Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357) (2 page)

It was the only bus of the day, but since he’d made the arrangements he was responsible, just as it was his fault the traffic was bad and the weather ugly, and that night had fallen.

“I’m a little peckish,” he seconded. As in everything this weekend, he wanted them to be on the same side, the two of them against the world.

“What time is our reservation?”

“The earliest I could get was seven-thirty.”

“What time is it now?”

“Just past six. It’s only another twenty miles.”

“I should have grabbed a breakfast bar. I still need to iron my dress. I hope they have one.”

“They should.”

“Should be like a wood bee,” she said.

It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut‑in twins, each other’s best and, most often, only audience. While they’d performed this exchange hundreds of times over the years, en route to graduations, weddings and funerals, and her skepticism was an old routine, delivered lightly, almost without thought, tonight, because he was on a mission to recapture, by one dashing, reckless gesture everything they’d lost, he took it personally. He liked to believe that when he first met her, when
she was completely foreign and even more inscrutable, a solemn blonde sociology major freshly graduated from Wooster with granny glasses and a tennis player’s shapely legs, a girlish love of James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg, a cedar chest full of pastel sweaters and a shelf crowded with naked neon-haired troll dolls, she had believed in things—luck, goodness, the inexhaustible possibilities of life—and that her disappointment now was a judgment not of the world but of him and their life together. If the room didn’t have an iron, he would call down to the front desk and go get it himself if necessary. They might be broke come Monday morning, and filing for divorce, but he would never stop trying to provide for her happiness, as impossible as that was.

She addressed her mystery again, tilting it to the beam of light from the overhead console. She read two or three a week, the pile of cracked and yellowing paperbacks on her nightstand dwindling as the one on the marble-topped table by the front door grew until it was time to trade them in at the Book Exchange. “I’m reading,” she’d say when his hand was advancing under the covers, and he would retreat.

Across the aisle, in flickering montage, the biker couple clutched at each other like plummeting skydivers, and Art was aware of the space separating him from her. He slipped his hand from atop the gym bag and dropped it to her blue-jeaned thigh, a middle-school move. He squeezed the yielding loaf of her leg, smoothed, patted. It had been weeks since they’d made love, and the last time had been a disappointment, perfunctory on her part, workmanlike on his. He’d had to lobby her for it, imagining ecstasy, the two of them communing, the sweet plenty of her
body wiping his mind clean of worry, and then, in the middle, it felt like a chore, and he’d struggled to finish, grudgingly picturing the overly rouged girl who did the traffic on the morning news. Tonight, with the Falls roaring below their window, he would prove that while they’d reached the age where passion sometimes flagged, his love for her was as strong as ever. Didn’t she see? The money, the house, none of it mattered. Since they’d met, with the exception of those few torturous months he’d long since repudiated, she was all he wanted. Mawkish as it sounded, he could say it with a straight face: as long as they had each other, they were rich.

Marion stayed his hand, covering it with her own, and kept reading. With nowhere to focus his attention, he was always needy on vacation, just as he’d been following her around the house all fall since he’d lost his job. He was eager—too eager, really—and normally she could divert him with a list of chores. She put him in charge of the leaves, checking on him surreptitiously from the bathroom window as she would Emma and Jeremy when they were teenagers, glad to have an hour to herself. One of her worries about this weekend was how much time they would spend alone together. At home she could busy herself running errands and making supper, messing around on Facebook and watching TV, and hide behind her mystery in bed. Here he would want more of her, as if this really was a second honeymoon.

To her it was the exact opposite. With every passing mile she was returning to a place where thirty years ago she’d been a different and certainly a better person—if naïve and a bit silly, then
relatively untouched by the larger sorrows of life, several of which, later on, were the result of her own decisions, choosing desire over duty only to discover she was wrong about everything, including who she was. The idea of that younger, blameless Marion chastened her, as if once they arrived she would have to meet with her and formally review her regrets once more.

She didn’t care about the money. She was sad about the house, and sorry for Art, but the children were gone and they could live anywhere. Secretly, as horrible as it sounded, she was actually looking forward to moving into a smaller place and starting over, or so she told herself, because sometimes, alone in the car at a stoplight or on the toilet with the door closed, she was subject to moments of trancelike blankness, staring straight ahead at nothing while biting the inside of one cheek as if trying to solve an impossible problem.

She wasn’t in love with him, or not the way she thought she should be. She wasn’t in love with Karen anymore, if she’d ever really been. She wasn’t in love with anyone, especially not herself. At some point, after menopause had robbed her of that bodily need, she’d convinced herself that the great movements in her life were in the past and succumbed to the inertia of middle age—prematurely, it seemed. While Art saw the divorce as a legal formality, a convenient shelter for whatever assets they might have left, from the beginning she’d taken the idea seriously, weighing her options and responsibilities—plumbing, finally, her heart—trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the ghost of Wendy Daigle out of the equation.

How much easier it would be if Wendy Daigle was dead. But
Wendy Daigle wasn’t dead. Against every reasonable measure of justice, Wendy Daigle was living with her second husband in Lakewood, just the other side of Cleveland, on a cul‑de‑sac, in a tan raised ranch with an aboveground pool in the backyard and a homemade hockey net in the driveway. Their e‑mail and phone were unlisted, but Marion had the license number of her Suburban written in tiny print at the bottom of the very last page of her old address book, where, occasionally, it would remind her of what a fool Art had thought she was.

She’d lost her spot on the page and read the same sentence again, sighed and kneaded the bunched muscles of her neck.

“Want a neck rub?” Art offered.

“I’m just tired of sitting.” She shifted and went back to her book, ignoring him again.

These little rebuffs, he would never get used to them. Years ago he’d come to accept that no matter how saintly he was from then on, like a murderer, he would always be wrong, damned by his own hand, yet he was always surprised and hurt when she turned him down. Gently, perhaps, but flatly, straight to his face, dismissing him as if he were a servant, his assistance no longer needed. As he was telling himself he had no right to feel slighted, his glance lighting on, then flitting away from the biker couple, from the front of the bus came a bang like a bomb going off—his first thought not a car but that phantom bugaboo, terrorists—the seismic impact jerked them forward, and, sickeningly, as if on a pivot, the entire rear end began to slide, and then, as the driver overcorrected, trying to bring it back, broke loose.

Odds of being killed in a bus accident:
        
1 in 436,212

    “Hang on!” someone behind them yelled, as a laptop clattered to the floor.

Marion grabbed at him, her book already gone, while he threw his arms straight out to brace himself against the seat back. The driver braked, and the gym bag flew across the aisle, bouncing around the bikers’ shins like a loose fumble. For a second Art thought of extricating himself from her grip to fall on it, but—just as quick—saw the problem with that option, and waited, rigid, still braced for impact, as the bus slowed, then stopped.

“What the hell.”

Marion relinquished her grip. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“I don’t think that was part of the deluxe package.”

“No.”

“Is everyone all right?” a woman up front asked.

“No,” an older woman answered calmly.

The gym bag lay on its side in the aisle, safely zipped. As he bent forward, stretching to retrieve it, the biker guy reached down, picked it up by one handle and passed it to him.

“Go Tribe.”

Art blanked, then caught up. “You know it. Thanks.”

“Whatta ya got in there—bricks?”

“Ha!”

Outside, copper-tinted snow blew through the high lights. They were sideways across all three lanes, the stopped traffic behind them cockeyed like bumper cars when the ride ends.

Up front, the driver was checking on the woman who wasn’t all right. Across the aisle, people were collecting their possessions, craning at their windows, calling on their cellphones. Gradually news filtered back. It wasn’t a car. A U‑Haul trailer had gotten loose and run into them, or they’d run into it. There were clothes all over the road. The biker concluded—unhelpfully, Art thought—that they weren’t going anywhere for a while.

“Great.” Marion held up her book by its flimsy cover, the pages butterflied. “I lost my place.”

Sitting there with the bag as she flipped the pages, he allowed himself to think of all the problems it would have solved if the bus had rolled and he alone had been killed. How clean it would be. No one could call it suicide, and Marion would receive the full half-million benefit, more than enough to pay off their debts. The policy had been in place forever, so no one would suspect. It was true that more than a few times over the last year he’d imagined his own death, though he would deny he’d ever been suicidal. He preferred to think of himself as practical rather than depressed, so that even now he viewed the crash as a missed opportunity, like a crime he wasn’t quite skilled or steely enough to pull off. He suspected there was something wanting in him to think like this, some lack of courage or integrity. His life had been staid and sedate for the most part, yet now that he was being tested, he grasped at the most dire solutions.

With a blip of static the driver came on the intercom and announced there would be a delay. He’d already called dispatch; a replacement bus was en route. He apologized for the inconvenience.

“Just what I want to do,” Marion said, “get on another bus.”

“Hmp,” Art snorted, to let her know she’d landed the joke, and that at heart he agreed. She went back to her book. As a complaint it was a mild one, delivered wryly, and well-deserved. He was hungry too, and tired. He understood that she didn’t want to be there, that this was just another ludicrous episode in the worst year of their lives—or possibly the second worst—and yet, while it was probably just a reflex, he was happy that, literally in the face of death, of all the possible reactions she might have had, she’d reached for him and hung on.

Odds of a vehicle being searched by Canadian customs:
        
1 in 384

    The Peace Bridge was lit up like a carnival ride, its trusses bathed a gaudy purple. Below the road deck, red navigation beacons warned boaters away from the great stone piers, tinting the dark river, making Marion think of all the freezing water headed for the Falls. It might beat them, depending on how long they had to wait at the tollbooths. He’d called and changed their reservation so they weren’t late, but after the delay, and changing buses, she was impatient.

Their first time they’d crossed during the day, a steamy Sunday in June, the two of them alone in his old Corolla, their friends’ squiggly shaving cream letters dried on the side windows. Just married—it was hard to recall the feeling, though she could see herself in her favorite white linen sundress, showing off her new ring to the customs agent. The idea made her wistful for that time before everything, the two of them younger than their children were now.

She’d been doing foster care in Cleveland and met him at a farewell party for a fellow caseworker who’d had enough of the revolving door of family court.

He was one of just a few men there, and the only one in a suit, having come directly from the office. He was tall, with broad shoulders like a football player, but had the gangly, near-concave leanness of a boy.
The bridge of his nose was generously freckled, his hair a lank cinnamon brown, a little long for her taste, and from time to time as they spoke he had to dip his head to one side and swipe it out of his eyes. He wrote grant proposals for Children’s Hospital downtown. His newest was for a mobile pediatric clinic—basically a tricked-out Winnebago—that would visit low-income neighborhoods on a rotating basis. In an effort to impress her, he was overly enthusiastic, as if he was on a crusade to fix the city. She wasn’t so cruel as to tell him it couldn’t be done. As he was describing its monthly route, ticking off names of notorious housing projects where she regularly did home visits with her clients, he threw one arm wide, sloshing beer out of his cup in a liquid arc that fell splashing to the hardwood floor. Before she could stop herself, she let loose a whoop of a laugh, drawing the whole room’s attention, and to her astonishment, the overgrown boy in the suit before her blushed deeply, red-cheeked as a leprechaun.

“I’m glad you think I’m funny.”

“I’m glad you’re funny,” she said.

Their courtship lasted more than a year, but in that moment she had already chosen—wrongly, it turned out, at least in one important category, which made it that much harder, now, stuck in the bus, to recall the happiness she’d felt then. Her entire life had not been a ruin. There were seasons she’d keep, years with the children, days and hours with Art and, yes, despite the miserable end, with Karen. Vacations, special occasions. The patients she’d come to love and then learned to let go. She’d be damned if she’d let Wendy Daigle poison everything.