The Do-Over (38 page)

Still vibrating with anger, she turned to Dan. “Your fighting newlyweds story won’t get you out of this one.”

“This one?” The man’s voice rose with interest, and he began to write on the top form. “You’ve been brought to the attention of airport security before?”

Dan smiled, in control again. “Of course not.”

“It was a warehouse store.” She rolled her eyes at Dan to use up an ounce of her contempt.

Dan poked himself in the temple. “She nailed me right here with a box of facial tissues.”

She leaned closer to the man. “He asked me to buy them.”

“We were out!”

She ignored Dan and counted on the airport man to have more sense than her completely dense husband had. “I was in Vancouver, working.”

“You ran away from home.” Dan appealed to the man. “She ran away from home.”

“I took a thirty day vacation from my home which was not even thirty days. It was twenty-five days because your father was helpless, just like you, after your mom’s skateboarding accident.”

The man scanned his paperwork. “Your mother’s a skateboarder?”

“And his father can’t feed himself or buy his own facial tissue. It’s a genetic flaw science is trying to eradicate by not letting them reproduce.”

Dan ignored her and gave the guy his
we’re in this together
look. “She took off and slept with lesbians. Many, many lesbians.”

The man dropped his pen and stared at Dan.

Dan shrugged. “I know. But that was the only positive. She also had a thing with a bubble bath salesman.”

“I didn’t sleep with him.”

He dismissed the possibility with a flick of his hand, and she couldn’t let him get away with that. She sat up straighter. “I could have.” That got his attention. “I thought about it. Hard.”

His lips tightened into a line.

“Unfortunately, the only sex I had was on the floor with you. I still have rug burns.”

“Oh, the sunburn.” He appealed to the man again. “She was sunburned,
everywhere
.” He smirked at her. “Who was on a nude beach with a bunch of naked women where anybody and everybody could see her?”

She jerked back, “how did you find out—”

He tapped two fingers at the back of his head. “Eyes right here.”

She snorted, but he ignored her and continued with his bucket of evidence. “My mother was attacked.”

“Here?” The man turned to his forms.

“In Vancouver by an alley cat. I have reason to believe it was deliberate.” He tilted his head toward her. “She also used an alias. And that sex on the floor?”

The man leaned closer.

Dan raised his eyebrows in a moment of guy connection. “It was different. And after fifteen years of marriage, it makes a man wonder.”

The man nodded, and Dan mirrored the nod back in complete agreement. “I told her we were separated.”

The word still brought her such pain, she just wanted to ignore it and get back to normal. “I’m here, right now. I’m using the name Janie. I’m wearing her sweats. I’m here with her husband to pick up her son.” She shook her head. “My husband. My son.” She put her hand over the man’s clipboard. “It’s been a confusing time for me, but I’m back. The fishing line is knotted, but it has to be really bad to cut it. I never use the f-word and only in a medical context will I ever say
pubic
again. Our son’s flight is due. Please.”

The man let out a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling then faced them both. “I was an FAA investigator for thirty years, saw a lot of wrecks. Sometimes at the crash site you’d know it was the plane itself, sometimes pilot error. Saw one time a bird ground up like burger meat in the turbine. Sometimes, I’ll be honest, we never knew what in the hell went wrong. Sometimes there’d be survivors. Sometimes there’d be nothing but body parts, and sometimes the people and the plane could fly again. It’s a lot like marriage.”

She and Dan sat silently, side by side, waiting for the verdict, but the man just shrugged. “It’s a crapshoot.”

“Logan!” Dan waved him over to their family cluster. They looked, at heart, just like all the other ones. There were groups of parents, a grandma/grandpa, and three girlfriends greeting a fourth. Logan found his own family, and he was taller, she thought, as she held him close. She breathed in his warmth and enjoyed his tight hug back that at his age took a month-long absence to really get.

Then he stepped back, and Dan threw an arm around him, two guys embracing in public, talking instantly about basketball, Grandma’s cool cast, and a fishing trip with Grandpa.

She let them walk ahead toward the baggage claim and could see from behind that their hair swirled just the same way in the back. Dan wore his shorter, but the wave, just at the nape of the neck, was identical to his son’s. She’d never noticed that before. She’d never noticed.

Logan turned and waved her closer. “It was four pounds!”

“Four pounds?” She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she answered just like she had when he’d been too little to talk. He’d use the two or three vowels he had a handle on and raise his voice at the end, and she would turn toward his high chair and say,
really? That’s amazing!
Then he’d smile his one-toothed grin. She’d watched for that first tooth’s arrival like any new parent, but she’d missed it. When they’d finally spotted it, Dan called it the secret tooth.

“I thought Grandpa was gonna fall right out of the boat. He kept getting up like he was gonna stand. I was reeling in this monster fish, and I’m like,
Grandpa, sit down
,” Logan laughed, pure excitement on his face. “Who taught me to sit in the boat? And he’s all getting up and rocking it.”

Dan reached over to the conveyor belt and pulled off Logan’s suitcase.

“Yeah.” She shook her head at Logan’s story. “Rocking the boat’s no good.”

She sat on the bedspread and leaned against the brown headboard. An unopened book on
Resistance in Self-directive Learning
lay beside her, the TV flickered with no sound, and the digital clock read 11:50 p.m. She’d made it home. There’d been dinner and conversation with Logan, who was so interested in retelling his month’s adventure, he hadn’t noticed any tension between her and Dan. Maybe there wasn’t any. It might have fizzed out at the airport like old champagne. Maybe she’d found normal again. She’d just forgotten what it looked like.

The only moment she’d even seen Dan look her way was when they’d run out of ketchup, and Logan had gotten out a new one, a move requiring a pair of scissors to release the giant jug from its twin. Dan had glanced at her then, and she was pretty sure his hand had gone to the spot on his temple where she’d drilled him with the box of facial tissues. Pretty sure, although it might be guilt that made her assume that was what he was thinking. Lois had been right about one thing. She really did have the rest of her life to assure Dan that she was back to normal.

At bedtime she’d been a little worried, since it was harder to find normal with someone breathing next to you. They’d managed just fine for years, but at the end of the night she’d only wasted her worry. 

Dan, without any sign or sound, had gone to bed in the guest room. She wouldn’t have known it if she weren’t sitting there alone, so Logan certainly wouldn’t guess. If it came up, she could claim sleep apnea, that handy ailment that drove non-snorers to guest rooms all across the country, maybe even in Canada. She and Dan would get back to their own normal soon enough. Like any return from a vacation, it wasn’t always easy to embrace the regular life you had to join again.

She decided when the clock hit midnight that it was time for sleep but didn’t have the energy to take off her sweats, brush her teeth, pull back the covers in that crisp way that said
I am going to bed
. Instead she curled her legs up to her chest and dug her toes under the blanket and top sheet letting herself slide down and go to bed by default. She’d sleep for as long as her life let her.

“My shoes totally don’t fit.”

A pair of skuzzy high tops dangled near the side of the bed, and she tried to focus on why.

“We’re doin’ the three on three, and I don’t have shoes.” Logan stood in flip flops, his high tops swinging from his hand, and the smell of them hit her. She sat up so quickly, she felt the room spin, but it might have been the odor of boy basketball shoes. It was like awakening to the aroma of coffee, the evil version.

“Don’t bother your mom, Logan. We’ll stop on the way.” Dan pulled a t-shirt out of his half of the dresser as if he were starting any other day in their bedroom. She could see the muscles bunch in his shoulders, the cotton slide over his damp skin, but it was like watching a familiar stranger act out the part of the husband.

She pushed some hair out of her face, tried to sit up more alert, but gave up when her body wouldn’t rise any higher off the mattress. “Go to Shoe Haven. There’s a coupon on the fridge.” 

God, how did she know that? It felt like remembering the name of the neighbor’s dog from when you were four. But when she gave it a thought, it
had
only been twenty-five days not twenty-five years since she cut the coupon out of the paper, knowing that when Logan came back from his trip, he’d have outgrown everything from his underwear out and his shirts, down. But… “Three on three?” That she did not remember from twenty-five years, twenty-five days or last night ago.

“Evan called and Jamie and his Dad had to bail on the tournament. Dad and I are gonna go.”

She eyed the clock. Eight-twenty a.m. Didn’t three on three sound sexual? What would… “Oh. Basketball.” Her brain kicked up a notch, but her body still didn’t want to move. “When will you be back?”

Dan tossed a towel, his shoes, and wallet in a duffel bag. He seemed to be part of the morning conversation, but she wondered if Logan noticed he’d not actually said anything to her.

“I don’t know. Dad?” Logan turned to him.

“After dinner sometime. When it’s dark, it’ll all be over.”

She felt a chill and sank lower into the bed, waving Logan down. He sighed, the teenage disclaimer against actually liking affection. Appearances, even in the privacy of home, were appearances, after all. But he leaned over the top of her head, gave her a kiss and a squeeze, and she knew he meant it. “Have fun.”

Logan ran out, and she heard the outgrown shoes crash into his room as he chucked them on his way down the hall. She waited, watched the swirl of hair at the collar of Dan’s t-shirt as he bent to zip his bag. He stood, shouldered it, and for a moment she thought he’d say something, but he seemed to change his mind, or maybe he didn’t have anything to say. What had she expected?

He walked out, and she listened to him following Logan down the hall. She slid all the way down to the pillow, stared up at the white ceiling, and thought a lot about sleep.

At ten-twenty she concluded that thinking about sleep didn’t have the same appeal as sleeping. It ought to have some benefit since thinking about sleep was also a mindless activity. Why didn’t it have any of the lovely numbing benefits of actual sleep? 

She was irritated that the white glare of the ceiling didn’t offer the comfort the warm dark of an eyelid did, and currently in her bedroom there was also an odor.
Odor
sounded like it was a bad thing, and it wasn’t exactly. A
smell
still didn’t capture it. It was an unusual aroma. In the first hour she’d stared at the ceiling, she’d noticed something drifting around her. It was an aroma beyond cotton and carpet and the aftermath of Logan’s sneakers, but she couldn’t identify it, and without a path for the scent memory to travel, it was as if she couldn’t take it in.

In the second hour, it insisted and didn’t dissipate with the aging morning as she’d expected it to. She sniffed her pillow, then the one next to her. She moved down the bedspread, nose to the fabric like a bloodhound, but nothing matched the scent in the air.

She swung her legs off the end of the bed and smelled the lotion bottle on the dresser then walked to the closet and took a tour from Dan’s oxfords and khakis to her blouses and dress slacks. Crouching down, she checked out the shoes in a dazzling assortment of browns and blacks, but they smelled leathery, not what she was looking for.

She crawled along the carpet, and the scent’s power grew. In her head she could hear the child’s game.
Warmer. Warmer. Warmer.
She rounded the end of the bed to Dan’s side, bonked her head against the box springs, and sniffed.
Hot.
But lifting the bed skirt she found nothing but Dan’s suitcase. She reached for the handle but fell short, and lay down on the carpet, wedging half her body underneath the frame. She remembered the day she’d left home, reaching for her suitcase with one arm and one leg. This time she made a complete snow angel, both arms and legs swinging freely along the carpet. She’d learned that lesson, and with the first try, she caught the handle and pulled the suitcase out.

Sitting cross-legged, she sniffed the case. Bingo. She unzipped it and inside the black nylon interior lay a small plastic bag filled with the spice of golden curry. The label was in the shape of an elephant and stamped
Punjabi Market, Vancouver
. Reaching inside the suitcase, she traced the stylized trunk of the animal and pictured Dan that last time at Abundance. He’d held out his hand, hadn’t he? She closed her eyes and pictured him at the moment he’d tried to bring her the brightness of the market she’d missed. But John had been holding her.

She lifted the bag out, smelled the spicy heat of it, and crawled back onto the bed. She held it against her chest and stared at the blank ceiling. The earthy scent of curry helped her feel a little better, but the white ceiling looked like a whole lot of nothing. 

She held the bag closer to her face and let the golden light of it seep in, a golden light like the ceiling of her loft. Hadn’t it made her feel better even when she knew she was leaving? Hadn’t yellow made the sleeplessness more bearable? Maybe she just needed a yellow ceiling, a clear curry yellow ceiling. Could she rally for that? She’d need a bucket of paint, a brush. In no time, she could be back in bed staring up at something with promise.