She couldn’t remember driving back to the highway. The rest of her life she’d wonder how a completely sober person could operate a motor vehicle for several miles through a medium-size city and not remember it.
She’d picked Brian as her spouse because he seemed safe. Because he was can-do. Earnest bordering on grating. A man who would never cheat. Never lie. Certainly never live a double life.
Yet she’d watched her husband enter the row house with his arm around the waist of his pregnant wife(?), girlfriend(?), and shut the door behind them. Rachel had no idea how long she sat in her car, staring at the house, enough time to note that the paint was peeling a bit from a windowsill on the second floor; the cable from a rusted satellite dish dangled off the roof down the front of the building. The window trim was white; the brick facade, recently washed by the look of it, was red. The front door was black and looked to have been painted many times over the course of a century or more. The knocker was pewter.
And then she was on the highway with no idea how she got there.
She thought she’d cry. She didn’t cry. She thought she’d tremble. She didn’t tremble. She thought she’d feel grief and maybe she did, maybe this was what grief felt like—a total numbness, a brining in nothingness. A cauterized soul.
The three lanes of the highway dropped to two as they crossed into Massachusetts. A car drove up on her right, attempting to cut in front of her as its own lane began to disappear. Signs warning of the lane drop had been posted for the last two miles. The other driver had ignored them until it was convenient for him and inconvenient for her.
He sped up.
She sped up.
He sped up some more. She sped up some more. He pushed the nose of his car toward hers. She held her lane. He sped up again. She accelerated, eyes forward. He beeped his horn. She held her lane. In a hundred yards, his lane ended. He sped up and she gunned it, as much as a Ford Focus could be gunned. He dropped away so fast it was as if his car came equipped with a parachute. It appeared seconds later on her rear.
She noted the Mercedes-Benz symbol on his hood. Made sense. He flipped her the bird and blared his horn. A balding specimen behind expensive wraparounds, cheeks just beginning to turn to jowls, thin nose, nonexistent lips. She watched him rant and rage in her rearview and definitely made out the word fuck several times and cunt a couple more. She assumed his dashboard was speckled with spit by now. He wanted to jerk his car into the passing lane and race up on her side, then cut her off, she assumed, but the traffic to their left was too heavy, so he just kept his hand on his horn and thrust his middle finger at her and screamed in his car about what a cunt she was, what a fucking cunt.
She tapped her brakes. And not a light tap. Dropped her speed a solid five miles an hour for a moment. His eyebrows shot up over his sunglasses. His mouth froze in a desperate O. He gripped his steering wheel as if it were suddenly electrified. Rachel smiled. Rachel laughed.
“Fuck you,” she said to the rearview, “you nothing man.” She wasn’t sure the words made a bit of sense, but they felt good to say.
A mile more and traffic had spaced itself out enough that the Mercedes driver could swerve into the left lane and come abreast of her. Normally she would have looked straight ahead—normally? There was no normal. Three days ago she never would have gotten behind the wheel of a car—but today she turned her head and looked at him. His glasses were off, his eyes as small and lightless as she would have expected. She looked at him steadily, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour. She looked calmly at this little man until the rage in his eyes became confusion and then guilt and then he went for something approximating disappointment, as if she’d morphed into the teenage daughter who’d stayed out past curfew, came home smelling of schnapps and Scope. He shook his head, an impotent scolding gesture, and turned his eyes to the road. After one last look, Rachel did the same.
Back home, she returned the Focus to the Zipcar lot and took the elevator up to fifteen. Walking toward her door, she felt lonelier than an astronaut. Unmoored. Untouched. Floating past frontiers with no way someone could hook her and bring her back. It didn’t help that of the four units on fifteen, her and Brian’s was the only one regularly occupied. The other three were owned by foreign investors. Every now and then they’d run across an older Chinese couple or the German financier’s wife, three children, nanny, and their shopping bags. She had zero idea who owned the third unit. The penthouse above was owned by a young man they’d dubbed Trust Fund Baby, a boy so young he’d probably been learning to read about the time Rachel lost her virginity. As far as she knew, he used the place to indulge a penchant for hookers. The rest of the time, Rachel and Brian never heard or saw him.
Most times she preferred this quiet and the privacy it afforded, but walking down the hall right now, she was a castoff, a mark, a fool, something amputated from the herd, an idiotic dreamer who’d been awakened via assault. She heard the cosmos laughing at her.
Didn’t you know, silly girl, that love is not for you?
The condo overwhelmed. Every wall, every angle, every view. This had been them, this had been theirs. It was all the places they’d made love, all the spots in which they’d talked or argued or shared meals. It was the art they’d picked out, the rugs, the dining set, the lamp they’d found at the antique store in Sandwich. It was the smell of him on his bath towel, the newspaper with the half-finished crossword puzzle. It was the curtains and the lightbulbs and the toiletries. Some of these she’d carry into her new life—whatever that new life would be—but almost everything else felt too much them to ever comfortably become hers.
To give herself a moment away from it, she took the elevator back down to the lobby to retrieve the mail. Dominick sat at his post behind the desk reading a magazine. Probably a tenant’s; might even be hers. He looked up and gave her a nod and the kind of bright smile that had absolutely nothing behind it and went back to his magazine. She walked into the mailroom behind him and opened her and Brian’s box, pulled out the stack inside. She added the circulars and junk mail to the recycling bin on the floor and was left, in the end, with three bills.
She came out behind Dominick’s chair and shot him a “Take care” as she did.
“You too, Rachel.” As she reached the elevator bank, he called, “Oh, I got something for you, sorry.”
She turned back and he was going through a bin of oversize mail. He handed her a yellow manila envelope. She didn’t recognize the sender—Pat’s Book Nook & More in Barnum, Pennsylvania—but then remembered the VHS she’d ordered the other night. She hefted the envelope in her palm; that’s exactly what was inside.
Back up in the condo, she opened the envelope and pulled out the tape. The box was battered, some of the cardboard missing from the corners. Robert Hays and Vivica A. Fox stared back at her with happy smiles, their heads tilted to the left. She was opening a bottle of pinot noir to accompany her when she realized she didn’t have a VCR. Who did anymore? She was about to go online and see if she could buy one when she remembered they had one in storage over in Brookline. She’d have to rent another Zipcar, drive a couple of miles in rush-hour traffic. And for what exactly? A movie that a drunk had told her to watch. She now knew her husband had another wife in another state. What more could she learn from an obscure movie from 2002?
She drank some pinot and flipped the VHS over, confirmed that the description of the film on the back was indeed the same one she’d seen posted on eBay. Above the description were two small photos. One was of Robert and Vivica talking on a sidewalk, giving each other big toothy smiles. The other was of a young man leaning over a young woman in a wheelchair, the young man’s lips to her neck, her head thrown back in delight. This must be the two supporting players, she thought, poor Kristy Gale and the guy, what was his name again? She checked the credits—right, Brett Alden.
She put her wineglass on the counter for a moment, closed her eyes.
Alden Minerals Ltd.
That’s why it had struck a chord.
She looked closer at the thumbnail photo in the top right corner. Brett Alden’s face was half obscured by the angle it took when he leaned into Kristy Gale’s neck to kiss it. You could only see his hair (dark, voluminous, and unruly), his forehead, the left side of his face—one eye, one cheekbone, half his nose, half his lips.
But she knew those lips, that nose, that cheekbone, that blue eye. The hair had receded some, the skin near the temple had sprouted wrinkles.
But it was Brian. No question.