Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “Are we?”

  “Jeeeeesus,” he said, “you seriously want to spend this whole day fighting? Is that honestly what you want?”

  She often found herself checkmated this way: forced to either swallow her anger or accept responsibility for the discord. There was a shard of rubber ahead in the road; she changed lanes to avoid it, and conceded. “No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  “Look, you’re gonna get here, we’re gonna crush some turkey and sweet potatoes, we’re gonna drink some beers, we’re gonna watch a movie on Netflix, and we’ll call it a holiday. I mean, does that sound so bad?”

  It didn’t; it sounded like all she wanted in the world. It sounded so great, she almost wanted to start crying again. “Let’s do that,” she said, and couldn’t help adding, “Please, let’s do that.” Delia was right; Delia was always right. Marissa would get it taken care of, and he would never have to know.

  “I got some good news, too,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “Freelance gig.” Robbie, when he made money, made it on freelance video editing jobs. The income was maddeningly (to her, anyway) unpredictable, but it always seemed to come just when they really needed it.

  “How much, do you think?”

  “Five g’s.”

  Thank God, she thought. “That’s great. That’s really, really great.”

  “Yeah, y’know, so—like we said, we’re good.”

  “I love you, Robbie.”

  “I love you, too. Drive safe.” And they got off the phone.

  She dropped the phone in the cup holder. Adam was leaning forward, his arms folded across his chest, his lips packed into his mouth, doing a terrible job of pretending to have nothing to say. “What?” He shook his head. “What?” she demanded.

  He held up his palms, his blameless gesture. “All I want to know is, what were you doing the day they were giving out mothers-in-law? I mean, holy shit!”

  She bit the inside of her cheek. “So you heard all that . . .”

  “I mean, Roz! Wow. Yikes. Roz. That is one bad trip of a mother-in-law.”

  “I’m glad it’s so hilarious to you, but if . . .” She was too tired to be indignant; anyway, she agreed with him. “You should’ve heard the toast she gave at my wedding. The joke was that if half the family was disappointed I wasn’t black, the other half was disappointed I wasn’t Jewish, so at least it gave them all something to talk about.”

  He laughed, maybe a little too hard. “Seriously, if Roz was my mother-in-law, I’d have fucked around on Robbie, too!”

  Silence, deep enough that she could hear each rotation of the tires over the ruts in the lane. “Sorry,” Adam finally said.

  “I’m sick of that word.”

  “I wasn’t the one who . . .” He was at least smart enough to shut himself up. She stared straight ahead. A few crimson leaves clung to the branches of trees climbing the embankment by the highway. Adam began humming, low and indistinct. She shot him a glance and he stopped.

  Scalloped gray clouds filled the sky. In the nearer distance, streaks of blue curled around them, like ribbons. They passed bus depots, self-storage units, billboards advertising beer, fast food, Indian casinos. Every two miles an exit sign appeared, reflective white on noble green, announcing towns in pairs: Longmeadow, Hampden; Agawam, Southwick; Granville, Westfield.

  After a while, Adam unbuckled his seat belt, started working his coat off his shoulders. After he’d tossed it into the back, he pulled off the sweatshirt he was wearing. “It’s hot as shit in here, you might as well let me open the window and smoke,” he muttered, but she ignored him. He wore a threadbare cotton T-shirt, the letters LFTR PLLR sagging in folds over his thin chest. There were tattoos on his forearms: on the right a sort of caricatured portrait of a bearded black man; on the left, thickly clustered musical notes, climbing up and down a staff. He spotted her looking, put the sweatshirt back on.

  “What’s your T-shirt?” she asked him.

  “I dunno,” he said. “A band. Maybe I was on a bill with them or something, I have about a million T-shirts.” He didn’t speak for another mile, then declared, “It’s not like cheating makes you some kind of evil bitch.”

  “Thanks.” Marissa got over on the left, passing a semi. When she pulled back over on the right, she asked, “What makes you so sure, anyway?”

  His legs were extended as far as possible underneath the dash, hands shoved in his jeans pockets—a pose much like the one in which she’d first seen him in the restaurant. “I don’t know, you said you weren’t happy about being pregnant, it doesn’t take an FBI profiler or something . . .” He added under his breath, “It isn’t my fault I was right.”

  “You ever done it?” she asked him. The car bumped in and out of a pothole she couldn’t avoid, making a dull, two-part clunk.

  “Fucked around? Yeah, sure. I’m not proud of it, but everybody does it, sooner or later.”

  “Someone ever done it to you?”

  “Probably. I mean, yeah, of course.”

  “That girl Johanna?”

  She looked at him: his face puzzled, wounded, angry. “Sorry,” she said. It had been a bitter burst of temper she hadn’t seen coming.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, crossing a leg over his knee, folding his arms across his chest. “Now we’re even.”

  The stretch of highway was bordered by panels of tall wooden boards, a muted sea-green color, tree branches stretching over from the opposite side. “So why’d you do it?”

  “I dunno,” he answered, “different reasons.” He paused. “Well, no, actually, pretty much the same reason: I was wasted. Plus, there’s the whole rock ’n’ roll thing, you tell yourself fucking around is part of the life, y’know? And you can get used to lying. But for the record, I never really cheated on Johanna, except when I was in a blackout.” He seemed to take a moment to consider this. “I get that that’s a fucked excuse. But at least I can acknowledge it, right?”

  She took her eyes from the windshield long enough to give him a careful look: the dark folds around his eyes, the pitch of his cheekbones, the grooves by his mouth and up his forehead to his hairline. It was a prematurely aged face. And then it all clicked, an unexpected alignment of facts so tidy, she figured she had to have known all along: the Diet Coke, the music career that ended in shambles, the odd bursts of earnestness, the unaccustomed way he performed the simplest physical acts—sitting in a car, walking to a chair—like he was just getting used to them. He was a recovering alcoholic: sober at the moment, but working every second to remain so. It was all just as she remembered from the AA meetings she’d accompany her mother to, during the odd week every other year when Mona announced she was going to clean up—the meetings Marissa and Caitlyn would beg her on their knees to return to when those weeks were over. Marissa had a panicked instinct to pull into the breakdown lane and kick him out of the car, like she’d recognized him from a serial rapist Wanted poster. But he was trying. He deserved credit for that.

  “What?” he said, noticing her look.

  She turned back to the road. “I just feel bad about bringing up your ex. I was being a bitch.”

  “No, it was my fault, I shouldn’t have brought up, y’know, how you, on your . . .”

  “It’s fine,” she cut him off, before the apology collapsed on him.

  “Anyway, me and Johanna, that was a long time ago. Troubled water under the bridge, like they say.”

  “Do you two still talk?”

  “Nah. After we broke up, or Kiss and Kill broke up, whichever happened first officially, she moved home to Michigan, and we didn’t talk again.” He drummed the glass of the passenger-side window with his knuckles. “Everyone said it was a good idea that we just . . .” He made a slicing motion. “By the time we split up, she was—she was having problems. She had, um . . .”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “She’d hear things, in faucets, or in sprinklers, like voices and shit, talking to her,
singing to her. She stopped showering for like, weeks at a time. It was such a sad—I mean, Johanna was the most beautiful woman, it was pretty heartbreaking, to tell you the truth.”

  Marissa had a helpless, guilty feeling, having brought them to this topic. She asked hopefully, “Is she doing better now?”

  “Fuck, I can’t remember the last time I talked to her dad! So, she went into a . . .” He swallowed. “She was in a facility, I guess you’d say. But then she got out, and the last time I talked to her dad she was doing a lot better.”

  “We don’t have to talk about this.”

  Adam shrugged. “Why not? Like I said, water under the bridge!” A moment later, he repeated, in an uneasy way, “Water under the bridge.”

  Marissa didn’t answer, let the conversation fade away, the medians they passed covered with frozen snow—shoots of grass that looked black the only thing poking through.

  The regular series of highway signs—the exits, the black-on-yellow merge arrows, the silhouetted deer cautions, the brown-and-white points of interest—was interrupted by an orange placard declaring “Road Work Ahead.” Cones from the shoulder narrowed the three lanes into one—though if there was work being done on the closed-off sections of highway, Marissa couldn’t tell. She came up behind a minivan with a metal Jesus fish affixed to the trunk, and as she got nearer saw the purple bumper sticker reading “Abortion Is Murder.”

  “Come fucking on,” she muttered, slowing down behind the minivan to forty, thirty.

  “So why’d you cheat on Robbie?” Adam asked cheerfully and out of nowhere. Marissa kept her gaze on the bumper sticker, like she might be able to stare it out of existence. Why couldn’t she have gotten stuck behind some aging hippie’s camper, adorned with harmless appeals for coexistence, the ecosystem, world peace? The real wonder was Adam’s question, coming just as they’d pulled up behind that bumper sticker—as though his gift for saying the wrong thing bordered on the telepathic. “I was wasted,” she told him.

  He replied, “Fair enough.”

  The cones arced back across the lanes toward the guardrail, as if in retreat, and immediately Marissa passed the minivan, looking over to see a backseat crammed with kids staring up at seat-mounted video screens, and a middle-aged, copper-haired woman in sunglasses at the wheel, moving her lips silently, like she was singing along to something. You never knew with people, like Adam had said—whose bumper sticker would be like a long slow twist of your neck, or whose neck you might be twisting.

  “I wasn’t wasted,” she admitted. Why not tell him the truth? Adam was a stranger; she’d never see him again. He’d never meet Robbie or Brendan or anybody she knew. “I wasn’t wasted, I was . . .” Did she even know the truth, though? Had she even explained it to herself?

  The highway passed under a bridge—green metal, rusted bolts. “You don’t even have to explain, I get it,” Adam informed her. “Being a flight attendant is probably just like being on the road—playing shows, I mean. You’re constantly meeting new people, you’re away from home, you’ve got a hotel room, and you gotta do something to unwind, so why not pick up a—”

  “Would you mind just shutting up?” she asked.

  “Sure, no problem,” he said.

  The stereotype of the life of a flight attendant being one giant spring break annoyed her to no end—as if all they did was pick up passengers and screw them in the plane bathrooms. Had the people who thought that ever been in an airplane bathroom? “Brendan was my high school boyfriend. It wasn’t Stewardesses Gone Wild or something. We had history.”

  He’d shifted in his seat again. In the corner of her eye, she could see that he’d swiveled his torso to face her, his face patient, attentive. You learned to do a lot of listening in AA.

  And again, why not? Delia hadn’t wanted to hear any of the details—had implied she found the tawdry details offensive. Marissa didn’t talk much with her little sister, she didn’t talk to her mother at all. This might be her last chance to tell anyone. There was still some resistance in her, though, as if she hoped that never speaking about what she’d done might allow the events to lose their hold as memory, lose their place in reality altogether, dissolve into something like a daydream. But the proof of what’d happened was literally growing inside her by the minute. And if she were going to have an abortion (even the mental formulation of those words sent a tremble down her spine; her CCD teachers would be proud) shouldn’t she, at least once, give an accounting of why she needed to? So as they drove through Springfield, and then north, roughly following the upstream course of the Connecticut River, toward Exit 19 for Roxwood, Marissa told him her whole foolish story.

  “We moved around a lot when I was a kid. By the time I was sixteen, my mom had skipped out on the rent in practically every neighborhood in the greater Boston area. And one spring we landed in a shithole one bedroom with no hot water in Needham, which is this suburb outside of the city. But it was a really nice little town, with a really good high school, and that’s where I met Brendan.

  “He was the best player on the baseball team, I was the best player on the lacrosse team. So in the beginning, it just made sense. It was high school. And he was also really Catholic, so he was okay with me not wanting to have sex. Some of that was me being a Catholic. But more of it was that I’d made up my mind that I was getting out of Boston. And you didn’t need a sociology degree to figure out why all the girls in the neighborhoods I got dragged through growing up were stuck in those neighborhoods. Every waitress and hairdresser and manicurist from Swampscott to Mattapan had a baby or two at home. But I was going to go to college. And that meant I needed a scholarship. And they don’t give lacrosse scholarships to girls who are six months pregnant.

  “Brendan’s family was the most normal one I’d ever been around. They were all just . . . really good people. His parents were divorced, but his dad lived around the corner, and he even got along with Brendan’s stepdad. And they were all cops. Brendan’s dad was a cop, his older brothers were cops. All Brendan wanted to do was be a cop, and live in Needham, and go to Red Sox games and barbecue with his brothers.

  “He wasn’t dumb. He knew I had reasons for never bringing him around my mom. He knew that when I said I was leaving Boston the first chance I got, I meant it. So I guess there was something temporary about the whole relationship, right from the start. But it was high school, you don’t think about it. And Brendan was good to me. He was nice to me. Nobody needs to shed a tear for me, but growing up the way I did, that meant a lot. He’d take me to the movies, he’d take me fishing with his brothers. We’d make out in his stepdad’s pickup, listening to Bruce Springsteen CDs. I know it’s so stupid and cliché, but I swear to God there was something romantic about it. Just being normal.

  “Anyway, that summer, my mom started a kitchen fire in the place in Needham, and we got evicted. We landed with all our stuff at a Days Inn up the highway. A girl from my high school worked there, it would have been humiliating if it hadn’t happened to me fifty times before. My mom eventually found us a place in Waltham, somebody always owed a favor to somebody who owed her a favor—the less I knew about it the better, she said, and she was right. Waltham’s an hour by bus from Needham. I guess my mom figured that fall I’d just start going to school in Waltham, if she thought about it at all. But Brendan’s family invited me to live with them. My mom went apeshit, but I was eighteen by then, there was nothing she could do.

  “Brendan slept upstairs, I slept in the little room off the kitchen his mother had used as a sewing room. Like I said, they were just good people. His stepdad even drove me for my recruiting trips. I think they thought I’d end up marrying Brendan, when it came down to it, no matter what I said.

  “But you can guess how this story ends. I got offered a full ride to play lacrosse at Syracuse, and I took it. Brendan started going to UMass Dartmouth. We tried long distance for a while, but that never works for anybody, and it didn’t help that I’d never go down to see him. In the end, w
e broke up. It was sad, but we weren’t even twenty yet. You get over it. A few years ago, I saw on Facebook he got engaged. I think I even Liked the announcement. He Liked my wedding photos when I married Robbie. I guess that counts as—I don’t know, like you said, water under the bridge. You wish someone well, even if you never plan to see them again.

  “But I did see Brendan again. On a flight I was working last month. He was in his army uniform, and I’m in my VentureJet uniform. It was like we ran into each other at a costume party, or, I don’t know, we caught each other pretending to be other people. Older people. He was flying to Norfolk on his way to an army base in Germany. And I had an overnight in Norfolk, so . . . We had dinner. It should have been awkward, right? It should have felt so different from when we were kids. Except it didn’t. He was still so nice to me, like he thought being nice to me was important. When he got out of the army, he was going to move back to Needham, become a cop, and he and his wife were going to start a family. And I’m living in New York City and the only time I set foot in Boston is when a flight I’m working lands in Logan. ‘It all worked out for you,’ he said. And it’d all worked out for him, too.

  “Only how can you not wonder? All the other ways it could have worked out. If I’d been that wife in Needham. Going to those barbecues, having those kids. It could’ve been me. Only I had to run away from my mother. I think I only wanted, for just one night—some other life, a simpler life, just to be free to be with Brendan. ‘I know the real you,’ he told me when he was taking my clothes off. ‘I wish I did,’ I remember thinking.

  “And I think we were both just curious about having sex with each other, since we’d never done it when we could’ve. Like we deserved it, after we waited all that time. God, it’s so ironic he got me pregnant, though, isn’t it? Like somehow I knew it would happen, like it would happen no matter what I did. What’s the word for that, when the world plays a trick like that on you?”

  “Bruce Springsteen, huh?” Adam said at length, breaking the silence. She looked over at him. “‘I’m on Fire?’ ‘Prove It All Night?’ I just can’t picture making out to Bruce Springsteen in high school. You didn’t have Radiohead in Boston?”