Valley of Ashes (33 page)

His voice was too tentative.

There’s a catch…

“It’s a lot more money.”

I waited.

“Thirty grand for a moving bonus.”

Ah, there it is.

“Where?”

“Massachusetts,” he said. “Watertown.”

Well, okay…

“Do you have to decide right now?” I asked.

“Soon, probably.”

I thought of all the places I’d lived since Dean and I first met: Williamstown, Syracuse, Pittsfield, Manhattan…

It was exhausting, just making the list in my head. And that wasn’t even counting the places I’d lived
before
Dean: Manhattan, Oyster Bay, Honolulu, Carmel, Dobbs Ferry, Bronxville, Dublin, Centre Island.

We hadn’t even been in Boulder for six months yet. And if I said yes, we’d be packing up and starting from scratch again.

Ellis’s mother, Glenn, always used to say, “Three moves is as good as a fire.” By that reckoning, how many fires had I racked up already?

And what exactly would you miss about the place, Madeline—all those M
EAN
P
EOPLE
S
UCK
bumper stickers? The triathletes? The psychic academy?

“When would it start?” I asked.

“Not right away. Probably June, maybe later than that. Before the end of summer, though.”

“We could live in Cambridge,” I said.

“Wherever you want,” said Dean.

And just like that, I was okay with the whole idea.

I knew people in Boston. I even had family there: Aunt Julie and Uncle Bill and their kids. We wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The girls could go to a proper school. Someplace where they wouldn’t require me to show up with vegan crap when it was my turn for snack day.

Maybe we could
buy
a house.

Something cozy, and old, with nothing orange anywhere. And if there happened to be any fucking shag carpeting, I could rip the shit out.

Shred it into confetti and throw it from the windows. Have a goddamn party.

“Cambridge borders on Watertown,” I said. “You might have a shorter commute to your office than you do from here to Ionix.”

Dean put our hands on top of our knees. “That would be really good.”

“I think you should take the job. But it would be deeply amazing if we could use some of that moving bonus to hire professional packers.”

He laughed, squeezing my hand tighter.

We needed this, Dean and I.

We needed the chance to keep things good—to sustain the fresh spring blades of sweetness we’d rediscovered in one another over the last week, even in the heart of all this tragedy.

Someplace new, untarnished.

Someplace that wouldn’t make me cry, the way I had been for days now—every time I thought of Cary.

And, let’s be fucking honest, every time you think about yourself, Madeline.

A
week had passed since Cary’s service, and I was still aching.

I needed to talk to a friend. Just spill my guts.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t have friends. I had dozens of them, all across the country. And lots of them were people I could’ve just unloaded all of this shit on, without the need for any chipper I’m-holding-up-all-right-despite-everything small talk.

But no one I’d tried calling was home: Ellis, my sister Pagan, my pal Sophia, my mother, Aunt Julie… just more voice mails to leave. And it was getting a little late to be calling people on the East Coast: close to eight o’clock here meant tennish in New York and Boston.

Who in California—Muffy? Katy? They’d just be sitting down to dinner in San Francisco.

I briefly flirted with the idea of calling my first stepdad on Oahu, something I did every other year or so, but that was guaranteed to be a trainwreck. He always told me the same stories about growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the Depression and working for Edward R. Murrow after the Marine Corps, and why the world would be a better place if we’d elected McGovern in ’72. That part was fine, and I even found some comfort in the sheer repetition of the anecdotes, but then he’d start bad-mouthing my mother and I didn’t want to listen to that. Plus it was exhausting to hear someone else’s monologue when you wanted to talk about sad shit that was happening in your own life,
and he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d ever think to ask me what was going on with me.

And by the time I’d run through all those options, I didn’t trust myself to hold up my end of a conversation without just starting to cry and not being able to explain to the poor person on the other end of the line why I was even crying.

I looked out the window at darkened Boulder. The girls were fed, bathed, and bedded down, but Dean was still at the office.

I turned on the TV:
Roseanne
was a rerun and I couldn’t stand
Frasier
or
Home Improvement. The CBS Tuesday Night Movie
was
The Dead Pool
, but I didn’t need any more inspiration to go all Dirty Harry on Bittler, or anyone else.

I tried Fox and decided
Iron Eagle III
looked like irredeemable shit before I’d watched a full thirty seconds, despite Lou Gossett. I gave up and turned it off altogether.

An hour to go before my weekly hit of homesick–New Yorker Sipowicz bonding on
NYPD Blue.
Maybe Dean would come home by then and we could both watch it.

I considered writing a letter or two in the meantime, then remembered Ellis giving me shit about how it was time I tried using email.

If the stuff actually worked, I might hear back from her the same night—better than leaving her yet another plaintively whiny voice mail.

Fuck it, might as well try out this virtual-communication shit.

I sat down at the big desk in Dean’s office, booting up our black Acer PC.

Sure, I’d toddled online once or twice, but to me computers were still strictly for word processing—especially now that I had articles to write again, like an actual human.

I read through the handbook and tried connecting, leaning in close to the Acer’s tower when it started beeping rapidly through a phone number.

I got a dial tone and then two busy signals in a row.

I coaxed it along in my very best HAL voice.
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that…”

The thing finally broke through: static-fuzz squawks ending in a metallic space-age wail.

Dean had shown me how to get onto CompuServe once or twice, scrawling his ID and password on a Post-it note for me. It had been stuck to the bottom of the screen for a long time.

Then the glue gave out and I’d stuck it somewhere for safekeeping.

In a book?

I closed my eyes, trying to remember.

The Joy of Cooking.
Bingo.

I went into the kitchen and grabbed it out of a cupboard.

Yeah, there it was—little slip of yellow sticking up, marking the page for a beef stew I’d never actually made.

I typed in “DeanBauer” and his password: “bigangst.”

It still took me ten minutes of noodling around before I ended up at what looked like the screen for emails.

There was a list of subject lines going down the page. Mostly things referencing filters and spares, or model numbers of the various water-quality-testing scientific instruments he was the salesman for.

There were a few I figured had to come from this Saudi customer he’d been talking about recently, just because the syntax was so bizarrely amusing for business correspondence: “Wonderful you,” “Hello!” and “So soon already we two will join in New Orleans.”

I was so bored, and the body copy promised to be equally entertaining, something like the liner notes for a bootleg Bob Dylan cassette I’d once almost bought on a Hong Kong sidewalk on which the initial track’s title was “Bowling in the Wind.”

So, I pointed the cursor at “Wonderful You” and double-clicked.

The opening line read, “Oh my sugar dearest…”

The closing, “From your best fluffy kitten, Setsuko.”

Bracketed between was the bitch’s gushing thank-you note to my husband for their first-ever fuck. “Now you have taught me how to love, and this first of times with you has been like no other time, no other man. All of my dreams of what it could be, only so much sweeter, so much better.”

It was dated March 9, the morning after my birthday. Which meant they’d been fucking for the very first time the night before, which pretty much explained why Dean hadn’t bothered calling home to wish me any happy returns of the day.

That wasn’t the end of it. I kept reading—not everything, just skipping randomly forward.

That hideous email, then the ones before it, then the ones after.

What had
really
been going on in my marriage since we’d moved here, with me so naively oblivious.

The last message was Dean’s thank-you note to Setsuko. For taking him out to dinner with her father.

In Tokyo.

The three of them had dined on
toro
and Kobe beef at what was apparently a very elegant restaurant.

“Ski-trip vacation” my ass. The skanky bitch had flown to Japan so she could ball my husband’s sorry brains out on her home turf.

Most transitions in anyone’s life happen gradually. You can look back and see all the tiny little increments leading up to whatever it is that’s going to shift into something different.

And then there are things that happen at one specific instant, huge and irrevocably sudden as your car doing a 360 into the parkway median after you hit a patch of black ice, when a split second before all you worried about was remembering to buy eggs and milk at the little market on your way home.

I stared at the computer screen, at that email, and watched everything I thought was my life writhing like that old Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the entire span undulating to bits for the delectation of newsreel cameras.

Steel and concrete aren’t supposed to do that. Rows of streetlights are not supposed to whip and saw like buoys marking the progress of gale-force surf.

This wasn’t a knife through my heart, this was full-body evisceration by the fucking Benihana dinner show—flying cleavers and all.

I ran from the room exactly the way that psychic guy had run from me, straight for the downstairs bathroom, and puked up what felt like everything in my being: the crusts of the quesadillas I’d made for the girls’ dinner, hope and faith and trust, all of it, right down to the last acid mouthful of yolk-yellow bile.

I stayed there in the dark for another five minutes, wrapped around the toilet’s chilly curves, my head heavy on my forearm. Water frothed into the cistern until the float rose to the top, then it was all quiet but for my breath and the metallic tinkling of icy snowfall outside, making everything white and soft and uniform.

I didn’t want to get up. I just wanted to stay there forever, static—a body at rest, no expectations, no bullshit, no death, no pain.

I wanted my mom. I wanted my life back, the way it had been fifteen minutes earlier. I wanted to hit a giant fast-forward button and get through all the crap sure to come because it was all going to suck so hugely I didn’t want to
begin
even imagining it.

I got to my feet, wobbly, and walked back to the laundry room desk to call Dean’s direct line at the office.

When he picked up, I said, “You need to come home right now.”

“I can’t, Bunny. I still have a ton of work to do.”

Those words hung between us for a long moment.

“I just read Setsuko’s emails, Dean. And yours back to her.”

Silence, then. I could hear the clock on his desk ticking. “Bunny—”

“Get your ass home,” I said. “Right goddamn
now
.”

Getting home would take him at least twenty minutes, so while I waited I read the rest of the electronic love notes. First all of Setsuko’s to him, then his to her.