by Gian Sardar
She shakes her head and then looks up at the ceiling as she speaks. “Like nothing’s ever over.”
When she looks back to him she sees it—it’s not disgust that’s in his eyes, it’s frustration. An inability—from this little room in Rochester—to undo the past, to save her. He wants to protect her. She sees it, so clearly now. And never has she known a feeling like this; never has she felt worthy of another’s worry.
He sits on the bed before her and takes both her hands in his. “No one,” he says, “should ever hurt you. And I’m sorry that he did.”
The tears are sudden. She doesn’t know they’re coming until in one swift second her eyes prick, her nose tightens, and her cheeks are suddenly wet. He wraps his arms around her. A beam of sun shoots across the floor, scattered particles that dance in the light’s direction.
7
Now
PLANE RIDES: The notorious reason for overdue phone calls, professions of love, and apologies. The morning she’s to leave for Minnesota, Abby wakes Robert with a kiss.
“You’re not gonna die,” he says, reaching for a glass of water on the nightstand.
“I know. But I could. So could you.”
“I won’t die. You won’t die. But you will find what you’re looking for.”
“Hard when you don’t know what it is.”
“You know where to look. You’ll know the rest when you see it. Then you come home, and I’ll have sold the script. And we celebrate.”
Today his script is going out, in time for weekend reads. Abby waits till he takes her suitcase to the car and then slips a couple of granola bars in his briefcase. Apple cinnamon, his favorite. He forgets to eat when he’s nervous and meetings can go long—especially if it’s a good meeting. She pictures him at the end of the day, getting back in the car, hungry, finding it there and thinking of her, how she’d just known.
At the airport she gives him a long curbside kiss as if the plane is taking her to war and not to her mother’s house, and tries not to turn around when she leaves. But she does, once she’s dragged her suitcase through the sliding doors, just in time to see Robert looking over his shoulder before pulling into the airport traffic. This one act, so typical, so basic, one in a million, unwitnessed and unimportant—a glance over a shoulder, head turned, blinker on—locks the entire day in the grip of sadness. Tragic, that’s how it feels, though it makes no sense. Before everything changes, her mother used to say, there is always a moment of nothing. As Abby watches his car, now traveling alongside everyone else’s, stopping when told, going when allowed, she strangely fears that this is that moment.
—
At Enterprise in Minneapolis, Abby initials in a million places, tosses the carbon copy in the glove compartment, then hits the highway—only to veer off quickly and stop for gas, pretzels, and a few protein bars to keep in her room, since her mother believes in meals, no snacks. Minutes later she’s back on the road, air dazzled with a flurry of white cottonwood seeds like the beginnings of an errant snowstorm.
Minnesota. Great stretches of grassland, wildflowers like joy uncontrolled, all the way to forests with ferns and emerald shafts of light. The sky above is bluer than seems possible, clouds wider, fuller, spread fat upon the horizon. It’s been so long that the first glimpse of a red barn makes her feel undone, a sort of desperate homesickness, because everything—farms with their giant satellite dishes, endless miles of fences, even the whoosh and shake of passing semis—all of it is home. And most of her time here was fine, wonderful even, despite her run-of-the-mill nightmares and fears—it was only in high school when the dreams of the meadow began that the world went sour. But now she’s remembering the good. Dirt roads stretch away into forever like veins she will always have within her, and already she’s decided she wants to come back for winter. Little things, mundane, the crunch of snow. The way it outlines bare trees and settles in miniature drifts in windowpanes. There’s nothing so beautiful, she once told Hannah, as a parking lot late at night when the snow has just begun. It made no sense to her California-born friend, even when Abby described working late at the mall and waiting in the quiet hush as flurries drifted under lights, then the warmth of her mother’s car and that sense that everyone had gone home, another day done. Though always, she added, there was one vehicle left behind, tucked off in a corner, being slowly covered in white.
The landscape changes, cleared stretches gripped by thickets of trees. She comes to a railroad. The crossing gates are small and will barely cover her lane, but she’s seen them from a distance, their practiced descent, and brings her car to a slow halt well before the tracks. I am fine. All is okay.
When she hears it, it’s behind a wooded bend. The whistle sounds, and even though the sun is out, it feels like something emerging from the night, that noise, that approach, the rattling steel. The whistle becomes louder, longer and angrier, and even from within her car Abby can hear the tracks begin to shake. When it rounds the corner, she’s aware of her foot on the brake—that’s it, all that keeps her from its path. One inch. If her foot eased up one inch. An eruption of fire, the screech of brakes, the wreckage of her car dragged alongside.
She throws the gear into park, but in her mind the train now jumps the track and barrels toward her, rails burning and alive with sparks. Her eyes are shut tight and her heart slams within her chest as the train pounds past. An eternity. The longest train known to man.
When it’s gone, there is silence. The world unbothered. The crossing gates lift, and she puts her car in drive, breath catching as her tires hit the tracks.
—
A bit later and the scenery has once again soothed her. Makade. Entered from a stop sign on the highway, two gas stations and an American flag at its edge. Within minutes, her old high school is on her right, its name advertised by a sign with removable letters as if on the weekends it’s something else entirely. She’s thinking of what she planned on wearing to the reunion tomorrow night: a revealing red halter top and her tallest heels, heels that will immediately scream I no longer live in Minnesota. This trip, she understands, will make her question everything—she’ll look at Sears photos stuffed in wallets, mottled blue backgrounds and kids with tiny-toothed grins, and hear all the stories of weddings and births and block parties, and she’ll miss this life she could’ve had. All because she wanted a world opposite of what she’d known—sun instead of snow, mountains instead of plains. The differences were deep, entrenched even in the way directions were given at a gas station: Take the 5 to the 134. Unfamiliar, a place where she could be whoever she wanted to be, with no past, no one who remembered her as the awkward freshman or the girl whose father left without saying good-bye. A big place, anonymity. And then time in Los Angeles with her mother, visiting UCLA, and not one nightmare. The right track, it was clear, the correct direction. And so she broke from a perfectly fine and beautiful mold to live in a world of Not Yets, a world where price tags are high and milestones—marriage, houses, kids, retirement—are pushed to the edge of possibility. Now all she has is what the people here cannot: Hollywood and the ocean. If only she could say they lived in Malibu, right on the water! But that could easily be debunked by someone’s asking her for an address. For the newsletter, they’d say, ready to google the street view and value and do all the horrible things that Abby herself has done whenever she’s been given an address.
But she has changed, she knows. She looks better, and that’s something. Tamed. Hair. Eyebrows. Waist. She’s reined herself in, plucked, and conquered. But more than that, she’d ended up in a place where people were fascinated by her past, unfamiliar with her familiarities, and within a matter of time she embraced who she was. Even her morbid fascinations and often ridiculous fears were all stories to tell at a dinner table, the elements people remembered. Her confidence grew, the attentive curiosity of a new place like water on a stone, colors seen for the first time.
Up ahead, ju
st around the bend, will be her house, but already visible is Brittany Deschamps’s family’s house, just across the street from Abby’s, a yellow Cape Cod that once loomed over her childhood like a blazing sun. Friends would come over, excited to play in the pool she’d just set up in the backyard until they caught a glimpse of Brittany in a window. Then the front yard was more enticing, hopscotch on the sidewalk, faces angled toward Brittany’s room. Is that a canopy bed? High school was worse, as Brittany and Aidan became a couple. The worst thing possible, played out right before Abby’s house, good nights whispered to the wrong girl, car windows fogging. Divorced, though—this one rumor of Brittany’s current state has given Abby a slight guilty comfort.
She can’t think about it. She’s regressing. It’s just a visit, but it’s only the second in fifteen years and thus it’s so chock-full of familiarity and significance that her emotions, her thoughts, everything is making her feel precarious. On the verge. And the dreams. Already she’s remembering high school nights spent with her Walkman, piano concertos that filled her mind with sunrises and beaches and soaring birds, efforts at relaxing, at falling asleep to beauty instead of fear. How bad could the dreams get, now that she’s returned? But this, she reminds herself, is why she’s here. A name, a sentence, something might explain, might undo a subconscious knot formed long ago.
Her mother is standing by the front path as Abby pulls into the driveway.
“It’s like a vision,” she says the minute Abby’s out of the car, wrapping her in a swaying hug.
Nivea Creme lotion, the smell of Abby’s childhood, a breath of history. Of course she’s seen her mother in Los Angeles, but the scent combines with the scenery in a way she’d not expected, and at once Abby’s dropped back in time. She finds what’s new—a line of orange marigolds that traces the garden path, the welcome mat a tableau of sunflowers. The house itself looks as it did before, an old blue bungalow with a wide front door that’s all glass panes and dark oak trim, though grown up, paint faded, its trees taller, everything a bit worn, a bit wiser.
Inside is the same—everything familiar, but aged. The same dark blue corduroy couch alongside an antique French maple table, a tacky glass coffee table atop an expensive Persian rug. A mixture of heritage and present circumstance, castle to cottage, a house that’s never made sense. When you come from money but have no money, things are either sold or illogical, her mother used to say. And despite being a teacher, I’ve never been a fan of logic. The only change, as far as Abby can tell, is a flannel shirt that Tom—her mother’s boyfriend of eleven years—has left on the bathroom door’s hook.
“We’re meeting Emilia at Applebee’s,” her mother says, with a glance at her watch. “But you’ve got a few minutes to freshen up.”
Abby sets her suitcases in her bedroom, the corner of the house. At a certain time of day the light from the front and side windows meets, almost smack in the center of her rug, an intersection of brightness. As a child Abby would sit in the spot. There was something about that moment, an embrace from a place unseen.
“No Tom?” Abby asks when they’re back in the car.
Dorothy adjusts her seat. “I saw him last night. We don’t need to see each other all the time. A relationship is not a crutch.”
“Mom, I know. I was just saying.”
“Just something to remember. Did you call Beth?”
Beth, Abby’s former best friend who’d gotten married and had children and a station wagon all while Abby was seeing lights flick on in bars, when she owned place settings for two only because the second set was half off. “Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe before the reunion.”
On the way to Applebee’s, Abby sees that Makade has grown up as well. Spaces filled, stands of poplars and pines lost to a Home Depot, an ExxonMobil station with six pumps. Where once there was a field of lupine and dogbane there’s now a condo complex that overlooks the community college, itself only a decade old. A new grocery store replaces the one where a winter long ago Marc Blanchard’s father had slumped to the floor, his son waiting in the parking lot, the car running, and Abby even notes more police, as if the town is determined to be ready for the violence of the world. In a way it makes Abby sad, that Makade has gone on without her, like someone wishing their ex well while actually hoping for not as good as me.
Right in front of Applebee’s, along the street, Abby finds a parking spot. Inside, the ceiling fans blur and black-and-white photographs of long-ago Makade line the walls.
“What an event,” a voice says, “two such beauties.”
Aunt Emilia. Her mother’s best friend. A fixture in their lives, the host of long-ago Thanksgivings, hot dishes in Pyrex, plates of lutefisk and gravlax. Everything about her is home and good, and as Abby stands for a hug she feels tears stinging at the corners of her eyes.
The usual catching up as booths around them fill and balloons from a birthday party sneak a few tables down before being caught. The reunion tomorrow night, whom she might see, who’s still in town, names Abby’s not heard in years.
“Not one suspect’s been brought in,” Aunt Emilia says suddenly. “Not that I’ve read.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her mother is silent as Emilia’s eyes flicker back to the TV in the corner. Abby turns, in time to catch the words Serial Rapist. Subtitles flash on the screen as the reporter questions young women: Nowhere feels safe.
“What is this?” Abby asks. “Is this in Minnesota?”
Still her mother says nothing, just stirs coffee that’s most likely already gone cold, eyes on the spoon.
Abby turns to Aunt Emilia. “Close to here?”
“You should’ve told her,” Emilia says to Dorothy.
At last Dorothy speaks. “I found out right after Abby booked her ticket. I really thought it would be settled by now.”
“Settled?” Emilia asks. She’s angry, and in this emotion Abby understands that whatever’s gone on would’ve stopped her from boarding the plane.
“I’m sorry,” Dorothy says to Abby. “All I could think was that you were coming home. After so long. And I really did think it would be solved by now, and saying anything would be pointless. A whole lot of worry for nothing.”
“It’s a serial rapist who apparently did the same thing in Marshall years back. Killed someone there, too.”
“Killed someone,” Abby repeats, feeling as though she’s just been handed cards with strange words and told to put them in order. Plates are set on the table. A burger sliced down the middle, pink juice soaking into the bread. She pushes it to the side. “Here?”
“Sarah Breining,” Aunt Emilia says quietly. “Died from complications, I heard.”
Abby looks back at her mother. “I knew Sarah’s older sister.” A little girl in a red dress, that’s how Abby remembers Sarah, the younger sister at a long-ago birthday party, distraught because her balloon had lifted into the air. The whole party seemed to stop in that moment. For a while Sarah’s mother just rubbed her daughter’s small back, circular motions until she caught her breath. In Abby’s mind the little girl’s lips deepen to blue and the red dress turns darker, a rusty, spreading hue.
“Blood loss,” Aunt Emilia continues. “Or internal bleeding? Is it the same? I heard he drugged her and took her fingers.”
“Enough,” Dorothy says. “I’m sure none of that’s true. They’ve been very vague about the whole thing, it’s all a bunch of speculation.”
“Except that she died,” Abby says. “And you didn’t tell me this.”
“Abby, you have nothing to worry about. I already told Tom I’d be staying home with you. I’ll get another lock if that helps. You need to believe me—I thought it would be done by now. Please know that.”
Out of the corner of her eye Abby spots a man staring at them, a book held low on the table before him. Quickly she meets his gaze, wanting to convey the message that she’
s caught him staring, but he doesn’t give. He keeps staring. With a slight roll of her eyes—just to let him know he should be ashamed—she turns away, back to the TV. Nowhere feels safe, the subtitles had said. She wants to duck out of the restaurant and call Robert and Hannah, but one glance at the parking lot, lit only with shallow pools of light, and the urge is gone.
“Abby,” her mother says. “It’s the job of the news to scare people. Okay? You should see the amount of cops here. The guy would be crazy to do anything.”
The cops. Now it makes sense, how many more she’d noticed. Across the room, the man is now reading his book, a damsel in distress on the cover, shoulders bared, hair flowing. A romance? For a moment something within her rises with a thrill of surprise—but then the man licks his index finger, turns the page, and abruptly lifts his gaze, locking eyes with Abby. Unnerved, she turns and sees the busboy on the other side of the room openly watching her. What is going on? A cold current passes through her.
Then the busboy is at their table, refilling their water. Water. That was all it was. Still, there’s a nervous feeling that’s settled in, a slight jitteriness. Closing her eyes, she takes a moment to reground herself, absorbing the sounds of the restaurant, life, everyone fine and healthy. “Happy Birthday” breaks out a couple of booths away. Nothing could be that bad. When at last she looks back, the man with the book is gone, a pile of change left on the edge of the table.
—
When they return home, Abby calls both Hannah and Robert. They each have their own slant. Hannah: You should come home, I don’t like this. Robert: I’m sure it’s been blown out of proportion, but take precautions. That’s all you can do. His logic, for once, fails to comfort. Would it be too much for him to worry?
It’s when she’s gotten in bed that she thinks of the ring, and gets back up to ask her mother to see it. No need to specify which ring, it’s the only one since Dorothy sold her own wedding band to help fund a cruise. We had the best pickled herring, she’d come back saying, still finding little ways to justify the sale. Who knew they could do it better than Olsen’s? Abby barely remembers her mother’s wedding ring, just that it was yellow gold, basic, and at last thrown at her father’s car as he backed down the driveway. You could wear it, Abby once said, about her grandmother’s ring, after her grandmother passed, even on the right hand. But Dorothy long ago took a vow not to go down that road again, and the ring stayed tucked away in her dresser.