The Fainting Room (45 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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“Oh, Jesus, Ingrid, I’m sorry. You’re my only friend. I never meant to mess you up like this.”

“I am not messed up!”

“I mean, I never meant to make you so unhappy.”

Ingrid stamped her foot in frustration. “I feel better than I ever have. Why don’t you believe me?”

“Will you lower your voice? People are staring at us.”

“So?” Ingrid whirled around glaring, and a white-haired man looked away. She turned back to Evelyn. “If you’re not going, I’m not going either.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you are. Ingrid, it was a crazy idea for me to think I could go with you. But you have to go.”

“I think you lost the right to tell me what to do when we started kissing in the motel.”

“Ingrid, please stop shouting!”

“I am not shouting!”

Evelyn tried to make her voice very calm. “All right. Suppose you don’t get on the plane. What do you think you’re going to do?”

“I don’t
know
what I’m going to do now that you’ve screwed it up,” Ingrid said. “Now will you shut up for a minute and let me think?” She jammed the hat down on her head so that no one would see her crying and walked away from Evelyn. Just beyond the ticket counter was a sign for the bathrooms and Ingrid went toward that.

A tiny woman in a janitor’s uniform stood outside the door of the ladies’ room with a cart of cleaning supplies. Ingrid began to walk around her.

“This is ladies’room, sir.”

Ingrid looked up from under her hat. The woman had a red bindi painted between her eyebrows, deep lines in aged brown skin. Yes, it was Ingrid she was talking to: “This is ladies’ room,” the woman repeated, and then, thinking that perhaps the young man in the hat spoke no English, she pointed to the blue sign on the door behind her, a stick figure wearing a dress. Then she pointed across the walkway. “Gentlemen’s room next door, sir.”

Ingrid opened her mouth to correct her and then didn’t.

“Thanks,” she said instead, and keeping her head down, she walked straight through the door of the men’s room. Eyes on the floor, she went toward the sink. A man came in behind her, walked past her and disappeared into a stall.

Without taking off her hat, Ingrid washed her face and dried it on the hem of her shirt. Stole a quick glance at her face in the mirror. It was no longer crying.

She found Evelyn sitting right where she’d left her, their luggage piled beside the row of chairs. Ingrid stopped in front of her. Not quite Ingrid, not quite Detective Slade. But with a plan.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s like this. You give me the car keys. I think what I want to do is just drive around for a while.”

“I’ll drive us somewhere,” Evelyn said. “We’ll go get something to eat and calm down, and then you can catch a later flight when you’re feeling better.”

Ingrid shook her head. “No. You’re staying here. You’re going to California, like you’ve always wanted.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No it isn’t. You want time away from Ray, and you want to see Hollywood—you just don’t want to see it with me.”

“It isn’t that, Ingrid—”

“—So give me the car keys. Go without me.”

“Why would you want me to do that?”

“Because I love you,” Ingrid said, and looked away. “And because you want to go and you should. But mostly because I love you.”

Evelyn was quiet a moment. Then she said, “I do need some time away from Ray.”

Ingrid turned back to at Evelyn. “The stuff Ray did—with his secretary and his job and stuff? He didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Just because you didn’t
mean
to do something doesn’t mean you didn’t do it,” Evelyn said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you either.”

“I’ll be all right,” Ingrid said. She was only saying the words, not believing them, but once they were out of her mouth, she realized they were true. She would be all right. She had some power after all. She wasn’t getting on the plane and that was all there was to it. Evelyn would go. She, Ingrid, would be alone again.

I work alone, Mister.

“But even supposing I did get on the plane,” Evelyn said, “what about you? Where would you go? I can’t just turn you loose with the car.”

“I’ll drive back to my dorm. My suspension’s been over for a week, technically speaking, and the dorm parents live there year round. They’ll let me in.”

“And what about your father?”

Ingrid shrugged. “Tell him I said hi when you get off the plane. No, I’m kidding. I don’t know what about him. I guess if he really wants me home, he’ll have to come get me. I don’t think he will, though. Now come on, go get on your flight.”

“Is that really what you want?”

“Yes,” Ingrid lied.

Of course it was not what she wanted. What she wanted was for Evelyn to feel the same passion that had detonated inside her and changed her forever. But Evelyn did not feel it.

What had occurred though, what was occurring even as they stood by the row of plastic orange chairs in Logan Airport, was something almost as wondrous. Ingrid had finally understood it: the physics of her own desire. There was a beautiful order to it, now that she knew the equation.

Ingrid grinned. She jerked her head toward the departure gates, took Evelyn’s hands in hers and said in her best Bogart, “Now go get on that plane. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

“You and your voices,” Evelyn said. “I’ll miss you.”

She never understood me, Mister. Not really.

Evelyn handed Ingrid the car keys. Ingrid threw her arms around Evelyn and tried to memorize it all, the scented heat, the sweet pressure, the ropes of red hair, the warm cream of her skin. And then the hug was over. Evelyn stepped away and nodded a silent goodbye. Ingrid picked up the typewriter case, shouldered her knapsack and disappeared into a crowd of people all going the other way.

29.

It’s a round trip ticket, Evelyn told herself. Stop freaking out. I’ll be back in a week, for God’s sake. She was going on vacation for a week, that was all.

That was the thought that allowed her to hurry to the gate, hand over her boarding pass, enter the tunnel that led to the plane.
I’ll be back in a week:
the thought allowed her to find her seat and stay there while the plane pulled away from the gate.

But once the wheels left the ground and Boston dropped away below her, the thought finished its job. Like an efficient maid who lets herself out when the work is done, the thought slipped out of Evelyn’s mind without her knowing it. The thought took along with it a pile of excuses, resolutions, failed attempts. As if they were just a day’s worth of dirty laundry.

A sparkle of excitement gleamed in the spacious room her mind had suddenly become. The plane gained altitude and Evelyn looked out the window, her hands gripping the armrests. The landscape was all greens and red-browns and everything was tiny. Houses became dots, then disappeared. Even the vast gray Atlantic grew smaller as the plane climbed.

Then they flew into a cloud and the world that Evelyn knew vanished entirely. She was higher than she’d ever been in her life.

Not balancing on a wire.

Flying.

Detective Slade slid behind the wheel of the Olds and piloted the enormous car out of the airport and onto the expressway.

Mister, I let her go. Yeah, she was guilty. She killed one man, and almost killed another, maybe would have done the same to me in the end. She’d married the wrong man—twice, if you ask me. But her problem was lack of being loved, not lack of morals. Me? I’ve got morals in spades. But I’d never drawn a heart until I met her.

I let her go because I loved her, Mister.

Now if you’re done taking my statement, I’m going to walk out of here, too. Don’t try to stop me. I gotta get back to my office.

Ingrid drove past the city, onto the interstate and past the first ring of suburbs. Then along the old narrow county roads that skirted the little towns that were half countryside, where the stone walls were still standing and the houses were still far apart. She passed the turnoff for Randall and kept going. On the outskirts of the next town over, she palmed the huge wheel hand over hand and managed to turn the car onto a narrow road. The road was marked with a blue sign whose small gold letters read “Newell Academy
.
”

On her left she passed the new dining hall, and wondered briefly if she’d be able to break into it as easily as you could the old one. It was possible; the new windows looked just like the original ones.
Contextualized design
, she thought, tipped her hat to Ray and kept driving.

At the far end of the campus, she parked beside a large white clapboard building, the girls’ dormitory. She lit a cigarette off the dashboard lighter and sat smoking and looking out at an empty playing field. After a while she pulled the bandage off her forearm. Beneath it, blood had dried precisely along the lines where the needle had entered, so that in its current state, the tattoo was visible as a scab in the shape of an atom. She scratched an edge and the old blood flaked away, revealing one red electron underneath.

Ingrid got the typewriter case out of the back seat and walked up toward the dorm. On the near side of the building, a small addition with a screened-in porch abutted the structure; this was her dorm parents’ apartment. Ingrid paused briefly in front of the porch steps, then continued around to the back, where the rear of the building was flanked by trees. There, hidden from both the road and the rest of the campus, she knelt by the basement window.

A bad thing, breaking and entering? Not if you don’t get caught. I don’t get caught. I’d done this particular window a hundred times. It was kid’s stuff. I climbed in and down onto the washing machine, dusted the laundry detergent from my knees and prowled up couple flights of stairs and down the hall. The floorboards squeaked like a soprano with laryngitis but nobody came out and caught me. I liked it that way.

I reached the door at the end of the hallway. My office. I’d been away a long time and the room looked it—empty of everything except a desk, a chair, and a bed. Yeah, I keep a bed in my office. Sometimes I do my best work lying down.

I hung up my hat, set up my typewriter, and stretched out on the mattress. Mister, I had a lot of thinking to do.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strong, Sarah Pemberton, 1967–

The fainting room / Sarah Pemberton Strong.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-935-43980-6

I. Title.
PS3619.T78F37 2013
813’.6--dc23

2013012279