In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (13 page)

“How long was I out?” Adam flexes stiff legs and arms.

“Four hours, maybe.” Phoebe shrugs. The economy cabin is paradoxically quiet and loud, and he can barely hear her over the ambient roar. “Just ten more and the International Date Line to go before the fun starts.”

In complimentary airline slipper socks, she looks small and sad, and Adam is glad he agreed to accompany her halfway around the world to visit her estranged mother at the Four Seasons Hong Kong, glad he can help her in this way.

“Pheebs, it’s gonna be fine.” Adam squeezes the closest part of her—upper arm—in a gesture he hopes conveys sympathy, hopes he’s speaking the truth.

“I know I’m being a baby.” She sighs. “It’s just, when I was little she was like a
mom
mom, and then all of a sudden she wasn’t. Now she’s even farther away.”

Adam sort of understands but often wishes his own mother would run away, see all the places she only reads about. When he’d told her he was going to Asia with Phoebe, his mother had sounded so vicariously misty on the phone that Adam vowed to send her on a round-the-world vacation if he ever really made it (not a recurring voice role on the
Go Go Trons
cartoon made it, but
really
made it).

The man in the window seat returns, gives the perfunctory nod of strangers sharing intimate spaces, and the three of them file back in. Adam reclines his chair, hoping to go back to sleep.

“Do you think Chase is right to blow her off?” Phoebe asks.

“Your brother’s busy.” Adam wrestles a yawn. Chase had been in LA for business a few months ago. The kid had dressed like Patrick Bateman, offered a challengingly firm handshake, and religiously checked his cell phone. That probably equated to busy. He’d also spent a chunk of time subtly and then less subtly questioning Adam’s intentions toward his sister; apparently none of the Fisher men were ever going to like Adam. “I’m sure he’ll go see your mom soon.”

“Oh.” Phoebe perks up. “You missed the food.” From her seatback pocket, she produces a packet of Pepperidge Farm Milanos, two mini bags of pretzels, and an apple. “I saved you these.”

And like that, his reservations dissipate. “Thank you.” He opens the cookies, offers her one.

“I’m good; I ate a lot of something they told me was chicken.”

Scrunching in his chair, he rests his head on her shoulder, smells vanilla lotion and Anais Anais perfume as she leans into him.

They haven’t
slept together
slept together for more than a year, since before he punched a hole in the wall around last Thanksgiving, but they’ve gotten in the habit of literally sleeping together—a mostly platonic tangle of body parts on the king-size pillow-top mattress he got after doing a three-episode arc on
ER
.

So much easier this way.

From the moment he’d seen her in Thetta Tunney’s workshop, Adam had thought Phoebe Fisher was breathtaking, even if he hadn’t realized how astute she was until she picked the scene from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
for them to put up, knowing, long before he did, how perfectly the vicious dialogue would highlight their strengths. Even if he hadn’t realized how sweet she was until the first night he fell asleep on their couch and woke up covered in a quilt, pillow under his head. But the few months they
were
sort of together, Phoebe had stomped around hurt and put out, as if everything connected to him was an epic failure. It had felt claustrophobic, like he was back in Coral Cove—the last time he meant too much to someone.

And there are plenty of breathtaking women in LA.

This time he can’t hide the yawn.

“Sleepy?” Phoebe asks.

Adam nods into her clavicle. “Aren’t you? What time is it?”

“Who knows? We get in, like, two days after we left.” She burrows closer. “We don’t get today.”

CORDOVA, ALASKA
5:03
A.M
.
AKST

In four hours you and Liam Wing are supposed to head out into the Prince William Sound on the
Jezebel Jones
for the last salmon voyage of the season. If the monthlong trip is anything like the others, you’ll be lucky to get three hours of sleep a night between twenty-hour days of grueling labor that cramps your hands and hunches your back. But in the bedroom you and Liam share in the Lake Avenue house, you’re lying awake because in his half of the room—separated by a sheet hung from the ceiling—Liam and his on-again-off-again girlfriend are packing for her trip back to Seattle.

Actually, you’ve been awake since 2:00
A.M.
, when Liam and Tina decided that the two times they’d had sex that night were not enough.

Since arriving three days ago, everything Tina has done has been loud and frustrating in your shared quarters. You haven’t said anything, though, because you’ve had a soft spot for Liam since you met on the deck of your first seiner last spring, when he’d pointed to the cold, open water and called it the “last frontier.”

“Ollie,” Liam had said, “we’re astronauts.” And you’d felt a little like an astronaut, signed on as a deckhand thousands of miles from home. When you’d fled Chicago, you’d told the Delta agent to send you as far as she could without a passport. You’d ended up in Anchorage and followed the job postings and college kids looking for adventure on the ferry to Cordova. But even that far away, Liam’s enthusiasm reminded you of Braden (if Braden had a half-Macanese doppelgänger), and there was something nice about that familiarity; you can put up with Tina a little while longer.

“Was the pilot blind?” Tina is saying, her high-pitched baby voice floating above the low hum of the television and through the sheet. “How can you hit a building?”

You roll onto your side so you don’t have to see their silhouettes—his short and compact, hers long and lithe.

“I wonder if this will screw up my flight,” Tina is saying.

“You can always stay here.” Liam at a fraction of Tina’s volume.

Sounds of shifting bedding as they make their way down to Liam’s futon on the floor.

Rubbing the long red beard you haven’t shaved since coming to Alaska, you resign yourself to the fact that they’re going to have sex again.

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Tina says through the sheet.

The sudden dropping of something.

An intake of breath.

Liam’s muffled voice, “Holy shit.”

And then the illusion of the wall explodes as Liam pushes aside the divider. “Ollie, you said your dad was a pilot, right?”

*   *   *

Tucked under Liam’s arm on the futon, Tina is quietly crying. For reasons you cannot explain, her tears are more horrible than any of the horrible things blowing up and burning down in real time on television.

Liam gave you the cordless phone half an hour ago, but each time you dial your father, you’re dumped straight to voice mail.

Every thirty seconds or so, you remind yourself to breathe.

A downed plane is found in rural Pennsylvania. Tina twitches underneath Liam’s arm.

In your hand the phone cries to life.

Glancing at the caller ID on the console, Liam tells you it’s a 312 number. Though it could be Maura (whom you haven’t spoken to in the ten months since you left), you answer before the end of the first ring.

“Ollie?” your father says. “Thought you might be worried, so I figured I’d give you a call and let you know that I’m fine.”

He doesn’t sound fine, though; he sounds like he did when he finally got to the hospital after missing your emergency appendectomy—old and out of his element.

“I’m really glad,” you say, enormously relieved to actually mean this. You may have been fucking your father’s wife, but you’re not quite Oedipus. “I sorta knew those weren’t your usual routes, but still.”

“Everything okay?” Liam mouths over Tina’s head, and you nod, step back into your half of the room and the illusion of privacy.

On the line your father is apologizing for missing your earlier calls, saying he spoke to your sister in Utah but had to search through old e-mails to find the number you’d sent after you were long gone.

“Maura took Nat to her parents’ in Cincinnati for a few weeks, but I got through to them a while ago, too.”

A pause.

“Who would have thought?” His voice is ramshackle.

And you remember how gray he’d looked the last time you’d seen him almost a year ago at Thanksgiving. With Phoebe’s reappearance and Maura’s hurt eyes, you’d been distracted, but even then you couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t the fierce, imposing superhero he’d been in your youth. In the handful of times you’ve called since leaving, Maura has never been home. Her being in Ohio is probably significant.

“Who could have imagined,” your father says, “airplanes as weapons?”

You knew. You always knew, but for maybe the first time since the Piper Saratoga when you were seven, you don’t want to say that now, don’t need to be right or prove a point. You want to give your father a hug or a back pat or something normal family members do to comfort each other. You want to be Batman to his Robin.

But you’re not there. For once you’re the one who’s gone, holed up in a far-flung corner of the world, while he’s in the Chicago suburbs trying to locate the people in his life.

“Dad,” you say, “I’m really sorry.”

5   scraps of things she used to know

Maybe she missed it?

For the fifth time in forty minutes, Sharon checks her cell phone to make sure it’s not accidentally turned off or on mute. That she hasn’t missed any calls or texts or smoke signals.

Chase
had
promised he would call.

But there aren’t any messages, only the time—9:07
P.M.
—glowing in the flip phone’s window.

Setting her cell on the bathroom vanity, she takes another swig from Chase’s bottle of Grey Goose—warmth blazing down her throat to her empty stomach—and runs her hand under the stream of bathwater to test the temperature.

Kristen’s apartment in Queens doesn’t have a tub, only a narrow stall shower with a cracked floor. This might be Sharon’s last chance to take a bath for a while.

No, Chase said he would call.

And if (
when!
) he does, she’s simply going to say she’s sorry and she loves him before she has a chance to mess things up anymore. He’ll say he’s sorry, too, and she can rent another U-Haul, go back to Queens, and retrieve all the boxes of clothes and books and papers that she had hauled to Kristen’s that afternoon. No need to figure out how everything would fit in Kristen’s windowless second bedroom/closet. No need to drop a change of address card in the mail or find a dry cleaner in Astoria. She could simply bring everything back to the thirty-fifth floor of the Madison Plaza and take a bath
with
Chase when he gets back from Chicago.

The night she moved in, three years earlier, they’d taken a bath. Chase had filled the tub with bubbles, lit candles, put some cheesy love song on the stereo—like all those couples in books and TV shows.

Another swig of vodka.

She’s never really been much of a drinker, but it feels good, keeps her pounding heart and the nagging thought that Chase might
not
call at bay. Plus, it’s his favorite and makes her feel close to him.

Another phone check.

There’s a Dorothy Parker story about a woman bargaining with God for her beau to call. Sharon had laughed out loud when she read it while babysitting for the Robbins on date night; it seems much less funny now.

She strips off her dirty clothes: sweater, T-shirt, jeans, bra and panties made of the silky material Chase prefers, even though she’s worn cotton for the better part of a year, even though Chase had gone to his parents’ house so he didn’t have to watch her move out.

Setting her stuff on the toilet, Sharon notices a utility knife and Sharpie marker in the space between the tub and vanity—moving supplies that must have fallen.

Squatting, she picks up the knife, absently slides out the blade.

Somewhere she’d read something. If bathwater is warm enough, you can slit your wrists and bleed out painlessly. Blood flowing from your arms like the antithesis of a water birth, a death made easier on the dier. Some famous Greek or Roman emperor went that way, didn’t he?

Nero?

Then the more concrete notion that’s been weighing Sharon down for the past six months, since the rejection letters from agents started pouring in and Chase started spending more nights out with the sell-side analysts: There was a time when she used to know all kinds of things about history and literature and … stuff.

Setting down the knife, she notices something else tucked in the tiny space. A yellow Post-it note. In Chase’s rigid, heavy handwriting:
Had to go to work, Shar, but I love you very much.—C

Until she took them down yesterday, there had been a half-dozen little notes like this stuck all over the apartment walls. It had been one of the little lovey things that Chase used to do when he was leaving early or coming home late. They’d charmed Sharon so much she left them up. It’s been months since he posted a new message (well, except for the night of the fire). This one must have fallen off the bathroom door when she was packing.

He still might call.

*   *   *

Chase had promised her as much when he left last night.

“You’re sure you don’t want any of the furniture?” he’d asked as he quickly packed a leather hanging bag.

Since their fight he’d been sleeping on his office couch, and it was the first time Sharon had seen him in days. He’d had the decency to look haggard—black hair greasy and no longer neatly parted, pretty face puffy and sallow. Initially, Sharon had taken solace in that, thought if he looked so upset, surely he’d change his mind. But he’d spoken only a few words to her since rushing in, and none of them had been about calling off their breakup. His appearance, she conceded, was probably the result of his office’s lumpy couch and lack of a full-length mirror.

“Kristen has furniture in Queens,” Sharon said.

At the mention of an outer borough, Chase flinched. “Like I said, if you want to stay in Manhattan, I can help with rent for a while.” He had the same expression he got when talking about how his sister was wasting her life as a bartender in LA.