Chương 2
Instead I remembered the hundred smaller moments she had heard.
Block.
Then I worked through the family group chat.
Aunts.
Uncles.
Cousins.
People I saw once every three years.
People who had never done anything wrong except remain part of a machine I suddenly couldn’t stand hearing.
I blocked all of them.
Marissa’s name was last.
My thumb hovered.
She had apologized.
Silently, yes, but she had.
I blocked her too.
It was unfair.
I knew that even while doing it.
That knowledge didn’t stop me.
I drove west.
For the first several hours, I had no destination.
I knew only that Chicago felt impossible because my apartment there was forty minutes from my parents’ house, Josh knew the building code, and Mom still had a spare key from the year I broke my ankle.
By midnight I was in Tennessee.
I rented a motel room where the comforter smelled faintly of bleach and cigarettes despite the NO SMOKING sign.
The man at the desk barely looked at my license.
Inside the room, I placed my phone facedown on the nightstand and lay on top of the covers fully dressed.
The silence terrified me.
I had wanted it, but wanting silence and hearing it were different things.
At two in the morning I almost called Lily.
At three I almost called Mom.
At four I searched jobs in cities where I knew nobody.
Denver.
Seattle.
Portland.
Boise.
Sacramento.
I had worked for six years as a logistics analyst, which was less glamorous than it sounded and more portable than I had realized.
Warehouses existed everywhere.
Companies everywhere needed someone willing to stare at shipping delays and spreadsheets until the numbers behaved.
By sunrise I had applied for eleven jobs.
One was in Portland, Oregon, at a regional outdoor-equipment distributor.
I forgot about it by breakfast.
Three days later, from another motel outside Kansas City, a recruiter called.
Her name was Elena.
She spoke quickly and apologized twice for barking dogs in the background.
“We normally do two rounds,” she told me, “but your experience lines up weirdly well with what we need.”
I looked around the motel room at a lamp screwed crookedly into the wall.
“When could you start?”
I said, “Pretty much immediately.”
There was a pause.
“Immediately immediately?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not under contract somewhere?”
“No.”
“You don’t need to relocate?”
“I’m already relocating.”
“To Portland?”
I looked at the interstate map open on my laptop.
“Sure.”
She laughed.
I didn’t.
Two video interviews later, they made an offer.
It paid four thousand dollars less than I had made in Chicago.
I accepted before the recruiter finished explaining the health plan.
I emailed my landlord in Chicago, paid the penalty for breaking my lease, and hired a moving company to pack the apartment without me.
I told the building manager they could let the movers in.
When he asked whether I was coming back for anything personally, I said no.
That turned out to be a lie.
There were things I missed later.
A cast-iron skillet my grandfather had given me.
A box of printed photographs.
A winter coat that actually fit.
But at the time I wanted nothing that required returning.
Portland greeted me with rain so light it seemed undecided.
I rented a one-bedroom apartment in a building with thin walls and a perpetually broken elevator.
My new couch came in three boxes.
I assembled it backward.
A neighbor named Malcolm knocked because my swearing had become loud enough to concern him.
“You murdering somebody in there?”
“Furniture.”
He looked at the half-built couch.
“Furniture’s winning.”
Malcolm was forty-six, divorced, and worked nights maintaining equipment at a hospital.
He helped me turn the frame around and refused the beer I offered because he had twelve hours left before work.
That was the first friendship I made in Portland.
Not a dramatic one.
He borrowed my drill.
I watered his plants when he visited his daughter in Eugene.
Sometimes we stood in the hallway complaining about the elevator.
My job was similarly ordinary.
Elena turned out to be six months pregnant and exactly as impatient in person as she had sounded on the phone.
On my second day she dropped a binder on my desk and said, “If anyone tells you our inventory system makes sense, they’re lying or sleeping with the software vendor.”
I liked her immediately.
For months, my life became small and repetitive.
Work.
Groceries.
Laundry.
A climbing gym where I was terrible enough that strangers offered advice.
Saturday mornings with a camera I bought used from a college student who needed rent money.
I photographed bridges, dogs, wet sidewalks, old men playing chess beneath an awning.
Nothing important.
That was the point.
My family existed only through absence.
On holidays I noticed it most.
Thanksgiving morning, I woke before sunrise because some internal clock still expected my mother’s seven-thirty call asking what time I planned to arrive.
The phone remained silent.
I made eggs.
Burned one.
Ate both.
Christmas was worse.
Malcolm invited me downstairs to drink eggnog with his daughter, Camille, who was home from college and regarded both of us with the affectionate contempt reserved for middle-aged men trying to operate a Bluetooth speaker.
Nobody asked why I wasn’t with my family.
I loved them for that.
Six months after I arrived, I met Claire at the climbing gym.
She was not climbing.
She was standing near the front desk holding an ice pack to her elbow and arguing with an employee about whether falling three feet counted as “an injury worth documenting.”
“It swelled instantly,” she said.
The employee, who looked nineteen, said, “I’m not saying it didn’t.”
“You’re making a face.”
“I’m just standing here.”
“That’s a skeptical face.”
I laughed.
Claire turned toward me.
“You work here?”
“No.”
“Then you’re useless.”
“Usually.”
May you like
That made her smile.
She was a public-school librarian, thirty-four, perpetually five minutes late, and incapable of leaving a restaurant without stacking the plates for the server.
