“Heads up, though,” said Mitch. “I learned on my cousin’s Nissan Sentra twenty-five years ago. This is a brand-new Jeep Wrangler. Much more powerful engine. If you hit it too hard, this thing’ll take off like a rocket. We don’t want that.”
Luke nodded with grim determination and turned the key again. He held the wheel, ten and two, shoulders hunched. This was way too much car for him, Mitch knew, like handing Emily a bazooka, but all he could do here was help. It wasn’t that different than teaching, really. You give them some tips, share some experience, and send them, woefully unprepared, out into the cruel, stupid world.
The Jeep started to shake; the engine muttered.
“Okay, there you go. Give ’er some gas.”
Luke lifted his left foot. His skinny calf muscle flexed.
“Easy now.”
The tachometer shot up, and the engine roared.
“Little less.”
They rolled five feet, and the car died again.
Luke slapped the top of the steering wheel. “See?”
“No. That was good. You had it. You just got tentative at the last second. It’s not as hard as you’re making it. The car knows what it wants, Luke.” Mitch smiled at his dad’s words coming out of his own mouth. “One more time. Come on. You got this.”
The engine turned over again. And, again, the Jeep shook just on the cusp of death as he released the clutch. This time, though, Luke timed it right and gave it just enough gas to save it from stalling. On gleaming custom wheels and trail-rated tires, the Jeep rolled along the pavement.
“Yes!” said Mitch. “See, man? You did it.”
“We’re driving,” said Emily.
Luke grinned. The houses in the neighborhood were set back from the road, so each driveway was long and straight. Still, though, they made it to the mailbox in just a few seconds.
“Okay, that’s good. Stop it here. We’ll work on reversing.”
But Luke didn’t stop. Instead, he took a hard left turn out of the driveway and headed up the street. Mitch looked at his own house as they passed it and then watched it shrink in the distance. Emily and Luke smiled in the back seat. Booster seats be damned, they were on an adventure.
“All right, then,” said Mitch. “I guess we’re going for a ride. Hold on to those handle things, kids.”
The rpms spiked. The Jeep wanted second gear.
“Okay. Time to shift, Luke.”
“Really?” he said.
“Yep. They put five gears in this thing for a reason. Let’s do it.”
It was perhaps the roughest first-to-second-gear transition in the history of suburban driving. Luke gave the Jeep too much gas, and it lurched ahead again, like something released suddenly from a cage. But then it settled, and Luke let out a long breath.
“You’re like an old pro at this,” said Mitch.
“Thanks,” said Luke. “I think I got it.”
“Hell yeah, you do.”
“Go faster, Luke!” called Jude.
Emily agreed. “Yeah. Let’s race!”
For a few blocks, stuck in noisy second gear at just under twenty-five miles per hour, they drove on, and everything was fine.
30
“I heard about the girl at your school.”
Scarlett Powers made a face like she didn’t know what Jessica was talking about.
“The girl who tried to commit suicide, Scarlett.”
“Oh, that. Yeah. She’ll be okay. She just did it for attention, obviously. Mission accomplished, I guess.”
“I think you’re smart enough to know that that’s a pretty enormous understatement.”
“Yeah, but…Advil?”
Jessica made a strategic decision to let that go. She didn’t want to spend the final moments of their session debating what did and did not make a teenager’s suicide attempt legitimate. “You’ve never thought about doing anything like that, have you?”
Scarlett smiled a sideways smile. “Come on. You know me better than that.”
And Jessica did. Scarlett was self-destructive, and she had an addictive personality, and she’d likely struggle with both of those things for the rest of her life. But she wasn’t depressed. “Well, do you want to talk about it? Mr. Butler said some of the kids were pretty shaken up.”
“I like how you call him ‘Mr. Butler,’ ” said Scarlett. “It’s, like, very sub. You don’t call him that at home, do you?”
Jessica ignored this, and Scarlett looked out the window. Rain clouds. A 70-something-percent chance of showers, according to everyone’s iPhone. Spring in Baltimore. “Well, you clearly want to talk about something,” she said. “You’re being evasive. You’re always evasive when something’s on your mind.”
Scarlett leaned forward and then back again, shifting. “Am I?”
“I’ve been at this a while. So let’s maybe save each other some time. Why don’t you put that 770 verbal score to good use?”
“Fine,” said Scarlett. “I recently had a setback.” She put air quotes around setback.
“You’re using the terminology. I’m impressed. Okay, what kind of setback? Drugs? Stealing? Sex?”
Scarlett was still looking out the window. She smiled. “Yes, please.”
Jessica waited.
“Darnell,” she said. “Jiffy Lube. I went back. And this time…well, you weren’t in my head handing out advice.”
She noticed that the girl’s ankle art was faded almost entirely now. “Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Tell me about it.”
“You, like, want details? Who did what? I’m happy to share, perv.”
“No, Scarlett. I don’t want details. Was the experience positive or negative?”
“Well, we woke his roommate up because we were being so loud,” Scarlett said. “So I’d call that pretty positive, wouldn’t you?”
Jesus. This girl. It was like talking to a jaded, grown-ass woman. She could hang with the Wives drinking wine and wisecracking about penises. “Emotionally speaking, Scarlett. After it was over. On your way home. The next day. Now. How did you feel about it? How do you feel? About yourself?”
Scarlett went quiet, but Jessica could see that she wasn’t evading; she was thinking. “We’ve been over this. How you feel while you’re acting out is one thing. It hardly counts, because usually what you feel is euphoria. Like, a thrill. A hit of a drug. But when the thrill’s gone? When that euphoria fades? Your feelings then are far more telling.”
And now it was Jessica who was shifting in her chair. Sometimes at work she’d actually listen to herself. In this case, she might as well have shooed Scarlett out of her office and replaced her with a giant mirror.
Jessica’s own ongoing emotional inventory had turned up only the slightest traces of guilt; virtually nothing. That was something to be concerned about in and of itself. But even more disturbing was how often she found herself thinking of Ryan. Weeks ago, spying on Mitch through a restaurant window, she’d doubted that a man could think about sex every seven seconds. But since she watched Ryan walk out of the food court, how many times had she thought of him? The way he’d felt inside her. His mouth on her. Him in her hand, helpless and near agony. And it wasn’t just sex. She thought about his silly woodworking business. His Springsteen T-shirt. How effortlessly he’d made those Chinese ladies happy at the mall.
“I don’t know,” said Scarlett. “I actually felt pretty okay.”
Jessica gave Scarlett a doubtful look. “Let’s talk about attention for a moment, shall we?” she said.
“Okay,” said Scarlett.
“Is that part of the draw for you? Attention from Darnell? From men in general?”
“Oh, fuck that,” said Scarlett. “What am I, a toddler?”
“No, you’re not. And neither is your classmate. The one
you say was just looking for attention. Is her need for attention any different from yours?”
“Well, yeah. Totally.” But then she went quiet, because she was smart enough to know that Jessica was on to something. “Okay, fine,” she said.
Jessica wrote the word attention in her notebook, for no good reason, and underlined it.
“Is it bad that I get, like, a rush when I know that a guy wants me?” asked Scarlett. “When there’s nothing to interpret? When he just thinks I’m hot as fuck, and that’s all that matters?”
She thought of Ryan’s face as he took her clothes off—of the utter lack of ambiguity in his expression. “This isn’t about good or bad, Scarlett,” she said. “Remember?”
“Oh, stop it,” said Scarlett. “That’s therapy talk.”
“No, it’s not bad. It’s natural. Desire is part of sexuality. Being desired.”
“Truth,” said Scarlett.
“But here’s the catch. You have to want it, too.”
Scarlett smiled. “You know what?” she said. “You’re right.”
“Am I?” Jessica put her legal pad down. “You’ve never said that, Scarlett. This is a first.”
“No, for real,” said Scarlett. “It’s the sequel to Me Too. Hashtag I Want It Too. Let’s do a manifesto together and send it to HuffPost and get famous.”
Jessica looked at her phone. The clock on the screen ticked away. “Well, I haven’t been published in a while.”
Their session was over, essentially. Just a few seconds left. But Scarlett wasn’t quite done yet. “Listen,” she said. “I know you want me to say that I feel tortured, and having sex with dudes means nothing, and it’s like some attention-delivery device or whatever.”
The iPhone screen flashed 0:00.
Scarlett rubbed at the ghost of a pretend tattoo. “But what if that’s not the case this time? What if it’s different?”
“What do you mean?”
Scarlett looked flustered. In fact, unless Jessica was mistaken, the girl was blushing. “Darnell was really sweet to me. He asked me if maybe I wanted to be his girlfriend. Like, go steady or whatever. Can you believe it? God, my parents would shit.”
Her phone kept flashing its zeroes. Jessica did her best to keep her expression still as she pondered this terrible, terrible idea. “Just be careful, Scarlett,” she said.
When the girl was gone, Jessica looked out her office window. The rain had arrived, transforming the city below into a glossier version of itself. She turned off the timer on her phone and then checked the fake email account she’d created to see if any new women wanted to have sex with her husband.
31
Eight hours later, Mitch sat alone at Tark’s, a restaurant in the northern suburbs.
It was the last place he’d expected to be on that Friday night, particularly by himself. The week had wound down as usual—his classes, his service as the faculty sponsor of the school’s literary magazine, his trips through the pickup line at aftercare to get the kids. But when he walked in the door, he found Jessica at the kitchen table looking at her phone.
She said hello to the kids and asked them about their days, like she always did. They hung their backpacks on the banister and ran upstairs to change.
“Pizza tonight?” Mitch asked. “Or we could try that new Thai place by Nacho Mama’s. I hear they give you, like, fifty fortune cookies.” He was already thinking about how nice it’d be to put on his sweatpants.
It was as if she didn’t hear him, though. “Guess what?” she said. She looked up at the ceiling, making sure the kids were fully out of earshot. “You’ve got a date tonight.”
* * *
—
Tark’s was a pretty decent bar and grill next to a doctor’s office and some faceless office buildings. He hadn’t been there in years, and he found that he was the only person in the whole place who wasn’t part of a plural. It was all couples and groups, and it was an older crowd than downtown.
Since marrying Jessica, Mitch had sat like this in bars and restaurants waiting for her more times than he could possibly count. But now he was waiting for someone else—a stranger—and he couldn’t stop fiddling with his ring finger.
* * *
—
“I know it sounds unseemly and all, but you’re gonna want to take that off,” Jessica had told him earlier, pointing at his ring. The kids were in the other room enjoying some screen time. “It’s just too complicated otherwise. Trust me.”
He twisted it a few times before taking it off.
And then she helped him pick out his outfit. Jeans and a nice button-down and his teaching blazer, because that was what she’d told the online woman he’d be wearing. When he looked at himself in the mirror, all dressed and ready, he thought of Alan. All he needed was one unbuttoned button and a neckful of cologne.
Once Mitch’s profile was up, the matches had come in pretty steadily—five right away, then a handful more over the course of the week. Jessica monitored them, categorizing and eliminating, until she’d settled on a woman named “El.”
“Look,” she said. “I like her.” She’d handled all text correspondence, pretending to be Mitch, which was even more unseemly than his ditching his wedding ring, but there were so many things wrong about all of this that it hardly mattered anymore.
“Yeah? You think?” He looked at the small, grainy picture of the woman she’d picked for him. According to her info, she was forty-five, a little older than him, and up for an adventure. Like Mitch’s picture, hers was indistinct, but seemingly attractive.
“El,” he said. And then he said it again, “El. You think it’s her real name?”
Jessica tilted her head. “I don’t know, Will. Does it really matter?”
“Jesus,” he said. “Could this be any fucking weirder?”
* * *
—
The bartender came by, and Mitch ordered a Jack and Coke.
The Orioles game was on mute above the bar, but he had trouble focusing on what was happening. His hands were shaking, he felt hot under his jacket, and he kept asking himself one unanswerable question after another.
Was he nervous, or was he excited? How did one actually initiate sex with a stranger? Would it happen organically, or would it require saying something like, “So, should we have all the sex now?” Statistically speaking, what were the odds that this was all a ruse by an online psychopath? Was he about to be murdered and have his skin made into a lampshade? Would this entire night eventually be dramatically reenacted on Dateline NBC?
“Mitchell?”
He looked up, and there was a woman standing next to his barstool. She wore a blue-and-white-striped dress, and she was smiling. Her hair was short, blondish, kinda spiky, and she had on a lot of makeup. She was familiar. Mitch knew her. He was sure of it.
“It’s me,” she said.
He squeezed his drink. “Hi there.”
The woman laughed. “God, Luke was right. I guess I really do look different, huh? Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mitch, it’s me. Ellen. Your next-door neighbor, you dope.”
“Ellen?”
She waved to the bartender. “Hey there. Can I get a cosmo?”
* * *
—
Ellen took her first drink down with purpose, barely pausing to breathe, and for a while, even though she’d sidled up onto the stool next to his, they didn’t talk much. Mitch was too busy being on the verge of panic, because in a moment, a woman in a red dress was scheduled to arrive. That woman would not be his wife. How would he explain this to his next-door neighbor?
“Are you meeting Jessica?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
Ellen waited, and he realized that more information was required.
“She’s at home.
With the kids. I had a parent-teacher thing at school. Needed a drink after three hours of one-on-ones with angry moms.”
Ellen’s face sank. “Shit. Was that tonight? Was I supposed to be there? I didn’t get an email.”
“Oh, well, no,” he said. “It wasn’t mandatory. Just conferences for parents of kids who’re…having trouble. Luke’s definitely not in that category.”
He was, indeed, a terrible liar, but it worked, and Ellen relaxed. “Thank God. That’d be just like me, right? Spacing on my first official week as a single mother.”
He looked at the half-empty bowl of sweaty peanuts on the bar in front of them. “Yeah,” he said. “I was sorry to hear about you and James.”
She nodded. It was one of those “it is what it is” gestures that people make when their lives have been flipped over like a Monopoly board.
“What about you?” he asked. “You meeting a friend or something?”
Ellen turned shy. “Not exactly. More of a date. Well, kind of. I’m not sure what you’d call it, exactly.”
“Yeah? Great. Good for you.”
“Getting back on the horse, right?” She laughed. “Horse. What am I even talking about? Isn’t it funny how utterly ill prepared we are sometimes to talk to other human beings?”
“Nah,” he said. “You’re fine.” He clinked his glass against hers. “To horses. Or whatever.”
In the years she’d been their neighbor, Mitch had talked to her only marginally more often than he’d talked to James, which wasn’t very often at all. He liked her well enough, though. Once, a few years back, she got locked out of her house in the rain and had a glass of wine with Jessica and Mitch in their kitchen while she waited for the locksmith to show.
“I’m meeting him here,” she said. “It’s an Internet thing. All the kids are doing it, right? I figured, why not?”
She flagged down another drink, and Mitch glanced at his watch again. El was ten minutes late. Maybe she wasn’t coming. Or maybe she was already there, watching him from a distance in her red dress and wondering who this other woman was.
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