The Office of Historical Corrections(9)
“JT is gone,” says Kelly. “He’s not answering his phone.”
Rena lets the other women in and pretends not to notice them scanning the room for any indication of her duplicity. She reminds herself that she is unhappy with JT and that this is not her fight.
“I ran into him in the hallway last night,” Rena says. “I didn’t think he would really go through with leaving.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Dori asks.
“That seems like the wrong question.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Ohio,” says Rena. The word has rounded its way out of her mouth before she has time to consider why she is saying it. But now that she has said it she keeps going. She invents an empty cabin belonging to one of JT’s friends overseas, a conversation about JT’s need to get his head together.
“OK,” says Dori. “OK.”
She sends Kelly downstairs to stall the guests and gives Rena fifteen minutes to get dressed.
* * *
—
The address Rena has given is a three-hour drive from where they are in Indiana, mostly highway. Dori buckles herself into the driver’s seat, still, Rena notices belatedly, in her pre-wedding clothes—white leggings, a pale pink zip-up hoodie, and a white T-shirt bedazzled with the word bride.
“I really am sorry,” Rena says.
“You didn’t tell him to leave, right?”
This is true, so Rena lets it sit. She is quiet until Billie Holiday’s voice from the car radio becomes unbearable.
“What do you want?” Rena asks.
“From you?”
“From life.”
“Right now I want to go find my fiancé before we lose the whole wedding day.”
“Right.”
At a traffic light, Rena’s phone dings and Dori reaches for it with a speed that could be habit but Rena recognizes as distrust. The text, of course, is not from JT.
“Michael?” Dori says. “Michael, really?”
Rena grabs the phone back. Hey, says the text. You didn’t have to take off last night.
Dori’s relief at knowing where Rena spent the night is palpable. She turns to Rena with the closest approximation of a smile it seems possible for her to manage at the moment and asks, “So what was it like?” Rena understands her prying as a kind of apology. They are going to be friends now; they are going to seal it with intimate detail the way schoolgirls would seal a blood sisterhood with a needle and a solemn touch.
“It was fine,” Rena says. “Kind of grabby and over pretty quick. We were both a little drunk.”
“I had to teach JT. It took a few years.”
“Years?”
“God, I did a lot of faking it.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have taken as long if you hadn’t faked it?”
“That, darling, is why you’re single. If I hadn’t faked it, he would have moved on to a girl who did.”
“So she could have waited a decade for him to not marry her on their wedding day?”
They are at the turnoff for the highway, and Dori takes the right with such violent determination that Rena grips the door handle.
“My wedding day’s not over yet. We could have JT back in time to marry me and get you and Michael to the open bar.”
“There’s an open bar?”
“We’re religious. We’re not cheap. Besides, my mother always says a wedding is not a success if it doesn’t inspire another wedding. There’s a bouquet with your name on it. Cut Michael off of the gin early and teach him what to do with his hands.”
Dori is technically correct about the timeline; it is early, the sun still positioning itself to pin them in its full glow. In the flush of early morning light, Dori looks beatific, a magazine bride come to life. Rena has no idea in which direction JT actually took off, but it is possible that he has turned around, that he will turn around, that their paths will cross, the light hitting Dori in a way that reveals to him exactly how wrong he has been, and Dori will crown Rena this wedding’s unlikely guardian angel. Until Toledo, there will still technically be time to get back to the hotel and pull this wedding off, but Rena saw JT’s face last night, and if she knows anything by now, she knows the look of a man who is done with someone.
As for Michael, it doesn’t really matter what she says about him; Dori is spinning the story that ends in happily ever after for everyone, the one where two years from now Rena and Michael are telling their meet-cute story at their own wedding. But Rena can see already everything wrong with that future. As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend. In her early twenties a series of men one by one held her to their chests and kissed the top of her head if they were gentlemen and palmed her ass if they were not and told her that she deserved better than they could give her. But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?
Rena pressed herself against the emptiness, flirted with cliché: nights fucking strangers against alleyway walls, waking to bruises in places she didn’t remember being grabbed. Though it had been almost a year of this by the time her sister was shot, her friends were happy to make retroactive excuses, to save themselves the trouble of an intervention that might only have been an intervention against a person being herself. So, more rough strangers, years she let make her mean. If she was not good enough for the thing other people had, who could be; if she did not deserve love, who should have it; if she could not find in a mirror what was so bad and unlovable in her, she would have to create it. She learned how to press the blade of her heart into the center of someone else’s life, to palm a man’s crotch under the table while smiling sweetly at his wife, to think, sometimes, concretely and deliberately, of her sister, punished for a thing she hadn’t done, while raising an eyebrow in a bar and accepting a drink from a man who didn’t bother hiding his ring. All the things she was getting away with! All the people who couldn’t see beauty or danger when it was looking right at them, when it had adjusted itself and walked out of their upstairs bathroom after tucking their husband’s penis back into his boxers, when it was under the hotel bedcovers while their boyfriend checked in on video chat. It was, if she is honest with herself, only because the circumstances were so strange that she didn’t sleep with JT, that she didn’t, one of those nights they woke up together, look him in the eyes and part her lips and trail her fingers down his bare chest and wait for what came next. It hadn’t been knowing Dori existed that kept her from it.