by Sue Halpern
“Kit!” I shouted. “It’s Sunny. Are you home?” I was just about to say it again when I heard voices, Kit’s and someone else’s, and I was so mortified I would have run out of there if Kit hadn’t come to the top of the stairs and was looking down at me.
“Sunny?” Kit said, as if she wasn’t sure that was my name. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing at work the day before, only now they were filthy and so was she. Seriously, she looked like she’d come down the chimney. “Sunny,” she said again. “What are you doing here?” She didn’t sound angry that I was in her house, only confused, and before I could answer she said, “Are you worried about Rusty? He’s fine. He’s here. He came back with me.”
And then, from the bedroom, I heard Rusty say, “Hi, Sunny,” and I was mortified all over again. “Thank you for worrying about me,” he said, and let out a loud yawn. “That’s really sweet.”
Now I was beyond embarrassed. Not only had I walked in on Kit and Rusty, I had no idea what I was being thanked about. “No problem,” I said.
“Wait down there,” Kit said. “I have to take a shower.”
Rusty must have fallen back to sleep, because he said nothing and wasn’t with Kit when she came down the stairs in clean clothes, with a clean face.
“I’m going to the store to get food for breakfast,” she said, grabbing up her wallet as she walked toward the door. “Are you coming?” she called over her shoulder when I continued to stand there. (I think I was in shock.)
“Let’s see what they’re saying about the fire on the radio,” Kit said, pressing the presets when we got in the car. Apparently, nothing. It was all music.
“We’ll have to wait till the top of the hour,” she said, and sure enough, when the news came on at eleven, the first story was about the eighteen-alarm fire at the Tip-Top Motor Inn outside of Riverton.
“Eighteen-alarm fire!” I said loudly, because this was the first I was hearing about it.
“I know, I know,” Kit said. “I’m pretty sure I counted twenty different fire departments. There were still at least two up there when we left this morning, just in case there was a flareup. Not that there is anything left to burn.”
We listened to the report. One minor injury, three firefighters sidelined when their truck rear-ended a parked car, and the Tip-Top gone. Burned to the ground.
“We stayed there, you know,” I said.
“I remember,” Kit said. And then, more to herself than to me: “At least he didn’t lose his car.”
The big supermarket, the one with the bakery, is next to the mall where Willow works, and I was worried I’d run into her, but Kit pointed out that she’d be working, not shopping for bagels. We got lots of stuff, and then, when we were walking down the toothpaste aisle, she said, “Rusty’s going to need one of these,” and put a toothbrush into our basket, and then a razor, though it took her ten minutes to decide if it should be the kind with four blades or five, a battery or no battery, a rotating handle and on and on. You’d have thought she was buying a car.
After we’d checked out, she said she had an errand to run in the mall, so I waited for her in the car, which was already getting pretty hot. When she came back she had bags from Banana Republic and J.Crew and Jockey, which she tossed in the backseat.
“Clothes,” she said. “For Rusty. He lost everything.” As if, by then, I didn’t know.
* * *
When the winter came, / I’d not a pair of breeches / Nor a shirt to my name.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Kit held up a pair of men’s khaki shorts and wondered what “medium” really meant. It had been years since she shopped for men’s clothes—for Cal’s clothes—and didn’t know if sizes had changed, now that people were “bigger” than they used to be. “All women want to be a size 8, so we call everything a size 8. It makes them feel good about themselves. If our clothes were true to size we wouldn’t sell anything,” she’d read in the style section of the New York Times, in an interview with a famous designer. Were men less deluded? she wondered, measuring the medium against the large and seeing that they were nearly identical. If she bought the large, would Rusty think she thought he was fat? Maybe men liked to be thought of as large. Maybe medium sounded wimpy.
A young man with gelled hair and crisply pressed pants, whose name tag said kenneth c., senior sales associate, interrupted her musing. “Can I help you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I’m looking for some clothes for a friend, but I’m not really sure what size he is.”
“I see,” Kenneth said, “so he’s a friend, but you don’t really know what size he is.”
“Yes,” Kit said. “He lost all his stuff in that fire.”
“Oh,” Kenneth said. “Let me check with my manager,” and was gone. Kit draped the medium shorts over her arm and moved on to the shirts, choosing a cornflower-blue polo, like the one she’d seen Rusty wear at the library, and a dark green T-shirt made of organic cotton.
Kenneth caught up with her in accessories, as she was shopping for a belt.
“Here,” he said, handing her a piece of plastic. “It’s a twenty-five-dollar gift card. Our compliments. We try to help out when we can. Just scratch off the silver strip.” He took the card back and scratched it off with his fingernail. “You’re supposed to use a coin,” he explained, handing the card back to her.
“Thanks,” Kit said. The belt in her hand cost sixty-five dollars. When did belts get so expensive? Cal had two belts, a black and a brown, and now she knew why. It was impossible to choose. She pulled a brown one off the rack and held them up side by side.
“Nice. You never know,” Kenneth said.
“I guess not,” Kit said, taking them both.
At the underwear store, Kit caught sight of her reflection in the window as she compared boxers with boxer briefs and was suddenly self-conscious. She was buying underwear for a man she didn’t know well—not just buying them, but trying to decide which he’d like better. Cal was a boxers guy, though not in the beginning. In the beginning, he wore the same dingy white cotton BVDs he’d had in high school, until Kit threw every one of them in the trash one day and replaced them with something she said was more manly. He didn’t care. Underpants were underpants. Rusty, Kit thought, might care. She could call him to ask, but that would be weird. So she got one of each, and a three-pack of socks, and when she got home put all the bags on the bed—he was just waking up again—and said, “I don’t think the clothes you were wearing last night survived the fire,” even though they were still on his body.
Kit and Sunny laid out breakfast—by now brunch—on the coffee table, and when Rusty finally came down the stairs, he was wearing his new shorts and the green T-shirt and maybe the boxers or maybe the boxer briefs.
“You’re good at this,” he told Kit, twirling around for her and Sunny, modeling his new clothes, and Kit felt— She didn’t know how she felt.
* * *
Sunny/lockup
After brunch, Kit and Rusty started talking about his car, and Rusty made a phone call to the police and got Evelyn’s son Jeffrey on the line, and he said that if Rusty came in to pay the fine, Jeffrey would get the towing company to remove the boot, so that’s what he decided to do. Rusty needed Kit to drive him, and because I was sitting there, they seemed to assume that I was going, too. It did occur to me that Steve might be wondering where I was, but my attitude was “let him worry.” He had me worried, which is why I was at Kit’s in the first place, but because of the fire, I hadn’t had a chance to tell her about it. I should have brought it up when we were in the car, but Kit was going on about the fire, and about Rusty and the motel owners, and there never seemed to be the right moment.
We got to the police station around 2:30. The jail cells were both empty. I know this because while Jeffrey was helping Rusty, Evelyn’s other son, Jack, asked if I wanted a tour of the building, and the tour consisted of showing me the two jail cells in the basement. They
were mirror images of each other, each with four bunk beds and a metal sink-toilet contraption, and that was it. It was humid down there; there were no windows.
“You want me to lock you up so you can see what it feels like?” Jack asked.
I said, “Sure,” and he opened the door, told me to go inside, and, once I was in, pulled it hard, so it closed with an ominous, thunderous bang.
“I’ll be back,” he said, leaving me there and going back upstairs.
“Hey!” I called as his footsteps receded. “Let me out!”
“That’s what they all say,” he said, laughing.
“That’s not funny!” I heard Kit say as she came down the stairs with Jack. I was in the cell for about five minutes, just long enough for Kit to notice that Jack had returned without me, though it felt longer than that.
“We do this all the time, Kit,” he said. “You know, scare the kids straight and all that.” He jangled his keys, pretended the lock was stuck, pulled on the door, tried the key again, and again it didn’t open.
“Oh, come on!” Kit said. “Are you kidding me?”
And then Jack broke out in a big smile and said, “Yes!” and the door opened, and I walked out.
“Well, he’s right,” I said to Kit. “I would not want to spend time in there.”
As we came up the stairs into the main part of the station house, we passed a small office, messy, with one glass wall, and when I looked through it to the other side, I saw a familiar photo, but enlarged to poster-sized, tacked on to the bulletin board. I nudged Kit so she would see it, too.
“What’s that?” I asked Jack, sounding as innocent as I didn’t feel. I knew all too well what that was. It was that grainy old security shot of Angus Parker from back in Pennsylvania—which is to say, that old picture of probably Steve.
“That’s the room where we do our detective work,” Jack said proudly. “No one’s in there now because the boys are helping at that fire investigation.”
“Do they think it was anything but a faulty wire?” Kit said.
“Can’t say,” Jack said. “I guess we’ll find out.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, when it looked like we were going to move on.
“Oh, him,” Jack said. “He’s the guy we think pulled that stunt at Culvert Medical and maybe some other stuff. He’s wanted in Pennsylvania, too, but we’ve got him in our sights.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said proudly. “We may be a small department, but we do good work.”
“So you really think you’ve got him,” Kit said, catching on that she was supposed to egg him on so that he’d tell us what he knew without knowing why it mattered.
“Like I said, we’ve got him in our sights. We’re closing in. Got his fingerprints. Not sure what he’s been doing for the past ten years. Sly fox. Probably nothing good. If people knew he was around here, they’d be scared and upset, so we’re not going public until we’ve caught him.”
“Smart,” Kit said.
So now she knew what I’d ridden my bike over to tell her: Steve was probably the guy who set the animals free at Culvert Medical on July 4th. July 4th, Independence Day. Steve likes a good joke.
* * *
We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all . . .
—Anna Akhmatova
Once he had paid the fine and the boot was removed, Rusty drove up to the Tip-Top, or what was left of it. The motel sign was still there, high above the highway, and when Rusty got to the access road it was no longer blocked. Water continued to trickle down from the ruins, and as he drove he noticed empty soda bottles and coffee cups strewn along the side of the road. The parking lot, so crowded not that long ago and so full of activity, was nearly empty.
An officer from a private security firm, dressed like a policeman and holstering a Maglite, stepped out of his car and walked over to Rusty’s, which was idling opposite what used to be room 7.
“You can’t be here,” he said, drumming on the shaft of his flashlight with his index finger.
“That was my room,” Rusty said, pointing to nothing.
“That’s tough,” the officer said, softening. “I heard that not a thing was left. Not even a paper clip.”
“Yeah,” Rusty said. “You should have been here last night. It was crazy.”
“Something about the old man’s hot plate, right?”
“That’s what they were saying,” Rusty said. “But who knows.”
“Well, they’ll never figure it out now, will they?” he said. “Take a good look—they’re bringing in the dozers tomorrow. In a week, you’ll never know what was up here.”
“They’ll rebuild,” Rusty said, as if he knew.
“Nobody’s told me anything about that,” the guard said.
Before he lost his job, Rusty didn’t give much thought to people who lost their jobs. People got fired, sure, but the job market was lush and they always seemed to land on their feet, so the whole thing seemed like floor exercises: you started at one end of the mat and, after a couple of twists and turns, you stuck your landing at the other, took a bow, and went on. Then he lost his job and was surprised to find that there was nothing cushy underfoot. Not that it mattered. His whole life was up in the air. He could have been a bird—no, an insect.
Losing the apartment in Hoboken was different. It felt like molting. It wasn’t that his skin had become too small to contain his body; it was that he had shrunk and his skin was too big and slipping off his frame. All the accoutrements—the steam shower, the five-figure Swedish mattress, even the double Gaggenau ovens—things he never had any use for, really, and then not at all—mocked him. They were mirrors, reflecting who he had been and who he wasn’t any longer. He hoped that whoever was sleeping in his bed now had better dreams than he ever did.
To go from all that to his room at the Tip-Top should have been hard, but wasn’t. “This is who I am now,” Rusty told himself, drinking bitter coffee he’d made in the ancient two-cup drip machine that sat next to a squat television of the same vintage. If anyone came looking for him, Rusty reasoned, they’d never find him here—and when no one did, he told himself, that was why. But the place grew on him. It was a little run-down, yes, but it was clean. It was a little remote, but it was quiet. But most of all, it was uncomplicated. He liked hearing old Mrs. Patel, in her lilting voice, on the wake-up call every morning. He liked being able to slide down the bed a few inches and turn on the TV with his foot. He liked the way Mr. Patel would tell him on Monday what they would be having for dinner every day that week, and how the aroma would greet him every evening, and how that was a happy thing, even as he grew tired of it. And it was that happy thing that brought every other thing crashing down. Talk about downsizing. He was fully downsized. Everything he owned was in his car. In New York, homeless people hauled their stuff around in shopping carts. “That’s what this is,” Rusty thought, patting the side of the Mercedes with his hand. “A very expensive shopping cart.”
“I must be in shock.” That’s what he wanted to say to Kit and Sunny when he got back to the house. “I must be in shock because I am not panicking even though everything is gone.”
And soon, he’d tell them, he’d be gone, too. He’d thank them for their kindness, Kit especially. He’d thank her for sticking it out during the fire, for taking him in, for feeding him, for buying him new clothes. She knew he had no way to repay her, and she did it anyway. Rusty tried to remember the hours before the fire, when they were sitting at her house, drinking the wine he’d brought. He had been good at angling—angling was what he did for a living (catch and release with women, catch and reel in with clients)—but he no longer had the feel for it. When she asked, he told Kit that he thought yes, maybe, if someone dangled the right lure, he’d go back to his old life, but he wasn’t sure when he said it, and he was less sure now. Income was good, and status was good, and having a business card he could hand out that declared who he was in the world was good. That’s wh
at he was thinking when he answered Kit’s question.
It wasn’t true that you could do whatever you set your mind to do. That was just something people said. But if your mind was not set on doing something, and you had no idea what you wanted to do, you could do anything—anything at all, Rusty told himself—so why panic?
Part VI (The End)
The Marriage Story
Cal strung the Doctor along as much as he could, but eventually the string ran out and we had to move. Cal was upset, I was upset, his supervisors were angry, and our friends in Atlanta were sorry enough, but in that world people came and went all the time. Cal dismantled his lab. (Mice were killed.) I packed up our house and watched the movers load years of our life onto a truck. We had two cars by then, so Cal and I caravanned, he in front, me behind. When he’d signal, I’d signal. When he’d speed up or slow down, I’d speed up or slow down. I know there is a metaphor there, and I knew it then, but the only one I could come up with was synchronized swimmers, which was only partially apt, since it felt like we were drowning.
Cal’s father was an investor in the hospital where Cal would be working, and he did not hide the fact that Cal, with his long list of publications and his reputation at Emory as the up-and-coming neurosurgeon, was the trophy mount the place needed to be competitive. When he made the announcement, he called it a coup for the hospital. It felt like a coup, too—like Cal and I were being held hostage by rogue forces that would determine our fate. The hospital corporation bought a house and handed us the keys, and made a big deal of the signing bonus Cal was getting, as if he were a free agent being courted by a big-time sports franchise. In private Cal was in a rage about having to play in the minors, but in public he was all about how much more autonomy he’d have now that he was freed of the Emory bureaucracy, and how much more free time he’d have without his lab obligations. It was difficult to tell which was the real Cal—the thwarted, derisive one or the humble, solicitous one—and as disconcerting as this was to me, it must have been more so to Cal, who turned out to be very good at telling people what they wanted to hear. The Doctor also put on a good show, trotting out his brilliant son at grand rounds, where Cal gave a talk on the innovative research he was no longer going to be able to do. That was the irony of it, the dead elephant in the room. Everyone clapped. Even me.