Ms. Taken Identity

by Dan Begley

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Dan Begley

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  5 Spot

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  5 Spot is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  The 5 Spot name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55061-1

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Robin, always

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Ms. Taken Identity exists because of the inspiration, wisdom, and love of many people, from a week ago, from twenty years ago. Thank you: Mom and Dad; Tim and Megan; Mama; Lori; Sister Marian Niemann C.S.J.; Mike Lord; Fr. Rick Stoltz; Professor Charles Larson; David Carkeet; Mary Troy; Dennis Bohnenkamp; the University of Missouri—St. Louis MFA faculty; the faculty, staff, and students of Cor Jesu Academy; Tex Tourais; David Nowak.

  Dan Lazar, for turning me in the right direction.

  Colleen Williamson, for your brilliant comments.

  Melanie Murray, for saying yes.

  Tooraj Kavoussi, for spreading the word.

  Special thanks to my agent, Laura Langlie. Wow. You’re simply wonderful.

  To my editor, Emily Griffin: what a pleasure this has been. Thanks for your expertise and enthusiasm.

  Thanks to Tareth Mitch, Claire Brown, and everyone else at 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing.

  I overheard the following conversation recently at the gym:

  GUY 1: How you doing today?

  GUY 2: Just another day in paradise.

  And so it is.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Here’s what I’m doing around six o’clock when the apartment door flies open behind me: poring over Who’s Who in Greek Mythology, jotting down story ideas, nursing a frosty Guinness. Here’s what my girlfriend Hannah is doing: stumbling through the door with her luggage. Here’s why it means big trouble: I forgot to pick her up at the airport.

  She heaves her purse and her carry-on inside, then starts wrestling a lumberjack-sized suitcase over the threshold. The bag gets stuck, but she promptly unsticks it with one of those vicious, shoulder-socket-ripping yanks, and rubber wheels slam down on the hardwood floor with a heavy ka-junk. I can’t see her face, but I can see her hair, which is darker blond than it should be and plastered to her skull, and the back of her blouse is sheer in spots and sticking to her skin. I didn’t even know rain was in the forecast.

  “Here, let me help you,” I say, starting toward her.

  She whips around to face me so fiercely that drops of water from her hair splatter my T-shirt and boxers.

  “No,” she says—spits, really—and instantly I catch her drift: Back off. Shut up. Drop dead. Two of the three which I immediately do.

  It’s quite an accomplishment, schlepping all that luggage from airport to cab to apartment, up a flight of stairs—in a downpour—and you’d think now would be a good time for her to catch her breath, say hi, maybe toss me out a window. Instead, she hitches her purse high on her shoulder, balances the carry-on against her hip, and drags the bulging suitcase behind her, clomping her way toward the bedroom, not even bothering to look back when she knocks into a table and sends a vase crashing to the floor. She rounds the corner and is gone, and I’m left in the living room, thoughts and busted ceramic all to myself.

  In hindsight, it seems like such an easy thing to have done, keep track of the time. After all, I’ve been doing it for the better part of twenty years now, usually with expert success. So what happened this time? Something in the apartment should have reminded me of her, and that she was gone, and that I needed to pick her up. The TV. The sofa. The coaster I was using. The vase that’s no longer a vase. Her stuff is everywhere, as it should be, I suppose: it is her apartment. How did I manage to make such a mess of things?

  But the soul-searching must wait for later. She storms out of the bedroom like a tornado looking to touch down, and my gut tells me I’m the nearest tin-roofed shed. Miraculously—or alarmingly—she swoops by me like I’m not even there and heads straight for the kitchen. When a few moments pass and I don’t hear glass breaking, I ease myself that way and lean in the doorway; this seems close enough for the moment. She’s changed into sweats, her hair tousled and frizzy, all her makeup wiped away. She’s boiling the kettle for tea.

  “So everything was fine in Houston?” I ask. She’d taken a trip there to visit her sister and brother-in-law and their new baby, Hannah’s first niece.

  She pulls out a mug from the cabinet. One mug.

  “And your flight? Smooth sailing?” Smooth sailing? Shit, I’m already mixing my metaphors. That’s how rattled I am.

  She gets out a lemon. And a knife.

  I get the feeling this could go on for hours, days, maybe the rest of our natural lives—me speaking, her ignoring me—so I figure it’s up to me to set things right.

  “Look, Hannah, I’m sorry. Very, very sorry. I can’t say it any other way. I forgot to pick you up and it’s totally my fault. But just so you know, I knew you were coming home today. I even made the bed.” She has to have noticed that. “I just lost track of the time.”

  She blasts me with an icy stare. “You just lost track of the time?” she snaps, incredulous. “Jesus, Mitch. I talked to you yesterday. I gave you my flight information. We said we’d get Chinese on the way home from the airport and have an early dinner, in bed. I haven’t seen you for five days. Five. And you lost track of the fucking time?”

  When she puts it like that—in other words, in English—I get exactly what she’s saying, no argument from me. I’m tempted to save her the trouble and tell myself to go fuck off. Still, the least I can do is try to explain.

  “I got caught up in my book, taking notes,” I offer. “I had my cell turned off, the answering machine unplugged.” I give her a helpless shrug. “You know how I get when I’m writing.”

  She squeezes the knife handle and stiffens her entire body, making it clear, yes, she knows how I get when I’m writing. And doesn’t think much of it. But just as quickly her expression changes and something darker takes hold. Her eyes glaze over, her shoulders slump, all the life in her goes splat on the floor.

  “Oh, god, Mitch. We need to talk.”

  She braces herself against the counter with all her weight, as if it’s the only thing holding her up.
But then, by degrees, she straightens and stands on her own two feet.

  “My sister was the one who always dreamed of the fairy-tale ending. Great marriage, house with a picket fence, beautiful children at the dinner table. Now she’s got it, and she couldn’t be happier. For me, it’s never been quite so clear cut. Maybe yes to all of it, maybe I’d pick and choose. But most importantly, let love come first, and we’ll see where it goes from there. But you already know that.”

  Right, sure I do, I nod. But here’s what I’m thinking: What the hell is she talking about? She never mentioned anything about marriage or houses or kids or love coming around. Did she?

  She gazes plaintively into her mug of tea, as if she’s searching for something inside. The clock over the sink ticks off the seconds. Finally, she turns to face me.

  “You don’t love me, Mitch. Not the way I want to be loved. And I can keep making excuses to stay, tell myself that no relationship is perfect and what I have is good enough and maybe it’ll get better over time. Or I can take the blinders off and face the truth. That after eight months of doing everything to be at the top of your list, I’m still stuck behind your writing and Bradley and all the other things so important in your life.” She takes a breath to steady herself. “And that’s the way it’ll always be.”

  She bites at her lip because she’s starting to lose it, so I throw myself on the fire. “Maybe I’m just not capable of such feelings.”

  She practically leaps at me. “But you are. I’ve seen it, in glimpses. Remember my birthday, when you took me out for sushi, even though you hate sushi? You did it for me, because you knew that’s what I wanted. Or when you surprised me with the de Sordi print. I just mentioned the guy’s name in passing, and you did all the footwork, tracking it down, special ordering it. Do you know how great that made me feel?”

  Yeah, I think I do. Because it made me feel pretty good myself.

  She looks like she wants to go on, stay with those happier memories, but she wills herself to push them away.

  “I can’t keep living this way, Mitch, getting bits and pieces of you. I deserve better. And maybe I don’t have it all worked out, but I do know this much: I want someone who makes me a priority. Someone who carves out a place in his heart that’s just for me, and when I go away for a few days, he notices. Because in some small way, I make his life complete. And I know that’s not true for you.”

  I’d love to tell her that she’s got it all wrong, if I could, without lying. “Maybe we should start all over,” I offer, to be nice.

  She gives me a look like that thousand-pound suitcase of hers just fell on her head. “Oh, Mitch. Is that what you really want?”

  I know how it’d go if we did; we’d re-create what we had—for a week—then arrive at exactly this moment again. I drop my gaze.

  “Good. Because neither do I. It’s been exhausting, it really has been. I don’t have the energy anymore. I think it’s better if we just call it quits, now, before it gets too… Well, you know what I mean.”

  I do. Before it gets too ugly.

  Despite the reasonably amicable end to things, we both agree it’s best if I just leave now, get what I need for the night, come back in a day or two to collect the rest of my stuff. So I grab my laptop and story notes and dissertation books, and slip into my September-in-St. Louis uniform: cargo shorts, flip-flops, T-shirt. But by the time I make my way to the bathroom for my toothbrush, water’s running inside. Hannah’s in there. Through the half-opened door, I can see her sitting on the floor, legs tucked under her in an awkward way, head buried in her hands. She looks like a little girl, or a little girl’s doll, all crumpled on herself. And even though the rush of water spilling into the tub is loud and forceful and drowns everything out, from the way her shoulders are heaving, it’s not difficult to tell what she’s doing: crying. Sobbing, really. I pause.

  Maybe I didn’t pan out as the greatest boyfriend, but what I’d like to do right now, if I’m being honest, is get this whole ex-boyfriend thing off to a good start. Go in there and wipe her tears away, tell her again how sorry I am that I forgot her, and let me explain how it is I could forget her and assure her it has nothing to do with her, it’s me, and why don’t I just hold her or soothe her or smooth her hair back, which I have no intention of turning into a bout of breakup sex. But I don’t, because I don’t know if I could do any of those things sincerely or insightfully or unselfishly. So I leave.

  Bradley is sitting where he’s always sitting at this time on Tuesday evenings: Colchester’s. His girlfriend Skyler runs a plant nursery, and this is her late night, which means Bradley grabs dinner at the pub. To see him sitting at the bar, brown hair wavy and brushed back, three-days’ growth on his face, you’d think you were on a movie set: Hey isn’t that Matthew McConaughey, and shouldn’t he be out banging on some bongos with his shirt off? But take another look, see if you can’t spot the guy who translated his summa cum laude degree in philosophy into life as a rehabber, transforming rundown Queen Annes and Dutch Colonials into something out of Architectural Digest.

  “What’ll you have?” he asks with a smile as I belly up next to him.

  “A pint. Of everything.”

  “Ah, one of those days,” he says, taking a bite of his shepherd’s pie. “Let me guess. No love from Chaucer? Lost some breathtakingly lyrical metaphor in your head before you could get it down on paper?”

  “Nah, none of that.” I shift on my stool. “It’s Hannah.”

  “Oh,” he says, obviously surprised. “Now there’s a switch. But don’t worry, Mitchell Samuel,” he drawls with an over-the-top Texas twang, leaning closer. “The doctor is in.” We hate Dr. Phil. “Speak to me.”

  There are lots of ways I could go with this. Tell him I spent her life savings on a Porsche. Tell him she’s in love with another man. Tell him I’m in love with another man. But I opt for the truth. “We broke up.”

  He drops the Dr. Phil shtick like a bag of rocks. “What happened?”

  I shrug. “I’m not really sure.”

  But after a pull on my bottle of beer, I go on to demonstrate that, in fact, I am really sure, by telling him how I forgot her at the airport because I was writing, which upset her, so there was arguing and a few tears and a bit of a back and forth, which led to our ultimate decision to go our separate ways. I don’t pull any punches, put the blame squarely on me, but I expect at least a little sympathy from him, since he knows how the creative process can tend to sweep you away and cause you to forget things. But more than anything he’s on Hannah’s side, which is to say that in this case, he thinks I’m a total ass. But still, I’m his best friend, so he’s concerned.

  “So how’re you doing with it?”

  “Oh, you know.” And he does, because he’s been out with me when I’ve seen another woman and made some comment, not as crude as, “Damn, I’d like a piece of that,” but enough that he’d get the idea that despite Hannah’s top-drawer pedigree—BA from Northwestern, MFA from Iowa—and the fact we’re perfect on paper, I was never completely satisfied with that particular match. (Unlike Bradley, who only has eyes for Skyler.) Besides, he knows I still have my novel.

  Having a book that’s about to be published has a way of keeping your spirits up, pulling you through the dark spots and rough patches in your life that might otherwise be a source of concern. Such as getting kicked to the curb. Again. I should’ve written it a long time ago, like when I was five and my little sister Emily died of meningitis, or when I was ten and my father had an affair and hit the road, or even when I was eighteen and found Sharon Manus making out with Colby Nash in the boys’ bathroom at the prom. It would’ve saved me a lot of tears (and in the case of Sharon, a busted set of knuckles from punching a bathroom wall).

  “And Hannah?” he asks. “How’s she taking it?”

  I hem and haw and roll my shoulders. “Okay. I think. I guess. She hated to lose a guy like me.”

  “Right. So she dumped you, then.”

  “Pret
ty much.”

  He gives his head a little shake. “Mitchell, Mitchell. When are you going to get it together?”

  Easy for him to say. He loves Skyler, so he just does what comes naturally. For the rest of us, being with people we care about but don’t really love, we have to figure out the right thing to do on an hourly basis, moment by moment, woman by woman. There’s a lot of hit-and-miss guesswork in that.

  We discuss my moving back into the apartment Bradley and I have shared for the last three years (I had a feeling things might fizzle with Hannah, so I never stopped paying rent: Who looks like the genius now?). It’s not a problem, since he spends all his time over at Skyler’s now, meaning our place is mostly unoccupied. I suggest we celebrate my homecoming by heading back to the apartment and watching a baseball game on cable, but he tells me that’s a no-go: He’s helping his sister pick up her new furniture.

  “In North Carolina?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t your sister live in North Carolina?”

  “No, she lives in Chesterfield.”

  I point west, toward the highway, a couple counties over, where my father lives. “That Chesterfield?”

  “That Chesterfield. She moved back in April.”

  So Bradley’s sister has been back in St. Louis for five months, living half an hour away, and this is the first I’m hearing about it. Of course, maybe the fact that she’s lived in North Carolina the entire three years I’ve known Bradley, and I’ve never met her, and she’s a hairstylist, and what would we possibly have to talk about (Me: “I prefer the elegiac wistfulness of Tennyson to the Romantic pessimism of Housman; Her: “Like, I totally love mousse!”), maybe all that has something to do with it. For starters.

  “I thought I told you,” he says.

  “Nope.”

  “Hmm. Anyway, she did. And she finally decided to upgrade from the furniture she came with. I told her I’d use my truck, save her the delivery charge.”