A year into their marriage, Hunter decided he was done with Philadelphia and the whole East Coast. It was a place so unfriendly, so dysfunctional, so pathologically negative that he was convinced he’d been tainted by the atmosphere, a Regional Affective Disorder that had exacerbated all of his worst qualities and stunted his personal growth. He’d hoped to be many things by the time he was twenty-five, but he’d become none of those things. He’d hoped to be professionally accomplished, for one, to have a career rather than just a job. To be creatively engaged in something, even if it was writing music reviews for the community newspaper. To have a small circle of trusted friends with whom he had a monthly meeting for lunch or coffee. To volunteer every other weekend at a homeless shelter. To have the disposable income to buy rare gems for Kait and take her out to extravagant dinners. On the Internet, he saw photos of his acquaintances skydiving, attending black-tie events with the governor, getting record deals, going on safaris, winning fellowships for their research. It felt like he’d hit a ceiling at eighteen and everyone he knew had just kept rising. His two greatest achievements were his marriage and owning a home, but Kait deserved more credit than him for both of those accomplishments.
Without Kait, he was a failure, so he began researching new places to live, places where he could reinvent himself. Criteria: vibrant arts scene, large and diverse population, a wide variety of career opportunities, some historical importance, good restaurants, generally liberal, generally young. He narrowed it down to six finalists before telling Kait about his desire to move. The top choice was Chicago (runners-up: Seattle; Victoria, British Columbia; San Francisco; St. Louis; and Austin). In addition to meeting the other requirements, Chicago was a good hub for domestic travel, and Kait was familiar with the area from her time as a student at DePaul. She’d told him once the only reason she moved back after college was because she was too young to live on her own so far away from home, but now, he reasoned, she was older and more mature and they would have each other. He presented the case to her in as much detail as possible, including a three-page handout detailing demographics, average home prices, school ratings, and other data. “You really put a lot of work into this,” Kait said.
“I wanted you to see I’m serious.”
She crinkled the edges of the handout. “But we can’t actually move.”
“We can do anything we want. Literally anything. It’s not like we’re chained up here.”
“But we kind of are. I have a job, and we have this house. And I like it here, and also how are we even going to find a good place?”
He produced another printout. “I’ve been looking. These ones all look pretty good, and if we fly out for a long weekend—”
“This is crazy. We can’t just move halfway across the country on a whim.”
“It’s a two-hour flight. We can come back here any time we want.”
“But if we stay in this house, it’s a zero-hour flight to get back here.” She skimmed through the home listings. “Anyway, you can’t try on new cities like sweaters. That’s not how things work.”
“You’re always talking about adventure,” he said.
“Yeah, I want to go on vacations to other places, I don’t want to live in them.”
“Did you at least look? How great is that second house?”
“What’s the rush to get out of here anyway?” she said. “You didn’t kill someone, did you?”
“My parents have lived in the same town their whole lives. Did you know that? Jack grew up on the same street they live on now.”
“You’re nothing like your dad.”
“This is just a place, you know? It’s never been the right fit for us.”
“Since when does everything have to be perfect? What if some things just have to be good enough?”
He shuffled his papers. Clicked on a few links. “What if also I killed a guy?” he said.
“Will you still love me if I testify against you? I think I’d be really good at being a witness,” she said.
HE COULD HAVE THE car repaired, wait a few days in rural Illinois, and then continue, but he is afraid of losing his momentum. He takes a cab to the nearest bus station, buys a ticket to Chicago, and while waiting for the bus to depart, he decides to map out the rest of his trip. Without the car, he needs to have more of a plan, because he’s now at the mercy of bus schedules and mass transit. Kait was the superior planner. Her intense level of organization was often a defense she’d erected against her insecurities, the dogmatic belief that if she spent enough time planning, then she could overcome all of her perceived deficiencies. She was the one who’d wanted to begin learning French and Italian, and who had bought atlases and European guidebooks. She was the one who insisted they spend at least two hours per week watching travel documentaries, just so they would know what to expect. She was the one who would have mapped out the itinerary down to the hour and who would be telling him right now that you can’t just get on a bus and expect a trip to materialize spontaneously. You need to act upon the world, she would have said. He reminds her now that it’s part of his charm (or at least he thought it was), one of the things she always loved about him (or at least he thought it was), the breezy nonchalance with which he’s able to approach a major project, the way he provided balance for her Type-A anxiety. And yet, the nonchalance has led to a trip that is now two weeks and over a thousand miles long, with no discernible progress to show for the time and effort.
After looking over maps and bus routes, he thinks the only plan that makes sense is to start with Chicago, then work his way through the other finalists on his list of potential new homes. Now he has no reason at all to remain tied to that old place—Kait is here with him, and the thought of returning to the shell of his old life is terrible enough without even considering the possibility that Sherry, Brutus, and the rest will be waiting there to break him in half. So he will look at homes in Chicago. He’ll go to open houses. He’ll move from there to St. Louis and do the same. He will learn everything he can about each city, and maybe if one of them is as perfect a fit as he’d hoped, then he will stop there and begin a new life with Kait in a new home, with a new job and new friends and new family and a new self. Because this plan is coming together at the last minute and there are a few landmarks the Internet tells him he should see along the way, he devises a convoluted route that gets him to Austin, Texas, by way of Nebraska, then South Dakota, then Oklahoma. After that, he will head west.
THE GENERAL ATMOSPHERE OF an interstate bus ride is best described as oppressively sad, but at least Hunter doesn’t have to drive anymore. As a passenger, he’s not worried about crashing because he trusts the professional driver, and also how often are bus disasters reported on the news? Sometimes it happens, sure, but Hunter suspects those events are pretty rare and that their relative rarity actually leads to them being over-reported. Perhaps just as important as the safety, though, is the fact that this bus knows exactly how to get to Chicago and drives with a purpose.
In a college creative writing class, he once wrote a short story about a young man on a Greyhound bus, running away from home and going “anywhere the road will take me.” The story ran twenty-seven pages (despite a fifteen-page limit), and was full of Big Revelations about Human Nature and The Way We Live Today. There was a Down-on-Her-Luck Single Mom. There was a Noble Stripper Chasing Her Dreams. There was a Gritty Blue-collar Worker. There was a Creepy Old Man, heaved off the bus by the group, which had cohered into a family halfway through the trip. A pivotal scene featured the narrator talking to a Wise Hobo who was tired of riding the rails and spoke entirely in homespun aphorisms. The narrator said to the Hobo, “At least you’ve lived; I’m a nonentity,” a comment Hunter himself had once uttered to a beggar on campus, because the only problems Hunter had ever faced were the most generic suburban white-kid problems anyone could imagine, and it made him miserable to think how sad that was. In real life, the homeless man flicked the bridge of Hunter’s nose and told him to go get fucked by a rhino. In the story, the Wise Hobo sympathized and told the narrator he understood, said it’s better to live life in the muck than watch from the sidelines. Said if ennui and ironic detachment could bring someone down so hard, then the Narrator ought to challenge himself and face real drama in his life, see what he’s made of. The last line of the story read: “Maybe we all have something to learn from one another after all.” His classmates called it mature and funny and engaging, even though he could tell some of them hadn’t really read it, and they’d just assumed it was good because it was long. He was also pretty confident that, yes, it was good, and, yes, he was witty and smart and talented, and so even when the teacher critiqued it, picking at all the loose threads and describing it as overwrought, Hunter decided that he was going to start telling people he was a writer, because he liked hearing people praise his work, and he liked the notion of being a Man of Letters, a person whose job it is to sit in his home and think about Important Things, then issue proclamations about those Important Things, living what appears to lay people to be a sedentary life, but which actually requires intense mental gymnastics. He knows now that it was a wrongheaded and juvenile dream, that very few people actually get to live the life of a public intellectual, and that anyway his great attraction to it was that it seemed important without actually involving a lot of labor, like a shortcut to being someone people cared about. He knows he’s incapable of being that person he pretended to be, but the problem was he never found a new goal; by the time of Kait’s death he still hadn’t determined the person he was supposed to be. Envisioning a life of rubbing his temples and telling people I’ve just been buried in my work all day long, he changed his major to English, took a few more creative writing classes, read most of the books he was assigned, skimmed enough of the other books to be able to fake it (surely his professors had done the same; how could anyone have encyclopedic knowledge of hundreds of novels?), and graduated with a BA in English and a 3.1 GPA that he now admits could have been higher, but, as he contended to Jack and Willow every semester when his grades came in, aren’t grades, after all, simply an arbitrary system of measurement designed to appease state accreditation boards and status-driven nerds, and isn’t the true measure of intelligence how much knowledge has been gained rather than whether one received a B or a B+ on a reading quiz on Beowulf? When, a year into their relationship, he recounted these arguments to Kait, she cringed at his description of the grading process, boasted her 3.8 GPA in finance, and said, “So what if grades are arbitrary? If everyone else cares about them, you have to care about them too,” and to a certain extent she was right; it was the GPA (and the ancillary honors) that enabled her to get a good job out of college and maintain a strong credit score and would ultimately lead them to their house, which was not exactly an estate, but was the kind of place that people often called adorable and charming. Hunter admitted she was right; it had made him feel better at the time, he said, but rationalizations don’t get you far on job interviews; recruiters want numbers and they want results. If he were back in school now, he said, he would put in a little more effort, spent more time actually trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with his life instead of deferring the issue.
At that time, he was still ostensibly pursuing the writing life, so she asked to see what he’d been working on, and all he could show her was the old Greyhound story, on which she made notes and copyedits and offered him feedback. She told him “This is really good, you should keep working on this.” She prompted him, in front of her family, to tell them about his work, which only served to reinforce their perception of him as an effete intellectual, and later when he asked her not to do that again, she apologized, said she was just proud of him, said she liked that he was different from them, that his creativity and curiosity distinguished him from her friends’ husbands and boyfriends. She sent him text messages in the mornings wishing him a good day of writing, saying, “I know you’ll come up with something great.” At first, he tried. Because it was good to feel like he was doing something worthwhile, to consider himself a writer again as opposed to considering himself nothing at all, and because he wanted to reward her faith in him, but within a week he realized he didn’t actually like writing. He just liked the lingering cultural significance of having written. Still, he pretended for three months, holing himself up in his bedroom and skimming the Internet for hours, always deferring Kait’s requests to read his work-in-progress. “You can’t read it until it’s done,” he said. One evening over dinner, he told her he probably wasn’t cut out for writing, and she said nothing at all, after which point he never pretended to write again.
AN UNABRIDGED LIST OF jobs held by Hunter Cady between ages 16 and 29 (plus: reason for leaving):
• Cashier at Santucci’s Pizzeria in Hartford, CT (fired over philosophical debate with manager re: the practice of charging a quarter for extra napkins)
• Summer intern at Cady Manufacturing (terrible working relationship with Jack)
• Sandwich designer at Gaetano’s Grinders in Hartford (fired for repeated lateness)
• Landscaper with Celtic lawns, Hartford (summer job only)
• Clerk at Underground Records, Hartford (shop closed)
• Barista at Whole Latte Love in Philadelphia (quit when he got a better job)
• Library assistant at Temple University (graduated, position limited to current students only)
• Intern at Philadelphia Daily News (quit, didn’t want to work in a dead medium)
• Technical editor at Farrelly Information Services in Hartford (job too soul-draining, left after ten days when he went to the supply closet to hide from the tedium and his manager was already in there doing the same thing)
• Substitute teacher in Hartford Public School District (a terrible idea from the start)
• Tour guide, Philadelphia Zoo (seasonal work only)
• Marketing and Development for Building Blocks, a nonprofit organization supporting children in low-income areas of Philadelphia (failed to reach fundraising goals)
• Writer of fictions that will open minds and change lives (harder than it looked)
• Contact Center Professional at Dependable Rentals (wife died)
There were times over the past half-decade when Hunter wondered whether he should have skipped college entirely and gone into a trade, learned to fix elevators—an industry on the rise, he would have said every day—or building bomb shelters or just about anything besides having spent four-point-five years in pursuit of an English degree with a minor in Philosophy that was long on intrinsic value and short on practical applications. Because understanding Petrarch doesn’t pay the gas bill. Being able to quote Kant doesn’t help you upsell a customer from a compact car to an SUV. But he’d been convinced, like so many of his classmates, that going to college was some sort of guarantee of future happiness, and also it delayed his entry into the real world and granted him what Jack calls the luxury of aimlessness, a phrase he surely read in some book filled with tips on how to become a tycoon. Jack enjoyed reiterating the Legend of Jack Cady, self-made man, who never had the luxury of aimlessness, and who made the mistake of granting that luxury to his son, who didn’t have to pay for school and whose mother kept him on an allowance until he turned twenty-four.
In the months leading up to Kait’s death, Hunter had applied to ten colleges to pursue graduate studies in a variety of business-adjacent fields. He wasn’t enthralled by the subject matter, but at least this way he could make better money and follow through on some of his lofty promises to Kait. She didn’t like the idea of losing his income while he was at school, but still it was her idea for him to apply. “You can’t keep living like this,” she’d said. “You’re too smart to be renting out cars and sitting around the house.” She helped him fill out the applications, copyedited his personal statements, tracked the deadlines. He’d wanted to keep the applications a secret as long as possible, but Kait had mentioned them to Jack, and Jack started e-mailing him grad school application tips and offering to look things over for him, to make calls to old friends with connections in admissions departments. By the time of Kait’s death, Hunter had only heard from one school, a rejection from Wharton, which was to be expected, but he’d treated that application like a lottery ticket, just in case. The responses from other schools are probably piling up in his mailbox now, reminders of a time when he thought planning for the future was a sensible and responsible thing to do.
THE FUNDAMENTAL DISAPPOINTMENT OF the bus ride is that the relative safety and the direction are there, but what’s lacking is what has been lacking from the start: nothing seems to be changing. He is viewing the country at a remove, as if watching a documentary about someone else’s more interesting cross-country trip, which is not at all the point of travel, is it? The point is to engage with the world, to meet new people and experience adventures and accumulate stories to tell, and to return home a transformed man. What he should be doing is making footprints and taking soil samples and learning the names of the local flora and fauna. He should be hacking a new path into the wilderness rather than watching the roadside through a rain-streaked window. There’s something too utilitarian about riding isolated across the country, flumping in the backseat of a Greyhound and silently gazing off into the distance; this is the sort of approach one takes when trying to complete a job, a courier delivering important documents to a client, and although Hunter has very important cargo in his care, there is no specific endpoint, there is no one waiting to collect Kait from him.
He decides the first step to improving his journey is to talk to the man seated across the aisle from him. The man is rumpled and musty, like he’s been stowed and neglected in a trunk beneath someone’s bed for the past ten years. His mouth is hidden behind an unfortunate mustache, and his nose is barely a stub, as though it’s been punched deep within his face. Like everyone else on the bus, including Hunter, his ears are plugged with earbuds, and he is staring down at a cell phone, jabbing at the screen occasionally. He looks away from the screen every fifteen or so minutes, but then only to glance out the window or stare up at the ceiling as if engaged in prayer. He waits for the man to look up from his phone, and waves at him like a diner calling for his waiter, but the man pretends not to see. Fifteen minutes later, he tries again, and this time the man sizes him up, then points to his ears as if the buds in there have been inflicted upon him and he’d like to talk if only these damn things weren’t here. Hunter gives up and fiddles with his own phone.
He snaps a photo of himself and Kait, adds it to his fledgling Facebook album, which he has since titled Postcards. Caption: Kait, checking out the scenery. Within five minutes, he has received a half dozen comments, people clicking on the little thumbs-up icon beneath the photo, liking it in the vaguest possible way (Do they like that he’s on the road? Do they like having a distraction from work? Do they just like acknowledging the existence of digital photography?), and one comment, from a guy he knew in high school: Dude, WTF LOL!, a response that is admittedly not entirely comprehensible, but which is at least an acknowledgment.
Over the next hour, he will refresh the website twenty times, never fully clear what type of reactions he is hoping to receive, but he is certain that what he wants is reactions. And the responses do trickle in—more Likes and more comments, most of which express something along the lines of still can’t believe she’s gone . . . RIP, or else they’re saying that’s not right, you shouldn’t joke about this, or they’re offering help, as in let me know if I can do anything for you, and he devours the responses, finds them wholly unsatisfying but also needs to get more, wants more people to respond and validate his sadness, his right to feel broken, is deeply frustrated when he refreshes and nothing has changed, shaking the phone as if it is the phone’s fault that not enough people care about his photo album.
The woman in front of him turns and says, “Something wrong back there?” She’s missing a front tooth and her skin is so damaged it looks like she has spent her adulthood lying on the surface of the sun.
“No,” Hunter says, “it’s just that I posted this thing on Facebook—”
“Didn’t ask for a story,” she says.
“Actually, you kind of did—”
“I just asked you to shut the hell up and quiet the hell down and let the hell go of my seat,” she says, turning away from him. He realizes he’s been leaning forward against her seat, gripping it with his free hand as if dangling from a cliff’s edge.
“Sorry,” he says, “it’s just that I’m on this road trip—”
“Don’t care,” she says, balling up a sweater against the window and burying her face in it.
When the bus pulls into a gas station, the driver announces that passengers have exactly ten minutes to smoke and buy refreshments and mill aimlessly about the parking lot. Most of the passengers are deflated-looking men wearing unironic trucker hats and dusty jeans; now they look away from their phones and they light one another’s cigarettes and in conversation they become increasingly loud and animated, gesturing as if hoping to injure the air. The women are too thin to be healthy, cigarettes clamped between their lips, eyes like storm clouds. The men have bad beards and red faces the color of uncooked beef.
He sees, standing in a circle of older men, a woman around his age, in a tank top and cotton shorts with the word DIVA written across the butt, a trash bag full of clothing resting at her feet. When she bends to retie the flaps on her bag, he steals a glance at her cleavage, senses the eyes of every other man checking her out, the instinctive group eye groping that men do in crowds. Kait never wore clothing like that, didn’t even wear lingerie on special occasions because she had some weird, lingering Catholic guilt thing regarding sex, which isn’t to say she avoided sex with Hunter—that was never a problem for them, they still engaged in regular, satisfying sex, especially on weekends when she wasn’t exhausted from work—but she was very traditional and reserved and would apologize to him when she screamed too loudly, believed that feeling pleasure was somehow sinful, so he knows she would frown upon him ogling this girl right now, and she would disapprove of the girl herself for choosing to present herself in such a way (Kait’s preferred term in these cases was skank). The girl does not seem to notice him.
What people do in these circumstances is they cluster together into alliances of convenience, and they all scan the area trying to determine which passenger is the crazy one, because everyone knows there is at least one crazy person on the bus, and so Hunter knows that right now they’re studying him and the handful of other loners, assessing his level of insanity in comparison to theirs.
Before reboarding, Hunter places Kait next to one of the gas pumps and takes a photo of her, uploads it to his album. He spends the next two hours bent forward in his seat, gazing into the window of his phone.
HIS FIRST STOP UPON arrival in Chicago is the DePaul campus, which he wanders for an hour and learns nothing about Kait or who she used to be before they met. It was a dumb plan, he now realizes. What did he expect would happen? That they would have her dorm room preserved like Salinger’s at Ursinus? That they would be waiting to give him a tour? That he could have somehow driven into the past and met twenty-two-year-old Kait, warned her about her future, and saved her?
After leaving the DePaul campus, he wanders along the Magnificent Mile and stops to eat a quick lunch while overlooking the Chicago River. Watching the joggers and cyclists zipping by, he thinks, yes, I could have lived here. We could have lived here. He feels the back of his neck burning in the sun, but he waits a while longer before moving on, closes his eyes and allows the river to rush past, the bustle and the city thrumming behind him like a racing pulse, and for that moment, the length of an extended eyeblink, he feels okay.
THE REALTOR IS A stout woman with arms like clubs. She takes short, hurried strides like a handler at a dog show. Hunter follows her up the stairs to see the master suite. His next bus, headed to St. Louis, leaves tomorrow afternoon, but in the meantime, he’s decided to visit a few open houses, just to see. Just in case.
Before they bought their house in Philly, they saw sixty-three other homes—Kait had a specific vision in mind, refused to settle for anything less—and so Hunter feels like an expert at this, notices the slight discoloration in the ceiling where there was once a leak, sees the hastily patched holes in the bathroom drywall, can tell from the obviously DIY nature of most of the repairs that there are some surprises and code violations hidden inside these walls.
The front door creaks open, and the Realtor scurries down to meet the new visitors, leaving Hunter alone. He tours the upstairs by himself. The second bedroom is decorated in an ocean theme, pictures of whales hanging on the walls, an awful seafoam green carpet, sheets covered with cartoony tropical fish.
A married couple passes him in the hallway. Hunter hears them debating the merits of the master. “It’s too big,” the woman says. “I feel like I’m in a cave.”
“You wouldn’t last one day in a cave,” the man says.
“Like you’d be so great in a cave. Like you’re the cave expert all of a sudden.”
The man stops in the hallway, stares at Hunter. “Hey,” he says. “I know you.”
“Oh, Stan, you think you know everyone,” the woman says. She’s shorter than Stan, and dressed in all white—sandals, capris, tanktop, cardigan. His face is creased and discolored from years of outdoor labor.
“Look at him. We know this guy. How do we know you?”
“I really don’t think you know me,” Hunter says.
“I think I would know who I know better than you know who I know.” Stan tugs on his goatee, steps into the ocean room. “Look, Edna. You recognize him too.”
“You know what? You’re actually right,” Edna says. “We saw you on TV.”
“I doubt that,” Hunter says. The last thing he wants is for them to ask where Kait is.
“Just the other day you were on. You and your wife looking at houses. The hell are you doing here?” To Stan, she says, “I can’t believe they broke up already.”
“I can,” Stan says.
Edna and Stan tell him Happy Homecomings? is one of their favorite shows. It went on hiatus for a while, but it’s back and the reruns air in marathon blocks every few weeks. Edna watches because she likes seeing the houses and Stan enjoys predicting exactly when and how the couples will break up. They have their DVR set to record every episode, and so when Hunter confesses that he’s never seen his own episode, they invite him back to their house. They live only a block away, had attended the open house just to snoop on the neighbors.
AND SUDDENLY, KAIT IS there in front of him, in HD, stretched across a fifty-two-inch screen. He is aware of being watched by Edna and Stan, even as he watches a younger version of himself and his wife walking through a south Jersey bungalow. Hunter turns up the volume, places the urn next to the TV just in case some mystical rift in the universe can pull her soul out of the set and revive her. He kneels on the floor only inches away, like a child enthralled by a Disney film.
Kait’s first words are, “Sure, it’s scary making a big move. But we wouldn’t do it if we had any doubts.” She squeezes Hunter’s hand when she says it. He deadpans, “Well, I’ve got some doubts, anyway.” She rolls her eyes and looks away—is it playful or is she annoyed? Had he spent his whole life with her interpreting that eyeroll as one thing when in fact it was another thing? Next, she is alone in Sherry’s home, speaking to the camera: “No, I’m not worried about him not having a job,” she says. “He’s just trying to find the right fit for him.” The camera lingers on her while she chews on her bottom lip, looks down at the floor, flips her hair out of her face. “But,” she adds, “it would probably be good if he gets a job.” Headed into a commercial, there is a shot of Hunter fumbling with a spackle knife while Kait watches. The narrator says, “Will straitlaced Kaitlyn have to put her slacker husband in his place?” After the commercial they walk through two homes before seeing the house they will eventually purchase; Kait carries a checklist of questions she pulled from a home-buying magazine, and she grills the Realtor about the condition of the plumbing, the pitch of the backyard, the age of the water heater. Hunter operates independent of the conversation, rifling through the bookshelf and smirking about the owners’ paperbacks. Cut to Kait signing the mortgage documents; Hunter is in the room but signs nothing because Kait’s credit is superior to his. The production assistant asks Hunter if he feels badly for not contributing to the house, and he says, “It’s not like I do nothing.” A week after they move in, the producers surprise them with cameras rolling at dawn on a Saturday; Hunter opens the door, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. An incongruous shot of a midday sun follows, and the narrator says, “Still recovering from a late night, the young couple struggles to stay organized.” Boxes are half unpacked and Hunter steps over debris as he leads the camera on a tour of the first floor. It looks like they live in an opium den. Kait does not appear on camera until they are on the second floor, at which point she is visibly agitated, hastily dressed, no makeup, her long hair piled on top of her head like cold spaghetti. She avoids eye contact with the camera, shuffles behind Hunter while he describes the changes they’re planning in the house: the paint colors, the new hardware in the bathroom, the furniture that still hasn’t arrived. “It’s been pretty stressful,” Kait says. Sweat beads on her upper lip. The camera lingers on her, knows it can stare at her and make her keep talking. “Is there something else I’m supposed to say?” She laughs nervously, covering her mouth as if it’s impolite to show one’s teeth on camera. “I don’t know. We’re excited, though. We are.” She looks over her shoulder at Hunter, who is straightening a photo on the wall. Hunter pauses the shot in that exact moment when the two of them lock eyes, and although it is impossible to quantify, he knows and everyone who has ever seen that shot knows: there is love there, real, actual love. There has to be. “It’s going to be fun, even when it’s not fun,” she says. There is tinkling music with bells and harps like the sounds uninteresting people expect to hear in heaven. The host pontificates on the nature of relationships while the show alternates B-roll of the two couples unpacking their homes, the other couple putting finishing touches on a formal dining room while Kait digs, exasperated, through a pile of knickknacks. The credits roll over a black screen and then she is gone and Hunter is gone.
There are three Kaits, maybe more than that. There is the Kait of his memory and the Kait everyone else remembers and the Kait from TV, and it’s impossible to say which one is the real one. One is filtered through his thoughts and perceptions, another is filtered through the perceptions of her friends and co-workers, and this third Kait is filtered through the lens of a reality television program intent on creating and exploiting conflict. Beyond the three he knows, there are infinite Kaits. The show was never going to accurately represent the two of them because the show wasn’t interested in accurately representing them; they just needed a young couple to present as the nervous, troubled couple. On one occasion, the production assistant said to Kait, “It would make things a lot easier if you could just say you’re worried about Hunter here,” and so she complied, gave them the footage they wanted. The PA liked to talk about the importance of playing ball, in the sense that Hunter played ball and Kait did not play ball. On the morning of the first day of filming, she was so nervous she nearly vomited, but by the time they got on camera she’d pulled herself together. When the cameras surprised them at dawn, she first refused to leave the bedroom, yelled through a closed door at the PA who reminded her they’d signed a contract and agreed to play ball. “I told you I need time to prepare,” she said. She stayed in the room for an hour while Hunter occupied the crew, and she only gave in because it was clear that nobody would leave the house until they got their shots.
“YOU WANT SOME SOUP?” Edna says. “You look like you need some soup.”
“Soup’s only going to make him worse,” Stan says.
“Everybody needs soup sometimes.”
He has soup. Spoon in his hand, steam rising up to his face. He is at the kitchen table, feels like he just awoke from a coma. There is a blank space in his memory between the viewing of the show and the serving of the soup. He does not remember telling them what happened with Kait, but their pity tells him he must have spilled the whole story. The linoleum at his feet is cracked like a pebble-sprayed windshield. The room is overwhelmed by the musty smell of domestic sadness, the vaguely moldy scent of nursing homes. It’s the smell of old carpet that has absorbed too much. Duck-patterned wallpaper peels at the corners. There are absolutely no other decorations on any walls, no photographs anywhere. Edna lights a cigarette.
“Italian wedding soup,” she says. “When my mother was sick, we ate this soup downstairs where we couldn’t hear her. She was in pain and we couldn’t do anything about it. My daddy told us stories about the war while she was upstairs dying, and the soup made me feel warm.” She takes a drag on the cigarette. “You have to be warm to be happy. It’s scientific fact.”
Hunter blows on the soup, watches the pasta drift in the ripples. “I don’t think I’m that hungry,” he says.
Stan presses the end of his own cigarette against Edna’s. There is a cat sleeping in the middle of the table while another struts across the kitchen counter. A bird squawks in another room.
“Elvis is hungry,” Edna says, and rushes out of the room.
“You don’t have to eat that soup. Here, gimme it.” Stan takes the bowl and dumps it in the sink. “You know we’re ninety-eight percent water already? We don’t need more liquid in us. It’s bad for you. Makes your organs soggy.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Hunter says.
“I used to not believe it either. My dad, he would say it to us, and he wouldn’t let us eat soup, never. No stew, no chili, nothing in a bowl basically. But one day I had vegetable soup at a friend’s house. Thought I was so smart. A week later, my insides are all torn up and I’m getting my appendix out.” He stubs out his cigarette on the table, which is freckled with burn marks.
Edna returns to the room with a parrot on her shoulder and a parrot biscuit between her teeth. The feathers on the bird’s head have been gelled into a mohawk. Edna leans toward the bird and lets it nibble the biscuit. “Elvis has entered the building,” she says. “Say hi to our guest, Elvis.” The bird lunges at the biscuit in her other hand. “Don’t be nasty now. Be a pretty bird. Are you a pretty bird? Who’s a pretty bird?” This performance goes on for a few minutes before the bird squawks “Hello Birdo!” Hunter waves to the bird. Edna crouches so that Elvis is eye-level with Hunter. “Do you want to feed him?” she says, handing him a biscuit.
“Christ, Edna, give him a break.”
“Don’t listen to Daddy. He loves you,” she says, leaning in to kiss the bird on the mouth. “Dinner time,” the bird says. It pecks at Hunter’s outstretched hand, its beak piercing his palm.
“I don’t love that bird and you know it,” Stan says. He stands, circles the table to the opposite side of the room.
“But Elvis loves his daddy,” Edna says, and she closes in on him, blocking his exit expertly, like a champion heavyweight cutting off the ring. Hunter pushes his chair away from the table, considers sneaking out before witnessing something ugly. The bird shrieks “Don’t be cruel” and spreads his wings wide.
“Get your goddamn bird away from me,” Stan says. He swats at it, then ducks beneath his wife’s outstretched arm to escape, running like a soldier beneath helicopter blades.
“You do not hit Elvis!”
“It’s not natural,” Stan says. “You know birds come from dinosaurs? Look at his fucking feet!”
“Show me a dinosaur with blue feathers. Find me one goddamn dinosaur that looks like Elvis and I’ll give you a dollar.” She pulls a dollar from her pocket and slaps it on the kitchen table.
Stan lights another cigarette. “Cares more about that bird than she does about her husband,” he says.
Elvis eats another biscuit out of Edna’s mouth. “You’re a good boy,” she says. “You know mommy loves you.” She kisses him on the head again, runs a finger down his chest. She coos at him and he spouts non sequiturs back at her, a mixture of Elvis lines and small talk and every now and then a name: “Dennis,” the bird says, “Dennis Dennis Dennis.”
“Who’s Dennis?” Hunter asks.
“I told him to stop saying that,” Edna says. “But nobody in this house listens to me.” When she looks at Stan, there is a flash of hate in her eyes.
Dennis. Dennis. The bird stares across the room at Stan. Stop it. Dennis.
“Could you shut up the fucking bird?” Stan says. He flicks his cigarette at it.
“You’re going to scare him!” The cigarette sits on the floor, smoldering. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying!”
Hunter crosses the room and bends to pick up the cigarette.
“Don’t you pick that up for him,” Edna says.
“Just leave it there, let the goddamn place burn down,” Stan says. He kicks his kitchen chair over and storms out of the room, slams a screen door leading to the backyard.
Edna is still physically there, but she is no longer present, her eyes vacant, breathing silent. In the dim kitchen light, in profile, Edna looks like Sherry, and in the blink of an eye he knows the whole story, knows who Dennis was and that he died too young and they have never gotten over it and it has caused their lives to dissolve. He sees Sherry, as clearly as he’s ever seen anyone, sitting in Kait’s old bedroom and holding on to the phone in case Hunter calls to say he’s bringing Kait back to her, Sherry talking to the dog to fill the void while people tell her she’s losing it. He hears her saying, So what if I’m losing it, don’t I deserve to lose it? She has her sons still, but she’s lost her only daughter, the best of them, and Hunter now sees that in the best case scenario she is probably headed for a full-on crack-up, just like Stan and Edna, who have been estranged from the life they wanted—the one they used to have—so long that they’re unstable and will never recover. Grief begins as a temporary condition, but left untreated it becomes a permanent sickness. Hunter knows that if he does not find a way to realign himself sooner rather than later, he is looking at his own fractured future. Some people face death and get over it and some do not; whatever the secret to saving oneself is, Hunter needs to figure it out before it’s too late. He crosses the room to stand with Edna and says, “I’m sorry,” and he hopes Sherry can hear him. “Dennis,” the bird says, and spreads his wings as if taunting her.