Twenty years had passed since I’d last seen the Beast. We were seventeen and embarrassed by each other back then. I’d asked him to prom. He’d agreed on the conditions that I would cover expenses and that we would have sex. I’d accepted the terms, so we had shared one night together, me in an aqua spaghetti-strap dress and him in a cheap rented tux. We both seemed to think we could have done better as we lay together in the motel bed, a foot of space between us.
On a Sunday morning at my kitchen table all those years later, I turned a page in the New Plains Record, and there he was. He’d become famous without my knowing it. His real name was Hadrian, and it was strange to see it in print. He and his band—a heavy metal group called Beastific—were doing what they called a Rural Terror Tour. They played small venues outside of cities, or they rented barns far out in the country.
I know we’ve played much bigger venues, noted Hadrian in the article, but we like the intimacy of a small place off the beaten track. Our fans do, too. Beastific is about the people.
“Beast. Ific,” I said. “Be-ah-stific.”
“What are you saying?” my husband asked.
I hadn’t heard him walk into the kitchen. He wore a bathrobe, though it was nearly noon. We slept like teenagers on weekends, throwing off our REM cycles and making Monday mornings hellish. Our jobs at offices eroded the idea that living a long life was a good thing. We just wanted to sleep and never wake up.
The terms of our marriage also included a no-children clause, a stipulation that remained uncontested by either of us, even though boredom had come to our hearth like a sleeping dog. I’d assumed one of us would have a change of heart, or that we’d make a mistake: an insurgent zygote would hold us at gunpoint and make us really decide if we meant it.
But that never happened, and I told myself I didn’t want children. What if I couldn’t love them? Worse, what if they couldn’t love me?
“Beverly, what are you thinking so hard about?” Robert asked. “Yoo-hoo. You look like you want to kill someone.”
“If you were going to name your band with a pun on the word beatific, by spelling it like this”—I held up the paper and pointed to the name in the headline—“would you expect people to pronounce the first part normally, like beast, or the way you pronounce beatific, like be-ahst . . .”
“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.
“I just think it’s asking a lot of people.”
“Hmm.” Robert sat down across from me and tugged at the Financial section until it came loose.
“We should unsubscribe from the paper,” I said.
“Does this beast thing really upset you that much?”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just garbage. They just write garbage. We can’t afford to pay for garbage.”
“We’re actually doing okay right now, money-wise,” Robert said. “So we can buy garbage if we want it. Do you know their music?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go see them play?” Robert asked.
“Not really,” I said quickly, folding the page and tucking it beneath the Sports section. “I’m making an Eggo. Want one?”
“Two,” Robert said.
I took the box from the freezer and shook out a handful of waffles. Did the band’s name mean Hadrian remembered me? The Beast had been my nickname for him. When he transferred to my school in the eleventh grade, he had long, chestnut-brown hair and a chiseled-looking face. He looked like the Beast from Beauty and the Beast after he turned back into a prince. A trace of rage shimmered around him, but for the most part the Beast was a quiet person.
I meant to taunt him with the nickname, because everyone else sought to make his life miserable, but then I grew fond of him. I thought of myself then as having one shy foot in the popular circle, so it was important to me that no one find out about my crush. I was mortified, of course, to realize I was in love with him—but this was before I knew I was neither popular nor unpopular, utterly nondescript. No one cared what I did or who I liked.
Then he found out about the nickname. I told too many people, thought myself too clever. One day he came to school with a close-cropped haircut, and the sudden transformation made me love him even more. I wondered if I’d had an effect on him, if he cared what I thought. The next day, I asked him to prom, jumping at his stipulations because I didn’t know enough then to know I was acting cowardly. I told my friends I was doing it as a joke.
The ringing phone brought me back to our kitchen in New Plains, Nebraska. I answered.
“I’m calling about an overdue balance on an American Express card,” said the woman on the other end. She’d asked for me by name. She had a pleasant voice, but cool and firm.
“I know this is a scam,” I said. “I’ve never had an American Express card in my life. Goodbye.”
“Again?” Robert asked.
“Again. On a Sunday, too. I looked it up on the internet. Apparently, these scammers convince people to mail checks to them.”
“I just checked your credit score last week,” Robert said. “You’re looking good.”
He put down the paper and grinned. “Definitely looking good from here.”
From here was about as close as we came to each other these days.
I worked at an insurance brokerage firm as something called a marketing specialist, but I mostly answered phones and forwarded emails and acted as a personal assistant and, sometimes, partner in crime to my boss, Cal Nevins.
Once, without discomfort, Cal handed me a pair of women’s glasses and a disk of birth control pills along with an address written on a scrap of paper. I wrapped the glasses in paper towels from the bathroom and slipped everything into a manila envelope, sticking a generic return label to its corner. I thought about adding a note, warning the woman she could get pregnant on the pill if she chronically missed days, but no one needs a stranger to patronize her.
One time I walked to the liquor store on my lunch break and bought him a fifth of Grey Goose with the company card. I didn’t mind, I told him. I needed to buy a lottery ticket anyway, and a tube of Pringles for my lunch. I used my own cash for the lottery ticket, not his card, and I saved the receipt. I didn’t want any trouble if I won, but I didn’t end up winning.
Cal often went out for long lunches at the bar in the hotel next door to our building, then called me from the parking lot and asked me to bring him his car keys. I always did, no matter how strongly he smelled of booze or how red his eyes were.
I commuted forty minutes from New Plains to Omaha each day to do these things. Taking care of Cal’s twin daughters, I liked best. They could be spoiled, grumbling girls, but they were sweethearts more than anything.
I found them both sitting in my desk chair when I arrived at work on Monday morning. The office was empty except for them. They’d taken ice cream from the freezer and were sucking chocolate off of flimsy plastic spoons. The lights were off, and cartoons playing on my computer blew moonlight over the girls’ faces.
“Dad told us to wait here for you, Bevie.” Caroline looked up at me.
“Is that so?” I leaned over them and nudged down the volume on the computer. “Are these cartoons pirated?”
“No.” Maggie giggled. “You don’t have to pirate anymore, Bev, you stream.”
“Let’s go.” I frowned. “I’ll take you to school.”
Maggie cried in the car, while Caroline stared pensively out the window.
“I’ve just about had enough of the second grade.” Maggie hiccupped.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a hard life. Here’s a wet wipe. Clean that chocolate off your face.”
“I didn’t do my homework,” Caroline said. “I was supposed to make bookmarks.”
I sighed. Caroline’s poor performance in school meant Cal had to go to conferences with his loathed ex-wife. “Tell your teacher you left them at home, but that someone’s bringing them later. Okay?”
“Which home?” Caroline asked. “Mom’s or Dad’s?”
“Well, that’s up to you. Actually, say it was your dad’s.”
“I did my homework,” mumbled Maggie.
I finished Caroline’s bookmarks when I returned to the office, which was now alive with ringing phones and the rushing sound of the copier. The lights were on in Cal’s office, but the blinds were drawn and the door closed. Caroline’s smile, reflected in the rearview mirror, had harpooned me. I felt elated from having spent a little time with her and Maggie. Sometimes I wondered what I wouldn’t do for those girls.
The assignment was to illustrate bookmarks with depictions from The Trumpet of the Swan. I wasn’t a good artist, and my thoughts wandered from the girls to Hadrian. The night before had brought a burgeoning fantasy of the two of us together and young. I’d imagined we’d done things we hadn’t, normal things like driving around in his car or eating at a restaurant. As quickly as the fantasy brought joy, it brought unhappiness, a reminder I was no longer very young. Our old selves, or what could have been our old selves, filled me with sadness, the striking type of sadness that demands to be remedied someway, somehow, and immediately. I put Caroline’s bookmarks aside and clicked through the internet until I had two tickets to the Beastific show in my basket. Luckily they were cheap; my credit card was nearly maxed out. I paid for the tickets before I could change my mind.
I bought two tickets because one seemed desperate. I didn’t want to take Robert with me, but who else was there? The show was the next day, a Tuesday night in New Plains, when everything was so dead we sometimes wondered if the sun would overlook us in the morning.
The phone rang. I answered.
“How did you get this number?” I said. “Stop harassing me.”
The caller was a man this time, from the same supposed collection agency, and he recited with confidence my full name and my Social Security number. He gave the balance on the credit card, an astronomical amount I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.
“I’ve told you that I know this is a scam. If you were a real collection agency you’d send me something in the mail.”
“We have. Several times.”
I listened to his breathing as he waited for me to respond. Then I hung up. I pulled up the number for Amex’s customer service and was ready to call them—to complain, to ease my worries—when Cal emerged from his office, wearing a white shirt with thin silky pinstripes running up and down the fabric. His always bleary eyes made him look some combination of tired and high. Sometimes I thought he was the wrong sort of person to have money; other times I believed the money had made him the way he was. I often felt protective of him, or maybe I was only protective of myself: I helped him with so many of the things he did wrong.
“Beautiful,” he said, picking up a bookmark. “You made it look like a child drew these.”
I wanted to ask him for gas money for this morning and for the trip I would be making later to drop off the bookmarks. The girls went to a private school thirty minutes away. But I felt too ashamed. Asking for money reminded me I had no real claim to their love.
But Cal would pay anything to show his two daughters he loved them, especially after he and his wife had dragged each other through that nasty divorce. I sent the girls presents to her house using Cal’s credit card. I made their lunches for the next day in the office kitchen before I left on the afternoons Cal had the girls. I spread mayonnaise on turkey sandwiches, peeled carrots, and filled tiny containers with ranch dressing, and tied neat baggies of chocolate with ribbon.
Other people would quit or at least find the work demeaning. I hadn’t gotten a promotion in the five years I’d worked for Cal, and I could be making more money somewhere else—money Robert and I could put toward a down payment. But this job made me comfortable, as though I’d found a knot of people who understood and appreciated me. Their dilemmas were mine to solve, and I solved them better than I did my own.
Robert and I had met ten years ago when we both worked for a labor union, he as the bookkeeper and I as the office manager. We worked for activists, which we felt good about, but we didn’t have to be activists ourselves, which made us feel even better.
Then a new president and financial secretary were elected. The financial secretary would keep the books and do the taxes herself, so Robert lost his job. I was let go because the new administration was suspicious of the old. The former president had been ousted for using union funds to visit, repeatedly, a psychic who charged a hundred dollars an hour. He’d gone crazy, but he was my friend.
Why hadn’t anything concerned me back then? Even when the president was charged with embezzlement, the idea that I might face my own consequences for my choices someday never seemed real to me.
Robert and I fell in love in our waning days at the union. We whispered in the break room about our futures and complained that it wasn’t fair that we were suspected of complicity. Integrity, trust, honor: those things had been important to us back then. Robert said he hadn’t known about the president’s secret debit card until it was too late, and as soon as he found out, he told a trustee. I believed him at the time, and now I didn’t care.
Robert and I were less in love now but we were still friends. There wasn’t any ill will between us, only boredom, and, on my part, occasional weeping in the shower. All that life, six years of marriage plus two years of dating, had passed serenely, without excitement or tragedy. We could have done with more money, but we always made rent, even if it meant putting groceries on credit. If only one of us had been mentally ill, or an alcoholic. If only I’d won the lottery one of those times I’d put a five-dollar bill down on the counter and asked for five easy picks.
I stood over the stove that night, stirring ramen noodles for our dinner. The collection calls had distracted me. I’d looked through Robert’s spreadsheets of our finances when I’d gotten home, but nothing seemed strange to me. The usual expenses, the usual low balance left over at the end.
“Robert?” I called. “I need the computer. I want to look at my credit score. Did you use the website that aggregates all the different reports out there?”
Robert didn’t seem to hear me. His office popped with the sound of music and gunfire. He was playing his computer game in which he was a spy on the Titanic. The objective wasn’t to stop the ship from sinking, that happened regardless, but rather to stop World War I and the Russian Revolution from happening. I didn’t get the connection but trusted it was there.
I turned the burner off and poured the noodles and their packets of salty powder into bowls.
“What’s this?” I set his bowl down on a pile of papers, picking up a book that lay open, pages down, on the desk.
Robert snatched it away. “Don’t,” he said.
But I’d seen the title. “Cheater’s Guide to ‘Titanic: Adventure out of Time’!” I exclaimed. “You’re cheating at the game?”
“Oh, come on, Beverly,” he said. “It’s a game.”
“But you’ve been telling me about the complicated puzzles as though you’d figured them all out yourself.”
Robert turned the computer off the way you weren’t supposed to, with one push of one button, and left the room. The book, with its answers and shortcuts, was small and depressing. We didn’t even have anything interesting to hide. Better not to fight at all.
“You didn’t save your game,” I said quietly.
He didn’t hear me.
“I don’t care how you play the game!” I said loudly.
Steam spiraled from the bowl of noodles, but even the steam looked pitiful, as though it could barely bring itself to rise.
Robert returned, a sheepish smile on his face. Our fights never lasted long.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too.”
He took the pair of chopsticks I’d set on his desk and clacked them together, then used them to pick up a strand of my hair and put it in his mouth. I smiled; he smiled. I put the book down on the desk but picked it up again. It had been covering an American Express bill with my name on it, addressed to Robert’s office.
“Bev, don’t. That’s a mistake.”
The bill unfurled in my hands, revealing a long list of charges. Gas, groceries, but also large amounts spent at Best Buy and on Amazon, and then other websites I didn’t recognize.
“I was going to pay it all off. I just needed more time.” Robert’s face looked alien: his small mouth was open wide and red splotches appeared on his neck and cheeks as though he’d been hexed.
Until he spoke, a part of me—a desperate, hopeful part—believed this to be part of the scam. Then it was as though I’d been sleeping on a plane, and I was thrown awake by the thump of wheels on the tarmac.
“How much?”
Robert hesitated. I stared him down.
“Twenty thousand,” he said.
A voice came back to me, one of the debt collectors on the phone. The number, so high, had made me completely sure it was a scam. But now Robert was standing there with his lie breaking apart between us, and I could hear myself snapping at the man on the phone. In my own memory I now sounded like the one who was wrong, a belligerent woman trying to get out of paying her bills.
I let the bill fall to the floor and sat heavily in the office chair. It twirled vaguely beneath my weight. Robert stood before me, admitting to what he’d done, but I felt guilty, like a criminal surprised at having been caught. There was the bill with my name on it. It said I had spent that money; it said those numbers belonged to me.
I asked Robert what he’d spent the money on, but he didn’t answer me, and I didn’t really want to know. Not tonight at least. I was just dumbstruck, and tired, and wanted to eat my pathetic dinner alone. I told Robert so, and he went into the bedroom and closed the door.
The noodles had gone gummy. Moonlight shifted through the curtains and I listened to the night birds making a cacophony outside. To soothe myself, I thought of the motel room where the Beast and I had spent our night. I remembered the stained red carpeting and an electrical outlet dangling from the wall by its wires. I’d stood on the balcony in my ridiculous dress, watching a girl—my age, or a little older—swim the length of the pool in slow strokes. I could see her whole body: long legs shimmering in the pool lights, the wavy white of her bathing suit, her hair moving like a jellyfish as she swam.
I’d turned to see Hadrian, his jacket removed, his tie undone and hanging from his neck. Had I gone to him or waited for him to come to me? Had he torn my dress off with the curtains wide open? No. I went inside and closed the door and the blinds. I think I might have tried to talk about poetry with him. I liked to write poetry back then, but mostly my poems were full of questions that made no sense, questions only a deranged person would ask. Oh, and didn’t we love to go into the river?
I was glad to find Cal full of anxious energy the next day at work. I needed a distraction. Robert and I had woken to our alarms and readied ourselves without speaking. Why hadn’t I thrown him out? Because I didn’t want him to put a motel on credit? Because I didn’t want to be alone? I had thought the two of us had been bearing our boredom silently, bravely, but Robert had been buying things to make himself happy. And what had he been buying? Only a horrible habit could require that amount of money. I wondered if it was gambling or pornography, or hookers or drugs. I almost missed my exit, so caught up was I in Robert’s imagined transgressions.
I parked my car and was waiting for the weather report to come on the radio—my signal that it was time to walk the two minutes from the car to the office so I could clock in by eight—when Robert called. I ignored it. He texted me a photo of the Amex cut in half, a gesture that annoyed me since it seemed he’d done most of his shopping online, where he probably had the number saved.
The morning brought a problem with one of the clients, a parking service called Safely Park. Cal had brokered the policy but now the carrier had canceled the general liability insurance because, when the policy was initially signed, Cal had forged the loss runs to make it appear as though Safely Park had never had an accident or filed a claim. But Safely Park crashed cars all the time.
Cal was furious when the notice of cancellation was faxed over. He snapped at the sales staff and the customer service reps. The general liability specialist emerged from Cal’s office with her head hung. I caught her blotting tears in the kitchen. Somehow, this was everyone’s fault but Cal’s and mine, though I’d used Photoshop to make the loss runs look clean. “I’ll end up in the slammer right next to Cal,” I’d joked back then, but I grew nervous as the day went on. What if the carrier reported the fraudulent loss runs to the department of insurance? What if I did go to prison?
Cal was on the phone all afternoon, calling in favors, saying he didn’t know how the mistake had happened. Finally, he slapped the phone into its cradle, which I heard from my desk outside of his office. I turned to see him take the bottle of Grey Goose from his desk, and he called out, “All clear! Get out of here, you scoundrels.”
Everyone in the office clapped. I did too. We hated Cal when he yelled and we loved him when he let us leave at 3:00 p.m., even if we’d almost gotten arrested earlier that day.
I lingered, and when everyone except Cal had left, I checked my credit rating. There was the American Express card, the balance glowering at me, and beneath it a Visa I didn’t recognize. I began weeping. I’d gotten pregnant on prom night, the night I’d spent with Hadrian. I stayed pregnant for twelve weeks, until I turned eighteen and didn’t need my parents’ permission. Getting rid of the baby then had been the right choice, but now, having a baby would never be an option, would never be feasible. I wondered if I could sue Robert, or put him in jail. But the truth was I was either bound to Robert, bound to the debt, or free of it but on my own.
I put my head in my hands.
“Beverly? You okay?”
Cal had come out of his office.
I swiped tears from my eyes and slowly gathered my things. Cal stood in his doorway, clutching the bottle of Grey Goose by his side. I avoided his eyes as I slipped my arms into my jacket. “Yeah. Yep. Just worried about today. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Everything’s really okay?” I said.
“Oh, Bevie,” he said. “I would never throw you under the bus. If the DOI came for you they’d have to go through me first.”
“Of course,” I said.
“What a day,” he said as he swung the bottle of vodka to his mouth. “I need to go get a drink.”
I looked at him closely and saw tears brimming in his eyes.
“I’m going to a concert tonight.” I didn’t know why I was telling him but I knew I didn’t want to see him cry. I hadn’t told Robert about the show, and as I spoke I knew I wasn’t going to.
“What band?”
“Someone’s I knew a long time ago. I don’t think the music will be very good.”
“Sounds fun.”
“I have an extra ticket. It’s all the way in New Plains, though.”
Sunlight pierced the window behind Cal’s head. He appeared to be thinking. We didn’t want each other. If we did, something would have happened by now. We just wanted to be a little less lonely; we wanted something different than what we had.
Cal and I ate dinner at the hotel bar, Cal guzzling vodka sodas, and then I drove us to the venue, a barn just outside of New Plains. I parked in a roped-off grass lot that spread away from the barn. Clusters of wild violets sprouted in the fields surrounding. Teenagers in heavy black boots stomped over them. Cal had fallen asleep on the way, and I sat in the car with the engine clicking, embarrassed that I’d cried, and surprised that I’d felt so strongly that I’d lost someone upon seeing my ruined credit, the rating persistently red on the screen. In a life of blind, vague longings, I’d seen clearly something I wanted, only to have it taken away.
I nudged Cal awake. “Ready, or would you rather stay here?”
“Ready.”
The barn teemed with teenagers wearing black. They’d painted their faces to look like skulls, and some wore devil’s horns like I’d seen Hadrian wearing in the paper. I trudged in my pumps and nylons toward the door. Cal trailed behind, looking ill. The last of the sun fell on a boy selling T-shirts adorned with the band name. The t in Beastific was an upside-down Gothic cross.
“Twenty bucks,” the kid said. He looked gaunt but his teeth had been straightened with braces.
“No thanks,” I said.
“These kids are fucked up,” Cal said. He pointed to a group of girls staring ghoulishly from within the hoods of their sweatshirts, their eyes rimmed with heavy black eyeliner. “What parents would let their kids dress like this?”
I thought of Cal’s girls and wondered what their futures would bring. Now they wore matching sapphire rings, Christmas gifts from Cal. What would they trade those rings for, when the time came?
“They probably think we’re parents who wouldn’t let our kids go alone,” I said. “They’re probably wondering who here is the loser who came with their parents.”
I warmed at the thought that one of these kids could be my own. I’d noticed a few women in parked cars, piles of coats in the back seats.
“I’m going to find the bar,” Cal said.
One long note resounded from inside the barn. The show had begun.
I stood in the back and watched Hadrian sing into a microphone swinging from the ceiling. His face was the same face: strong chin and sunken eyes, high cheekbones. He was wearing his hair long again. He still looked boyish. I became, once again, the girl who wanted him, the girl who had teased him out of love, but standing there, I also felt the presence of all the time we’d been apart. We’d never even known each other in the first place. I’d had nothing to do with his angst. I was not the wicked bitch he sang about. Our lives had briefly overlapped, and that was it. These two feelings—I loved him, and we meant nothing to each other—combined to make me brazen.
The crowd of teenagers moved chaotically, but I tried to shoulder my way into the mosh pit. I lost my breath quickly; my jostled bones felt like rattling tin cans. I was knocked to my knees, and a group of hands pulled me up and pushed me toward the back wall—the safe haven of the few adults who had chosen to come inside. I felt stupid, but no one seemed to notice me.
Hadrian sang one song, then another. They all sounded the same to me. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I wanted to talk to him, touch him. Above me the packed beams of the roof seemed to clasp their hands in prayer.
The show ended, and my keys were in my hands but I didn’t go to my car. I milled around outside with the rest of the people finishing their drinks or buying T-shirts and waiting for a chance to get an autograph. I didn’t see Cal. I put my keys back in my purse. And then a swell of sound rose from the crowd as the band emerged from the barn, their long hair flying in the breeze. Hadrian was close enough I could see the closed smile that shaped his jaw. And I knew, upon seeing it, that I wanted to know if he would recognize me. I thought of Robert as I shouldered through the crowd, nudging aside the girls who lingered around Hadrian. I pictured Robert at home, nosing around the Titanic, flipping through his book for clues.
Then I was in front of Hadrian, and his eyes met mine with the blankness of a stranger’s.
“Do you want me to sign something?” he asked, looking down at my hands, which weren’t holding a T-shirt.
“I’m sorry,” I said, fumbling through my purse. “I’m here to get something signed for my daughter. She couldn’t make it—she really wanted to come, but she had to work.”
The lie came out like a ball of light: enthusiastic and with a trueness of spirit that even my truths didn’t always possess. I thought he might recognize my voice, but he didn’t seem to.
“I was going to say,” Hadrian said, and his smile opened up a little, “that you don’t look like our typical fan.”
I gave him a twenty, and he pulled a T-shirt from a box near his feet and signed his name to it. He handed it to me along with a flyer for an after party.
“Bring your daughter if she gets off work,” he said. “We’ll take a photo.”
And without saying anything else, he handed his attention over to the group of kids standing behind me, smoking impatiently.
A photo. A family photo. I almost said the words aloud.
I was overjoyed, my heart punching my chest, but as I walked away the joy grew damp with dread. I looked for Cal, hoping he needed me for something. I wanted to go to the party but hoped to have a reason not to. I was afraid of what I would do, and I was afraid I wouldn’t do anything at all.
I found Cal making out with a woman. She looked like someone’s mother, and also a businesswoman. I wondered what I’d be mailing back to her the next day. I called Cal’s name, and he broke away from her.
“Bevie!” He sounded delighted. “Look, you go home. I’ve got a ride.”
“Do you need me to pick up the girls? I could stay with them.”
The girls. As though they were mine, too.
“No,” Cal said. “The bitch on wheels has them tonight.”
I walked away, but slowly. What if earlier, when we were walking from the car, I’d reached out and held his hand? What if we’d played the role of parents, even if only for one night?
But one thing in my life I was realistic about was this: I couldn’t make a move on Cal. I would have to quit a job I badly needed. I knew, too, that Cal was self-centered, had been a bad husband, and wasn’t that good of a father. And, no matter how dysfunctional our relationship already was, neither of us had anything else that was stable.
So I left Cal with the woman and went to the party.
The after party was at a motel off I-80. Beastific had booked a few rooms on the top floor. People wound their way in and out of rooms with doors propped open. Music blared and people mingled close to one another. I picked my way through plastic cups and wafting cigarette smoke, looking for Hadrian. I was curious to know how much the motel would charge their credit card for damages when all was said and done.
I went out on one of the balconies and watched cars go by, their headlights straining to cut through the dark. I swayed against the railing, suddenly dizzy from the height and from the beer I’d been handed upon entry.
I felt a gust of air behind me. Someone had slid open the glass door. I turned to see Hadrian, who was flanked by two girls who looked to be in their twenties. I looked at the blond one with her lips near Hadrian’s earlobe and saw Caroline. The sulking one behind her could be Maggie in ten years. What I felt when I looked at them wasn’t rivalry but a hope that Hadrian wouldn’t use them—and in that sense I wanted to take him from them, because I’d already been used, and when one got to be my age, being used was at least a little bit of excitement.
“Hey,” Hadrian said, unsnaking his arm from the brunette’s waist so he could snap a lighter beneath the cigarette that dangled from his lips. “Did your daughter make it?”
“She isn’t coming.” I looked away as I said it, into the distance, as though I might recognize her in a car speeding by on the highway.
I turned back toward him. Beyond his shoulder I could see my coat on the bed where I’d left it. I could grab it and flee. My eyes lingered on it: a camel coat, made from a nice buttery fabric, a Christmas gift from Cal the year before. I’d found it tucked under my desk in a ribbon-tied box while the rest of the office received a bottle of cheap red wine.
But I couldn’t leave without talking to Hadrian, without bringing him to recognize me. I wanted to stop thinking of each day as something to be gotten out of the way, and this night was one of the most important of my life so far, a night I would remember forever, and I didn’t want to have to revise the memory later on, to scratch out the silence and write in words I hadn’t said.
“We need to talk alone.”
In a moment of boldness I looked pointedly at the girls, who raised their eyebrows but complied because I was old enough to be their mother. They slid shut the door, muffling the sounds of the party.
Hadrian was uncomfortable, I could tell. He looked at the retreating backs of the girls regretfully, and I knew he’d only come out here to look for a younger version of me. He flicked ash from his cigarette and gestured toward the cars as though I’d only told him to stay with me so I could show him the view.
“So,” he said, “what’s up?”
I didn’t say anything more, not right away. I put my hand on his arm, though, to keep him from going inside. What if I hadn’t asked him to prom, hadn’t gotten pregnant? How much of my life had been shaped by the decisions I had made with this man years ago? Here with me seemed to be not all the people I could’ve been, but all the people I hadn’t been. Hadrian probably wasn’t worth my obsession—as I wasn’t worth his—but I wanted to be sure so I backed him against the railing and kissed him.
His lips didn’t feel familiar. I didn’t recall their shape from years ago, but I wanted more of them all the same. My nerves leaped, fiery, when he returned the kiss and touched my neck. He dropped his beer on the ground—I felt it splash my leg—so he could grab my ass.
He put his mouth on my neck. “You might be older than those two girls combined,” he said, laughing.
I pulled away. “We’re the same age, you asshole,” I said.
He looked surprised. Maybe he thought he looked younger. Maybe his career depended on it. The shows, the parties, the angst of his music. I laughed at him. He laughed, too, except he had no clue why we were laughing.
He took my hand. I was so close to getting what I’d come for, which if not his recognition was his attention, but I caught sight of a red windbreaker I recognized. A man was wandering the lot below with his phone in his palm, its rectangle screen glowing in the dark.
It was Robert. Robert had found me.
My stare drew his attention. He looked up at me and waved.
I could turn my back on him, pull Hadrian into the party and through the crowd until we found a quiet corner, but the sight of my husband brought me, just by an inch, back to the reality of my life. The uncertainty of it. An urge to confront Robert, as I hadn’t the night before, swelled in me.
“Do you know him?” Hadrian asked.
“I do,” I said. “I have to go talk to him.”
I paused.
“Come with me.”
Hadrian looked down at the parking lot, at Robert looking up at us, and then back at me and I saw in his eyes that the spell, whatever it had been, was broken.
“No,” he said. “You do your thing. Come and find me after.”
I looked at him. I smiled. “I’m not going to find you after,” I said. “But will you do me one favor first?”
Before he agreed I kissed him again so Robert could see.
When we parted, I cupped his cheek in my palm. “Goodbye, Beast,” I said. “Do you remember prom night?”
Hadrian stepped away from me, leaving my hand to cup the air. His eyes searched my face, and I smiled. I was leaving a piece of myself with him; maybe now he would remember me. The baby, though—my baby was my secret, and I would never tell anyone.
In the moonlight these two men looked at me. I knew that using Hadrian wouldn’t make me feel less used myself. It wouldn’t make me any younger, and it wouldn’t make Robert feel ashamed. Still, I would have liked to sleep with him again. I would’ve liked to send Robert home knowing Hadrian would be good in bed, better than before, and that morning was far away. But part of being an adult was letting passing fantasies blow away, wasn’t it, even if I’d already taken the first step toward making a mistake?
The motel doors slid open and Robert stood looking stricken. I closed the distance between us.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
Robert looked at the balcony, but Hadrian had gone. Slowly, Robert turned his phone around to show me the screen. A map with a pulsing blue dot stared back at me. I looked closer. The dot was in the parking lot of the motel.
I was the dot.
“I installed this app on our phones,” Robert said. “GPS tracker. You can track me too—here, give me your phone, I’ll show you . . .”
But I held up my hand.
My person, my money, my privacy: my husband had manipulated all of it. Maybe he thought the app was harmless, but he hadn’t bothered to tell me about it. As with the credit card, I hadn’t bothered to look. But I was waking up.
Robert brought his phone to his chest. “Beverly,” he asked. “Who was that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It matters,” Robert said.
“No. It would’ve at one time. But not anymore. I’m sorry, Robert, but I can’t trust you.”
My car was parked in the back of the lot, and I said nothing more as I walked away. My heels clacked on the concrete, I fished for my keys, and when I was in the car with the engine roaring, I opened the window and flung my phone from it so Robert couldn’t track me. I cherished the feeling of being free.
I was surprised to find Cal at the hotel bar where hours earlier we’d shared a meal. I’d planned to go alone for a drink and then sleep on the couch by the receptionist’s desk at my office. I thought Cal would be with the woman from the show, but he sat hunched over a vodka on the rocks. The TV stared down at him, beaming a basketball game over the bar, to which Cal paid no attention.
I’d lost my beautiful camel coat, and there wouldn’t be another one.
“Your night didn’t work out the way you’d hoped either?” I said.
He looked up at me and I saw relief seep into his face, as though it were a spill he’d sopped up with a napkin. “Oh, Bev,” he said. “I’m happy to see you.”
He hugged me, still holding his glass, which sweated on my back. I ordered a drink over his shoulder, and we sat on the high stools, embracing, surrounded by empty tables and plastic plants. Cal began to shake with silent sobs, and this time, instead of pulling him away from his tears, I ran my hands in circles over his back and let him cry.
“Starting tomorrow,” he said, “things will change. No more forged loss runs, no more lies.”
“Okay,” I said.
“No more close calls with the DOI. We’ll do things right going forward.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” I said. “Or I’m leaving.”
I meant it, too. I didn’t want to commit fraud anymore. I wanted to be proud of what I did for a living.