Chapter 18
“I don’t know how else to say it, so I’m just going to say it.”
The words were on the tip of Will’s tongue, and he knew no matter how far apart he and Rachel may be on this, no matter what her reaction might be, he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.
“How could you possibly find that ferry ride scarier than driving over this bridge?”
“Oh, it’s no contest,” she said. “This bridge has been here for a million years and is like a four- or five-minute ride over solid ground. The ferry was twenty minutes at sea.”
“I’m sorry, is the fact that the bridge is old supposed to make me feel more comfortable? Because apparently I’ve read more stories about the crumbling state of our nation’s infrastructure than you have.”
She laughed. “That’s fun for you. I just mean that clearly it’s stood the test of time.”
“And solid ground? Have you looked over the edge at what’s under it? It’s a two-hundred-foot drop into the abyss.”
“I told you I’d be happy to drive,” Rachel said, breaking off a piece of the peanut butter fudge. It was a little after 8:00 Tuesday morning, and they had grabbed coffee and tea but foregone breakfast in order to get on the road early for the four-hour drive downstate to Ann Arbor.
“No, it would be worse if I weren’t the one driving,” Will said. “Having a job to do is distracting me just enough to keep me from having a repeat of the Sears Tower.”
“Well, then here, have some more of this.” She held out a piece of fudge to him. “It’s so delicious you won’t be able to think about anything else.”
With his hands locked at ten and two, he glanced from the road to her offering and then back again. “No thanks, the one was good.”
“Seriously, I’m going to eat the whole slice if you don’t take some.”
“I don’t think I’m really a fudge guy.”
Rachel pulled the piece back and bit it. “You’re kidding, right?” she said through her chewing. “Oh my God—it’s so good. It’s like if they took that sunset last night and turned it into candy.”
“I don’t know. I always want fudge to be better than it actually is. Does that make sense?”
“No. No it doesn’t. And I’m now reconsidering our entire relationship.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. At least we’ll always have last night.”
The return carriage ride to the ferry, the ferry across the water, and then the short drive back to the hotel had basically served as extended foreplay, their bodies in constant contact with one another. The way they’d touched hadn’t been scandalous, but it definitely had conveyed what was going to happen as soon as they got to their room. Rachel had ripped his new shirt yanking it off him. Neither of them had seemed to mind.
“So why’d you let me buy so much?” she asked, returning the fudge box to the back seat.
Even knowing they were within their budget, Will had started to notice their spending more while they were in Mackinac and to tally up the ways it would have to change once there were three of them. But this wasn’t the time to be nitpicking the fudge or Birkenstock expenditures.
“You seemed really excited about it,” he said.
“Not fifty dollars’ worth!”
“Hey, don’t sleep on that tote bag,” he said. “And for the love of God, how much longer is this bridge?”
“Okay, here, let’s put the audiobook back on. I’ll back it up to where we were when you did the second gummy, and we can try listening to that for the third time.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Nah, we didn’t make it much past that anyway. Trying to find those letters while managing you being high was a real challenge.”
“Wanna tell me anything about this tattoo yet?”
“Nope,” she said, smiling and pressing play.
Rachel reached out and gently put her left hand on his right, beginning to massage it in the same way he had hers on the boat. He took it off the wheel and rested his right arm on the center console, where she continued to rub her thumb on his hand in a circular motion. He didn’t realize they had left the bridge until he had to slow down to pay the toll.
Her thumb eventually stopped moving, but they continued holding hands that way for quite a while, listening to their Taylor Jenkins Reid novel and occasionally commenting on how this stretch of I-75 in the Lower Peninsula looked just about as isolated as their drive across the UP but somehow felt less remote. They decided it was a combination of being back on a proper highway—even one so rural that the speed limit stayed at 75 for a long stretch—rather than a two-lane road plus the knowledge that their alma mater was now just a few hours away.
“So here’s a question,” Will said after they’d listened to four chapters in a row. It was a book where the main character had been married multiple times, and he was thinking again about his parents’ failed relationship. “Do you believe in romantic destiny?”
Rachel hit pause on the screen. “You mean like the idea of soulmates?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Seems like a funny question to ask someone while listening to a book that literally has Seven Husbands in the title.”
“I don’t think getting divorced is a sign that there’s not someone you’re meant to be with. It just means you haven’t found them yet. Divorce might even be nature’s way to get you to leave the wrong person to go find the right person.”
Would the right person ever be keeping the secret I’m keeping right now?
The thought took him by surprise, and it sent a shudder through him that he did his best to ignore, adding:
“I mean, look at my mom.”
“Exactly, look at your mom,” Rachel said, taking her sunglasses off. For the first time on the trip, it had gotten cloudy for more than a few minutes. “I’ll grant you that she was married to the absolutely wrong person in your dad. But she’s never gotten serious with anyone in particular since, and yet I think if you asked her, she’d tell you she’s living her best life.”
“You usually don’t have to ask her,” Will said, the memory of the heavily dog-eared copy of 50 Sex Positions to Try in Your 50s he’d once stumbled upon on her bookshelf bringing him fully (and graphically) back to what he and Rachel were talking about.
“Right. So is she just some sort of lost soul until or unless she finds her one true love?”
“No, of course not. But don’t you think if she met the right person, she’d know, and she’d want to be with them for the rest of her life? I’m not even talking about marriage. I just mean a committed relationship.”
“Sure. Except I don’t believe there’s one right person for everyone. I think for anyone, there are lots of people out there who, given the right circumstances, they could build the kind of relationship you’re talking about with. So no, I don’t believe in soulmates, at least not in a you’re-destined-to-be-with-someone sense.”
Logically, Will knew she was right. There were, what, eight billion people in the world and counting? It was simple math. And in reality, thinking that you had a shot at happiness with only one out of all those people wouldn’t be exhilarating. It would paralyze you with indecision and commitment issues.
Part of him still wanted to believe it could be true, though. Admitting that he and Rachel were together due at least in part to chance made their tightly knit bond feel a touch more severable, which was not something he wanted to contemplate while in the midst of such a consequential lie.
“You look like I just told you there’s no Santa,” Rachel said.
“I mean, I feel like I should get on eHarmony just in case you’re trying to tell me something,” he said, tiptoeing across his sense of vulnerability. “But no, disagreeing with anything you just said would require a degree of mental gymnastics that I’m incapable of without massive amounts of THC in my system.”
She laughed. “Hey.”
When she didn’t keep talking, he looked at her.
“I find it far more romantic to know that I have a choice, and the person I’m with is the one I choose,” she said.
She was right again. That was better.
“Well, when you put it that way,” he said in the direction of the windshield.
“I know. In addition to being correct, I’m quite charming.”
“And just for the record, I am that person, right?”
Rachel stuck her tongue out at him, and he smiled.
“You wanna listen to more of the book?” she asked.
“Actually, I was thinking it might be nice to put the windows down while the weather is still cool enough to go without the AC. You in?”
“Road-tripping with the windows down? Of course I’m in.”
She opened hers all the way, and he did the same with his and the two in back. Driving that way at 80 miles per hour lasted for about 15 seconds until papers started flying out of the tote bags and Rachel’s hair looked like it was being teased by one of those industrial-size dryers at the end of an automated car wash.
“Maybe a little too much?” Will shouted over the gusts of wind buffeting them from all sides.
“What?” she shouted back.
He raised the back windows three-quarters of the way up. “I said, maybe it was a little too much.”
“Good call.” They were still almost yelling, but it no longer sounded like they were on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. “How about some music?”
“Yes,” he said. “But no playlists. If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it right.”
He pushed the button on the screen for the FM radio—an anachronism that mildly dampened his nostalgia play—and engaged in the time-honored but slowly dying tradition of pressing “Seek” over and over again to listen to two to five seconds per station until you hear something worth stopping for.
Violin concerto. Apocalyptic preacher. News talk. Ad for a used-car lot. Something with a banjo. Something with an overly aggressive guitar indicative of men compensating for something else. Cell phone commercial. Then:
Elton John, “Saturday Night’s Alright.”
They were in business.
Will cranked the volume louder than he would ever have reason to in their day-to-day lives, and he and Rachel were immediately rocking out despite a very limited knowledge of the lyrics. That was not a problem with the next song, however.
“Aah!” Rachel screamed over the synthy beginning of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” “This was my freshman year of college!” She turned it up even louder and started moving from the waist up like she was on a dance floor, not in a RAV4. There were hand gestures and everything.
The station was a gold mine, hopping from decade to decade like a wedding DJ you didn’t mind being drunk on power. Gaga gave way to a murderers’ row of tracks by Madonna, Adele, Alanis Morissette, Michael Jackson, Rihanna, and Ed Sheeran. It didn’t let up until they’d made it through all eight-plus minutes of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” They were starting to lose the station to static about halfway into the song, but there was no way they weren’t going to hang in there.
Rachel turned the radio down as the static grew even louder and a commercial started playing. “That was so incredible I’m going to pretend this station didn’t just age us by twenty years by referring to itself as ‘continuous soft rock.’”
Will rolled the windows up and turned the air back on. His ears were ringing from the combination of road noise and music, but it was hard to believe he and Rachel weren’t somehow meant to be after flawlessly lip-synching “Umbrella” together.
“There’s something about not being able to control what comes next on the radio,” he said. “I think it makes it harder to take the songs for granted.”
“Whoa, be careful. You’re going to start sounding like the art major in the car.”
“If we make our kid listen to the radio just so they have that experience, would we be good parents or annoying old people?”
“Yes and yes.”
They saw their first sign for Ann Arbor, now 81 miles away, and decided to celebrate by stopping for gas and to use the bathroom. They were making great time and on pace to get there a little after noon.
Will filled up the car, which didn’t take that long because it was a hybrid and had a smaller tank, before heading into the convenience store. On the other side of the pump, the woman with the full-size SUV that could wear his like a backpack had started before him and was still going when he stopped.
“Speaking of our child,” Will said when he returned to the car, referring back to their radio conversation. “How are we going to explain humanity’s collective inaction on climate change?”
Rachel, who had gone to the bathroom and bought them bottles of water while he was pumping, looked up from her phone. “Humans suck?” she tried.
“I’m sure that will be a real comfort when they’re swimming to a floating Trader Joe’s.”
“Do you worry about that?”
“No, the Trader Joe’s people are entrepreneurs. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”
“The environment and the future, smart guy. For the baby, I mean.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
It wasn’t altogether unlike the gun stuff. Climate change had always been upsetting, but knowing they were bringing a kid into the world who would have to deal with it long after they would? It magnified the stakes. In his lowest moments, during those 2:00 a.m. conversations with himself, Will questioned whether they were already betraying their future child’s trust.
“I’m not asking because I have some great answer,” Rachel said. “Just sometimes it helps to say stuff out loud.”
She left some space to show him that he could keep going, whether about this or some of the other anxieties she suspected he was keeping to himself. He nodded to show he understood, which was debatable, but didn’t offer anything beyond that. In his mind, every fear he would list—from the earth’s rapidly degrading climate to the baby’s health to how to pick a day care to just thinking he’d be as bad a dad as his was—would just stack on top of Rachel’s own worries until she couldn’t see a way to anything but staying put in a life she’d eventually outgrow.
That’s why this thing with Creative Vices had to work.
“So what’re you looking at?” Will asked as he started the car.
“Oh,” Rachel said, returning to her phone. “Just the map. We go right by Brighton, that town where Seth’s client grew up.”
He rolled his eyes. “Did you know they call it U of M, Rachel?”
“I also heard that the Lower Peninsula looks like—get this—a mitten.”
They both shook their heads. Rachel got the book going again while Will piloted them back to the highway, their anticipation starting to build with each passing mile. Because even if the idea that there was just one right person for everyone didn’t hold up, you still had to meet the person who would become your person somewhere. Some place. Distinct from all the other places in the world as the spot where your story began.
The next time they stopped, that’s where they’d be.