She followed him back into College Hill. On a block caught somewhere between decay and refurbishment, he pulled to the curb. She pulled over fifty yards back in front of a boarded-up travel agency and a defunct record store. Past that was a furniture rental store that seemed to have cornered the market on black lacquer dressers. Next was a liquor store and then a camera store, Little Louie’s. Camera stores, she suspected, would all go the way of record stores and travel agencies (liquor stores, she suspected, would hold the line the world over), but Little Louie’s was, as yet, hanging on. Brian entered it. She thought of walking up the sidewalk and getting a glimpse of what he might be doing in there, but she quickly deemed that idea too unpredictable to risk. This was confirmed when Brian walked back out within two minutes of entering. If she’d given in to her impulse, she would have been caught flat-footed in the middle of the sidewalk. He drove off and she pulled away from the curb. As she passed the camera shop, she could see that it was fairly dark inside; the windows displayed only photographs of cameras and newspaper ads taped to the glass. She had no idea what went on in that store, but she suspected selling cameras wasn’t the main priority.
Brian led them out of Providence, through a series of smaller and smaller towns, where the clapboard homes grew more and more distressed, and farms sprouted up here and there, until he pulled into a strip mall that appeared to be reasonably new. He drove past the Panera Bread on the edge of the mall to a small freestanding bank, pulled into a parking space, and got out of the car. He walked to the bank, the laptop bag over his right shoulder again.
She idled in the strip mall lot, in front of a CVS and a Payless ShoeSource. While she waited, she took her phone out of the cup holder and saw that she’d received a text.
She opened it. It was from Brian and it had been sent twenty minutes ago as he’d walked out of the Seaver Street building and crossed directly in front of her.
Babe, on the runway. Taking off soon. Land in about 10 hours. Hope you’re still up when I call. Love you so much.
Ten minutes later, he came out of the bank but no longer carried the laptop bag.
He got in the Infiniti and drove out of the lot.
She followed him back into Providence. He stopped at a florist and purchased a bouquet of white and pink flowers, and her stomach turned. She wasn’t sure she was ready for where this was headed. He stopped one more time and purchased a bottle of champagne from a liquor store. Now she knew she wasn’t ready. He turned off the main road at Federal Hill, long an Italian-American stronghold and the seat of power for the New England mafia but by now just another handsome, gentrified neighborhood of chic restaurants and redbrick row houses.
He pulled the Infiniti into a slot in front of one of those row houses, its windows open to the fine day, white curtains wafting in white-trimmed windows. She parked across the street and a few houses down from where he stood on the sidewalk with the bouquet in his hand. He put two fingers into his mouth and let loose a loud, sharp whistle, something she’d never seen him do in all their time together. It wasn’t just the whistle that was new, she realized. He moved differently, his shoulders higher, his hips looser, springing off the balls of his feet with a dancer’s confidence.
He walked up the steps and the front door opened.
“Oh, Jesus,” Rachel whispered. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
It was a woman who answered the door, about thirty-five or so. She had curly blond hair and a long, pretty face. But none of that held Rachel’s attention when Brian handed her the flowers and the champagne, then knelt on the landing to kiss her pregnant belly.
20
VHS
She couldn’t remember driving back to the highway. The rest of her life she’d wonder how a completely sober person could operate a motor vehicle for several miles through a medium-size city and not remember it.
She’d picked Brian as her spouse because he seemed safe. Because he was can-do. Earnest bordering on grating. A man who would never cheat. Never lie. Certainly never live a double life.
Yet she’d watched her husband enter the row house with his arm around the waist of his pregnant wife(?), girlfriend(?), and shut the door behind them. Rachel had no idea how long she sat in her car, staring at the house, enough time to note that the paint was peeling a bit from a windowsill on the second floor; the cable from a rusted satellite dish dangled off the roof down the front of the building. The window trim was white; the brick facade, recently washed by the look of it, was red. The front door was black and looked to have been painted many times over the course of a century or more. The knocker was pewter.
And then she was on the highway with no idea how she got there.
She thought she’d cry. She didn’t cry. She thought she’d tremble. She didn’t tremble. She thought she’d feel grief and maybe she did, maybe this was what grief felt like—a total numbness, a brining in nothingness. A cauterized soul.
The three lanes of the highway dropped to two as they crossed into Massachusetts. A car drove up on her right, attempting to cut in front of her as its own lane began to disappear. Signs warning of the lane drop had been posted for the last two miles. The other driver had ignored them until it was convenient for him and inconvenient for her.
He sped up.
She sped up.
He sped up some more. She sped up some more. He pushed the nose of his car toward hers. She held her lane. He sped up again. She accelerated, eyes forward. He beeped his horn. She held her lane. In a hundred yards, his lane ended. He sped up and she gunned it, as much as a Ford Focus could be gunned. He dropped away so fast it was as if his car came equipped with a parachute. It appeared seconds later on her rear.
She noted the Mercedes-Benz symbol on his hood. Made sense. He flipped her the bird and blared his horn. A balding specimen behind expensive wraparounds, cheeks just beginning to turn to jowls, thin nose, nonexistent lips. She watched him rant and rage in her rearview and definitely made out the word fuck several times and cunt a couple more. She assumed his dashboard was speckled with spit by now. He wanted to jerk his car into the passing lane and race up on her side, then cut her off, she assumed, but the traffic to their left was too heavy, so he just kept his hand on his horn and thrust his middle finger at her and screamed in his car about what a cunt she was, what a fucking cunt.
She tapped her brakes. And not a light tap. Dropped her speed a solid five miles an hour for a moment. His eyebrows shot up over his sunglasses. His mouth froze in a desperate O. He gripped his steering wheel as if it were suddenly electrified. Rachel smiled. Rachel laughed.
“Fuck you,” she said to the rearview, “you nothing man.” She wasn’t sure the words made a bit of sense, but they felt good to say.