Vince is waiting for me in the Air France departures gate at JFK, sitting on my extra-large rose gold Rimowa suitcase in line to check in. When he sees me, he climbs to his feet, guiltily, knowing that I hate it when he treats my nice luggage like a beanbag chair in a dorm room. He threads his fingers through his hair and gives me a busted! smile.
“I tried to check in for you,” he says. “But apparently that’s a security issue.” He laughs and tosses a flap of hair that is not in his eyes.
“No shit it’s a security issue.” I send the carry-on I’ve been living out of for the last few days wheeling his way.
Vince stops it with his foot, his pink pouty lips ajar. He’s been using my Fresh sugar lip scrub while I’ve been away, I see. “Babe?”
“You can’t check in for somebody else, Vince. Not even someone as devastatingly handsome as you.” I balance my foot on my overturned suitcase and rest my Fendi power bag on my knee, pushing aside old plane ticket stubs and Quest Bar wrappers in search of my wallet. The inside of my purse has never looked like this before in my life. I am not one to take my nice things for granted. I have lived the good life since I was six months old and yet I somehow always knew it would be temporary.
Vince crouches at the knees so that his face is below mine and he’s gazing up at me. His hair flops forward, skimming his searching, soulful eyes. How he imagined he would look on the movie posters outside Regal Cinema one day. “Steph. Babe. You okay?”
I have shuffled all of my credit cards and medical ID cards and Sweetgreen rewards cards and I still can’t locate my passport. I tip my head back and tears spill into my ears.
“Babe,” Vince says, gently, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out my passport. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
I forgot my passport and Vince suspected I forgot my passport. He looked in the drawer where I keep it before he left for the airport just in case I had. I feel suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful for him, and suddenly, overwhelmingly certain that it is a bad idea I go to Morocco.
“Come here.” Vince straps his arms around me. “I know you’re disappointed about the dinner with the Female Director. And it’s a lot of travel. You’re tired.”
I hook my chin over his shoulder, remembering the bartender, and the regret is as express and dangerous as a flash flood, waterlogging my heart. Not regret because I love Vince and I broke our vows—I am so far past that kind of regret—but regret for doing something so careless when there are already so many cracks in the fa?ade and I am running out of caulk. “I am tired.” I sigh, tearfully. “But I’m also scared.” Admitting this turns my tears into physical, silent sobs.
“But Gwen said not to worry, right?” Vince rubs circles into my back. “This sort of thing happens all the time with nonfiction?”
“It’s not nonfiction, Vince.”
Vince’s hand dies between my shoulder blades. He pulls away from me. He takes a step back. The look in his eyes—like he has turned over his meal ticket and realized Oh, shit, she has an expiration date. I shouldn’t be surprised, but still it twists. We loved each other once. I think.
“Steph,” Vince groans, bringing his hand to his cheek, his revulsion exemplary in case anyone is eavesdropping. Someone is always eavesdropping on this termite mound of a life I’ve built out of my own saliva and dung. “Jesus. You made that up?”
I look into my husband’s guileless eyes, showing off the acting chops he honed playing cute guy in a bar/elevator/towel in so many CW pilots that never got picked up I’ve lost count. My contempt for him is superhuman. I could pick him up and throw him through the plate glass revolving doors, send him all the way back to the Joey Bag o’ Donuts town where he came from. “Aw,” I say, with pitying scorn, “poor, innocent Vince. Just another victim of his fame-hungry wife’s desperate grab for her sixteenth minute. You must be shocked. Appalled! I’m sure that’s how you’ll try to sell me out to TMZ once the divorce is finalized and you’re searching between the couch cushions for quarters.” I shake my steepled hands at the heavens. “Thank you, Mom, for talking me into signing that prenup before you died.”
Vince checks over his shoulder. Yes, the couple ahead of us in line is listening. In a stage whisper, he says, “Steph, I actually am appalled. You lied about being assaulted? That’s a new low. Even for you.”
I snort. “You knew none of it was true after chapter five.”
The memoir is a memoir for the first seventy pages. I did hear things. I did have what felt like an unquenchable thirst for sleep. I did immediately jump to the worst-case scenario, as most teenagers do, that I was showing early signs of a debilitating case of schizophrenia. I did become convinced that if I could get in touch with my biological mother and understand my mental health history, I could somehow outsmart my genes.
A few months after I heard my first voice, I did pay to run a background check on her. At seventeen, I did gather the courage to drive my baby blue BMW to my biological mother’s residence in a banal middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. As I parked my car across the street from the townhome where my mother lived with my grandmother, on a circle preposterously named Kensington Court, a boy about my age happened to be walking by my window. He looked like he had just come from some sort of sports practice, the smell of grass and dirt and sweat clinging to him, alluringly. I was quick to call out to him.
The boy stopped. He looked at my car, eyebrows cocked in appreciation, before registering me and doubling back in surprise. I don’t think he expected to find someone like me behind the wheel.
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said. I read my mother’s name, written in blue pen at the top of the MapQuest webpage printout. I’m prehistoric, remember.
The boy made an indeterminable face. He had pretty, curled eyelashes and a strong jaw; the combination of hard and soft was extremely appealing. There were no boys like him in the magazines my friends and I read, but if there were, I would have cut out his picture and taped it to the wall, over the tear of Leonardo DiCaprio dragging down his lower lip with his thumb. I never got the Leo lust, but as a matter of survival, I performed it.
“I have her address as fifty-four Kensington Court. But this is Kensington Court and there is no fifty-four.”
“This is Kensington Square,” the boy explained. “Kensington Court is over there.” He pointed.
“That’s confusing!” I laughed. He was so cute. “Thanks.” I started to roll up my window, but he took a step forward, motioning for me to lower it again.
“Wait,” he said. “That woman you’re looking for? Sheila Lott?”
I nodded.
“You know she killed herself, right?”
My vision went spotty. I gripped the steering wheel tighter, like the stress balls they give you when you donate blood. “When?” I managed, thunderstruck.
“Few months ago.” He shrugged, like the specifics weren’t important. “Something like that.”
“Do you, um . . . do you know why?”
He actually laughed a little. “Who knows. She was a little, you know . . .” He wound his finger next to his ear. Like Vince would later do whenever I asked him why he took his phone into the bathroom with him to shower. Stop being crazy, he’d laugh.
“Got it,” I said, weakly. “Thank you.” I pressed the gas pedal and the engine blustered. I’d forgotten that I was still in park. I yanked the gear stick into get the fuck out of here and lowered my foot.
And so that perfectly average and helpful boy, who was admittedly a little insensitive in his language around suicide, became A.J., even though he never laid a hand on me. Even though I never saw him again.