If I Forget You(33)

“Where are you?” Chad asks for the second time, not stern yet, just trying to figure it out.

“In the city,” she says, getting up now while she talks, looking around the room frantically, as if he might come rushing through that door.

“Shopping?”

“A little,” Margot says. “Met Cricket for a drink.”

“You drove,” says Chad.

Did she? Of course she did. It seems forever ago that the hotel valeted her car. “Yes, I was running late for the train.”

“Okay, well, are you heading back? There’s nothing to eat here. I was thinking of calling in for some Thai.”

“Go ahead,” says Margot, seeing now on the clock that is just past five thirty. She was asleep for a few hours. “I’m going to wait till after rush hour. Poke around a little bit.”

“Drive safe, then,” Chad says. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” says Margot and hangs up the phone. In the mirror she dislikes herself, eyes red from the crying, clothes a wrinkled mess from the rain and then sleeping in the bed.

She hurries into the shower, and while the water tumbles over her she thinks about this, the boring safety of marriage, how moments ago she was just a woman in a hotel room, asleep, and now she is racing to put herself back together to get home to her husband, who will have eaten his Thai food out of a box in front of SportsCenter, having fulfilled his obligation for calling her and now grateful for her absence, since he can spend this time alone after his flight.

In the mirror she applies her makeup. When she is finished, she stares at her reflection and makes small corrections here and there. Margot looks now like someone who spent a day shopping in New York, and she suddenly remembers she should e-mail Cricket to say they had a drink together when they didn’t, but then she realizes that she would rather invite Chad’s questions than Cricket’s. Plus, what are the odds of Chad even saying something?

Instead, sitting on the edge of the bed with her bag packed, a bag she will have to hide in the way back of her SUV, as if she has not been away for a few days, she pulls out the business card Henry gave her earlier today.

She types his number into the phone and then writes, “It was good to see you today. Oh, this is Margot.”

Then she hits SEND and holds her breath.

A reply is back in moments. “It was GREAT to see you.”

Oh, Jesus, Margot thinks, her heart racing. She has a sudden urge to be outside, to run again. Don’t think, she tells herself. She types quickly with her thumbs. “We should do it again sometime. Maybe not on the street.”

“Meet me for a drink. Not tonight. I have Jess. But Monday.”

Margot sits and stares at his sentences on her phone. She feels somehow as if she has already cheated, like she won’t be able to look Chad in the eye when he rises out of his chair to give her a perfunctory hug.

But for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t really give a shit, and this is a good feeling. It has been forever since she has done something that feels true and honest.

She types back. “Where?”

A moment later, her phone lights up again.

“Anywhere you are willing to be,” the poet says.





Henry, 1991

Now this: coming to, bright sun through the doorway, a pounding in his temples from the wine the night before, an awareness that she is not next to him anymore, sentience returning like a migraine, sitting up and then thinking it might be a miracle to stand, wondering what time it is, when he hears raised voices from outside the cabin.

Henry stands and quickly puts on a pair of jeans and pulls on a T-shirt. Holy shit, his head aches. Then the voices from outside are louder now, a man’s voice and then, clearly, Margot’s, unintelligible through the walls but sounding distressed.

Henry is an animal, hangover be damned, the former shortstop, still quick as a cat, out the door and into blinding morning sunlight, which obscures even the blue sky the way it beats down directly on the east side of the cabin.

It is disorienting for a moment, but then coming around the corner, he sees them, Margot and some man, and at first he thinks it must be Ted, the vintner, for who else could be here?

But the man is taller than Ted, and as Henry moves toward where the two of them are standing across from each other, not aware that he is only some twenty yards away, he sees Margot push the man hard in the chest, and then the man reaches for her, in almost a hug, and turns her around, brings her in tight to him, the way someone would subdue a violent child. He is hurting her.

Henry runs into the sun. Around him, it all explodes like stars inside a dream. Margot’s voice is distant, though she is right there. The man’s jaw is a fat fastball down the middle. Henry’s almost leaping in the air as he punches him as hard as he can, and then it’s all terribly wrong as the man goes down.

Margot yells no in that half second before he swings; then she goes down to the ground next to the man while the pain shoots from Henry’s fist up his arm. The man is prone on the ground. His hands hold his face. Thankfully, his legs are moving.

The madness leaves Henry quick as a fever. Margot is saying “Dad” over and over again.

Oh f*ck oh f*ck oh f*ck, what has he done?

Henry goes toward them and Margot turns from where she is bent down and sees him and says, “Get away from me!”