She pulls in at a truck stop.
It’s east of midnight.
She buys two Red Bulls, though she hates the stuff, because there is nary a 5-Hour Energy to be found.
It’s going to be close.
She might just make it back to the airport for the 6 a.m. flight.
It’s either that or nothing.
The routings from this small hub don’t work after that, the connections don’t sync up, not ’til the next 6 a.m. flight.
Which will be a day too late.
But she’s got a full tank of gas now, so there will be no more stops.
She will just make it, she reassures herself.
If she needs to piss, she can just go in her pants, like that astronaut chick back in the day, the one that who across the country in a singular, nonstop fury to kill her husband’s girlfriend, or some such.
Oh the schadenfreude of the news.
Or did the astronaut have diapers?
She had diapers, didn’t she?
It’s just on the edges of her memory.
But it seems right.
Which puts a damper on her piss-the-pants plan.
Still, if she ends up needing it: an off-ramp, a quick squat, and she’ll be back on the track within sixty seconds flat.
She’s a NASCAR bitch.
Not a pants-pissing astronaut.
She looks over at the two empty Red Bull cans on the passenger seat.
Reminds herself never to drink them again.
She will be Robin Hood, she decides.
That’s the solution to this.
What’s she going to do with $16.4 million anyhow?
First thing she’ll do is go back up to Centralia.
Drop a small chunk on Peter.
Two, two-fifty?
Is a quarter million too much?
Would he take it wrong?
His problem.
He gets two-fifty.
More specifically, she will be John D. Rockefeller.
She remembers reading about him in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Back when people read the Guinness Book of World Records.
When everybody seemed to have a dog-eared copy of the latest installment somewhere in the house.
Rockefeller was so rich he used to hand out silver dollars to strangers.
She always liked that.
But her silver dollars will be hundred dollar bills.
She will always carry a purseful and hand them out until she dies.
(That’s a lot of money to have on you, all the time.
[Does this mean I need to carry a gun?])
She’s been hit by the perfect storm of road trip madness, she knows.
Too much caffeine.
Too much time in the car without a break.
Sleep deprivation.
The world is a circus, inside her head and out.
But the sun, unseen beneath the horizon, is breathing warmth into the sky.
Day is coming.
And she’s within spitting range of the airport.
Her bladder is bursting, even though a hundred miles back she popped a sixty-second NASCAR squat, but that is another matter.
She ditches the rental at the kiosk, takes the hit on the refill fee.
Bill me!
She runs headlong through the small terminal—nearly over-strips in the security line in her haste—then makes the final push for the finish line at the gate.
Her body is confused by all the running.
That was another life, it says.
This sort of behavior is no longer possible.
But she persists.
Only to find that she is too late.
The gate is closed, the plane visible through the glass taxiing onto the runway.
She stands there, gasping, sweating, eyeing the indifferent white turboprop as it slowly jounces toward the main runway.
If she’d have just pissed her pants, she would’ve made it.
She drinks a beer in the airport lounge, though it has only just opened, and not even the coffee has been brewed yet.
She’s got to undo this sickly buzz in her veins: the Red Bull, the lack of sleep, the sting of missing a flight.
But mostly she knows she’s got to call Wes.
She finishes her beer first.
Asks the lone bartender if they perchance have Klondike Bars.
They do not.
She orders another beer.
Calls Wes.
He answers, which she’d hoped he wouldn’t.
So much easier to apologize to the digital lady than your boss in real time.
It’s early for him.
He wears last night in his voice.
It is husky and full of gravel like he was out drinking somewhere.
Yeah?
Hey, Wes, it’s Lily.
Caller ID; I know.
The tone of this: get on with it; I still got to swim through a pot of coffee before I’m interested in making nice.
Listen…I’m not gonna be able to make it into work today.
Not an option, I told you; this is our biggest traffic day of the year.
I would if I could; it’s just…I’m in Pennsylvania.
There is a long silence on the other end of the line.
Goddammit, Wes says, and hangs up.
Twenty-four hours in an airport hotel with only a cell phone as company is a horrid, horrid thing.
It is your tether to the world, or at least to your responsibility.
Right now those things seem the same to Lily.
She tries calling Wes again, but only gets voice mail.
She tries Jocelyn in HR.
Voice mail.
And she swears that her email inbox is unusually light with correspondence.
She is being frozen out.
Have they fired her already?
Can they do that?
Her cell phone, purveyor of all knowledge, remains mute on this.
As does her room.
It’s just her and the indifferent thrum of the interstate outside.
She won’t do this, won’t stew in guilt over a dead-end job.
She will not get paranoid.
(This is your Battle?
Really, Lily?)
She tries to sleep—God knows she needs it; she has not stayed up all night since Mardi Gras back in the six-pack days—but it’s hopeless.
Even with her eyes closed, and everything in her body conspiring to sleep, her brain nevertheless twitches, aware of the cell phone unseen on the nightstand beside her.
Has she gotten an email?
Is her ringer off?
Have they called and she hasn’t realized?
(This is my Battle?)
In spite of herself, she opens her eyes, checks the phone.
Goes through these fits and starts perhaps a half dozen times, and finally sits up.
She calls Tish.
Marlena, it’s Lily; is Tish there?
She is, but the Missus, the phone, she’s not so good with it…
Put her on the goddamn line.
Lily is surprised to find that she is more offended by her language than Marlena seems to be.
(Though no doubt the Puerto Rican maid—or whatever her official job title is—is accustomed to such discourtesy, having been in Tish’s employ for as long as she has.)
Marlena respectfully says she will try to get Tish, puts down the phone before Lily can say thank you.
Lily feels bad immediately.
Don’t ever let shit run downhill, she tells herself as she waits for the other end of the line to come back to life.
Doesn’t matter how dogshit your day is.
(And who’s to say Marlena’s downhill from where you are?
Marlena’s still pulling a paycheck.
You, however, might be out there with a cup in your hand pretty quick.
[No, right, humility’s definitely in order.
And penance.
/>
Would two-fifty do?
Would that smooth over all this?
{That’s ridiculous.
You dropped a goddamn on her.
That doesn’t warrant giving her a quarter-million.}
Then, I don’t know, something.
Fifty.
Just for all the shit Tish has no doubt subjected her to.
{Deal.
Fifty.}])
Tish gets on the other end of the line.
She tells Tish she found correspondence from Gray.
Tish feigns disinterest.
She tells Tish that the man didn’t seem so monstrous.
Just…troubled.
(Peter’s word, coming back to her.
She underlined that one, apparently.)
You can call an animal anything you want, Tish finally says, in fact they do, they do call animals different things in different languages, but they’re still animals.
Same with that mongrel.
Can we put this to bed now, Lily?
It was so nice to see you, but if this is to be the content of our conversations from now on, if this is the only reason you want me in your life, I don’t want it.
Makes me think all you care about is either money, or poking at really old wounds that have taken a long, long time to heal.
Lily tells her she’s sorry, that this is not her intent.
I know it hurts you, I hate that, but I’m just trying to get all the information I can.
I’ve given it to you.
What happened to him before the war?
What happened to him?
What happened to me!
He happened to me!
A long, tremulous exhale buffets the speaker from Tish’s end; it’s a pained, punctuative thing that says far more than any words would.
Do you really want me to go into the details?!
She’s on a roll now—at once incensed, defensive, horrified.
I won’t do it, young lady, I won’t do it.
It is the first time Lily can remember vulnerability in Tish; it is a foreign tone to the old woman’s voice, strangely unbefitting her.
Lily backs off, apologizes.
Once again, she’s gotten into the raw places of a person and doesn’t like it.
Doesn’t like that access to another’s humiliation.
She wants nowhere near these secret holes that riddle people.
She’d rather just believe the bullshit edifices people spackle them over with.
The outside Lie that makes the world so perfectly mundane and endurable.
She tells Tish she’ll come up and see her, that yes, they’ll just visit, talk about something else.
Tish mutters some sort of one-syllable assent.
Before she hangs up, Lily thinks of one last thing she should share with Tish about the letters.
If it’s any solace, there wasn’t any mention of another woman.
Of the war whore.
Tish absorbs it, emerges from an ambiguous silence a moment later.
She probably left the son of a bitch too, she says.
Did u find anything
This, a text from Bruce at midnight.
She thumbs a response:
Yes. He DID die in the Pacific.
I meant anything new
(Men: oblivious to how things come across.
Especially in texts.)
Bradley Westover, she types.
?, is all he sends back.
It was another name that came up a guy he apparently served with
I’m on it, he responds a moment later.
There are no more texts after that.
Again, the silence, her equally silent cell phone, and its implication.
Don’t completely undersell yourself, Lily.
You have had your battles.
Yes, the hysterectomy was just another impersonal procedure, and you have made peace with being childless, but there are the other things that went with the hysterectomy, before it.
You wanted to meet the baby first.
Wanted to behold her face, know her, understand her character before naming her.
But she never made it that far, did she?
She made it to the light…in the sense that she arrived into the radiance of the world from the darkness of the womb, squinting, fearful, half-blind.
But she was a broken thing, wasn’t she?
She just didn’t work, not like a baby is supposed to work.
Thankfully, it was only a single day so she was never lucid enough to know her own suffering before she died.
And then there was Him, a father for all of twenty-four hours, who turned tail soon afterward and ran.
But that’s what they say, isn’t it—that the death of a child rips couples apart more than anything else.
She can see that.
She’s not singular.
You know that six hundred thousand hysterectomies are performed in the US every year?
She’s not remotely singular.
And over a million babies die on the day they’re born.
Not that she looked this up.
They told her this.
Trying to counsel her.
It’s apparent though that she’s not forgotten it.
It helps.
Gives her perspective.
Keeps her safe and separate from the old Goth Girl she was—All In For Love.
That girl would go to pieces over this.
Would lament the triple void left in her life—all accomplished within a single three-week window over a decade and half ago—the loss of womb, child, and partner.
So yes, Lily, you have had your battles.
But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and you have survived.
Maybe it was not just Tish who rubbed off on you, but your grandfather as well.
She is in South Carolina the next day.
Racing like a spurned astronaut from the shuttle to her car to the freeway to work.
No one has returned her messages.
It will be the end of business hours when she gets there, but that is not the point.
The effort is.
The guilt it implies—how serious it says she takes this job—is.
No one is in the office.
It’s five minutes after five and no one is in the office.
Everyone’s apparently yabba-dabba-do’d on out of here the moment the bell rung.
This on the supposed busiest day of the year.
Yes, the port is full of tramps and liners.
But an office that was supposed to be overwhelmed by the incoming payloads, especially without her presence, is a ghost town.
No overtimers, no midnight oilers.
Just the thin buzz of the fluorescents, filling empty space, whispering to the worn carpet beneath.
She spots two figures out on the jetty.
They are miniatures against the purpling horizon line.
One has a distinctive miniature gut from this distance.
Unhealthy in its proportion to the rest of the body.
Like an anaconda might look after it’s swallowed a goat.
Wes.
They are drinking beer.
In her spot.
She approaches.
She has a whole soliloquy worked out in her head.
Mea culpa, top to bottom.
She will make this right.
She will work the weekend.
She will come in early and leave late.
She will make this Right—
Her phone buzzes in her pocket.
She eyes it.
A text, from Bruce.
B Westover is a bingo.
That’s how she walks up to Wes and Jack.
Head dunked halfway into her phone.
The Wanderer has returned, says Wes.
Lily buries the phone in her pocket.
I’m so sorry, she says.
Want a beer?
Wes pops t
he top off a Coors Light, offers it to her.
She eyes him.
He bobs his head amiably, stretches the bottle toward her with just an extra inch of reach that says: Take it, it’s all right.
She does.
I really am sorry, she says.
Then drinks, eyeing him and Jack.
How’d it go today?
Wes shrugs: Oh you know, typical pain.
Looks like you got it done though.
Wes shrugs, opens another beer.
We left two tramps outside the jetty.
They’re putting their scheduling bonus on us.
Eighteen thousand per.
Thirty-six thousand bucks.
Perkins says that’s exactly your annual salary, Wes says.
Wonders why we should be paying one if we’re losing the other.
I can call him if you want, Lily says.
I can tell him I’m sorry; I can make it up—
What were you doing in Pennsylvania?
The options churn through her.
Family emergency, she says, clipping the silence quickly enough that it does not seem she was stymied by the question.
Who do you got in Pennsylvania?
Great-uncle.
Didn’t know you had one.
Neither did I.
He sick?
(Lily…)
Yes.
Bad?
(Lily……..)
Yes.
Wes looks uncomfortably to Jack.
Jack checks the clock on his phone.
Gotta jump, he says.
He offers Lily a commiserative look.
The end is oh-so-nigh, the look seems to say.
He clinks his bottle to hers.
He smiles wanly to both her and Wes, then heads out.
Wes watches him go, turns to Lily.
Perkins wants documentation; from the hospital.
What?
That’s what he says.
Why are they after me?
I missed a day.
No, you missed The day, Lily.
Yes, but if they’re talking about thirty-six thousand dollars, we plus-or-minus that all the time.
Not all the time.
No, all right, not all the time, but it does happen.
Look, in case you haven’t figured it out: what I was getting at when we were out here last time, it’s real.
Perkins, all them: they’ve been building a case, a real case, brick by brick.
A case?
A countercase, I guess is a better way to put it.
They want to have enough material to be able to counter any wrongful termination lawsuit you might file.
And they feel they have that now.
The Far Shore Page 14