Two by two the animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way. Forty days and forty nights of being locked up helpless, knowing everything you’d ever known was drowning all around you, and at the end God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.
Dori must find something reassuring in the story. Dori is a preschool teacher and a pastor’s daughter, and she has found a way to carry the theme of the ark and the rainbow sign across the entire three days of her wedding, which began tonight with a welcome dinner and ends Sunday afternoon with brunch and a church service where, according to the program, her father will give a sermon titled “God’s Rainbow Sign for You.” The bridesmaids’ dresses are rainbow, not individually multicolored, but ROY-G-BIV-ordered, and each bridesmaid appears to have been mandated to wear her assigned color all weekend; the red bridesmaid, for example, wore a red T-shirt to the airport, a red cocktail dress to dinner, and now red stilettos and a red sash reading BRIDESMAID for the bachelorette party. When assembled in a group, Dori’s bridesmaids look like a team of bridal Power Rangers.
Rena is not a bridesmaid but has been dragged along for the festivities thanks to the aggressive hospitality of the bridal party. She has worn black to avoid stepping on anyone’s color-assigned toes, and Dori, of course, has worn white, and so all night Rena has been waiting to judge Dori for the look on her face when someone spots the two of them and the rainbow bridal party and takes them for brides-to-be, but so far they have only been to bars where the bartenders greet everyone but Rena and the green bridesmaid, the other out-of-towner, by name.
There is a groom involved in this wedding, though Rena believes his involvement must be loose; she can’t imagine JT is on board with this ark business. Rena has known JT for five years. When they met, most of what they had in common was that they were Americans, but far away from home, that could be enough. JT was on his way back to the States after a Peace Corps tour in Togo; she was on her way back from Burkina Faso. The first leg of their flight home was supposed to take them to Paris, but it had been diverted, and then returned to Ghana, after the airline received a call claiming that an agent of biological warfare had been released on the plane. They landed to chaos; no one charged with telling them what happened next seemed sure what information was credible or who had the authority to release it. The Ghanaian authorities had placed them under a quarantine that was strictly outlined but loosely enforced. Had the threat been legitimate, it would have gifted the planet to whatever came after humans. Instead, they’d been stuck on the grounded plane for the better part of a day, then shuttled off for a stressful week at a small hotel surrounded by armed guards, something, JT pointed out, a lot of tourists pay top dollar for.
As two of the three Americans on the flight, JT and Rena found each other. The third American was a journalist of some renown, and so even after the immediate danger was contained, the story of their detention was covered out of proportion to its relevance. Reuters picked up none of the refugee camp photos Rena spent months arranging into a photo essay but did pick up a photo she’d taken of JT in his hotel room. His face was scruffy from several days without shaving and marked with an expression that was part fatigue, part cockiness, just a hint of his upper lip peeking from atop the loosely secured paper mask he’d been assigned to wear. It ran a few months later on the cover of the Times magazine, with the text overlay reading It’s a Small World After All: America in the Age of Global Threat.
In December’s deluge of instant nostalgia, the photo made more than one best-of-the-year list. Rena had not lacked for freelance jobs since its publication. Aesthetically, it was not her best work, but JT, handsome, tanned, and blond, was what the public wanted as a symbol of the boy-next-door on the other side of the world. Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door. When there is one natural blond family left in America they will be trotted out to play every single role that calls for someone all-American, to be interviewed in every time of crisis. They will be exhausted.
Rena was present in the photo, right at the edge, a shimmery and distorted sliver of herself in the mirror. Most people didn’t notice her at all. One blogger who did misidentified her as hotel staff. In her line of work, it was sometimes helpful not to be immediately identified as an American, to be, in name and appearance, ethnically ambiguous, although her actual background—black and Polish and Lebanese—was alchemy it had taken the country of her birth to make happen.
It was clear to Rena by the second day of their detention that nobody was dying. Dori phoned daily but stopped worrying about JT’s physical well-being somewhere around day four, at which point she took a sharp interest in Rena. JT as JT had talked at length about life as an expat, mostly his life as an expat, but JT as Dori’s ventriloquist dummy wanted to know about Rena’s childhood, her future travel plans, her dating life. In some ways, Rena has Dori to thank for the fact that she and JT became close enough to sustain a friendship once the crisis was over. Rena guessed where the questions were coming from and wished that she had something to defuse the situation, to reassure Dori, but then and now, she had nothing. She had built the kind of life that belonged to her and her alone, one she could pick up and take with her as needed, and so there she was in JT’s tiny hotel room, unattached and untethered and unbothered. To a girlfriend on a different continent, she might as well have been doing the dance of the seven red flags.
Dori is simple but she is not stupid, and since arriving in town for the wedding, Rena has wanted simply to level with her, but Dori will not give her the chance. Dori greeted her warmly and apologized extravagantly for JT’s failure to ask her to take the wedding photos; Rena can’t tell if Dori is being passive-aggressive or really doesn’t know the difference between wedding photography and photojournalism. Dori has left aggressive-aggressive to the yellow bridesmaid, who materializes to interrupt every time Rena finds herself in private conversation with JT. Dori has negotiated her anxiety with perfect composure, but Dori has not womaned up and simply said to Rena did you ever fuck my fiancé, in which case Rena would have told her no.
What had actually happened was that Rena and JT spent most of the hotel days playing a game called Worst Proverb, though they could never agree on the exact terms, and so neither of them ever won. JT believed the point of the game was to come up with the worst-case scenario for following proverbial advice. Over the course of the week, he offered a dozen different hypotheticals in which you only regret the things you don’t do and if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again came to a spectacularly bad end. Rena thought the point of the game was to identify the proverb that was the worst of all possible proverbs, and make a case for its failure. She’d run through a number of contenders before deciding on in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.
The fourth bar on the bachelorette party tour is dim and smells of ammonia, with a faint aura of gasoline courtesy of the auto shop next door. The bridal party is seated around a wobbly wooden table playing bachelorette bingo, a hot-pink mutant hybrid of bingo and Truth or Dare. The bridesmaid in blue has unclasped her bra and pulled it from under the arm of her tank top. She holds it in the air and strides to deposit it atop the table of a group of strangers at a booth against the far wall. The blue bridesmaid is two squares away from winning this round of bridal bingo, and this is one of the tasks between her and victory. The prize for winning bridal bingo is that the person with the fewest bingo squares x’ed out has to buy the winner’s next drink. The winner never actually needs another drink. Rena has bought four winners drinks already tonight, but everyone is being polite about her lack of effort.
Dori is seated across from Rena and is, in infinitesimal increments, sliding her chair closer to the wall behind her, as if she can get close enough to merge with it and become some lovely, blushing painting looking over the spectacle. Dori claims to have been drinking champagne all night, which has required that she bring her own champagne bottle into several bars that don’t serve anything but beer and well liquor, but for hours the champagne bottle has been stashed in her oversized purse, and she has been drinking ginger ale out of a champagne flute. When Dori last ordered a round of drinks, Rena heard her at the bar, making sure some of the drinks were straight Coke or tonic water, for friends who were past their limits. Because she is the prettiest of all of her friends, Rena assumed she was the group’s ringleader, but now she can see that this is not true. Dori is the caretaker. Dori turns to Rena, keeping one eye on her friend striding across the bar with the dangling lingerie.
“Sorry this is getting a little out of hand. I guess you’ve seen worse though. JT says you used to photograph strippers?”
Rena imagines Dori imagining her taking seedy headshots. Her photo series had hung for months in an LA museum, and one of the shots had been used as part of a campaign for sex-workers’ rights, but Rena isn’t sure the clarification will be worth it.
“Kelly used to dance, you know,” Dori says. “She was the first adult I ever saw naked.”
“Kelly?”
“In the yellow. My cousin’s best friend. She used to steal our drill team routines for the club. We used to watch her practice, and sometimes on slow nights she would sneak us in to drink for free.”
“I didn’t think you were much of a drinker.”
“You haven’t heard the rumors about pastors’ daughters? Thankfully, I’m not much of anything I was at sixteen. Except with JT. I thought we’d be married practically out of high school.”
“Why weren’t you?”
“He went to college. Then he went to grad school. Then he went to Togo.”
“Where were you?”
“Here,” Dori says. “Always here.”
There is a shrieking and then deep laughter from the other end of the bar. The blue bridesmaid, whose left breast is now dangerously close to escaping her tank top, has been joined by reinforcements, and they are dragging over a man from the table across the bar. He is muscled and burly, too big to be dragged against his will, but plays at putting up a fight before he falls to his knees in mock submission, then stands and walks toward their table, holding the bra above his head like a trophy belt. He tosses the bra on the table in front of Dori and tips his baseball cap.
“Ma’am,” he says to Dori’s wide eyes, “excuse my being forward, but I understand it’s your bachelorette party, and your friends over here have obliged me to provide you with a dance.”
For a moment Rena thinks this might be orchestrated, this man a real entertainer, Dori’s friends better at conspiracy than she would have given them credit for, but then the man wobbles as he crouches over Dori, gyrating clumsily while trying to unbutton his own shirt, breathing too close to her face and seeming at any moment like he might lose balance and fall onto her. Dori looks to the bartender for salvation, some sort of regulatory intervention, but the bartender only grins and switches the music playing over the bar loudspeakers to something raunchy and heavy on bass. The bridesmaids begin laughing and pull dollar bills from their purses. Before they close a circle around the table, Rena sees her chance. She is up and out the door before anyone can force her to stay.
It’s a short dark walk back to the hotel, where the bar is closed and its lights are off, but someone is sitting at it anyway. Rena starts to walk past him on her way to the elevators but realizes it’s one of the groomsmen. Michael from DC. He was on her connecting flight, one of those small regional shuttles sensitive to turbulence. He is tall and sinewy, and before she knew they were heading to the same place, she had watched him with a twinge of pity, folding himself into the too-small place of his plane seat a few rows ahead of hers.
“Early night?” Rena asks as she walks toward him.
“Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to a bachelor party with a pastor present.”
“Cake and punch in a church basement?”
“Scotch and cigars in a hotel penthouse. Still boring as all get out. JT and I were roommates in college and he used to tell me he was from the most boring place in the country, but I didn’t believe him until now.”
“So you thought you’d liven things up by sitting at an empty bar with a flask?”
“You never know when something interesting might happen.”
“At least you got to change out of your rainbow color. Or were you guys not assigned colors?”
“We only have to wear them tomorrow.”
“Men. Always getting off easy.”
“Easy? Do you know how hard it is to find an orange vest?”
“Ooh, you’re orange. Have you spent much time with your bridal counterpart?”
“Only met her briefly.”
“See if you can get out of her what she did.”
“What she did?”
“You have seven color choices, you don’t put a redhead in orange unless you’re angry at her. Girl is being punished for something. Must be some gossip.”
“So far most of the gossip I’ve heard at this wedding has been about you.”
“I only know one person here. Whatever you’ve heard isn’t gossip, it’s speculation.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “You want to finish this upstairs? Less to speculate about.”
So, now there will be something to gossip about. Maybe it will put Dori’s mind at ease if Rena appears to be taken for the weekend. Michael tastes like gin and breath mints, and he is reaching for the button on her jeans before the door is closed. Rena affixes herself to his neck like she is trying to reach a vein; she is too old to be giving anyone a hickey, she knows, but she is determined right now to leave a mark, to become part of the temporary map of his body, to place herself briefly along his trajectory as something that can be physically noted, along with the smooth and likely professionally maintained ovals of his fingernails, the faint appendectomy scar, the very slight paunch of his unclothed belly. She clasps a fist in his hair, which is thick and full, but they are at that age now, a few years older than the bride and groom, youth waving at them from the border to an unknown territory. Rena can tell that if she saw Michael again in two years, he would be starting to look like a middle-aged man, not unattractive or unpleasant looking, but it has snuck up on her, that time of her life when age-appropriate men remind her of her father, when you go a year without seeing a man and suddenly his hair is thinned in the middle, his beard graying, his body softer. So she is saying yes please to right now, to the pressure of his palm along her arm and his teeth on her earlobe, and she is surprised by how much she means it.
Sleeping in someone else’s bed doesn’t stop the nightmares. Rena observes this almost empirically—it has been a while since she has spent the night with anyone and a very long while since she slept soundly. It is her job to go to the places where the nightmares are. It is not a job a person takes if full nights of sleep are her priority. Plus, weddings are not easy. Rena has missed a lot of weddings by being strategically or unavoidably out of the country. The only time she was actually in a wedding, she was the maid of honor. It was her little sister Elizabeth’s wedding, autumn in Ohio, a small ceremony, a marriage to a man both of them had grown up with, Connor from the house around the corner. Connor who used to mow their lawn and rake their leaves and shovel their snow. Rena’s dress was gold. Her mother worried about the amount of cleavage and her grandmother said her baby sister’s getting married before her, let her flash whatever she needs to catch up. For a week before the wedding, her sister had been terrified of rain, and Rena had lied about the weather report to comfort her, and the weather turned out to be beautiful, and her sister turned out to be beautiful, and Connor turned out to be the man who, a year later, suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day, and so he put a bullet through her head. She lived. Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been.
Rena has not been to visit Elizabeth in three years. Her mother says Elizabeth is making small progress toward language. She can nod her head yes. She can recognize again the names of colors. Rena’s sister was a middle-school drama teacher, a job she had chosen because pursuing a theater career would have taken her too far away. When Elizabeth was in college, Rena had come to see her in Antigone on opening night, and though the show was not only in English but staged, at the director’s whim, to involve contemporary sets and clothing and a backing soundtrack of Top 40 pop, Elizabeth told her afterward that she had memorized the play both in English and in its original ancient Greek, which she had taken classes in to better get a feel for drama.
There had been signs. Rena had been too far away to see them, her parents maybe too close. Connor had threatened her before, but her sister did not say she was afraid of Connor. The whole week of the wedding, her sister said she was afraid of rain. All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.
That Rena wakes up screaming sometimes is something JT knows about her, the way she knows that he is an insomniac and on bad nights can sleep only to Mingus. There was a point at the hotel when they stopped sleeping in their own rooms and then when they stopped sleeping in their own beds, and even now she cannot say whether what they wanted was the comfort of another body in their respective restlessness or the excuse to cross a line, only that they never did cross it, and that tonight, before JT’s wedding, she does not want to wake to a strange man holding her while she cries. It is 4 a.m. according to the hotel clock. She dresses in the bathroom and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her. Her room is one floor down and she is ready to pass the elevator and head for the staircase when she sees JT in the hallway. All week he has been put together—clean-shaven, with his hair gelled and slicked into place—but the JT she sees now looks more like the man she met, like he has just rolled out of bed. He seems as surprised by her as she is by him, and his face relaxes for a moment as he grins at her and raises an eyebrow.
“Where are you coming from?” he asks.
“Where are you going?” she asks. She is fully awake now and taking in the scene. It is four in the morning. There is a wedding today. The groom is standing at the elevator with a duffel bag. Something has gone wrong.
“I can’t do this,” he says.
Rena thinks of Dori, surely sound asleep by now, Dori with two years of wedding Pinterest boards, Dori almost certainly rescuing herself from the sweaty machinations of the would-be stripper and then making her friends feel better about having upset her.
“You can’t just leave,” Rena says. “You have to tell her yourself.”
“I’m going to call her,” he says. “I’m going out of town for a little bit.”
Rena moves herself between JT and the elevator to look him in the eyes. He does not seem or smell drunk, only sad, and that he should be sad, that he should treat this decision as a thing that is happening to him, enrages her to the point that it surprises her. She speaks to him in a fierce whisper.
“When I met you we were trapped across the world, and you told me you were calm because you’d learned not to take for granted that anything was safe. You don’t get to be scared of a woman you’ve been with since you were teenagers.”
“I was scared,” he says. “You were calm. You were so fucking calm, and that was what I liked about you. For a while I thought you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”
Rena flinches. She imagines slapping him, first imagines slapping the him inches from her face and then closes her eyes and imagines slapping the him from the photograph, slapping the useless mask right off of him. He wants this fight. People would come out of their rooms to see her shouting in the hallway, see a parting quarrel between old friends or old lovers or JT and a woman nursing an old wound. Excuses would be formulated; they would all calmly and quietly go back to sleep. JT is giving her a reason to give him a reason to stay. Rena does not stop him. She walks past him to the staircase and hears the elevator ding before the door closes behind her. The window in her room faces the parking lot, and she sees JT cross through the lot under the flush of the lights and disappear into his car. She sees the car flicker to life before he drives off, and she watches for quite some time but he does not come back.
Rena falls asleep with the curtains still open, and in the morning the sun through the windows is dusty and insistent as the banging at the door wakes her. Her body, groggy from sex and drinking, is temporarily uncooperative, but the noise continues until she is able to rally herself to open it for Dori and Kelly the Yellow Bridesmaid.
“JT is gone,” says Kelly.
Rena lets the other women in and pretends not to notice them scanning the room for any indication of her duplicity. She reminds herself that she is unhappy with JT and that this is not her fight.
“I ran into him in the hallway last night,” Rena says. “I didn’t think he would really go through with leaving.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Dori asks.
“That seems like the wrong question.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Ohio,” says Rena. The word has rounded its way out of her mouth before she has time to consider why she is saying it. But now that she has said it she keeps going. She invents an overseas friend with an empty cabin, a conversation about JT’s need to get his head together.
“Okay,” says Dori. “Okay.”
She sends Kelly downstairs to stall the guests and gives Rena fifteen minutes to get dressed.
The address Rena has given is a three-hour drive from where they are in Indiana, mostly highway. Dori buckles herself into the driver’s seat, still, Rena notices belatedly, in her pre-wedding clothes—white leggings, a pale pink zip-up hoodie, and a white T-shirt bedazzled with the word BRIDE.
“I really am sorry,” Rena says.
“You didn’t tell him to leave, right?”
This is true, so Rena lets it sit. She is quiet until Billie Holiday’s voice from the car radio becomes unbearable.
“What do you want?” Rena asks.
“From you?”
“From life.”
“Right now I want to go find my fiancé before we lose the whole wedding day.”
“Right.”
At a traffic light, Rena’s phone dings and Dori reaches for it with a speed that could be habit but Rena recognizes as distrust. The text, of course, is not from JT.
“Michael?” Dori says. “Michael, really?”
Rena grabs the phone back: Hey, says the text. You didn’t have to take off last night.
Dori’s relief at knowing where Rena spent the night is palpable. She turns to Rena with the closest approximation of a smile it seems possible for her to manage at the moment and asks, “So what was it like?” Rena understands her prying as a kind of apology. They are going to be friends now; they are going to seal it with intimate detail the way schoolgirls would seal a blood sisterhood with a needle and a solemn touch.
“It was fine,” Rena says. “Kind of grabby and over pretty quick. We were both a little drunk.”
“I had to teach JT. It took a few years.”
“Years?”
“God, I did a lot of faking it.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have taken as long if you hadn’t faked it?”
“That, darling, is why you’re single. If I hadn’t faked it, he would have moved on to a girl who did.”
“So she could have waited a decade for him to not marry her on their wedding day?”
They are at the turnoff for the highway, and Dori takes the right with such violent determination that Rena grips the door handle.
“My wedding day’s not over yet. We could have JT back in time to marry me and get you and Michael to the open bar.”
“There’s an open bar?”
“We’re religious. We’re not cheap. Besides, my mother always says a wedding is not a success if it doesn’t inspire another wedding. There’s a bouquet with your name on it. Cut Michael off of the gin early and teach him what to do with his hands.”
Dori is technically correct about the timeline; it is early, the sun still positioning itself to pin them in its full glow. In the flush of the early morning light, Dori looks beatific, a magazine bride come to life. Rena has no idea in which direction JT actually took off, but it is possible that he has turned around, that he will turn around, that their paths will cross, the light hitting Dori in a way that reveals to him exactly how wrong he has been, and Dori will crown Rena this wedding’s unlikely guardian angel. Until Toledo, there will still technically be time to get back to the hotel and pull this wedding off, but Rena saw JT’s face last night, and if she knows anything by now she knows the look of a man who is done with someone.
As for Michael, it doesn’t really matter what she says about him; Dori is spinning the story that ends in happily ever after for everyone, the one where two years from now Rena and Michael are telling their meet-cute story at their own wedding. But Rena can see already everything wrong with that future. As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend. In her early twenties a series of men one by one held her to their chests and kissed the top of her head if they were gentlemen and palmed her ass if they were not and told her that she deserved better than they could give her. But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?
Rena pressed herself against the emptiness, flirted with cliché: nights fucking strangers against alleyway walls, waking to bruises in places she didn’t remember being grabbed. Though it had been almost a year of this by the time her sister was shot, her friends were happy to make retroactive excuses, to save themselves the trouble of an intervention that might only have been an intervention against a person being herself. So, more rough strangers, years she let make her mean. If she was not good enough for the thing other people had, who could be, if she did not deserve love, who should have it, if she could not find in a mirror what was so bad and unlovable in her, she would have to create it. She learned how to press the blade of her heart into the center of someone else’s life, to palm a man’s crotch under the table while smiling sweetly at his wife, to think, sometimes, concretely and deliberately, of her sister, punished for a thing she hadn’t done, while raising an eyebrow in a bar and accepting a drink from a man who didn’t bother hiding his ring. All the things she was getting away with! All the people who couldn’t see beauty or danger when it was looking right at them, when it had adjusted itself and walked out of their upstairs bathroom after tucking their husband’s penis back into his boxers, when it was under the hotel bedcovers while their boyfriend checked in on video chat. It was, if she is honest with herself, only because the circumstances were so strange that she didn’t sleep with JT, that she didn’t, one of those nights they woke up together, look him in the eyes and part her lips and trail her fingers down his bare chest and wait for what came next. It hadn’t been knowing Dori existed that kept her from it.
Rena thought for years that the meanness in her would be hers forever, except first, the hard mean thing about her started to sparkle; she began to advertise trouble in a way that made her the kind of woman friends did not leave alone with their boyfriends. Then, the rage she’d spent a decade fucking to a point softened into a kind of compassion. Men seemed more fragile to her now, and because it was impossible to entirely hate something for being broken, she forgave even those men who’d left her teary-eyed and begging for their damage. No wonder they had sent her off—who wants to be loved for the hole in their chest when there is a woman somewhere willing to lie and say she can fix it, another prepared to spend decades pretending it isn’t there? She was, she wanted to tell everybody, so full of forgiveness lately, for herself and for everyone else. Her heart, these days, was a mewling kitten, apt to run off after anyone who would feed it, but try telling that to anyone who had known her the last decade, to anyone who had lived through all of her tiger years and wouldn’t hold a palm out to her without wanting the chance to be destroyed. It was a lovely daydream Dori was having for her, but if Rena went to Michael’s door speaking of her kitten heart, he would only hear kitten, he would only think pussy.
The awkward conversation fades into the comfort of nineties pop—God bless XM radio, the mercy of Dori changing the station before Billie broke open what was left of their hearts. Songs they have forgotten but now remember loving keep them company as they press through the landscape of rest stops and coffee shops and chain restaurants, slightly above the speed limit, so that things look even more alike than they might otherwise. By a little after ten they are at the edge of Indiana and Dori needs to pee, so they pull over at a rest stop off the turnpike. Rena follows her into the travel plaza to buy a bottled water and a packet of ibuprofen, her mouth still dry and her head faintly pulsing. The warm smell of grease activates her hangover, and by the time Dori exits the ladies’ room, Rena is grabbing breakfast at the McDonald’s counter.
There must be some law that any chain in an airport or rest stop is required to be just slightly off-brand: Rena’s hash brown tastes congealed and suspiciously like grape soda, and her breakfast sandwich is dry and slightly oblong. Dori has a Coke and a sad parfait, which is so sad that she has downed the Coke before making it more than a few spoonfuls into breakfast. When she gets up to refill the soda, she walks by a man a few tables away, hunched over his own pitiful breakfast, the bottom of his gray beard dotted with a drip of coffee he doesn’t seem to have noticed. His face breaks into a full smile as Dori walks by, and on her way back he calls, “Who’s the lucky man?”
Dori freezes. For a moment her grip on the soda is so shaky it seems clear that she will drop it, that she will stain the offending bride T-shirt beyond wearability, which will at least solve the problem of future commentary. But she keeps the soda in hand and composes herself as she turns back to the man with the beard, who has dabbed off the coffee with a napkin while waiting for her reply.
“All of Toledo,” she says with a smile.
“Huh?”
“Bride’s our band name. I’m the drummer. Show tonight.”
“Yeah?” he says. His smile is still just as affable and natural; it is not the wedding that excited him but the chance to congratulate a stranger’s happiness, and this endears him to Rena. She walks over to join the conversation Dori and the stranger have started regarding their imaginary band. He was in a band in college. The band was called Cold Supper. His name, fittingly, is Ernest.
“We never made it so far as the tour part,” Ernest says. “Got out of the garage at least, played a few local shows. But never the road.”
“Believe me, the glamour of the road life doesn’t stop,” says Rena, holding up the soggy second half of her sandwich.
Ernest smiles and pulls out a phone to show them a picture one of his old bandmates posted a few months earlier. A younger, skinny and long-haired version of himself plays the guitar. He has not played in years, ten or fifteen, but he has a lucky pick in his wallet, which he shows them too. It is smooth to the touch and dips in where his thumb has pressed against it and has faded to the yellow of a smoker’s teeth. Ernest insists on an autograph on the way out, promises to tell his niece in Toledo about their made-up show in a made-up bar, and so they provide him the autograph on a paper napkin, renaming themselves Glory and Tina. He waves them good luck on their way out. Rena flushes with shame. Ernest and his earnestness, his guitar pick, his poor niece in Toledo.
In the car Rena can’t bring herself to close her door or click her seat belt, even as Dori starts the car and the bells ding.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. “I have no idea where JT went. I made the cabin thing up.”
Dori is still flushed with guilt and exhilaration from the life they made up inside. It takes a minute for her face to catch up with her feeling, for her eyes to start and her delicate features to scrunch together.
“You made it up?” she says. “What the hell address did you give me?”
“My sister’s old house.”
“Who lives there now?”
“Some people who sued their realtor because they didn’t know when they bought the place that someone was shot there.”
“Who was shot there?”
“My sister. By her husband. Two days before her first wedding anniversary. She’s alive. She can’t talk. Or maybe she can now. I don’t visit.”
“So this is your fucked-up cautionary tale? It’s a good thing JT left me now because if he hadn’t he would shoot me when he got sick of me?”
“I wasn’t thinking that. I wasn’t thinking anything, and I said the first thing that came to mind.”
“The house where your sister got shot was the first thing that came to mind when I asked if you knew where my fiancé was?”
“It’s always the first thing that comes to mind,” Rena says, and she is too relieved by the honesty to be ashamed.
Dori pulls the car out of the rest stop lot and Rena prepares for the long silence on the way back. Dori will be too proud and polite to say what happened; she will only say they didn’t find him. She will send guests home with tulle-wrapped almonds and be front and center at her father’s sermon Sunday, by which point Rena will be on a plane home, home being a city she hasn’t yet lived in, two weeks in a short-term sublet while she looks for a real rental, her belongings in a pod, making their way across the ocean. But two exits later and many exits too early for that future, Dori gets off the highway. Rena isn’t sure which set of signs they are following until they get there.
Waterworld. As advertised in highway billboards, except the billboards make it look giant and fluorescent, while in person it is somewhat sadder, a slide pool one direction, a wave pool in another, and off to the side, vendors and a carnival stage with no show in progress. It is fifteen dollars to get in, but the real cash cow is the entryway gift shop, where now that they are here Rena supposes it would be rude not to buy a bathing suit. Dori buys a pink suit and a pair of blue Waterworld sweats. She is luminous. It is the first time all weekend Rena has seen her in real color.
“I’m sorry,” Rena says, which she realizes only then that she didn’t say earlier. Dori doesn’t answer, and Rena follows her poolside, where they lock their phones in electric blue lockers with the paint scratched and peeling. KING SUM, someone has carved into theirs, and there is no explanation or response. On the other side of the lockers, there is a whole tangle of slides, the tallest of which has a long line, but it is the one Dori wants and so they wait.
In order to go down the slide you must first go up, and halfway through their waiting they have come to an uncertain staircase, alarmingly slippery in places, spiraled and winding around a cylinder. The higher they go the more Rena feels something like fear. Once she spent some time in Mexico, in the city where Edward James built unfinished or intentionally incomplete sculptures in the middle of a series of waterfalls: stairs leading nowhere, a lack of clarity about what was nature and what was built, a wildly unsafe tourist trap. This staircase should feel safer but does not, and by the time they reach the top Rena is giddy with relief at the thought of going back down. She seats herself at the start of the slide with something like genuine joy.
It is a fast ride to the pool below. At the third turn is a waterproof camera, the kind that projects the photo down to a booth where the operator will offer to print and frame it and sell it to you at an outrageous markup. Dori and Rena, riding together, two to a tube, down through a series of sharp turns, are sprayed with water that seems to be coming from every direction and then dropped into the pool, which stings first with impact and again with chlorine. Rena surfaces with an unexpected lightness, which she sees mirrored in Dori’s smile. It occurs to her this might be the least terrible idea anyone involved in this alleged wedding has had in the last forty-eight hours.
Dori insists on checking out their picture after they towel off, so she heads for the photographer while Rena retrieves their phones.
Rena has three texts from Michael:
Did I do something wrong last night?
Did you kidnap the bride?!
Hey, I don’t know what’s up, but get your perfect ass back here—there’s an open bar waiting for us.
There are five texts from JT:
Where did you guys go?
Why did you think I was in Ohio?
Tell her I’m here
Tell her I’m sorry
Wedding is on! Where are you?
Wedding is on! JT has doubled back after all. He has come back to the place where whatever his decision is, it always stands. When Dori makes her way to the lockers, Rena hands her the phone. For a minute Dori’s face is soft. She reaches for her own phone and reads through whatever amended case JT has made for himself there. She tugs on a strand of her wet hair. Then she turns to Rena and shrugs, turns the phone off, and shoves it back into the locker. She holds out to Rena the photo of the two of them. Dori’s hair is whipping behind her, her smile open-mouthed and angled away. Rena is behind her, staring at the camera, laughing and startled. Dori has chosen a hideous purple-and-green airbrushed paper frame reading WISH YOU WERE HERE.
“This is going to be hilarious someday,” Dori says. “I hope.”
Rena stashes her phone in the locker with Dori’s. There is still nothing at the carnival stage, and so they share cheese fries and cotton candy and make their way to the wave pool, where they rent inner tubes. Rena floats and thinks of the last time she did this, which must have been twenty years ago, must have been with her family when this was the kind of day trip they would have all found relaxing. When Rena would not have looked at the water and thought of E. coli, of hantavirus, of imminent drought, of a recent news story of a child who drowned in a pool like this because his parents sent him to the water park alone for daycare and no one there was watching for him. When it was still her job to keep Elizabeth’s swimmies on, when there was still Elizabeth’s laugh, when there were still seas to be crossed, when the whole world was in front of her. Wish you were here. Wish you were here. Wish you were here.