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 ab
out 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 def
initely 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.”
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