Vegas Girls

by Heather Skyler

  “We all make mistakes,” he said. “It sounds like you just made one in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “It was more than a mistake,” Jane said.

  “What was it then?” He tilted his head, waiting, one white eyebrow lifted over his dark eye.

  Jane thought for a moment. “It was a revelation. I realized that I no longer wanted to be married.”

  “Hmmm.” He nodded and leaned back in his chair.

  “We’re sort of officially separated. At least that’s what I would call it. Adam would say something else—‘taking a breather’ is how he’d probably put it. He likes to mitigate situations, which is one of the many things he does that makes me mad.” Jane paused to wonder if Rex knew what the word mitigate meant, then felt guilty for wondering and plundered forward. “I mean we had a gigantic fight last week, over this trip actually, and he referred to it later as a ‘minor disagreement.’ It was a fight. Definitely a fight. But he’s in his own world where everything is just fine between us.” She shrugged and crossed her legs again. Rex sat watching her, sipping his beer, as if waiting for her to continue.

  “But I don’t have any good reasons not to be married,” she told him. “My husband is a bit of a slacker, and he’s been working on his dissertation for at least six years, which is annoying, but he’s kind and smart and he loves me and the kids. It’s just …” She paused and looked up at the sky, clear but devoid of stars. “It’s just that sometimes, so much of what’s fun about life feels like it’s behind me now.” Hearing herself say these last words out loud, she felt them to be true, and a blue shade of depression pulled down through her.

  “We all feel that way sometimes,” he said. “It’s the human predicament.”

  “Maybe,” she shrugged, embarrassed again for having said so much to a stranger. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asked, setting down her beer and rising, wanting to put some space between the words she’d just uttered and her physical self.

  The mirror above the sink in Rex’s bathroom revealed pink across her nose and shoulders from today’s sun. She ran the water and splashed her face, then dried it on a slightly dingy, white towel. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, she felt decidedly lighter for having told him her story. So what if Rex judged her—though she didn’t think he would. Now at least one other person knew what she had done wrong, and it was a relief.

  Jane thought about the editor who’d also been fired from the paper and wondered what it was he’d seen in her. They hadn’t spoken at all since their mutual dismissal, though he’d emailed her twice. Both times she’d deleted the messages without responding. At the office, his interest in her, his desire, had seemed like such a gift. But the emails—both asking her to meet him for coffee or a drink, to talk over what had happened between them—made that gift feel small and suddenly worthless, though she couldn’t explain why. It was his physical presence that had affected her, the heat of his desire rising from his skin like a visible force. That desire had made her walk around the office with a lighter step. It had glowed secretly within her while she performed her daily chores, helping her to be more patient and loving with her children.

  It had even, in some strange way, brought her closer to Adam. The editor compared poorly to her husband in many respects. He was not as funny. He couldn’t throw a Frisbee or set up a perfect campsite in twenty minutes. He didn’t like to have a drink on the back porch at dusk just when the fireflies appeared for their brief, radiant light show.

  But the editor had made her feel happy, or, at least, expectant. He had lightened the feeling of overwhelming despair she had many mornings upon waking. Her whole day sometimes seemed like a series of chores—dress and feed the kids through a maze of arguing and cajoling; go to work for eight hours; pick up the kids at day care and feel guilty about having left them with strangers all day; fix a dinner that Rocky and Fern wouldn’t like; do dishes and laundry and give baths and read books and solve ridiculous disputes; then finally, at last, sleep. Adam would slip in beside her late at night after working at the bar, smelling of liquor and laying a heavy arm across her middle as if pinning her, unwittingly, to the bed.

  The two final emails from the editor had felt like one more chore to attend to, one more heavy presence to weigh her down, which she guessed is why she had deleted them.

  Jane looked around Rex’s bathroom and took in the details, willing her mind out of the past and into this moment. There was a black comb and single green toothbrush stuck into a cup. The shower curtain was clear and slightly moldy. A naked Barbie doll sat on the back of the toilet. If I lived here, Jane thought, I would get a new shower curtain and brighter towels, hang a picture on the wall and ditch the Barbie. I would tan my skin as dark as I could to see the sharp contrast of my limbs against Rex’s white ones in bed at night.

  Back outside, everyone was in the same position in which she’d left them. Rex standing by the telescope, kids in the sandbox.

  “Okay, it’s time,” Rex said, when he saw her. He set his beer down on the concrete and clapped his hands together. “It’s dark enough now, I think. Hey, Rocky,” he called across the yard, “why don’t you do the honors?”

  Her son jumped off the swing and ran to the telescope as if he’d been given a military command, then leaned to look through the lens, adjusting the eyepiece as Rex instructed, and moving the position of the scope just slightly to the right. Jane realized she was holding her breath. For some reason, she did not think they would actually see Saturn tonight.

  The girls were gathered on the concrete square now too and formed a line behind Rex and Rocky, waiting for their turn to view the planet. Jane was surprised that Fern even knew what Saturn was; she couldn’t recall teaching her daughter about the planets. It would have been Adam, she realized. He liked to tell the kids about things like the stars and planets, mountains, canyons, oceans, all the natural wonders.

  “There it is!” Rocky suddenly cried out.

  Jane felt a rush of energy move through her as she let out her held breath and laughed with delight. He had found it! Her son moved away from the scope with a huge grin on his face and looked at Rex, who nodded in approval. “Good work,” he told Rocky, lifting his beer in a toast. “I knew you could do it.”

  Calliope went next, then the other two girls each took turns gazing through the scope. Each viewing brought a sigh and smile, a laugh of delight. Fern clapped her hands as if she’d just seen a show, then ran to hug Jane’s legs.

  When it was her turn, Jane handed her beer to Rex, then leaned down and placed her eye against the cool lens. It took a moment for her vision to adjust to the scope, and she squinted, then relaxed until the sky came into clear view. And then, there it was floating before her: Saturn. It was smaller than she’d expected, and paler, almost black and white with just the faint glow of orange; there were the rings too, darker reddish-orange loops that looked absolutely still, though she knew they were in orbit. The sight made her heartbeat quicken. She had never seen Saturn before, nor thought she cared to, but there it was, glowing before her right eye with unexpected beauty and promise.

  “Wow,” she said straightening up. “That’s amazing.”

  Rex grinned and passed back her beer, then leaned to take his turn at the scope. “It’s my favorite planet,” he said, his eye pressed to the lens. “I guess it’s sort of an obvious choice because of the rings—I should pick something obscure and unloved like Mercury—but I just think it’s radiant.”

  “It really is,” Jane agreed. She was light-headed for a moment and sat back down in her chair. The two beers were working on her now, but it was more than that. She was excited, filled up with simple, awe-inspired joy. The two younger girls and Rocky had taken up residence on the swing set now, but Polyhymnia remained, hovering nearby. “What’s your favorite planet?” Jane asked her.

  “I like Pluto,” she said. “Even though it’s not considered a planet anymore. It’s still my favorite.”

  “I know, what a rip
-off,” Jane said. “It will always be a planet to me.”

  “They thought about naming it Zeus before it became Pluto,” the girl added. “Right, Dad?”

  Rex turned and put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “That’s right; I guess they considered hundreds of names. But Zeus was one of them.”

  The two of them standing before her, Rex’s hand lightly on the tall girl’s shoulder, reminded Jane of Adam standing in exactly that position with Rocky on their back porch. Instead of stars, however, Adam liked to point out birds—cardinals, starlings, crows, the occasional hawk. It struck Jane that this man and his daughter were simply stand-ins, actors replicating scenes from her life at home, an absurd idea that flitted through her, then was gone.

  Jane realized how dark it had become and stood, knowing that Ivy and Ramona would be worried. “We should head back,” Jane told them. She called her kids over, finished the last swallow of her beer, then shook Rex’s hand. “Thanks so much,” she told him. “That was really great.”

  “Come by whenever,” he said. “The telescope is always open.”

  Passing back through the house with Fern and Rocky—Rex had stayed outside with the girls—Jane noticed another photo, framed and hanging on the wall near the front door. It was a picture of Rex, she decided, though he looked to be only fourteen or fifteen, with close-cropped hair and a nervous smile. He wore a thin black tie over a blue shirt and was standing in front of a white building, possibly a church. He looked vaguely familiar, and Jane thought that perhaps she did remember him from high school. An image flashed through her of a boy sitting beneath the palm tree in the quad, all alone, eating a sandwich. She’d seen that boy sitting there by himself on many occasions, maybe even wearing the exact outfit Rex had on in this photo.

  “Mom,” Fern said, pulling on the leg of her shorts. “Let’s go.”

  Outside on the front lawn, Jane realized she’d left the origami bird behind. She instructed the kids to wait exactly where they were, then let herself back inside and made her way through the living room and down the hallway where she saw Rex coming toward her. He met her halfway and set the bird into her outstretched palm.

  In this close, dark space, Jane felt a desire to touch his skin, which glowed in the dim light reaching them from the kitchen. But before she could react to this strange urge, he stepped toward her, then leaned down and kissed her, wrapping his hands around her waist and pulling her into him so that she could feel the boniness of his chest through his T-shirt. The bird was in her left hand and she held it out and away from her body and put her free hand briefly around his neck before pushing his shoulder away and taking a step back. “My kids are waiting,” she said, feeling guilty, but also humming with the kiss, with the sensation of his hands on her waist.

  He let her go and nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “But once you said you were separated from your husband, that’s all I could think about doing.”

  “But you’re not separated.”

  “Actually, I’m officially divorced. For about five months now. I should have told you before, but I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Oh,” Jane nodded, thinking about the morning she’d seen the wife through the front window. Was he lying to her?

  “I have to go,” she said, then turned and walked through the dark house to the front door. Her children were waiting for her outside, right where she’d asked them to stay, and she took each one’s hand and began walking in the direction of Ivy’s house.

  REX

  He should have lied and said he’d made the bird; perhaps that would have kept her there longer, against him in the hallway. She’d felt sturdier than he’d imagined, not bony at all, and he’d enjoyed the firm curve of her waist in his hands, the lemon smell of her hair. But now she was gone, and he was alone again with his daughters, thinking about Kristina, who was likely lying in a bed somewhere beside a man who now had a particular presence in his mind and a name: Peter.

  The girls were still out in the sandbox. He couldn’t imagine sinking back into that lawn chair and drinking another beer, thinking and thinking about things he didn’t care to think about, so he said, “Let’s go girls, we’re taking a drive.”

  Inside the car, leaving his neighborhood behind, Rex continued to feel an anxious buzzing in the pit of his stomach. He needed a sanctuary, somewhere without memory, because every street he passed called up some time from his life before the divorce—there was the square park with the tunnel slide where he and Kristina used to take the girls, there was the coffee shop where he picked up her espressos on the way home from work; they passed Rhonda’s house, where he’d spent many evenings at raucous poolside barbecues. Now Kristina would likely take Peter to those gatherings.

  The girls were quiet in the backseat, as if they knew better than to speak and interrupt his growing discontent. He turned off of Eastern and drove into another neighborhood. The yellow squares of lit windows lined the street. At nine o’clock, it was too late for kids to be playing outside, he realized, and knew that his own daughters should be in bed too. In the rearview mirror, Callie looked tired, like a mournful wood nymph with her wild blonde hair and pixie features. He couldn’t even bring himself to look at Polly. Since the broken finger, she’d been cheerful enough, but Rex could detect a distinct undertone of despair in her every movement.

  He was not fully aware of where he was going until he was there. The church loomed up on his right, a dark presence that pulled him to the curb where he cut the engine, and sat for a moment in silence.

  He’d been parking outside of this Mormon church for a couple of months now, swinging by after he dropped the girls at school and sitting beside the building in his car. It did not look like the church he’d once attended with his family, but it did remind him of that time, that feeling he’d had of belonging to something.

  Finding the church had been an accident. On his very last construction job, he’d driven by it, noticing the place without stopping. Later that month, after he’d been laid off, he considered going back, possibly joining the congregation, but he had never ventured inside, never looked it up online or called to inquire about the hour of services. It was a medium-sized building—nothing special to look at—but Rex found a certain comfort in just sitting beside it, knowing he could get out and open those wide front doors if he ever decided to do so. The pale beige stucco of the building’s walls looked bumpy in the moonlight. The high-peaked roof cut an angle out of the dark sky.

  “Why are we here?” Calliope asked him from the backseat.

  “No reason,” he told her. “I just felt like sitting for a minute.”

  “I’m tired,” Polly said. “Can we go home?”

  “In a few.”

  Rex could tell they were aware something was the matter but were uncertain how to proceed. He should get out of here and take them for a cone at Baskin-Robbins, but the thought of leaving this dark curb and venturing further overwhelmed him. He needed to be here, just for a few minutes, then he’d be able to face whatever needed doing next.

  He’d left the Mormons for baseball but stayed away for Kristina, who was Catholic. He wouldn’t have gone back anyway, Kristina or not, because during his time apart from the church, he’d begun to understand its intolerance and rigidity. He didn’t think the Catholics were much better, but it really didn’t matter because he and Kristina had never gone to church, not once during their entire marriage. His daughters had never seen the inside of a church, despite efforts from both grandparents, and Rex decided that he would take them at least once, maybe this summer, just so they could see what it was like.

  He stepped out of the car and stretched, then looked up and down the block lined with homes. Across the street, a curve of green park reached around the corner. Not a single human being was in sight. This was his first visit to the church at night, and he felt emboldened to take a closer look, so he stepped over the sidewalk and stood on the lawn, leaning back to take in the roof, then moving his gaze down the building
until his attention was caught by something sitting on the concrete step by the front doors. It was a dark bundle, the size of a backpack.

  Halfway up the walkway, his breath caught. The pinkish arm of a baby was stretched out of the bundle. He rushed over to the step, all his nerves firing at once. He’d heard about this sort of thing occurring—of course he had, everyone had—but the sight of an actual child on an actual church doorstep seemed unreal, out of a movie.

  When he reached the bundle and crouched down, he saw that it wasn’t a real child inside the scrunched-up blanket but a doll. Rex sat back on his heels and looked at the naked, plastic infant. His heart was still pounding from the shock of seeing the baby’s arm; an instinctive panic had propelled him here, and now it felt as if he’d been knocked over. He realized that he’d wanted the child to be a living being, that he’d already imagined the comfort he would provide, picking it up and patting it on the back as he bounced lightly, circling this yard.

  Polly appeared behind him, then crouched down and lifted the doll out of the blanket, turning it over for careful inspection. “Can I keep it?” she asked.

  Could she keep it? He didn’t think so. “No, honey. It’s not ours.”

  “Let me hold it,” Callie said, crouching to join their half-circle on the step. Polly passed the baby to her younger sister.

  Rex rubbed his eyes, then stood and looked across the lawn. When he turned back, he noticed a white slip of paper inside the whorled depths of the blanket and he leaned to retrieve it, then unfolded it slowly. You pretend to give, but all you do is take and take. The writing was slanted and neat, done in blue pen. The words sent an unexpected shiver through him. Had someone lost a child? Given one up for adoption? Abortion? What could the meaning of this message possibly be? He slipped the note into his pocket, not wanting his daughters to see it, and watched Callie, sitting on the dark grass talking to the doll. Polly sat beside her. Rex settled down on the grass nearby, then lay back and looked up at the sky.