Chương 3
“No.”
“You’ll get there faster.”
“I said no.”
She looked at me sideways.
“Because it belongs to Elijah?”
“Because I don’t want anything from him tonight.”
The elevator descended.
At the fifth floor, the doors opened and a man in gym clothes stepped in holding a bottle of fluorescent sports drink.
He glanced at Margaret’s evening gown, then at my cheek, then concentrated very intensely on the floor numbers.
For four floors, none of us spoke.
When he got off, Margaret said, “I dislike that color.”
I looked at her.
“The drink.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
It hurt my cut lip.
Margaret’s face softened.
Then the lobby doors opened.
My phone began ringing again.
This time, I answered.
“Elijah.”
“Where the hell are you?”
His voice was low and furious.
Behind him I could hear applause.
Apparently the program had resumed.
“I’m leaving.”
“For where?”
“The airport.”
Silence.
Then, “What are you talking about?”
“My mother.”
Another silence, longer this time.
I could almost hear him searching through forgotten conversations.
“Alex.”
“She’s dying.”
His breath changed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I stopped walking.
Margaret stopped beside me.
In the bright hotel lobby, surrounded by bellmen and late arrivals dragging suitcases across polished stone, I listened to my husband ask why I had failed to remind him of something I had told him three days earlier.
“I did,” I said.
“No, you told me she wasn’t doing well.”
“She’s in hospice, Elijah.”
“I know that, but you didn’t say tonight was—”
“I called you twice this afternoon.”
“I was in meetings.”
“You were with Laura.”
“That was a meeting.”
I looked through the revolving doors at the black sedan pulling toward the curb.
“Of course.”
“Alex, wait.”
I started walking again.
His voice sharpened.
“Do not get on a plane while we’re like this.”
I pushed through the revolving door.
Cold night air struck my face.
The pain in my cheek returned with astonishing clarity.
“Like what?”
He did not answer.
The driver opened the rear door.
Margaret touched my arm.
I looked at her.
She bent toward the phone.
“My son,” she said clearly, “if you have even one functioning instinct left, do not tell your wife what she may or may not do tonight.”
Then she ended the call for me.
I stared at the dark screen.
Margaret handed the phone back.
“That was rude,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You enjoyed it.”
“Immensely.”
For one second, we stood under the hotel awning while valets rushed between cars and somebody behind us argued about a missing parking ticket.
Then Margaret’s expression changed.
“Alex, when you come back, do not go to that house until you speak to me.”
I frowned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means exactly what I said.”
“Margaret.”
She looked toward the hotel doors.
For the first time that night, I saw fear in her face.
Not anger.
Not embarrassment.
Fear.
“There are things about Laura that I should have told you sooner,” she said.
The sedan waited beside us with its rear door open.
I stared at my mother-in-law.
“What things?”
Margaret swallowed.
“Go to your mother.”
Her voice was suddenly unsteady.
“Whatever happens next, you deserve one goodbye that no one can take from you.”
I watched the sedan disappear in the rain-slicked glass of the terminal doors and carried Margaret’s warning with me all the way through security.
The airport was crowded with people living ordinary emergencies.
A toddler screamed because his father had confiscated a plastic dinosaur.
A woman in navy scrubs slept upright beneath a charging station with her shoes tucked under her chair.
Two college-aged boys argued over whether they had time to buy tacos before boarding.
Nobody knew that my marriage had ended in a ballroom less than an hour earlier.
I found that comforting.
At the gate, I bought a bottle of water I did not drink and a turkey sandwich I could not swallow.
My cheek had started to swell.
The cashier looked at it, looked at me, and then looked away with the tact of someone who had spent years serving travelers on their worst days.
My phone vibrated continuously inside my clutch.
Elijah called six times.
Then he began sending messages.
Alex, answer me.
I’m sorry about your mother.
I should have remembered.
Please don’t make tonight about Laura.
That one stopped me.
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
Not because I was surprised, but because the sentence was so perfectly Elijah that it almost deserved study.
He had struck me in public.
He had forgotten our anniversary.
He had forgotten the woman who once mailed him homemade soup when he worked seventy-hour weeks and had no family nearby willing to say they worried about him.
And still, somehow, the problem was that I might make the evening about Laura.
I turned the phone facedown.
Five minutes later, another message appeared on my watch.
I lost my temper.
You know I would never hurt you.
My cheek throbbed in response.
I removed the watch.
The boarding agent called my group.
I stood with everyone else, shoulder to shoulder beneath harsh white lights, and tried not to think about the last time I had flown to Seattle.
My mother had met me at baggage claim wearing an old University of Washington sweatshirt and carrying a cardboard sign that said WELCOME HOME, TRAITOR because I had moved to California.
She had laughed so hard at her own joke that strangers laughed with her.
Four months later, pancreatic cancer turned her skin yellow.
By Christmas, she had stopped joking about living to ninety.
By spring, she stopped pretending treatment was working.
The flight attendant paused when I boarded.
“Are you okay?”
Her eyes flicked toward my face.
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly.
May you like
She gave me the kind of look women sometimes gave each other when they recognized something but had no right to name it.
“If you need ice, let me know.”
