“This is nice,” she said, settling into the chair across from Jane’s.
“Insomnia?”
She smiled. “Just being with you. That’s all. And the quiet. I’ve always liked this time of night.”
The kitchen light was off, but enough moonlight came through the windows to make artificial light unnecessary. Still, Jane would have liked to see her mother’s face more clearly. The shadows crossing her familiar features made Jane uneasy, and she tested her tea too quickly and burned her tongue. “Shit,” she muttered. “Sorry. Too hot.”
“You always burn your tongue,” her mother said, shaking her head. “For as long as I can remember.”
“One of my many flaws.”
“Well, if that’s a flaw, you’re not doing too badly.” Her mother blew across her tea, then took out her bag, expertly wrapping it around a spoon, and took a cautious sip.
“So who do you drink tea with in the middle of the night when I’m in Wisconsin?”
“You’d be surprised, but I actually sleep through the night sometimes now that you and Russ are out of the house.”
“No one to wait up for?”
“Or worry about.”
Jane nodded. There had been many nights when she’d arrived home on the exact dot of her midnight curfew to find her mother in a white nightgown at the window, or even sitting outside on the porch. “I wonder if I’ll wait up just like you did when the kids are teenagers.”
“Of course you will,” her mother said with a smile. “It’s the circle of life.”
“But I don’t seem to have the same natural maternal instincts that you have. It doesn’t come so easily to me.” Jane looked down into her tea as she said this and could feel her face burn from her mother’s gaze. This was the closest she had come to admitting anything was wrong to anyone in her family.
“You don’t have to be the exact same mother that I was. There was definitely room for improvement.”
“I don’t think I’ve improved upon your model in any way.” She looked up now and saw that her mother wasn’t watching her at all, but stirring her tea and staring into its swirling heat.
“Is anything going on at home, Jane? Rocky said something was wrong with Adam.” Now her mother met her gaze, her green eyes serious and expectant.
“Adam’s fine,” Jane said, stalling. “What did Rocky say?”
“He said Adam wanted to come on this trip with you, but you wouldn’t let him.”
Jane shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“So why didn’t he come?”
“He couldn’t get the time off. And …” She shrugged and looked around the kitchen, as if hoping to find the answer written somewhere. “I needed some time by myself.”
“Oh,” her mother said. “Well, that sounds reasonable.”
“Also, we’re separated.” Jane said this quickly, then took a long swallow of tea, hoping to drown her rising anxiety with the hot liquid. She watched her mother’s face absorb the information. It began with a slight furrow between her brows, then moved through her eyes and cheeks and ended with a downturn of her mouth.
“Why?” was all she said.
“It’s complicated,” Jane began.
Her mother cut her off and set down her mug with a loud clunk. “No, it’s not. You have two young children who need both their parents, and I don’t want to hear anything else about it. Adam is a good person. You’re a good person. That’s all I need to know.”
“You’re not even going to let me explain?” Jane said, knowing as she said this that she couldn’t really explain the situation clearly, even to herself.
“No, it’s your business. I don’t want to get in the middle of it.” Her manner had become cold and efficient, a strange pairing with her robe and sleep-worn face.
“But Mom, what if I need some advice?”
“You’ve never wanted it before, even when I offered it.”
“But now I do want it.” As she said the words aloud she felt their inherent truth, though it was obvious her mother’s advice was going to be the same as Ivy’s: return to your husband. And that wasn’t the advice Jane wanted, so what was the point in hearing it again? It was more of a need to be soothed, Jane understood, than to hear the truth. She wanted to crawl onto her mother’s lap, wrap her arms around her neck, and weep into her shoulder, but she was taller than her mother now and heavier, and besides, she hadn’t been able to shed a tear for many months. It was as if her sadness was something brittle and dry. It scraped against her insides when she swallowed or moved or even when she slept.
Her mother raised her thin shoulders. It was not quite a shrug, because the shoulders stayed up. It was more a gesture of cramped dismay, a motion used to absorb a blow. She didn’t say anything else in response to Jane’s plea for advice, merely shook her head.
This small movement hit Jane with such force that she rose from the table, set her tea cup on the counter, and returned to her bedroom. She shut herself in and quickly dressed, pulling on jeans and a tank top and slipping into her green flip-flops. She grabbed Ramona’s car keys from the dresser along with her purse, then left the house without looking to see if her mother was still in the dark kitchen.
There was broken glass on the street beside her car, and she felt a moment of despair to think someone had broken Ramona’s window, but the glass on the car was intact, and on closer inspection Jane saw it was a broken bottle at her feet. Kicking it aside, she slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The neighborhood closed in around her as she drove down her old street. It felt stiflingly narrow, and Jane wondered why she had always remembered her block as expansive, her street as a place of lovely trees and neat grass. It was a child’s memory of a place, she decided, a memory that no longer held any truth.
The streets leading her back to Ivy’s place were nearly deserted, and when she passed a bank she saw the time, 4:07, and the temperature, sixty-seven degrees, blinking at her across the dark sky. No one would be awake at Ivy’s, and she imagined slipping back into her bed then getting up and eating breakfast with her friends as if nothing had happened yesterday. No one needed to know that she’d slept with Rex. She would skip that part of the day entirely and explain that she’d gone to her parents’ house to be with her kids.
Just past Sahara, her gas light blinked on, so she pulled into a station and filled the tank, then bought a pack of powdered sugar donuts and a small jug of milk and stood eating and drinking as she leaned against the car and looked out across the strip malls and highway toward Sunrise Mountain, its dark shape collecting gray light at the edges, though it wasn’t nearly time for dawn, was it?
Standing here reminded her of high school. It was something to do with the donuts and the time of night. On a few occasions she and Ivy and Ramona had stayed out until dawn at the lake—if Jane stayed the night with Ivy or Ramona, no one kept tabs on them at all—then driven back and stopped at a gas station for food, ravenous from a night of swimming and drinking wine coolers and telling each other ghost stories. It was likely those outings had been dangerous—Lake Mead was not necessarily a safe place at night—but it had never occurred to them to be truly scared. They had been lucky, she guessed, to have arrived home intact. Her mother hadn’t known about those nights at the lake, and Jane wondered if she would ever tell her.
Back in the car, her stomach felt slightly sick from the sugary donuts, and she sat in her space at the gas station for several long minutes wondering if she should head back home or continue on to Ivy’s house. Her certainty to return to her friends had begun to dissolve, and she worried she may not even be welcome, especially once Ivy found out that Jane had slept with Rex, for it suddenly struck Jane that the fact would be impossible to hide. It must show on her face, on her skin, in the way she would move across a room. The details of this afternoon played in Jane’s mind like a movie, and she could feel her skin heat up at the memory. Her distaste for Rex’s tears had vanished, and in its place remained a curiosity
, a desire, even a need to see him again.
But first she must make things right with Ivy, so she started the engine and left the empty gas station. She would have to explain the separation from Adam to her friend in a way that made sense. This was a necessity. My parents’ marriage was so perfect and vibrant, she might begin, that the shock of my actual marriage, its meandering love, its many irritations and disappointments, knocked me over. She had never explained the situation to herself in this way, but was struck now by the truth of it. Her expectations had been too high. She had been blindsided by the struggle of trying to continuously love another person for years on end. This was the advice she needed from her mother: how had she and Jane’s father managed to be happy for over thirty years?
She was in Ivy’s neighborhood now, and the rows of identical homes on either side of the street gleamed with newness compared to her parents’ neighborhood. Seeing Ivy’s now familiar red door gave Jane a leap of hope, as it had the first day she’d seen it, and she parked and got out of the car without hesitation. Coming here had been the right thing to do.
On the front step, however, she realized she had no key, and it wasn’t yet 5:00 a.m., much too early to ring the doorbell. She tried to peer past the blinds into the front room but could see nothing, so she walked around the side of the house and noticed that the kitchen light was on. It would be Ivy, Jane knew, up with Lucky, and she walked down the narrow alley of pea gravel, then stood on her tiptoes and looked inside.
The scene before her made her insides contract. Adam was sitting at Ivy’s table, drinking a glass of wine and nodding at something Ivy was saying to him across the table. She was drinking wine too and using her hands to describe something to Adam that Jane couldn’t decipher—a waterfall? A boat ride? Everything about the vision was wrong. For one, it was almost dawn and they were drinking wine. Also, Lucky was nowhere in sight. Most of all, Jane couldn’t fathom how Adam had materialized at Ivy’s kitchen table in the middle of the night. Of course, he’d taken a plane and then a taxi or car from the airport, but it was too unlike him for the actions to be real. Adam did not take action; he waited for things to happen to him.
Jane flattened her feet and the scene disappeared from view, then she took a deep breath and lifted back up onto her toes to study her husband. He looked exactly the same as he always did. Her leaving him had left no visible trace. His light brown hair waved up from his forehead and down over his collar. His skin was slightly burned from reading in the hammock in their backyard. His profile revealed a nose that was a little too big, bumped at the top from breaking it during a tetherball game in junior high, lips that were thin and wide and a jaw that cleaved a neat, solid line, not yet softened by age. In five or six more years, she imagined it would begin to disappear like his father’s, and his pale skin would weather around his eyes and mouth, but for now he still gave off the solid vibrations of youth. He was only thirty-four, two years younger than she was, and she understood as if for the first time how very young he had been, how young both of them had been, when they got married.
She felt a tenderness toward him then that she hadn’t in a long time, and Jane placed her palm against the windowpane as if to touch him, expecting him to see her hand and turn toward her, wanting him to and not wanting him to at the same time. But neither Adam nor Ivy noticed her there outside in the dark, and the thought of knocking on the pane seemed impossible.
Her raised hand felt like a good-bye, and she lifted it off the glass, then walked back along the alleyway and out to the front of the house. Leaving the car at the curb, Jane began walking up the sidewalk. Her feet were leading her toward Rex’s house, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to see him. It would be a good destination, just to give purpose to her walk, then she could turn around and return to Ivy and Adam. In about an hour, Lucky would be up, then Jane could tap lightly on the front door and be let back in.
The dark air around her was clean and smelled of swimming pools, the familiar scent traveling from backyards and reaching her here as she moved in a straight line up the street. This smell alone was enough to call up an entire childhood, enough to press a painful fist against the back of her throat. Jane had been mostly happy here, growing up, and this seemed lucky. It was more than a lot of people had.
She had taken her happiness for granted, she saw now. She acted as if it was a birthright, but that wasn’t true, and Ivy and Ramona already knew this. Being happy was a sort of perk, an extra that came to you in odd moments, then was gone. It was not continuous and steady. You could not rely on it to be there every morning.
Rex’s house looked different in the dark, and she wasn’t sure she was even standing in front of the right one. The row of oleander bushes along the edge of the yard seemed wrong, as did the circular stones leading to the front door. But that was his old blue car in the driveway, she decided, and the large front window where she’d glimpsed his ex-wife. When she noticed two skateboards leaned against the garage door, she finally felt certain this was the right place.
Jane sat down on the front lawn and pulled her knees to her chest. It wouldn’t be light, she guessed, for another hour, so no one would see her sitting here. She wondered if Adam and Ivy were still at the kitchen table, but thought they had likely gone to sleep. Behind her, she pictured Rex asleep alone on that giant bed. He would have his arms flung out wide and welcoming, his white-blond hair a sharp contrast against the blue of his pillow. Jane felt an urge to climb through his window and slide in beside him. If she could manage that feat without waking him, she would do it, but she didn’t see how that was possible.
She rose from her seat on the grass and began walking again, traveling the path she and Ivy had taken to the mountains the other day. It felt as if she were the only person awake in the entire city. Of course, a couple of miles away on Las Vegas Boulevard thousands of people would be up, playing cards and slot machines and eating cheap breakfasts, but out here the world was quiet and dark.
It took her hardly any time at all to reach the base of the Black Mountains, and she hopped over the low wall and began climbing, hoping she wouldn’t step on a scorpion in her flip-flops. The sky was growing brighter now; the polished undersides of the clouds radiated a pale orange light that reminded her of winter skies in Wisconsin right before it snowed. Adam had first pointed those skies out to her, showing her the way the clouds were so full with ready snow that they cast a glow, even late at night.
Before they had Fern and Rocky, they used to stand on the back deck on nights like those, waiting for the first flakes to arrive. Usually, they couldn’t wait long enough and they missed the beginning, going to bed after midnight and waking to a lawn of white in the morning, but once or twice they had witnessed the arrival of the snow, and it had felt, then, as if they had won a prize, together.
It struck Jane that this was the sort of memory that should lure her back to Adam, to their life together, but it felt more like a story about two people she no longer knew, rather than an actual vision of her past.
She sat down on a flat rock and looked out toward the city. She’d climbed higher than she had with Ivy and the kids and had a good view of the entire neighborhood and a glimpse of the streets and buildings beyond. Lights began to come on in houses; cars started in driveways. The sun was still behind the mountain, but the sky had transitioned to a pale, washed-out blue. The ground at her feet was visible now too, and she took in the low, green bundles of sage, the rocky, gray-black earth. Soon she would have to make her way back down the mountain, then walk to Ivy’s house and see Adam, but for now she would just sit here, waiting for the city to awaken.
RAMONA
In the morning, Ramona felt a twinge of nausea and quickly ran to the bathroom, but once she shut herself inside and waited, the feeling passed, so she brushed her teeth and hair, then braided it and went to get dressed. It was as if learning she was actually pregnant had brought on the symptoms, which seemed absurd since the body knew what it knew and reacted accordingly. S
till, in the kitchen she was hungrier than she’d been in weeks and was rummaging through the fridge for bacon and eggs when she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find Ivy, still wearing the robe she’d worn all day yesterday.
“We’re out of coffee, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Ivy told her.
“Bacon.”
Ivy leaned in past her, reached behind a tub of cottage cheese, and produced a new package of bacon, which Ramona accepted gratefully and took to the stove to cook. Once the package was open, however, she hesitated, wondering if nitrates would harm the baby.
“Have you seen Jane?” Ivy asked. “Her car’s here, or your car—the one she was driving—but I can’t find her.”
Ramona shook her head as she read the ingredients on the package, then resealed it and slid it back into the fridge. “Maybe she took a walk?”
“To that weirdo’s house.”
“I doubt that. It’s pretty early.”
“True,” Ivy said, and sank into a kitchen chair. She sighed and rubbed her eyes, then ran both hands through her unwashed hair. “Adam showed up last night. He’s asleep in Jane’s room.”
For some reason, this didn’t surprise Ramona. “I guess I sort of expected him to show up sooner or later,” she said, then poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and sat down across from Ivy. “The minute I heard they’d split, I had a feeling he’d come after her.”
“Really?” Ivy raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I didn’t see that coming at all.”
“Jane always had boyfriends who couldn’t live without her. Remember Arnold? And that other guy, Ricky? He used to stand outside her English class every day, waiting to say hi to her even after they broke up. He pretended he was there to get a drink at the fountain, but it was so obvious.”
Vegas Girls Page 24