12

Lake Sumner, New Mexico

Our final destination was, as I’d feared, a nothing-place.

The country was filled with them, these yawning spaces. Whether they were purposeful, by way of the government playing keep-away with resources from the hands that needed them most, or simply the accidental way in which nature made room for itself, creating abscesses in the vast swaths of Western openness, these places were like vacuums for reality. We had been seeing them in small ways throughout the journey, but here now we landed on the emptiest place of all.

And we were to pass the entire summer here.

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

As I stared through the window at the sleepy outskirts of town scrolling past, disappointment tried and mostly failed to burble beyond the surface of my last dose. The buildings were all small and low, as though they were embarrassed by having been built. Whitewashed slabs of adobe and sad plastic siding lined the narrow, empty roads like chipped and scattered shards of bone. I counted more buzzards on the electrical wires than I did cars parked outside of shabby, unremarkable buildings.

And they were courting an audience for Shakespeare? Here?

I sank lower into my seat and held my sides with crossed arms. I practiced breathing very steadily: in through my nose, out through my mouth. The vans weren’t stopping.

“In what part of town are we staying?” I called up to the driver over the rumble of the engine.

“There’s a motel on the main drag,” he grunted to my curdling chagrin. “We’ll pass the theater on the way.”

I shut my eyes and tried to remind myself this wasn’t about me. This wasn’t forever.

Besides, a few months of boredom might be good for me. It might force me out of my own head.

I might get t—

“Oh, Jack, look.”

I had drifted off. “What,” I said, fighting to open my eyes against my fluttering lashes, “a tumbleweed?”

“Look.”

Wesley’s voice was so full of awe from the other side of the seat that I couldn’t help but follow his stare. My jaw dropped.

I had only ever seen illustrations of the Globe in the endpapers of Shakespeare folios, and in photographs of a replica building from Edie’s scrapbooks—before stepping back from the stage, she had performed in what she deemed the only real American production of Richard III during the Great Lakes Exposition in Ohio twenty years ago.

Another clone of the hallowed place towered in the middle of the desert, alone and ecclesiastical.

A wide, glassy lake bled like a vast puddle over the empty ground. Low scrub trees traced its edges, clinging to the only evident moisture, and on an islet in the water rose the theater. It was as if someone had sliced the real thing directly out from the beating heart of Tudor England and airlifted it here in one piece.

The caravan slowed, but nobody got out. Only one door from the leading van opened for Kline, who stumbled out onto the dirt and began to speed-walk at an awkward, self-conscious clip to the lake’s edge. The line of vans started up once more toward the motel as soon as the door shut again.

I stayed glued to the window, marveling at the theater. A sunset-colored Corvette was parked under a cottonwood by the lakeside, on which a skinny-hipped man with a cowboy hat was leaning with his arms crossed and the brim angled low over his face. He kicked into a stand with a palm stuck out in greeting, and before the dust cloud from our retreating tires obscured the last of my vision, I saw Kline eagerly take his hand.

We decamped at the motel—the sorriest of all the places so far, but at least the couple’s suite was vacant. In addition to two double beds, Wesley and I got what passed for a kitchenette with a single-burner hot plate, a sink, and one narrow cabinet filled with mismatched, lightly chipped dishware.

The cramped bathroom left much to be desired. The carpet had a questionable stain worked in by the foot of one bed. The bedclothes didn’t look that itchy.

Home, for the next three months.

“I’ll unpack in a bit,” I said briskly to Wesley as he laid out his clothes. I hurried out the back door with my purse in tow.

An open field sprawled beyond the motel, patchy with yellow grasses and the occasional sprig of insistent wildflowers pushing up through the cracked earth. An empty, dilapidated swimming pool baked in the sun like a discarded Bundt pan. With the main road stringing along past the front of the motel, here at the back there was nothing for as far as I could see in the interminable miles beyond.

The shard of my reflection looked back as I prepared a dose in the compact. The sky hung with a vivid, choking blue above and around me.

“Afternoon.”

I flinched at the call from the next door over, carrying easily through the still air—I nearly dropped the dose but managed to hurry it into my nose before turning to greet whomever was also out here, taking it all in, perhaps also deeply regretting their own choice to join the company.

Felix Haas stood in shirtsleeves with a hand raised in greeting. I fussed the compact back into my purse and swiped subtly at my nose. “Settled in already?” I called back.

He sauntered over with that long, easy bearing. He wasn’t much taller than Wesley, but the archness with which he viewed everything around him lent a peremptory pitch to his carriage. Haas nodded at my purse. “Analyst’s chalk?”

I sniffed. “For my nerves. You know how it goes.”

Haas’s collar was open to the third button and color rose faintly under his fair, high cheeks, likely from unloading boxes of costumes. A spray of freckles decorated the bridge of his nose. I tried not to stare at the divot of his throat. He smiled, a supple tip of his lips. “If you’re ever in need of a more effective fix,” he said, his voice low and conspiratorial, “please know you need only ask.”

I raised my eyebrows. “And what might that mean?”

“Is Wesley inside?” Haas glanced at the door behind me, through which the low muddle of the radio persisted—Wesley had found the daytime channel.

“He’s unpacking.”

The roots of my teeth began to tingle. The tension in my shoulders ebbed, ever so slightly. I sighed gently, easing into the familiar feeling, and tried not to think of going without this relief if I ran out.

I couldn’t think about that—fear reared hard in me, bidding me away, away, away from that thought. I couldn’t be without it.

Couldn’t I?

Haas was eyeing me when I focused back on him. “I mean it,” he said gently. He lifted a hand to the seam at my waist, where my skirt met my bodice, and ran his thumb over it with the unassuming rote of familiar work. “Anything you need, anything at all; I’m right over there, room six.”

I was keen, of course. I would have to be blind not to be piqued, at the very least to pick up the innuendo he was dropping for me like breadcrumbs for ducks in the park. But I reached down and removed his hand with a gentle push, letting my thumb linger ever so slightly on the fine ridge where the heel of his hand met his arm. “You’re a very good salesman, Mr. Haas, I—”

“Felix,” he cut in gently. He slid both hands into his pockets and looked me over like several good yards of fabric. “Call me Felix, I told you.”

I smiled. “Felix. You’re astute, but I don’t think you want to get involved with my mess.”

“Mess?” Haas’s expression flashed with amusement. “Au contraire, Mrs. Shoard—”

“Margaret.”

Haas peered at me, the intention of his gaze lifting yet another layer of fascination. “How about Jack?” he asked lightly.

My chest tightened with a brief and subtle squeeze. “Only Wesley has that privilege.”

We watched each other through a long silence, broken only by the faint sound of the radio inside the room behind me and the faraway whistle of wind I swore I could hear slipping across the mountains as the drug made soft the border between reality and illusion.

Haas dug into his breast pocket with one long, fine finger and thumb to produce a small silver tin the size of a pack of playing cards. He proffered it in the air between us. “You can say no,” he said.

“Is that the more effective fix?”

“It could be.”

“Maybe another time,” I said, and held out a hand between us. “I still need to unpack.”

Haas took my hand and shook it this time instead of kissing it—but with the heat in his gaze, he might as well have put my fingers in his mouth.

I stared after him on his return to the room next door. He moved like a mountain lion, svelte and sure-footed and proud of his own shape.

I slipped back into our room. Wesley looked up at me from the fold-down ironing board with a smile. “Want to leave your dress for me?”

“Oh, no, it’s as sweaty as the others. I’ll find a Laundromat tomorrow.”

I turned to present my zipper to him, which Wesley peeled down for me. He kissed the back of my neck before I wriggled it from my waist, stepped out of my skirts and slip, and retired to the bathroom.

I ran the water as hot as I could get it. I peered at myself in the mirror, dimpling and nudging my flesh and lightly judging the juts of my bones and joints from every angle out of habit as the edges of the mirror fogged gently. No longer was I the scrawny, bug-legged child with the freedom of a flat and sexless body, but I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a more shapely figure.

Under the shower, I let sensation wash over me as the water scourged away the days and days of travel. The nudging impulse twisting in my gut had evolved beyond my brief exchange with Haas from simple curiosity to an insistent arousal.

The sense of my body as a thing with an appetite was not something I tended to focus on very often. Looking on my own wiles from the inside out was a dangerous game; there was too much buried in the loam that made me Margaret, and to dig my hands into it could unearth hideous bones I feared classifying. In me were too many scabbed-over hurts I couldn’t risk picking at lest they bleed again—the old nausea from feeling Mr. Matthews leer at me as I helped him embezzle from the collection plates without realizing what the work really was; the burning shape of Hollis’s hand squeezing bruises into my flesh, which I still felt sometimes without intending to remember at all.

And yet here on my own, in the privacy of my thoughts far away from home and held aloft by my medicine, my body wanted with briary persistence that would not be quieted by anything besides facing it.

I shut my eyes and summoned up the sight of Haas with his shirt open, and then with no shirt at all. I did away with his shoes, his socks, his belt and trousers and shorts; I imagined him bare in the sun, kissed with a reddish tan; the way he could take me by the hand to lead me into the vastness of the field beyond the motel—how he might strip me bare with tender fastidiousness, lay me down gently on the dusty ground, or in the basin of the empty pool, and then hold me down for my own good, because maybe I’d ask for that; open me up, press my name into the side of my face as he knelt over me, and I would all but taste the way he fell in thrall to me, my—

My hand slid flat along the shower tiles as my knees buckled gently, stumbling forward to catch my weight before I slipped.

I looked at myself in the fogged mirror, sodden and wrung out and alone, my eyes bright as anything amid the sulfurous mist of the showerhead.

Devour.

The hot water ran out with a groan from the pipes—I yelped as I jumped away from the cold and shut the faucet with a hasty slap.

I stood dripping, returning to myself, and tucked away the mystery of my desire on the same deep shelf that held my ambition.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

I tried to find the pattern of decent living in Lake Sumner.

As much as I hoped it would be a freeing retreat—to suddenly find myself awake, as though doused in the lake itself; dragged back to my surface, gasping for a wide and full-chested breath of dry, clean air—it was nothing of the sort.

The first few days passed in one great blur. I found the Laundromat a ten-minute walk away and spent two hours watching a couple loads thump and tumble and blur with my perception smeared like the sudsy wash. Next door was a sleepy salon that only did cuts. No color. No set and shellac. I did my own hair from scratch each morning, but that only took up meager half-hours at a time—a full sixty minutes if I really took pains with a new style, but there was never any reason to dress up or look particularly nice.

There were too many goddamn hours in the day.

It was deeply lonely even despite the dinners and drinks and evening chatter I spent with Wesley and Haas, both together and separately. Otherwise the company went up to their rehearsals at the lake, and I stayed behind like a bird unable to take wing through the open door of its cage.

I was confined to the motel and the paltry offerings in town—the bar, the sorry excuse for a grocer, and the endless emptiness that surrounded us. I was stranded. At least in the city if I went stir-crazy, I could jump on the bus and go spend money on things I didn’t need.

Here, I was alone. Completely, utterly, and entirely.

The motel had no name or title to speak of. It simply stretched low and off-white for twenty room-lengths, lined with uniform red doors that sported each number with rust-rimed plates. The cantilevered roof, extending flat as a cap brim, sagged faintly between the angled wooden beams that braced it.

Every one of us, the actors and the outfit and any in-between attached to this peculiar venture, had been flattened here into the same class: boredom. There was a certain poetry in it. Had I the patience, the general sanity, I might have found rare charm sewn in along the edges of what was happening here. But as it stood, I was desperate and fraying. The immediate present, charged and burning, was the only thing I could stomach holding in my hands.

Wesley was taking an afternoon with Haas next door. I had been lying around in my slip after we got a drink together at the bar—Haas had invited me, Wesley had encouraged me, but I still didn’t feel comfortable inserting myself into whatever was blooming between them. I made a silly little excuse as we parted on the breezeway, and I’d been staring through the weak signal of the television for nearly an hour now with nothing but frustration buzzing around under my fingernails. I was ready to start peeling the wallpaper with my teeth.

I stood up without ceremony and pulled on my robe before stepping into my house shoes.

I knocked briskly on Haas’s door. There was silence within, but soon the soft rattle of the chain and the lock flipping open.

“Margaret,” Haas said, squinting in the blanched slap of sunlight that carved into the cool, low light of the room through the door’s vee. He sounded pleased to see me. “Have I kept your husband past curfew?”

He wasn’t wearing a shirt. A cigarette hung casually from the corner of his mouth. I wasn’t staring. I blinked quickly and made a twitchy gesture. “I only wanted some company.”

Haas nodded backward over his shoulder and opened the door a fraction wider in invitation. “He’s washing up. Come in, if you’d like.”

Inside, my eyes took their time adjusting—all of the shades were drawn, and the first thing I saw with any clarity was the tossed riot of sheets on the bed. I hadn’t heard them at all through the shared wall.

Haas offered me a smoke, but I held up a hand. He indicated the single sun-faded armchair before crossing to a tidy collection of bottles on top of the sagging dresser, where he began mixing up a drink.

“So, what do you think so far of our lodgings?” Haas asked over his shoulder, heavy with sarcasm. I sniffed dryly and prodded at my forehead as though I might dispel my constant headache.

“Do you want the pretty lie or the ugly truth?”

Haas mocked a thinking face as he turned and held the cup out to me. I took a deep-throated sip, savoring the smooth bite of it—bottom-shelf, but still whiskey. “Is there a pretty truth?” he asked.

I thought for a moment and jangled the remelted-together ice in the belly of the cup. “I’ve lived in worse places for longer,” I said tightly. Haas made a commiserative grunt. He crossed his arms and leaned easily back against the dresser, peering with a lingering glance at my bare legs crossed at the knee under the hem of my robe.

“I, for one, hate this fucking tomb,” he said starkly and gave a flat smile.

I chuckled. “Have you been here before?”

“Once.” He didn’t elaborate.

The water in the bathroom stopped with a shallow shudder. Haas took a slow suck on his cigarette, still watching me. “I’m one of Kline’s associates,” he clarified, as if taking mild pity on me.

I gave him an expectant look. “Which means…?”

Haas flicked his eyebrows up, pleased with himself. “Details are reserved for my paramours, and only if they ask nicely.”

I pursed my mouth around an avid smile as the bathroom door opened—shit. I had wanted to ask for a taste of that more effective fix he’d mentioned the other day, but it felt too abrupt now with Wesley stepping fresh into the room, his hair combed back wet, drying himself off briskly with the same threadbare blue towel as in our room.

“Well!” The light in his eyes flickered, just barely. He beamed at me and unconsciously made to cover his nakedness with a smooth flick of the terry cloth. “Alright, Jack?”

“I’m fine.” I stood up and tossed back the rest of the drink Haas made me. “I just needed company.”

Haas was watching me, attempting to pry down past my surface as I stood and set the cup on the dresser beside him. “Two’s company,” he said lightly, “but three; are you sure you weren’t looking for a crowd?”

“Give her a crowd,” Wesley said with his back to us as he stepped into his shorts and hunted the rest of his clothes from the floor, “she’d give them a hell of a show.”

“Would she,” Haas said, not looking away from me. His gaze made a persistent heat beg up under my skin, a restlessness that didn’t know how to free itself.

“You should have seen her in Twelfth Night,” Wesley carried on. He tossed his shirt around his shoulders and turned to us as he buttoned it. He winked at me. “Looks better in a pair of buckskins than anyone.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that for a moment.” Haas’s gaze crawled up me from the root; ankle, calf, the bend of my knee, my thigh, nestling—

Haas jogged me from my imagination when he leaned forward, one hand on my hip, to kiss me on both cheeks. He had the faint scent of Wesley about him. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Shoard,” he said brightly. On drawing back, he felt the sash of my robe between two fingers as though testing its thread count. He made a gratified sound and gestured at the flash of my slip past the bottom hem. “Perhaps I’ll see more of you like this.”

He crossed the room to kiss Wesley goodbye as well, on the mouth—I looked away in automatic propriety, but I caught sight of them in the mirror fixed to the wall. Wesley looked more centered in his skin than I’d ever seen him before.

He deserved this happiness, and more.

And me; what did I deserve?

Wesley finished tucking in his shirt and smiled at me. “Shall we?”

He was happy.

I looked at Haas again, set to tidying the bedclothes with fastidious ease. He glanced up and caught my gaze in the low, simmering heat of intrigue.

Why should I not be, as well?