Mark could feel himself getting rankled. He knew being mad at a dog was irrational. You can’t reason with an animal. But he couldn’t help it. He was peeved. “Come on, man,” he said. “Come on.”
Finally, just as Maggie emerged from the little store, Gerome squatted and peed.
“You took forever,” Mark called from across the parking lot. His shoulders were wet from the rain, the tops of his shoes damp.
Maggie shrugged. She had a coffee in each hand and a little plastic bag hooked around her wrist. “Yeah, but Gerome’s just now doing his business,” she said. “So what does it matter?”
The coffee, like Mark knew it would be, was lukewarm.
“This is bad,” he said.
“I’ll drink it,” Maggie said.
But that wasn’t the point. Mark wanted coffee. He needed the caffeine.
Maggie pulled the car back onto 35. Gerome was standing in the backseat. He was drooling—something he did when he was nervous. It drove Mark nuts that they had a neurotic dog. Neurotic people had neurotic dogs, and Mark was not a neurotic person. And Maggie was a vet, for Christ’s sake. It made no sense that Gerome wasn’t a more natural animal.
“I swear to god, your dog is going to kill me if he doesn’t sit down,” Mark said.
Maggie was ignoring him. Or, rather, she was ignoring his pessimism. Or what she’d call his pessimism. Which was an imprecise term for his current state of mind. What she meant by pessimism—even though she hadn’t said anything, but what she meant in her thoughts, which right now Mark could’ve read a mile away—was, in fact, his current dissatisfaction. That’s what she was actually ignoring. She didn’t like it when he complained about more than one thing at a time: the coffee, the dog.
Well, tough luck. Sometimes the cookie crumbled in an unforgiving way, and sometimes Mark just needed to spout off about it. Sometimes it felt dishonest to keep his grievances to himself, which was what Maggie would have preferred.
He took another sip of coffee and grimaced deliberately, even though he knew Maggie was looking at the road and not at him. It felt good to grimace. It felt good to indulge in a physical manifestation of his dissatisfaction. He grimaced again. He felt like a man. A man’s man, he thought. A dog’s dog and a man’s man. But Gerome was not a dog’s dog. Where had that thought even come from? He shook it off.
Maggie switched the wipers to a higher speed. Outside, the air was glossy. Cotton ball clouds gathered overhead—milk blue at the bottom but rich green high up where the red sun hit the rounding peaks. In the distance, above a blinking streetlight, there were multiple cracks of sepia lightning.
“They were running on a generator,” Maggie said after a moment. “The gas station.”
“A generator?” said Mark. “I guess you don’t need power to pump gas, huh? Or maybe you do. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“The guy said all the houses on his side of the street lost power. All the houses on the other side”—she pointed out Mark’s window—“still have it.”
For a moment, he watched the houses, one after the other. Some with cars in the driveway, most empty. Some with tidily mown lawns, most not. In almost every yard, there was a child’s abandoned toy—a car, a castle, a shovel. If they’d had a kid, Mark would have avoided the brightly colored plastics, the neon yellows and greens that were geared more toward safety than fun. Not just for ecological reasons would he eschew the plastics, but for sentimental ones. Like so many others of his generation, he’d grown up with a classic red metal wagon: first he’d been carted around in it by his parents, and then, later, when he was big enough to pull it himself, he’d used it to tow the pots and pans and wooden spatulas Gwen had given him as playthings. He used his imagination to color in the fantasies, to brighten those hours of magical aloneness he spent outdoors. If they’d ever had a child, Mark would have raised him the same way. But, of course, they didn’t. There was no one to be raised in or out of his image, which was simply the fact of the matter.
“In ten more years, towns like this won’t exist,” Mark said. “Did you see all those For Sale signs? Everything is empty. It’s just not cost-effective to live in the middle of nowhere. It’s irresponsible.”
“Your parents live in the middle of nowhere,” she said.
“It’s different. They live off the grid.”
“No,” she said. “They don’t. They aren’t farmers. They’re retirees. They couldn’t live without access to the city.”
“My father still teaches.”
“He’s emeritus. He teaches once a year,” she said. Then, after a beat: “When he feels like it.”
Mark didn’t understand why she was being so aggressive, perhaps because he’d been finicky about the coffee. “You love my parents,” he said.
“I do love your parents,” she said. “I love them more than my own. I don’t know what I’d do without them in my life.”
Other wives made similar avowals to their husbands and they didn’t mean a single word. But something Mark loved about Maggie—something he was genuinely thankful for—was that she did love his parents. And they loved her. They’d taken her in so keenly, so dearly. Maggie had a way of bringing out the best in Robert and Gwen. Around her, their eccentricities fell away. His mother especially seemed to understand, without ever being explicitly told, that Maggie’s childhood had been—to put it kindly—subpar. Maggie was the first girl with whom his mother hadn’t tried to compete. Instead, Gwen—like Mark, like Robert—had fallen quite quickly in love with Maggie.
“I only meant,” he said, “that if they wanted, they could live without access to the city. But they don’t want to.”
Maggie nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know exactly what you meant. I’m being snippy. My mind is somewhere else.”
Mark had a great affinity for Maggie’s mind. He’d fallen first, yes, for her looks—that goofy gap between her teeth hidden always just behind her plump upper lip. But he’d been seduced ultimately by her brain—its quirks, its ambitions. There were nights still when he would wake with a start, fearing the evening on the riverboat had been a dream, fearing he’d never met her. Lately, though, he was frightened that her mind might be morphing. He wanted desperately to keep it safe and steady.
“Where is it now?” he said. “Your mind? What are you thinking?”
“Are you making fun?”
“Not at all,” he said. “Tell me.”
She massaged the steering wheel with both hands. After a minute, she said, “Do you think you willfully see the worst in people?”
“How do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“Typically speaking, do you think you’ve been pessimistic or optimistic?”
“Optimistic,” he said. “Where’s this coming from?”
“Typically speaking,” she said, “do you think you’ve been even-tempered or are you prone to moodiness?”
“Moodiness?” he said. “Is this part of your test?”
“Strong changes of mood,” she said. “Like with the coffee.”
“I suppose . . .” he said. He searched for a real answer. He didn’t want her to retreat, but he also didn’t want to be tricked into taking some adulterated version of a test he had no faith in and whose results—accurate or otherwise—proved nothing. “I suppose you were feeling snippy just now and I was feeling moody. I think we can safely blame the weather and the drive for both.”
Maggie was right—what she was suggesting but hadn’t come directly out and said—Mark did find occasional pleasure in predicting life’s disappointments, but she was wrong to suspect him of seeing the worst in people. He saw the best. He did! It was why he taught, why he was a teacher in the first place. He believed in humanity, in the generosity of the human spirit, in the individual: My heart leaps up! It was the Internet that had gotten in the way, eliminating face-to-face interaction, obviating the need, the desire, the occasion to see the whites of another’s eyes. Strip it from them and they’d all go back to nor
mal. It, normalcy, was still attainable. Real childhood could still be salvaged: The Child is father of the Man! Maybe not for the ones who had already been exposed, but they could be treated. Like for a virus. They could be weaned slowly off it. The Internet was a teat, a drug. Take it away—cut those thirty billion watts of electricity—and they’d get used to it. They’d become human again: Bound each to each by natural piety. He was sure of it. Elizabeth had once called him a breathtaking teacher.
To their right, they were now passing a single-story structure with a sign overhead: PINEY CAMP HOTEL. There was grass growing up its sides, but there were a few cars parked in front. He thought again of Elizabeth. She could have made a place like Piney Camp fun; would have called it an adventure, maybe even a breathtaking one. So I’ve been thinking about sex, she’d written. Without too much effort, he could picture the kind of life they might have had together if he’d been younger, single, if she’d really been an option: road trips for the sake of it to towns they’d never heard of. He could practically hear her saying, “It has a bed, doesn’t it? Is there anything more we need?”
Mark squeezed his temples. He needed to snap out of it.
Part of it—You know what? Yes, though he’d never thought of it this way before: part of what made Maggie’s intense new relationship with fear so intolerable was that it felt like a comment about him. That switchblade, those cans of mace, that outrageous application for a concealed carry permit—it all felt like maybe Maggie didn’t think he could protect her if and when she needed protection. Sure, he’d not been with her in the alley, but if he had been, he could have done something. He could have pushed the guy down or stepped in front of her and told her to run. He could have done any number of things. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t there. Just like it wasn’t his fault that the college girl was dead. It was coincidence they lived near her at all; coincidence that both women at the hands of different men had been hit in the neck with the heel of a gun. But there was something about Maggie’s newfound paranoia, about her determination that she was suddenly more susceptible to another attack than someone else, that made Mark feel like less of a man.
Yes: less of a man. That right there was the problem. It was devastating.
9
The rain picked up. The sky turned dark and slick. If there was a moon, they couldn’t see it. The streetlamps on the left side of the road were working. On the right side—eastbound—they weren’t. Gerome was snoring aggressively in the backseat. After a while, Mark leaned his head against the passenger window.
“I’m just resting my eyes,” he said.
Maggie turned down the radio.
“No, no,” he said, his eyes already closed. “I promise not to fall asleep.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Maggie said. “Rest.”
“Just my eyes,” he said. “I promise not to sleep.”
He was out in five minutes. Maggie turned the radio off altogether. She liked the sound of the rain, the steady thunk of the wipers. She didn’t necessarily like driving in weather like this, but at the end of the day, she didn’t mind it. That’s just how she was. And if Mark was tired, she was happy to let him sleep. He’d been working nonstop all semester. This was his break. It was time for him to rest up, to get his energy back so he could write.
The thing about Maggie: she would have made a good mom. People were always saying so. Her patients’ owners especially couldn’t believe she didn’t have children. “But the way you are with animals . . .” It was a constant refrain.
Totally, totally, she’d thought about it. And why not? She was a woman: it was impossible not to have the discussion at some point or another. When they first started dating in fact, Mark had asked if she was interested, but the conversation hadn’t lingered on babies. Instead, it turned quickly to Maggie’s own mother. “There was so much disappointment in that house,” she’d told him. “But there were also these photos, photos from before me and my brother, and in them my parents looked happy. I don’t remember ever seeing them look happy around me.” Maggie didn’t think her parents’ miserable attitudes were her fault, but she understood that—rightly or wrongly—she and her brother had changed things. “You know they didn’t hug us?” she’d told Mark that day. “I can’t remember a single hug. What I’m getting at, I suppose, is if it happens, it happens. But if it doesn’t, I’ll be okay.” And it hadn’t happened, and Maggie really was okay. There were bound to be regrets one day. When she was Gwen’s age, for instance, she assumed she would experience a sort of homesickness for someone who never existed—a son, maybe a daughter. She’d miss the presence of youth in her life; miss getting to see that son or daughter fall in love for the first time. But Maggie also assumed that the homesickness would be infrequent, and the possibility of a future regret certainly didn’t seem reason enough to change one’s life now.
She slapped the steering wheel. “A mother,” she said, though Mark was out cold, “what a strange thing to be.” She shook her head.
Maggie glanced in the rearview. In the back, Gerome readjusted himself. His two yellow eyes glowed up at her. “Can you imagine?” she said to the dog. “Can you even imagine something so odd?”
Gerome sighed. The yellow eyes disappeared into the darkness of the backseat.
They were east of Xenia now, but they were no longer making good time. The rain had slowed everything down. At nearly every streetlight, she caught the red. They’d have to get a hotel eventually, but they wouldn’t hit the big chains for another hour or two. They were still four hundred miles from Charlottesville, still two and a half hours from West Virginia.
“Damn it,” Maggie said.
Mark shifted but didn’t wake. The wipers ticked right, left, right, left. A streetlight ahead turned from green to yellow to red.
“Mark,” she said.
He smacked his lips and yawned.
“Mark,” she said again. Now she tapped him on the knee.
“We there?” His eyes were still closed.
She laughed. “You’ve been out twenty minutes,” she said. “We’re definitely not there.”
“What’s up?” He cracked his neck. He was slowly coming to.
“We didn’t even think about dinner,” she said.
US-35 was a wasteland when it came to food. Usually they were on 64, in West Virginia, by the time they were hungry, which meant Starbucks, Panera, Chipotle. US-35 involved gas stations with fried chicken and fast-food buffets with names like Krispy Kitchen and Fishin’ Freddie’s.
“Did you pack snacks?” he said.
She shook her head. “Only for Gerome.”
The light turned green, and Maggie slowly pressed down on the gas.
“Don’t get too close to the trucks,” said Mark.
“I know,” she said.
“Their brakes,” he said.
She nodded. She wasn’t annoyed. She might have been annoyed, but just then she wasn’t. Just then she liked that he was acting a little paternal. It made her feel safe. It made her feel loved.
“How far are we from Charleston?” he said.
“Three hours,” she said. “Then another three to Charlottesville.”
Mark got out his phone.
“What are you looking at?” asked Maggie.
“Why are you always asking me that?”
“I didn’t realize I was,” she said.
“I’m checking e-mail.”
“I thought you didn’t like checking e-mail on your phone.”
“Students,” he said. “We left early. I want to make sure there are no questions about the final.”
Mark was so meticulous about avoiding the computer at home. So meticulous, as a matter of fact, that lately she’d begun to wonder at it. Not that he could have known—because she wasn’t in reality, as he’d suggested, always asking—but she’d recently grown curious about the nature of his online correspondence: computers, phones, or otherwise. For one thing, she’d been wondering why he changed his password a few m
onths ago. That question had most certainly been on her mind, but no way had she brought it up with him. There were too many obvious follow-up inquiries from Mark:
How did she know he’d changed his password?
Had she tried logging in to his personal account?
His school account?
Why?
Surely—as far as he was concerned at least—his queries would trump and possibly invalidate her initial one: why had he needed to change it in the first place? So she hadn’t asked, but it was something she wondered about from time to time.
“Also, I wanted to see where we are,” he said, “on the map.”
Mark had an early generation smartphone with a scratched-up screen; it was unlikely the map was even readable.
“Is it the stupidest idea in the world to say we should just turn around?” he said.
“Go back to Chicago?”
He gave a little chuckle. “Dayton,” he said. “We’re only twenty miles east of it.”
“How is that even possible?” she said. “That makes no sense.” It was daylight when they’d skirted Dayton. Now it was night.
“Small roads,” he said. “Rain.”
A station wagon pulled abruptly in front of them. Maggie hit the brakes and put her arm out as if to keep Mark from jerking forward. He took her hand and kissed it. “You’re doing great,” he said.
She smiled. “Thanks.”
“Should we just keep going, then?” he said.
“I guess,” she said. “The idea of Dayton . . .”
“I know.”
Mark went back to his phone. Maggie drove in silence for a few minutes, then turned on the radio. Mark turned it off again.
Listen to Me Page 6