Strangled (15 page)

I
was in San Francisco International Airport when I saw her. Specifically, I was sprawled across a chair in one of those generic lounges with the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the departing and arriving planes, waiting for my connecting flight to Boston, because the only nonstop out of Vegas with any available seats was the red-eye, and civil people, it must be said, don’t fly on red-eyes. My shirt was untucked. My hair was mussed up. I had circles of worry and exhaustion under my sky-blue eyes. I had my cell phone plastered to my ear, listening to Vinny Mongillo explain that he had once again proven himself to be the world’s most tenacious and talented reporter by producing, in a mere three hours, Paul Vasco’s entire criminal record, his incarceration history, and, most notably, his most recent release date, which, not by coincidence, happened to be six months before. He also had Vasco’s current home address, a nugget of information he said would cost me dinner at a major Boston restaurant or, better yet, a private club, for him and the state bureaucrat who provided it. I couldn’t even imagine how much fun that would be.

When I was done with the requisite congratulations, promises, and thank-yous, Mongillo said, “Now let me tell you about Kimberly May.”

And that’s when I saw her, sauntering down the airy walkway amid a cluster of humanity that had apparently disembarked from the same plane and were heading for the exits and for wherever else after that — great hotels, bad motels, overseas flights, the warmth of home, the stone-cold reality of a failing marriage. Wherever. I noticed first the achingly familiar walk, the swivel of the hips, the fit of her jeans, the way her long brown hair swished back and forth. Then I saw the unmistakably beautiful shape of her face, the deep-set eyes, and the perfectly proportioned nose. All those people walking by, maybe a hundred a minute at least, and my eyes naturally fell on her. I swear to God, you could see the person you truly loved in a pitch-black room.

And not that I’d make too big a deal of this, but there must have been eighty people sitting in the waiting area for the flight to Boston, and out of all of us, her look naturally came to rest on me. So she came walking over, calm and casual, unflustered, as if I’d been her destination all along, like something prearranged, not in the slightest bit surprised to see me. She had an overnight bag slung over her shoulder and a computer satchel in her hand. She placed them both on the floor, sat down in the empty seat beside mine, and said in that somewhat husky voice, “Come here often?” And then she smiled that crinkle-eyed smile that I don’t think has ever fully left my thoughts, or, in my more honest moments, my hopes.

It was Elizabeth Riggs, a woman I once thought I’d marry and probably should have married, but never did, mostly because, I’ve come to convince myself, she came into my life at exactly the wrong time.

She knew her line was weak, and so did I, but I let her off the hook with the following pale little offering of my own: “Only when I’m flying.”

I remained slung across my chair, my neck supported by the top of the backrest. She reached out and touched the side of my face with her hand — no hesitation, no qualms, no forced display of formality. It’s just what came to mind or body, so it’s what she did.

Her touch, by the way, was warm and soft, casual yet luxurious, like a cashmere blanket flung across an aging couch. I wanted to wrap myself in it, to take shelter from the cruel world in it. Instead, I took her hand in mine, kissed it once, and placed it back against my cheek. Given how attractive she was, anyone who was watching, and there were probably more than a few people who were, would have assumed that we had been lovers for a long, long time. And in some odd way, they were right.

“So I get to the building about ten seconds ahead of the first screaming patrol car…”

That was Vinny again, his voice still coming into the forgotten phone that remained absently against my ear. I said, “That’s terrific. Call you back in a little while.”

I flipped the phone shut and said, “That was Vinny.”

She nodded, her gaze hanging on mine in a spell of silence. She said, “You look good.”

I didn’t.

“So do you,” I said.

She did.

Her hands were now resting on her thighs. I asked, “Where are you coming from?”

“LA. I was down there visiting a friend for a couple of days.”

A friend. There used to be a day not so long before that I knew every one of her friends and she knew every one of mine. Times, quite obviously, change, and a friend in this case could mean absolutely anything.

She asked, “Are you heading back to Boston?”

I nodded. We looked at each other again, undoubtedly both racking our overwhelmed brains for more banal questions.

They write songs about these kinds of encounters, particularly bad songs, actually. Wasn’t there an especially awful one about a pair of former lovers who ran into each other on Christmas Eve in a grocery store, or some similarly regrettable time and place, shuffling their feet in the frozen foods aisle as they tried to stem the flood of memories?

She finally moved beyond the realm of verbalized politesse and said, “I heard you were getting married. I’ve been meaning to call and congratulate you. But you know, you violated our agreement. We’re supposed to inform each other of moves, deaths, marriages, and births.”

I didn’t remember any such agreement, though I kind of liked the sentiment. I smiled a weary smile and thought about the number of times we’d sat on the couch together, or lain in bed, or faced each other on bar stools, sitting close, one of us telling of a recent failure, the other there to do the propping up, always successful until the day it wasn’t, and then the relationship wasn’t a relationship anymore.

I said, “But you didn’t read the follow-up story of me not getting married?” I shook my head self-consciously, expressing, or at least trying to, the full depths of my idiocy in male-female relationships.

She looked surprised without being particularly disappointed, though maybe I was reading too much into that. “Um, why not?” she asked.

Blunt now. She pulled her hair back with both arms in that way she always did, getting it out of her face, getting ready to have a serious talk.

I said, “You know. Life.”

“Or death?”

Clever, her referring to my wife’s death six years before, something that Elizabeth ended up believing would color me for the rest of my days, making it impossible to have a normal, healthy relationship with a normal, healthy woman.

I leaned forward now, my elbows on my knees, looking at her with a cocked head. I said, “No, I’m pretty sure it’s life. You know, sometimes two people aren’t meant to get married, even if they first thought they were, and it’s not because the guy’s wife died.”

She nodded. “Point taken. What went wrong?” Not dropping it, and unapologetic in her pursuit of facts.

“I’m not really sure. I haven’t talked with her.”

She looked at me with a flash of incredulity and bemusement.

“So how did you tell her you didn’t want to get married?”

“I didn’t.”

She guffawed, which probably wasn’t the most endearing or empathetic reaction to this revelation. Then she said, “She called it off, not you?”

“Long story, though I guess not really. I was sitting down at Caffe Vittoria that morning trying to figure a way out of things. I mean, the woman is terrific — for somebody else. I swear, someone’s going to marry her someday soon and think they’ve hit the fucking lottery.

“We were going to do a little justice-of-the-peace deal and then head to Hawaii, you know, everything very low-key. So I finally get up the guts to call her, and when I do, she tells me she’s in the Atlanta airport. It’s five hours before we’re due to be married, maybe less. I say, ‘What are you doing down there?’

“And she comes back with, ‘I’m so sorry, Jack. I was just about to call you.’

“She literally fled town. I haven’t seen her since.”

Elizabeth looked at me incredulously. “You’re sure you didn’t pull a Jack on her without realizing it? You didn’t send her signals? You didn’t drive her away? You didn’t do that thing where you kind of cut her off from everything you’re doing and thinking because you’re afraid to let someone else in?”

Pull a Jack.
“That’s real nice,” I said. “Thank you for your heartfelt sympathy in this most trying time.”

I said that last part with intentional, mocking formality. She laughed and absently dropped her hand on the outside of my leg like she always used to do and said, “I’m sorry, but come on. You know how you can be.”

“And I know how you are, which is not very nice.”

Past the awkwardness, everything very familiar again, comfortable.

She asked, “And you really haven’t talked to her since?”

I shook my head.

“What are you doing out here? Don’t tell me you went on your honeymoon on your own.”

I smiled and said, “No. Story.” I didn’t tell her what, and she had obviously been too busy with her friend in LA to have read the
Record
online.

She said, “At least you picked a honeymoon destination that we’d never been to. I would’ve killed you if you went to Turks.”

The Turks and Caicos Islands, amid a stretch of too much arguing, near the end of a bitter winter. We were having yet another senseless fight over something we wouldn’t be able to remember the next day when she glared at me and said, “You know what the problem is with us? We don’t spend enough time together.” I mean, I always knew she could be counterintuitive, but this was the biggest bit of counterintuition that I had ever heard.

That’s when she flipped open the morning
Record,
pointed to an airline ad, and said, “We’re going here.”

“Where.”

“Providenciales.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know. Um, says here, the Caribbean.”

“When.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

And sure enough, there we were at the airport the following morning, bags in hand, frequent-flier miles drained out of our accounts, with two round-trip tickets to the Turks and Caicos Islands and a reservation for three nights at a beachfront guesthouse named Jose’s Place. I had created a rule for myself about never staying at a place named for the owner, unless it was Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. But in this case, every decent resort on the island was booked. Jose’s, for every good reason, wasn’t.

After Jose himself proudly showed us to our room, with the torn shade covering the single window, the scraped tile floors, the refrigerator-size closet, the Third World bathroom, we looked at each other, wondering what the hell we were going to do.

Ends up, we decided pretty quickly: we had sex. We had it in the room, immediately and urgently, then later, constantly. We had it that evening on a blanket under a coconut tree on the pristine beach as insects the size of dairy cows chirped in the nearby brush. We had it in the handicapped restroom of a very swank resort before the dessert course of our dinner the following night. We had it in the middle of the afternoon under a blanket on a dock during a passing rainstorm.

Not that I’m proud of any of this. Well, okay, maybe I am a little.

We also talked. We talked about the past, mine and hers and ours. We talked about the present. And we talked about the future, always as a couple, the challenges we’d face, the marriage we would undoubtedly embrace, the babies that would someday pop into our lives. And then we had more sex.

She wore a flower in her hair. The tops of our feet got brown. We’d walk the beach and look at the silent, sullen couples sunning themselves on the expensive chairs at their luxury resorts, knowing that our little eighty-five-dollar-a-night prison cell of a guest room back at Jose’s was the most perfect thing we could ever have imagined.

“I wouldn’t have gone to Turks,” I told her, solemn now. “That’s off the list.”

She squeezed my thigh. “Good,” she said. “Same here.”

We fell silent for a minute. Finally, I looked her square in the eyes and asked, “What went wrong?”

When she looked back at me, her eyes were glistening like the top of a pond after a hard rain, like they might spill over in even the slightest breeze.

She swallowed and said, “Life went wrong, Jack. Life. We didn’t share enough of it. You spent too much time looking at the past — understandably so. I spent too much time worried about the future — maybe just as understandably. And the moment kind of passed us by. Before you knew it, you and I weren’t really you and I.”

I saw a tear fall from her left eye to her cheekbone, then begin the long descent toward her neck. My reflexes wanted me to reach out for her. My brain kept everything still and in its proper place. Brains can be stupid sometimes, especially mine.

She added, “The thing with you, Jack, the thing with you, is that the dead people in your life keep on dying.”

She paused after this declaration, causing me to replay it in my mind.
The dead people keep on dying.
She always did have a pretty amazing way with words, as well as piercing insight. The problem now, though, was that even people who had never been in my life kept on dying.

“It’s completely understandable,” she added, “but the fact that it’s understandable doesn’t make it any easier on the living people in your life.”

I said, “You’re over us?” I don’t know where I got the guts to ask that question, but I did.

She replied, “Some days, yes. Other days, not really. You?”

I bit my lip and replied, “That about sums it up here as well.”

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you, too.”

A woman’s voice over the PA system announced a preboarding for the flight to Boston, which brought me back to that awful day at Logan Airport when she first left for her new life in San Francisco. I should have stopped her. I could have stopped her. And I didn’t.

She flashed me an odd look, the two of us sitting there amid the soft commotion of passengers all around us rising to their feet and grabbing their purses and computer cases and carry-ons. She said, “I had planned to tell you this if you ever got around to calling me to let me know you were getting married —”