by Dan Deweese
CATHERINE AND I REQUIRED only ten minutes to unfold and set up all one hundred and fifty of those chairs. It turned out there was no math problem at all—Catherine suggested we decide where we wanted the first row, put ten chairs on each side of the walkway, do that for each following row, and then adjust the last rows however we wanted. The whole issue was solved painlessly, in practice, and when we were finished and retreated again to the shade to admire our work—the straight and even rows, the clean walkway down the middle—Catherine turned and, in a tone that implied nothing more than idle curiosity, said, “So what did you and Miranda talk about?”
I studied the granite columns and limestone façades of the university buildings, but the differences between what Miranda and I had talked about and what I had only thought about didn’t immediately resolve themselves. “She mentioned control,” I said. “And she asked about her mother and me—about our marriage.”
“Do you think she’s having cold feet?”
“I thought that just meant feeling nervous. Not disappearing entirely.”
“She hasn’t disappeared—you just saw her. I felt like running away on my wedding day. It’s normal.”
How she felt she could get away with relaying this news in a calm, reassuring tone was beyond me. “What are you talking about?” I said. “When were you married?”
“When I was nineteen,” she said. “We were kids. It was stupid. He was my high school boyfriend and we thought we were in love.”
She spoke as if summarizing the plot of a bad movie—as if the marriage had been nothing more than a couple hours’ annoyance. “I’ve worked with you for ten years,” I said. “I went through a divorce while you were working with me. And it’s only now you tell me you’re divorced, too?”
“Mine was hardly a real marriage. Or I don’t count it, at least. It only lasted five months.”
“Very efficient. And no one stopped you beforehand?”
“I didn’t let anyone. I was nineteen and I knew everything. Or I did until the day of the wedding, when I suddenly realized I wanted to run in the opposite direction. But everything was already planned by then. And I was the one who’d planned it.”
She looked at me as if watching me puzzle my way through the strategies of a game she knew better than I. “So what am I supposed to do?” I said.
“Well, if I ever tell you I ran into someone named Simon Tolliver and we’re going to go camping together, don’t let me go.”
“I’m talking about Miranda.”
“I know,” she said. “But I don’t know about Miranda. Did something happen last night?”
Did it? I’d made a speech I couldn’t remember, after which Miranda had told me, “It’s okay. Everything is fine.” I had tried to reassure Sandra about the weather, and she had teased me about it. One of the bridesmaid’s mothers hit on me—or didn’t. I wasn’t sure. Then I went home.
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I’m supposed to see Sandra in a few minutes to check the reception site. Maybe I’ll ask her. Again.”
“That’s where you’re going next?” Catherine said, as if my plans were of significance.
“Yes. Why?”
“My conversation with the security people was so short because they wanted to talk to us after they’ve had a chance to look at the videotape and the photos. They’re going to be unhappy if you don’t show up.”
“So I won’t expect a birthday gift from them.”
“I mean they might be really unhappy. They said they want to talk to both of us, because we have the most access to systems and approvals.” Then, with the slightly widened eyes of someone alluding to something, she said, “And they always check staff accounts to see if there’s anything unusual. They’re probably looking at your accounts right now.”
“There is nothing wrong with my accounts.”
“I know. But they’re going to go through all recent account activity.” She enunciated the last four words as if naming an obscure disease or syndrome. I knew what she was getting at. Why didn’t she just say it?
“You’re saying they’ll see I have no savings. And I’ve maxed out my line of credit.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not unusual. Lines of credit have maximums to indicate the amount of money you are allowed to borrow.”
“But they’re going to be looking for things,” she said. “And they’ll consider that a red flag. All I’m saying is they want to talk to you, and after seeing those details, they’re really going to want to talk to you.”
Anyone looking for aberrations in my deposits or withdrawals, for large purchases, or for any financial details that would indicate a possible motive for stealing would probably see exactly what they were looking for when scanning my accounts. The home equity loan I had taken out was for twenty-five thousand dollars—I had deposited the money in my checking account and used it to cover every expense related to the wedding. But bank security could go back further than that. They could look at every financial transaction I’d made for the last decade, if they wanted. They could watch me pay thousands in lawyer fees while Sandra and I got divorced, could watch most of my remaining assets disappear when I purchased my townhouse—at what struck me as a ridiculously high price, though my Realtor assured me it was normal for the market, and that the value would only go up—and could watch me dispense with my remaining savings and then go into debt to cover the last two years of Miranda’s college tuition. I had reduced, or, as I liked to think of it, simplified my lifestyle. But next had come the wedding, and anyone poking into my financial history would see it had all combined to flatten me. And my colleague at the managers’ meeting who had joked that just about every penny the bank ever paid him, he had given right back? He’d been with the bank twenty years, and was talking about his purchase of a big new house. I’d been with the bank twenty-seven years, and what I had to show for it on the day of my daughter’s wedding was no savings, a checking account I often checked the balance of before writing a check, the equity loan I was going to need to start paying on, and a mortgage on which I’d probably gone upside down. And now Catherine was saying I should go explain this to bank security—to total strangers who knew nothing about me at all, and cared even less.
“How many times are you going to make me angry today?” I asked her. “I thought you didn’t like this feeling.”
“I’m not the person you should be angry at,” she said. “I’m just telling you I told them you’d be by soon.”
“Then you’ll be wrong about that. Because I have things I have to do, and if they’re going to play detective by looking through my finances, then they can also play detective by tracking me down physically. Or you can just tell them where I am, if you want to.”
“I feel like you’re putting me in a weird position between you and the bank, as punishment for something I didn’t even do. Can you at least call and tell them when you will stop by? I know it’s awkward that I know about your finances, but I can’t help that. Transactions show up on my reports. It’s my job to look at them.”
“I understand,” I said. “That’s fine. I’ll call them. But not now.” Seething, I started across the grass in the direction of my car. But something else occurred to me, and I had to turn and walk back. “Even if I find something out, how am I going to know if Miranda disappearing from the restaurant is the sign of a real problem, or if it’s just jitters?” I said.
“You won’t,” Catherine said. “Because even when you are in over your head, you always think you can swim. I didn’t know I was in trouble with the marriage I had until I was really in trouble. And I can’t see how I would have known before.”
“All right, then.” I turned and headed across the grass again. And that time, I did not turn back.
THERE WAS NO BROKEN water, no alert in the night, and no panicked drive: Sandra and I simply awoke to the buzz of the alarm clock, ate our breakfast, and carried our bags to the car. There was nothing but wind that morning: trees bent and spr
ang and bent again, leaves tumbled by, and plastic garbage cans lay on their sides in the street. I drove a blue Ford station wagon purchased for the occasion and, unused to its length, pulled too far into a parking spot in the hospital’s concrete parking structure—the car’s front end hit the cement wall and we were jolted forward with a bang. Sandra shouted as if I had struck her personally. “Sorry,” I said. “Here we are.”
Obscure machines waited silently in the corners of the fourth-floor room we were shown to, where Sandra changed into a gown, climbed onto the mattress, and looked up at the wall-mounted television, whose dark screen reflected back a fish-eye image of the bed, herself, the chair, and me standing to the side, hands in pockets. The room’s window offered a view of three buildings under construction across the street—their iron skeletons huddled beneath tarps that bulged and flapped in the wind, and some were already torn to tatters.
A nurse came in and, after some preparatory drama, inserted an IV into Sandra’s arm, and pressed a button on a small black box attached to the IV stand. The box sighed, and its red light began to blink. It was dispensing the drug that would induce labor, the nurse said. After fitting an elastic strap around Sandra’s belly, she flipped the switch of another machine, and the room filled with the sound of a galloping horse: it was the baby’s pulse, rendered hooflike in the machine’s cheap speakers. The nurse left, and afterward, whenever Sandra or the baby shifted, the pulse would distort into the sound of a grunting voice or the bellow of a frustrated beast, before shifting back again to galloping. Sandra expressed reservations about the name we had chosen, claiming I had chosen the name and then talked her into it. I calmly disagreed. She questioned the spelling of the name, and I reassured her the spelling was standard. Outside, the wind continued, buffeting a flock of a dozen small white birds as they flew past the buildings in unified darting swoops and vertiginous drops. Sandra wondered aloud how they managed to fly in the wind. When I told her I didn’t know, that it seemed impossible, she bounced her leg and smiled. “I’m feeling something,” she said.
The anesthesiologist—a grim, chubby man with pink cheeks—entered and launched into a businesslike preamble regarding what he would be doing, the technically possible but extremely unlikely risks, and so forth, and then rolled Sandra onto her side and inserted a huge needle into her back. I looked out the window, watching the tarps furl and snap, and when I looked back, the man was feeding a quivering filament through a tube that entered Sandra’s back where the needle had been. The filament went in and in and in, the man taped everything down, rolled Sandra faceup, and gathered his tools and scrap lengths of filament into his bag, the same as any tradesman after a job. He told us it would take effect shortly, and walked out the door. When I looked back to Sandra, her expression had gone blank. She was submitting to forces larger than herself, it seemed. “Now,” she said with a flat, strained little laugh, “I feel it again now.” She bounced her leg on the mattress while beyond the window, we watched a windborne leaf levitate slowly upward and out of sight.
Sandra’s obstetrician, a handsome young man who wore a white shirt and red paisley tie beneath his green scrubs, arrived and talked about how exciting it all was. He had Sandra raise her knees and, placing a sheet across them, bent to examine her beneath the little tent. They’d scheduled a tentative order to the day’s births, he said—like airplanes lined up for takeoff. He remarked on my calmness, and instead of explaining that I was silent, not calm, I told him my demeanor was courtesy the fifth of vodka I’d had for breakfast. He laughed and left. The contractions began to arrive in earnest. Sandra said she felt pressure, but not pain. The creature galloped, then grunted and bellowed, and then galloped again, faster. A light rain began to fall, drops exploding in spidery bursts against the window as Sandra asked how long it had been since I’d gone down to the waiting room to give her parents an update. I wasn’t sure, but when I asked if she meant I should go speak to them again, she said no, stay. The birds passed again, the whole flock darting and quivering and flitting as one, braving conditions. The wind pressed against the glass with a long sigh.
Then they all burst in together: the nurse, the doctor, a younger nurse, and a woman the doctor introduced as a resident who would assist. The nurse unfurled a machine printout as if it were a stock ticker and examined it, calling out numbers that seemed to please everyone. The doctor said he hoped to be holding the baby within an hour. “An hour?” Sandra said. The nurse pulled two levers beneath the bed and then struck the mattress with a balled fist, and the bottom half of the bed fell downward and away. Raising the back of the bed, she helped Sandra to sit up, legs dangling, as Sandra’s entire body began to tremble uncontrollably. The younger nurse rolled a small table into the room, its surface lined with blankets and surrounded by short plastic walls, and the resident came in behind her pushing another table, but this one, holding a green plastic pan and a fantastic array of gleaming steel instruments, was rolled into the far corner, as if merely an idle threat. As Sandra gasped and wept, the doctor said to me, “Here, look.” Just visible between Sandra’s thighs was the crown, the slick dark hair covered in yellow mucus. The bones of the skull had collapsed to a dorsal ridge beneath the scalp, and I watched the ridge slip back within Sandra like a creature sinking beneath the surface of the sea. “I want the head this time,” the doctor told Sandra. She tried to speak, but couldn’t, and when I heard the doctor say, “Okay, let’s turn her,” I saw that there between his hands was the baby’s head, the eyes shut tight and the silent mouth bent as if this creature, too, was in speechless agony. The child’s shoulders were still pressed together and pinned within—it was a shock to realize that in the beginning, the frame is entirely collapsible. “Now!” the doctor shouted, and the child slipped free and fell wailing into his hands amid a rush of fluid. In one swift movement he wrapped the wailing baby in a blanket and placed her on Sandra’s stomach, telling her she had done well. The nurses busied themselves with the cord while the doctor wiped the child’s eyes and cleared her mouth.
“Do you see?” Sandra said to me, weeping. I nodded, unable to speak.
The doctor examined the baby’s eyes and ears, ran his finger through her mouth, and took each of her limbs in his hand. He announced numbers that the nurse copied into a chart, and when he was satisfied, he stood back, smiled, and said, “This is all very good. But I’m afraid I don’t know this young lady’s name. Or have you decided yet?”
I looked at Sandra and she nodded, smiling, as she lowered her face to the child’s and murmured in a tone I’d never heard from her before. Miranda’s eyes remained tightly closed, as if she were concentrating intently upon that voice, in hopes of understanding it.
“We’ve known for a while,” I said. “Her name is Miranda.”
THE SYCORA PARK SUITES is a ten-story, atrium-style hotel located in the heart of Sycora Park, a vibrant neighborhood that features upscale shopping, many of the city’s finest restaurants, and numerous popular coffeehouses and bars. Those, at least, were the claims made by the brochure Miranda had brought me eight months before the wedding, and which I had examined at my dining room table with the seriousness I bring to any business or legal document. I suppose I thought repeated examinations of the item might at some point reveal an inconsistency in its story, or uncover suppressed information: a broken vending machine beyond the cropped edge of the swimming pool photo, perhaps, or an overlooked sentence acknowledging that the fire alarm will go off inexplicably at three A.M., forcing disoriented guests into the parking lot in their pajamas. But there was nothing to find. And my review of the brochure was just a formality, really, because the decision had already been made: Miranda and Sandra had decided that the Sycora Park Suites would be the reception site, and I was to write my check, please. So I did.
When I entered the hotel on the day of the wedding, a black signboard on an easel announced in handwritten fluorescent script that one of the hotel’s three ballrooms would host Miranda’s reception, while the
other two would be the site of a bar mitzvah and a thirtieth high school reunion, respectively. The news pleased me: I once attended a wedding reception in a hotel where those of us taking a break in the lobby late in the evening were treated to the sight of brides from adjacent receptions walking past each other on their way to and from the restroom. The sight had provoked a psychic shiver in me exactly like one I’d experienced upon seeing a publicity photo from a filmed version of the gospels, in which both the leading man and his stand-in were present and in full costume, attentively listening to their famous director. Two brides crossing paths in a Holiday Inn, two Jesuses taking orders from a man in blue jeans: images like these are best forgotten. The illusion of a wedding’s uniqueness is probably as false as the illusion of a marriage’s permanence, but still—one bride is enough.
The large oak door to our assigned ballroom stood wide open. I assumed that inside I would find a regiment of linen-covered tables standing in silent readiness, but instead I discovered not only that the room wasn’t empty, but that one of those people was an altered version of my ex-wife. Sandra had hired a professional stylist—toiling away in a room somewhere among the dozen or so identical floors that rose overhead like stacked billiard racks—to charm the hair of each woman in the wedding party into exotic weaves and tangles, and Sandra’s hair was now pulled up and held tightly against her head by what I could only assume was a hidden superstructure of clips or bands. A number of curls on top had been woven into a garland of tresses that seemed inspired by sylvan tales of giggling sprites or fairy princesses. The transformation, however, was not complete: beneath the imaginative fairy-tale locks, Sandra remained strictly middle-class in a white V-neck T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and sandals. She frowned at the other person present, a teenage boy pushing the heavy leaves of a fake-parquet dance floor into place at the front of the room. Sporting the khaki slacks and white dress shirt of someone trying to be promoted out of manual labor, the boy kicked at the edges of the floor as if they disgusted him, though I soon realized he was just tightening the gaps between the pieces. After a final, especially vicious kick, he raised his eyes, saw me standing in the doorway, and seemed about to address me—but Sandra beat him to it. “Do you think the ten-foot dance floor, or the fifteen?” she asked.