The Narrows(15)
Chapter Two
1
Maggie Quedentock was still shaking when she climbed back into her husband’s Pontiac. With one shaking hand, she keyed the ignition and pulled out onto the darkened strip of pavement that was Full Hill Road. The radio was on, John Fogerty straining the speakers, singing about something that had fallen out of the sky. Maggie quickly turned it off. Though they’d owned the car for several years, it now felt completely alien to her: the seat was uncomfortable and too close to the steering wheel, the dashboard controls were in all the wrong places, and when she went to hit the high beams she accidentally flicked on the windshield wipers.
Am I really going to lose my shit right now? After all this?
Once she got far enough down Full Hill Road that the lights of the houses behind her had blinked out of existence, she pulled along the shoulder beneath a lamppost and slid the gearshift to Park. She clicked on the Pontiac’s interior light but didn’t look at her reflection in the rearview mirror right away. Instead, she sat in the uncomfortable driver’s seat and faced forward, staring blankly at the curve of roadway and the dense black trees that loomed up on either side. Already her mind was replaying snapshot scenes from the night’s escapades, accusatory in all their vividness. She couldn’t blink them away. Finally, she confronted the creature in the rearview mirror.
Muddy eyes, blotchy complexion, hair askew, she was instantly reminded of those self-deprecating little moments back in high school, so many years ago now, when she had surrendered countless times to boyfriends’ lustful desires. They used to paw at her mercilessly in the backseats of their parents’ cars. She was forty-five years old now and married, with high school a distant, if not smeary and indistinct, memory, and the blotchy skin and wild nest of hair suddenly struck her as vulgar. A deep, personal resentment briefly rumbled around inside her chest, thick as a blood clot.
She had never had an affair before—had never even considered cheating on Evan—and now, less than an hour after the deed had been done, she wondered what the hell she was doing. Was it possible she had been a completely different person just a couple of hours ago, sitting at Crossroads and nursing a Heineken at the bar?
From her purse, which she’d tossed haphazardly onto the passenger seat in an effort to leave Tom Schuler’s house as quickly as possible, she produced a small black makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her lap then fumbled with the zipper until the contents spilled into her lap and onto the floor.
“Fuck.”
Get it under control, lady. You’re vibrating like a guitar string.
She leaned forward, the side of her face resting against the steering wheel, and scrounged around in the footwell. When her fingers brushed along the thin, square packets of moist towelettes, she snatched them up and hastily peeled one open, her eyes volleying furtively between her unsteady fingers and the blotchy mask of her face in the rearview mirror. She was attractive and she kept in good shape, exercising several times a week and watching what she ate, yet the visage staring back at her was horrific.
She exhaled nervously then began wiping the streaks of mascara that had leaked from her eyes to the tops of her cheeks. The smell of ammonia burned her nostrils.
Fifteen years of marriage and this is what I do. Again, she unleashed a shaky breath, this time certain she could smell Tom Schuler on her. Her mouth was full of him. His perspiration was commingled with hers, too, clinging guiltily to her body like an illness. Moreover, she could still feel him inside her—a tender, vacant sensation nestled between her thighs that, even now, simultaneously nauseated and excited her. Fifteen years of marriage.
She and Evan had dated on and off throughout high school, and even for a while after graduation. They’d fumbled through their fair shares of other relationships—Evan had even gotten engaged to a woman from Delaware, though it had never culminated in marriage—before reconnecting. At that point she had been thirty, and although she did not feel the motherly desire to have children, she knew that a woman in her forties had a better chance of being killed by terrorists than getting married. Or so she’d heard. Whatever the case, forty had only been a scant decade away at that point, and the notion that she might be doomed to spend her life unmarried and alone terrified her.
She confessed her desire to Evan on more than just a few occasions, but Evan Quedentock, high school football star and the life of the party (as long as the party was in a bar with his lifelong friends), was not the type of man to be easily persuaded. They lived together, took care of each other. What more did she want? Marriage, she’d informed him. Commitment. To this, Evan would always chuckle and ask what more commitment there was than a man forking over his paycheck every two weeks. It was then that she realized this approach wasn’t going to get her anywhere with him.
Like a sailor tacking for new wind, she decided on a different approach: she lied and told him she was pregnant. You really want to be responsible for bringing a bastard kid into the world? That did the trick. They went down to the courthouse the following week and got hitched. It seemed Evan Quedentock could be caught after all; she just had to put the right bait in the right trap.
A week or so after they got married, she had summoned some tears by spraying perfume in her face. She thought she’d done an admirable job telling him she had lost the baby. At the news, Evan had seemed both relieved and a bit disappointed (the latter emotion a surprising revelation to Maggie since she knew Evan, much like her, had no great desire to have children). He had comforted her in his clumsy, brutish way, and that had been the end of it. Fifteen years later, they were still married.