The Daylight Marriage

by Heidi Pitlor

  Chapter 33

  Lovell locked up the house and stepped outside. The March air was breezy but warm and he tilted his face to the sky for a moment and soaked in the sunlight. Across the street, a woman he didn’t recognize held a baby to her shoulder and buried her face against its head. She lifted her eyes and looked over at Lovell once, then again. He tried not to hide his face. He managed to actually wave to her.

  He wandered next door to find Janine and the neighbors in their driveway. Stephen and Janine leaned side by side against the bumper of a U-Haul truck and snapped bottle caps into an icy puddle. The men would leave the next day, and within a couple of weeks, apparently, another family would move into their house. Janine kept her eyes on the puddle. Last week, she had gone to get her tongue pierced, but she had gotten too nervous and backed out in the end. A few days ago, she had dyed her hair, the little that remained, a pale purple. In some strange way, it suited her.

  Jeff appeared in a black T-shirt and jeans. “Hey there,” he said to Lovell, giving him a warm slap on the back. Stephen moved next to his partner and set his head on his shoulder. Here were two men in love, two people who unquestionably belonged together.

  “You’ll come meet Hannah?” Jeff asked Lovell.

  He blinked.

  “Janine didn’t tell you? The name was her idea.”

  “It’s a girl?” Lovell managed.

  “It is. She—will be.”

  Janine said, “And Rose will be the middle name.”

  “Hannah Rose,” Lovell said, glancing over at her. “Hannah Rose,” he said again. He was grateful that the men had given Janine at least this. “Of course we’ll come meet her.”

  Ethan wandered over and began to kick his soccer ball toward them. Lovell stopped the ball with his foot and reached down for it. He went to Janine and held her to his side before she pulled away. Ethan ran toward him and grabbed the ball from his hands.

  Janine began to dance from side to side, and said to Jeff, “You promised you’d run through ‘Humoresque’ and ‘The Swan’ with me before you left.”

  All this time, Lovell had forgotten that Jeff was a cellist.

  Stephen said, “You want to come hear them play at our house? It’s empty, but we could sit on the floor.”

  Lovell looked at Janine, who only shrugged. “You go. Ethan and I will catch up with you later. Good luck with everything, guys.” He shook their hands and said good-bye.

  He turned toward his son, and the two kicked the soccer ball back and forth, back and forth, as they made their way in the newly spring morning across the gulley between the houses, across his patchy front lawn, and forward to their home.

  LOVELL POURED DETERGENT into the machine in the basement, let the lid drop with a bang, and turned the knob. He listened while the machine filled with water and began to churn. It was late on the second night of April, nearly midnight, but he had awoken just now, remembering that Janine had a concert the next day. Her black skirt and white blouse had been sitting in the laundry basket in the basement for a week.

  He would have to wait around until the washer cycle finished in order to dry the clothes in time for tomorrow morning. He paced the basement and considered getting his computer and doing some work. But he decided not to, decided instead to stay down here and see if he could find the box that he had tried but failed to find before, the cardboard box that contained the heavy glass tea set and hand-stitched djellaba that Hannah had bought him. He looked everywhere he could think but still could not locate it.

  He stood in this place beneath his house. He was here still. The kids were too. Without those objects, that evidence, even without any remaining kindness or comfort or even love, a history would remain.

  Their plane had landed at Carthage International, and they had taken a cab to their hotel in Tunis, where they collapsed, exhausted after the wedding and the flight, and slept for hours. When Lovell woke, Hannah was gone. He checked the bathroom and the front lobby, but could not find her. He went back to their room to take a shower, and when he came out, she sat on the bed with several bags of candies that she had bought. “Look, I found this sesame candy, halwa chamia. I got some wafers, some candied dates, and these candied chilies.”

  “You went for a walk without me?” he asked, rubbing the towel through his hair.

  “I couldn’t just sit here and watch you sleep anymore.”

  “I thought you were sleeping too.”

  She shrugged. “I was, for a little while.”

  They went back out together and wandered around the souks for a while. They stopped at a small café and had chickpea soup and octopus with harissa and couscous that had been made with orange-blossom water, and Lovell began to get his energy back. They made love that evening, and they lay in bed afterward, feeding each other candied dates, and admitted to each other being in awe of the fact that they had gotten married and were now on their honeymoon.

  The next morning she shook him awake. Something was wrong. “I feel awful,” she said. “Like I swallowed a knife or something.”

  She vomited into the hole in the ground that served as the toilet in their bathroom. He stood behind her, holding her hair back. They wondered whether she had food poisoning. They had been warned not to drink tap water here and had taken the precaution so far of drinking only bottled water, but what about the food? What if some of it had been cooked in tainted water? He thought of the couscous and that orange-blossom water.

  Lovell went down to the lobby to ask the location of the nearest pharmacy, but no one was at the front desk. When he returned to the room, he found Hannah on the floor in the bathroom, again vomiting into that filthy hole. He rubbed her back and kissed her head. And she continued to vomit until she passed out.

  He splashed water on her face, paced the room, and went down to the lobby again, and again it was empty. Finally she came to and stumbled back to the bed. The next few hours continued on like this until Lovell said, “Come on, come on,” and cleaned her up and led her downstairs. He guided her across the street to another hotel and asked the concierge about the nearest hospital. The man told him that an ambulance could take all day, given the traffic in the city. He tried to give Lovell directions to walk there, but his English was only fair and the map in Arabic that he handed over was little help.

  Still, Lovell slung one of Hannah’s arms over his shoulder and set off, doing his best to get them headed in the right direction at least. When they passed through the souks, hands grabbed at them. Something slid inside his pocket, and a moment later his wallet was gone. He turned to see who or what had just made off with it, but the crowds were too dense. He pushed his way forward, on past the other souks, and set Hannah down across the sidewalk. She said, “Lovell?” and she looked up at him, maybe afraid for her life.

  He said, “I’ve got you. I’ve got this,” although he was well aware that by now he did not. He lifted her again and carried her to a small restaurant nearby, where someone knew someone else whose cousin was a doctor. “But I have no money,” Lovell admitted, and the someone soon disappeared.

  At this point, Hannah was draped over a table, her skin white.

  Lovell rushed over to the host of the restaurant and told him, “You need to find me a doctor.”

  The man went to talk to someone else who left and returned with an old man, supposedly a doctor, wearing a white T-shirt and old khakis. He ushered them toward his small car a few blocks away and drove them through the congested city, past the buildings and mosques, over a long bridge, and eventually toward smaller towns and finally past a squat village along a dusty road and into a driveway that led to a tiny stone structure.

  He allowed Hannah to rest on a cot that he set up in his cramped basement. He told them he was going out to get medicine and would be back as soon as he could. He gave them a bottle of water and told them that the sounds coming from upstairs, the singing that “sounds like a sick bull”? “That is my wife and she rarely stops. I can do nothing to stop it,” he sa
id as he left.

  Hannah lay there, looking over at Lovell, blinking fast. “What is going on?” she said.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” She closed her eyes. The woman continued to sing in Arabic upstairs. “Am I going to be OK?”

  He reached over to touch her forehead. The cot was small, but he edged his way onto the mattress beside her. The basement was dark and smelled awful, like sewage and mold. The woman upstairs sang louder. A truck thundered by outside.

  “I am going to die on our honeymoon,” she said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I never should have married you,” she said, laughing and coughing at the same time.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck.” She could hardly sustain a smile.

  “Come here,” he said, sitting up now. “Come on. Give me your head,” he said, and he moved toward the top of the cot. He slid his hands beneath her head. He bent down and kissed her forehead. He kept his lips there against her damp skin. “We got married,” he whispered.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I’ve got it. Don’t be scared.”

  “What if he doesn’t come back?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “What if I get sicker?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  She ran her tongue over her cracked lips. “What if he locked us down here?”

  Lovell rose and walked up the stairs to check the door, relieved when the knob turned and the door opened.

  “You’re the only one that I have right now,” she said when he came back.

  He nodded.

  She looked over at him with something like amazement. “We got married, Love.”

  “You’re my wife now.”

  “And you’re my husband. My husband.”

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to those whose helped me in writing this book: Chris Castellani, Carolyn Cooke, Bret Anthony Johnston, Michael Lowenthal, Ladette Randolph, Jane Roper, Anna Solomon. For assistance with research, thanks to David Linsky and Kate MacDougall. To my team at Algonquin: Emma Boyer, Brunson Hoole, Rachel Careau, Lauren Moseley, Craig Popelars, Elisabeth Scharlatt, and Ina Stern. Thank you to Kathy Pories, talented editor whose keen vision and guidance helped transform this book into what it was meant to be; to Bill Clegg, longtime and invaluable friend, reader, advocate, therapist. Thank you to my sister, Margot Geffen, warm and safe haven. Thank you to my daughter, Amelia, intuition and kindness; to my son, Milo, heart and curiosity; and finally and most importantly to my husband, Neil, superhuman patience and support and unfailing optimism.

  HEIDI PITLOR is the author of The Birthdays, about which Fred Leebron wrote, “Undeniably gratifying . . . Subtly riveting . . . This isn’t just a terrific family novel; it’s a terrific novel through and through.” Pitlor was formerly a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin and is the series editor for The Best American Short Stories. She lives with her husband and their twins outside of Boston. Her website is pitlor.etherweave.com. (Author photo by Aynsley Floyd.)

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  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

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  © 2015 by Heidi Pitlor.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-492-1