The Tell (33 page)

He blinked at the dark ceiling and didn't know where he was or how long he'd been asleep. A chenille ball rested in the corner of his mouth. Where was his glowing bureau, the battling roses on the wallpaper and the searing point of the streetlight outside his bedroom window? Where was his wife with her hand curled on his chest? Where were the locust trees, the bayberries, the catcalls of frogs? His phone was ringing and he leaned over to the floor and dug around in the pockets of his pants.

“O.” Then nothing but the sound of the sea. “O? Are you there?” It was Mira with that breathless expiration of his name. “O, the car, the goddamn car. It's dead and I'm stuck here.”

He didn't understand. Where was the clock? Where was she and why wasn't he with her? He reached behind for her and felt the cold touch of wall. This was not his bed, not his wall, but this was his wife. He pounded his skull with the heel of his hand to dislodge the murk.

“O. Say something.”

Her voice cracked. She was on I-95, on her way home from the casino, though she wasn't sure exactly what part of the highway she was on, not even if she was in Rhode Island or Connecticut because she hadn't been paying attention. Owen sat up, light-headed. He went into the kitchen. The clocks on the microwave and the stove, though resynchronized by George, still ran minutes apart by the end of every day and now read 1:14 and 1:19. Mira was by the side of the road and she couldn't see anything on the other side of the guardrail. The fog was too heavy. She was terrified—of the road, the dark embankment, of being stuck there in a blizzard. She begged him to say something. Downstairs, the TV murmured. He heard a truck passing Mira and pictured the stretch of highway going both directions and cut down the middle by a velvet belt of exiled trees and desperate bramble.

“I'm alone,” she said shakily.

“Where's Wilton?”

“He's not with me.” He heard the useless click of the ignition, and then what sounded like her batting her keys. “He was before, we came together, but he isn't now. Will you come get me?”

“Do you know what time it is? Where the hell is he?”

“I don't know where he is,” she said, revving up in frustration. “But I'm scared. Could you please come?” He asked again where Wilton was. “I left him at the casino and I drove for about twenty-five minutes, and then I thought I should go back and get him, but I couldn't find him anywhere, so I turned around again. Please, O. I'll tell you later. Just come get me. Please!”

When he went downstairs, George opened his door a few inches. Owen gave him a silent nod and went around back where his car was parked and two cats huddled in conference by the garbage cans. The temperature had risen eerily and the streets were hidden in fog. His wipers smeared the glass, and light burst into spikes on the highway. He could guess the number of times Mira had made this same trip, and yet she still didn't know where she was? There was nothing to notice, she'd once said about the drive to the casino: no wild building, no cross with plastic flowers on the side of the road to mark a death, no rest stops with two cars pulled up next to each other. She only knew where she was going and where she was coming from and who was in the seat next to her. She used to observe everything, he thought, and everything was once interesting to her. The heaviest disappointment began to sink him, and his hands strangled the wheel for rescue. The fog was terrible. He could see only a few yards ahead. No other cars cleared the way for him.

Half an hour later, he saw her car, just a shadow through the fog, on the other side of the highway. He took the next exit, circled back, and pulled up behind her in the breakdown lane. On the other side of the guardrail was a steep embankment ending in a tureen of swirling fog. Mira watched him in her rearview mirror, and he watched her until she got out and climbed into his car. When he leaned over to buckle her seat belt because she was too dazed or too cold to do it herself, she thought he was leaning over to kiss her and offered her mouth. He pulled back and shook his head.

“Wilton disappeared,” she said. She was shivering in the blasting heat. “I couldn't find him anywhere. I looked and looked.” Her eyes were gargoyled and her tongue tripped on her teeth. “I don't know where he went.”

“He took a room. Maybe he met someone. He's okay.”

“No, I don't think so.” Mira insisted that something was wrong.

How easily she and Wilton had gone to the casino again tonight, as though nothing Owen had said or done mattered. As though he hadn't moved out, as though his marriage—and Brindle—weren't devastated. In the dip ahead, red and blue throbs swept through the white haze in a volley of patriotic colors. He knew that whatever was going on was assuming in Mira's mind the shape of Wilton. Her hand pressed to her mouth as a policeman with a flashlight waved them past. Two cars in strobed brightness and shadow were in the right lane, one station wagon overturned, one bent at midsection and facing the wrong way. It was impossible to tell smoke from fog. Owen thought he heard the very distant whine of sirens, but it was only Mira sucking air in through her teeth. He must have passed the accident going south and not even known it. The drivers might already have been dead.

“We have to go back and look for him,” Mira said. “He was acting strange and unhinged and a little crazy. I've never seen him like that. Will you turn around?”

“Not a chance. I think you're—”

“What, overreacting? You didn't see his face, O. He fell the other day and bruised his cheek badly. His eye was almost swollen shut. He was limping. There's something wrong with him. He's sick.” She hesitated. “He was talking about the end of things.”

“Wilton will find his way home. He can take care of himself.”

“He wasn't acting. You weren't there, O,” she insisted. “He was talking about how he'd failed at everything, how he'd made a mistake moving to Providence and thinking Anya would take him back. He wasn't making any sense.”

“He was drunk.”

“He doesn't get drunk. How can you not know that by now? He was furious at me—about Brindle and what I'd done, furious at you that you'd moved out, furious at himself for being involved. Furious at Anya. He wouldn't let me stay with him.” She began to cry. “He said, ‘Leave me fucking alone.' It was horrible.”

Owen didn't speak.

“He was the one who asked me to go with him tonight. He begged me. I didn't want to, I told him I couldn't ever go again, that I'd promised you, but he insisted. Just one last time, he said. I've made a mess of everything.” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “It's all my fault. And now I've lost Wilton.”

“He'll come back,” he said, uncertainly. Mira couldn't be consoled.

In all his rambling fury, Wilton had not told Mira about Owen's visit. Why had the man kept quiet? The city came into view with the rise of the hospital and the stacks of the power station near Brindle. Owen got off at Eddy Street near the hospital. If they parked across from the emergency room, the hopeless cases from the car accident would soon be wheeled in. He felt the emptiness of having witnessed a tragedy and being unable to do anything about it, give comfort or even stand witness to the final conveyance. So he didn't stop, but drove back to Whittier Street, which was luminous in fog tinted green from Alice Jessup's nightlights.

M
ira asked him to stay with her, and they were still awake, waiting for Wilton to come home or call. Mira held a cup of tea gone cold and kept an eye on his place.

“I shouldn't have left him.” It was her incantation; she'd said it a hundred times already. “He tried to call Anya a couple of times tonight, but she wouldn't answer. I think he finally gave up any hope that she might move in with him.”

“She was never going to move in with him,” Owen said. “That was pure fantasy, wishful thinking.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” She pulled at the neck of her threadbare Brindle sweatshirt. Her arms looked thin and vulnerable. “We don't know.”

I know, Owen thought. He listened for birdsong, a car, a bang through water pipes, something real instead of the morning's boundless worry. Finally Mira went upstairs to lie down. As he wandered to stay awake, he saw that Mira had been on a cleaning jag since he'd last been there. Every object had been lifted, cleaned under, and put back, but not in precisely the same place as before. It was as though his acuity were painfully sharp for the first time in the house, and he saw that his tenure there had been only a blip in its long history. The dust ring that had gathered around him for almost six years of marriage had been whisked away. If he turned fast enough, he could catch his own afterimage as a wisp. So this is what it looks like without me, this is life without me, and how it goes on, he told himself. What Mira had been doing was returning the house to the way it had been before him, when she was its sole caretaker and before she believed, if only for a while, she could actually have a life here with someone else, with him. In his study, he stretched out on the short couch with his legs draped over one end. His fatigue was dizzying. When he tucked a blanket into the seam where the cushions met, his fingers touched something cool and he extracted the squid pen from the leathery depths. He couldn't imagine how it had gotten there.

The way Mira said his name when she woke him was part dove, part moan, an insistent force of O, O, O. She hadn't changed her clothes, but she'd washed sleep from her face, and the way her hair was pulled back made her alertness appear forced. “What if he doesn't come back?” she said.

“But he will.” Here they were, back in this same discussion, as if they'd never taken a break from it.

“You can't say that. You don't know how he was acting.”

“But we know he's done this before, gone away sometimes without our knowing. He's not required to tell us or check in with us. I can't talk about this anymore, Mira. You have to stop.”

She looked stunned. He could reassure her that Wilton was okay, and he could come up with a million plausible reasons for why he hadn't come home last night, but he wouldn't believe any of it himself. The dread he'd been fending off all night now charged him. He hobbled off the couch, pushed past Mira, and went into the bathroom where he vomited—sleeping pill, Anya, a million bad decisions, Mira. He hid the noise with running water.

“You all right?” Mira asked when he returned.

He wouldn't look at her. “Just tired.”

She sat in the desk chair and leaned back. “Do you know why Wilton doesn't leave any lights on when he goes out?” she asked, looking over at his house. “So when he comes home, he doesn't have to face that second of disappointment when he realizes there's no one waiting for him.”

Mira swiveled to face Owen. “Did I ever tell you how I wasn't allowed in this study without my father's permission, and if I did come in, he couldn't wait to get me out? He'd clear his throat and fiddle until I left. It was so wrong. Sometimes when he wasn't home, I'd sit in this chair and touch all his things, his papers. I opened his drawers and felt all the way in the back, looking for something. It was thrilling. I'd never keep a child out of my room, never. I'd invite them in and show them everything.” She let the chair tilt forward—enough of the past. “I have to go back and look for Wilton,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

He agreed, and by the time they left the house, the first sunlight insulated the telephone wires that ran along the highway. After a silent hour, the casino rose like a steel-hued fortress not meant to be approached in the morning. It was all angles and glass and unkind seams. The engineering and mechanics were hidden on purpose; the whole place was trickery.

“This is exactly where I left him,” she said, stopping under a fake cedar when they were inside. She ran her finger down the fiberglass trunk. The recorded sounds of skittering breezes and birds hung in the branches. The abandoned plastic cups, the flecks of wrappers and napkins, the disillusioned wanderers, and the piped-in smell of bacon and coffee gave away the early hour that was otherwise hidden. A woman in a tight blue uniform ran a rag back and forth over a chrome railing. He couldn't believe he was back in this place. In her open jacket and untied red sneakers, Mira looked almost destitute, and so did he. He followed her as she went in one direction and then turned as she went the opposite way. He scanned every face; they looked eerily alike. Mira crossed the bridge over the waterfall's river and gestured to the bartender. She used her hands, one high above her head to describe Wilton, the other to pat the stool next to her. The bartender gave her the kind of smile that meant he was going to be professionally polite and tight-lipped. He shook his head and turned back to filling bowls with pretzels.