“Did things change after that?” I asked. “With your mother?”
“No, she just took up with another troublemaker. Some ex-army guy, retired but still built like a truck.” Then she laughed. “My mom calls herself a passionate woman, and she claims her men are passionate, too. But she just uses that word to excuse people for their bad behavior. Her so-called passion leads her from one loser to the next. She was a beautiful woman, though. Still is. Very alluring. One day she’ll be alone, that’s for sure. I feel bad for her. And I won’t let it happen to me. It almost did, you know.”
“The baseball player.”
She smiled. “He played backup second base for the county high school. He was always throwing the ball over the first baseman’s head. Beautiful eyes, though. The boy was beautiful, I’ll give him that. And not violent or mean. But a local guy. Small-minded. The sort of guy who thinks that the ultimate thing a woman would want is her name spelled correctly when it’s tattooed on his bicep. You’ve got to be crazy to build a future with a guy like that. When I told him I wanted to go to college and become a novelist, he literally laughed, and then when he saw I was pissed he said all he meant was that there was a perfectly good newspaper right in Slaughter that I could write for.” She shook her head. “Which was extra stupid because it wasn’t a ‘perfectly good newspaper.’ It was a shoddily written weekly devoted mainly to church activities.”
“You really need to stop bringing that guy up in front of Jeffrey,” I said. “It makes him crazy.”
She nodded. “I know. I hate when I do it, even when I’m doing it.”
“Well, maybe just don’t do it.”
In that regard, our conversation wasn’t just informative, it was practical. Because as far as I know, she never mentioned him to Jeffrey again.
“You know, I’ve never told anyone about Leo,” she said, several minutes later, once our shirts were dry and folded.
“Except for Jeffrey, you mean.”
“Nope.”
“Just me?”
She must have seen the confusion in my face, because she smiled. “It’s no big deal. I just sort of felt like talking, that’s all.” She shrugged. “Anyway, you’re a good listener.”
Her compliment filled me with satisfaction, though I didn’t believe I’d done anything to earn it. “You know I’d never—”
“I know you won’t. There’s no need to say anything.”
My fear, now, was that we were creating just those sorts of “Leo” moments in Marie, instilling the presumption of violence and betrayal in a person who hadn’t asked for it and didn’t deserve it. She’d been foolish, trying to get more money out of us. And greedy. But in the scheme of things her faults were small-time and forgivable.
At some point during my musings, she had lain down on the sofa. She turned onto her side and curled up her legs, making herself smaller, and then was still.
Sleep, Marie. From the control room I further dimmed Room A until it went black. Sleep.
22
The philly-bound plane had sat on the runway so long it needed to be de-iced all over again, and by the time Evan called us saying he’d touched down in Philadelphia, it was nearly five in the morning.
“Sorry if I woke you,” he said.
“You didn’t,” I said.
He hadn’t woken any of us. Jeffrey, Nolan, and I had spent these hours apart. Even after Evan’s call I spent two more hours staring at my hands, wishing for my friend to get here already while simultaneously hoping he’d never arrive. At seven thirty he called again from the parking lot behind the studio, asking to be let in.
Only two days earlier I’d tried to keep Evan away. Now, despite my stiff limbs, I couldn’t get to the door fast enough.
The bright morning sun nearly took my breath away. It must be how gamblers feel stumbling penniless out of a casino and being shocked that the colorful world is carrying on without them. Evan stood in the doorway, framed by the morning light. He wore a gray business suit and carried his computer bag. He looked tired, but if his expression reflected what he saw, I must have looked worse. We shook hands. “Thanks for coming,” I said, and led him into the studio. “It’s good to see a friendly face.”
We kept walking down the hallway, past the bathrooms.