Flight (3 page)

She’s going to need gas. If she and David had driven to Michigan together, as planned, they would have brought what has always been considered “their” car, a reasonably new Toyota Corolla with gray upholstery and a CD player and air-conditioning. Instead she is driving “her” car, a powder blue Volkswagen Rabbit that has somehow survived, through underuse and sheer doggedness, since her grad-school days in Irvine. She hadn’t considered what she was doing, but when she picked up her suitcase—packed since yesterday, before the fight began—and took Trevor’s hand, the keys she lifted out of the Mexican ceramic bowl by the front door were not the Corolla’s but the Rabbit’s. Her car. It was what she said when she left the message for Vasant.
I’m taking my car and driving to Michigan.

“I don’t care about some stupid wedding,” David had said. “This is about our life together. You’ll stay until we’ve sorted this out.” It’s ludicrous, really. She bites her lip, remembering. How did they end up arguing that way, she and David, like some couple on
Jerry Springer?
How did her perfectly rational, well educated husband, the likely next chair of physics at Northwestern (and what could be more rational, more dedicated to the steady, dispassionate, judicious pursuit of solutions than physics?), how could this man have such words in his mouth? But even worse than what he said was what he did when she quietly moved toward the door. He stepped between it and her. It was deliberate and immediate, and at that moment it seemed that some completely different consciousness was ruling the father of her child. His hands were clenched at his sides. He wasn’t going to
let
her leave. For the first time since she met him in college, she felt afraid of him. Not afraid that he might hurt her—that seemed likely, but not the real tragedy. The real thing to fear was what would happen after that. How much things would change. How unfixable it would all be then.

Up until now she has felt jittery and wired, as if something in her was goading her to push things to a breaking point and then make a run for it. All of a sudden, the sheer awfulness of it all sweeps over her, and her eyes fog up with tears. Sniffing hard, she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She can’t risk crying on the Dan Ryan at
sixty-five miles an hour. She glances in the rearview mirror again and is dismayed to see Trevor’s eyes on her, fixed and wide.

“Go to sleep, sweetie,” she tells him. “It’s going to be a long drive.” To her relief, her voice sounds normal, and Trevor lets out a little sigh, a habit of his that makes him seem, for an instant, more like fifty than pushing five.

They might have survived all of it—David’s girlfriends, Vasant, the awkwardness, the anger—their marriage was based on rational principles, after all—but the phone call shattered it. And there’s no taking it back.

The worst part of it, the thing she keeps mentally replaying with a frantic, nauseated feeling of regret, is the laugh. It was right after she hung up the phone. David was sitting on the deacon’s bench in their entryway, looking at her, eyes wide, as if seeing her for the very first time. She could see he was still in the process of realizing that she was capable of what she had just done. Suddenly, seeing it from his eyes, she realized what she
had
done, realized that her act of pure and simple desperation was in fact a brilliant first move in a battle that had just commenced. And then she laughed.

It wasn’t humor, it wasn’t even triumph; it was a desperate hysterical impulse, because it seemed the whole world had turned upside down and the only person who might understand exactly how crazy everything had become was David, sitting there staring at her. Her laugh released him from his stillness, and for a moment she thought he might laugh with her, the two of them might crack up and forget the whole thing, might reverse course and go back to where they were before, turning the awful night and more awful morning into a funny story to tell good friends at dinner parties, after a bottle or two of wine.
The night David tried to be a tough guy. The night Margaret called the cops to arrest me.
For an instant, things hung in the balance as their eyes met and her laugh hung in the air.

“Well then,” he said, and looked away. And that was it. She couldn’t take back the phone call, and worse, she couldn’t take back
the laugh. She felt frozen, immobilized against the telephone table, as her husband stood up slowly. His moves were casual but deliberate, as if calculated to prove how far he was from requiring legal restraint. The thing that had scared her, made her pick up the phone and dial, wasn’t gone but had retreated to somewhere further down inside him.

“I’m not going to wait around to be arrested,” he said, and as if something in him suddenly jerked into gear, he moved, quick and agile, to the foyer. Before anything more could transpire between them, he opened the door and left.

A semi towing two containers roars by her, and Margaret realizes that she has been stuck behind a slow car, a large Galaxy that looks like a relic from the sixties. She’s edging left to pass it when she sees up ahead, like a beacon, the service plaza she’s been waiting for, crouching over the highway. Relief washes over her, and she slows down to move right instead. At least she won’t run out of gas.

It’s been so long since she drove the Rabbit that she has forgotten which side the gas tank is on. She gets it wrong the first time, pulls forward, backs into another spot, finds herself too far away, pulls forward again to back in closer to the pump. Her hands are shaking on the wheel.
Calm down,
she tells herself.

Trevor’s eyes are half shut, so she leaves him in the car as she uses her Amex card in the automated gas pump. The sight of the card causes another icy lump to form in her stomach. Will he cancel all her plastic? Can he do that? She makes a mental note to call American Express tomorrow. Somehow this makes her feel better. Everything has changed now; they’re playing a whole new game, with new rules, but at least there
are
rules. As soon as she has a chance, she will sit down and think through every single thing he might do, and try to formulate a plan.

And then there’s Vasant. She won’t allow herself to think of him, his thick eyelashes, his graceful hands. She holds that thought in reserve, a treat she’s saving for herself, the way when she was writing her thesis, she used to buy a beautiful piece of fruit and save it for when she had completed a section.

The wind has picked up, and she breathes deeply. There’s the smell of gasoline and something fried coming from the restaurant area, but there’s still a fresh smell in the wind—perhaps the rain, or perhaps something coming off the lake. It’s a warm June wind, not yet the hot, fetid current of summer in the city. She finishes filling the gas tank and starts to get back into the car, but then on second thought, gets the squeegee from its tub of gray blue water and does her windows. Something about the methodical motion calms her down: wet the window, scrape the wetness off with the rubber edge, wipe the tool with a paper towel, do it again. The front window is quite dirty, and cleaning it off is so satisfying that she does the sides, even though they’re not that dirty, and then the back window, which has sticky brown marks on it from leaves falling on the car. She and David have a parking lot attached to their apartment building, but they get only one covered space. That was always reserved for the Corolla, so Margaret’s car has been sitting out in the weather for months without being driven. It’s a wonder she even got it started. She stops to experience a satisfying feeling of gratitude toward the Rabbit.

Perhaps this is what her life will be from now on, a series of small graces, now that she’s awake to the world again. Vasant did that, she thinks with a small, shuddery thrill. She looks around the service plaza, and suddenly the living, breathing, sensory fullness of the place overwhelms her, as in movies where a video simulation gives way to reality. She breathes in the oily gas-station fumes, and the wind picks up a strand of her hair as gently as a lover would. The orange red of the neon sign, 24 HOURS, the iridescent black of oily spots on the cement, the bottle green of a beater car full of teenage boys pulling up to the next bank of pumps: all of these impressions triple, quadruple in intensity, and her capacity to receive them seems to yawn wide as well. She puts one hand on the car to steady herself. She feels disoriented, as if she were in an airplane and a trapdoor in the floor fell open, plunging her into limitless emptiness. It’s a rush of terror and exhilaration: she’s no longer going where she was once going, but who knew about this? Who
could have imagined the boundlessness of the space that existed outside that tiny moving tube? Who could have imagined the thrill of falling from it?

There’s a burst of music, a last gasp of sonic self-assertion as the teenage boys in the beater turn off their engine, and the extraordinary feeling vanishes. A couple of them glance Margaret’s way as they pile out of their car, and her neck prickles with a sense of potential danger. Quickly, but with a studied attempt to look calm, she moves back to the driver’s side and gets in her car. She locks the doors before starting it.

A sign directs her to the freeway entrance, with arrows pointing to westward and eastward ramps. The possibility flashes up: she could go back. She could turn around and drive straight back to Evanston, and maybe she would get back to the apartment before David returned, maybe he would never have to know that she climbed into her car and drove away from their marriage. Maybe she would even get there before the police did, and she could explain to them,
No, no, I’m so sorry, it was all a big mistake. Yes, I called, but it was just a misunderstanding, everything’s fine now.

She points her car east, toward Michigan.

Somewhere around Michigan City, she notices in the rearview mirror that Trevor has fallen asleep. She drives steadily, four miles above the speed limit, so she’ll get only a warning if stopped. When she sees the large blue WELCOME TO MICHIGAN sign, she presses her lips together in a thin line. In the midst of everything, she can’t help noting the irony of what she’s doing, the ridiculousness of fleeing to Michigan when she has spent the last fifteen years of her life—at least fifteen—trying to put Michigan and everything it stands for behind her. What was the University of Chicago, what was Irvine—what was David, with his Westport family and his cultured upbringing and his nontraditional ideas about marriage—if not a wholehearted rebuke to the flat, rural landscapes, the solid midwestern values, the low expectations that proclaim themselves from every shabby farmhouse, every blue Harvestore silo, in this state?

A few miles inside the Michigan border, she drives smack into
what feels like a wall of rain: the silence is wiped out by the tinny roar of water banging onto her car. As if in answer, her eyes fill with tears, and this time she lets them fall, silently, so she won’t wake Trevor. She drives and weeps, windshield wipers on high, gas-tank needle still close to F.
The pathetic fallacy,
she thinks, the notion that the weather can represent interior states. But as her strange exhilaration drains away, she knows that it’s not really sadness that makes her cry. She’s crying because she’s turned a corner that was not on her carefully mapped life plan. She’s crying because she’s on her way, alone, to celebrate her sister’s wedding, an event that has been in her plans for months, but not like this. She’s crying because she’s Margaret and she has just passed Benton Harbor, which means she has only sixty more miles to cry before she’ll stop, wipe her eyes, practice some of the deep ashtanga breathing she has learned in yoga, and pull herself together to face her family as the ambitious, confident, self-sufficient woman they all know her to be.

The doves are okay.

The vacuum cleaner growls along. Carol’s back is showing the first signs of getting sore, but she keeps going, putting her full wrist, arm, and shoulder into each stroke across the living room carpet. She’ll be doing this even more regularly once she has the bed-and-breakfast up and running. The vacuum hums going out, haws coming back in. Its baleens sift through the deep pile of the fawn carpet she fell in love with at Carpet World. When she’s done with the living room, she’ll move on to the dining room. Back and forth, thrust and parry. Not. One. Speck. Of. Dirt. Will. Remain.

The doves are okay.

She’s been saying it all morning, a kind of mantra. She pictures them in their wooden cage in the garage, turning in futile circles or huddled bleakly, in the corner. Every now and then a soft trilling, like a fairy princess gargling, comes from one of them, it’s never clear which.

But they’re alive. At that thought, she redoubles her vacuuming
efforts, throwing her lower back into it, as if nothing but an impeccable living room carpet can possibly testify to her gratitude for the lives of two small grayish birds. Sparks of pain crackle up the ladder of her spine, but she ignores them.

“Why are you so worried about it?” Will said at breakfast. “It’s not like there’s any shortage of poultry in these parts.” He’d already proposed that Leanne’s guests might appreciate it more if she bought a couple of turkeys to release and let everyone bring their rifles. That’s Will’s sense of humor, hiding his deep-down inability to understand. Leanne wants one still, beautiful moment at her wedding—she and Kit will release the doves after the kiss—and Will has never been one for still moments, beautiful or otherwise. Life for him is a highway: the faster you move forward, the more you’ll see along the way. After thirty-six years, Carol understands that much about him, has learned to accept it and even sometimes laugh at it. Still, she can’t help but chafe against his continued desire to bait her, even when the second-to-last full day for preparations is upon them. The wedding is Saturday. The girls are coming today with Kit and David, Trevor must be lapped with grandmotherly attention, Kit’s mother comes on Friday, and somehow Carol must be ready to host forty people for cocktails on Friday night (“Let’s skip that whole dull rehearsal-dinner thing,” Leanne said on the phone) when the Harding’s in Ryville has never stocked an artichoke, let alone fresh shrimp. Can’t Will see that she’s stressed and try to be nice? Instead, he’s been mocking her practically since the moment she awoke this morning with an icy hand squeezing her heart, convinced that something was drastically wrong.