The Office of Historical Corrections(11)
“My sister. By her husband. Two days before her first wedding anniversary. She’s alive. She can’t talk. Or maybe she can now. I don’t visit.”
“So this is your fucked-up cautionary tale? It’s a good thing JT left me now because if he hadn’t he would shoot me when he got sick of me?”
“I wasn’t thinking that. I wasn’t thinking anything, and I said the first thing that came to mind.”
“The house where your sister got shot was the first thing that came to mind when I asked if you knew where my fiancé was?”
“It’s always the first thing that comes to mind,” Rena says, and she is too relieved by the honesty to be ashamed.
* * *
? ? ?
Dori pulls the car out of the rest stop lot and Rena prepares for the long silence on the way back. Dori will be too proud and polite to say what happened; she will only say they didn’t find him. She will send guests home with tulle-wrapped almonds and be front and center at her father’s sermon Sunday, by which point Rena will be on a plane home, home being a city she hasn’t yet lived in, two weeks in a short-term sublet while she looks for a real rental, her belongings in a pod making their way across the ocean. But two exits later and many exits too early for that future, Dori gets off the highway. Rena isn’t sure which set of signs they are following until they get there.
Waterworld. As advertised in highway billboards, except the billboards make it look giant and fluorescent, while in person it is somewhat sadder, a slide pool in one direction, a wave pool in another, and off to the side, vendors and a carnival stage with no show in progress. It is fifteen dollars to get in, but the real cash cow is the entryway gift shop, where now that they are here Rena supposes it would be rude not to buy a bathing suit. Dori buys a pink suit and a pair of blue Waterworld sweats. She is luminous. It is the first time all weekend Rena has seen her in real color.
“I’m sorry,” Rena says, which she realizes only then that she didn’t say earlier. Dori doesn’t answer, and Rena follows her poolside, where they lock their phones in electric blue lockers with the paint scratched and peeling. king sum, someone has carved into theirs, and there is no explanation or response. On the other side of the lockers, there is a whole tangle of slides, the tallest of which has a long line, but it is the one Dori wants, and so they wait.
In order to go down the slide you must first go up, and halfway through their waiting they have come to an uncertain staircase, alarmingly slippery in places, spiraled and winding around a cylinder. The higher they go, the more Rena feels something like fear. Once she spent some time in Mexico, in the city where Edward James built unfinished or intentionally incomplete sculptures in the middle of a series of waterfalls: stairs leading nowhere, a lack of clarity about what was nature and what was built, a wildly unsafe tourist trap. This staircase should feel safer but does not, and by the time they reach the top Rena is giddy with relief at the thought of going back down. She seats herself at the start of the slide with something like genuine joy.
It is a fast ride to the pool below. At the third turn is a waterproof camera, the kind that projects the photo down to a booth where the operator will offer to print and frame it and sell it to you at an outrageous markup. Dori and Rena are riding together, two to a tube, down through a series of sharp turns, sprayed with water that seems to be coming from every direction, and then dropped into the pool, which stings first with impact and again with chlorine. Rena surfaces with an unexpected lightness, which she sees mirrored in Dori’s smile. It occurs to her this might be the least terrible idea anyone involved in this alleged wedding has had in the last forty-eight hours.
Dori insists on checking out their picture after they towel off, so she heads for the photographer while Rena retrieves their phones.
Rena has three texts from Michael:
Did I do something wrong last night?
Did you kidnap the bride?!
Hey, I don’t know what’s up, but get your perfect ass back here—there’s an open bar waiting for us.
There are five texts from JT:
Where did you guys go?
Why did you think I was in Ohio?
Tell her I’m here.
Tell her I’m sorry.
Wedding is on! Where are you?
Wedding is on! JT has doubled back after all. He has come back to the place where whatever his decision is, it always stands. When Dori makes her way to the lockers, Rena hands her the phone. For a minute Dori’s face is soft. She reaches for her own phone and reads through whatever amended case JT has made for himself there. She tugs on a strand of her wet hair. Then she turns to Rena and shrugs, turns the phone off, and shoves it back into the locker. She holds out to Rena the photo of the two of them. Dori’s hair is whipping behind her, her smile open-mouthed and angled away. Rena is behind her, staring at the camera, laughing and startled. Dori has chosen a hideous purple-and-green airbrushed paper frame reading Wish You Were Here.
“This is going to be hilarious someday,” Dori says. “I hope.”
Rena stashes her phone in the locker with Dori’s. There is still nothing at the carnival stage, and so they share cheese fries and cotton candy and make their way to the wave pool, where they rent inner tubes. Rena floats and thinks of the last time she did this, which must have been twenty years ago, must have been with her family when this was the kind of day trip they would have all found relaxing. When Rena would not have looked at the water and thought of E. coli, of hantavirus, of imminent drought, of a recent news story of a child who drowned in a pool like this because his parents sent him to the water park alone for free day care and no one there was watching for him. When it was still her job to keep Elizabeth’s swimmies on, when there was still Elizabeth’s laugh, when there were still seas to be crossed, when the whole world was in front of her. Wish you were here. Wish you were here. Wish you were here.