My roommate, Sarah, was desperate to bond with me, but I’d always managed to avoid her attempts until I found myself a full month behind on rent. I pleaded and promised, I’d have the money in just a few days, but she wasn’t budging. “If we were friends,” she said, “this wouldn’t be as big of a deal. I could probably keep covering for you.” So I agreed to hang out with her after I got off work, to watch one of her favorite shows. I even agreed to try and enjoy it.
I had just gotten off the night shift at the nursing home. I had been there less than a year, so I always got the night shifts. I worked as an orderly, and it was often hard to bear. It was just past eight in the morning when I got back to my apartment, and the world had a syrupy, dreamlike tilt to it. There was a tunnel in my head where my eardrums were supposed to be. Sound stumbled in and confused itself while trapped inside my skull, only to exit an entirely different thing, nothing like sound at all.
Sarah was waiting for me on the couch, stuffing her face with children’s cereal. She looked well-rested. We both worked at the nursing home, but her shifts didn’t start until the afternoon, so of course she looked well-rested. She hadn’t forgotten what I’d promised. She made room for me on the couch, shifting under her cocoon of sweatpants, sweatshirt, and fuzzy blankets. “I swear you’re going to love this show,” she said. “It’s, like, a cultural phenomenon. I can’t believe you’ve never seen it.”
“Just give me a minute,” I said.
“You get a single minute while I set the laptop up. That’s it.”
I took off my scrubs and fixed myself a glass of Evan Williams. When I sat back down, Sarah was still fiddling with her computer, trying to force the video to start. We didn’t own a television and were too poor for subscriptions, so Sarah watched her shows on those illegal pirating sites. When you paused, there were pop-up ads for chat rooms with airbrushed, dead-eyed women. The subtitles were in Russian, and they couldn’t be turned off. Her laptop made distressed noises and kicked off heat as the browser refreshed again and again.
Finally, our programming began. “Get ready,” Sarah said. This episode was halfway through the season, and Sarah started bringing me up to speed – which contestants she liked, what she thought about the main girl, who she thought would win – but I told her I needed to form my own opinions. Shut up, I wanted to say. Shut the fuck up for the first time in your life. But I smiled instead. Rent was on the line.
I tried not to pay much attention. I even tried to sleep with my eyes open, but Mike appeared onscreen almost immediately, and I felt my body jerk and go cold with a shock I wouldn’t have known how to brace for. He looked healthy, tan, older. He’d gained back the weight he’d lost when we were together.
“Wait a fucking minute,” I said.
“Right? He’s so cute,” Sarah said. She crunched her cereal, transported.
I wouldn’t have been sure it was him, except for the banner under his name that spelled “Mike” or “Майк” if you were reading the Russian subtitles. He was a software developer now. He lived in San Diego, where his family was from. It stung to think about him returning home, him having a home to return to.
I hardly understood how the show worked. Mr. Right, it was called — a reality dating gimmick where fertile-looking people hunt for a spouse. The Mike I knew never would have signed up for something like that. An unconscionable scam, he would have ranted, coke-fueled and furious. Even as I watched him onscreen, an actual participant on Mr. Right, smiling like a used car salesman, I could hear his imaginary diatribe, feel its cadence like a heartbeat. Years later, his voice — edgy, ragged, relentless — still gnawed away at the corners of my brain, tenderizing my white matter into pulp. What I heard from Sarah’s laptop screen didn’t compute. It was Mike, I knew it was, but his voice had changed somehow, his words had been sanitized. How had this happened? Did he have a Ken doll-looking doppelgänger with the same name? Or maybe he’d sold his body to a scientist for cash, and that scientist had cloned him, and that clone had escaped the lab and wandered all the way onto the set of a reality show. These were the only reasonable options I could think of.
The only woman on the show, the one seeking Mr. Right, had picked Mike for a private date. A helicopter ride followed by a gourmet, rooftop dinner. From the little ribbon of text at the bottom of the screen, almost blocked by the subtitles, I learned her name was Kylie. She was twenty-six, from Santa Barbara, a yoga instructor and social media influencer. For me, “sun-kissed” was only an advertising term until I saw her.
They chatted for a minute or two about the helicopter, the view from the restaurant, how much fun they’d had together, and then Kylie held her hand out on the table. Mike sighed, took it with his own, and met her gaze with a sad, brave smile.
“You know what I really want to talk about tonight,” she said. “If you’re ready to be vulnerable with me.”
Mike squeezed her hand. The camera zoomed on his forlorn face. “You’ve been so patient with me, and I want to tell you everything. This isn’t going to be easy. But for you, I’ll try anything,” he said.
Kylie urged him on with a pretty little nod.
“Well I told you that I’ve been sober for almost three years now. But I never told you why. Truth is, I was into some bad stuff. Hanging with some bad characters. Since I was a kid, really, I just had one of those addictive personalities. And my dad and I — well. That’s another story. Let’s just say we never saw eye to eye,” he said. “Anyways, it just got worse. And worse. And worse. I followed every impulse. I stole. I lied. I betrayed anyone I ever cared about.”
He pressed his fingers to his face, and they came away wet.
Kylie inhaled, a bit raggedly. “You’re doing so good, Mike,” she said, her cheeks flushed. It was almost obscene.
“Those were the darkest days of my life,” Mike said to her. “I was with someone who was not good for me. She brought out my worst self. We were addicts. Drifters. Criminals. We were bad for each other in every possible way. I’ll be ashamed to have been that person, who I was with her, for the rest of my life.”
I craned my neck closer to the screen. My heartbeat strained against my skin, begging for release from my body, shattering a long-cultivated numbness.
“It’s okay,” Kylie said. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here, and I’m listening.” She leaned across the table to stroke his arm like he was a dog about to be euthanized.
“Thanks. Wow. Thank you for hearing me,” he said. “I don’t know. I just had so much pain inside me. And drugs, drinking — it was the only way out. But one day, I’d had enough. I can’t explain it, but I knew. I broke up with her. I checked myself into rehab. I made amends with my father. I found God. And you know, He was waiting for me, just like I knew He would be.” Mike chuckled and looked upward, an I’ll be darned expression on his face. Kylie laughed at this, pressing her hand to the cross around her neck, that glittery, golden promise.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “You fucking son of a bitch.”
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked, scattering cereal crumbs onto her sweatshirt. I hadn’t known I was talking out loud.
“I’ve been clean ever since,” Mike said. “And, it might sound crazy, but all of it, my whole path, every miracle, I really do feel like it led me here. To you.”
Kylie shook her head. “Thank you for sharing your journey with me. You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to hear this from you.”
“I’ve been wanting to tell you. Kylie, I look at you,” he said, and his eyes were soft, glistening. “And I see the type of girl I’d like to take home to my parents. I see someone who could help me be a godly man and push me to walk the path He’s chosen for me.”
“You continue to amaze me,” Kylie said. “I can’t believe you’re real.”
“It’s you. It’s all you.” Mike inhaled like he had been saving his breath for her. “I think I’m falling for you, Kylie. I know I am. I’ve never felt this way before.”
“This is insane,” I said. “This can’t be happening.”
“Yeah, I’m not really into all the God shit either, but they seem happy,” said Sarah.
Mike and Kylie kissed. Behind them, fireworks exploded, cluttering up the stars. In the real world, I finished my whiskey.
“This is like a fairytale,” Mike said.
“It’s our fairytale,” Kylie said. They kissed again and held each other close, her small body nestled into his larger one. Watching them, I felt the creeping sensation of a bad memory, the dark opposite of what I saw onscreen — me trying to hold Mike as he shivered through the night, the sweat of our withdrawal, every sharp angle of his body digging into mine, shoving me away.
I shut Sarah’s laptop, silencing Kylie mid-sentence. “I need to borrow this,” I said.
“What the fuck?” Sarah asked. “It gets better if you keep watching, I promise.”
I went to my room and googled Mike. He was a fan favorite on Mr. Right. Everyone was rooting for him, his recovery journey, and his newfound faith in God. In a recent interview, published after this episode had aired, a reporter had asked him about this bad relationship he’d escaped from, whether he was still in contact with his ex-addict-toxic-mess-former-lover. “I haven’t talked to her since we ended things three years ago,” he’d said. “But I wish her luck, and I pray for her salvation and repentance. I hope she finds a way to live with herself, the pain inside her, and the hurt her addiction has brought to herself and others.” He’d actually said that. With his mouth, the same one that in the half-decade we’d spent together had called me every dirty name in the English language, the same one that had bitten a chunk out of my arm when we were tripping on some bad LSD, the same one kissing Kylie under the fireworks, he’d said that. I lit a cigarette and rubbed my temples. I was itching for payback. This could not stand. I would not let it. He had to pay.
Sarah banged on my door. “I’m not paying the smoking fine,” she said.
“It’s a candle,” I called back.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “And just for the record, when Janine asked me to give you a place to live, this isn’t what I had in mind.” Janine was our supervisor at the nursing home, the person who hired me. She had taken me under her wing. “I see a lot of my younger self in you,” she’d told me, and I tried not to wince.
Revenge was easier as an abstract concept than a concrete plan. Vague ideas tumbled through my mind like a metal ball winding its way through a wooden puzzle. And then it hit me. Albuquerque clicked into place with all the force and responsibility of a psychic vision, and I remembered that bouncer at the bar and his offer to help me. It was clear what I had to do. It was the only option. I dropped my cigarette into a half-full wine glass and opened the door. Sarah was sitting on the couch, watching videos on her phone.
I handed her the laptop. “I’ll pay the smoking fine if I get caught,” I said. “Which I won’t.”
“Yeah, that you’ll pay for. Whatever.” She stood up and got her water pitcher out of the fridge. Sarah only drank filtered water. She feared microplastics, fluoride, aluminum.
“So, I need a favor,” I said. “A small favor.”
“Of course you do,” she said. She gulped. “What now?”
“Do you have a suitcase or a duffel bag I can borrow? I have to go out of town for a couple days.”
I left Janine a voicemail saying I would be gone for at least a week. I told her she could fire me or not, it didn’t matter to me, but I knew my job would be safe. She wouldn’t have hired me if she didn’t have extra chances lying around. People like that are never short of their own dumb hope. They won’t believe their disappointment in you.
There was no way my car would make it all the way from Orlando to Albuquerque, and Sarah would never trust me with hers, so I asked the old lady in the apartment below me if I could borrow her Nissan. Mrs. Nelson was her name. She liked me because I picked up her groceries sometimes and cleaned out her litter box on Sundays, after she got home from church. She said I looked like her favorite granddaughter, the only one who visited her even when it wasn’t a holiday, but her cataracts were so bad she couldn’t tell her right hand from her left, so that didn’t mean much to me. She said yes to loaning me the car because she legally wasn’t allowed to drive it anymore, and because I lied about where I was going and what I was doing.
“Now, is it a church wedding?” Mrs. Nelson asked, palming her desk for the car keys. Every surface in her house was cluttered with stacks of crinkled paper, water-stained pictures, loose coins. I could see her keys, but she didn’t like my interfering, so I sat on her couch and watched her. Her cat jumped into my lap and kneaded my flesh.
“My sister wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said. I would never have told her about Mike and the bouncer and everything else. As clear and reasonable as my plan seemed in my mind, when I thought about explaining it to Mrs. Nelson, I felt afraid, not of repercussions for my future actions, I didn’t care about that, but of how differently she would perceive me, of the disappointment that would flood her murky, hooded eyes.
“Well thank goodness for that. And here I was, not even knowing you had a sister, much less a Christian one,” she said, sounding satisfied.
I do have a sister. That wasn’t a lie. I have two, actually. I didn’t know if either of them believed in anything. The one I was imagining in the veil, the older one, I hadn’t spoken to since she graduated from nursing school. I missed the ceremony and showed up high to the party afterwards. She was tipsy and yelled at me while our parents did nothing, averted their eyes and picked at the cheese plate. She was so angry she had to be held back by two of her friends, one for each of her skinny arms. It was the only time she’d ever told me she hated me, even though I’d felt it for years. In my lie to Mrs. Nelson, I saw her in a tight, classic wedding gown, draped in lace, holding a bouquet of roses. In the lie, she’d forgiven me for everything. She’d never even been angry.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Nelson said. She reached out for my hand and closed my fingers around the car key. There was a small keychain attached to it — a red, plastic feather, glossy and smooth like hard candy. “No cheap gas. Drive safely. And come home in one piece.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, feeling guiltier than I had expected.
Without stopping, it would take about twenty-five hours to get to Albuquerque. I would burn through most of my bank account just for gas, but I didn’t care. It was worth it. It didn’t matter if I never made rent again, if Sarah threw me out on the street. I couldn’t believe I had ever cared about such things. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this already.
I filled a thermos with whiskey and stuffed the bottle under my seat. I bought a handful of beef jerky sticks from the gas station and merged onto I-40, smiling to myself, full of electricity and purpose. I flipped through Mrs. Nelson’s radio presets, finding mostly news stations. I listened, There were hoaxes and uprisings and civil wars. Polar bears were coughing up nerf pellets in the Arctic. A bill was dying in the Senate, a bill that meant everything, apparently, because of a few congressmen who believed in election fraud. I had never voted in my life.
When we were together, Mike was always telling me that I didn’t care enough about the world. He’d actually gone to college, been a political science major at a school that cost as much to graduate from as it did to buy a house. “Children are dying every day in countries you can’t even point out on a map,” he’d said to me once. His face was up close, hanging down over mine, and his breath was a warm swell, traipsing across my collarbones like acid rain. “In these places, all these places, women are raped just for leaving their homes to fill buckets of water for their families. How do you even think about your life when stuff like this is happening?”
We were in Missoula, lying on a mattress in someone’s buddy’s garage. This was an argument I’m pretty sure I started, but I was too tired to finish it. Every ounce of strength in my body was devoted to keeping my eyelids from shuttering close.
“Children are dying everywhere. Women are being raped everywhere,” I’d said. I remember being naked and cold. “Someone’s probably being raped in this neighborhood, right down the street. Do you want to go intervene?”
Mike leaned away from me and did another line off a cardboard box marked “XMAS LIGHTS.” When he turned to look at me, his pupils were huge, nearly bursting.
“Your cruelty astounds me,” he’d said.
I fiddled with the radio dial until I found music — modern Christian rock, my only static-free option — and I let it try to save me for as long as I was in range.
After about fifteen hours, I stopped in Tyler, Texas. It was ten p.m., and my vision was blurring. The roads were all but empty. Downtown, streetlamps transformed the handful of tall buildings that Tyler, Texas had to offer into hollow imitations of industry, like low-budget movie sets. Every restaurant was closed and if people were out, they walked alone, heads-down and unsmiling. That’s really all I can say about Tyler, Texas. At night, every small city is the saddest strip mall in the world.
I went to McDonald’s and ordered a freezer-burned double cheeseburger. When I finished, I knew I wasn’t capable of paying for a motel, of talking to a receptionist, of pulling stale sheets and a stained comforter over my head, so I parked behind the McDonalds, grabbed a moth-bitten picnic blanket Mrs. Nelson had probably kept in her car for longer than I’d been alive, and closed my eyes. I didn’t even lock the doors, but I lived to see the sun rise over the golden M in the sky.
In the morning, I refilled my whisky thermos and stopped at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes, cinnamon gum, and a large to-go cup of coffee. The guy at the register was old, maybe even older than Mrs. Nelson. He had a nose like a witch’s finger, long and bony, leveling a curse. On top of his nose sat a pair of wire-frame glasses with filmy lenses.
“Out-of-towner?” he asked, scanning my items.
“Passing through,” I said. I handed over some cash, and my heart scattered like a nest of mice when the lights are turned on, like it always did when I had to buy anything.
“Well, now, it’s a shame you weren’t passing through in October,” he said.
I had nothing to say to that, but still, he rustled through some things beneath the counter and emerged with a postcard. He handed it to me. “Tyler, Texas Rose Festival,” it said at the top. Beneath it, lines and lines of rose bushes stretched to the edges of the frame and disappeared. Roses planted in geometric, looping patterns, creating pathways, encircling a fountain in the middle of the field. Thousands of roses. Each one perfect, I could tell. I felt sure of that in a way I rarely felt sure of anything.
“That’s why they call us Rose City,” he said. “Tell me, you ever seen anything like that?” He smacked his hand on the counter the way old people do to make a point.
I took the question seriously. Had I ever seen such nature, such beauty, such spectacle? There was the occasional pumpkin patch when I was a kid. Riding a tractor with my sisters. A petting zoo. Sheep docile enough to eat pellets right out of our palms, their wool warm and soft like cotton candy. And when I was sixteen, on a walk with a boy I wanted to be in love with, we found a mile or so of abandoned train tracks out in the woods. The railroad ties had warped from rain and rot. Thin, green vines sprawled across the tracks, peeking through like arteries, the whole woods in that moment just one verdant, beating heart. And with Mike, maybe a month after we got together, a lavender field a couple hours outside of Detroit. It was just a fraction of the rose garden’s size, but we spent hours sitting in the lavender, pressing it to our skin, plucking out the petals and blowing them on each other. For the rest of the day, our clothes and hair smelled good and clean, and I could imagine that we were too.
“More or less,” I said. “Thanks.” I put everything in my purse and made for the door, but he held out the postcard for me to take.
“Come back one day,” he said. “See it for yourself.”
In the car, feeling stupid but unable to stop myself, I pressed the postcard to my nose. I waited to smell roses, but they didn’t come.
I made it to Amarillo that day. I stopped three times, twice for gas, once to throw up on the side of Interstate 287. The cigarettes weren’t mixing with the fast food and the whiskey and the coffee and the increasing panic I felt the closer I got to Albuquerque. What if the bouncer had left town? What if he was in a respectable, legal, line of work now? What even was the name of that bar? I ran through scenarios in my mind, one after another, while I purged a stream of bile and toxins out of my body. When I was done, my skin was cool to the touch and only semi-solid, nearly gelatinous.
I only drove a little bit further. The sun was still up, and the flat, blue sky over the Amarillo exit sign made me believe it could be a safe place to land. I pulled into the parking lot of the first hotel I could find. The Sleep-Well Mo-Tell, it was called. The vacancy sign glowed neon, sex-bomb pink. There were about five cars in the parking lot. The ground was all dirt, molten red, bleeding out into the dusk.
The lobby floor was orange and white checkerboard tile, the colors foamy and worn. Framed, signed headshots of famous people covered the walls, but all of the signatures had the same flourishes, clearly written by the same hand. A woman named Mary was behind the counter. She pointed at her nametag and said, with a practiced air, “This time, Mary is the innkeeper, but I’m not much of a mother. Or a virgin.” Apparently, this was a joke. “That always gets people,” she said, throwing her head back to laugh. A splotch of turquoise, dangling off a leather rope around her neck, bounced in and out of her tanned cleavage.
“Ha,” I said.
I paid in cash, and she handed me the keys to room nineteen. It was cleaner than I expected. There were mini seashell soaps in the bathroom, and the faded bedspread matched the curtains — pink and green with flamingos in vertical rows.
I looked outside my window and saw a small, rectangular pool with leaves and bugs skirting its surface. The motel formed around it in the shape of a horseshoe. A handful of people lounged out there, some swimming, some just dipping their limbs into the water. There was an older man with an older woman draping her arms around his shoulders; a younger woman, about my age, holding a baby in yellow water wings; and a man rising out of the shallow end, a beer bottle in his hand. He had tattoos all over his pale body. I couldn’t make them out individually, just a general mass of black and red ink. Besides the older couple, I knew none of them belonged to each other, but they were laughing and talking as if they were family.
I don’t know what possessed me to change into clean clothes, to run a comb through my hair, to walk outside with my half-empty bottle of whiskey and join them, but I did. I dipped my feet into the water, and they welcomed me in like they’d known me for years. There was a cooler of beer by the tattooed man and a speaker playing twangy music from an era I hadn’t lived through.
The older couple were fixing drinks with a bucket of Piña Colada mix and a handle of Bacardi. Their names were Dale and Gloria, and they were road tripping from South Carolina to Napa Valley, where their daughter lived with her family.
“Now I don’t think much of Annie’s husband,” said Dale. He was puffing on a cigar, and it perched from his lips like a fishing rod dangling an invisible line. “So we’ll see how this all works out.”
“It’s thirteen years they’ve been married, Dale,” said Gloria in a good-natured, rehearsed sort of way. “This is what happens when it all works out.”
The woman and her baby, I don’t remember their names, were moving down to San Antonio. “We just need a fresh start,” she said softly, “Away from Oregon,” and the way she said Oregon, like she didn’t know how to hold its edges on her tongue, told me she was probably from somewhere else. The baby only babbled in agreement.
“What are you doing here?” I asked the younger man. Later, I would learn his name was Tony. He waded closer to my side of the pool and handed me a beer. I could make out his tattoos now. They stretched with his body: pin-up girls, skulls, flowers, words so faded I could barely make them out. The most prominent piece was just the phrase, “If Not God,” plastered in cursive across his stomach, surrounded by a cluster of stars.
“That’s a loaded question, baby,” he said. The others laughed, but I didn’t. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me.
It was my turn to talk. I couldn’t avoid it. They wanted the cheat sheet of my life, the who and where and why. I could have lied, and I did a little bit, but less than I did with Mrs. Nelson. Something about the pool, these strangers, the tickle of light beer in my throat, made me hungry to reveal myself, to be seen as clearly as possible. So I told them most of the truth, all of it except for the worst of it, what I really had planned. I told them about the reality show, about Mike, about the night at a bar in downtown Albuquerque when he hit me in public and my lip smacked the countertop and bled for hours, about how he disappeared from my life the very next day. And that’s when I stopped, for their sake as well as mine. I told them I was driving out to San Diego. I was going to confront him, to make him beg my forgiveness.
To tell them the whole truth would be to tell them about the bouncer who’d hauled Mike outside and told me I should find him if I ever needed help getting myself out of trouble. He offered permanent solutions, he’d said, flashing the gun in his waistband. At the time, I hadn’t believed I was in trouble, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have thought anyone could get me out of it. Maybe I still didn’t believe it.
My new companions had listened the way people do when they don’t know you very well, when they’re trying on their best social graces: finetuning facial expressions, raising eyebrows in sync, laughing only when it was obvious and appropriate to do so, but I saw something in their eyes, a hopelessness settling in, a look of impending doom that was hard to shake. All of them except for Tony, who only smiled, just slightly, the whole time I was talking. He finished his beer and opened a fresh one.
My skin was prickly with shame and the fear of what had taken me years to learn, and them only seconds to realize: that I was only a short, humiliating footnote in Mike’s life, when for so long, he’d been most of my story. My current reality was only discernible because I could compare it to my past one, the one I’d shared with him, and I’d assumed he’d cherished and despised those years like I did, equally, often at the same time. I felt sometimes how far I’d come, how close to normal I could fake, but seeing him on Mr. Right confirmed that for me, the hurt had only just begun to set in. I hadn’t even allowed myself to feel it, and yet it had been feeding off me for years. But for Mike, God had whisked that pain away. All he was left with was embarrassment — of me, of himself, of the filthiness we’d exposed each other to. He could pretend to be a real person now, he allowed himself that. But for me, it didn’t matter that I had a roof over my head, a bank account, a cell phone. I was just as lost in that pool with those strangers as I was in the days we roamed the country by van, on foot, slumped across bus seats, getting high on anything we could get our hands on, fucking like animals through days and weeks of comedowns, staring down the chasm of near-psychosis, tripping through realms of our brains we could never return to. Pain and pleasure were just ends of the same spectrum. I didn’t exist, I only felt. And even now, I could just as easily fall off the face of the earth if I wasn’t careful, and I hadn’t been. Sarah, Janice, Mrs. Nelson, that stupid job at the nursing home, these were the strongest tethers I had to my existence back in Florida, and I didn’t trust them to hold me in place.
Dale exhaled a large plume of smoke, breaking my trance. I didn’t know how long we’d been sitting there in silence, since I had stopped speaking. The sun was disappearing, but the air was still warm. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s one hell of a story.”
The mother nodded with me in solidarity, or maybe just in understanding. “I guess I just hope you find him. And I hope he does right by you,” she said.
Gloria said, “Bless your heart, honey. You know, I’ve watched that show for years, and I always wonder about stuff like this. The tales they tell, I mean. Everyone seems to have something they can peddle out for sympathy. It makes me so sad to think of a thing like that. Him saying that, and to another woman of all things, and you just watching.”
Tony was staring at me.
“What?” I asked him.
He scratched the back of his head. “Don’t you think this whole thing is a little irrational?” He asked. He didn’t sound cruel. Or mocking. Only curious. I watched him swirl the last inch or so of his drink into a tiny vortex and down it in one gulp. “You want him to what? Apologize? After all this time?”
“It’s only been three years,” I said. “We were together for five. And even if it were irrational, what else am I supposed to do? Just let him get away with it?”
I felt something animalistic rise in me, anger, maybe fear. I didn’t want to be wrong. I didn’t want to be looking for the wrong thing. I waited for Tony to get angry, to fight with me, but he only shrugged. “Whatever brings you peace, I guess. That’s what I’d be looking for if I were you.”
I thought about that for a while. Everyone watched me. Even the baby watched me. The intimacy between us all felt great in that moment, even though it was finite. It would disappear for good when we left the pool that night. We wouldn’t be able to dig ourselves back in. Even the memory of this night and the way we told it to other people would be just slightly wrong, unable to encompass the way we’d taken each other seriously, made space for perfect strangers.
“I don’t know if peace is possible for me. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for it,” I said.
“I hear that,” Tony said. “I hear it. But peace comes to all who ask for it. That’s all the looking you have to do.”
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. I regretted speaking at all.
“I’m so sorry you feel that way,” Gloria said to me. She got out of the pool, walked over to me, and wrapped her wet arms around my shoulders. “But let me tell you, it’s not over for you, honey. It’s only just beginning.” When she pulled away, I felt the shadow of her limbs still holding me.
Tony caught my eye and gave me a small cheers, I saw that he wasn’t going to press me. Dale poured me a piña colada, and the woman with the baby clasped my hand in hers for a single, precious moment. We turned the tide of conversation to other, pleasanter things. Drunken teenage anecdotes, strange things we’d seen on the road, all the excitement of life that lay out ahead, on the road or at our next destination. There was balance and generosity between us and a lightness in my body I hadn’t felt in years.
We stayed out by the pool for a long time. The mother left for a while to put her baby to bed. When she came back out, she lit a cigarette and hung her head in her hands. We looked away until she was ready for us not to. Mary the innkeeper joined us too. She sat on one of the deckchairs and smoked out of a corncob pipe. Dale and Gloria handed me one drink after another, and soon I was drunk, singing along to songs I hadn’t known I’d heard before. When it was really nighttime, Tony dared me to jump into the few feet of deep end the pool had to offer. He would do it with me.
Everyone cheered us on. It didn’t matter that the dare was silly. We clasped hands and made our bodies as compact as possible, gathering knees into chests. The water was dense with chlorine, and at the bottom, a thin, spotty layer of debris, bug carcasses, and cigarette butts had accumulated. I opened my eyes through the chemicals and looked up, toward the blurry streaks of light. I tried to look past the surface, where the atmosphere was breaking and clouds were forming and planes were flying, but all I saw was darkness, nothing. Tony’s arms found my torso, and he dragged me to the surface like a deep-sea diver hauling treasure to the shore.
Above the water, I breathed harder than I thought I would. I looked around to see if I’d embarrassed myself, but no one was watching us closely.
“Thought I lost you for a second,” he said, his mouth behind my ear.
I let him hold me. His heart thumped dully against my back, between my shoulder blades. “I guess I owe you one,” I said.
A little after midnight, Mary said she had to close the pool, but nobody complained. That’s the way it had to be. Gloria hugged everyone goodbye, but the rest of us only waved, shy now, like children getting picked up from a sleepover.
Tony and I were still sitting by the side of the pool while Mary fiddled with a control panel. The lights flickered out one by one.
“So. Are you lonesome tonight?” he asked me, not at all like Elvis. He took the last sip of his last beer.
“Not really,” I said.
“Can I stay in your room anyways?”
I nodded before I could think about it. “You do actually have a room here though, right?” I asked him. “Like, this isn’t just a scheme?”
He laughed. “I’m not a grifter, or anything. I just like you. And I am always lonesome.” He spread his hand out on my thigh, and little water droplets trickled off his fingers, off my skin, down to the pavement.
“I don’t want to do anything,” I said, eying his hand. “If we sleep in the same bed, I just want to sleep. Okay? Nothing funny?”
“Of course, baby. Of course.”
He followed me back to my room, a finger crooked into the back of my damp shirt, as if I’d leashed him to me. I splashed my face with water and brushed my teeth while he sat in the bedroom, doing whatever he was doing. I went back to the bedroom and took off my clothes, and he took my place in the bathroom. He left the door open. I heard him piss into the toilet and then I heard him use what could only be my toothbrush.
I was already under the covers when he took off his shirt and slid in next to me. He wasn’t as warm as men are supposed to be. I shivered against him.
He turned off the lamp and closed his eyes, and I put a hand on his chest. He exhaled. I leaned over to kiss him, and he let me, and then, gently, he took my arms, kissed them both, just beneath my wrists, and put them down. He faced the ceiling and closed his eyes.
“You don’t want to?”
“Let’s just rest now, baby,” he said. He curled his body against mine, and I shivered again. I was underwater still, holding my breath. The sensation was fermenting for my dreams. “Let’s rest.”
I woke up with a headache. Tony was gone and so was my toothbrush. I thought about the day Mike had left me for good. It was the morning after the incident in the bar, after I’d met the bouncer. I had woken up in Albuquerque shivering and afraid, covered in sweat and my own sickness, mouth bruised and crusted with blood. Mike was nowhere to be found. Our car was gone, and so was my cash, the last of the booze, and my father’s pocketknife. Anything we had to spare. Any trace of him, any proof that he had ever existed, had been swept from the room while I slept. No word from him. Nothing.
Tony had left his number on a thin paper napkin. Above it, he’d written, “I’m rooting for you. Just ask for it.”
I bought an energy drink from the vending machine outside and loaded my things into Mrs. Nelson’s car. Gloria was outside, packing her truck. She gave me another hug. “Good luck, baby,” she said. “It’ll all be okay,” and then she and Dale drove off to their daughter. I was alone in the parking lot with Tony’s napkin in my pocket, the smell of Gloria’s perfume still tingling against my nose, the already fading impression of the humans I’d spend last night with, taunting me with a goodness I didn’t know how to achieve on my own, without them.
I got into the car and wept. There was no Albuquerque to return to. No bouncer to track down. No revenge that would be big enough, that would mean anything. No death that would bring me peace. I drove back to Tyler, Texas. It was night by the time I got there, so I hunted for rose fields in the dark. The first farm I found was closed for the off-season. I parked outside its fenced edges, emerged into the hot night, and pressed my face against the chain links. The field was all dirt plots and empty rose bushes, but if I closed my eyes, I could see them, thousands of perfect roses, sprouting up one by one.
Image: photo by SOCMIA Fotografía on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
