Oh, Brian, have I ever really known you?

Caleb was giving her a curious smile from the other side of the table, as if to ask, Where did you go?

Her phone vibrated on the table. Brian. She resisted the childish impulse to ignore it.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he said warmly. “Sorry about earlier. Friggin’ thing just died. Then I was worried I’d forgotten my adapters. But I did not, my wife. And here we are.”

She got out of the booth, moved a few feet away. “Here we are.”

“Where you at?”

“Grendel’s.”

“Where?”

“That college bar by your office.”

“I know it, I just can’t figure out how you turned up there.”

“I’m with Caleb.”

“Uh, okay. Help me out here. What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on. Why would something be going on? It’s raining like holy hell but otherwise just grabbing a drink with your partner.”

“Well, that’s great. What brought you over to Harvard Square?”

“A wild hair. It had been a while. I got an urge to visit some bookstores. I went with it. Where you staying this time? I forgot.”

“Covent Garden. You said it looked like a place Graham Greene would have liked.”

“When did I say that?”

“When I sent you a picture last time. No, two times ago.”

“Send me one now.” As soon as the words left her mouth, adrenaline flooded her blood as if poured from a bucket.

“What?”

“A picture.”

“It’s ten o’clock at night.”

“A selfie from the lobby then.”

“Hmm?”

“Just send me a picture of you.” Another sunburst of adrenaline exploded at the center of her. “I miss you.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll do that?”

“Yeah, sure.” A pause and then: “Everything okay?”

She laughed and it sounded shrill to her own ears. “Everything is fine. Perfectly fine. Why do you keep asking?”

“You just sound funny.”

“Tired, I guess,” she said. “All this rain.”

“So we’ll talk in the morning, then.”

“Sounds great.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

She hung up and went back to the booth. Caleb looked up as she sat, his thumb working his cell phone keypad as he gave her a smile. She was a little amazed at people who could do the talk-with-one-person-text-with-another trick. It was usually computer geeks and tech nerds like, well, Caleb.

“How’s he doing?”

“He sounded good. Tired but good. Do you ever go on any of these trips?”

Caleb shook his head and continued tapping away on his phone. “He’s the voice of the company. Him and his old man. He also has the business acumen. I just keep the trains running on time.”

“Are you demurring?”

“Hell, no.” After a few more distracted seconds, he pocketed his phone. He folded his hands on the table, looked at her to let her know she had his full attention again. “Without me and people like me in the here and now, that two-hundred-year-old lumber firm wouldn’t last six more months. Sometimes — not every day but sometimes — the speed of a transaction can save a couple, three million dollars. It’s that fluid out there.” He waved his fingers at the global “there.”

The waitress returned and they ordered another round.

Caleb opened the menu. “Do you mind if I eat? I walked in the office at ten this morning and didn’t get up from my desk again until I walked out at five.”

“Sure.”

“You?”

“I could eat.”

The waitress returned with their drinks and took their orders. As she left, Rachel noticed a man around the same age as Brian, forty or so, sitting with an older woman who gave off a stylish professorial air. She could have been sixty, yet it was a sexy-as-hell sixty. Normally Rachel would have studied her to see what about her gave off that impression so forcefully — was it her clothes, the way she sat, the cut of her hair, the intelligence in her face? — but instead Rachel focused on the man. He had sandy blond hair going gray over the ears and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He drank a beer and sported a gold wedding band. He also wore exactly what her husband had worn this morning, sans the raincoat — blue jeans, white T-shirt, black pullover sweater with an upturned collar.

Was this what she’d missed being holed up so much of her time? It wasn’t like she didn’t get out, but she certainly didn’t get out much. Maybe she’d overlooked the prevalence of some styles. When had all men decided, for example, to stop shaving until every third or fourth day? When had half-fedoras and porkpie hats come back into style? Where did the brightly colored tennis shoe spring from? When was the moment all casual bicyclists decided they should dress in skintight spandex, replete with brand names all over the shirts and leggings, as if they required corporate sponsorship to pedal to Starbucks?

Back when Rachel had been in college, hadn’t every third boy worn a plaid shirt, V-neck tee, and ripped jeans? If she went to the hotel bars frequented by middle-aged Republican salesmen right now, how many would be dressed in light blue oxford shirts and tan pants? So, by that metric, wasn’t it entirely possible that the combination of dark pullover, white T-shirt, and blue jeans — which had probably never gone fully in or out of style, basic as it was — could be worn by three men in Boston-Cambridge on the same day? If she walked through a mall right now, she’d probably see it on a couple more, not to mention on the mannequins fronting the J. Crew and Vince stores.

Their food arrived. Caleb made short work of his burger, and she devoured her salad. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

When they’d both cleaned their plates, they sat in the warmth of the low lights and gathering dusk. The rain had let up and a steady stream of footsteps returned to the cobblestones just above their heads as people ventured back out into the evening.

His smile wrapped around his bourbon as he raised the glass to his lips.

She could feel the wine when she smiled back.

They’d shared a moment — no more than that — when she’d first been dating Brian. In a pantry at the apartment of a friend of Brian’s in the Fenway. Rachel had gone into the pantry for olives, Caleb had been coming out with Stoned Wheat Thins, if she remembered correctly, and they’d paused as their bodies passed. Their eyes met and neither dropped their gaze. Then it became something of a challenge — who literally would blink first?

“Hi,” she’d said.

“Hi.” The word stumbled out of the back of his throat.

Vasoconstriction, she remembered thinking. The process by which skin capillaries constrict in order to elevate core body temperature. Corresponding increase in respiratory rate and heartbeat. A flush to the skin.

She’d leaned toward him at the same moment he’d leaned toward her and their heads touched, her breasts pressed against his chest, the edge of his right hand brushed the edge of her left on its way to her hip. Of all the places their bodies met in that second or two, it was most intimate when his hand grazed hers. When that hand found her hip, she turned away and sidestepped deeper into the pantry. He let out a small sound — some hybrid hiccup-laugh of amazement and exasperation and embarrassment — and was gone from the pantry in the time it took for her to look back.

Vasodilation: When the core body temperature is too high, blood vessels below the skin dilate so heat can escape the body and core temperature can be restored.

It took her almost five minutes to figure out where the fucking olives were.

She sipped her wine and Caleb sipped his bourbon and the bar filled up around them. Soon they couldn’t see the door. In the past, that could have easily shot bolts of anxiety into her bloodstream, but tonight it only made things seem warmer, more intimate.

“How’s Brian been handling all this rain?” Caleb asked.

“You know him — positive mental attitude. He’s the only person in the city who hasn’t bitched about it yet.”

Caleb shook his head. “Same at the office. We’re all drowning, he’s like, ‘It creates a mood.’”

She finished the sentence with him. “He says the same thing at home. I’m like, ‘What mood? Abject depression?’ He says, ‘No. It’s fun. It’s sexy.’ I said, ‘Honey, it was fun and sexy on day one, and that was ten days ago.’”

Caleb chuckled into his glass, took a drink. “Man would find a silver lining in a concentration camp. ‘You don’t see barbed wire of that quality in other death camps. Plus the showerheads are top-notch.’”

Rachel drank some more wine. “It’s awesome.”

“It is awesome.”

“But it can be exhausting.”

“Wipe you the fuck out. I never met someone who needs positivity like that guy. And it’s weird ’cause it’s not like Hallmark positivity, it’s just a can-do thing. You know?”

“Oh, I know. Do I ever know.” She smiled at the thought of her husband. Couldn’t stand movies with bummer endings, books where the hero lost, songs about alienation.

“I get it,” he’d said to her once. “I read Sartre in college, I had friends who dragged me to a Nine Inch Nails concert. The world’s a pointless, chaotic mess where nothing means nothing. I do understand. I just choose not to engage that philosophy because it doesn’t help me.”

Brian, she’d long ago realized with both admiration and irritation, didn’t do depressing. He didn’t do hopeless or bleak chic or whining. Brian did objectives and strategies and remedies. Brian did hope.

Once, during an irritable mood, when Brian said, “Anything’s possible,” she said, “No, Brian, it’s not. Curing world hunger is not possible, flapping our arms to take flight is not possible.”

A small, strange fire grew in his eyes. “No one’s got long game anymore. Everyone wants it now.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“That if you believe, really believe, and if your strategy is sound, and if you’re willing to leave everything you’ve got on the field of battle to win the day” — he held his arms wide — “you can do anything.”

She’d smiled at him and left the room before she’d be forced to decide if the man she’d married was just a tiny bit crazy.

On the other hand, she never had to worry about him whining or bitching or kvetching in any way. Sebastian, no surprise, had been a whiner. A glass-half-empty negativist who showed in a thousand ways, both large and small, that he believed the world awoke every morning thinking about ways to urinate in his food. Brian, on the other hand, seemed to approach each day as if there was a present hidden somewhere within it. And if he didn’t find it, there’d be no point bitching about it.

Another Brianism: “A complaint that’s not looking for a solution is a disease that’s not looking for a cure.”

Caleb said, “He loves quoting that one at the office. I keep expecting to see it on a plaque someday, hanging in the waiting room.”

“You gotta admit, though, it really works for him. You ever known Brian to stay in a bad mood more than a few minutes?”

He nodded. “I’ll give you that. Why, some people would follow him into a burning cave — they just feel he’d get them out the other side somehow.”

She liked that. It made her see her husband as heroic for a moment, a leader, an inspiration.

She sat back in her chair and Caleb sat back in his and for a minute or so neither of them said a word.

“You look good,” Caleb said eventually. “I mean, you always look good, but you look...”

She watched him search for the word.

He found it. “Secure.”

Had anyone ever said that about her? Her mother used to say she rushed around so much she would’ve forgotten her head most days if it wasn’t already attached. Two ex-boyfriends and her ex-husband had all told her she was “anxious.” In her twenties, alcohol, cigarettes, and books, always books, could anchor her in place. When she quit smoking, a treadmill replaced the window seat until her doctor, noting a rash of shin splints and a pretty significant weight drop in a body that was never in danger of being overweight, convinced her to complement the running with yoga. Worked well for a while, but the yoga eventually led to the “visions” and the visions, post-Haiti, led to the panic attacks.

Secure. No one had ever accused her of that. What could make Rachel Childs-Delacroix appear secure?

Her phone vibrated by her elbow. A text from Brian. She opened it. She smiled.

There stood Brian, still in the clothes he’d worn today, smiling big, if a bit blearily, his hair mussed from travel. Behind him, a facade of brown wainscoting, wide double doors, large yellow lanterns hanging from either side of the entrance, and above it all the name of the establishment, COVENT GARDEN HOTEL. He’d sent her a few pictures of the street over the years — a curved tidy London street of retail shops and restaurants, red brick and white trim. The doorman, or whoever took the photo, would have had to step off the sidewalk to get the full facade of the hotel into the frame.

Brian was waving, a shit-eating grin dominating his handsome, weary face, as if letting her know he understood this wasn’t just an ordinary selfie, she didn’t just “miss him.” This had been a test of sorts.

And damn, she thought as she slid the phone into her pocket, did you ever pass.

She and Caleb did end up sharing a cab. He had the farther trip; he lived in the Seaport District. On the short ride back to her place they kept the conversation on the rain and the effect on the local economy. The Red Sox, for example, were approaching a Major League Baseball record for rainouts.

At her place, Caleb leaned in for the kiss to the cheek and she was already turning away when his lips landed.

In the condo, she took a shower and the hot water hitting skin pickled throughout the day by cold rain was so exquisite it felt sinful. She closed her eyes and could see Caleb in the bar and then in the pantry, and she flashed on Brian the last time they’d been in this shower together, just a few days ago, and he’d slipped up behind her and run the bar of soap over each nipple, then up one side of her neck and down the other and caressed her abdomen with it in an ever-shrinking circle.

She duplicated his efforts now, could feel him hardening between her legs. She could hear her own breathing mingle with the shower spray as Brian became Caleb and Caleb became Brian and she dropped the soap to the tile and placed one hand to the wall. She thought of Brian in the shower the other day and Brian in front of the Covent Garden Hotel, that shit-eating grin of his, those blue eyes filled with boyish glee. Caleb vanished. She used a single finger to bring herself to a climax that moved through her body as if the hot water had entered her and flushed her capillaries.

After, she lay in bed and was drifting to sleep when an odd thought occurred to her:

When he’d decided to order dinner, Caleb had said he’d spent the entire day — 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. — behind his desk. Said he never got up. Never went out. But when she’d shown up outside the building, he’d just been exiting. He still hadn’t stepped out from under the overhang above the door.

Yet his coat and his hat had been soaking wet.

16 Reentry

Friday. The return.

She thought about picking him up at the airport, but she didn’t own a car anymore. She’d sold it when she moved in with Brian; the condo came with only one parking spot. After that, she’d driven Zipcars if she needed to get somewhere. She couldn’t believe how convenient they were actually — one lot was within a block of the condo — but then came the Dunkin’ Donuts and the food court and the vomiting on the Scientologist. After that, Brian asked her not to drive for a bit.

When it came time to renew her license, they had one of their fiercer fights. She couldn’t imagine not renewing, but he countered that he was owed — owed — peace of mind. “It’s not about you,” she recalled shouting across the kitchen bar. “Why do you think everything’s about you? Even this?”

Mr. Unflappable slapped the kitchen bar top. “Who did they call when you couldn’t leave the food court? And who did they call when—?”

“So this is about intrusions on your time?” She twisted a dish towel around one hand, tightening it until the blood bloomed under her skin.

“No, no, no. I’m not going to play that.”

“No, no, no,” she mimicked, feeling like an asshole, but feeling good too because the fight had been building for a week by that point.

For a microsecond, she thought she caught a rage bordering on hatred slip through his eyes before he took a long, slow breath. “An elevator doesn’t go sixty miles an hour.”

She was still back at that flash of rage. Was that the real Brian I just saw?

Eventually she realized it wouldn’t return. Not today anyway. She dropped the dish towel to the counter. “What?”

“You can’t get mortally wounded if you have a panic attack in an elevator or a mall or, I dunno, in a park or walking down the street. But in a car?”

“It doesn’t work that way. I don’t have panic attacks when I’m driving.”

“You only started having these things a few years ago. How do you know how the next one will manifest? I don’t want to get the call that you’re wrapped around a pole somewhere.”

“Jesus.”

He said, “Is it an unreasonable fear?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Out of the realm of possibility?”

“No, it’s not.”

“What if you started having trouble breathing, you’re sweating so hard you can’t see through it, and you hit somebody in a crosswalk?”

“Now you’re bullying.”

“No, I’m just asking.”

In the end, they reached a compromise. She renewed her license but promised not to use it.

But now that she’d strolled through a mall and ridden the subway, walked past old South Church into Copley Square, taken a cab through the rain, and sat in a crowded basement bar and all of it without a single uptick in her heart rate, not a single twitch in a throat vein, wouldn’t it be cool to show up outside baggage claim at Logan? He’d freak, of course, but would his apprehension be overwhelmed by his pride?

She went so far as to update her Zipcar account info — the credit card she’d first used had expired — but then remembered he’d driven himself to the airport and left the Infiniti in long-term parking.

So that was that. Her gratitude at being able to pass the cup induced some guilt — she felt gutless, weak — but maybe it was better she not drive if even the scantest trepidation remained.

When he came through the door, he wore the mildly surprised look of a man trying to reacquaint himself with the part of his life that didn’t include airports and hotels and room service and constant change but the opposite — routine. He glanced at the magazine basket she’d placed by the sofa as if he couldn’t place it, because he couldn’t; she’d purchased it while he was gone. He wheeled his suitcase to a corner and took off his copper raincoat and said, “Hey,” with an uncertain smile.

“Hey.” She hesitated before she crossed the apartment to him.

If he’d been away for more than twenty-four hours, there was always a hiccup or two upon reentry. An awkward stumble toward reassembly. He’d left their lives, after all, the things that defined them as “we,” which meant they each had spent the week becoming “I.” And just when that had become the new normal, he stepped back into the frame. And they tried to figure out where “I” ended and “we” began again.

They kissed and it was dry, almost chaste.

“You tired?” she asked because he looked it.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He looked at his watch. “It’s, what, midnight over there.”

“I made you some dinner.”

He smiled broadly and easily, the first real Brian smile since he’d come through the door. “No way. Going all domestic on me and whatnot? Thanks, babe.”

He kissed her a second time and this one had a little heat to it. She felt something loosen in her and returned the kiss in kind.

They sat and ate salmon cooked in foil with brown rice and a salad. He asked her about her week and she asked him about London and the conference, which apparently hadn’t gone well.

“They set up these boards so they can convince the world they give a shit about the environment and the ethics of timber acquisition. Then they stack the board with industry assholes whose only ambition besides sampling the local hookers is to make sure nothing gets done.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and sighed. “It’s, um, frustrating.” He looked down at his empty plate. “You?”

“What about me?”

“You seemed off whenever we talked on the phone.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

As he yawned into his fist and gave her a weary smile, it was clear he didn’t believe her. “I’m gonna shower.”

“Okay.”

He cleared their plates and put them in the dishwasher. As he headed for the bedroom, she said, “All right. You want to know?”

He turned just short of the doorway and let loose a soft sigh of relief. Held out his hands. “That would be lovely.”

“I saw your double.”

“My double?”

She nodded. “Getting into a black Suburban behind the Hancock on Monday afternoon.”

“When I was in the air?” He stared back at her, confused. “So, give me a sec here because I’m wiped... uh, you saw a guy who looked like me and—”

“No, I saw your double.”

“So maybe you saw Scott—”

“—Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont? I considered that. Problem was, this guy was also dressed in the exact same clothes you left the house in.”

He took that in with a slow nod. “You didn’t think you saw my double. You thought you saw me.”

She poured them both a little more wine and brought his glass to him. She leaned against the back of the couch. He leaned against the doorjamb.

“Yes.”

“Ah.” He closed his eyes and smiled and a weight seem to rise from his body and leave through the vent above him. “So the weird tone and the selfie you wanted me to send that was all because you thought...” He opened his eyes. “You thought what?”

“I didn’t know what I thought.”

“Well, you either thought Scott Pfeiffer made a trip into Boston or that I was lying about being out of the country.”

“Something like that.” It sounded so ridiculous now.

He grimaced and drank some wine.

“What?” she asked. “No, what?”

“You think that little of us?”

“No.”

“You thought I was living some kind of double life.”

“I definitely didn’t say that.”

“Well, what else would it be? You claim you saw me on a street in Boston when I was on a 767 over probably, I dunno, Greenland by that point. So you grill me about where I am when I call from Heathrow and you grill me about not charging my phone and—”

“I didn’t grill you.”

“No? And then you ask me to take a picture of myself so I can prove I’m, you know, exactly where I’d fucking said I’d be, and then you go out with my partner and, what, grill him too?”

“I’m not going to listen to this.”

“Why would you? You might actually have to take responsibility for acting like an asshole.” He lowered his head and held up a weary hand. “You know what? I’m tired. I’m not going to say anything helpful right now. And I need to, I dunno, process this. Okay?”

She tried to decide how angry she wanted to stay and if she was mad at him or just herself. “You called me an asshole.”

“No, I said you were acting like one.” A thin smile. “It’s a small distinction but a meaningful one.”

She gave him back her own thin smile, placed a hand to his chest. “Go take your shower.”

He closed the bedroom door behind him and she could hear the water run.

She found herself standing over his raincoat. She put her wine on a side table and wondered why she didn’t feel guilt right now. She should; he was right — she’d walked down an insulting road thinking her husband of two years was so untrustworthy that he’d lie about which city he was in. But she didn’t feel guilt. All week she’d told herself that what she’d seen had been an optical illusion. The selfie proved it. Their own history together, one in which she’d never known him to lie about anything, proved it.

So why didn’t she feel mistaken? Why didn’t she feel guilty about mistrusting him? Not wholeheartedly, of course, not with full certitude. But just a little bit, just a niggling sense that all was not as it should be.

She took his raincoat off the back of the chair where he’d left it, a pet peeve of hers. He couldn’t just reach into the hall closet and hang it on a hanger?

She reached into the left pocket and came back with an airline ticket — Heathrow to Logan, dated today — and some loose change. His passport was there too. She opened it and rifled through the visa pages, which were cramped with stamps from all the countries he’d visited. Problem was, the stamps weren’t in any kind of order. They seemed to show up on whichever page the immigration officer had decided to flip to that day. She listened to the muffled sound of the water running in the bathroom and continued to rifle the pages — Croatia, Greece, Russia, Germany, and then there it was: Heathrow on May 9, this year. She returned the passport to his coat and reached into the other pocket: a swipe card for the Covent Garden Hotel, 10 Monmouth Street, and a tiny receipt the size of her thumb for a news and magazine shop just up the street at 17 Monmouth. It was dated today, 05/09/14, 11:12 in the morning, and gave evidence that Brian bought a newspaper, a pack of gum, and a bottle of Orangina, and paid with a 10-pound note and received 4.53 pounds sterling as change.

The shower turned off. She put the swipe card back in the pocket of the coat and returned the coat to the back of the chair. But she slipped the receipt into the back pocket of her jeans. She had no idea why. Instinct.

17 Gattis

Every year, on the anniversary of the night they met, Brian and Rachel returned to the RR and danced to “Since I Fell for You.” If it could be found on a jukebox these days, it was usually the Johnny Mathis version, but the RR’s jukebox had the original version, the granddaddy of them all by one-hit wonder Lenny Welch.

It wasn’t a love song so much as it was a loss song, the lament of someone trapped in a hopeless addiction to a heartless lover who will, there is no doubt, ultimately destroy him. Or her, depending on which version you listened to. Since their first dance to the song, they’d heard most of them — Nina Simone’s, Dinah Washington’s, Charlie Rich’s, George Benson’s, Gladys Knight’s, Aaron Neville’s, and Mavis Staples’s. And those were just the headliners. Rachel had once looked it up on iTunes and found two hundred and sixty-four versions, performed by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Captain & Tennille.

This year, Brian rented out the whole back room and invited some friends. Melissa showed up. So did Danny Marotta, Rachel’s former cameraman at 6; Danny brought his wife, Sandra, and Sandra brought a coworker, Liz; Annie, Darla, and Rodney, who’d all accepted buyouts from the Globe in the years since she’d left, dropped by. Caleb showed up with Haya, somehow dressed to lay waste in a simple black cotton sheath dress and black flats, black hair swept back off the curve of her elegant neck in an updo, and all of her made somehow earthier and even sexier by the baby on her hip. The perfect baby, by the way, the dark good looks of both parents fused into a child with the most symmetrical face, eyes of warm black oil, skin the color of desert sand just after sundown. Rachel caught Brian, usually circumspect in such matters, pushing his eyeballs back into his head a few times when Haya and AB passed by, like some fantastical ur-humans who’d stepped from a creation myth. Haya got some of the youngest guys — Brian and Caleb’s latest interns, no point in learning their names, they’d be replaced with new ones the next time she looked — to take long looks, even though all their female counterparts were blindingly pretty and flush with firm, unblemished early-twenties flesh.

On another night, Rachel might have felt a twinge of jealousy or at least competitive edge — the woman had just given fucking birth, for Christ’s sake, and she looked ready for the center spread in a lingerie catalogue — but tonight she knew how good she looked. Not in an advertising-of-the-wares way. But in an elegant, understated way that told everyone in the room she didn’t feel any need to trumpet what God had placed in good proportion in the first place and which genetics — and Pilates — were leaving, thus far, in place.

She and Haya caught up by the bar at one point as AB slept in the car seat at her mother’s feet. Because of the language barrier, they’d rarely spoken other than a few passing hellos and had hardly seen each other in a year, but Caleb had said Haya’s grasp of English was vastly improved. Rachel decided to brave the waters and found that he hadn’t been exaggerating: Haya now spoke well, if deliberately.

“How are you?”

“I am... happy. How are you?”

“Great. How’s Annabelle?”

“She is... fussy.”

Rachel glanced down at the child sleeping in her seat in the middle of a party. Earlier, while she’d been on Haya’s hip, she’d never once squawked or even squirmed.

Haya stared back at Rachel, her beautiful face a blank, her lips set.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Rachel said eventually.

“Yes. He... is my husband.”

“That’s why you came?” Rachel felt a small smile tug her lips. “Because he’s your husband?”

“Yes.” Haya’s eyes narrowed in confusion. It made Rachel feel guilty, as if she were bullying the woman over language and cultural barriers. “You look... very beautiful, Rachel.”

“Thank you. So do you.”

Haya looked at the baby at her feet. “She is... waking.”

Rachel had no idea how she predicted it, but about five seconds later, Annabelle’s eyes popped open.

Rachel squatted by her. She never knew what to say to babies. She’d watched people over the years interact with them in a way she found unnatural — jabbering in that infantile tone of voice no one ever adopted unless they were talking to babies, animals, or the very old and infirm.

“Hello,” she said to Annabelle.

The child stared back at her with her mother’s eyes — so clear and untainted by skepticism or irony that Rachel couldn’t help but feel judged by them.

She placed one finger on Annabelle’s chest and the child closed her hand around it and tugged.

“You’ve got a strong grip,” Rachel said.

Annabelle let go of her finger and looked up at the cowl of her car seat with a hint of distress, as if she were surprised to find it there. Her face crumpled and Rachel only had time to say, “No, no,” before Annabelle wailed.

Haya’s shoulder brushed Rachel’s as she reached for the handle of the car seat. She lifted the seat up onto the bar. She rocked the seat back and forth and the baby immediately stopped crying and Rachel felt embarrassed and incompetent.

“You have a gift with her,” she said.

“I am... her mother.” Again Haya looked a bit confused. “She is tired. Hungry.”

“Of course,” Rachel said because it seemed to be the kind of thing one said.

“We must go. Thank you for... asking us to your... party.”

Haya lifted her daughter from the seat and held her to her shoulder, the baby’s cheek pressed to the side of her neck. Both mother and daughter looked of a piece, as if they shared the same lungs, saw through the same eyes. It made Rachel and her party seem frivolous. And a little sad.

Caleb came over to gather the car seat and pink baby bag and white muslin blanket, then he walked his wife and daughter out to the car and kissed them both good night. Rachel watched them through the window and knew she didn’t want what they had. On the other hand, she knew that she did.

“Look at you,” Brian said when someone — Rachel suspected Melissa — put a dollar in the jukebox and pressed B17, “Since I Fell for You,” and they were compelled to dance to it a second time that night. He raised his eyebrows at their reflection in the full-length mirror on the back wall, and she saw herself head-on. She was surprised, as she always was in the very first millisecond of seeing herself, that she was no longer twenty-three. Someone had once told her that everyone had a fixed age in their mind’s-eye image of themselves. For some it was fifteen or fifty, but everyone had one. Rachel’s was twenty-three. Her face had, of course, grown longer and more lined in the ensuing fourteen years. Her eyes had changed — not the gray-green of them — but they were less sure and less adrenalized. Her hair, so dark a shade of cherry it looked black in most lights, was cut short with a side bang, a look that softened the harder curves of her heart-shaped face.

Or so a producer had once told her when he convinced her to not only cut her hair but straighten it. Before that conversation, it had always been a long tangle that fell to her shoulders. But the producer, after prefacing his critique with “No offense,” words that always preceded something offensive, told her, “You’re a few steps short of beautiful but the camera doesn’t know that. The camera loves you. And that’s making our bosses love you.”

That producer was, of course, Sebastian. She thought so much of herself that she married him.

As she and Brian swayed on the dance floor, she acknowledged what a huge improvement he was over Sebastian. A step up in every way — better-looking, kinder, better conversationalist, funnier, and smarter, even though he tried to downplay that part of his makeup, whereas Sebastian always played it up.

But there was the issue of trust again. Say what you would about Sebastian being an asshole, but he was a genuine asshole. Such an asshole that he didn’t think he had to hide the fact. Sebastian didn’t hide anything.

On the other hand, with Brian, she didn’t know what she had lately. Things had been unnervingly polite between them since he’d returned from his trip. She had nothing to support her mistrust, so she didn’t press the issue. And he seemed fine with that. And yet they moved around each other in the apartment like they were circling a jar of anthrax. They pulled up short in conversations lest they say something that could lead to conflict — his habit of leaving yesterday’s clothes hanging over the bedpost, her predilection for not changing the toilet paper roll if there was still one square left stuck to the cardboard — and chose their words with ultimate care. Soon they’d stop discussing potential spots of tension altogether, which would only lead to resentment. They smiled distantly at each other in the morning, smiled distantly at each other in the evening. Spent more time on their laptops or their cells. In the past week, they’d made love once and it was the carnal version of their distant smiles — as binding as water, as intimate as junk mail.

When the song ended, the group clapped and a few whistled and Melissa tapped a fork into her wineglass and shouted, “Kiss! Kiss!” until they finally obliged.

“How self-conscious do you feel right now?” she asked Brian as she leaned back in his arms.

Brian didn’t reply. He was trying to make sense of something behind her.

She turned as his fingers parted and she stepped out of his grip.

A man had entered the room. He was in his early fifties, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. Quite skinny. He wore a gray unstructured sport coat over a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt and dark jeans. His skin was leathery and tan. His blue eyes were so bright they looked aflame.

“Brian!” He opened his arms.

Brian exchanged a quick glance with Caleb — it was so fast that if Rachel hadn’t been standing three inches from his face she would have missed it — and then a smile flooded his face and he approached the man.

“Andrew.” He grasped the man behind his elbow with one hand while shaking his hand with the other. “What brings you to Boston?”

“A show at the Lyric.” Andrew raised his eyebrows.

“That’s great.”

“It is?”

“Isn’t it?”

Andrew shrugged. “It’s a job.”

Caleb walked a pair of drinks over. “Andrew Gattis, back in da house. Stoli still your poison?”

Andrew drained the drink in one swallow and handed the glass back to Caleb. He took the second drink from him, nodded his thanks, and took a moderate sip. “Good to see you.”

“You too.”

Andrew chuckled. “It is?”

Caleb laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “That seems to be your line tonight.”

“Andrew, my wife, Rachel.”

Rachel shook Andrew Gattis’s hand. It was surprisingly smooth, even delicate.

“A pleasure, Rachel.” He gave her a knowing, reckless smile. “You’re smart.”

She laughed. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re smart.” He was still shaking her hand. “I can see that. Shit, anyone can. The beauty, I get. Brian always liked beauty, but the—”

“Play nice,” Brian said.

“—brains, that’s a new one.”

“Hey, Andrew.” Brian’s voice was very light.

“Hey, Brian.” He let go of her hand but kept his eyes on hers.

“Still smoke?”

“I vape.”

“Me too.”

“No shit?”

“Care to join me for one on the sidewalk?”

Andrew Gattis cocked his head at Rachel. “Think I should?”

“What?”

“Join your husband for a vape?”

“Why not?” she said. “For old times. You can catch up.”

“Mmm.” He looked around the room, then back at her. “What were you dancing to?”

“‘Since I Fell for You.’”

“Who would dance to that?” Andrew gave them both a big, baffled smile. “It’s a hopeless song. It’s all about emotional imprisonment.”

Rachel nodded. “We’re trying to be post-ironic, I think. Or meta-romantic. I can never decide which. Enjoy your vape, Andrew.”

He tipped an imaginary hat to her and turned toward Brian and Caleb.

The three of them headed for the door, but Andrew Gattis suddenly turned back. He said to Rachel, “Google it.”

“What?”

Brian and Caleb, almost at the door, noticed he wasn’t with them.

“‘Since I Fell for You.’ Google it.”

“There’s about two hundred covers of it, I know.”

“I’m not talking about the song.”

Brian headed back toward them and Andrew sensed it. He pivoted and met Brian halfway across the floor and they went outside to smoke.

She watched them on the street, all three of them exhaling their vapor. They laughed a lot, like the dearest of old friends, and there was a lot of bro-fection — fist bumping, shoulder slapping, pushing. At one point Brian grabbed Andrew by the back of the neck and pulled him in so their foreheads were touching. They were both smiling, laughing actually, Brian’s lips going a mile a minute and the two of them nodding with their heads adhered like Siamese twins.

When they broke the clinch, the smiles died for a moment, and then Brian looked in the window and caught Rachel’s eyes and gave her a thumbs-up, as if to say, It’s all okay, it’s all okay.

This is a man, she reminded herself, who would literally give you the coat off his back.

When they returned, Andrew seemed interested in everyone in the room but Rachel. He flirted with one of Delacroix Lumber’s employees for a while, chatted up Melissa, spent a fair amount of time talking to Caleb, both of them wearing very somber expressions, and he got drunk with exceptional speed. Within an hour of arriving, he took one step sideways for every five steps forward.

“He never could handle his liquor,” Brian said after Andrew knocked one of the intern’s bags off the back of a chair and then toppled the chair trying to remedy the situation.

When the chair fell everyone laughed, though few seemed to find it funny.

“A buzzkill, this guy,” Brian said. “Always has been.”

“How do you know him?” Rachel asked.

Brian didn’t hear her. “Let me deal with this.”

He walked on over and helped Andrew right the chair. He put a hand on his arm and Andrew yanked the arm back, knocking a half-full glass of beer off the bar in the process. “You fucking roofie me, Bri?”

“All right,” Caleb said. “All right.”

The bartender, Gail’s CrossFit-addict nephew, Jarod, came down the bar, his face tight. “We okay down here?”

“Andrew?” Brian said. “The gentleman’s asking us if we’re okay. Are we okay?”

“Tip fucking top.” Andrew saluted the bartender.

Which pissed Jarod off. “Because I can arrange a ride home for you, sir. You follow what I’m saying?”

Andrew slipped into a rich British accent. “I do, my good publican. And I’d much prefer not to cross paths with the local constabulary tonight.”

Jarod told Brian, “Get your friend in a cab.”

“You got it.”

Jarod picked up the glass that had fallen behind the bar. Remarkably, it hadn’t shattered. “He’s still here.”

“I’m on it,” Brian said.

By this point Andrew had the scowling, inward look of the petulant drunk. In her youth, Rachel had seen her mother and two of her mother’s boyfriends sport similar looks as a regretful day crossed the plane into a regrettable night.

Andrew grabbed his sport coat off the back of a chair, almost toppling it as well. “You still keep the place in Baker Lake?”

Rachel had no idea who he was talking to. His eyes were on the floor.

“Let’s go,” Brian said.

“Don’t fucking touch me.”

Brian held his hands high, like a stagecoach driver in the Old West during a stickup.

“That’s some pure fucking wilderness there,” Andrew said. “But then you always liked the wild, Bri.”

He stumbled toward the door, Brian walking behind him, arms still half raised.

On the sidewalk two things happened almost simultaneously: The cab arrived and Andrew took a swing at Brian.

Brian easily ducked the punch and then caught a reeling Andrew in his arms like he was catching a woman in an old movie on her way to the fainting couch. He stood him up straight and slapped him in the face.

Everyone saw it. They’d been watching the drama unfold since the two of them had exited the bar. A few of the young interns gasped. A few others laughed. One young guy said, “Shit. Don’t fuck with the boss man, huh?”

There was something about both the speed and the casual ease of the slap that made it seem twice as brutal. It wasn’t the way someone slapped a man who was a threat, but the way someone slapped a child who was an annoyance. There was contempt in it. Andrew’s shoulders heaved and his head bobbed and it became clear he was weeping.

Rachel watched her husband saying something to the cabdriver, who was out of his cab and trying to wave off the fare, keep a potentially violent drunk out of his taxi.

But Brian handed him some bills and the cabbie took them. Then they both poured Andrew into the back of the cab, and the cab headed up Tremont.

When Brian came back in the bar, he seemed surprised that anyone had been paying attention. He took Rachel’s hand and kissed her and said, “Sorry about that.”

Half of her was still back at the slap, the effortless cruelty of it. “Who is he?”

They went to the bar and Brian ordered a scotch, slipped Jarod fifty bucks for his trouble, and turned to her. “He’s an old friend. An embarrassing, pain-in-the-ass, never-adapted-to-growing-up old friend. You got any of those?”

“Well, sure.” She took a sip of his scotch. “Well, I used to.”

“How’d you get rid of them?”

“They got rid of me,” she admitted.

That pierced something in him. She could see the pain find him, and she loved him very much at that moment.

He reached out with the same hand that had slapped his friend and caressed her cheek.

“Fools,” he whispered. “They were all fools.”

18 Culture Shock

She spent the morning after the party Googling with a hangover while Brian went for a run along the river.

First she looked up “Since I Fell for You.” As she’d expected, the first page contained nothing but links to versions of the song. On the second page she found a reference to an episode of a TV show, L.A. Law, that had been on when she was in grade school. She remembered her mother watching the show religiously and once putting her hands to her mouth as one of the characters — a woman with tall hair and wide lapels — fell down an elevator shaft. Rachel looked up the “Since I Fell for You” episode on IMDb and nothing about the description struck any chords.

On the third page, she found a link to a movie from 2002 starring Robert Hays, Vivica A. Fox, Kristy Gale, and Brett Alden, with special appearances by Stephen Dorff and Gary Busey. She clicked on the link and got a 401 message that the site no longer existed. So she opened a fresh window and Googled “Since I Fell for You 2002 movie.”

Even with the added specificity, most of the links that appeared were to the song. Finally, though, one to “Since I Fell for You/May-December (2002) VHS eBay.” When she clicked the link, it brought her to eBay and a screenshot of a VHS tape. The enlargement function was for shit, but she did get close enough to make out the two main actors’ faces. It took her a minute to recognize the male as the guy who’d starred in Airplane. The female, she was pretty sure, was in Independence Day; she’d played the twit who’d risked everybody’s life at one point to save her dog. To the right of the photo was a description, probably pulled from the back of the VHS:

Rachel hopped back on IMDb and cross-referenced Robert Hays’s and Vivica A. Fox’s credits for other links or information. She found none. She did further due diligence and checked for the title in the credits of Stephen Dorff, Gary Busey, and the two actors she’d never heard of, Kristy Gale and Brett Alden.

Messrs. Dorff and Busey didn’t even list the film in their credits.

Kristy Gale seemed to have had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it career in straight-to-video and had appeared in only one major theatrical release, Scary Movie 3, as “Girl on Unicycle.” Her page hadn’t been updated since 2007, which was also the date of her last credit, something called Lethal Kill. (Was there another kind? Rachel wondered.)

No page existed for Brett Alden. He must have had his one acrid taste of the off-off-off Hollywood Boulevard life and run back home to Iowa or Wisconsin. Rachel clicked back on the open eBay window and purchased the tape for $4.87 and chose second-day air for delivery.

She got another cup of coffee and came back to her laptop, still in her pajamas, and looked out at the river. Sometime last night, it had stopped raining. And sometime this morning, the sun — yes, the sun — rose. Everything appeared not just clean but polished, the sky looking like a frozen tidal wave, the trees along the river as sharp as jade. And here she sat indoors, with a hangover that thumped in her head and throbbed in her chest and made every synapse hiccup at least once before it fired. She clicked on her music folder and chose a playlist she’d compiled to chill herself out on days when the nerves were too close to the skin — The National, Lord Huron, Atoms for Peace, My Morning Jacket, and others of that ilk — and started looking into Baker Lake.

There were three of them — the biggest in Washington State, another in the Canadian Arctic, and a third in Maine. The one in Washington looked touristy, the one in Canada was populated mostly by Inuit, and the one in Maine was wilderness, the nearest town, by the looks of it, forty miles away. As for proximity to a major city, it was actually closer to Quebec City than Bangor.

“Camping trip?”

She spun with the chair to face him: Brian, covered in sweat from his run, standing eight feet behind her, drinking from a water bottle.

“Reading over my shoulder?” She smiled.

He matched her smile. “Just walked in, happened to see the back of my wife’s head and ‘Baker Lake’ beyond it.”

She dug her toe into the rug and swiveled the chair again, back and forth this time. “Your friend mentioned it last night.”

“Which friend?”

She gave him an arched eyebrow.

“I had several there last night.”

“Any others that you bitch-slapped?”

“Ah.” He took a small step back and another sip of water.

“Yes. Ah. What was that about?”

“He got drunk, nearly got us tossed from our favorite bar, and then took a swing at me on the sidewalk.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Why?” He peered at her in a way she found vaguely reptilian. “He’s a violent drunk. He always was.”

“So why did Caleb bring him two drinks at the same time?”

“Because he’s Caleb. I dunno. Ask him.”

“It just seems an odd thing to do — give a violent drunk a plethora of liquor as soon as he walks through the door.”

“Plethora?”

She nodded. “Plethora.”

He shrugged. “Again, you’d have to ask Caleb. Maybe next time you guys hang out while I’m away.”

She mock-pouted, something she knew irritated him to no end. “That threatens you?”

“Didn’t say it did.” A blithe shrug from his broad shoulders, trying to play it cool while the temperature in the room ticked up five degrees.

“That you can’t trust your partner?” she said. “Or you can’t trust your wife?”

“I can trust both of you. I just find it odd that you, virtually a shut-in for the last two years, hopped a cab to Cambridge and stumbled across my business partner.”

“I didn’t stumble across him. I went to your building.”

He squatted on the rug and rolled the bottle between his palms. “And why would you do that?”

“Because I thought you were lying to me.”

“This again?” His laugh was unpleasant.

“I guess so.”

“You understand how nuts you sound?”

“No. Illuminate it for me.”

He rose up and down on his haunches several times, as if preparing his calves for the blast of a starter’s pistol. “You thought you saw me in Boston when I was actually thirty thousand feet in the air.”

“Unless” — she crinkled her nose at him — “you weren’t.”

He batted his eyelashes at her. “Then you put me through a series of hoops to prove I was actually in London. Hoops that I successfully jumped through. But that wasn’t enough. You” — he coughed out a laugh of sudden disbelief — “you walk around for the last week giving me looks like I’m the... the leader of a fucking sleeper cell.”

“Or,” she said, “you could be like that guy who pretended to be a Rockefeller.”

“I could.” He nodded as if that made absolute sense. Drained his water. “He killed people, didn’t he?”

She stared back at him. “I believe that he did, yes.”

“Left the wife alive,” he said.

“That was sporting of him.” She felt an inexplicable smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.

“Stole their kid but left behind the silverware.”

“Place settings are important.”

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Why are you?”

“Because this is so ridiculous.”

“Beyond the pale,” she agreed.

“So do we keep circling it?”

“I don’t know.”

He knelt at her feet, took her hands in his, looked in her eyes. “I flew out of Boston last Monday on British Airways.”

“You don’t have to—”

“The flight was delayed because of weather for seventy-five minutes. I spent the time wandering E Terminal, read an Us Weekly someone left behind at an empty gate. A janitor caught me doing it. You ever gotten a disapproving look from an airport janitor? Shrivels the testes, it does.”

She grinned and shook her head. “Really, I believe you.”

“Then I grabbed a cup of Dunkin’s, and by that point we were boarding. I got on, found out the outlet in my seat wasn’t working. Fell asleep for an hour or so. Woke up, read my board meeting materials even though I knew it was pointless, and watched a movie where Denzel refused to take any shit.”

“That was the name of it?”

“In several foreign territories, yes.”

She met his eyes again. There was always something in that act; you either ceded power, took it, or shared it. They came to a mutual decision to share it.

She put a hand lightly to the side of his head. “I believe you.”

“You haven’t been acting like it.”

“And I wish I could tell you why. It’s probably just all this fucking rain.”

“Rain’s gone.”

She acknowledged that with a nod. “But, hey, I did a lot these two weeks — the subway, the mall, the cab, I even walked into Copley Square.”

“I know you did.” The empathy in his face — the love — was so genuine it hurt. “And I couldn’t be prouder.”

“I know you went to London.”

“Say it one more time.”

She kicked his inner thigh softly with her bare foot. “I know you went to London.”

“Trust is back in the house?”

“Trust is back in the house.”

He kissed her forehead. “I’m going to take a shower.” He touched her hips with both hands as he rose from his knees.

She sat in the chair with her back to her laptop, her back to the river, her back to the perfect day, and she wondered if they’d been off all week because she’d been off. If Brian was acting weird because she was acting weird.

As she’d just pointed out to him, in the last fourteen days she’d ridden a subway, entered a mall, walked into Copley Square, and trusted a stranger to drive her — all for the first time in two years. For most, these were tiny accomplishments, but for her they were monumental. But maybe those accomplishments had also scared the shit out of her. Every step she took out of her comfort zone was either one step closer to better mental health or one step closer to another breakdown. But another breakdown now, after so much progress, would feel ten times as debilitating.

For the last two years, one refrain had raced back and forth through her brain pan — I can’t go back there. I can’t go back there — every fucking minute of every fucking day.

So it made sense that when she engaged in acts that promised liberation at the same moment they threatened imprisonment she might start to deflect the totality of it by obsessing over something else, something that began with a credible basis — she’d seen an awfully realistic replica of her husband in a place he wasn’t supposed to be — but had clearly evolved past a rational place.

He was a good man. The best she’d ever known. Didn’t make him the best in the world, just the best for her. With the exception of The Sighting, as she’d come to think of it, he’d never given her reason not to trust him. When she was unreasonable, he was understanding. When she was frightened, he soothed. Irrational, he could translate. Frantic, he was patient. And when it had been time for her to venture back into the world, he recognized it, and he led her there. Held her hand, told her she was safe. He was there. They could stay or they could go, he had her back.

And this man, she thought as she swiveled back to the window and caught her own ghostly reflection hovering over the river and the green banks beyond, is the man you’ve chosen to mistrust?

When he came out of the shower, she was waiting on the bathroom counter, her pajamas pooled on the floor. He grew hard in the time it took to reach her. There was some awkwardness after he entered her — the countertop was narrow, the condensation was thick, her flesh squeaked against the mirror behind her, he slipped out twice — but she knew from the look in his eyes, a kind of shocked wonder, that he loved her like no one ever had. It seemed to do battle within him sometimes, this love, which made its reappearances so exhilarating.

We won, she thought. We won again.

She banged her hip on the faucet one time too many and suggested they move to the floor. They finished on top of her pooled pajamas, with her heels digging into the hollows behind his knees — a ridiculous sight, she imagined, to God, if He was looking, to their dead, if their dead could see through time, through galaxies — but she didn’t care. She loved him.

The next morning, he left for work while she was still sleeping. When she went into their walk-in closet to pick out her outfit for the day, his suitcase was open on the wooden rack he otherwise kept folded and stowed beside his shoes. He was mostly packed, one empty square of the suitcase awaiting his shaving kit. A garment bag hung from a hook nearby, three suits inside.

The next trip was tomorrow. And it was one of the big ones he took every six weeks or so. This time it was to Moscow, he’d told her, as well as Kraków and Prague. She lifted a few of his shirts, noticed he’d packed only one sweater and one coat, the thin raincoat he’d worn on his last trip. Seemed light for Eastern Europe in May. Wouldn’t the average temperature there be in the high forties or low fifties?

She checked it on her phone.

Actually, temperatures in all three cities were expected to be mostly in the high sixties.

She went back to their bedroom and flopped on the bed and asked herself what the fuck was wrong with her. He’d passed every test she’d put before him. All yesterday, after they’d made love, he’d been attentive and funny and a joy to be around. A dream husband.

And she rewarded that by checking the weather report to see if he’d packed appropriately for the places he was claiming to go to.

Claiming. There it was again. Jesus. Maybe she needed to double up on sessions with Jane for a while, get this paranoia under control. Maybe she just needed to do something with her time besides lying around imagining ways in which her marriage could be a sham. She needed to get back to writing the book. She needed to sit in the chair and not get up until she fixed whatever was causing her blockage in the Jacmel sections.

She got off the bed and took the laundry basket into the alcove where they’d stacked a washer and dryer. She went through his pants because he always left coins in his pockets and retrieved a total of seventy-seven cents and a couple of balled-up ATM receipts. She checked the receipts — of course she did — and found two cash withdrawals for Brian’s standard “fast cash” amount of $200, a week apart. She tossed the receipts into the small wicker trash basket and added the change to the cracked coffee cup she kept up on a shelf for just that purpose.

She went through her own pockets, found nothing in any of them until she came across the receipt she’d stolen from his raincoat over a week ago. Well, stolen was a harsh word. Appropriated. That seemed better. She sat on the floor with her back to the washer and smoothed it against her knee and wondered yet again why it bothered her. It was just a receipt from a shop in London where he’d purchased a pack of gum, a Daily Sun, and a bottle of Orangina at 11:12 A.M. on 05/09/14 for a grand total of 5.47 pounds sterling. The address of the shop was 17 Monmouth Street, which put it just down the street from the Covent Garden Hotel.

Here she went again. It was just a receipt. She tossed it in the trash basket. She added detergent to the washer and turned it on. She walked out of the alcove.

She came back. She pulled the receipt out of the trash and looked at it again. It was the date that bothered her. 05/09/14. May 9, 2014. Which, yes, was the date Brian was in London. Month, day, year. But in Britain, they didn’t record their dates that way. Instead of month, day, year, they would write day, month, year. If this receipt were truly from a shop in London, it wouldn’t read 05/09/14. It would read 09/05/14.

She put it in the pocket of her pajama pants and made it to the bathroom before she threw up.

She survived dinner with him, though she barely spoke. When he asked if anything was wrong, she said her allergies were acting up and the manuscript was turning into far more work than she’d anticipated. When he pressed, she said, “I’m just tired. Can we leave it there?”

He nodded, a resigned and deflated look on his face, a martyr forced to bear the hostile caprices of an unreasonable wife.

She slept in the same bed as him. She hadn’t believed she’d be able to fall asleep, and for the first hour or so she just lay there, one side of her face pressed to the pillow, and watched him sleep.

Who are you? she wanted to ask. She wanted to straddle him and pound his chest and scream it.

What have you done to me?

What did I do to myself when I committed to you? When I locked myself to you?

Where do your lies lead?

If you’re a fraud, what does that make my life?

Somehow she fell asleep, a restless sleep, and woke the next morning with a startled “Oh” escaping her lips.

While he took his shower, she went into the living room and looked out the window at the small red Ford Focus she’d rented yesterday from the Zipcar lot around the corner. Even from this height, she could make out the orange parking ticket a meter maid had slipped under the right windshield wiper. She’d expected that; she’d parked in a resident-only parking zone yesterday because it was the only way she could place the car where she needed it to be today — with a view of their garage exit.

She dressed in workout clothes and a hoodie. When the shower shut off, she knocked softly on the bathroom door.

“Yeah?”

She opened the door, leaned into the frame. He had a towel around his waist and his neck and jaw were covered in shaving gel. He’d been about to cover his cheeks but now he looked at her, a small swirl of purple gel in his right palm.

“I’m gonna go work out.”

“Now?”

She nodded. “That instructor I like? On Tuesdays she’s only there at this time.”

“Okay.” He crossed to her. “See you in a week.”

“Fly safe.”

They stood there, faces a few inches apart, his eyes searching hers, her eyes not moving at all.

“Bye.”

“Love you,” he said.

“Bye,” she said again and closed the door behind her.

19 Alden Minerals Ltd.

Yesterday, when she’d driven the Zipcar from the lot around the corner to the parking spot by their building, she’d covered a distance of two blocks, and even that had been a little nerve-racking. Now, as she watched Brian pull out of the garage and drive up the ramp to street level, all the oxygen in her body pushed into her heart. Brian turned onto Commonwealth and immediately got into the left lane. She pulled out with a jerk. A cab hurtled up on her left. A horn blared. The cab veered around her, the driver throwing his hand in the air at this idiot who couldn’t balance driving and paying attention at the same time.

She sat, half in the parking spot, half in the lane, and heat flushed through her head and throat.

Quit.

The next time he goes on a trip, try it again.

But she knew if she listened to that voice she’d never do it at all. She’d spend the next year (or years) indoors, in fear, in mistrust and resentment until those very things became a balm, an ironic salve, the worry stone she caressed until that caress replaced every caress she’d ever give or receive again. And the worst of it was that by that point, she’d have convinced herself it was more than enough.

She pulled out onto Commonwealth and could hear her own breathing, never a good sign. If she didn’t get it back in tempo, she’d hyperventilate, maybe black out and crash, as Brian had once predicted. She exhaled slowly through pursed lips. Brian took a left on Exeter. She dropped in behind the cab that had almost hit her as it made the same turn. She exhaled again, just as slowly, and her breathing resumed a manageable rhythm. Her heart, on the other hand, continued to scamper like a penned animal watching the farmer approach with an ax. She gripped the steering wheel like an old lady or a driving instructor, her neck tight, palms wet, shoulder blades scrunched.

Brian took a left past the Westin and she lost him for a moment, which was not the place to lose him. He had too many options there — he could loop around onto the Mass Pike, head straight down Stuart, or turn right onto Dartmouth and head into the South End. She caught his brake lights as he did just that and passed the mall on his right. She lost the cover of the cab, though, as it continued straight and she turned right. Brian was half a block ahead but there were no cars in between them. If she got any closer he’d be able to see her face in his rearview.

She’d considered a disguise yesterday but it seemed so ridiculous — what was she supposed to do, wear a Groucho face? A hockey mask? As it was, she wore a newsboy cap, something she rarely did, and sunglasses with wide round rims that he’d never seen before, so she’d pass the test if he looked at her from a reasonable distance but definitely not close up.

He turned left on Columbus, and another car slid into the mix, a black station wagon with New York plates. Rachel dropped in behind it and they continued in unison for a couple of miles. All three of them left Columbus for Arlington together and Arlington for Albany and headed toward I-93. When she realized they might be getting on the expressway, she feared she might projectile-vomit onto the dashboard. The surface streets were hard enough, the noise, the bumps, the jackhammers breaking open pavement at a construction site, the pedestrians who dashed across the crosswalks, the other cars pressing in, cutting in front, riding up hard on her tail. But that was at twenty-five miles an hour.

There wasn’t much time to think about it because there was Brian pulling onto 93 South. Rachel followed, feeling as if the on-ramp sucked her forward. Brian punched the gas and bolted across three lanes of traffic into the left lane, his Infiniti rocking on its wheels. She stepped on her own gas pedal and the immediate result wasn’t much different than if she’d stepped on a boulder and expected it to gallop. The small Ford inched forward and then inched forward a tiny bit faster and then a little bit faster again. By the time it reached the seventy-five miles an hour or so that Brian had reached near instantaneously, his Infiniti was a quarter mile ahead. She kept pressing on the pedal, staying one lane to his right, and soon she made up enough of the distance that by the time they’d passed through Dorchester into Milton she had a perfect bead on him from five cars back.

She’d concentrated so hard on the task at hand that she’d forgotten all her terror at being on the expressway in the first place. Now it returned, but it wasn’t quite terror, just a persistent fluttering at the base of her throat accompanied by the certainty that her skeleton might burst through her skin.

And a sense of betrayal and rage as toxic as Drano. Because what was abundantly clear, though there had never been much doubt, was that Brian was not headed to the airport. Logan was fifteen miles in their rearview.

When they left 93 for 95 South and the signs for Providence, she considered the possibility that he could have chosen to fly out of TF Green Airport, the only major airport in Rhode Island. She’d known people to prefer it to the crowds at Logan, but she also knew for certain they wouldn’t have a direct flight to Moscow.

“He’s not going to any fucking Moscow,” she said aloud.

A few miles later she was proved correct when he engaged his turn signal at least ten miles short of the airport and began to glide smoothly across the lanes. He got off in Providence, at the Brown University exit, where the neighborhoods of College Hill and Federal Hill met. Several other cars chose the same exit, including Rachel’s, three back of his. At the top of the exit ramp, Brian went right but the two cars between them took a left.

She slowed as she neared the intersection, let him get as far ahead as possible, but there wasn’t much stalling to be done. A Porsche swung wide on her left, engine revving, and shot out in front of her. She’d never been happier for a small penis driving a small penis car to act like a small penis because she again had cover between her and Brian.

It didn’t last, though. At the first light, the Porsche drifted into the left-turn-only lane, then floored it, zipping around Brian as they crossed the intersection, and roaring up the road ahead of him.

Little dicks, Rachel thought again, and their little dick cars. Shit.

Now there was no buffer between her and her husband, no way to control whether he looked into his rearview and recognized her. She passed through the intersection. She kept four car lengths between them, but the driver of the car behind her was already craning his head to see past her, as if to discern why she’d commit the unforgivable sin of not keeping pace with the car in front of her.

They drove into a neighborhood of Federalist clapboard homes, Armenian bakeries, and limestone churches. Once, Brian’s head tilted up and to the right — he was clearly checking his rearview — and she damn near stomped her brake pedal in panic. But, no, no, he looked back at the road. In two more blocks, she saw what she’d been looking for — the shoulder widened by a doughnut shop and a gas station. She put on her turn signal. She pulled over by the doughnut shop and prepared to pull right back out again as the green Chrysler pulled past her.

But behind the green Chrysler was a brown Prius and behind the Prius was a tan Jaguar and right behind the Jaguar was a Toyota 4Runner with monster wheels and, Jesus, behind the 4Runner was a minivan. By the time she pulled back out, not only was she five cars back, but the minivan was too tall to see past. And even if she could, she’d then find herself staring at the back of the 4Runner, which was even taller than the minivan.

The traffic stopped at the next signal and she had no way of knowing if Brian had actually passed through the signal before the light turned red.

The traffic moved again. She followed as they continued along in a straight line, no curves in this road. Just give me one curve, she prayed, just one fucking curve and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to catch a glimpse of him.

A mile up, the road forked. The Prius, the minivan, and the 4Runner all went right onto Bell Street, while the Chrysler and the Jaguar stayed the course on Broadway.

Only one problem — Brian’s Infiniti was no longer in front of the Chrysler. It was nowhere at all.

She screamed through gritted teeth and gripped the steering wheel so hard it felt like she might rip it out of the drive shaft.

She banged a U-turn. She did it without thought or warning, meriting angry beeps from both the car behind her and the oncoming one in the opposite lane that she cut off. She didn’t care. She didn’t feel fear, she felt rage and frustration. But mostly rage.

She drove back up Broadway, drove all the way to the gas station and the doughnut shop where she’d lost sight of him. She U-turned again — this time with warning and a bit more finesse — and drove back down the way she’d just come. She looked at every side street as best she could at thirty miles an hour.

She reached the fork again. Resisted the urge to indulge in another scream. Resisted the urge to cry. She took a left into a tiny lot outside a VFW Post and turned back again.

If she hadn’t hit a red light, she never would have found him. But she did. And as she sat at it, with another gas station and a drab insurance agency to her right, she looked down the cross street and saw a large Victorian with a tall white sign on its front lawn that listed the businesses housed within. And there, in the parking lot that branched off the side of the building under a wrought-iron fire escape, was Brian’s Infiniti.

She found a parking space six houses past the Victorian. Walked back up the sidewalk. The street was lined with old oaks and maples, the shaded parts of the sidewalk still a bit damp from the dew the trees had shed this morning, the May air filled with the scents of decay and rebirth in equal measure. Even now, approaching a building in which her husband hid the truth of himself — or certainly a truth of himself — she could feel the street and its odors calm her.

The sign on the front lawn listed three psychiatrists, a family practitioner, a mineral company, a title company, and two attorneys. Rachel stayed in the shade of the great trees until she reached the alley along the side. A large sign at the entrance to the alley warned that the parking spaces were for occupants of 232 Seaver Street only, while a series of smaller signs bolted to the siding identified whose spot was whose. Brian’s Infiniti was parked in the spot reserved for Alden Minerals Ltd.

She’d never heard of Alden Minerals Ltd., and yet it seemed vaguely familiar, as if she had heard of it. But she was certain she hadn’t. Yet one more paradox in a week full of them.

Alden Minerals Ltd. was on the second floor, suite 210. Seemed like now would be as good a time as any to storm up the stairs and burst into the suite and see exactly what her lying husband was up to. Yet she hesitated. She found a spot under the fire escape and leaned against the building and tried to ferret out if there could be any logical explanation for any of this. Men sometimes engaged in elaborate hoaxes on their wives if they were, say, planning a surprise party.

No. They didn’t. At least not to the point where they claimed to be in London when they were in Boston or claimed to be flying to Moscow when they were driving to Providence. No, there was no acceptable explanation for this.

Unless...

What?

Unless he’s a spy, she thought. Don’t spies do this kind of thing?

Well, yes, Rachel, a sarcastic voice that sounded like her mother’s agreed, they surely do. So do cheating husbands and sociopaths.

She leaned against the building and wished she still smoked.

If she confronted him right this second, what would she gain? The truth? Probably not, not if he’d been lying to her this successfully for this long. And whatever he told her, she wouldn’t believe it anyway. He could show her his CIA credentials and she’d think of the selfie he’d “sent” from London (how did he fake that, by the way?) and tell him to take his fake CIA credentials and find a way to go fuck himself with them.

If she confronted him, she’d get nowhere.

Harder to admit, of course, was that if she confronted him, whether he lied to her in the moment or not, the relationship — or whatever she’d call it from here on — would leak out on the floor. And she wasn’t ready for that yet. It was a humiliating realization, but at this moment she couldn’t stomach the loss of him from her life. She pictured their condo emptied of his clothes, his books, his toothbrush and titanium razor, the food he liked gone from the fridge, the scotch he preferred removed from the liquor cabinet or, worse, forgotten and left behind as a reminder until Rachel poured it down the sink. She pictured the magazines he subscribed to still showing up months after he left and her long empty days bleeding into long endless evenings. Since her on-air meltdown, she’d lost most of her friends. She had Melissa, yes, but Melissa was the type of friend who expected her to “buck up” and “think positive” and — Excuse me, waiter, could I have one more of these with less ice this time? — “shake it off.” Beyond that, her friends weren’t friends at all but casual acquaintances; it was hard, after all, to maintain social contact with a virtual shut-in.

These last few years, her one true and constant friend had been Brian. She relied on him the way trees relied on their roots. He was her world in full. And the rational part of her knew that, of course — of course — she would have to divest herself of him. He was a fraud. And theirs was a house of sand. And yet she—

He walked out of the back of the building and crossed directly in front of her. He was texting someone as he walked to his car and she stood less than six feet away from him under the fire escape. She waited for him to see her. Tried to think of what she’d say. He’d changed into a dark blue suit with a white shirt, silver-and-black-checked tie, and dark brown shoes. He wore a brown leather laptop bag over his right shoulder. He climbed in the Infiniti and shrugged the bag off onto the passenger seat, still texting with one hand as he shut the door with the other. He pulled the seat belt strap across his chest. He started the engine, still texting, and then must have hit “send” because he flipped the phone onto the passenger seat and backed out of the space, his eyes on his rearview. All he had to do was move his gaze down six inches and he’d be staring at her. She imagined the shock would be so great he’d forget he was in reverse and back straight into the light pole across the alley. But it never happened. He backed up, turning the wheel as he did, and then he was facing forward, looking out at Seaver Street. He drove out of the alley and turned left on Seaver.

She ran to her car, thankful she’d dressed in sneakers as part of her “workout” ruse. She got in the car and turned around, drove up the street and went careening through the intersection as the yellow turned red. A minute later, she spotted him on Broadway, three cars ahead.

She followed him back into College Hill. On a block caught somewhere between decay and refurbishment, he pulled to the curb. She pulled over fifty yards back in front of a boarded-up travel agency and a defunct record store. Past that was a furniture rental store that seemed to have cornered the market on black lacquer dressers. Next was a liquor store and then a camera store, Little Louie’s. Camera stores, she suspected, would all go the way of record stores and travel agencies (liquor stores, she suspected, would hold the line the world over), but Little Louie’s was, as yet, hanging on. Brian entered it. She thought of walking up the sidewalk and getting a glimpse of what he might be doing in there, but she quickly deemed that idea too unpredictable to risk. This was confirmed when Brian walked back out within two minutes of entering. If she’d given in to her impulse, she would have been caught flat-footed in the middle of the sidewalk. He drove off and she pulled away from the curb. As she passed the camera shop, she could see that it was fairly dark inside; the windows displayed only photographs of cameras and newspaper ads taped to the glass. She had no idea what went on in that store, but she suspected selling cameras wasn’t the main priority.

Brian led them out of Providence, through a series of smaller and smaller towns, where the clapboard homes grew more and more distressed, and farms sprouted up here and there, until he pulled into a strip mall that appeared to be reasonably new. He drove past the Panera Bread on the edge of the mall to a small freestanding bank, pulled into a parking space, and got out of the car. He walked to the bank, the laptop bag over his right shoulder again.

She idled in the strip mall lot, in front of a CVS and a Payless ShoeSource. While she waited, she took her phone out of the cup holder and saw that she’d received a text.

She opened it. It was from Brian and it had been sent twenty minutes ago as he’d walked out of the Seaver Street building and crossed directly in front of her.

Babe, on the runway. Taking off soon. Land in about 10 hours. Hope you’re still up when I call. Love you so much.

Ten minutes later, he came out of the bank but no longer carried the laptop bag.

He got in the Infiniti and drove out of the lot.

She followed him back into Providence. He stopped at a florist and purchased a bouquet of white and pink flowers, and her stomach turned. She wasn’t sure she was ready for where this was headed. He stopped one more time and purchased a bottle of champagne from a liquor store. Now she knew she wasn’t ready. He turned off the main road at Federal Hill, long an Italian-American stronghold and the seat of power for the New England mafia but by now just another handsome, gentrified neighborhood of chic restaurants and redbrick row houses.

He pulled the Infiniti into a slot in front of one of those row houses, its windows open to the fine day, white curtains wafting in white-trimmed windows. She parked across the street and a few houses down from where he stood on the sidewalk with the bouquet in his hand. He put two fingers into his mouth and let loose a loud, sharp whistle, something she’d never seen him do in all their time together. It wasn’t just the whistle that was new, she realized. He moved differently, his shoulders higher, his hips looser, springing off the balls of his feet with a dancer’s confidence.

He walked up the steps and the front door opened.

“Oh, Jesus,” Rachel whispered. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

It was a woman who answered the door, about thirty-five or so. She had curly blond hair and a long, pretty face. But none of that held Rachel’s attention when Brian handed her the flowers and the champagne, then knelt on the landing to kiss her pregnant belly.

20 VHS

She couldn’t remember driving back to the highway. The rest of her life she’d wonder how a completely sober person could operate a motor vehicle for several miles through a medium-size city and not remember it.

She’d picked Brian as her spouse because he seemed safe. Because he was can-do. Earnest bordering on grating. A man who would never cheat. Never lie. Certainly never live a double life.

Yet she’d watched her husband enter the row house with his arm around the waist of his pregnant wife(?), girlfriend(?), and shut the door behind them. Rachel had no idea how long she sat in her car, staring at the house, enough time to note that the paint was peeling a bit from a windowsill on the second floor; the cable from a rusted satellite dish dangled off the roof down the front of the building. The window trim was white; the brick facade, recently washed by the look of it, was red. The front door was black and looked to have been painted many times over the course of a century or more. The knocker was pewter.

And then she was on the highway with no idea how she got there.

She thought she’d cry. She didn’t cry. She thought she’d tremble. She didn’t tremble. She thought she’d feel grief and maybe she did, maybe this was what grief felt like — a total numbness, a brining in nothingness. A cauterized soul.

The three lanes of the highway dropped to two as they crossed into Massachusetts. A car drove up on her right, attempting to cut in front of her as its own lane began to disappear. Signs warning of the lane drop had been posted for the last two miles. The other driver had ignored them until it was convenient for him and inconvenient for her.

He sped up.

She sped up.

He sped up some more. She sped up some more. He pushed the nose of his car toward hers. She held her lane. He sped up again. She accelerated, eyes forward. He beeped his horn. She held her lane. In a hundred yards, his lane ended. He sped up and she gunned it, as much as a Ford Focus could be gunned. He dropped away so fast it was as if his car came equipped with a parachute. It appeared seconds later on her rear.

She noted the Mercedes-Benz symbol on his hood. Made sense. He flipped her the bird and blared his horn. A balding specimen behind expensive wraparounds, cheeks just beginning to turn to jowls, thin nose, nonexistent lips. She watched him rant and rage in her rearview and definitely made out the word fuck several times and cunt a couple more. She assumed his dashboard was speckled with spit by now. He wanted to jerk his car into the passing lane and race up on her side, then cut her off, she assumed, but the traffic to their left was too heavy, so he just kept his hand on his horn and thrust his middle finger at her and screamed in his car about what a cunt she was, what a fucking cunt.

She tapped her brakes. And not a light tap. Dropped her speed a solid five miles an hour for a moment. His eyebrows shot up over his sunglasses. His mouth froze in a desperate O. He gripped his steering wheel as if it were suddenly electrified. Rachel smiled. Rachel laughed.

“Fuck you,” she said to the rearview, “you nothing man.” She wasn’t sure the words made a bit of sense, but they felt good to say.

A mile more and traffic had spaced itself out enough that the Mercedes driver could swerve into the left lane and come abreast of her. Normally she would have looked straight ahead — normally? There was no normal. Three days ago she never would have gotten behind the wheel of a car — but today she turned her head and looked at him. His glasses were off, his eyes as small and lightless as she would have expected. She looked at him steadily, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour. She looked calmly at this little man until the rage in his eyes became confusion and then guilt and then he went for something approximating disappointment, as if she’d morphed into the teenage daughter who’d stayed out past curfew, came home smelling of schnapps and Scope. He shook his head, an impotent scolding gesture, and turned his eyes to the road. After one last look, Rachel did the same.

Back home, she returned the Focus to the Zipcar lot and took the elevator up to fifteen. Walking toward her door, she felt lonelier than an astronaut. Unmoored. Untouched. Floating past frontiers with no way someone could hook her and bring her back. It didn’t help that of the four units on fifteen, her and Brian’s was the only one regularly occupied. The other three were owned by foreign investors. Every now and then they’d run across an older Chinese couple or the German financier’s wife, three children, nanny, and their shopping bags. She had zero idea who owned the third unit. The penthouse above was owned by a young man they’d dubbed Trust Fund Baby, a boy so young he’d probably been learning to read about the time Rachel lost her virginity. As far as she knew, he used the place to indulge a penchant for hookers. The rest of the time, Rachel and Brian never heard or saw him.

Most times she preferred this quiet and the privacy it afforded, but walking down the hall right now, she was a castoff, a mark, a fool, something amputated from the herd, an idiotic dreamer who’d been awakened via assault. She heard the cosmos laughing at her.

Didn’t you know, silly girl, that love is not for you?

The condo overwhelmed. Every wall, every angle, every view. This had been them, this had been theirs. It was all the places they’d made love, all the spots in which they’d talked or argued or shared meals. It was the art they’d picked out, the rugs, the dining set, the lamp they’d found at the antique store in Sandwich. It was the smell of him on his bath towel, the newspaper with the half-finished crossword puzzle. It was the curtains and the lightbulbs and the toiletries. Some of these she’d carry into her new life — whatever that new life would be — but almost everything else felt too much them to ever comfortably become hers.

To give herself a moment away from it, she took the elevator back down to the lobby to retrieve the mail. Dominick sat at his post behind the desk reading a magazine. Probably a tenant’s; might even be hers. He looked up and gave her a nod and the kind of bright smile that had absolutely nothing behind it and went back to his magazine. She walked into the mailroom behind him and opened her and Brian’s box, pulled out the stack inside. She added the circulars and junk mail to the recycling bin on the floor and was left, in the end, with three bills.

She came out behind Dominick’s chair and shot him a “Take care” as she did.

“You too, Rachel.” As she reached the elevator bank, he called, “Oh, I got something for you, sorry.”

She turned back and he was going through a bin of oversize mail. He handed her a yellow manila envelope. She didn’t recognize the sender — Pat’s Book Nook & More in Barnum, Pennsylvania — but then remembered the VHS she’d ordered the other night. She hefted the envelope in her palm; that’s exactly what was inside.

Back up in the condo, she opened the envelope and pulled out the tape. The box was battered, some of the cardboard missing from the corners. Robert Hays and Vivica A. Fox stared back at her with happy smiles, their heads tilted to the left. She was opening a bottle of pinot noir to accompany her when she realized she didn’t have a VCR. Who did anymore? She was about to go online and see if she could buy one when she remembered they had one in storage over in Brookline. She’d have to rent another Zipcar, drive a couple of miles in rush-hour traffic. And for what exactly? A movie that a drunk had told her to watch. She now knew her husband had another wife in another state. What more could she learn from an obscure movie from 2002?

She drank some pinot and flipped the VHS over, confirmed that the description of the film on the back was indeed the same one she’d seen posted on eBay. Above the description were two small photos. One was of Robert and Vivica talking on a sidewalk, giving each other big toothy smiles. The other was of a young man leaning over a young woman in a wheelchair, the young man’s lips to her neck, her head thrown back in delight. This must be the two supporting players, she thought, poor Kristy Gale and the guy, what was his name again? She checked the credits — right, Brett Alden.

She put her wineglass on the counter for a moment, closed her eyes.

Alden Minerals Ltd.

That’s why it had struck a chord.

She looked closer at the thumbnail photo in the top right corner. Brett Alden’s face was half obscured by the angle it took when he leaned into Kristy Gale’s neck to kiss it. You could only see his hair (dark, voluminous, and unruly), his forehead, the left side of his face — one eye, one cheekbone, half his nose, half his lips.

But she knew those lips, that nose, that cheekbone, that blue eye. The hair had receded some, the skin near the temple had sprouted wrinkles.

But it was Brian. No question.

21 P380

What if he came back?

She’d been lying on the couch with her eyes closed when the thought sat her up.

What if he walked through the front door and he knew she knew? Polygamy was against the law. So was impersonating someone else for financial gain. However little she understood of it, Rachel was witness to a series of crimes. She suspected that men who led double lives didn’t react well when exposed.

She went to their walk-in closet and reached up on the high shelf where he kept some of his shoes. And behind the shoes, he kept a gun. A P380 subcompact, slightly larger than a cell phone but a pistol he assured her would put down any home invader not wearing Kevlar.

It wasn’t there. She stood on her tiptoes and reached back on the left side of the shelf until her fingers touched the wall.

She heard a click from the front of the apartment. Or did she? Could have been the front door opening, could have been the AC kicking on. Could have been nothing at all.

So the gun was gone. Which meant...

Nope. There it was. Her fingertips closed over the black rubber grip and she pulled it out, knocking one of his loafers off the shelf as she did. The safety was on. She dropped the clip out of the gun and into her hand to confirm it was loaded and then slid the clip back until she heard a click. They used to practice at a range on Freeport Street in Dorchester, Brian joking that if there was one place in the city where the locals didn’t need help learning how to shoot — or dodge — bullets, it was Dorchester. She enjoyed the range, the crack crack crack of rifles in the neighboring bays, the pop pop pop of the pistols. She was less enamored of the brrrrapt of the assault weapons because it called to mind dead schoolchildren and dead moviegoers. It could feel like a fantasy camp for overly aggressive children in there, most of the shooters well past the point where they needed to practice their shooting; several just wanted to fantasize what it would feel like to actually kill that burglar, that abusive ex-boyfriend, mow down that dark horde of gangbangers. They let her try other guns besides the P380, and she proved a good shot with a pistol, less so with a rifle, but the P380 was a perfect fit for her. Soon she could put all seven bullets — six in the mag, one in the chamber — center mass. After that, she stopped going to the range.

She confirmed with a glance that she’d hooked the chain on the front door, so whatever sound she had heard from the closet, it hadn’t been Brian returning. In the kitchen, she opened her laptop and looked up Alden Minerals Ltd. It was a mining company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, that owned a single mine in Papua New Guinea. According to the recent assessment of that mine by a consulting firm, Borgeau Engineering, the mine was sitting on resources in excess of 400,000,000 troy ounces. A recent item in the Wall Street Journal made reference to a rumor that the dominant mining concern in Papua New Guinea, Houston-based Vitterman Copper & Gold, was contemplating a friendly takeover of Alden Minerals.

Alden Minerals was family-owned and family-run by Brian and Nicole Alden. Rachel found no pictures of them. She didn’t need pictures. She knew what they looked like.

She called Glen O’Donnell at the Globe. She and Glen had come up together, first at the Patriot Ledger, then at the Globe. She’d worked in investigative features, he covered business. After five minutes of pleasantries in which she learned he and his partner, Roy, had adopted a daughter from Guatemala and bought a house in Dracut, she asked Glen if he’d research Alden Minerals for her.

“Sure, sure,” he said. “I’ll get right back to you.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do—”

“Be my pleasure. I’m not doing shit now anyway. Call you right back.”

Another glass of pinot later, she sat in the living room by the picture window and watched night find Arlington, Cambridge, and the river. As the world turned brass and then blue, she considered her life without him. The panic attacks would return, she suspected, as soon as the numbness wore off. All the progress she’d made in the last six months would vanish. Not only would she go back to zero, she feared that this series of shocks — oh, your husband has another wife; oh, your husband has another life; oh, you might not even know your husband’s real name — would plunge her into free fall. Already a ball of mild hysteria clotted her windpipe when she imagined interacting with the world again, with people, with strangers, with those who could not rescue her, who would run from her pain the moment they smelled it. (Thin the herd, thin the herd, thin the herd.) One day she wouldn’t be able to board the elevator again; the next she’d need to have her groceries delivered. She’d wake up a few years from now and realize she couldn’t remember the last time she’d left the building. She’d have no more power over herself or her terrors.

And where had that power come from? It had come from herself, yes, of course it had. But it had also come from him. It had come from love. Or what she mistook for love.

An actor. Her Brian was an actor. He’d practically rubbed her face in it during the argument after his “return” from London when he’d made reference to Clark Rockefeller. Which meant not only was Brian not Brian, he wasn’t a Delacroix. But how was that possible?

She went back online, searched for “Brian Delacroix.” The bio that came up matched what Brian had told her — forty, employee of Delacroix Lumber, a Canadian lumber concern with holdings in twenty-six countries. She clicked “images” and found only four, but there he was, her Brian — same hair, same jawline, same eyes, same... not the same nose.

Her Brian had that bump just above the septum at the beginning of the nasal bone. Unnoticeable head-on, but discernible in profile. Even then it could escape notice if you weren’t looking for it. But if you were, it wasn’t up for argument — he had a bump on the bridge of his nose.

Brian Delacroix did not. Two of the photos were profiles; no bump. She took a longer look at the head-on shots, and the longer she looked into Brian Delacroix’s eyes, the more she realized she’d never looked into them before.

Her Brian Delacroix/Brett Alden was an actor. Andrew Gattis, his inconvenient friend from the past, was an actor. Caleb knew both of them quite comfortably. It seemed a rational leap that Caleb might be an actor too.

As the dark settled over the river, she texted him.

A minute later, he responded.

Her cell vibrated. Glen.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” he said. “What’s this company to you, Rachel?”

“Nothing much. Why?”

“It’s a rinky-dink operation that owns a rinky-dink mine in Papua New Guinea. However...” She heard him click his mouse a couple times. “Turns out the mine might not be so rinky-dink. Rumor has it a consulting firm did an assessment and found out Alden Minerals could be sitting on resources of up to four hundred million troy ounces.”

“I came across something about that,” she said. “What’re troy ounces, by the way?”

“Gold measurement. Sorry. It’s literally a gold mine. Won’t do them much good, though. The major competition in that region — the only competition they’d have — is Vitterman Copper & Gold and they don’t play nice in the sandbox. And Vitterman would never, fucking ever allow a mine to be sitting in that region on that kind of lode and not have their name on it. So at some point there’s going to be a hostile takeover. Which is why Alden has been trying to keep news of the consulting company’s findings hush-hush. Unfortunately for them, they needed more cash. They took several meetings with Cotter-McCann.”

“Who’s that?”

“A venture capital group. Last week Cotter-McCann leased several parcels of land suitable for commercial real estate near Arawa township in Papua New Guinea. What’s that tell you?”

Rachel had drunk too much wine for it to tell her anything. “I don’t know.”

“Well, it tells me Cotter-McCann gave Alden Minerals an infusion of cash probably for a shitload of shares in that mine. When it starts to pay off, they’ll push Alden Minerals aside and clean up. It’s what they do; they’re sharks. Worse than sharks, some say. Even sharks stop eating when they’re full.”

“So Alden Minerals will probably fail.”

“‘Fail’ is not quite the right word. They’ll be subsumed. Either by Vitterman or Cotter-McCann. They went from A ball to the major leagues overnight. I doubt they can handle the pitching.”

“Ah.” She couldn’t put any of it together. “Thanks so much, Glen.”

“Of course. Hey, Melissa told me you’re making your way back out into the world.”

“She did?” Rachel swallowed a scream.

“You’ve got to come out to the house, meet Amelia. We’d love to see you guys.”

A wave of despair hit her. “We’d love that.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Just got a cold.”

For a moment it felt like he might press the issue. But then he said, “Take care, Rachel.”

When Caleb rang the bell, she buzzed him up. She’d laid her evidence on the kitchen counter by a scotch glass and a bottle of the bourbon, but he didn’t notice it when he first came in. He looked distracted and worn out.

“You got a drink?”

She pointed at the bourbon.

He took a seat at the counter. He poured himself a drink, didn’t even notice the other items on the counter. “Hell of a day.”

“Oh, you had one too,” she said.

He took a long pull on the glass. “Sometimes I think Brian was right.”

“About what?”

“Getting married. Having a kid. It’s a lot of moving parts, lotta balls in the air.” He glanced at the items on the counter and his tone grew distracted. “So what needs lifting?”

“Nothing really.”

“So why...?” He narrowed his eyes at one of Brian’s plane tickets, the receipt from the shop in Covent Garden, a photo she’d printed up of the selfie Brian had “taken” outside the Covent Garden Hotel, the VHS of Since I Fell for You.

Caleb took a pull from his drink and looked across at her.

“You wrote the date wrong.” She pointed at the receipt.

He gave her a confused smile.

“You wrote it as month, day, year. In Britain, it would read day, month, year.”

He glanced at the receipt, then back over at her. “I have no idea what you’re—”

“I followed him.”

Caleb took another drink.

“To Providence.”

Caleb was very still.

The building was just as still around them. Trust Fund Baby was definitely not home; she would have heard his footsteps. The other tenants on fifteen weren’t there either. It was as if they sat atop an aerie in a forest at the far reaches of the earth.

“He has a pregnant wife.” She poured herself more wine. “He’s an actor. But then you knew that. Because” — she pointed her wineglass at him — “you’re an actor.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Bullshit. Bullshit.” She downed half her wine. At this rate, she’d be peeling the foil off a second bottle soon. But she didn’t care, because it felt good to have focus for her rage. It gave her the illusion of power. And at this point she’d take illusions if they beat back the terror.

“What do you think you know?” he said.

“Don’t you fucking speak to me in that tone.”

“What tone?”

“The condescending one.”

He held up his hands like a man being robbed at gunpoint.

She said, “I saw Brian go to Providence. I saw Brian at Alden Minerals. I saw Brian go to a camera store and buy flowers and go to a bank. And I saw Brian and his preg—”

“What do you mean, he went to the camera store?”

“He went to a camera store.”

“The one on Broadway?”

She didn’t know how she’d managed to strike a nerve, only that she had. Caleb scowled at his reflection in the marble countertop, scowled at his glass before draining it of bourbon.

“What’s in the camera store?” After a minute of silence, she said, “Caleb—”

He held up a finger to silence her and called someone on his cell. As he waited, she could hear the rings on the other end. She was still back to the finger he’d raised to silence her, the contempt in it. It reminded her of Dr. Felix Browner; he’d dismissed her in the same way once.

He pressed “end” on his cell and immediately tried another number. No answer there either. He pressed “end” again and then squeezed the phone so hard she expected it to shatter.

He said to her, “Tell me some—”

She turned her back on him. She retrieved the bottle of wine from the counter beside the oven, kept her back to him as she refilled her glass. It was petty of her, but that didn’t make it feel any less sweet. When she turned back to him, the glare on his face vanished a half second after she noted it and he smiled a very Calebesque smile — boyish and sleepy.

“Tell me some more about what you saw in Providence.”

“You first.” She placed her wine down on the counter across from him.

“There’s nothing for me to tell.” He shrugged. “I don’t know anything.”

She nodded. “Then leave.”

His sleepy smile turned into a sleepy chuckle. “Why would I do that?”

“If you don’t know anything, Caleb, then I don’t know anything.”

“Ah.” He unscrewed the cap on the bourbon and poured himself another two fingers. He put the cap back on, swirled the liquor in his glass. “You’re one hundred percent sure you saw Brian enter the camera store.”

She nodded.

“How long was he in there?”

“Who’s Andrew Gattis?”

He gave that a touché nod as he took a drink. “He’s an actor.”

“I know that. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“He went to Trinity Rep in Providence.”

“The acting school.”

Another nod. “It’s where we all met.”

“So my husband’s an actor.”

“Pretty much, yeah. So the camera store. How long was he in there?”

She looked across the counter at him for a bit. “About five minutes, tops.”

He gnawed the inside of his mouth. “He come back out with anything?”

“What’s Brian’s real name?” She couldn’t fucking believe the words left her mouth. Who in her life ever expected to ask that about her husband?

“Alden,” he said.

“Brett?”

He shook his head. “Brian. Brett was his stage name. My turn.”

She shook her head. “No, no, no. You’ve been withholding information from me since we met. I just started tonight. You get one question for every two of mine.”

“What if that isn’t good enough?”

She wiggled her fingers at the door behind him. “Then fuck off, my friend.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m buzzed,” she said. “What’s at the offices in Cambridge?”

“Nothing. It’s never used. A friend owns it. If we need it — like, say, you’re coming over and we have warning — we dress it. Just like a stage.”

“So who are the interns?”

“You’ve already had your two questions.”

But in that moment she saw the answer, as if it had descended from the heavens decked out in neon.

“They’re actors,” she said.

“Ding!” Caleb checked an imaginary box in the air before his eyes. “Gold star. Did Brian leave the camera store with anything?”

“Not that I saw.”

He checked her eyes. “Did he go to the bank before or after the camera store?”

“That’s a second question.”

“Be kind.”

She laughed so hard she almost threw up. Laughed the way flood victims and earthquake survivors laughed. Laughed not because something was funny but because nothing was.

“Kind?” she said. “Kind?”

Caleb made a steeple of his hands and placed his forehead to their point. A supplicant. A martyr waiting to be sculpted. After no sculptor arrived, he raised his head. His face was ash, his eye sockets dark. He was aging as she watched.

She swirled her wine but didn’t drink it. “How’d he fake the selfie from London?”

“I did it.” He rotated his glass of bourbon on the countertop a full three-sixty. “He texted me, told me what was up. You were sitting right across from me in Grendel’s. It was all just hitting buttons on a phone, snatching an image here, an image there and running it through a photo program. If you’d looked at it in hi-res on a decent computer screen, it probably wouldn’t have held up, but for a selfie supposedly taken in low light? It was easy.”

“Caleb,” she said, the wine definitely hitting her now, “what am I part of?”

“Huh?”

“I woke up this morning, I was someone’s wife. Now I’m... I’m, what, I’m one of his wives? In one of his lives? What am I?”

“You’re you,” he said.

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re you,” he said. “You’re unaltered. Pure. You haven’t changed. Your husband’s not who you thought he was. Yes. But that doesn’t change who you are.” He reached across the counter and took her fingers in his hands. “You’re you.”

She pulled her fingers free of his. He left his hands on the counter. She looked at her own hands, at the two rings there — a round solitaire diamond engagement ring sitting atop a platinum wedding band with five more round diamonds. She once took them to be cleaned at a jeweler’s on Water Street (one, she now realized, Brian had recommended), and the old man who owned the place whistled at them.

“A man who would give you such precious stones,” the old man said, adjusting his glass. “Whoo. He must love you very much.”

Her hands began to shake as she looked at them, at the flesh, at the jewels, and wondered if anything, anything in her life, was real. These last three years had been first a crawl and then a climb toward sanity, toward reclamation of her life and her self, a series of baby steps taken in a tsunami of doubt and terror. A blind woman walking down a series of corridors in an unfamiliar building she could not remember entering.

And who had arrived to guide her? Who had taken her hand and whispered, “Trust me, trust me,” until she finally did? Who had walked her toward the sun?

Brian.

Brian had believed in her long after anyone else had gone home. Brian had pulled her out of the hopeless dark.

“All of it was a lie?” She was surprised to hear the words leave her mouth and surprised to see the tears fall on the marble countertop and on her hands and on her rings. They rolled down the sides of her nose and off her cheekbones and into the corners of her mouth; they burned a bit.

She moved to get a Kleenex, but Caleb took her hands again.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Let it out.”

She wanted to tell him it wasn’t okay, any of it, and would he please let go of her hands?

She pulled her hands out of his. “Leave.”

“What?”

“Just go. I want to be alone.”

“You can’t be alone.”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“No,” he said, “you know too much.”

“I...?” She couldn’t repeat the rest of his threat. It was a threat, wasn’t it?

“He won’t like it if I leave you alone.”

Now she repeated it. “Because I know too much.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

She’d left the gun in the chair over by the picture window.

“Brian and I have been at this for a very long time,” he said. “There’s a lot of money at stake.”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

“And you think I might tell someone?”

He smiled and drank some bourbon. “I don’t think you necessarily will, but I think you could.”

“Uh-huh.” She carried her wineglass with her to the window, but Caleb came right along with her. They stood by the chair and looked out at the lights of Cambridge, and if Caleb looked down, he’d see the gun. “Is that why you married a woman who didn’t speak the language?”

He said nothing and she tried not to look down at the chair.

“Who doesn’t know anyone in this country?”

He looked out at the night, but moved his hip slightly closer to the chair and kept his eyes on her reflection in the window.

“Is that why Brian married a shut-in?”

Eventually, Caleb said, “This could be so good for everyone.” He met her eyes in the dark glass. “So don’t make it bad.”

“Are you threatening me?” she said softly.

“I think it’s you who’s been doing the threatening tonight, kid.” And he looked at her the way the rapist, Teacher Paul, had in Haiti.

Or at least that’s how it felt in the moment.

“Do you know where Brian is?” she asked.

“I know where he might be.”

“Can you take me to him?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because he owes me an explanation.”

“Or?”

“Or what?”

“That’s what I’m asking. Are you giving us an ‘or else’?”

“Caleb,” she said, and hated how desperate she sounded, “take me to Brian.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Brian has something I need. Something my family needs. I don’t like that he has that and hasn’t told me.”

She felt herself trying to swim up through the wine again. “Brian has something you...? The camera store?”

Caleb nodded. “The camera store.”

“What—?”

“He has something I need. And you’re something he needs.” He turned to face her, the chair between them. “So I’m not going to take you to him just yet.”

She reached down, grabbed the pistol, thumbed off the safety, and pointed at the center of his chest.

“Yes,” she said, “you are.”

22 The Snowblower

Driving them south in his silver Audi, Caleb said, “You can put the gun away.”

“No,” she said, “I like having it.”

She didn’t. She didn’t like having it at all. It sat in her hand like dead vermin that might spring back to life. Its power to stop a life with the flexing of a finger was suddenly one of the ugliest concepts she’d ever considered. And she’d pointed it at a friend. Was, even now, pointing it generally at him.

“Could you put the safety on?”

“That would add an extra step in case I have to pull the trigger.”

“But you’re not going to pull the trigger. It’s me. And you’re you. Do you get how ridiculous this is?”

“I do,” she said. “It’s ridiculous for sure.”

“So now that we’ve agreed you’re not going to shoot me—”

“We haven’t agreed on that.”

“But I’m driving,” he pointed out, his tone falling somewhere between helpful and condescending. “So you’re going to shoot me and — what? — sit in the passenger seat as the car goes flying across the expressway?”

“That’s what air bags are for.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If you try to take the gun from me,” she said, “the only choice I’ll have is to, you know, shoot you.”

He jerked the wheel and the car lurched into the next lane. He smiled at her. “Well, that felt unpleasant.”

She could feel the power dynamic shifting and she knew from the housing projects and the ride-alongs and the long nights in Haiti that when power shifted it stayed shifted unless you grabbed it back immediately.

His eyes were on the road when she flicked the safety on. It didn’t make a sound. She shifted in her seat, leaned forward slightly, and slammed the butt of the pistol down on his kneecap. The car lurched and swerved again. A horn blared.

Caleb hissed. “Holy fuck. What is wrong with you? That fucking—”

She did it again, exactly the same spot.

He jerked the car back out of a third swerve. “Enough!”

They’d be lucky if another car on the freeway wasn’t calling 911 right now to report a drunk driver, giving the operator Caleb’s license plate number.

She flicked the safety off again.

“Enough,” he repeated. Riding his vocal cords along with the anger and attempt at authority was a clear timbre of anxiety. He had no idea what she was going to do next, but he was definitely afraid of the possibilities.

So now the power had shifted back.

He exited the freeway in Dorchester, in the southern tip of Neponset. He headed north on Gallivan Boulevard, stayed right at the rotary, and at first she thought they were crossing the bridge to Quincy, but instead he headed for the on-ramp back onto the expressway. At the last moment, he turned right, and drove down a street badly in need of repaving. They bounced along until he turned right and took them into a blocks-long stretch of bent, weather-lashed houses and Quonset-shaped warehouses and dry dockyards filled with boats that ran to the smaller side. At the end of the street, they found the Port Charlotte Marina, something Sebastian had pointed out to her a few times on their sails through Massachusetts Bay their first few summers together. Sebastian, showing her how to steer and navigate at night by the lights in the sky. Sebastian, out on the water with the wind in his Nordic hair, the only time she’d ever known him to be happy.

A restaurant and yacht club sat just past a near-deserted parking lot, both buildings looking freshly painted and hopeful for a marina in which there were no yachts. The biggest boat moored at the dock looked to be a forty-footer. Most of the others looked to be lobster boats, aged and constructed of wood. A few of the newer ones were fiberglass. The nicest of those was about thirty-five feet long, the hull painted blue, the wheelhouse painted white, the deck a honey teak. She paid attention to it because her husband stood on it, bathed in their headlights.

Caleb exited the car fast. He pointed back at her, told Brian his wife was not taking things well. Rachel was happy to note Caleb limped even as he speed-walked to the boat. She, on the other hand, moved slowly, her eyes on Brian. His gaze barely left hers except for the occasional flicks in the direction of Caleb.

If she’d known she’d end up killing him, would she have boarded the boat?

She could turn around and go to the police. My husband is an impostor, she’d say. She imagined some smarmy desk sergeant replying, “Aren’t we all, ma’am?” Yes, she was certain, it was a crime to impersonate someone and a crime to keep two wives, but were those serious crimes? In the end, wouldn’t Brian just take a plea and it would all go away? She’d be left the laughingstock never-was, the failed print reporter who’d become a pill-addicted broadcast reporter who’d become a punch line and then a shut-in and who would keep the local comics stocked with weeks of fresh material once it was discovered that Meltdown Media Chick had married a con man with another wife and another life.

She followed Caleb up the ramp to the boat. He stepped aboard. When she went to do the same, Brian offered his hand. She stared at it until he dropped it. He noticed the gun she carried. “Should I show you mine? So I feel safer?”

“Be my guest.” She stepped aboard. As she did, Brian caught her by the wrist and stripped the gun from her hand in the same motion. He pulled his own gun, a.38 snub-nosed revolver, from under the flaps of his shirt and then laid them both on a table by the stern. “Once we get out into the bay, sweetheart, you let me know if you want to walk five paces and draw. I owe you that.”

“You owe me a lot more than that.”

He nodded. “And I’m going to make good on it.” He unraveled a line from the cleat, and before she’d even realized she could hear the engine, Caleb was under the standing shelter with his hand on the throttle and they were chugging up the Neponset River toward the bay.

Brian sat on the bench on one side of the deck and she sat across from him, the front edge of the table in between them.

“So you own a boat,” she said.

He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Yup.”

Port Charlotte receded behind her. “Am I ever going to get back off it?”

He tilted his head to the side. “Of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I can expose your double life for starters.”

He sat back, opened his palms to the idea. “And where will that get you?”

“It won’t get me anywhere. Get you in jail.”

He shrugged.

“You don’t think so.”

“Look, if you want, we’ll turn this boat around right now and take you back. And you can drive to the nearest police station and tell them your story. And if they believe you — and let’s face it, Rachel, your credibility is a little shaky in this town — then, sure, they’ll send some detective out tomorrow or the next day or a week from Tuesday, whenever they get around to it. But by that point, I’ll be smoke. They’ll never find me and you’ll never find me.”

The thought of never seeing him again slid through her intestinal tract like a shiv. Losing Brian — knowing he was out in the world somewhere, yet she would never see him again — would be like losing a kidney. It was a certifiably insane reaction, and yet there it was.

“Why aren’t you already gone?”

“I couldn’t synchronize every part of my timetable as fast as I wanted.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We don’t have much time,” Brian said.

“For what?”

“For anything but trust.”

She stared across the boat at him. “Trust?”

“I’m afraid so.”

There were probably a thousand things she could have said to the galactic absurdity of his asking her to trust him, but all she managed to say was “Who is she?”

She hated the words as they left her mouth. He’d stripped her of every foundation she’d built the last three years of her life on, and she was coming off like the jealous shrew.

“Who?” he said.

“The pregnant wife you keep in Providence.”

Another smile, bordering on a smirk, as his eyes rose to the starless sky. “She’s an associate.”

“At your mineral company?”

“Well, tangentially, yes.”

She could feel them dropping into the rhythm of all their fights — she typically played offense, he played an evasive defense, which usually made her more and more aggressive, like the dog chasing the rabbit that has no meat under its fur. So before it could deteriorate any further, she asked the real question.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your husband.”

“You’re not my—”

“I’m the man who loves you.”

“You lied to me about everything in our lives. That’s not love. That’s—”

“Look in my eyes. Tell me whether you see love there or not.”

She looked. Sardonically at first, but then with growing fascination. It was there, no question.

But was it? He was, after all, an actor.

“Your version of it,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” he said, “that’s the only version I’d know.”

Caleb cut the engine. They were about two miles out in the bay, the lights of Quincy off to their right, the lights of Boston back and to their left. In front of them, the ink dark was interrupted by the ridges and crags of Thompson Island to their west. Impossible to tell in this dark if it was two hundred yards away or two thousand. There was some kind of youth facility on Thompson, Outward Bound maybe, but whatever the organization, they’d turned in for the night because the island emitted no light whatsoever. Small waves broke softly against the hull. She’d once piloted herself and Sebastian home on a night like this using only their running lights, the two of them chuckling nervously through most of the journey, but Caleb had cut every light but the small bulbs of uplighting on the deck by their feet.

Out there in the impermeable dark on a moonless night, she realized Brian and Caleb could quite easily kill her. In fact, all of this could have been orchestrated to get her to think she was supervising the events that led her to this boat and this bay and this callous dark when in fact it was the other way around.

It suddenly seemed important to ask Brian, “What’s your real name?”

“Alden,” he said to her. “Brian Alden.”

“Are you from a lumber family?”

He shook his head. “Nothing so glamorous.”

“Are you from Canada?”

He shook his head. “I’m from Grafton, Vermont.”

He watched her carefully as he removed a plastic sleeve of peanuts from his pocket, the kind they gave you on planes, and opened it.

“You’re Scott Pfeiffer,” she said.

He nodded.

“But your name isn’t Scott Pfeiffer.”

“No. That’s just the name of some kid I went to high school with, used to make me laugh in Latin class.”

“And your father?”

“Stepfather. Yeah. He was the guy I described. Racist, homophobic, scared the world was run by a large-scale conspiracy to fuck his life up and piss on everything he’d put his faith in. He was also, paradoxically maybe, a nice guy, good neighbor, help you put up a fence or fix a gutter. He keeled over from a heart attack while shoveling a neighbor’s walk. Neighbor’s name was Roy Carrol. Funny thing? Roy was never even nice to him, but my stepfather shoveled his walk because it was the decent thing to do and Roy was too poor to hire anyone to help and he lived on a corner lot. You know what Roy did the day after my father’s funeral?” Brian popped a peanut in his mouth. “Went out and bought himself a three-thousand-dollar snowblower.”

He offered her some peanuts and she shook her head, feeling numb to all of it suddenly, feeling as if she’d stepped into a virtual-reality booth and this was the set onto which she found herself projected.

“And your real father?”

“Never really knew him.” He shrugged. “Something we have in common.”

“How about Brian Delacroix? How’d you come up with that identity?”

“You know, Rachel. You know because I told you.”

And she did. “He went to Brown.”

Brian nodded.

“And you were the pizza delivery guy.”

“Delivered in forty minutes or less or you get it for half price.” He smiled. “Now you know why I drive so fast.” He shook some more peanuts into his hand.

“Why,” she said, “are you sitting there eating peanuts like nothing’s changed?”

“Because I’m hungry.” He popped another one in his mouth. “It was a long flight.”

“There was no flight.” She clenched, then unclenched her teeth.

He cocked an eyebrow at her and she wanted to tear it off his face. She wished she hadn’t drunk so much. She needed to be clearheaded right now and she wasn’t even close. She had wanted to have all her questions lined up in perfect sequence.

“There was no flight,” she said, “because there’s no job and you’re not Brian Delacroix, which means our marriage isn’t even legal and you’ve lied to me about...” She stopped. She could feel the dark all around her and all inside of her. “Everything.”

He slapped the peanut dust off his hands and pocketed the empty plastic sleeve.

“Not everything.”

“Really. What’s real?”

He waved his fingers between their chests. “This.”

She mimicked the gesture. “This is bullshit.”

He actually had the temerity to look hurt. The balls. “No. It’s not, Rachel. It’s as real as anything.”

Caleb joined them on the deck. “Tell me about the camera shop, Brian.”

Brian said, “What is this, bad cop/bad cop suddenly? You’re both gonna grill me?”

“Rachel says she followed you to Little Louie’s.”

A heartless cast found Brian’s face. He’d worn the same look when he’d slapped Andrew Gattis, wore it when he’d walked out of the Hancock Tower in the rain, and it had flashed across his face during a fight once, for just a second. “How much did you tell her?”

“I didn’t.”

“You told her nothing?”

For a second, she thought Brian’s voice sounded funny, like he’d bitten his tongue or cut it somehow.

“I told her we were actors.”

“Nothing else?” His voice sounded like his own again.

“I’m right here,” she said.

Brian looked over at her and his eyes were dead. No, not dead. Dying. The light bled from them. She felt infinitesimal in them. He swept her body with them in a way that was clinical and lustful at the same time, the look of a man watching pornography when he wasn’t even sure he was in the mood.

Caleb said, “Why’d you go to the camera store, Brian?”

Brian held up a finger to Caleb, his eyes still moving up and down Rachel, and Caleb’s face seized with the dismissiveness of the gesture.

“Don’t fucking hold your finger up to me like I’m the help. Are the passports ready?”

Brian’s jaw tightened even as he chuckled. “Oh, ho, ho, my man, let’s not push me tonight.”

Caleb took a step toward Brian. “You said they wouldn’t be ready for another twenty-four hours.”

“I know what I said.”

“Is this about her?” Caleb pointed at Rachel. “Her and her bullshit? People could fucking die because—”

“I know people could die,” Brian said.

“My wife could die. My child could—”

“A wife and child you shouldn’t have.”

“But it’s okay for you?” Caleb took two more steps. “Huh? It’s okay for you.”

“She’s been in war zones,” Brian said. “She’s battle-tested.”

“She’s a shut-in.”

Rachel said, “What are you two—?”

Caleb stepped to Brian, pointed a finger in his face. “You lied about the fucking passports. You put us all at risk. We’re gonna fucking die because you can’t see past your dick.”

As violence always did in her experience, the next few things happened very fast.

Brian slapped Caleb’s finger out of his face. Caleb whacked the side of Brian’s head with a hastily clenched fist. Brian rose half out of his seat as Caleb took another swing at him, half connecting with his neck. Brian buried his fist in Caleb’s solar plexus. When Caleb doubled over, Brian punched him in the ear hard enough that she could hear the cartilage crunch.

Caleb stumbled sideways. He dropped to one knee and inhaled desperately for a moment.

She said, “Guys, stop,” and the words sounded ridiculous.

Brian rubbed his neck where Caleb had hit him and spit off the side of the boat.

Caleb used the table to push himself to his feet. Then he was holding her gun in his hand. She watched him thumb off the safety, and she couldn’t make sense of it at first. It characterized the surreal quality that had marked the entire day. They were Brian, Rachel, and Caleb, regular people, boring even, not the kind of people who brandished firearms. And yet it was she who’d forced Caleb to drive her here using the same gun.

And now he was pointing it in Brian’s face. “Hey, tough guy, tell me where the fucking—”

When Brian struck Caleb’s gun hand, the gun went off. It wasn’t as loud as it sounded on the range, with partitions on either side of her. It sounded like a desk drawer being kicked shut. Judging by the muzzle flash, the bullet passed in her general direction. But she didn’t scream. Brian swiped the gun out of Caleb’s hand and swept Caleb’s legs out from under him with the kind of ease that again suggested he’d had some wrestling experience. Caleb landed on his back, and Brian kicked him in the chest and abdomen, kicked him like he was going to kick him to death.

“Point a gun in my face?” Brian screamed. “Fucking kidding me?”

With every sentence Brian delivered a kick.

“Try to fuck me?” Brian kicked him in the stomach. “Talk shit about my wife?”

A blood bubble popped from Caleb’s mouth.

“Try to fuck my wife?” Brian kicked him in the groin. “You don’t think I notice the way you fucking drool over her? Stare at her? Think about her?”

When the kicks started, Caleb had begged him to stop. Now he just lay there.

“Brian, stop.”

Brian turned toward her, his eyes narrowing at his gun in her hand. She couldn’t remember picking it up, but she could feel its weight, so much heavier than hers, which, in Brian’s hand, looked like a toy.

“Stop?” he said.

“Stop,” she repeated. “You’ll kill him.”

“And why would you care?”

“Brian, please.”

“What in your life would change if he was dead? If I was dead? Or just gone? You’ll do the same thing — sit inside and look out at the world. But you won’t engage it. You won’t affect it. I mean, forget about him. What difference would it make if you’re in the world or not?”

The words seemed to surprise him as much as her. He blinked several times. He looked at the lightless sky and the black bay. Looked at Caleb. Looked at her again. And she could see a realization take root — if he returned to land with an empty boat, no one would be the wiser.

He raised her gun. At least she thought he raised her gun. No, he did. He raised it. Raised it from his knee in a sweep, bringing it up and toward the center of himself, his right arm half-crossing his chest.

And she shot him.

She shot him as she’d been taught — center mass. Bullet straight to the heart.

She heard herself say, Brian no Brian no. She heard herself say, No no no please.

Brian stumbled backward and the blood bloomed on his shirt and then fell from his body in drops.

Caleb looked at her with a mix of horror and gratitude.

Brian dropped her gun. He said, “Shit.”

She said, “I’m sorry,” and it left her mouth like a question.

And there was so much love in his eyes. And so much fear. Words left his mouth accompanied by a spoonful of blood that spilled down his chin. And she couldn’t compute what he was saying to her because of the blood and his fear.

He took a half stumble-step backward, his palm to his chest. He fell off the boat.

And she heard clearly now what he’d said to her, what had gotten lost while the words fell from his mouth with the blood. “I love you.”

Wait. Wait. Brian, wait.

She could see his blood on the deck and a small splatter of it on the white foam cushion of a bench by the rail.

Wait, she thought again.

We were supposed to grow old together.