Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  “Maggie?” said Barbara kindly.

  “Um. My husband and I—” Don’t have a future together. “We can’t go anymore,” I said, and took a swig of my wine.

  “That’s a shame. Are you absolutely sure? Of all the trips I’ve put together, the Rome excursion is one of my absolute favorites. Even in December, you’ll still have plenty of sun, and because it’s not high tourist season it’s one of the best times to see the popular destinations like the Colosseum and the Vatican.” Barbara paused. “I’m sure Mark told you this, but unfortunately, the deposit is nonrefundable.”

  Rome was supposed to be our big trip—the one Adam and I had been waiting for. International travel was out of the question when the kids were young, and later their teenage schedules and Adam’s unceasing workload made it only slightly more feasible, which is to say it never happened.

  When Jack went to college, Adam and I had flown to Argentina for a week; the day after I arrived, Jack had a meningitis scare that turned out to be an especially bad case of the flu, and though Rose was able to step in and we didn’t fly back early, I had been racked with guilt the entire time. That put us off long flights for a while.

  But with the kids officially on their own, last year Adam and I decided we would finally do it up properly for our next anniversary. Rome was Adam’s idea—he had visited with his parents when he was young and wanted to return. I was eager to see the frescoes painted on cathedral ceilings and dine on pasta that had been made that day.

  Mostly, though, I was looking forward to a week with my husband in which legal caseloads and grocery runs and the countless humdrum demands of our everyday life were not present. It was supposed to be a chance for us to connect the way we used to and, I secretly hoped, to rekindle our flame.

  “Are you sure my husband didn’t cancel in time for a refund?” I asked Barbara. It wasn’t like Adam to forget something like that. Then again, it wasn’t like him to be a bald-faced liar and ruiner of lives, either, so what did I know?

  “Unfortunately so. I attempted to contact him earlier in the month and didn’t hear back. I’ve tried to call you a few times as well, with no success. Did you get the email I sent last week?”

  I had not, probably because I hadn’t opened my computer. Nor had I bothered to listen to my voicemail; I was too wrapped up in preparing for Thanksgiving and my ill-fated reunion with Adam.

  I wandered from Zoe’s room back into my bedroom and sat down on the bed. The mattress was a lumpy old queen. I had wanted to replace it with a king for years but had read online that a smaller bed was better for marital intimacy. (So much for that theory.) Lord, how I had come to hate this space.

  I was about to tell Barbara that we would have to forfeit the deposit when Zoe’s words came back to me: “For once in your life, Mom, it would do you good to focus on what you want.” I still wanted to go to Rome. So why shouldn’t I? “Since the deposit is nonrefundable, is there any chance you could change the reservation?”

  “I may be able to do so, depending on availability. Are you and your husband eyeing a particular week?”

  “Actually, it would just be for one person. Me.” Adam wasn’t the only one who had gone and lost his mind. But if there was ever a time to act irrationally, it was now.

  “Of course,” said Barbara, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a hint of glee in her voice. She added, “I love taking trips on my own.”

  I had not traveled on my own for leisure since—ever. “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” she twittered. “There’s nothing better than exploring by yourself. The places you’ll go, the people you’ll meet—you just don’t have the same sort of serendipity when you’re traveling in a pair. Of course, as a woman you must be careful.”

  Spontaneously signing on to a solo trip to Rome—which I would need Adam to pay for, even if he didn’t yet know that—was 180 degrees from careful. But I had spent my whole life avoiding risk, and a fat lot of good that had done me.

  “I’ll do my best,” I told Barbara. “How soon can I go?”

  “One second.” Barbara put me on hold. When she returned, she said she could arrange for me to leave in a week and a half if I was willing to pay a $200 change fee. (I wasn’t, but Adam would have to.) Then she went over the itinerary to see if I wanted to adjust any of my plans.

  Adam and I had settled on a relatively unstructured trip that included a few guided tours. I told Barbara I would skip the Vatican trip we had signed up for—I could see that on my own—but keep the ancient-ruins expedition. “You know,” said Barbara, just before we got off the phone, “the last time I was in Rome, I went on this wonderful culinary tour in Testaccio. It’s one of the best food neighborhoods in the city, and it isn’t as touristy as Campo de’ Fiori or Trastevere. You’ll go to a traditional Roman bakery, a restaurant that only serves pasta, a cheesemonger—”

  “Sold,” I said. “Please put it on my husband’s credit card.”

  I hung up feeling simultaneously triumphant and terrified. I was almost as excited about Rome as I had been about seeing Adam at Thanksgiving—but this time he wouldn’t be there to deliver yet another unpleasant surprise.

  Except . . . who was I, heading across the Atlantic on my own and sticking my almost ex-husband with the bill?

  I didn’t know anymore. But maybe I would find out in Italy.

  When I got to work that afternoon, I told Terry I would need to take the second week of December off.

  “I would have appreciated a little more notice,” he said stiffly, holding up a crown for inspection.

  I almost said I was sorry for springing my vacation on him, but it wasn’t true. “Terry, I haven’t taken a nonholiday off in almost two years, and this time of year is always incredibly slow. Besides, it’s kind of an emergency.”

  He kept staring at the porcelain tooth. “Are you having a health problem?”

  “Yes. Menopause,” I said dryly. I wasn’t sure what had gotten into me, but I was not in the mood for Terry.

  He placed the tooth back in its case. “That’s not amusing.”

  What was not amusing was that a medical professional either didn’t know or didn’t care that the question he had just posed was illegal. “May I have the time off or not?” I said.

  Terry turned to me. “Maggie,” he said, his voice as cold as his blue eyes, “I ask for very little from you.”

  This was untrue. In the past three years, Terry had required me to learn two new accounting systems—both of which, as I had warned him, were useless and quickly abandoned—on my own time. He also routinely asked me to stay an extra fifteen minutes to run a payroll report or do some other task that could have waited, and on every single occasion had to be reminded why my paycheck was slightly higher than normal.

  Of course, Terry asked very little about me, and maybe that’s what he had actually meant. Inappropriate health question aside, I could not think of a single occasion in which he had inquired about my personal life. To him, I might as well have been a Waterpik. Or, you know—invisible. “So is that a no?” I said, cocking my head.

  Terry, who seemed taken aback by the way I was looking at him, cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  Something strange was brewing in me. It almost as though all of the anger I had bottled up after Adam left had been fermenting and was now far more potent. “I’m not actually clear on what your yes means, but I’m going to plan on not being here. I’ll put in extra time this week and the beginning of next to make sure everything is set up so there are minimal interruptions.”

  He was peering at me over the edge of his bifocals. “I don’t think that’s the best way to keep your employer happy, do you, Maggie?”

  I glanced around the office for a moment, considering my next move. Then I said brightly, “Well, Terry, as it happens, I’m finding that trying to keep other people happy isn’t working out so well for me. And in fact, this place makes me the opposite of happy, and your patronizing response to my simple vacation request put th
at in stark perspective.”

  I opened my desk drawer, retrieved the pens I had purchased for myself because Terry stocked the kind that bled all over your hand, and carefully closed the drawer again. Then I removed my key to the dentist office from my keychain and put it on my desk next to a discarded X-ray. Terry was still staring at me over his glasses. I smiled at him like the crazy person I had become. “Best of luck to you, Terry,” I said. “I quit.”

  NINE

  “Oh no. I knew this was going to happen,” said Gita, shaking her head.

  We were outside our favorite Italian restaurant, and I had just told her about quitting my job. “What?” I said. “I’m finally taking control of my life. You should be happy for me.”

  “It was inevitable, really,” she said, holding the door open.

  The smell of fresh bread wafted at me as I stepped inside the restaurant. “You make it sound like a bad thing that I’m finally focusing on what I want for a change,” I said. “It could have been worse. I could have told Terry to wade in a piranha pond.”

  Gita laughed the brief, bark-like laugh of a person who is humoring you, and told the hostess we needed a table for two.

  “Going to Rome is great, and I’m proud of you,” she said once we had been seated. “But quitting your job on the spot? What’s next? You going to hitchhike across Europe and call me once you’ve located a yurt and a young lover to call your own? I mean, this seems awfully Eat, Pray, Love to me. I’m on board with the food part, but I’m less enthused about the rest.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I scoffed. “I’d rather get a nasal piercing than meditate, and I’m certainly not looking for love. I’m not moving anywhere, either.” I had liked Oak Valley well enough to remain there for twenty-four years; the town was socioeconomically and racially diverse, which was more than you could say for most places, and its proximity to Chicago couldn’t be beat.

  But as I looked across the restaurant at the table where Gita, Reddy, Adam, and I had been seated earlier that spring, I was filled with the most painful sort of nostalgia. Never again would the four of us dine together. Nor would Adam and I have breakfast at Jimmy’s, the diner down the street that we both loved, or walk through the wooded park on summer nights, seeing if we could spot one of the cicadas that were filling the air with their mating songs. Adam may have moved to the city, but his memory was scattered all around this town.

  No surprise, Gita had already considered this. “You could get a nice condo in Naperville,” she said, referring to a nearby suburb. “Just don’t hightail it out of Illinois.”

  A waiter had delivered a basket of bread, but the piece I had taken sat on my plate like a joyless lump. “You know I’m trying to keep my life as normal as possible.”

  “With the crap Adam just pulled on you, it would almost be weird if you didn’t have a midlife crisis. Ditching your job without another lined up indicates you’re well on your way. Especially for you,” she said, arching an eyebrow at me. “Two weeks ago, you were freaking out about spending sixty dollars on a dress. Now you’re telling me you’re fine with living on spousal support?”

  Fine? Not exactly. I broke into a cold sweat if I spent more than two minutes trying to do the math on what the next one to thirty-five years might look like for me financially. So mostly I tried not to and attempted to channel my mother instead. When money was really tight during my childhood, she would smile and say, “Don’t you borrow trouble from tomorrow. Things have always worked out before, so there’s no reason to think this time will be any different.” And sure enough, she would find a way to pull us out of whatever hole we had slipped into.

  No, I would not work myself into a lather about my financial situation. It may not have been a smart move, but the astonishment on Terry’s face as I marched out of his office had almost been worth every penny it would cost me.

  “It’ll work out,” I told Gita. “The minute I get back from Italy, I’ll focus on getting a new job.”

  Our waiter appeared to take our drink orders. After the scotch with Adam, I had abandoned my quest to avoid alcohol. I had higher hurdles to clear, I decided, and besides, I was on my way to Italy, which happened to produce some of my favorite adult beverages on the planet, which I planned to partake in. After we ordered wine, I turned back to Gita. “Let’s pretend I’m midlife and not two-thirds of the way through. I think I’ve already taken a ride or three on the SS Crisis, don’t you?”

  “Sort of, though that was what happened to you, not how you responded.” Gita sipped her water. “Anyway, I don’t think fifty-three is too late.”

  “Yes, well—” I had been about to make a remark about turning fifty-four in June when I stopped myself. My mother was fifty-four when she died, and that made me think of an entirely different sort of “too late.” “I don’t think I can afford to have a midlife crisis even if I were so inclined,” I concluded.

  But later, as Gita was telling me about her daughter Amy’s medical school applications, I thought about what was keeping me from doing something drastic and arguably stupid. And the answer was . . . nothing. My husband didn’t want me; my children barely needed me. I no longer had a job or anything tethering me to Oak Valley, or anywhere else. I was a free agent, and if I wanted to go behave like Adam—recklessly and without consideration for others—then who could blame me?

  When Gita and I left the restaurant later that evening, snow was falling in wet clusters, coating the fences and trees in white. Beneath the lamplight, the five-block stretch of Main Street that constituted Oak Valley’s downtown sparkled. At any other point in my life, I would have thanked God and my lucky stars for being fortunate enough to have landed in such a place.

  Now I could not wait to get out of there.

  A week later, I said goodbye to Gita and drove myself to the airport.

  “We’re going to have the very best time!” I heard a young woman squeal to her friends as they wheeled their enormous suitcases toward the check-in desk.

  I wondered if they sold that sort of enthusiasm at the gift shop. There I was, heading to an international destination with warmer weather and a plethora of possibilities—and I was staring into the sea of faces at the security line, wishing Adam’s were one of them. Maybe he’d had a come-to-Jesus moment, I thought futilely, and had called the travel agency and arranged to join me. Maybe he had suddenly realized what I had understood months ago: that there were few things as depressing as facing down the last decades of your life alone.

  When I printed my boarding pass at one of the check-in kiosks, I did a double take: the pass said I was seated in 4C. It had to be a mistake, I decided as I went through security. But when I checked in with the gate agent, she informed me that no mistake had been made; my reservation had been upgraded, though by whom she could not say.

  “So it was already paid for?” I asked her, envisioning a surprise bill when I returned from Italy.

  The agent smiled at me. “There are no additional fees. Enjoy.”

  Barbara at Bridgewater Travel had confirmed that Adam—or at least his credit card company—had accepted all of the fees for the trip. Had he paid for the upgrade out of guilt? After all, he knew I had always wanted to fly first class but had never had the opportunity, or extra cash, to do so. Or was it just a lucky break? Even as I stowed my carry-on and took my seat, I kept glancing around to see if an agent was going to run up and tell me there had been a mix-up. Don’t borrow trouble, I told myself as I settled into my seat, which was not so much a chair as a self-contained privacy pod.

  “Champagne?” asked a flight attendant the minute I had clicked my seat belt.

  I nodded, thanked her, and took one of the flutes from the tray she was carrying. I loathed flying—especially the first minute of the ascent, which I had read was when a crash was most likely to occur—but maybe complimentary bubbles could help take the edge off.

  The wine was just okay, but I drank it anyway; I couldn’t get over the fact that they used real glass in
first class. I had just accepted a refill when a woman’s head appeared from behind the divider between my seat and the one next to it.

  “Howdy!” she said.

  I wasn’t in the mood to chat, but the woman, who had a warm, craggy face and gray hair that was cropped close and tousled in every direction, seemed harmless. Interesting, even. The hand she thrust at me was decorated with silver rings, several of which were studded with chunks of turquoise. “Jean Abernathy,” she said as I shook her hand. “That’s a good handshake you have on you.”

  “Maggie Halfmoon,” I said. I almost added Harris, but stopped myself. I had left my wedding ring at home; might as well do the same with my married name. “And thanks. My husband always says a good handshake is important.” Oh no.

  “Lordy, I didn’t at all mean to make you cry,” said Jean.

  “I’m not crying.” I dabbed at my eyes and then took a sip of my champagne for good measure.

  “Course you’re not,” said Jean. She had a southern twang, and I couldn’t tell if it was her voice or the champagne bubbles in my head that made her remind me of my mother. “Listen, Maggie. I’ll give you some space, but if you need me, I’m just on the other side of this here wall.” She knocked the plastic with her knuckles, and I managed a small laugh. “Holler if you need me.”

  I told her I would. I finished my drink, trying not to begin crying again over my gratuitous use of the word husband, and leaned into the deep leather seat. I spent a few minutes feeling guilty about stretching my legs out on the foldout bed while passengers a few rows behind me were forced to slumber in the fetal position. Then I fell fast asleep.

  When I came to again, the cabin was dark. As my eyes opened I was gripped with hunger. I couldn’t remember when I had last been legitimately hungry. It had been weeks, at least. A dish of fancy nuts from takeoff was still on my tray, and I poured them into my hand. I had just popped the second almond in my mouth when a flight attendant appeared. “Would you like to begin with the cheese plate, Tuscan white bean soup, or beet salad with goat cheese and quinoa chips?”