Miracle Creek(44)

Matt turned into the 7-Eleven, parked far from the entrance, and looked at its image in the rearview mirror. The store hadn’t changed since his last time here, almost a year ago. An aura of neglect permeated this place—the 7-Eleven sign still cracked and listing to one side as if from old age, the handicapped-parking sign missing from the rusted pole, the white parking-space lines faded into ghostly dashes and dots. Across the street stood a gleaming Exxon, bustling with cars and trucks in line, people in and out, the door flapping open and shut in constant motion. The day he first bought cigarettes last summer, he’d almost gone there. He’d gotten in the left-turn lane for the Exxon behind two semis waiting to turn, and after a few minutes, Matt gave up and went to the 7-Eleven down the road. A little run-down, sure, but at least it’d be quick.

Now, sitting here squinting, trying to make out the cashier through the grimy glass, it occurred to Matt: What if he’d been patient for thirty more seconds for the trucks to turn, then gone to the Exxon? For sure, he wouldn’t be worried about the clerk identifying him now; the clerks across the street were busy, had to be, wouldn’t remember him from Adam. Not like the 7-Eleven clerk, the Santa look-alike who’d teased Matt for worrying about his hacking cough while buying cigarettes of all things, who started calling him “the Smoking Doc.” Hell, he wouldn’t have gotten cigarettes in the first place if he’d just stuck to Exxon. He’d only wanted a quick bite—a doughnut and coffee, maybe, or a corn dog and Coke. Some combination from Janine’s bad-for-fertility banned-foods list. It wasn’t until he passed the smokers outside 7-Eleven that he decided that cigarettes—probably even worse for sperm motility than junk food—were exactly what he needed. If not for that, he wouldn’t have hiked to the creek to smoke, wouldn’t have run into Mary, bought another pack and the next and God knows how many more, one of which may have ended up in a murderer’s hands. Could it be that by turning right rather than left one day a year ago—an impulse, no more a “decision” than picking which tie to wear—he’d changed everything? If he’d turned left, would Henry still be alive, head intact, and Matt at home right now, hands unmangled, taking pictures of a sleeping newborn instead of at this decrepit lot, spying to figure out if the man who could tie him to a murder weapon still worked here?

Matt shook his head to evict these thoughts. He needed to stop this mental masochism, the asking of unanswerable if-only questions that hurt his brain, and focus on his task. It took five minutes: one to see that the cashier was a girl, and four to call from the pay phone outside and tell the girl cashier he was looking for an employee, an older guy with white hair. The second she said no, no guy like that worked there, hadn’t for the ten months she’d been there, Matt hung up and breathed in deeply. He expected relief from the muck of dread he’d felt all day—for the pressure squeezing his lungs to lift, for the act of breathing to refresh rather than exhaust him. But none of that happened; if anything, his unease intensified, as if his worry about the 7-Eleven clerk had been covering up something else, like a bandage, and now that it was ripped away, he was having to face the bigger worry, the real worry, the thing he’d been dreading ever since he whispered, “6:30, same place, tonight,” passing by her in the courthouse: his meeting with Mary.



* * *



MATT’S FIRST MEETING with Mary last summer had been on Ovulation Day, a.k.a. As Much Sex as Possible Day. Another manifestation of Janine’s hyper-anal-retentivity, which (like snoring, burning food, and the mole below her butt) he’d found charming at first but irritating as hell now. How had that happened? He couldn’t remember making the switch; was it like falling off a cliff, and one day, he’d still loved these quirks and the next, he woke up hating them? Or did the charm wear off bit by bit, like a new car’s scent, declining linearly with each hour of the marriage’s aging until he’d crossed the line without ever noticing? One hour, the tiniest bit likable, neutral the next, the tiniest bit annoying the following, and in ten years, it’d sink to the level of repulsive, and in thirty, I’ll-take-an-ax-to-your-head-if-you-don’t-shut-the-fuck-up detestable?

It was hard to believe now, but Janine’s all-encompassing focus on future goals was one of the reasons he fell for her when they first met. Not that it was unusual. Pretty much every med-school student had a pathetic need to achieve, which peaked even higher into warp-drive levels among the Asians he knew. What was unusual about Janine was why. Unlike his Asian-American friends who told sob stories about their parents forcing them to study 24/7 and harping about Ivy League schools, Janine’s achievement orientation was born out of rebellion, because her parents hadn’t pushed her. She’d told him on their first date how she’d loved her freedom, relative to her younger brother—her parents forcing him (but not her) to go to school even when he was sick, for example, or punishing him (but not her) for getting A-minuses—until she realized: they expected more because he was a boy, their all-important firstborn male. She became determined to achieve what they expected from him (go to Harvard, become a doctor) just to spite them.

It was an interesting story, for sure, but what drew Matt in was the way Janine told it. She’d railed against the blatant, unapologetic sexism inherent in Korean culture and confided that because of it, sometimes she hated Koreans, hated being Korean, and then she’d laughed at how ironic it was that by trying to escape Asian gender stereotyping, she’d fallen into white America’s racial stereotyping and become a cliché: the overachieving Asian geek. She was fierce and funny, but also vulnerable, a little lost and sad, and it made him want to hail and protect her simultaneously. He wanted to join in her crusade to prove her parents wrong, especially after her mother said to him at their first meeting, “We prefer she marry a Korean man. But at least you are a doctor.” (And yes, it occurred to him that dating him might be part of Janine’s rebellion (but no, he didn’t let that bother him (too much.)))