Chapter 13: The Tarmac Reunion
The carousel groaned and coughed up a gray duffel, then a hard-shell suitcase with a pink ribbon knotted at the handle. Joaquin let both go past him. He had learned the rhythm of this room three weeks earlier, the way the belt exhaled and the fluorescent tubes buzzed like trapped flies, and he stood in the exact same spot now, four feet from the same steel pillar, because some part of him wanted to measure the distance between the man who waited here then and the man standing here now.
That man had been starved. He had driven to the airport with his dead mother's name in his mouth and no plan past the motel, and then Marnie had come down the escalator in a cardigan with her hair clipped back, and forty minutes later he'd had his hand on her knee in a rental car with a bag of her clothes in the trunk.
Six days. Three bodies. The two under the overpass by the feed store, the man with the box cutter east of the motel. Room 112 with its broken ice machine and its view of a drainage ditch. He could still smell the bleach she'd used on the tub. He could still feel her teeth on his shoulder in the dark, both of them laughing at nothing, both of them sane for the first time in years.
Out there he hadn't had to hunch. He hadn't had to twist the ring on his finger until the skin went raw. He had eaten when he wanted and slept when he wanted and killed when he wanted, and nobody had called him pathetic in a voice pitched for company.
At home the ring was a lump on his knuckle again. The sink had a drip he hadn't fixed. Vera had left a list on the counter in her block capitals, and he had read it standing in his own kitchen with wet hands, obedient to paper.
A suitcase with duct tape on one corner came around. He stepped forward, hand out, and then a fingertip pressed into his shoulder blade. Light. Twice.
He knew before he turned. He knew from the pressure, from the height, from the way she stood close enough that he could feel the warmth without touching.
Marnie.
She had her hair down and loose over a long summer dress, pale yellow with a tie at the waist, and the fabric moved when she did, and she looked, for one stupid second, like every other wife waiting on a Thursday. Then she smiled, and it was hers, and he got both hands under her arms and lifted her off the tile.
She was light. She made a small sound into his ear and her hands went to his shoulders, and he turned her once, all the way around, her dress swinging out, and set her down carefully.
They stepped apart at the same moment. Two feet of polished floor opened between them. A man in a Nationals cap walked around them with his bag and didn't look twice. Joaquin put his hands in his pockets. Marnie tucked a curl behind her ear, and something in her jaw reset, and there she was again, the woman who organized a bake sale and addressed the county about streetlights.
"Your hair's wet," he said.
"I showered at the last gas station." She reached past him for the suitcase with the duct tape. "It was a mistake. Their dryer is a hand dryer."
"I got here early."
"I can see that." She looked at the carousel, at the belt going around with nobody's things on it, then at him. "You're parked where you parked last time."
He took the suitcase. "Come on."
The walk out took four minutes. The doors opened onto the concrete-level heat and the smell of jet fuel, and by the time they reached the long-term lot, both of them were sweating at the collar. He put her bag in the trunk and got in and started the engine, and she got in the passenger seat and buckled herself in like it was a Tuesday carpool.
"So," she said. "Two days. I wiped the room with the bleach wipes and put the towels in the tub and the sheets folded on the chair, and I checked out at ten fifty-eight because the woman at the desk watched me bring the cart back up. Then I drove south for three hours and ate a club sandwich at a place with a fake slot machine, and then I drove back north, and I slept in the car at a rest stop with the doors locked and the seat back. I watched the sun come up over a cornfield." She ran her thumbnail along the seam of her skirt. "I didn't kill anybody."
"You wanted to."
"I didn't."
He merged onto the access road. She shifted in the seat and her hand landed on his right thigh, just above the knee, and stayed there, fingers spread, and he felt every one of them separately.
After half a mile, she squeezed.
"What's wrong?"
He kept his eyes on the road. The exit sign for the loop came and went.
"I got home Tuesday morning," he said. "Early. Half past ten. I had the cab drop me at the corner because I didn't want her to hear the door."
"I know you did."
"The Escalade was gone. Her Rover was gone." He swallowed. "I heard them from the driveway."
Her fingers didn't move.
"Your kitchen," she said. Not a question.
"The island. He had her bent over it with her hands on the sink, and she had her shoes on. He talked the whole time. So did she." He felt the heat come up his neck and he made himself say it flat, like reading a list. "They did my voice. The whiny one, the one she does. Then they did yours. The chirping, about the HOA and the streetlights and the mulch."
Marnie's hand tightened once and went still again.
"And then she told him to start hitting you."
The AC blew cold on his face. A truck passed them on the left and rocked the car.
"She said it like advice. Take her by the back of the neck and she'll settle." He heard his own voice go thin and hated it. "Curdle her like milk, she said."
Marnie took her hand off his thigh and folded it with the other one in her lap. She looked out the window at the retention pond and the dead grass on the median.
"Pull over," she said.
"We're on the highway."
"Pull over."
He took the shoulder. Gravel rattled under the tires and the car settled at an angle in the grass, and the trucks went by close enough to push the whole frame sideways. He put it in park.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She watched a flatbed go past. "I'm thinking about all the things I want to do about it."
He almost laughed. "So have I."
"Have you picked one?"
"Four," he said. "The pool. Nobody watches a man swim alone. I could hold him under by the ankle and count to ninety."
"Hugh doesn't swim."
"He would if I asked him to come look at something in the water."
"He wouldn't." She turned toward him. The freckles across her nose had gone dark from the sun and she had a small burn on one shoulder. "Benadryl in the bourbon. He drinks it neat at nine and he's asleep by ten. It wouldn't look like anything."
"You've thought about it before."
"I've thought about it for ten years." She said it the way she said the deep clean of the grout in the hall bath. "I never had a reason that held up under the light of day. Now I do."
"And after?"
"The merger closes in six weeks. If he dies before the escrow clears, the board gets a say in who runs it, and Vera doesn't get a say, and Vera will burn an entire year fighting them in Delaware." She picked at a cuticle. "If he dies after, she inherits his seat. Half of everything. She'd have his house and her house and she'd put you in a rental."
"Then after," he said.
"After." She nodded slowly. "Vera first is cleaner. A woman with a heart condition and a surgery consult is a woman who can go any time. I'd do it at night with my needle and nobody would look past the autopsy."
"He'd remarry within a year."
"To who?"
"Someone like her," he said. "He picks them like that."
They sat with it. A plane crossed the sky, low, gear down, belly lit up, and the sound arrived late and rolled over the roof of the car.
Marnie reached up and pulled the tie loose on her dress. She did it absently, but her chest had gone pink at the collarbone and her breathing had changed, short and even, and he knew what that was because he had seen it in her six times across a motel bed.
"Say the pool part again," she said.
"I hold him under until he stops."
"Say it slower."
He said it slower. Her hands came up and undid the top button, then the second, and she pulled the dress off over her head and dropped it in the footwell. Underneath she had on a plain gray bra and no underwear at all, and the sight of her bare thighs on his passenger seat did something to his chest that made it hard to breathe.
She reached over and undid his belt herself. He lifted his hips and she dragged his jeans and shorts down to his knees, and his cock came up hard against his stomach, and she wrapped her hand around it and squeezed until he grunted.
"Back seat," she said.
They climbed over. He got the rear door open for the air and she shoved him down on the vinyl and straddled him, and she was already wet when she slid onto him, all the way down in one stroke, and both of them made a noise that the trucks swallowed.
She rode him rough. Her knees dug into the seat on both sides and her hands were flat on his chest, and every time she came down he drove up into her, and the car rocked on its springs with a squeak that sounded like a bird being killed. He got a hand in her hair and pulled her head back and she bit his thumb and told him to do it harder.
"Harder," she said. "Come on, you wanted to count to ninety."
He flipped her. She landed on her back with her legs spread and he shoved back into her and fucked her without any rhythm at all, one hand hooked under her knee and the other flat on the window, and the glass fogged where his palm was. She hooked her ankles behind his back and pulled him in deeper and swore at him in a steady flat voice, filth about his wife, filth about her husband, filth about what they were going to do to both of them with their hands, and he came so hard his vision went white at the edges and he felt her tighten around him a second later and shake with it.
They lay there breathing. Somebody's coffee cup rolled around in the footwell.
"Get off," she said finally. "You're heavy."
He pulled out and sat up. She had a red mark on her hip from the door handle and she touched it and shrugged. He found a package of wet wipes in the glovebox, left over from the motel, and she cleaned herself up with two of them while he pulled his jeans back on and wiped the seat down. She got dressed in the front, one arm through at a time, and did up the buttons.
"Nothing yet," she said.
"Nothing yet."
"We play it cool. We smile at the block party. You bring me a casserole when I have the flu." She pulled her seatbelt across. "I want to know what this is. What it's been. How long, how often, whether he's told her anything true about me."
"He hasn't. He doesn't know anything true about anybody."
"I want to hear her say it."
Joaquin put the car in gear and checked the mirror. "If he ever does put his hands on you, I don't know if I can hold it."
"He won't. He's a coward with a good tailor." She said it without heat. "And if he tries, I can handle myself. I've handled worse than Hugh Merrick with a glass of bourbon in him."
He pulled back onto the highway. Neither of them said anything for the next twenty minutes, and the quiet wasn't awkward; it sat between them the way it had in room 112 after the third night, easy and used.
They came off the exit into the development, past the brick sign with the engraved name and the crepe myrtles the crew had trimmed last month, and Marnie's hand went back to his thigh.
The car turned onto Rowan Court and the crepe myrtle blossoms lay flattened all over the asphalt, pink and wet from the sprinklers. Marnie's fingers came off his thigh the second the house showed through the gap in the hedge.
Both garage bays stood open. The Escalade sat in the left one with its nose out and the hood still ticking heat into the morning.
"Shit," she said, very quietly, and then her face did that thing it did, the jaw resetting, the eyes going soft at the corners. In four seconds she was somebody's wife again.
He pulled to the curb because the driveway was full. The bags could wait. Through the windshield he could see Hugh coming down the front walk with a phone in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other, in a golf shirt, in loafers without socks, and Joaquin felt his back settle into the hunch before he had even opened the door.
Hugh leaned down and knocked twice on the passenger window with his knuckle, grinning.
Marnie got out. So did Joaquin.
"Marnie, my love. I'm so happy you're back." Hugh kissed her, then held her at arm's length by both shoulders to look at her. "I have missed you."
"Missed you too." She let him keep hold of her. "I'm a bit jet lagged from the flight. You know what flying does to me."
"No worries. You get some rest. I'll order in." He was already scrolling with his thumb. "Thai. The place with the good noodles."
Marnie leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, and on her way past she glanced over at Joaquin and gave him one short nod, a thank you with no words in it. Then she went up the steps and into the house, and the storm door eased shut behind her with a soft hiss.
Joaquin had the trunk open and her suitcase in his hand when Hugh stepped sideways into his path.
"Don't worry about that. I'll get those for her." Hugh took the handle out of Joaquin's grip, easy about it, like relieving a waiter of a tray. "After all, I am the man of my household."
The suitcase had duct tape on one corner. Joaquin let it go and pulled his hand back and stood there with the canvas bag still in his other fist.
"Right. Well, you guys have a good night."
He turned for the driver's door.
"Oh, come on now, don't rush off so quick." Hugh set the suitcase down on the walk and straightened. "Come in, have a beer with me. Take it as my thanks for taking care of the wife."
Joaquin stopped with his hand on the door handle. The heat came up off his skin and he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep his mouth still. Twenty minutes ago her legs had been hooked over his shoulders and she had been swearing at him in a flat steady voice, and his come was running down her thigh right now under that yellow dress, and this man was thanking him.
He got the smile turned around before he faced him.
"No problem, but I do have to get back to Vera. She'll be expecting dinner soon."
Hugh's eyebrows went up. He picked the glass off the roof of the car and took a drink of it.
"Ah, yes. Vera." He said it the way a man says the name of a dog that bit somebody at a barbecue. "She's quite the demanding one, isn't she?"
Joaquin didn't answer with words. He laughed, the short awkward one he used for Vera's friends, and gave his head a little tilt, and it seemed to land fine because Hugh laughed too.
"Well, I don't want you to get in trouble or anything." Hugh set the glass down again and put his phone away, and now his hands were free, and he used one to point at Joaquin's chest, loose and friendly. "Tell you what. You and Vera come over for dinner this weekend. I'll have Marnie whip something up. Give you a night off from housework."
The lawn crew had edged the walk that morning. Joaquin stared at the dark cut line where the turf met the concrete and heard himself say it.
"Sure thing. I'll run it by Vera."
"Saturday. Seven." Hugh picked up the suitcase and got the canvas bag off him in the same motion, both of them in one hand. "Bring nothing. She'll make too much anyway."
Joaquin got into the car. He started it and put his belt on and pulled the door shut, and through the glass he watched Hugh Merrick walk up his own front steps carrying his wife's luggage like a porter, in a shirt he had bought on a business trip, with that red nick still healing on his jaw from where Vera must have caught him with a nail.
The window fogged from the inside. Joaquin put the car in drive and eased off the curb and the house slid past him in the mirror, both garage bays still open, the sprinkler ticking over the hedge.
Saturday. Seven. A table for four, and a fork in his hand, and a glass of bourbon with Benadryl in it that wasn't his to pour yet, and Vera across from him with her shoe off rubbing up Hugh's ankle under the cloth.
He turned at the stop sign at the end of the court and his hands were shaking, so he took them off the wheel for a second and laid them flat on his thighs.
Playing it cool was going to be harder than he thought.