The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  Evelyn studied Ingrid’s arm and picked up the tattoo machine again. “Do you want a little color in it?” she asked. “Like those three little electron bits, I could ink them in a different color if you want.”

  “Red,” Ingrid said without hesitation. “Make them red.”

  Afterward, they toasted Evelyn’s work with Fresca and ate hot dogs straight from the package. Evelyn held the soda can to her forehead, trying to cool off. And then, because everything was different now, she rolled up her shirt sleeves and opened the top two buttons of her blouse.

  Ingrid, stoned from the combination of pain endorphins and her wine cooler, felt as if she were having a vision: on Evelyn’s forearms she saw orange koi and hearts pierced with arrows, below her collar bones were the familiar orange tips of the sun’s rays.

  “Come to California with me,” Ingrid said. Not knowing she was going to say it. Then saying it again. “Come with me. I could manage to get through the wedding if you were there.”

  “You know what?” Evelyn put down her soda. “I just realized this. I never thought California was a place I could actually go. But I suppose I could.”

  “You totally could. You could come with me, and then you could talk my dad into letting me come back to Newell Academy in the fall. And then after that we could rent a car and drive up to L.A. and I could show you all those places you wanted to see. You know, Hollywood and stuff.”

  Evelyn nodded. “Maybe I could. Besides, I need some perspective after what’s happened with Ray. And speaking of Ray, where is he? He’s been out walking around for what, three hours? I hope he didn’t fall in a ditch or something. Not that it wouldn’t serve him right.”

  “He wasn’t walking,” Ingrid said. “He took the car.”

  “No, he didn’t. He was too sloshed. He’s not that stupid.”

  “I saw him. He drove off in the Saab.” No need to tell her I went after him. No need to tell her what I did next. It was for her, Mister. It was always for her.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Evelyn’s face went a sickly white, and Ingrid realized that turning pale was not something that people did only in books.

  “I doubt he drove very far,” Ingrid said. “Maybe he’s just, I don’t know, sitting in the parking lot at the train station.”

  “Ingrid, how could I be so stupid? Again?” Evelyn jumped up and paced the few steps to the deck railing and back again. “I should have known it. He’ll be dead in some ditch somewhere. It’s happening all over again and it’s still my fault.”

  “What’s happening all over again?’

  Evelyn brushed at her face. “I can’t cry about this. We have to find him. Oh, how could I be so stupid? How could he be so stupid? Oh, my God.”

  Ingrid stood up too. “It’ll be all right,” she said. That sounded stupid; Detective Slade would never say that. I took her in my arms and kissed away all those watery diamonds her eyes were squeezing out and by the time I got around to her mouth I was a rich man, Mister—

  Yeah, right. Ingrid dared the palm of her hand onto Evelyn’s upper arm, laid it over a bluebird with streamers in its beak.

  “We’ll just go find him,” she said. “We’ll get in the Olds and go see.”

  Evelyn felt her ears ringing. Too much was the same as the night Joe died: a drunken husband, an infidelity, a confrontation.

  “Come on,” Ingrid said. “We’ll just drive down the road to the commuter rail and I bet we’ll see him.”

  Evelyn allowed Ingrid to lead her to the car. She was back in the circus, the day Joe died, it was happening again. Next it would start to rain, there would be a thunderstorm. Her hands were shaking.

  “You drive,” she said. “I can’t do it.” She sank down onto the passenger side of the front seat and closed her eyes.

  Ingrid got behind the wheel. “They fixed the transmission nice this time,” she said. They coasted down the hill to the train station. “Open your eyes,” Ingrid said. “See? There’s the Saab.”

  Evelyn looked. There was the Saab, all right, parked in the lot just as Ingrid had said. She felt a blur of relief. “How did you know he’d be there?” she asked, and then a new hand was tightening around her throat because Ray was not there, not in the car, not anywhere. She climbed out into the heat of the afternoon sun and checked the back seat, just to be sure. Stood on the blazing macadam and screamed, “RAY! RAY!” No one was in sight.

  Just past the station there was a ditch on the far side of the tracks. Could he have fallen in there? Could he have fallen on the tracks, oh, of course that was it, he’d been hit by a train. “RAY,” she screamed, and then Ingrid was beside her, gripping her shoulders, saying something.

  “Evelyn, stop.”

  “He’s going to be dead.” She was sobbing. “I know it.”

  Ingrid was pulling her back toward the car. “We have to go back to the house and do this right. Why do you think something happened to him?”

  “It’s just like what happened with Joe. How he died. We had a fight and then he went off drunk.”

  “You said he fell down the stairs.”

  “I’m so stupid,” Evelyn whispered.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Evelyn didn’t answer, but in the silence that followed Ingrid realized with perfect clarity that she knew exactly what had to be done. It was the power the lithium atom had given her. She opened the passenger door of the Olds and pushed Evelyn gently in. Started the car and drove back up the hill to the house.

  “I’ll find your husband,” I told my client. “I know where to look for him. Leave everything to me.”

  Evelyn washed her face and put on a clean blouse and allowed Ingrid to give her a cup of coffee. She took one sip and spit it out. “What did you put in it?”

  “A splash of bourbon.”

  “No more booze, Ingrid. Please.”

  Ingrid had put in the bourbon because it made it more like her story that way, but she knew she couldn’t explain that to Evelyn. So she poured the laced coffee down the sink and make another cup, with cream and sugar this time. Then she got the Yellow Pages and looked up the Hotel Bristol, the place Ray had gone when he skipped out of college.

  It didn’t exist anymore. That would have been too easy, Mister.

  “You got a train schedule around here?” she asked.

  Evelyn found one. Detective Slade traced a finger down the column and tried to remember the morning. Ingrid and Ray had kissed in the car about eleven, it must have been, because the train to Boston had gone through without stopping while they sat there. The next train that stopped at Randall Common was an outbound one at 12:39.

  “Why do you think he got on the train? Evelyn asked.

  “Because he left his car at the train station, for one thing. And I think he wanted to go to a hotel, or a motel somewhere.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s where he went when he had that breakdown at Yale. Wouldn’t you say this is another breakdown?”

  “What breakdown at Yale?”

  “You know. Where he almost didn’t graduate because he got drunk and left school during his exams.”

  “What are you talking about?” Evelyn began to cry again.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Detective Slade put both hands firmly on Evelyn’s shoulders. Looked into her underwater blue eyes.

  “Evelyn, look at me. Take a deep breath. Ray isn’t dead. I know he isn’t. You’re freaking out for some other reason from whatever happened with Joe. Why don’t you tell me?”

  No answer from her, Mister. Just tears. So I pulled my heart off my sleeve and dried her tears with it. She didn’t notice.

  “I want you to get your purse and go sit in the car and wait for me,” Ingrid said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” Evelyn asked.

  Ingrid paused in the foyer. “I have to get something upstairs.”

  25.

  This is it, Mister. This is the case you think abo
ut for years after. If you get it right it’s the one thing you did in your life that was good. If you get it wrong it’s the thing that keeps you up at night, the thing that turns your guts inside out and clings to you like a bad dream, long after the taste of her lips and the smell of her perfume has faded.

  Ingrid stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, exhaled a screen of smoke. Behind the screen, she stepped out of her cutoff shorts and put on the pair of men’s suit pants she’d got at the Goodwill last autumn. The pants were much too hot for the weather, but she needed to look exactly right. Then she put on her bowling shoes, because they were the closest thing she had to men’s street shoes. She took off her tee shirt and put on a white button-down Oxford, lit a second cigarette off the butt of the first. Put on the trench coat, the one that had once been Ray’s but now belonged to Detective Slade. Put on the fedora that went with the trench coat.

  Detective Slade looked in the mirror and adjusted the brim of the hat. Went into Evelyn’s room and fished the gun out of drawer. Pocketed the gun.

  And with hat and coat and gun, Detective Slade went out.

  It was almost five o’clock. I was behind the wheel and she was beside me. I was sweating from nerves as much as from the heat. It was that kind of case and she was that kind of dame.

  Ingrid didn’t trust herself to drive in rush hour traffic on the freeway, but there was no room for Ingrid to feel anything right now: Ingrid might chicken out where Detective Slade wouldn’t. So it was Detective Slade driving.

  It started to rain. The rain steamed up the air until it was as muggy as a hot towel in a Turkish bathhouse. Everything on the road slowed to a crawl. Everything except for my heart, which was still doing the crazy tap dance it broke into every time she was near me. She didn’t notice, or talk. She just sat there and did what I told her, which was to look up train stops on the map. At each stop I checked to see if there were any motels. The first two train stops were in the middle of nowhere—no dice there. The next one was in a small town’s idea of a downtown, and a hundred yards past the station was a three-story hotel. I clamped my fedora on my head against the rain and ran across the street and into the hotel lobby and asked the blonde at the front desk if anyone had checked in that afternoon.

  “No one’s checked in the last three days.” She kind of grinned at me. “I’m wearing out my fingers playing solitaire back here. You know any card games?”

  “Not today, sweetheart,” I said and beat it out of there and tried the bar across the street and found it wasn’t even open.

  I got back in the car where the love of my life was still sitting, as wilted as last night’s flowers. She had one hand over her eyes and when I got back in the driver’s seat she looked at me a moment between her fingers but she didn’t say anything.

  I smoked another cigarette. I drove another five miles. She sat beside me like the memory of a dream, tangling herself in the sheets of my life. I didn’t ask her to tell me the truth about what had happened to her. She wouldn’t have come clean with me anyway, not yet, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more lies, so I clammed it. There was no sound but the swish of the windshield wipers until it stopped raining and I turned them off again.

  Then we reached the final stop on the train line. The station was right near the exit off the interstate, and across the road from the station was a one-story wooden building with a blue neon sign telling anyone who wanted to know that it was THE LONE PINE SALOON. About thirty yards past that was another sign, this one painted on wood with green paint. A big green arrow on it pointed to a handful of little wooden cabins. Above the arrow, peeling green letters explained the cabins: THE LONE PINE MOTEL.

  Bingo.

  I should have known it would be the last stop. A guy gets on a train drunk and what does he do? He falls asleep and doesn’t stir until the end of the line, when the conductor shakes him back into the misery of being awake in a place where there’s no place left to go.

  I wanted a shot from the office bottle and wished I’d brought along a flask. But I was doing all right. Better than all right. I had a hat and a coat and a gun in my pocket. I had a car and a beautiful dame beside me. I had a case I knew I’d crack. It was like that kid’s game where someone shouts “Warmer!” when you’re getting close to finding the thing that’s hidden, and “Colder!” when you’re going the wrong way. I was close. I was white-hot. My atom was burning, there on my arm.

  She, the love of my crummy life, had fallen asleep beside me with her head against the car door. I stroked her arm and she came awake and looked at me blurry. Not unhappy to see me, but not all that pleased either. I was just a job to her.

  Mister, I knew that once. But I guess I must have forgotten it somewhere.

  Evelyn shook her head to clear it. She had been asleep for only a few minutes, but deeply so, and for a moment she was disoriented. The Olds smelled musty in the rain. Ingrid had just told her something, but it didn’t make sense. She sat up in the seat.

  “What do you mean, you found him?”

  Ingrid was just sitting there, tapping the steering wheel with her index fingers and looking pleased in a not-smiling Ingrid kind of way.

  “If you found him, where is he?”

  Ingrid jerked her thumb out the driver’s side window. “Over there.”

  Evelyn looked; saw the cheesy motel and the roadhouse. An actual roadhouse. She hadn’t even know they existed in Massachusetts. It was the kind of place Joe would go, get to know the bartender, hang around the pool table and shark himself through the regulars, then light out of town with the circus before anyone caught on. Or pick up some whore and get her to blow him in one of the cheesy motel cabins in exchange for a little tattoo.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Evelyn wasn’t sure if she was addressing Ingrid or the ghost of Joe Cullen. This would be Joe’s idea of a great joke, to have Ray wind up in a place like this. “Ray wouldn’t be—” she started to say, and then stopped, because in fact she had no idea what Ray would or would not do, not any more. “I’m not going in there,” Evelyn said instead.

  “Why not?” Ingrid asked.

  Chicken, said the ghost of Joe Cullen. Buck buck buh-cock!

  The rain started up again, a slow drizzle that felt too warm for how late in the day it was. Evelyn squinted up at the sky. The thunder was coming. And Joe wouldn’t shut up:

  Wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, you were going to say?

  “I just, I just don’t want to go in there. You go, Ingrid. Please.”

  I stepped out of the car and into the steam bath that was trying to pass for rain. I went around to the passenger side and jerked the door open, but she just sat there. She was trembling a little. So I took her arm and pulled, hard enough to make her get out of the car.

  The guy in the motel office didn’t even look up from his game show. If he had, he would have seen a private dick with a hat pulled down low and a dame with hair like little flames that lit up his dingy lobby where no one ever came if they were happy. But he didn’t look up. He was busy watching a lady almost win a new Cadillac and then guess wrong and blow it.

  “A drunk guy with nice manners? Yeah, he checked in a couple hours ago.” The clerk jerked his thumb in the direction of the cabins. “In number twenty-two.”

  Evelyn forced herself to follow Ingrid down a gravel path from which most of the gravel was missing. The rooms of the Lone Pine Motel were made up to look like hunting cabins, two to a roof, with fake log cabin fronts and pine tree cut-outs in shutters that had once been green. Evelyn already knew that the carpeting would smell like mildew and cheap disinfectant, that the shower would leak, that under the dirty polyester bedspreads the mattresses would sag. Joe fucked other women in rooms like these. Sometimes she’d come and find him afterwards.

  The door of number twenty-two was unlocked. They stepped in, first Ingrid, then Evelyn behind her. The room showed no signs of having been occupied, but behind the bathroom door there was the sound of water running in
the shower. Ingrid banged on the door.

  “Ray! It’s us!”

  No sound besides the water. Evelyn began pounding on the door.

  “Gimme one your bobby pins,” Ingrid said. “I’ll pick the lock.” I could have kicked the door in, Mister, but I don’t like to show off.

  Evelyn reached up and touched her hair. She had pinned it up in a coil on top of her head this morning; now it sagged at the nape of her neck in damp strands. She pulled out a hairpin and passed it to Ingrid, who bent it open and inserted one end into the hole in the center of the doorknob. The lock clicked free at once and Ingrid opened the door.

  The shower was running but Ray was not in it. He was slumped against the wall opposite the sink with his eyes closed. His hair and his shirt were wet, as if he had stuck his head under the showerhead before collapsing. His hands hung limp on either side of him and his head had fallen forward. His glasses were gone.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Evelyn said. She stood in the doorway, not moving.

  Ingrid knelt beside Ray on the tile floor. Over the sound of the water she could hear Ray breathing with a faint whistling through his nose. He smelled as if he’d been sick.

  “He’s dead,” said Evelyn in a slapped voice.

  “He is not,” Ingrid replied, feeling disgusted, and without knowing she was going to do it, she slapped Ray hard on the face. His eyes flew open and his head jerked back, banged against the pink tile wall. He put up his hands to ward off more blows. When none came, he lowered his hands and blinked up at the two women, confused.

  Evelyn moved. She pushed past Ingrid and yanked hard on Ray’s arms, pulled him up to a standing position. He remained standing, but barely. Evelyn held him by the arms.