Next time she saw him was at Penn Station, mid-January. It wouldn’t have taken much to cut through the crowd to say hello, but she didn’t. He looked different in the city, in his work clothes. He was reading something on his phone, a messenger bag crossed over his chest. She saw him again when she transferred at Secaucus but he was ahead of her and didn’t look back. The whole ride to Gillam she imagined him somewhere on the same train, staring out at the same view, and it was only when they disembarked at Gillam’s station that he saw her.
“Oh, hey,” he said, surprised. The circle of light cast by the streetlamp enclosed them together. How lonely he must be. How much courage it must have taken to break his life open and change it. The other commuters had already scattered. They each made a bunch of standard complaints about the train. “Was your day okay?” he asked. He seemed to have genuine interest in her answer, so she told him a little about it, then asked about his.
He had to go, he said eventually. The sitter was due to leave. His younger daughter needed a rock to paint for school and couldn’t find a good one in the yard. The older girl needed a particular color T-shirt for spirit week and he promised to take her to the mall.
“It’s a lot,” Jess said.
“It is a lot,” he agreed. “And by the way. I’ve been meaning to apologize about, you know—”
“It’s fine.”
“You know what I was going to say?”
“I think so.”
That was a Thursday. On Friday, the very next night, he texted for the first time in a long time, to ask if she was home, if he could stop by. He must have known Malcolm would be at work. Everyone knew where to find Malcolm Gephardt on a Friday night.
When he arrived, he closed the door behind himself but just stood on the mat. He wouldn’t take off his coat. Jess thought, maybe he’s dropping something off. But he had nothing in his hands. She was nervous, her voice loud when she offered him something to drink. How cool she was trying to be, how badly she wanted to seem at ease. But instead of answering he put his hands on his head and clutched it like he was trying to hold it together.
“Jess,” he said, dropping his arms to his sides.
She waited, the electric hum inside her body getting stronger. It was now, she knew. It was now. She had a decision to make. She was in cotton joggers. Her old R.E.M. T-shirt. A ponytail. No makeup.
He took a step closer and then reached past Jess to the panel of light switches behind her. The cold air from outside rolled off his clothes. He turned off the light in the hall, and Jess knew that he’d decided, that whatever he was about to do he couldn’t have people see if they glanced at her house.
“What are you doing?” she asked. She felt like she was breathing through a straw. His coat was unzipped, and she put her hand flat to his chest, over his heart. He went perfectly still, maybe to figure out if she was pushing him away. But she slid that same hand to his shoulder and he groaned like an animal, like she’d injured him somehow.
six
On the second morning after the storm—Sunday—Malcolm woke in the clothes he’d been wearing the day before, his knit hat twisted up with the bedsheets, his coat on the floor. His phone was dead. He remembered getting up in the middle of the night to search the medicine cabinet, and then Jess’s bedside table for an old Xanax that might have escaped the bottle. She never took one until she’d truly tried to sleep on her own, and she made a rule that she could never take more than one a week. But all he found was a tube of self-tanner, a pile of bobby pins, an empty baggie labeled “folic acid.” He could see his breath in the slant of moonlight.
He wondered if Neil Bratton knew by then what trouble she had sleeping, how she fell asleep easily but couldn’t stay asleep, how her thoughts found a loop and stayed there, night after night, all the things she would have done differently, like a marble rolling down a run, the same twists and turns over and over and over.
Surely the power would come back that day. Surely something would happen, because he wouldn’t be able to stand another like the previous one, no markers to go by, no beginning, middle, or end. He stood up from his bed, his shoulders aching, and went to the window, first the back and then down the hall to the front, his new snowstorm ritual. The plow had come through—there were grooves on the road—but it must have snowed more because the tracks were blurred. He tried to tell from the sun what time it was, but every corner of the sky was gray.
Downstairs, the wall clock showed it was just after ten. He lifted the smaller of the two pots of water on the stove and chugged as much as he could. He placed the pot back down on the range and took a deep breath, pressing his fist to his chest. He opened and closed cabinet doors, looking for something to eat. He ate a bit of the cold meat loaf his mother had wrapped for him on Friday, and hoped she had a good fire going, that she knew to close the doors to trap the heat. He could feel his temper stirring, like chop on the surface of a shallow pond. Amazing to consider the situation he was in, stuck in his house while his bar sat empty and his wife played pretend across town. He closed his eyes and conjured the scene that always calmed him: a vision of the Half Moon packed from end to end, a cover band playing songs everyone loved. He thought of his friend Adrian who worked at the Half Moon for a few years but then moved down south, Nashville first, and then Miami. He’d called Malcolm twice recently. Left voicemails for Malcolm to call him back without saying what he wanted. Malcolm hadn’t gotten around to it, and then just a day or two before the storm, he opened Neat magazine and whose face did he see but Adrian’s, looking at him from his bar “on the edge of the world.” It wasn’t really on the edge of the world. It was on St. John, basically a pergola set over a stone patio from the looks of it, up-lighting, the Caribbean shimmering in the background. The article was mostly about the hurricanes that had hit the previous year, and what the rebuilding effort looked like. Malcolm imagined having no heating bill. No cable. No windows to break. Just a steel drum and a nightly sunset. He wondered how Adrian protected the back bar and the stemware when it rained.
Maybe Adrian had heard the Half Moon was struggling. He wasn’t a bragger, so Malcolm was sure whatever he wanted had nothing to do with the feature in Neat, but Malcolm couldn’t quite bring himself to call back and hear how well Adrian’s place was doing. Maybe he should visit St. John. He could get out of town for a few days and get some perspective from a friend who knew Gillam, knew Hugh and the Half Moon, knew what it took to run a place.