Anita felt a surge of rage. “How dare you say that,” she spat in her harshest tone, words dripping with hatred. “You know that isn’t true. You are a weak, desperate piece of shit.”
Dennis hit her.
He smacked her across the face with his hand, a sudden jolt, and she felt the sting, stumbled backward, almost fell, but grabbed the refrigerator door handle for balance.
“Get out!” she screamed.
He stared at her.
“I mean it! Get out! Get out!”
Dennis turned and left the kitchen.
He left the house.
He drove away.
Anita locked the doors. She was hyperventilating. She wanted to run from room to room, smashing things. She paced wildly.
When Dennis called fifteen minutes later, he was crying, apologizing.
She didn’t care.
“I want a divorce,” she said simply.
He murmured drunken words that were so entangled that she couldn’t understand him. She hoped, at the very least, that he could understand her.
“I…want…a…divorce,” she repeated, crisp and clean, and then disconnected. She slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
Eighty percent.
She felt overcome by dizziness.
All your fault.
She wanted to throw up, but there was nothing to throw up, no food in her stomach, nothing since breakfast. Was there breakfast?
Tim’s bear.
She climbed the stairs. They seemed to move, swim, like an escalator from hell.
I am more of a mother.
She staggered into the bedroom, barely able to move in the right direction, slamming into the doorframe.
You can always have another child.
She tore through the clothes in her closet, going deep into items long buried and forgotten.
Pam’s great!
She found her old blue sweatsuit from college. Not really fashionable anymore, wrinkled and faded, but still there, faithfully.
Damn it, Tim, you spilled your juice!
She peeled out of her jeans and turtleneck and pulled on the sweatsuit. She dug out her gym shoes and stuffed them on her feet.
They’re getting the Coast Guard!
Anita burst out of the house. She jogged across the lawn, reached the sidewalk, then followed it in one direction: away.
She jogged past her neighbors, left them behind, advanced to a new block, and then another. Perhaps she could outrun the crashing storm that lived above her head. The world moved past her.
Her head hurt. Her limbs hurt. She could feel the shin splints sending shock waves up her legs with every step. But she couldn’t stop. Physical pain was trivial. She let her rage combust throughout her body and fuel her momentum.
She seethed with anger for Dennis. For Maggie. For Roy. For the reporters who hounded her. For the police who gave up hope. Everybody was her enemy now.
But as she continued to run, leaving behind a lot of junk from an overflowing mind, her anger at the world receded.
Some focus returned. Anita knew that more than anything, she needed someone to lash out at, but the only person who truly deserved it was dead.
She could not touch Pam.
Finally, after a long run, Anita stopped jogging. She collapsed to the grass. Her destination stood before her, all red brick and indifference.
Pam’s apartment building. Anita could see Pam’s windows. They were dark and empty.
Anita remained sitting on the grass, catching her breath, lungs aching, staring at the building as if it could somehow cough up an explanation for the evil that once lived inside.
In several windows, elderly faces began to peer out at her. Who was this stranger on the grass, casing the joint? The faces looked worried. Gray-haired grannies with big glasses. Frowning old men with droopy jowls.
Anita felt very old herself, just like one of these withered seniors, retreating from the world in their tiny apartments, idly killing time before the grim reaper pressed the buzzer. Every day, slipping a little further into irrelevance, watching the days grow dimmer, less focused.
Two weeks earlier, Anita had stared into a palmful of sleeping pills and weighed the pros and cons of ending her life. Ultimately, she couldn’t commit the act. While she no longer had enthusiasm for life, she couldn’t muster the energy to die. And what would it achieve, really, aside from giving her own parents the same kind of sorrow she now suffered. Pointless.
I don’t need to die, Anita told herself, watching one of the old ladies get on the phone, probably calling the police, or the funny farm, to come drag her away.
I don’t need to die because I’m already dead.
PART TWO
IX
Anita sat in a ten-by-ten-foot booth in the buzzing, cavernous convention hall, relaxing and enjoying the people watching. There were thousands of name-tagged business professionals moving about, squeezing past one another, filling bags with freebies and checking out the loud displays that competed for attention.
When a visitor would wander close to the Your Resources booth, Anita would invite him or her to a five-minute demonstration of the latest and greatest in Human Resources administration software. She was always sweet and inviting, not pushy, and more often than not they accepted.
This was Anita’s seventh trade show this year, and it was only June. Sometimes it would take a moment to recall where she was; the convention halls, bland and windowless, all looked the same. Today and tomorrow was the Business Solutions Expo in Chicago. Late next week, it would be the HR Technology Forum in Seattle.
She had joked with her coworkers back in Sacramento that she should have tour T-shirts made with the Your Resources company logo on the front and her travel dates on the back, like a rock band.
ANITA SHERWOOD
NORTH AMERICAN TRADE SHOW TOUR
DENVER
L.A.
MIAMI
NEW YORK
NEW JERSEY
ATLANTA
CHICAGO
SEATTLE
The new job required a lot of travel, and she welcomed it. She didn’t want to sit still. Movement was good. It was healthy to see the world outside the walls of her home and cubicle. In her marketing role, she interacted with a constant barrage of fresh faces, coming and going, no one connecting for too long. Once an account was landed, it became someone else’s long-term project.
More than two years had passed since Tim’s death, followed by her permanent departure from Digital Learnings and her divorce from Dennis. She didn’t miss either one.
The divorce was handled quickly, mostly between attorneys. Dennis came back a few times for some of his things—his Giants golf bag, some clothes, the stereo and CDs. Not much. The rest, including the aquarium, he told her to sell. He took the Jeep, she kept the Jetta. He had little to say. His emotions had been hollowed out. He was no longer there.
The tragedy had ruined Dennis beyond repair. She wouldn’t let it ruin her, too. She sold the house in Rockridge and moved to a condominium in Sacramento. The new environment cleansed her mind. There were no memories here. Only new memories to be built from a new life.
She joined Your Resources, a company that specialized in software products for HR professionals. She started as a product designer but quickly sought out a new role. She simply could not tolerate long hours in a confined space at a PC anymore. When the marketing position opened up, she jumped for it. Her bosses were happy to oblige. Her strong grasp of software technology made her a smart and savvy sales rep.
Anita liked her new boss, Clifford, and her coworkers. They knew about her background, but didn’t treat her differently, because there was no previous relationship for comparison. In her first week, Anita brought up the topic of Tim first, before they asked, and then let it drop. No one else retrieved it.
Not directly, anyway. In a strange manner, she became a magnet for others to share their own tragedies over lunch. A mother with cancer. A cousin in a fatal
car crash. Anita listened and nodded with concern. Maybe she made them feel better because her tragedy dwarfed their own. As long as they didn’t probe about Tim, it was fine.
Anita made new friends at Your Resources. She was starting over from scratch. Most of the Bay Area friendships had dissolved, unable to withstand the test of trauma. Granted, she wasn’t the most enjoyable person to be around in the months after Tim’s murder, but true friends should have stuck with her. A few did, like Maggie. Many did not, like Gilda, quietly slipping out of contact with her.
For a while, Anita felt tainted. She was certain that people perceived her as a downer, a frightening reminder of the fragility and cruelties of life. Who wants somebody like that around? Ignorance is bliss.
The absence of Dennis created a second hole in her life. Sometimes she missed Dennis terribly and regretted the divorce. Other times, she couldn’t imagine staying with him. Either way, it still hurt.
In recent months, Anita had started dating. No one special emerged, but there were occasional glimmers of hope that romance could blossom again. And if that was the case, could intimacy be far behind?
She told her dates up front about her background. The men all offered sympathy and didn’t openly appear bothered, but she could see the interest draining from their faces. A murdered child presented too much baggage for them.
Fine, she told herself. I don’t want a man who can’t handle it anyway.
They had to cope with a woman with severe psyche trauma and all of its side effects, which included a total lack of desire to rush into the sack.
Most recently, there was Will, a friend of a coworker. Will had a nice build, but a goofy face that could not be masked by nice clothes and free weights. At the conclusion of their third date, parked outside her condominium, he was anxious to be invited up, and the invitation was not forthcoming.
He kissed her a little, and she gently drew back and reached for the door handle.
“The closer I am, the more tense you become,” he said.
“I’m not tense,” she lied.
“Do I make you uncomfortable?”
“No, but this conversation does.”
Date four ended with Will calling her frigid.
“Am I supposed to be insulted?” she asked him, as they sat again in the front seat of his car outside the condominium. She didn’t know if the frigid crack was teasing or if he was genuinely irritated. He was always grinning like an idiot.
“Hey, it’s OK,” insisted Will. “It turns me on. I like a woman who plays hard to get.”
“You do?” she replied. “Then this ought to really get you off: I don’t want to see you again.”
She opened the car door, exited, and slammed it shut on him.
Dating sucks, she concluded. It was certainly not as fun or exhilarating as it was in high school or college. Now it was predictable, tedious, and consistently disappointing. But she was in no rush.
As she watched the trade show activity, a handsome young man with wavy blond hair and an expensive suit walked up to her table, smiling. “Hope I win,” he said, flashing his business card.
There was a large jar on the table, collecting business cards for a raffle. Three winners would receive free software packages. All contestants became leads for the direct marketing folks back in Sacramento.
The handsome man didn’t drop his card into the jar. Instead, he handed it to Anita, probably to show off the fact that he was the CEO of some no-name dot.com out of Indianapolis.
“If you get mine, do I get yours?” he asked, and the tone was not business.
“You get our brochure,” she smiled sweetly in return.
He pressed on a little bit more, steering the conversation away from the software, asking questions about her, trying to reel her in.
Five years ago, maybe, I would play this game, she told herself. But not today.
He finally gave up. He wasn’t the first one. There had been a few other men who flirted with her today, lured by the absence of a wedding ring. One had written his room number on the back of his business card. She wondered how many one-night-stands occurred at these things. Many of them were probably married, inhibitions conveniently left at home.
When they toyed with her, she was flattered, happy, and not interested. I guess I still look good, she thought to herself, and that was satisfaction enough.
She knew she had aged more than two years in two years. She had lines in her face. She had a few gray hairs, not many, but set against her jet-black hair they definitely stood out. She had traded her longer hairstyle for a shorter, sophisticated look, and most of her outfits were conservative, not youthful but not bland. For summertime, she was pale, while everybody else seemed to sport tans, authentic or not. But she was still in good shape for a woman in her mid-thirties. Still able to turn heads at a business technology trade show, anyway.
For the first time since her jogging days in college, she regularly worked out. Instead of running, she exercised at the gym. When she traveled, she sought out the hotel’s workout facility or pool. The benefits were twofold: it not only brought new energy to her body, but also helped her emotional state. Shortly after she started working out, she found herself laughing in a conversation with a coworker. It was the first time she had laughed after Tim’s death, and it immediately sounded strange and foreign in her ears. For a while, she felt guilty about laughing. But she accepted that it was all part of the recovery. Soon she might even feel genuine happiness again.
The simple truth was that she was feeling better and stronger every day. She had a new life. It wasn’t disrespectful to Tim to enjoy life again, Dr. Andrew had told her during one of their last sessions together. Instead, it was honoring Tim’s spirit to embrace life and not withdraw.
She could believe that, if she tried.
Day one of the trade show passed by pleasantly if uneventfully. Anita previewed the software dozens of times, distributed about half of her brochures and most of the free mousepads. She had collected maybe a hundred business cards. The crowd swelled at the end of the afternoon when the final workshops and seminars let out, and then drained when cocktail time arrived.
The vendors hall shut down for the day at five o’clock.
“Not a bad turnout,” said the rotund woman with chipmunk teeth at a neighboring booth. She sold WebSpy, a service that tracked (and busted) inappropriate employee use of the Internet. Anita had seen her before at other trade shows. “Better than Houston, not as good as Hartford,” said the woman.
On the other side of Anita, a wiry, raspy man with a chiseled face shut off his kiosk with a loud sigh of relief. It had been playing a looped video clip all day, praising the virtues of benefits enrollment software with relentless, chirpy theme music. “I don’t want to ever hear that goddamned song again,” he groused. “Christ, I need a smoke.”
A pretty, twentysomething Asian woman in a black dress and black stockings walked over from her booth across the aisle to join the conversation.
“I’ve got a guy from a food company who wants me to come out and pitch to his vice president. In Pittsburgh! Gag.”
“Are you guys going to the cocktail reception?” asked the WebSpy woman.
“Hell yes!” scowled the wiry man.
“A group of us are going to Navy Pier for dinner,” offered the Asian woman. “Anybody interested?”
“Sure,” said WebSpy woman.
The wiry man grumbled something about getting drunk and watching a pay-per-view movie in his room.
Anita politely declined Navy Pier. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m going to do some shopping. I need to spoil myself.”
“Right on,” grinned WebSpy woman, adding, “My husband put an end to my out-of-town shopping after New York. I maxed out the credit cards.”
As more booths shut down, the gathering of idle vendors grew. Anita finally packed up the laptop, took the jar of business cards, excused herself, and returned to her room.
In the elevator, she refle
cted on the day’s interactions. Most of the people she encountered had no idea who she was. Usually, even if they didn’t say anything, she could tell if they recognized her face or name from the news. The expressions softened, the conversation became tinged with awkwardness and delicacy.
It took a long time for her fifteen minutes of fame to end. The media wouldn’t let go for months. But finally, other headlines and horrors filled its place. Thank God for other horrors.
As Anita walked down the corridor to her room, she passed a mother sweetly interacting with her toddler. A non-event for anyone else, a momentary ache for Anita. There was a growing list of things she could now absorb without pain, but not moments like this. Not now. Maybe not ever.
In her hotel room, Anita ditched the nametag, put on comfortable shoes, and tossed aside the suit jacket to go sleeveless. She left a voicemail message with Clifford that said all went well and promised him good leads.
The hotel was perched on the south bank of the Chicago River and a short walk from the Magnificent Mile, a stretch of North Michigan Avenue that boasted world-class, upscale shopping. Hundreds of retail stores and boutiques lined the corridor and adjacent street. Anita looked forward to submerging herself in the latest fashions and accessories, even if her purchases would be slim to none. She was making good money, but not Michigan Avenue money.
She worked her way north on the east side of the street. It was a perfect summer day, bright sun extending through the late afternoon and into the early evening. The streets hummed with rush hour traffic and the sidewalks were alive with people: the fast pace of workers heading home mixed with the slow amble of tourists gaping at skyscrapers.
Dipping in and out of stores, she advanced to the Water Tower Place mall, a high-rise of shops directly across from the fabled historic Water Tower that survived the Great Chicago Fire in the 1800s.
Inside the mall, Anita wound her way up and down the levels, finding a lot of expensive nonessentials, the things you would buy if you had an unlimited supply of money, but otherwise simply provided great browsing and window shopping. Too many of the stores were starting to look familiar—chains that weaved a web through every big city she visited.
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