Marissa sighed as she deleted the message. Notwithstanding a vague curiosity about what “mellower” could mean, one thing she would not be doing that day would be spending a minute with her mother. She’d made up her mind years ago to exclude her from her life—and it was, she believed, among the smartest she’d ever made. She called Caitlyn’s cell, left a voicemail. “Hey, Caitlyn. Good to hear from you . . . Um, look, I’d like to help you out, and I’d like to see Jade, but I’m not going to come today. I have to go up to Robbie’s, and then I’m flying out to Seattle tonight. But maybe we can figure out a time around Christmas or something. It’d be great to see you, I’m . . .” She had an unexpected urge to blurt out about Brendan and the pregnancy, and what should she do? But she and Caitlyn had never been close, had drifted further since Marissa’s estrangement from their mother. “I really am sorry I won’t be seeing you and Jade today,” she finished. “Happy Thanksgiving, Caitlyn.” She hung up, and dropped the phone back in her coat pocket.
Past the check-in desk was a bar/restaurant, cordoned off from the rest of the lobby by red ropes on stanchions. There was the standard urn of free coffee to the left of the USA Todays, which would be faster, but the prospect of a few more minutes off her feet before getting in the car proved too enticing. She pulled her rollaboard across the lobby.
At the podium, the only waitress working—a heavyset woman in her late forties, with mottled skin and ink-black hair pulled back in a bun—smiled widely in greeting. “Welcome to Lester’s! Just one, sweetie?”
“Just one,” Marissa confirmed.
“Okeydokey.” The waitress took a menu from under the podium.
“Could I get a table away from the . . .” Marisa made a gesture toward the handful of men seated singly at the bar, looking up at television screens showing sports highlights. The uniform was like honey to flies in these places, she’d learned: louche, horny, lonely flies on business trips. What any man found attractive about a knee-length wool skirt and a white button-down she sweated into ten hours a day was another mystery of the male libido, but apparently there was “something sexy about it,” as had been whispered thickly into her ear more than once.
“Oh, I know, honey, believe me, I know,” the waitress answered, rolling her eyes in solidarity. She led Marissa to a table on the opposite side of the restaurant. “You fly in this morning?”
“From Seattle.”
“You based there?”
“No, New York.”
“Oh, New York!” the waitress said brightly. “I bet that’s a lot of fun.”
“Um . . . sometimes.” Marissa had never been much good at small talk, but she detected something sincerely warmhearted in the woman’s manner. “Do they give you overtime today?”
“Don’t get me started, love,” she answered, adding a wink, and she went so far as to pull Marissa’s chair out for her. “Now I’ll get you coffee. You need anything else to start with?”
“Just the coffee. And some water. Please.” The waitress winked again, Marissa wasn’t sure in reference to what, and moved off toward the bar.
Looking again at the men on the stools, Marissa thought maybe she’d been overdoing it with her concern. Uniform or not, she was not the kind of woman men dropped their drinks—or even necessarily turned away from their TV screens—to hit on. The men didn’t look threatening, really; more, they looked sad. Two sat on opposite sides of the bar in nearly identical blue shirts and khaki pants, another in a checkered wool coat and a Red Sox hat, all watching sports by themselves on Thanksgiving morning in a shitty hotel restaurant next to the airport in central Connecticut. There was a sort of resignation in their faces that maybe wasn’t actually there, but was something she put there—because she was by herself in a shitty hotel restaurant next to the airport in central Connecticut, too.
Enough wallowing in self-pity, she commanded herself. She’d chosen to be here, and she could leave whenever she wanted—get on the road and head to a Hallmark-card Thanksgiving in a lavish house on a hill. And as for the pregnancy, she had only herself to blame there, too, because she’d been stupid, and then stupid some more, and when you piled up that much stupidity . . .
She pressed two fingers to her right temple, like she was poised to massage a headache that hadn’t formed yet. As rigorous as she might be in assigning cause and effect, in building back from the test’s yes a daisy chain of her dumb choices, she couldn’t help noting that even allowing for all her dumbness, the pregnancy had depended on a maddeningly improbable series of events. A freak hail storm canceled an evening’s worth of flights and left her stranded for a night in a crash pad in San Antonio; and she managed to forget her birth control pills in the crash pad; and it took her weeks to find time to get to the pharmacy for a refill, and it wasn’t like she and Robbie were having any sex, anyway. And it was a few weeks after all of this as she was gesturing in pantomime to the exits on a 757 on the LaGuardia tarmac that her eyes landed on Brendan, in his army fatigues, in the exit row, smiling at her with a sort of wonder. She’d started taking the pill again by then—but evidently it hadn’t kicked in yet. “Hadn’t kicked in yet”—that was a tough little phrase to hang an entire marriage from, maybe an entire life, too.
Without thinking to, she moved her hands to her stomach. It was important she not think of it as a baby in there. It was just something her body was doing that she didn’t want it to. But no hail storm, or getting to the pharmacy a little sooner, or seeing Brendan a little later, or never seeing him again at all: An inch, a glance, a cell or two one way or another, and it never would have happened. It was all so unlikely, you could call it miraculous. Only it was the opposite of a miracle: It was a catastrophe.
The waitress came over to the table, coffee and cream on her tray. Putting the saucer down without looking at Marissa, she whispered, “You just hang in there, sweetheart.” Then she straightened, said at normal volume, “You going to want some breakfast? We do French toast that’s good, with strawberries and whipped cream. Or the garden omelet. I can tell you watch your figure.”
Marissa blinked up at her. Clearly, if she hoped to disguise her roiling inner turmoil from her in-laws and husband, she was going to have to work a little harder. “Just the coffee, I think,” she answered. “I need to get going soon.”
She poured the cream into the cup; she watched the ivory liquid sink, the black at the lip grow lighter shade by shade, like it was melting, giving way to something. She considered calling Delia. But she already had Delia’s advice: Get it taken care of. Forget it ever happened. Marissa thought of herself as unsentimental, but Delia really was unsentimental. And yet she had a great husband, four children she doted on, four children who adored her. Had she ever done what she was telling Marissa to do? Marissa knew better than to ask. They were friends, but work friends—the sort of friendship that depended on its limits.
She watched as the waitress slid some change off a nearby table into her palm. If she caught the woman’s eye, maybe she’d order a Bloody Mary. Sure, it was before ten in the morning on a Thursday and she was pregnant and had had some beer already. But if fate was determined to make her a Cavano, she might as well act like one. But she’d never believed in fate—or if she had, only to the extent that she’d spent her whole life pushing against its tide with all her strength. When the waitress straightened up, Marissa looked back into her cup of coffee.
When she looked up, her eyes landed on a skinny guy sitting down at a table beside the stanchions. He had deep-set, gullied eyes, bony and stubble-stained cheeks, greasy black hair and a gaunt frame under an overcoat two sizes too large. He kept glancing anxiously around the lobby, as though looking out for someone, but not sure who. The waitress walked over to him, dropped a menu on his table. He picked it up, immediately pushed it aside without opening it, shoved his hands in his pockets, and leaned back in the chair with his legs extended, the way teenagers in the boarding area did when they wanted to tell the world they’d rather be anywhere else. (Well,
who didn’t?)
He must have sensed Marissa watching, or maybe again it was some curlicue of chance (Good? Bad? Who can say?), but he turned his head and looked at her. Marissa didn’t feel the coursing back and forth of raw sexual interest; there was no antagonism, there was no superficial smiling. He just looked at her, and she looked back, as though they were both surprised to see another person there. “Hi,” he mouthed at length.
And after a moment, she mouthed back, “Hi.”
Then he stood up and walked toward her table, a stiff-legged, arm-swinging gait. The silent greeting had been a mistake, obviously. Where could this lead that wouldn’t be awkward, or worse? He wasn’t bad-looking: his thinness sinewy, like a runner’s, the lived-in look around his soft brown eyes eliciting an instinctive sympathy, like this guy had been through it. And what did she need in her life less right now than a good-looking stranger, tough and vulnerable all in one face?
“Cool if I sit down?” he asked, with a note of something like desperation, his hands on the back of the chair across from her.
She hesitated, put her left hand on the table, keeping her wedding ring between them. “Yeah, okay.”
“Thanks,” he answered with relief, and sat down. “I just figured, I don’t know, there’s nobody else in here, and it’s Thanksgiving . . .”
“Yeah, it’s okay.”
“So I take it you’re a fireman!” he began, grinning. The tips of his smile fell when she didn’t smile back. She didn’t want to be unfriendly but she heard variations of this joke five times a day. “Sorry,” he added. “So, like, you’re working on a flight today?”
“I’m flying to Seattle tonight.”
“And you’re just hanging out here until then?”
“No, I’m . . .” She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she finally told him.
But he nodded, as though this made sense. “That’s pretty much where I’m at, too. Fucking holidays, right?”
The waitress appeared, a soda on her tray. “Are you moving tables, sir?” she asked him.
He looked at Marissa. “If it’s all right with you.” He had his palms up, as though promising to do no harm. She moved her ring an inch closer toward him on the table, and nodded. The waitress scowled at Marissa as she set the soda down, then stomped away with her tray under her arm.
The stranger said, “I’m Adam.”
“Marissa.”
He lifted his Diet Coke. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
She raised her cup of coffee. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
His smile rallied a little, he had a sip from the straw in the glass. “So, you live around here?”
“No, New York.”
His face brightened further. “No shit? Where?”
“Astoria.”
“You know, I almost was gonna, today—but anyway, I used to live in Williamsburg, right on the water. But that was a while ago, before you needed a trust fund to live in Williamsburg. Astoria’s still pretty cool, though.”
“It’s easy to get to LaGuardia. That’s really the best part for me. I’m flying most weekends, so . . .”
“So it’s not like you get to seek out the little authentic Syrian bakery or whatever.”
“Exactly.”
“What airline do you work for?”
“VentureJet.”
“Ah, VentureJet!” he said, grinning fully again. “They lost my bag a couple times.”
She smiled now, too. “Do you want to yell at me?”
“If you think it’d help.” She laughed, allowed herself that. “I work at a bank, believe it or not,” he continued, “and we get people coming in all the time, screaming at us because the ATMs won’t give out less than twenty bucks. I mean, I get it that it’s frustrating sometimes, but it’s not like I’m the one programming the ATMs and deciding what denomination of bills to put inside.”
“Sometimes when we’re delayed on the tarmac, passengers will hit the call button just to tell me it’s unacceptable. Passengers love that word, ‘unacceptable.’ It’s like they think if they say it, I’ll run up to the cabin and have the pilot call the tower to make the weather change.”
“When is it cool to push that call button, though? Like, only if someone’s choking?”
“Depends who,” she answered, and now he laughed, his mouth opening to expand the breadth of his smile, his brows lifting over his eyes, the watchfulness that seemed etched with their creases easing a little. Laughing made him look younger. The waitress walked behind Marissa and bumped into the back of her chair, and walked away.
“What’d you do to her?” asked Adam.
She shook her head, watching the waitress’s back. “God knows . . .”
“Y’know what’s weird, though?” he went on. “How on the holidays it’s easier to be around strangers than your own family. That’s why the night before Thanksgiving is always the biggest night in the bars in New York, have you noticed that? Everyone’s relieved they’re not at home.” He took a sip of soda. “Or, I don’t know, they’re depressed because they’re going home. But it works out to the same thing. It’s not as if all your family issues just magically disappear because it’s the third Thursday in November.”
“Fourth.”
“But then you look at a place like this,” he continued, ignoring her correction, gesturing around the restaurant, the lobby. “Yeah, it’s sterile and corporate, and it’s really just a place in between the places people are going. But that’s what’s so great about it! There are no awkward conversations you need to have, you’re not going to disappoint anybody, by, y’know, doing something. We can just sit here and drink our coffee, or soda, or whatever it is. You know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” she answered. “There’re no expectations, no one you have to answer to.”
“Exactly!” he replied, nodding vigorously. “Sure, you wouldn’t want to spend your whole life here, and yeah, the waitress seems to hate you. But at least she doesn’t have a reason for hating you. It’s not personal—it’s the opposite of personal. In here you’re just somebody in a hotel lobby. We might as well be invisible! It’s like . . .” His face became still, as if to demonstrate some quality invisibility had; then his eyes widened, he raised his index finger toward the ceiling. “‘Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You,’” he declared.
“What?”
“Billy Squier.”
“Who?”
“Listen,” he told her, still pointing upward. She heard the song—recognized it, though she had no idea from where. “Christ, I can’t remember the last time I heard this. Do you remember this video on MTV? It was like, all the VJs and the production crew and whoever at a Christmas party, and Billy Squier playing acoustic guitar and lip-synching? God, that seems like a million fucking years ago.”
He seemed to become engrossed in what he could hear of the song, his face fixed in a look of happy attention. He was right, she thought, there was something easier about being with strangers. And she understood better, too, why he’d wanted to sit down with her. He wasn’t seeking what she worried he might be seeking, wasn’t hoping they’d end their chat by heading up in the elevator together. The strangely needful look he’d had on his face when he asked to join her was one she recognized from airport boarding areas, from airport bars, from terminals and shuttles and ticketing lines and the planes themselves—from all the sorts of in-between places he’d described, and where she spent so many of her waking hours. It was a desire not for sex, not even for friendship, but rather for something simpler: mere confirmation that you were not entirely by yourself.
When the song ended, he leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “Okay. So what’s your story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Not, like, your story starting from birth, just what you’re doing here. You’ve got to fly to Seattle tonight, but in the meantime, you’re sitting around drinking coffee? It seems like there’s a story there. Not that you have to tell me or anything,” he added, leaning
forward on his elbows, “but I am pretty curious.”
And here was another benefit of the company of strangers: The conversation didn’t have to be freighted with the seriousness of your life. Your dilemmas, your bad choices, your multipronged regrets could be kept off to the side, out of frame. “Just . . . working up the courage to see my in-laws.”
“You’re married?” he answered, surprised. She held up her hand, flapping the ring he’d been meant to notice. But men never noticed these things—not when you wanted them to, at least. “Huh,” he said, with something between a nod and a shrug. “So your husband’s a pilot?”
“Yeah, he proposed over the PA and everything.”
He laughed. “It must happen!”
“It happens. There are girls who maybe want it to happen when they take the job, but they never last very long. But no, Robbie’s not a pilot, he’s a filmmaker . . .” Before he might pursue this, she added, “We met in college.”
“College sweethearts,” Adam replied, thoughtful. “That’s cute. I mean, it’s pretty smart. I didn’t stick around college long enough to meet anybody serious, but that seems like a good way to do it. Finding somebody who is at least compost mentis enough to get to class and write essays and whatever. Marriage is pretty terrifying, in my opinion, but it’s probably the right thing to do.”
“It’s not for everybody.”
“No, but most of the people I know who truly have their shit together are married. And that’s kind of my priority these days: keeping my shit together.”
The waitress walked past their table, dropped the check without stopping, muttered, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Marissa was giving her a puzzled look when Adam asked, “So? What’s he like?”
“Who?”
“Your husband. Who’s not a pilot.”
“Robbie? He’s—he’s a really nice guy. He’s . . .” She trailed off, glanced back into her cup of coffee—half-gone and lukewarm, but she knew better than to expect a refill. “He’s a really nice guy,” she repeated. She kept her eyes on the cup, not wanting to see whatever reaction Adam might have to this. It was not that she couldn’t think of anything else to say about Robbie; it was rather that everything else that came to mind was so tangled in emotion—guilt or regret or see-saws of gratitude and resentment. Even saying he was nice brought her back to the verge of tears because tepid as the compliment was, it was so central to what she loved about him: his kindness, his patience, his gentleness . . .
Start Without Me Page 4