Wrong Highway

by Wendy A. Gordon

  She took Ethan to a club she’d wanted to go to for a long time. It was situated in a part of the New York City subway system that had long ago been closed off to use. To get there, you climbed down three steep flights of stairs to an old subway platform. The rails were blocked off at some point, obviously, but at the edge of the dance floor, all that you could see was their dark expanse, curving away as far as the eye could see. People were rumored to live down there, like moles. She imagined these creatures as pale and wet, their eyes clouded over from lack of light. She and Ethan leaned over the railing, their bellies hard against the metal. She wanted to scramble over it and explore the slimy depths of the tunnels, but instead they both drank watery margaritas, one after another. When she was ready, she took Ethan by the arm and steered him into the anonymous sway of dancers.

  The music wasn’t as clangorous and angry as Jared’s heavy metal, but it shared the same incessant, hypnotic beat. To cleanse her head of everything else, she bobbed up and down on her heels. She twirled like a child. She raised her arms to the ceiling. She pressed her face into Ethan’s chest. Aside from Ethan, she knew no one there, nobody, and nobody knew her. She was simply another sweaty body, crammed into a rayon leopard-print bustier dress with cutouts at the waist and a stinging cut hidden under her leggings. She drank more tequila until she landed somewhere at least approximating where she wished to be, where all the extraneous static evaporated, leaving nothing but her core. Her potent core. It still lay at the heart of her being, crystalline and invulnerable.

  Ethan smelled so fine. His white work shirt, damp and unbuttoned. His arms, wrapped around the small of her back. His hips, pressed into hers. She’d lost him for so long. His absence, that impression in the mattress where his body used to be, that cool breeze under the blanket, had grown more real than his presence. But he was present now, in this moment, and so was she. She knew what she wanted. She’d assumed she wanted to be wasted, to be numb, to be lost, but no, this raw presence beat everything. She wanted Ethan, right there on this dance floor, in the midst of all these strangers, or maybe on the slick concrete of the tunnels, where it stank faintly of urine and years of accumulated grime. Anywhere but in their bed, on the plain mattress on the floor of their empty bedroom, on the one reserved set of flowered three-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. She raised herself on her toes and kissed him, on the neck, on the mouth.

  “Who’s Anders?” Ethan whispered throatily.

  She looked into Ethan’s eyes, wide and hazel and hurt, eyes that were searching for the wrong things. All the secrets she’d kept from him, and he was convinced of one she hadn’t even contemplated.

  “I don’t know,” Erica said. “I’ve never met him.”

  “Bullshit. C’mon, who is he?” Ethan gripped her tightly, pressing painfully against her ribs.

  “He’s a friend of Stephan Langston’s,” Erica said.

  Ethan’s grip relaxed slightly. “You doing some insider trading?” he asked, incredulous.

  “You think I’m having an affair, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, you’re wrong. I never wanted anyone but you. I don’t want anyone but you. I love you. Don’t you believe me?”

  He nodded again. All around them, people pushed and shoved and twirled. Somebody stepped on her big toe. “Yeah,” Ethan said. “If you say so. But who’s Anders?”

  A dark cloud enveloped her, vast and deep, the one that lingered close by all the time, waiting for her. The one she always clawed at and pushed down. The one she always thought she could beat. But she was done with lies and had nowhere to run. Let Ethan finally look inside her flawed crystal core. Let Ethan call her on her game. Let Ethan deal out her punishment.

  Erica breathed in sharp and big. “He’s a cocaine dealer,” she said, awaiting the explosion.

  “You’re doing coke?”

  “Yeah, I mean, no, not anymore. I quit. I mean, today; I mean, never again; I mean it truly. I decided today, in the kitchen, really, that that was the last time. . .” She rambled on, as if words alone could make her intent tangible, a solidity that she could cling to. She’d been looking down at the ground as she spoke, but now she looked up, back into Ethan’s hazel eyes, awaiting the crushing blow. She could not evade what she could not erase. Let Ethan punch her where Ron had missed. Let Ethan crush her.

  But instead, he cut her off, his arms running roughly down her back. “Erica, stop it. Don’t tell me anymore.”

  “Are you serious?” She staggered, bumping into a dancer’s swaying hip and falling down onto her knees. She’d been holding her breath, and now she released it, gulping gallons of musty air, filling her lungs to bursting.

  “Yes. Way too much information. I don’t want to know.”

  “You mean that?” She reeled back on her heels. Someone stomped on her index finger. She gazed at the length of Ethan’s blue jeans, his tanned hands reaching down for hers.

  “Yes, didn’t I make that clear? I got enough on my plate.”

  He pulled her up. His hands felt warm and moist, clutched around her waist where the cutouts were. He kissed her deeply.

  “Let’s go home,” Erica said.

  Outside, it was cold, the feeble snow already dissipating. The air smelled of diesel fumes and burnt toast. She breathed in that thick, unclean, familiar essence for the last time.

  She drove home. The traffic was light, the roads clear.

  A full moon appeared between two clouds, like a face in the window. Everyone was sleeping. Window shades were drawn, lights out, alarm systems activated. Their house was as dark as everyone else’s, with all four kids sleeping at the Schrabners’. She parked in the driveway instead of the garage. She was wasted but so awake. She wished she could take Ethan to the Mackay estate, show him the bricks overgrown with moss, the cracked sink propped up against a tree, the concrete foundation eroded by weeds, but none of that existed anymore. The land was covered over with houses where people slept with their alarm systems activated.

  Ethan had pushed the back of the passenger seat down and lay against the headrest, half asleep. He didn’t even seem aware she’d stopped the car. She reached her hand under his shirt and stroked his chest, those tendrils of curls, that slight softness at the belly, so good, how could she have forgotten? She kissed his neck, his mouth. He turned his head and, barely opening his eyes, kissed her back. She untied the bustier portion of her dress. His hands reached out to stroke her breasts. She unzipped his slacks. He was in her power.

  Vince Volvo, her unreliable but always dear friend, who would never travel these roads again, felt like the proper place to be. She couldn’t return to high school and the stones and weeds of the Mackay estate. She couldn’t return to college, to her first time with Ethan, on the loft bunk in his dorm room, with the door open. But she could be with her beautiful husband in her large automobile, no matter how she got there.

  Everyone could see them, but she knew no one actually would, because no one would think to look, and besides, they were all asleep in their locked-up houses with their central heating and their televisions. But Ethan and Erica were awake, on a chilly, moonlit night with scudding clouds. They were still young, under forty, and they had the sense to know it. They were not stale. They were not static. They could make themselves new. She climbed on top of Ethan in the passenger seat.

  Both of them, plastered to the moment, failed to notice she wasn’t wearing her diaphragm. Erica didn’t remember that it was ex­actly fourteen days since her last period, and that inside her an egg was primed and waiting. Squished together in the cramped confines of Vince Volvo, rubbing against the leather, elbows bang­ing against the door handle, they fit together perfectly; they always had. Outside, it was cold; inside the car, they were warm. Outside, the world drowsed in a numbed sleep, but they were awake. Erica’s arm slid against the gumminess of a melted lollipop. It smelled dense inside t
he car, like sugar and baby wipes and mud from Dylan’s soccer shoes. Afterward, she drove the car into the garage—hilarious, driving in the nude—and they peeled themselves stickily from the seats and walked through their stripped-down kitchen, arm in arm and laughing.

  EPILOGUE

  JANUARY 1987

  You seize upon a weak burst of midday sunshine and take Sophia for a walk around the neighborhood. You consider asking Lisa to join you, but she’s chatting on the phone and, as you recall, had mentioned some undefined plans for later that afternoon. The scattering of snow that had fallen throughout the morning is now melting, sending spurts of muddy water up Sophia’s stroller wheels, but the WNEW weatherman is predicting another storm that evening. You hope he is mistaken, because your plane flight to Fort Lauderdale leaves at 9:00 a.m., tomorrow and if it snows sufficiently, both getting to the airport and enduring the inevitable delays with four children promises to be hell.

  Lisa, bless her, is driving you to the airport. You and the children, plus Sam the iguana, spent last night in her basement family room, camped out in sleeping bags. You’ve closed on your house, packing two weeks of essentials into five giant duffels. The new family, the two doctors plus their six-year-old son, four-year-old daughter, and live-in Jamaican nanny, are moving in this afternoon. You circle around your old block to avoid seeing their moving van. You don’t want to think of strangers positioning their bed under your skylight. You don’t want to think of them recarpeting the family room or steaming off Sophia’s rainbow wallpaper.

  Ethan keeps talking about how you’ll inaugurate your new home with margaritas on the dock, but it’s been raining unceasingly in Boca Raton, a residue of hurricane season. Every time you’ve visited Florida, it’s been unfailingly sunny and hot, so it’s never occurred to you that it often rains there, just like New York. You’ve been counting on Florida to clear up the cold that has settled on you, never reaching a drastic peak but leaving you drained and congested. Your throat is sore. You cough up a greenish glop of phlegm. Your head feels thick and heavy; you need a full pot of coffee and a six-pack of diet Cokes to jump-start your day. You’ve forgotten your scarf. Living in Florida, your mother will no longer be able to hassle you, at the age of 31, about not dressing warm enough for the weather, or forgetting your raincoat, or wearing shoes that do not match your pants. She will not have any idea what you are wearing at all. Your legs feel cold and achy flapping against the lining of your corduroys. The deep gash in your knee is only partially healed, and you keep ripping off the scab when you pick at it at night. You’re gaining weight by the day even though you can barely eat; you choke down a slice of toast, and your belly strains against the waist of your pants. Your legs are still fast and long, your knees still knobby and scraped like a child’s, but they will never power you as far away as you need to go.

  You walk for a long time, crossing over the railroad tracks, past the low-income housing and the turn-of-the-century frame houses of Meadow Heights. You pass your parents’ house, where no one is home. After you closed on the house, they took you out to dinner at a mediocre Italian restaurant and then left to visit old college friends of your father’s in New Hampshire. For the first time in your memory, your father has forgotten to prune the rosebushes, and evidently to cancel the paper, as there is a big pileup of the Times by their front door. A young family with a toddler has moved into Nick’s house. Nick is in jail for a plea-bargained six months. News of a drug bust in Brooklyn, perhaps courtesy of Nick’s information, was splashed all over yesterday’s paper. They were big fish, these drug dealers from Colombia that got sent away for twenty years. While you were a subatomic particle, as Ethan might put it. You never sold drugs to a single soul. All you ever did was buy them, like you might buy cookies at the supermarket. Like Debbie bought Coumadin at the drugstore. You were a subatomic particle, invisible to society’s microscope, and now you are swimming off the glass slide away to subtropical seas. You peer in the door of the pet store at the tortoises and lizards and one lonely-looking furry white cat. You walk back to your parents’ house and put their newspapers in the yellow plastic box your father normally reserves for this purpose. You walk back across the railroad tracks toward where, as you practice telling yourself, you used to live.

  You pause at the West Meadow Elementary playground, which is empty due to the weather. The rubber baby swings are too wet for Sophia’s tush, but you roll her stroller up onto the sodden bark chips anyway and, with your eyes, frame the scene like a photograph. The wooden play structure, with its towers and tubes and rope ladders. The tire swing. The rocking animals on springs, shaped like elephants and hippos. The low brick structure of the school behind them. In the near distance to the right side, the high school, the cluster of leafless trees, the gateway to the luxurious colonials of Mackay Estates. The thin line of sky, gray fighting with blue. The sharp air, tinged with moldy leaves and exhaust. This is the image you will conjure when your children ask you where they are from.

  Dylan, Jesse, and Jake will carry their own memories, of course. For a while their image of West Meadow will be as vivid to them as it is to you. But they are children, resilient and adaptable, and without reinforcement, these images will recede, and others, more current and pertinent, will rise to the forefront. Their voices will soften and slow. Their skin will turn a permanent shade of tan. Their life in West Meadow will become a faded remnant of early childhood, odd elements occasionally recalled in the context of something else, background to a dream. As for Sophia, she will remember nothing of this. You wish for all of them what you will never have for yourself, what you know to be impossible for anyone: blank pages to write their histories on.

  Airplanes and moving vans cannot take you far enough away. That place—beyond roads, beyond phones, lost in fog—exists, but the path there, you now realize, is forever closed to you. It’s closed for your husband, as well. Ethan still works for Grant Fishel, doing, as far as you can determine, essentially the same things as he’s done all along. Maybe the actions that have been determined by the courts and by public opinion to be acceptable will no longer be acceptable a year from now. Maybe one of his disgruntled, betrayed superiors will rearrange his loyalties. Maybe the underpinnings of Grant Fishel’s whole abstract empire will collapse. You understand the potential for collapse now. It is stashed in your bones; it stares back at you with your own eyes.

  In a few weeks, as you arrange your possessions in your new home, while you enroll the boys in their new schools and dangle your legs off the dock, while you sniff the yellow wild sage that blooms in your yard all winter, Debbie will come home from the rehab center to her new ranch house in Albertson. Ron, who now manages a Tower Records in Hauppage, will rent his own customized van and wheel her up the entry ramp built by a contractor buddy of his, but everyone’s expectation is that slowly, painstakingly, she will regain her ability to walk. She might always require a cane or maybe one of those motorized scooters. With the help of extensive therapy, she will also regain her speech, her doctors believe. Progress will be slow, though, measured and self-conscious: her rapid-fire patter is a thing of the past. Never again will she gab about Phil Donahue while frosting some boring lady’s hair.

  You’ve relinquished your part in this. You aren’t very good at what’s required: the tediousness, the inane conversation, the refusal to acknowledge the avoidable catastrophe that put her in this situation. All your life Debbie told you how impulsive and unreliable you were, how all you did was get her into trouble. She never wanted your kind of love, she never wanted the kind of help you offered, and now it is too late.

  As you look around this playground you have known your whole life, you still see Debbie swinging next to you on that old metal swing wobbling in its concrete base. Somewhere below the fresh asphalt, the blood from her elbow fracture still stains the ground. You prefer to think of her in her cast, cluttered with signatures and drawings, playing jump rope with her friends. Even in the cast,
you have to admit, she was pretty adept at jump rope.

  Jared for a time felt as much your child as the ones born from your body, but of course that was never true. You always want too much. You hope, if he remembers nothing else, he remembers how the gate opened up at the Pritima Center like you’d willed the garbage truck to enter. You hope he will see other gates in his life, the ones that stand there in plain sight, and understands he can walk through them like he has every right to do, by looking straight ahead and putting one foot in front of the other.

  The new baby growing in you remains your secret for now. Already, you think you see a little bulge peeking out of the waistband of your corduroys. Five children, how absolutely insane. No one you know has five children, but no one you knew had four, for that matter. Your child is bound to you in hunger, and she will suck food and air from your body and take from you anything she requires to survive. Her heart already beats. The heart is the first organ that fully forms. She will grow inexorably, blood pulsing between your two consciousnesses, arms forming, legs, head, fingers, pushing out against your belly, creating bumps like marbles in your skin as she kicks, reaching down toward the light, making herself known. You don’t need any cocaine. You don’t need any chemical high of any kind. Like you told Justine, a couple of lifetimes ago, childbirth is the best rush ever.

  You need to allow one day to follow another, permeated by the white noise of the ordinary. As many times as you have tried and failed to penetrate the fog surrounding the afternoon of Debbie’s collapse, one image remains inviolable: you, at the end, still standing. Whether you deserve that gift is perhaps irrelevant. This is the gift you’ve been granted, and you will run with it.

  A cocker spaniel bounds past Sophia’s stroller, followed by a woman in a fur coat holding tight to her extended leash. “Doggie!” Sophia exclaims. Then that spaniel is followed by another, then another. Soon the playground is awash with cocker spaniels, sniffing each other’s butts, yipping, peeing against the play structure, kicking up wood chips and mud. You have never seen so many of the same kind of dog in the same place. Then Lisa strolls up the hill with Penny, and the realization dawns on you: this was her plan for the afternoon; this must be the monthly gathering of the cocker spaniel club she’s talked so much about. “Doggie, doggie!” exclaims Sophia as each spaniel appears, until her system short-circuits, and she can only stare in stunned wonderment. She wants every one of those doggies, all of them at once, wants to run her chubby hands through their damp spiky fur, wants the press of their wet noses on her cheek, the kiss of their smooth pink tongues. She wants it now, no, before now. She wants it as badly as anything she has ever wanted in her fourteen months of life. She works the nylon strap of her stroller, manipulating it through the plastic loops and past the restraining teeth. She flexes her fingers and, gripping with all her might, pulls up the snap. The strap falls loose. She is free! She slithers down under her seat, onto the footrest, onto the slush-drenched bark dust. She staggers to her feet, and she is off.