by Mark Powell
“I don’t want anything except for you and Carol and the girls to stay the entire week.”
“I’ll see you Christmas Eve, Tess.”
“At least through New Year’s Eve, all right?”
“I have to be back in Charlotte on the twenty-seventh.”
“David.”
“I’ll see you soon, Tess.”
But not even her brother could burst the swelling bubble of her happiness. Part of it—a huge part of it—was her newfound friendship with Kayla. That they would hit it off hadn’t been immediately evident. They had met at the fountain; they had hugged; Kayla had cried a little and then apologized for crying. From there they had walked to a coffee shop where they had sat making awkward small talk while time crawled toward whatever point at which they could both walk away without feeling like total fools. Both were a little over-caffeinated. Both, Tess surmised, were a little regretful and embarrassed, as much for themselves as for the other. Kayla’s hair was no longer streaked with pink but dyed black, and Tess wondered if that was some concession to maturity. She ran her tongue over her uneven bottom teeth and Tess wondered if that was some concession to fear. Either way, neither seemed to want to be there, and around ten Tess realized if she left right then she could drive to Cades Cove in time to eat lunch with John and the children.
She was on the verge of making her excuse when something else came to her.
“You know what,” Tess said. “This is crazy and sort of out of nowhere, but would you want to get your nails done?”
“My nails?”
“I used to get them done when I was a girl. It was a thing I did with my mom and sister. But I haven’t had them done since I was like fifteen.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had mine done. I mean professionally.”
“So maybe?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No. I’d love to,” Kayla said. “I mean why not, right?”
It was more of a spa than a nail salon and they wound up with matching mani-pedis.
“We should pick the same color,” Tess said.
“I love it.”
“Something totally crazy.”
“I so completely love it.”
Tess so completely loved this girl. She was happy. They both were. It was the Essie Raise Awareness Pink. It was the foot scrub. It was the mimosas the girl kept bringing and they both kept drinking, glass after glass.
“I have to work today,” Kayla said.
“What time?”
“I have no idea. Now maybe?”
And they both burst into laughter because why shouldn’t they? Tess felt like she had been denied laughter for she didn’t know how long. But she didn’t resent it. She just laughed. She had been denied the friendship of Kayla but she didn’t resent that either.
They went for lunch at a cheesy hamburgers-and-margaritas place beneath a giant Ferris wheel. The place was packed with women, all happily exhausted, washed-out shoppers drinking early cocktails and recounting the morning’s haul. The menu had a line of overpriced cocktails and they both ordered a Mountain Mist and then a Tennessee Sunrise.
“This is so breaking diet,” Kayla said, “but I think I’m going to get a hamburger.”
“What kind of diet?”
“A stupid one. I’m supposed to be in like a fitness contest in February and I should pretty much be living off greens and canned tuna at this point.”
“But you don’t need to lose weight.”
“You always need to lose weight,” Kayla said, and lifted her empty drink. “Should we?”
“Absolutely we should.”
This time it was the Appalachian Apple Pie, which appeared to be apple juice and vodka and some sort of syrup, and then the Black Bear which was maybe chocolate and something that tasted faintly of lighter fluid.
People were laughing, music was playing—
“Do you know this song?” Kayla said, and Tess found her head cocked, listening not just to Kayla or the music, but to the whole earth, the way the floor shook, and then the ground beneath it, and the way it echoed out in perfect synchronicity. The entire planet one coordinated heart.
“It’s ‘Straight Tequila Night,’ ” Kayla said.
“John Anderson. I totally know it. I love this song.”
“I am so, so glad you said that, because I love it, too, and I always feel a little embarrassed by it.”
“Why embarrassed? It’s a great song,” Tess said. “You know who would hate it?”
“I know exactly what you’re going to say.”
“John would.”
“He would, wouldn’t he?”
“Actually, no, he wouldn’t hate it. He would like it.”
“I know exactly what you’re going to say.”
“He probably does like it. But it would be even worse.”
“I know exactly,” Kayla said. “He would analyze it!”
“Yes! Mansplain it!”
“John Anderson as cisgendered response to heartache.”
“Normative emotional states in late-eighties ballads.” Tess was nodding, smiling. “Analyze it, and never hear a thing.”
“I know, right?”
She was so happy, Tess was. She was a little drunk, too. They both were. But it was the first time all day John had been mentioned and she was so glad it wasn’t some taboo subject, some minefield through which she would have to step with blind precision. They kept talking about him, his habits, his past. Kayla talked about her mom and the time in Minnesota, then being sent back to Georgia while her dad was in California working for some mega-billionaire who wound up getting shot. Tess told Kayla about their new life, John’s work, the children, her running. The sweetness of Kayla’s grandparents.
It was so simply inexplicably uncontrollably fun.
It was fascinating too, to remember that Kayla knew John, knew him as only a child can, and for a moment Tess felt the briefest flare of jealousy—would her children ever know their father so well?
It was afternoon by the time lunch was over and they wandered for hours through the outlets and then it was off to another meal, no pretense of food at this point, just a carafe of house red and then, why not? Let’s get one more.
“You have to work, right?”
“I think I missed work.”
“Can you get home?”
“I’ll maybe just sit in the car for a few minutes.”
It was dusk by then and Tess was thinking: yeah, maybe I should sit in the car for a few minutes, too.
So now, a week later they were texting and keeping up with each other on Facebook and already planning to get together right before Tess and the family left for Florida.
Late one evening Tess’s phone pinged and when she saw it was Kayla she put down her book and slipped out of bed. John looked up from his New Yorker.
“Who is that?”
“Wally’s school.”
“Pretty late for that. Everything okay?”
“Christmas party stuff.”
She took the phone into the living room and looked at Kayla’s message.
Met this guy.
Yeah?
Been coming to the gym and we sort of hit it off.
Yeah?
When her phone pinged again Tess was looking at a picture of Kayla and a boy with dark eyes and crinkly hair, their faces pressed together above the long extension of his arm.
Cute right?
Super cute.
Kind of excited. About to go out. Third time!!!!
Have fun and let me know.
K
love you
love you back
So maybe it was all part of the happiness, the seemingly endless abundant nature of it that led her to forget to tell John about Christmas. Or maybe she just didn’t want to tell John, knowing that the moment she did that clean laundry smell she seemed to find everywhere these days would begin to sour. So instead of hearing it from Tess, John heard of her pla
ns for an extended stay from Tess’s brother.
It was the afternoon of the last day of classes and they were calling for flurries. John came home in boots and scarf and hat and left everything by the door to dry.
“Is it snowing yet?”
“Blowing,” he called from the kitchen, “not sticking.”
“The boys are dying. They said maybe three inches on the news.”
“I doubt it,” John said, and if she hadn’t detected something in the way his voice lumbered out she detected it in the darkening of his face as he came into the living room. “Your brother called today.”
“David? What did he want?”
“He was asking about Florida. Wanted to know if you were serious about staying because he and Carol were maybe thinking about it, too.”
“Oh.”
“I told him of course you were serious. Why wouldn’t you be?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I meant to—”
“It’s honestly fine.”
It was honestly fine because he wasn’t going. That was what he told her. Work, his parents. She should take the kids and he would see them all when they got back. They fought a little, but not really. His was an absurd overreaction—there was no reason she couldn’t call her dad back and amend their plans—but she knew it wasn’t a reaction at all. It was an excuse, an out. He didn’t want to go and now he had his reason. Tess got to take the children to Florida while John got to take the high road.
She told herself it was actually better this way. That having him around—as much as a family should be together for the holidays—was simply too stressful. He got along well with her parents, too well actually, and what that did was remind Tess of their difference in age, which, naturally, reminded her of John’s previous life. The dead wife. The kneeling man in his orange jumpsuit. And anything that took her thoughts there was to be avoided at all costs, including Christmas with him.
So, yeah, it’s fine. No big deal. The children will be disappointed but they’ll have their cousins and grandparents and so, yeah, whatever you want.
She was okay with it, she repeatedly told herself she was okay. Still, the joy was gone. It took her a few days to admit as much, but it was gone. It was Saturday, in fact, before Tess caught herself in the living room darkness.
John was gone again and it had just hit her what a mistake everything was, not just Christmas but tangling herself in Kayla’s life, snooping through the closet at John’s parents. For the first time in weeks she thought of the USB drive, she thought of the man no longer in the basement, but in some shallow unmarked grave. For the first time in weeks she found herself centered in a dark room, alone and clicking.
36.
Reed Sharma watched her go across the parking lot toward the stairwell and her apartment. Kayla Maynard stopped once to turn and wave, a little hopefully, he thought, and he waved back and after another moment she was gone. When the light came on in her second-floor room he pulled onto the highway and headed south.
It was something like their fourth or fifth date and they’d spent the last twenty minutes making out in the front seat of Jimmy Stone’s Camry. Kiddie stuff, lips and slobber, pawing each other over their clothes. She wanted him to come up, but he said no, barely said no. He wanted to of course—it had been how many months since Aida or the debacle at the Sit-n-Chat?—but he had a larger plan and it called for patience.
Still, he thought about her the whole way south to Peach Creek. She was a beautifully needful thing, the back of her shoulders tattooed with tiny blue planets and stars, a celestial swirl that appeared to signal nothing so much as hope. Everything about her seemed to signal hope. Everything about her seemed to signal some radiant goodness. If he wasn’t in love with her, he was at least charmed by her. They had met at the gym. He told her he’d been sick, had lost weight. He was a fighter, which was true enough, and with the flattened nose and early intimations of cauliflower ears it was easy to believe. Then he went into the other room and attacked the squat rack. He worked out like a pent animal suddenly freed, all the while watching her watch him, sauntering back to the reception desk between sets, smiling. He’d cut off his feelings of late—he didn’t feel a thing beyond a cold mechanical indifference—but now there was the teasing sense that maybe he wasn’t done with the whole being alive thing.
But that had to wait.
The previous Saturday he had sat by the entrance to John Maynard’s gated neighborhood and then followed him an hour south to a house in Peach Creek. Maynard had spent the night there. Now it was Saturday again and Reed had the feeling Maynard wouldn’t be hard to find.
And he was right.
Reed drove once through the neighborhood at dusk, an older part of town, split-levels on cleared lots, bungalows tucked back in the trees. Stoops and front porches with swings. Barbecue grills. A lone shopping cart pushed into a wall of kudzu. He parked in front of a fourplex with its dull primer coat, fleeces of insulation foaming through the plank siding as if spilling its own pink guts. He was three houses down from John Maynard’s car, and sat in the failing light with the windows down, waiting. Kids came by on bikes, parting around his car, standing on their pedals, legs jack-hammering, four or five of them. Slapping their flat hands against the side panels so that it sounded personal, some coiled menace in the resonant thud. But then they were gone, gray shapes in the graying night.
He got out and popped the trunk, took the tire iron from the well and sat back in the driver’s seat, the iron shaft balanced across his thighs because come on, motherfuckers, come slap the car again why don’t you. But they weren’t coming back. It was dark now. The lights were on in the house he was watching. He was too far away to see shapes, but he knew they were in there. John Maynard and whoever else, some woman. He touched the tire iron. It was very cold. He hadn’t consciously thought about it driving down, but in some sense he had. In some sense it had occupied a central place in the life of Reed Sharma, whether he admitted it or not. But why not admit it? Why not own up to it?
It was something about the proximity to his parents, he thought. This inability to acknowledge his intentions. The weakening effect nearness to them had on him. He could be at their front door in an hour flat. In the house, in his old bedroom, in his old life. But he wasn’t going to do that.
When his phone went off he saw he had a text from Kayla but didn’t allow himself to read it. He needed to wait, he needed to focus. What exactly it was he was doing here wasn’t completely clear to him. But Reed felt certain that if he was still enough and patient enough some larger purpose might emerge.
Then he gave in and looked.
Miss U!
He didn’t reply, just put the phone face-down on the seat beside him. She’d had questions for him that first day at the gym. Where was he from? Atlanta. Did he do anything besides fight? Not at the moment. He told her he’d lost a fight, an undercard at the Georgia Dome, $10K it would have been and she just said oh because nobody asks about losing. Americans aren’t made to lose. Then he went back to the bench press.
She came over later holding a weight belt.
“Have you ever used one of these?” she asked.
He had.
“How do you wear it? Like this?”
“Higher,” he said.
“Here.”
“Yeah. Sit it above your waist.”
It was evident she knew exactly how to wear a weight belt. Not that he minded. He wound up asking her out and she gave this ridiculous pause as if such a thing had never occurred to her.
His phone went off again, screen-down on the seat so that the cheap upholstery glowed blue.
She had sent one of the selfies they had taken, one of about twenty they had made over the last few hours. Pouting, laughing, frowning. He cranked the car and felt the heat come on, warm and then warmer. There was one he particularly liked, their faces close, the long sweep of his arm reaching out.
He felt
himself drifting toward it, that particular contentment, and knew he needed to move. He was freezing despite the heat and dropped the car into drive, eased forward so that he could see someone through the front blinds, the house bleeding light. Then he accelerated quicker than he’d intended.
It was definitely something about his intentions, about not knowing them but sensing something particularly dangerous there, something that once he started he might not be able to contain. The phone call he’d made to Professor Hadawi was part of it, so too the things Stone had said. The visit from Maynard. The sense in which they were all using him, that he was no more a person to them than he had been to his parents. The Voice of goddamn Reason, yo-yoing with his life.
Do you know what bombs do, Reed?
He drove to the Dunkin’ Donuts out near I-75 and ate three glazed and drank two cups of coffee. An impossible indulgence, but why not? Let the caffeine and sugar carry him because what else would? Certainly not Kayla, at least not through this. His phone kept going off, pic after pic from her and he scrolled through them, but didn’t answer, not yet.
When he felt calmer he drove back to the neighborhood and got out, the tire iron held against his thigh. The street was silent, a few windows squared in blue, otherwise shutters and darkness. Grandparents raising grandchildren in the nub of shadow, entire clans asleep behind bed sheets hung for curtains. A world of snapbacks and Timberland boots. In the storm drain were crushed forties and the nubs of cigarillos. He started walking, fully expecting to be stopped, some homeowner with a .410 and the ability to divine Reed’s ill intent would step out and blow him into the outstretched arms of seventy-two virgins. The cops would arrive, sirens screaming, guns drawn. He’d be another dead kid with sixteen entry wounds and a hashtag attached to his name.
Yet somehow he made it to the house. Somehow he stood by John Maynard’s car. Somehow he felt himself crossing the crinkly grass, brown and dormant. He stood on the porch waiting to be accosted, waiting to die, perhaps, and maybe it would be a welcome thing, an end to the confusion. But nothing happened.