I’d been married six months when my husband died choking on an oyster. I was 23 and he was 27. I grew up by the ocean but hated the mineral-salt reek of seafood and wouldn’t let him bring any into our home. While I was out with my friend Lily at what she called ‘our local Polynesian discotheque,’ he took the opportunity. He came from a long line of fishermen, so I understood he faced terrible temptations.
For weeks after the funeral all I did was cycle between my job answering phones at a midsize insurance firm and Market Basket and the apartment. Everything felt repeatable and undistinguished except my breathing, which started going unpredictably haywire. Sometimes I had to count the seconds between my inhales and exhales until I reestablished a rhythm. Sometimes I had to pull over and press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I saw white stars exploding over the black.
Then one day I called Lily. By then she was off the Tiki joint and onto a sad pub near the county courthouse that was full of cops and ADAs and EMTs—eligible bachelors, to Lily’s mind. She’d come home after college on a mission to find a man, armed with polyester dresses and fake eyelashes she’d learned to apply. Her drinking was more enthusiastic but also more compressed than I remembered. She often started yawning by 10, resting her head on my shoulder, calling me cunt with sleepy affection. I’d push her off, tell her to get back out there, where the love of her life awaited. I didn’t believe in love anymore but liked to think I was helping her. It restored a sense of purpose.
The pub had no jukebox, but any floor could be a dance floor, and Lily spun bad circles in the silence to prove it. She’d gotten to know some of the regulars, had become something of a regular herself. She introduced me to the bartender and his ancient, blind labrador, who’d had a cameo in The Perfect Storm and met Mark Wahlberg. She introduced me to her crush, a 34-year-old lawyer named Jules, and his friend Colin, a 25-year-old maniac who monopolized the bar’s only pinball machine.
A sign outside the bathroom told us never to forget 9/11. I liked the familiar ugliness of the place, its plain New Englandness. The deep blue of its collar was good for widows, and there was a disused wooden phone booth in the back for me when I felt like crying.
◆
One night Colin suggested a trip.
“It’s winter,” Lily said.
“We have work,” Colin said.
It was freezing. The bartender kept the door propped open because he felt the bracing drafts kept his patrons coherent. Colin, in his Sox cap and thin coat, looked huddled, adolescent. He worked at UPS as a package handler.
“That,” he said, “Is exactly why we should go.”
Usually if I was for something Lily was against it. Since childhood, I’d committed stupidities while Lily chaperoned. This time, though, she turned to me and nodded to an oblivious Jules. I understood she thought this was her chance. Jules had a soft belly and the personality of pleated chino pants but had been divorced twice, which gave him an odd tragic glamor. His imbalanced friendship with Colin had a vaguely unsavory quality that intrigued us.
Curled under Colin’s barstool, the labrador snored.
◆
We picked a warm state full of Polynesian discotheques. None of us took initiative in planning. We all assumed someone else was in charge: I thought Lily, Lily thought Colin, Colin thought Jules, Jules thought me, probably because I volunteered my husband’s car.
On our departure date Colin slept late and Lily’s terrier escaped on the way to the kennel and was found quivering under a Cape Cod potato chip truck and I lost an hour to not-breathing. It was dark when we left, and snowing too. Connecticut was only an hour’s drive via I-84 but we kept getting lost. I’d pull off at an exit to loop back only to drift down lightless roads with menacing names like “Breakneck” or “Leadmine.”
“Bad weather,” Lily said, to make me feel better about wasting gas. I’d never had one of my breathing episodes while driving before, but then I hadn’t attempted unfamiliar roads since my honeymoon at a spider-filled cabin by a cold deep lake in Vermont.
By then it was late. “Let’s call it a night,” said Jules, in his authoritative lawyer-voice. I suspected he just wanted a drink. Nothing was open except Cumberland Farms. Lily and Jules chose their snacks quickly but Colin took his time buying three foil-wrapped hot dogs and a lotto ticket. I stood at the curb, watching him through the window and Lily in its reflection, my double vision mediated by Camel ads and posters for movies I hadn’t seen.
I held my breath and counted the rows of milk in the back refrigerator through the window: one, two, three, four. Pints of ice cream: three; frozen dinners: one. Milk won. Colin thumbed through a National Enquirer, checking what the extraterrestrials were up to. Lily honked. I exhaled.
◆
The next day we stayed in-state to see A Perfect Storm on re-release, part of a screening series celebrating the anniversary of the commonwealth. Other titles included The Crucible and Good Will Hunting and Legally Blonde, all advertised on a marquee visible from the highway. We went in honor of the labrador.
Lily couldn’t be coaxed out of the motel, insisting on sticking to the plan we didn’t have. She could watch A Perfect Storm at home anytime, she said. The seats at the theater were La-Z-Boys; nachos were served. I sat between Jules and Colin and held the popcorn tub between my knees, getting butter on my pants.
I’d never gone to the movies with my husband; the enterprise of storytelling was lost on him. He’d been a literal man, nightmared by symbols and metaphors. I wished I’d forced him, an EMT, to teach me the proper maneuvers. I wished I hadn’t assumed one useful person per couple was enough. I wished someone else had found him blue-faced on the floor, or that he’d died heroically, incorporeally, at sea, like the man played by Mark Wahlberg.
I don’t know why I wished these things. Thinking as I was in impossibilities, I could’ve just wished he’d never died at all.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as the credits rolled. I wanted to be kissed. The want surprised me. I’d thought I’d never want a kiss again. I’d thought I couldn’t trust love, the way it had made me feel about someone fragile enough to be felled by fruit of the sea. My desire to be kissed was so wild and big and directionless I felt sure everyone could see it, Jules and Colin and the usher sweeping the aisle.
I wiped my face on my sleeve. No one kissed me.
We’d all looked for the dog on the docks but must’ve missed him.
◆
On the way back from the theater we stopped for gas and Jules had to go inside to pay and in that narrow window Colin put his hand on my knee. Maybe my desire had been perceptible after all. I liked that he chose me over Lily, who had bigger tits and less emotional baggage, not only because I liked being chosen, but also because I felt the choice reflected his hidden complexity. His measureless depths.
Jules and Lily went downstairs to the jacuzzi. I put on my too-big coat—which, like everything, had once been my husband’s—and went to the room where Colin waited. I brought the ice bucket as an alibi. The smell of Massachusetts pervaded. It was the smell of water that has been in the same place a long time.
I succeeded in not thinking of my husband except for superficial comparisons I knew I’d make the rest of my life. I figured Colin would approach sex like that pinball machine, pushy and startling, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.
“I thought you liked Lily,” I told him, afterward.
“Nah,” he said. “Too, like. I don’t know. Full of it. I don’t like the way she calls you cunt either. She says it kinda mean.”
“It’s just a joke,” I said. “Like, reclaiming the word, or whatever.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Can I reclaim it too? I called my aunt a cunt once and my mom threw me out of the house.”
“You probably said it kinda mean.”
He got quiet again, thoughtful. He traced idle patterns on my ribs with his fingers, then said, “I don’t think your husband died of natural causes. I think you killed him.”
This was so bizarre it made me laugh. I liked his alternate image of the past, where I was the architect of my own sadness. I liked his undivinable sense of humor. Besides, comedy ought to be considered one of the stages of grief.
“What the fuck,” I said.
I could feel Colin’s grin against my shoulder. “I don’t know, man. My teachers always said I speak before I think.”
I settled deeper against him. “Since you’re so smart,” I said, “How’d I do it?”
Colin pretended to think while I counted nubs on the popcorn ceiling. I’d liked being a wife, however briefly. Sometimes I worried about that. If I’d loved my husband or just the idea of a husband, whatever the abstraction implied.
“Poison,” Colin concluded. A disappointing answer reflecting no knowledge specific to me—everyone suspects poison with women.
I went back to the room I shared with Lily before Jules returned. I’d expected her to still be downstairs, working her seduction scheme, but she was reading a paperback in bed, silk eye mask untouched on the nightstand.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
“Ice.” I rattled the few cubes in the bucket as proof.
“You were gone so long.”
“Machine broke,” I said. “Jules?”
Lily sighed, “Nothing,” closed her book, and rolled over so her back was to me.
◆
We tried to leave again the next day. The snow had yet to melt but the sky was clear, the roads crunchy with salt. We took our time checking out; Colin filled three paper coffee cups with hash brown squares and sausage spheres from the complimentary breakfast bar for later.
I got into the driver’s seat. I looked at the GPS and thought about how small the state was, how tiny my pocket of it. How it had still been big enough to contain most of my husband’s life. Most of mine. It seemed an awkward, too-tight fit.
Lily cheered when we saw the border sign. I held my breath and counted as the speedometer ticked upward, but then I was flicking on the blinker and pulling off at the next exit, as if to turn back.
“What are you doing?” Lily said.
I said, “I can’t, I’m not in control.”
Lily seemed to recognize the problem. Her voice climbed a few octaves, becoming softer yet sterner. A professional tone she’d evidently mastered at college; I’d never heard it from her before. “Stop the car, OK?” she said. I said, “OK.” From the backseat, Jules said, “No need to panic.” Colin squinted at me in the rearview, thoughtfully chewing.
I pulled over to the shoulder. My hands shook. Lily leaned over the gearshift and roped me into an embrace, patting my back and saying, “Shh.” She wanted me to cry, to validate her skilled comfort-giving with an expression of emotion, and knowing that made me resist it.
She said to Jules, who nodded in agreement, “It’s just a psychological thing, PTSD manifests in totally weird ways.”
“I don’t have PTSD,” I said.
Lily said again, “Shh.” We sat a while with the engine ticking and cars passing close enough to rock the cabin.
“Let me drive for a bit,” said Lily. I didn’t want to cede to her, to let her prove how reasonable she was, but I was too embarrassed to insist, so I did. She huffed to the front seat in her boxy parka and merged back onto the road, picking up speed while weaving between lanes. She’d always been a terror behind the wheel.
I trapped another breath in my chest, counted to twenty before I decided it was safe to inhale, closed my eyes. When I opened them again, we were driving north. I had no memory of Lily turning or stopping; just a blink, a moment of nothing-time, a shimmer of the mind.
◆
We thought it was a minor episode of collective psychosis. A driver’s delirium, or variant of snow blindness, light refracting off the blanketed fields on either side of the road. We tried another route. At the border we passed an ugly accident. Oranges rolled out of a torn brown paper bag across four lanes of traffic to burst under tires. Then we passed the same scene again from the other direction.
We stopped and reshuffled so Jules could drive. We tried again: same result. Colin was still eyeing me, his hair flattened from resting against the window, unable to take a turn behind the wheel because the state had suspended his license. When I said he worked for UPS, I meant he used to, but had been fired for union organizing or being high on the job or both. He’d suggested the trip because he was unemployed, had nothing better to do.
I liked that we’d encountered a problem Lily couldn’t solve. This had never happened to Lily before. She made us try routes 7, 84, 91, 95, 395, 495, interstates and local roads. She made us go north and south and west, past Mashpee, Braintree, Teaticket. She muttered to herself while we fussed about in the separate nests of our seats, jackets peeled back like candy wrappers. We slowed to 5 miles an hour in case it was a question of pace. We shifted into neutral and tried to roll over the invisible line, in case it was a question of volition.
On the shoulder near Vermont, hazards on, we watched other cars progress untroubled. Lily took a few deep breaths and stretched her fingers, then took her phone from her pocket.
“Who’re you calling?” I asked.
“Better not be the cops,” Colin said.
It was the cops. Lily described our location and the nature of our difficulty. The officer who arrived threatened to send us all to the hospital and have the car towed and made us take sobriety tests over Colin’s protests.
“That’s a violation of my sixth amendment rights,” he said.
“Fourth, maybe,” said Jules.
“Can I just show you?” Lily asked the cop, gesturing to the asphalt ahead.
The officer said, “Ma’am, I don’t know what kind of prank this is, but I’m about to arrest you all for felonious wasting of my time,” and Lily said, “OK, fine, fuck us, I guess,” and the officer said, “Have a nice day, ma’am,” and Jules leaned out the window to yell to his retreating back, “You too.”
Lily tried one more time. When we wound up in the wrong lane again, she hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand several times, bruising herself.
I resumed control.
◆
That night we stayed in a motel advertising an arcade and HBO, though I could find neither. Plastic covered the lampshades and the sofa upon which Lily reclined, making a soft farting sound every time she shifted. Colin and Jules shared the room next door. All night they thumped the common wall in primitive attempts at communication.
“What do you think they’re doing in there?” I asked, turning off the light.
“Package handling,” Lily said.
I awoke at four in the morning, heart trying to flee my body. One two three four. I heard tapping on the window. Lily crammed a pillow over her head. I got up and slid the shades to the side. It was Colin, wearing only boxers, blue-skinned in the phosphor parking lot glare. It was snowing again. I gestured that he should go, but he only pressed his lips to the window, clouding the glass.
I opened the door. We were on the second floor balcony; a pool below was covered for the season. Colin’s tongue was not stuck, as he proved with a kiss that tasted like martini olives plus a bitter tone beneath, a chemical I’d never met before.
He said, “Come downstairs. I found the arcade.”
“You’re wasted. Go to bed.”
He said, “I will throw myself into this pool. This pool, right here.”
My husband had been a lightweight. We’d met at my cousin’s wedding, where he had three beers and touched my waist a lot, even when we weren’t dancing, like he trusted it would support him. Everyone had been badly surprised when we eloped except Lily, who’d said on the phone, “Now someone else can look after you.” I’d dropped out of school, found a job.
I’d thought marriage would make me an adult, but looking at night-Colin I realized it had not done that at all. I clung to his torso to keep him in place, my nails leaving welts on his skin. He looked down at me and said, with faint surprise, “Ow.”
Jules appeared on the balcony, then Lily.
Jules said, “There’s a tarp on that pool, man.”
For some reason this only encouraged Colin. He twisted in my arms and climbed halfway over the railing, foisting one leg up before we pulled him down to the textured slabs of the balcony floor.
Jules said, “Oh man were those martinis a bad idea.”
Probably more than martinis were involved. The manager stood at the threshold of the office downstairs, which still had its Christmas lights up, and yelled that we were violating posted rules. Another guest screamed for quiet.
Jules grabbed Colin by his legs while Lily and I each took one of his arms. In Jules’s room, we burritoed him in a blanket until he stopped screaming, this being what my husband had done with his mentally unsound patients. “Cradling, not restraint,” he’d said, practicing his moves on me with a quilt my mother had crocheted us as a wedding present as I laughed.
I guess he did teach me something after all.
◆
The weather was oddly warm, spring-like, the next day. We walked from the hotel to a diner, speaking little. The snow melted, revealing wet leaves and brown petals that stuck to our shoes. I stepped over a puddle of an opaque pink liquid at the curb with no known source.
Colin, hungover and still wearing sunglasses, asked the waitress if he could smoke indoors. The ban was still relatively fresh, then. Jules, riffing on Colin’s joke, lamented about the Massachusetts he used to know, where you could smoke wherever you damn well pleased. The waitress giggled. I sort of wanted to rip her eyelashes out but instead packed miniature cartons of strawberry jelly into a pyramid.
Lily said to Colin, “‘Ooo, I’m so cool, I should get to smoke indoors.'”
Colin responded with a glare so disdainful it was detectable despite the shades. I hoped he’d never turn that look on me. Lily smiled at him with every tooth she had. He stood to go outside, presumably to smoke, knocking over my monument with his elbow, and I pivoted to watch him go.
I turned back to the table. Lily was saying, “Maybe it has to do with the car. You know how people get those shock fences so their dogs won’t leave their yard?”
Jules said, “I don’t think we’re there yet, technologically. And the cop probably would’ve told us if the car had issues.”
“All I’m saying is, maybe we should try to leave some other way.”
I got up, mumbling about the bathroom. Colin was nowhere. The diner was in a strip mall. At the end was a discount home goods warehouse, mostly a labyrinth of area rugs in tall stacks. I went in, passing a coffee urn on a cart with a sign taped to it that said, Don’t make fun of our coffee, one day you’ll be old and weak, too.
I found Colin by a wall where fish tanks were stocked on rivet-racked shelves, his face tinted blue by their light. He said, “The fish are all dead.” The fish were indeed all afloat. Colin turned to a passing employee with a pin on his vest that read, Suffer a Little, Save a Lot, and said, “Hey, man. Hey. Your fish.”
◆
We bought bus tickets, hoping to conceal our bad luck in a crowd. The seats were upholstered in a patterned fabric designed to hide filth. I looked out the tinted windows at falling snow, the sky gray like charcoal rubbed out of paper, and counted the flakes. I made it to 346 before we were standing by a guardrail on the wrong side, holding our bags, a long roadside trudge back to the hotel lot where we’d left the car and a few yards from a sign that said Welcome on its far side.
Lily said, “Wait.” She walked along the shoulder in a southerly direction, looking vulnerable next to all the passing semis, her parka no protection from motorists or sprays of gravel, but she made it past the sign and turned back to us. I sat on the guardrail, relieved. Then she called Jules.
“She wants to try something,” Jules said, when he hung up. Snow had accumulated on his mustache, aging him.
Like she thought I couldn’t tell what she was up to. Colin’s hands were crammed into his coat pockets. He was shivering. I liked that he didn’t have any masculine hangups about pretending to be unaffected by cold. He was nothing like my husband.
They walked away single file, hunching into the wind, and made it across. They stood talking to Lily for a moment before Jules waved me on. I didn’t want to try, didn’t want the truth confirmed, so I sat still for a full minute. The wind made a lonely sound as it danced snow across the pavement in uncountable ripples and waves. I already knew I was stuck.
◆
We walked on the forest side of the guardrail until we reached the preceding exit, continuing up to an intersection where a car Lily called could find us and take us back to my husband’s car. We communicated in grunts and nods until we got into the cab and I said, “Go without me.”
Jules said, “Don’t be silly.” Colin clapped his hand to my knee again and said, “We’ll get you out of here, you’ll see.” Lily said nothing. I had an inadvertent habit of stealing attention and spoiling her fun. The time I got my thigh impaled on a fence trying to run from the cops after setting off roman candles we bought in New Hampshire. Dancing on a boy’s kitchen island counter at a house party, too drunk to realize how far my dress had ridden up, needing her to take me home. My hair catching fire from the candles on her thirteenth birthday cake. I thought I’d changed—if not because I’d matured, then at least because I was sad. Lily didn’t seem to agree.
◆
Under cover of night, we drove to the river, as close to the border as we could manage. No one would rent us a kayak in winter, so Lily and Jules parked on the banks with the heat cranked after dropping Colin off on the Connecticut side to wait for me with a blanket. I stripped to my bra and numbered every pebble that cut my soles. The water was 40 degrees. I emerged two minutes later, chattering blue and disoriented. I made it to the backseat and awoke sometime later with my head in Colin’s lap, reborn. I cried and babbled, telling them I loved them for trying, that they were such good friends, but I was still shaking violently and the words didn’t come out right.
Later Colin talked me into buying a plane ticket at a regional airport. Lily and Colin and Jules watched from the ground as I saw more of the state than ever before, loose patterns of tree branches and low roofs dusted with a fine sugary white. Black lakes. No identifiable border where one place became another.
The plane circled the sky for five minutes, then landed again. “Engine trouble,” the pilot said.
Back in the car, I said, “We can’t do all this on my account.”
Lily said, “We probably just need to give it time.”
Colin and Lily never agreed. “No way we’re giving up that easy. We have to call the news, NASA, the National Enquirer. A psychic.”
Jules said, “I do actually need to be back at work Monday.”
“No one cares about your boring job,” said Colin.
“I do,” said Jules and Lily together, like twins.
◆
That night I called my mother. I’d pretended to have misplaced my Nokia though I hadn’t; had received every message, including one from HR warning me of imminent termination due to job abandonment because I hadn’t told them about my vacation before I took it.
My mother’s news was that my father had shoveled the driveway 20 times already and that she never received a postcard I claimed to have sent and that she was worried. My news was that there was nothing to worry about. She said I sounded better and that she was glad and that my mother-in-law would be, too. I asked her when she’d last left Massachusetts and she reminded me that she drove up to Nashua every month for the tax-free shopping.
I watched Jules stretch in an empty parking space. His bones were older than ours, needed more attention after so much car. I said, “I’m having this problem,” and Mom said, “Oh yeah, that’ll happen,” and then my battery died and the call terminated.
I stayed in the booth, thinking about dead-blue cheeks, an oyster in the shell of my husband’s throat. He’d choked not on the meat itself but on a weird misshapen pearl found inside. As the doctor pressed it into my palm, he told me it was rare to find pearls in edible oysters like that. I’d wanted to have it framed, preserved behind glass. Instead I’d been careless, and it turned up then in the left pocket of my husband’s old coat, lumpy, unseen.
◆
The last day of the trip was also Lily’s birthday. We agreed for her sake to forget my problem for the day. The air felt colder though the temperature was no different. We visited a museum with dioramas of witch executions. The cost of admission was thirty dollars. Colin kissed me in an alcove next to Tituba’s testimony. My great-grandparents had arrived to Massachusetts on a Portuguese boat in 1911 but I tried on the Puritan disposition and found I liked seeing signs and devils everywhere, being victimized by dark magic, finding that a curse had trapped me, an irritant, in a prison of nacre. It made life seem rich and sticky, full of hidden meaning.
The restaurant Lily chose was Canada-themed. A taxidermied, mechanized elk head was mounted on a plaque in the dining room. Every half hour, a spotlight shined on the head, which turned to and fro, cracking pre-recorded jokes. At the end of the meal Lily smiled without making eye contact with anyone, like a politician, and asked for cake. I’d instructed Colin to get a cake earlier at a grocery store. He’d avoided martinis, opting instead for scotch.
Colin told Lily, “You can’t demand people do anything for you. You’re never entitled to anything, even on your birthday.”
Lily told Colin, “You ass, I wish you had jumped into that pool.”
I imagined sitting at a neighboring table with my husband, watching the scene unfold. He would’ve held my hand, walked me to the car, and then gone back inside to help the waitstaff with these unruly patrons. He’d been better than all of us but that hadn’t helped him at all.
Jules said, “How about that cake?” He put the cardboard box in the center of the table and lifted the cover briefly before closing it again.
Lily said, “What?” and, when Jules didn’t answer, reached over for a brief tug-of-war above the table’s candles before she gained control and plopped the box back down. It was a small cake that read, in delicate sugary scroll, HAPPY BIRTHDAY CUNT.
Too late, I clapped my hand over my mouth to hide my smile. It was just surprise—the appearance of the word in that context, its lingering power to shock.
Colin stuck his hands in his pockets, tilted back in his chair. He said, “Pretty good, right? Had to bribe the bakery kid to do it.”
Lily glared at me, not Colin, across the table, assuming I’d told him to do this, had granted him access to our private language.
“You—” she said.
“I—” I said.
“Ruin everything,” she said.
Lily grabbed a fork and lunged at me. I lifted the cake box in what seemed an instinctual movement of self-defense. She took the full force of it to her face. A tipped-over chair, a girlish mask of buttercream, and a room silent but for my terrible laugh.
◆
I drove Lily and Jules back in the morning. The furthest we could get from home and still be within state lines was only about three hours, a unit of time we’d stretched to translucency.
Colin hadn’t wanted to come. “I’ll get back my own way,” he said.
Jules and Lily both sat in the backseat, holding hands. Jules had been the one to assure the restaurant’s manager that we were leaving, to drive us back to the motel in silence, to take Lily upstairs. I’d spent the night in Colin’s room. His clothes were scattered everywhere, and I gathered them up for him out of some vestigial wifely habit.
I parked outside Lily’s condo and turned back to face her. Two of her upper eyelashes were still stuck together with a smidge of pink. She said, “I think you should know Colin hit on me first, and I said no,” and I said, “You’re just saying that to hurt me,” and she said, “I wasn’t going to tell you because I thought he would like, make you happy, but now I think it’s going somewhere bad and your PTSD is clouding your judgment,” and I said something like, “I don’t have PTSD and I’m not going anywhere and don’t talk to me like George Clooney, you’re not better than me,” and I’m not sure she knew what I meant because I didn’t either but she understood at least enough to scoff.
I wanted to say something like, Remember when we were 11 and I fell out of that tree you told me not to climb during recess and landed on my back so hard I couldn’t breathe and the school nurse said I did it to myself and you called her a cunt to her face and we both got detention?
As if we could get back there.
Instead I said, “If you weren’t such a drunk whore I’d still have a husband and we never would’ve met Jules and Colin and none of this would’ve happened.”
She said, “Oh,” in a half-sarcastic way that, in its attempt to hide real pain, only confirmed it, and got out of the car.
Jules, who I’d forgotten about, went after her. He waved at me feebly from the sidewalk, wearing a downtrodden expression that reminded me of that old labrador. A memory surfaced of him back at the bar, telling with the great care of divorced experience, Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much about marriage.
◆
I drove the three hours right back to the motel where I’d left Colin, figuring he wouldn’t have made much progress. If he wasn’t at the motel, he’d be no further than the nearest bar. I spotted him from behind by his neck tattoo, in a strip mall across the street from the motel. He’d been to prison once. Jules had been his public defender; that was how they’d met.
I stopped in the fire lane, my tires resting in a puddle of slush. Colin stood in front of a long-closed Blockbuster, looking at a poster for some forgotten Mark Wahlberg vehicle. “Marky Mark,” Colin said, seeing my approach reflected in the window. “I heard he’s related to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Isn’t that the most Massachusetts shit ever? From Goodman Brown to Good Vibrations in less than 200 years.”
“Goodman Brown,” I said, trying to place it in my memory.
“What? I know how to fuckin’ read,” said Colin. I loved his uselessness. Here was a man far too abstract to be killed by anything so real as an oyster.
We resumed trying to leave the state, confident we’d find a gap to slip through. We followed signs to not-too-far places like Woonsocket or Portsmouth or Albany, caught in a groove, running the same roads smooth. He recited facts about Massachusetts from a brochure he’d picked up in the movie theater.
“Bigger than Israel by land mass,” he said. “Albania, too.”
One night we went east, thinking we’d escape by sea. We drove through a neighborhood at the end of the continent that seemed abandoned, with no lights on in any windows or cars in any driveway. Colin asked if I’d like to save some money. I said the houses looked haunted. Colin said we were basically ghosts ourselves. I had no real argument for that.
He took my husband’s crowbar from the trunk and pried a board off a window. He was inside so long I worried he’d succumbed to the house’s dubious structural integrity or squatters. I considered leaving and calling Lily, taking it all back. Then he reappeared and I un-considered it.
He brought me in through what was once a kitchen. Our flashlight caught glimpses of crushed beer cans and snow drifts. We sneezed. The ground floor had a similar layout to the apartment I’d shared with my husband, the rooms likewise sized and ordered. Colin swept aside debris to reveal stained hardwood. As I shucked off my coat my husband’s pearl slipped out from a crumpled pocket into a gap between the floorboards. I grasped after it, then watched it go, rolling rolling clack clop clack and gone.
I slid into the coarse polyester sleeping bag shell beside Colin. We fit nicely. I felt an unknown but imminent transition, a sea change. We were so close to the water.
Colin reorganized himself against me. “I figured out how you did it,” he said. “Your husband. It wasn’t poison. It was much more sophisticated, far more subtle, this weapon of love. But don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”