In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (38 page)

He’s mesmerized that now he’s waxing dangerously close to saying yes.

“Ma,” he says, “I’m fine.”

*   *   *

She should probably be tired from driving four hundred miles, but the whole last hour on the road an electricity races through Sharon, and she feels she’s burning thousands of calories. If she weren’t buckled into her seat, she might simply float up and fly away. As traffic thickens outside the Detroit limits, it takes all her willpower not to abandon the car and sprint the rest of the way.

When her phone’s GPS claims she’s only two exits from the Renaissance Center, Sharon pulls off at a Shell station and grabs the cosmetic kit from her backpack. Under the fluorescent bulb, she brushes her teeth, reapplies mascara and lipstick. Sprays j’adore at her throat and wrists, slathers on deodorant, and runs a comb through her black hair—even though it’s perfectly straight and flat as always. She’d chosen the blue knit dress because it’s the exact color of her eyes, and people always comment on that. Plus, there’s enough Lycra in the weave that it hasn’t wrinkled during the long drive. Still, she straightens it and pulls back the shoulders, wishes she were taller, like the woman from the photo with Adam.

In the mirror she examines herself with the kind of cold calculation she hasn’t used since her freshman year of college, when she determined she could look better than average if she wore heels and dresses instead of the shapeless sweatshirts and jeans everyone else favored. It’s a tactic that still seems to be working. She’s unlikely to win any beauty pageants, but there seems no reason anyone (maybe not even someone like Adam Zoellner) would outright laugh at a sexual offer she made.

Sharon had reserved a room at the convention hotel but doesn’t bother checking in. The dedication ceremony—where Adam and Cecily Beissel are slated to present Ed Munn with an award—isn’t for another two hours, but if Adam is at an autograph table or exploring the floor, there’s a chance she might be able to approach him for an interview.

Whereas Fan-Con at the Javits Center had been a big, bustling affair, this is a much smaller event. There are only a handful of people in line to buy tickets from a lone man seated at a folding table with a metal cashbox. Through the open door of the ballroom, she can see tables of vendors with stacks of vintage comic books.

A guy ahead of her in an
E&E
T-shirt makes her think of Oliver Ryan. Pinprick of emotion—guilt? regret?—for blowing off someone so seemingly nice. Or maybe it’s a different feeling, something like longing? Either way, she shoves it aside. She
needs
to focus on this, whatever it is she’s attempting to do with Adam Zoellner.

Almost her turn in line, Sharon is shuffling through her purse for her press pass when she notices a black-and-white head shot of Adam clad in Captain Rowen attire with the universal “No” slash across his face:
Adam Zoellner will not be able to attend
is written in red marker.

“He’s not coming?” Sharon points to the picture, as if its meaning weren’t perfectly clear, as if there weren’t still a person in front of her in queue.

“His rep said he was in an accident,” the cashier says from behind the table. “He sent some autographed photos, though, and a statement they’re going to read at the ceremony.”

“Thank you,” Sharon says calmly, numbly.

Get out of this car.

The ticket clerk is saying something about other activities, but Sharon just walks back to the lobby, out the door, and to the parking garage down the street.

She’d thought her car was on the second level but can’t find it when she gets there. Walks up two flights along the sloping ramp, then back down. Realizes she doesn’t really even recall what kind of vehicle it was, or the color—something generic and compact in a gold, or was it beige?

Late January, it’s already getting dark, which casts a film of creepiness over the concrete walls splotched with grease and occasional graffiti.

Up and down the floors in her five-inch platform boots. Each time a little more panicked, a little more hurried, until she’s actually running. Her breath comes in ragged gasps, her skin covered in a sickly cold sweat. Up and down and up again.

Tripping over uneven stone, she twists her ankle and falls, catching herself hard on her wrists.

And then she just sits on the cold floor, studying the rainbow in a puddle of motor oil until her ass is numb.

Dips her finger in the indigo.

After what might be a very long time, a woman in a Lexus honks behind her.

Sharon pushes herself up, gives the driver a dirty look, and almost immediately finds her own car—a Chevy Impala in metallic gray.

Starting the engine, she begins the eleven-hour drive home. Ninety minutes outside Detroit, exhaustion hits. All at once she’s so drained that keeping her eyes open is positively Herculean.

There’s a billboard for a cheap motel chain, boasting rooms for thirty-nine dollars a night at the next exit, so she turns off the highway.

An ancient-looking innkeeper behind bulletproof glass slips her a metal key through the slot and informs her there’s a vending machine by the stairs. Fleeting thought of the room at the Marriott she needs to cancel.

Her unit, which opens onto a wooded area reminiscent of every horror film, is a smoking room, and the ghost of burned things is so overwhelming she actually coughs. She recalls her parents’ house before her dad gave up cigarettes twenty years ago, how all the curtains and carpets were yellowed. Tries to remember if she’s talked to her family since Christmas and realizes she’s in the Midwest and hadn’t even thought to stop by.

The scratchy, threadbare coverlet is just begging for a
Dateline
black camera investigation to reveal semen and other bodily fluids, but she doesn’t care, collapses on top of it. A TV chained to the dresser gets only four channels, and she settles on the one airing a
Law & Order
marathon. Slipping into oblivion, Sharon remembers that no one knows where she is, wonders who Briscoe and Greene will investigate when she ends up murdered in the middle of nowhere Michigan.

*   *   *

Pain and the pressing need to puke wake Adam.

Getting to the bathroom isn’t artful. The crutches are a useless hassle, and hopping exacerbates the nausea. He won’t admit it later, but some hands-and-knees crawling is involved.

Once again, his mother in pink scrubs beams into his head telling him not to take Percocet without food, so clear he can almost see her in the toilet water.

After twenty minutes perched over the bowl, Adam determines he’s
not
actually going to vomit, just going to be stuck with his stomach doing a weird slurry thing for God knows how long.

For good measure, he manages to smack his head against the side of the commode when he starts to get up.

Dizzy and sick and feeling sorry for himself, he just sits there for a while … a long while.

Finally he tries to pull himself up on a glass shelving unit. The piece (picked out by Terri Minerva) is designed to give the illusion of floating, so it probably shouldn’t stun him quite so much when the whole system comes away from the wall.

Crashes and crashes and crashes on travertine tile, and he’s covering his face with his arms as the glass shatters.

The noise stops, and he opens his eyes.

Dangerous-looking icebergs all around him, a half-dozen bloody nicks on his arms. Two steel beams and chunks of drywall have fallen on his leg, essentially pinning him down. Probably the only reason it’s not excruciatingly painful is that his big honking temporary cast is acting as a buffer.

Brushing stray shards from his pants, he cuts his hand. Then he actually does throw up, more on the side of the toilet than inside the bowl. He wonders if he’ll die in the bathroom before Elena comes back the day after tomorrow.

For some inexplicable reason, he thinks of Sharon Gallaher’s wind-tousled black hair and the shape of her mouth.

Pulling his phone from his pocket, Adam scrolls through the e-mails for her number. Even as he’s dialing, he doesn’t think he’ll go through with it.

It’s complete melodrama. He
knows
this. His phone is chock-full of people he
could
call. Yes, some of them
do
work for him, and some might be more responsive if he’d remembered their names after they’d fucked. But there are at least ten
real
people in his contacts list who could be here, helping him off his ass in fifteen minutes.

“Sharon Gallaher,” a voice says before the end of the first ring.

Who answers the phone like that after midnight?

“Hello?” she says when he doesn’t respond.

Is hers a voice he heard on campus years ago?

Would his whole life be different if he’d been standing behind her in line for the falafel cart and stopped to say something about her eyes or how she looks like someone he knows from somewhere? He could have stayed in the city, waited for her to graduate, maybe done a few more
Law & Order
s, branching out to an
SVU
or
Criminal Intent
. She could have moved into his apartment on MacDougal and Bleecker, taken to writing in the pink tub in the middle of the kitchen, chewing her pen caps, twisting her fingers and pressing them to her chest when she got frustrated. She could have switched from novels to screenplays for male leads with engaging smiles and gray eyes (no sci-fi, no villains, never a
Murder Island
sequel). The two of them could have forged the kind of partnership of legends. Sure, he might have strayed with a costar or seven in a big spectacular made-for-
Star-
magazine kind of affair, but he and Sharon would have worked it out for the sake of the children—Zach and Zelda. And he wouldn’t be alone and miserable on overpriced flooring.

“Hello,” Sharon says, again. “I can hear you breathe.”

*   *   *

“I can hear you,” Sharon says, flipping off the television.

She realizes any other person would have hung up on Breather thirty seconds ago, or more accurately, any other person wouldn’t have answered a call at three in the morning from an “Unknown” number in the first place. She could argue that she was awake anyway, watching
Law & Order
and eating Doritos from the vending machine. Could say she knows, more than most, that a middle-of-the-night phone call can be important—that an unfamiliar number could be a police station or a hospital. It could be Kristen at 26 Federal Plaza, hysterical because the FBI
did
come after her for giving out the actor’s e-mail. Heck, it could be Adam Zoellner himself calling to say he’d love to give her an interview, or maybe act out some of those fan fiction stories.

None of those reasons is what made Sharon pick up or stay on so long. Sharon
always
answers in case it’s the call she’s been waiting for for seven years. Even if it’s simply a phone call in a dream or some flirtation with an alternate universe, it would be worth it, as long as she can say the things she never got the chance to say.

“Chase?” she asks, tastes salt, and realizes she’s crying. Crying like she didn’t after running out of the Madison Plaza, bleeding and wet and cold.

“Is that you?” she asks inaudibly between sobs. “I love you, and I’m so sorry.”

The person on the other end makes a wet sound, like he’s crying, too.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, or something close to that. It’s hard to make out through his raw and haggard pants.

“I know,” she says. “It’s all right.”

“So sorry.” And it might not be her dead boyfriend, but there’s something she recognizes about his voice, even so muddled.

“It’s all okay,” she says. “We’re gonna be all right.”

She keeps the line open until his breathing stabilizes, until her breathing stabilizes.

“I’m going to hang up now,” she says. “Everything is going to be okay.”

*   *   *

Adam holds the silent phone in his hand and wipes his eyes with the shoulder of the running shirt he’s still wearing.

She’s the first person listed on his phone’s “Favorites,” even now. Taps on her name and calls.

Twenty minutes later she lets herself in with old keys and follows his voice to the half bath by the den.

And it’s so clear, Adam can’t believe he ever missed it. The hair color and the set of the mouth, something about the forehead. Sharon Gallaher seemed familiar because she looks a little like Phoebe Fisher.

*   *   *

Wiping her eyes, Sharon looks around the shoddy motel room, mere minutes off the highway but completely silent at night with the television off. Her phone’s clock says it’s 3:30
A.M.

No traffic if she leaves now. Maybe the rental place will even give her a break and charge her for only two days if she makes it home before nightfall.

Gathering her things takes all of twenty seconds (though she’ll almost certainly leave something behind, as always), toothbrush and makeup kit stuffed back in her bag. She pulls her blue knit dress back over her head and stabs feet back into boots. Grabbing her notebooks, she notices the printout from the
E&E
convention Web site with information and a thumbnail print of the stars, including Adam Zoellner dressed in Rowen’s black robes. Feels herself laughing, head so clear it hurts.

Nearly two decades ago, she’d skipped school and walked to the mall to see the
Eons & Empires
movie; twenty years and she’s still chasing Captain Rowen.

Leaving the convention info for some other person to find, she grabs her cell from the bed, is about to shove it back in her bag when she remembers Oliver’s message from hours earlier.

It’s the time of night for booty calls or drunken maudlin ramblings (even if she’s never participated in these things, she’s heard about them from Kristen), but she’s sane, sober, and stable when she sends Oliver a text:
Yes, I would really like that.

*   *   *

Getting Adam off the bathroom floor is a more challenging task than Phoebe initially anticipated. The larger glass chunks are unwieldy and treacherous. Even finding a broom to sweep up the thousands of shards takes longer than it should, because he doesn’t know where the housekeeper stores supplies, and nothing is where it used to be when she lived here.