Chapter 9: The Airport Goodbye
The bag was canvas, soft-sided, green, the kind you would take to a farmers' market or a weekend lake house. Marnie laid it open on the bed and folded in two pairs of jeans, three shirts, a sweater she never wore because it made her look tired. She chose the sweater deliberately. Grief made people look tired, and she wanted the edges softened before she stepped in front of anyone who knew her.
Downstairs, the house held its morning quiet. The dishwasher hummed through its last cycle. Out the window the Marsh house sat with its blinds half drawn, Vera's cobalt SUV gone from the drive, Joaquin's modest grey sedan still parked in its usual spot near the garage. Marnie looked at it for exactly as long as a woman checking the weather would look, then went back to the closet.
She had rehearsed the call in the shower, which was where she rehearsed most things, the water loud enough to cover a voice pitched low. Her mother's phrasing, the tremor on the second sentence, the way her mother would say honey twice in a row when she was frightened. It had taken four attempts to get the tremor right. In the end she had not needed to call her mother at all. She had simply stood in the bedroom with her phone against her ear for eleven minutes, listening to the dryer, saying okay and when and no, no, I'll come, and if Hugh had asked she would have had an answer for every word of it. He would not ask.
The front door opened.
"Marnie?"
"Up here."
His keys hit the bowl. His shoes came off, one heel, then the other, the same two thuds she had heard at the end of nearly every workday for ten years. The stairs took his weight the way they always did. She did not have to look up to know he was loosening his tie before he reached the top of the landing, because he always did, because the tie was the first thing about the day he wanted off.
He stopped in the doorway. The tie hung loose around his collar, and his face did the thing she had been counting on, the slow collapse of the brow, the mouth opening before there were words ready for it.
"What's going on?"
She let her hands stop moving over the sweater. She let her shoulders drop. She had practiced the drop, too.
"It's my dad." She said it quietly, the way you said a thing you had not yet decided to believe. "My mom called about an hour ago. He had a heart attack this morning."
"Jesus." He crossed the room. His hands went to her arms, then her face, cupping it, thumbs at her jaw, and for one instant she noticed how warm his palms were and how little she felt about it. "Is he, is he alive, what did they say?"
"He's in the ICU. They put in a stent. She said he's stable, but she said that word four times, Hugh, she kept saying stable like she was reading it off a card." Marnie let her voice crack on card. She was good at the crack. It was the only part of the performance she genuinely enjoyed.
"Okay." He pulled her in. She fitted her forehead into the hollow under his collarbone and breathed him in, the soap, the faint sourness of a day spent in a building that recycled its air. "Okay. Which flight?"
"Two-forty. I booked it while we were talking. I didn't want to wake you, you had that call at seven."
"You should have woken me." His hand moved in circles between her shoulder blades. "You shouldn't be doing this alone."
"I'm not doing it alone. I'm doing it with my mother, which is worse." She pulled back enough to smile at him, and the smile worked, because it always worked. "I'll be fine. I just need to get there."
He looked at the canvas bag. "That's all you're taking?"
"It's a week. Maybe less. He'll either be home by Friday or he won't be, and if he isn't, I'll send for more."
The words landed the way she meant them to. His jaw tightened and he pulled her back in and held on for a long moment, cheek resting against her hair. Marnie kept her eyes open. Over his shoulder, out the window, Joaquin's grey sedan sat in the drive next door, and the curtains behind it shifted a quarter inch and went still.
"I'm driving you," Hugh said.
"You don't have to."
"I'm driving you."
* * *
The car came off the freeway with the sun high and flat, and the airport rose out of the scrub in glass and concrete the way it always did, all of it temporary, none of it belonging to anyone. Hugh drove with his left hand and kept his right hand on hers the whole way, resting on the console, thumb moving slow over her knuckles, and every few seconds he squeezed, as if checking that the contact was still registering. Marnie let her fingers stay slack and let him do the work of it.
"You'll call me when you land."
"I will."
"Even if it's midnight."
"Even if it's midnight."
"And you'll tell me the truth about how he looks. Don't do the thing where you say he looks fine when he looks like hell."
"I won't do the thing."
He glanced at her and almost smiled, and she could see that he believed her, and there was a small cold satisfaction in that, a thing she could not have explained to anyone and would never have tried to. She was a very good wife. That was the part no one ever understood. Anyone could lie. Very few people could be good at the same time.
He pulled into departures and stopped where the sign said passenger drop-off, hazards on, and got her bag out of the back himself before she could reach for it. The doors slid open and closed in their endless automatic rhythm, and the curb was crowded with people in motion, a family with a stroller and too much luggage, a man in a blazer arguing into a phone, a woman in sunglasses hugging someone who did not want to be hugged. Marnie stood on the pavement and let the sterile current of it wash over her, and felt nothing at all, which was familiar.
Hugh set the bag down and put both hands on her waist.
"I love you," he said.
"Love you too."
He kissed her. It was gentle and it lasted a second longer than a goodbye needed to last, and she closed her eyes for it because that was the correct thing to do, and because the glass of the terminal doors behind him reflected them both, a tall man in a suit with his tie gone crooked and a thin woman with auburn curls and a canvas bag, and it was a good picture. She made a note of it.
"I'll text you when I'm through security," she said.
"Text me before."
"Before."
She picked up the bag and walked in, and she did not look back, because looking back was for people who might be missed. The doors took her. She knew the exact moment he turned away, the way she always knew, and she did not have to see it to feel the little slackening in the air where he had been.
* * *
Hugh sat in the driver's seat for a long moment with the hazards still ticking, watching the doors. People kept going in, people kept coming out, and none of them was her.
He pulled the hazards off, eased out into the lane, and let the airport fall away behind him. He drove ten minutes before the light at Del Mar and Fremont went red, and he sat there with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, and then he reached over to the passenger seat and picked up his phone out of the cupholder.
He typed it, deleted it, typed it again. The wife's gone for the week. Three dots, a pause, then send.
The light went green. He set the phone face down on his thigh and rolled forward with the traffic, and it buzzed against his leg before he had gone half a mile, and he did not look at it until the next red.
The light at Del Mar and Fremont went red and he let the car roll to a stop and picked the phone up off his thigh. One handed, thumb swipe, the screen bright in the flat morning glare.
A thumbs up.
Nothing else. No word, no question, no little hook thrown back across the line the way she had thrown them all month, in boardrooms, over desks, on a balcony with his lipstick on his collar. Just the yellow hand with its thumb up, a thing you sent a contractor about a quote. It sat there on the screen and he looked at it long enough for the light behind him to honk.
He typed nothing. Put the phone back in the cupholder and rolled forward with the traffic and did not touch it again.
She wanted him to ask what that meant. She wanted him to call, and hear her pick up on the second ring with that slow gray-eyed patience, and give her one more reason to believe she had a hand on the wheel. He'd spent a month learning the way she worked. She set a hook every time she opened her mouth. The trick with her was not the pulling. The trick was never touching the line.
The light went green and he drove home with the radio off and his window down, and by the time he pulled into the driveway the thumbs up had stopped bothering him the way an itch stops bothering you when you refuse to scratch it.
The house was the same house it had been that morning, and it had stopped being the same house the second the terminal doors took her. The dishwasher was done. The counters were clean. The kitchen clock ticked against the refrigerator's hum and the two sounds did not quite line up, and he stood in the middle of his own floor for a while and listened to that.
He worked the rest of the afternoon. Emails, a call with Patel about the Marsh integration that ran forty minutes past what it needed, and he heard his own voice go even and competent down the line, and Patel heard nothing. At seven he went to the kitchen and pulled the foil off a glass dish and found the chicken and rice and the roasted carrots, all of it from the night before, all of it hers.
He ate it standing at the counter some nights when she was away. That night he put it in the microwave and poured a bourbon and put his feet up on the second chair and let the house get dark around the edges.
The knock came at eight forty.
He did not hurry. He set the glass down, pushed the food to the side of the table, and went to the door in his old college sweats and the robe Marnie had bought him two Christmases ago, hanging open, chest bare under it, because a man alone in his own house on a Tuesday did not dress for a knock.
He pulled the door and Vera Marsh was standing on his stoop.
Trench coat, cinched at the waist. Heels, the slim kind that clicked when she shifted her weight. Hair black and severe, cut in a line you could have leveled with a spirit level. He looked at the coat and could not tell whether there was anything under it, and found that he did not especially care.
He stepped back and held the door open. He did not check the street. The Hollands' porch light was on across the way and the Nguyens' blinds were drawn, and none of that registered as anything but weather.
Vera walked past him and into the house like a woman attending a showing she had no intention of buying. She took in the entry, the hall, the kitchen, her chin high, her eyes moving slow. "Your house is", she said, and paused there at the doorway of the kitchen, "typical."
"Thanks." Hugh crossed to the microwave and hit the button. It started to turn. "My wife designed it."
"Look at me when I'm talking to you." Her voice had gone tight at the top, that leash-shortening sound he had heard her use on her own junior staff and once, through a garage wall, on Joaquin.
Behind him the plate came around in its little box of light. "You must have me mistaken for your husband."
"No." Her heels came across the tile and stopped at the table. "But you can be trained to be."
He heard the fork scrape the dish. He turned around then, and she had his plate in her hand and one forkful of rice already lifting toward her mouth, and she ate it while she watched him.
"I am not a dog," he said, and crossed the floor, and took the plate back out of her fingers. Not rough. He did it the way you took something off a child who had not asked. "And that is my food."
"Your wife is a good cook." She chewed and swallowed and ran her tongue across her teeth, unhurried. "I could never be the housewife she is."
"Yea, well." He set the plate down on the counter behind him, and did not turn his back to her to do it. "Some people are just better at things than others."
He said it looking straight into her face, and she read it in him, because her eyes narrowed the way they had in the boardroom when he had slid the audit across the table at her and told her the valuation was fiction. She liked that. He could see her like it.
"Trust me." Vera reached up and unhooked the collar of the coat with two fingers and let it fall off her shoulder, the wool sliding down her arm and settling at the crook of her elbow, and under it there was nothing but her, one long line of shoulder and collarbone and the top of one breast lifting with her breath. She leaned in over the corner of his table, close enough that he could smell the hotel soap and the wine on her. She held his gaze the whole way down. "I am better than your wife."
Hugh looked at her. He was aware of the microwave finishing behind him and going quiet, and the oven clock ticking, and the bourbon sweating on the table by his second chair. He was aware of his own blood moving and of the fact that he did not intend to pretend otherwise with this woman ever again.
"Prove it," he said.
Her hand came up fast, palm open, aiming for his cheek the way it had on the balcony when the wind off the hotel roof had eaten the sound of it. He caught her wrist before it landed, same grip, thumb in the soft spot under the bone, and held it there between them.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." He said it low, and there was a rasp in it that had not been there when he opened the door. "I will say this one last time. I am not your husband."
Her wrist turned in his hand, testing the hold, and found no give in it. The other side of the trench coat slipped off her shoulder and hung at her elbow. She was watching his mouth.
"Are you calling me crazy?"
"You might be."
He let his eyes drop to the top of her breast, to the pale line of it against the dark wool, and then brought them back up to hers. It took less than a second. She read it the way she read everything, fast and with contempt, and it was all the permission she needed.
She came over the corner of the table so hard the fork jumped off the plate.
He caught her, arms open, and it was exactly what he had let himself want. Her mouth hit his with the old balcony violence, teeth first, and he took her lower lip between his and bit down until he felt her breath snag. She had the robe off his shoulders in one pull and he peeled the coat the rest of the way and threw it behind him, and it landed somewhere near the second chair and neither of them looked.
Under it there was only her. Long and lean and hard from whatever she did in the mornings before anybody was awake. He got his hands under her ass and lifted, and her legs came around his waist, and the whole of her was damp heat against the front of his sweats. He walked her back into the island and set her down on the granite and she made a sound at the cold and did not stop kissing him.
"Bedroom," she said against his jaw. "I'm not doing this standing in a kitchen like a housewife."
"Then get off the counter."
She did the opposite. She hooked her heels into his back and dragged him in by the waistband and got her hand around his cock through the cotton, slow and proprietary, and he let her have that for exactly as long as he wanted it and then took her wrist again and pulled her hand away.
"Nobody gets to touch me like they own me," he said.
"Everybody touches you like they own you." She smiled, wide and cold. "Your wife. Your board. I've watched it for a month."
He stepped back and stripped the sweats off and stood in front of her with nothing on. Her eyes went down and stayed down, and he watched her decide, and the deciding did something to her face that he had not seen there before. Then he took her by the hips, dragged her to the edge of the island, and put himself against her, and made her wait with the head of him sliding over her where she was wet.
"Beg," he said.
"Go to hell."
He pushed in an inch and stopped. Just the head, just enough that she clenched around it and her toes curled at the back of his legs.
"That's not begging."
"You bastard." She got her hand up and into his hair and yanked it back hard enough that his neck cracked, and the pain went through him like a current. "Fuck me or I'll put the coat back on and walk home."
He drove the rest of the way into her in one stroke, and she took all of it with a sound bitten off at the back of her throat, and then her other hand came around and slapped him across the face and it was a real slap, flat and loud in the quiet kitchen.
He laughed. Then he fucked her.
The island took it. The granite was cold and she slid on it and he had to hold her down by one hip to keep her from going anywhere, and she was doing everything in her power to turn the thing around, which meant nails, teeth, elbows, and her palm across his face twice more before he caught both her wrists and pinned them over her head with one hand and put the other around her throat.
"Now," he said, and squeezed. "Who's got the wheel?"
She looked at him down the length of his arm with her hair in her eyes and her lip cut and her breath hissing through her nose, and for a second she was not going to answer. Then her chin moved in a nod against his palm.
He let up, and she flipped on him.
She got her legs under and shoved and rolled them, and he hit the floor with her on top of him, and she rode him down there with one hand braced on his chest and the other in the open wound of the four lines on his palm, digging her thumb in until he groaned, and that was her ten seconds of being in charge and she spent them well.
Then he sat up under her, got an arm around her back, and put her on her back on the tile with the air knocked out of her.
They went at it like that through the dishwasher cycle and past it. She bent him over the sink and got behind him and he caught her by the hair and turned it back around and took her from behind against the cabinets, and her forehead hit the wood and she said fuck you, and he said not yet, and she laughed with her teeth bared, or snarled, and it was not possible to tell the difference.
The best part came near the end, or maybe the whole thing was the best part, and neither of them was in any shape to rank it. She ended up on the floor on her back with her hands fisted in the robe she had thrown off him, and he got her ankles on his shoulders and fucked her flat and hard and did not look away from her face while she came, which she did twice, the second time with a noise dragged up out of her gut. He followed her into it with his forehead on the tile beside her ear and her legs still weighing on his arms.
Afterward they lay there on the cold floor in the spilled light from the hood, breathing like two people who had run the same race and lost it together.
Neither of them said anything for a while. The oven clock ticked. The bourbon on the table had sweated a ring into the wood, and the chicken had gone cold in the microwave, and Vera's heel had come off somewhere in the middle of it and was sitting upright on the rug like a small black bird.
"That was," she said eventually, to the ceiling.
"Yea."
She turned her head and looked at him. "You're not boring."
"High praise."
They got up off the floor at the same time, slow, both of them unsteady and damp and marked, and started gathering the scattered pieces of their things off the tile and the chair and the rug. He picked her coat up off the floor and shook it out. She found his robe by the dishwasher and folded it once the way it had been hanging on the hook.
When they turned around to face each other, they were holding each other's clothes.
They stood there for a moment with their arms full of each other, and neither one reached right away. Then the corner of her mouth went up. He felt his own do the same, and it was not warm, that smile. It was the smile two people give each other when they have both just admitted to the same appetite.
He traded her the coat for the robe. She pulled hers on and cinched the belt. He shrugged into the robe and did not bother tying it.
He walked her to the door. The porch light was on out front and one of the Holland kids had left a scooter on the lawn across the way, and the street was as quiet as it ever was. Vera stopped on the stoop with one hinged heel in her hand and looked back at him over her shoulder, hair coming apart at the temple for the first time all night.
"See you at work tomorrow," she said.
He closed the door behind her and stood in the entry with his hand on the lock, listening to her heels chain themselves down his walk and fade into the sound of the street.