The Vanishing Year(65)
“Never? You’ve lived in New York for how long and you’ve never gone to a Mets or Yankees game? That’s, like, un-American.”
“I know. I guess, just it wasn’t Lydia’s thing, and it’s certainly not Henry’s thing. I think his firm has had events at Yankee Stadium, but we haven’t gone.” I flick my fingertips in his direction. “I didn’t mean to hijack the conversation. Keep going. This Mary, she liked your daiquiri, then?”
“Oh, sure. Who wouldn’t?” He winks at me, and I laugh. “So, I got to plead my case, that it wasn’t my fault, ruffians and all that. She believed me, I guess. I saw her later at a bar outside the stadium and bought her another daiquiri. We met for dinner the following Saturday. She was . . .”
I give Cash his reverent moment. Beautiful? Amazing? Luminous?
“Bat-shit crazy. That’s what she was. She was a lawyer, an attack dog in the courtroom. She got an offer from a New York law firm after killing them in an insurance case. She drove a hard bargain and walked away a partner and a rich woman. I followed her here. I was a journalist. There had to be a ton of work in New York, right? I was working freelance but she didn’t think I had a lot of ambition and suggested the Post as a way to be more structured with my life. A real job, she called it.”
“Huh,” is all I can think to say.
“Yeah. Huh. But I did. And we had a spacious high-rise on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. She worked long hours, so I started working long hours. I proposed to her, to fix it, which is just about the dumbest thing a person can do. She said yes, because, well, I don’t know why. I surprised her at work one night to find her screwing one of the partners in her office. Wouldn’t you lock the door?” He offers a quick glance over. “I’d lock the door. I mean, c’mon.”
“Ouch.”
He sighed. “So I moved out and haven’t spoken to her since. Oh!” He snaps his fingers like he just remembered something. “That’s a lie. I covered a wedding a few years ago, and she was there as a guest. With him. She married that guy. She was all tucked and lifted, her face was a thick cake of makeup. She was like an ice sculpture of Mary. When I said I still worked at the Post, she laughed.”
“What did you say?” I ask, incredulous.
“I asked her if she still fucked her husband in her office. He was standing right there and by the look on his face, I could tell that answer was no.”
I laughed. “So you’re not still hung up on her?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “No, not hung up on her. She was the only woman I was ever engaged to, so sometimes I wonder. Plus, she was such a loose cannon. I find myself sabotaging relationships with other women, that’s all. They’re all so normal. Am I self-destructive? My mother thinks so.”
“Maybe a little bit.” It feels so nice to swing the camera around and focus on someone else’s problems.
“Well, self-destruction seems to be something we have in common.” He turns the radio on, but to a low volume. Something classical. More surprises. “How did you end up on the East Coast?”
The question is tangled up in the things I cannot say. I think of how to be honest, truthful, and not give away all my secrets. For me, the basest act is also the most admissible. Evelyn.
“I was in college. I was in a bad place.” I trace swirl patterns with my fingertip on the cold windowpane. “My adoptive mother, Evelyn . . . she died. I was depressed and too poor to take care of her so I . . . ran away.”
“She was sick?”
“She had cancer.” I try to avoid saying it, that big looming pit of blackness in the corner of my mind. The one that I skirt around with euphemisms and niceties like common burial and state-funded, when I really mean abandoned. Unloved. “So New York was an escape for me. I saw an opening at La Fleur d’Elise and started working there as a glorified custodian. I worked on design at night. Then . . . I met Henry.” My voice drops on the Henry. “The thing is, I left my mother.” I square my shoulders and stare at Cash’s profile, willing him to pass judgment. I see nothing, not a flicker of understanding, even. “In the morgue. I couldn’t afford to bury her. I left her.”
I see comprehension dawning in his eyes. He reaches out, touches my hand. “Are you that same person?”
“No. I was a mess then, running from myself. From other people. I’m only a slightly more put together mess now.” I pat my running nose with a napkin I find in the glovebox.
“Have you tried to go back? Find out . . . what the county did? I can do that for you. You could have a memorial. Have closure.”
“No. I can’t.” I shake my head vehemently. “They did a state-funded burial. That’s what they give to people who are abandoned. The only people who are abandoned in death are those who die unloved. I . . .” I can’t finish my sentence. I can’t even finish the thought, except I push. My brain pushes past the whooshing in my ears and the whir of the tires on the road and the awareness of my body and I think the thought I’ve avoided since I left San Francisco five years ago. “The last thing I ever did to Evelyn was tell her that she was unloved.”
The words themselves don’t feel so terrible out there, clunked out on the console between us. Cash covers my hand with his, and his eyes are so filled with compassion that I think I might break, right there in that shitty car on I-84. I gaze out onto the interstate in front of us, a large, flat expanse of nothingness with no cars and no people. It’s all so lonely.