Chapter 37
JOEL
There were no open rooms at the hotel. Joel thought briefly about going to the beach, but he didn’t want to be in the vulnerable position of sleep anywhere near where he’d seen the person with the knife.
The pulse in his neck would be a taunt. As he sat in the hotel sitting room, watching drunken guests return from the bar, tripping over the edge of the carpet and shushing one another’s laughter, he considered the front porch of the island’s history museum or the wooden steps of the church.
He felt so exhausted, deflated and heavy, and he wondered if he could just lie down on this sofa, if anyone would bother him if he clicked off the table lamp and went to sleep.
He closed his eyes and thought of Carmen, sinking back into the cushions.
It felt like she had dropped off the side of the earth, but she was simply upstairs, folding her dresses or brushing her teeth.
Last month, he’d told his mother about her.
An actress! she’d exclaimed, like he’d told her he was dating Julie Christie, though he could faintly hear his father in the background, saying the same words in a very different tone: An actress?
He barely spoke to his parents anymore, and he wasn’t sure why he’d told them.
He’d convinced his brothers to visit New York last spring, each taking a bus from their respective colleges, but they’d spent most of the weekend sleeping and drinking his beer.
Shay was the closest he’d ever come to family.
When he returned to the city, Jack and Roger would be more difficult to evade, and Tom the worst, as he and Carmen had become true friends, conspiring together at parties, drunkenly shuffling Joel’s books out of alphabetical order.
Why? they’d all ask. You seemed so good together.
The word good throbbed in his head as he rested against the couch’s arm, the room around him receding.
From a literature course, he knew that good was not derived from God, like so many think.
The word is used so often, it’s become nearly meaningless—good coffee, good work, good sex—but in Old Germanic, it most often meant worthy or noble.
The word had weight. In Beowulf, there is a good king.
And so, no, he was not good with Carmen in the end, though she was good to him.
Someone was standing over him. In Joel’s half-asleep fog, he sensed them, the creak of the floorboard beneath their feet pulling him back into the present. Undoubtedly the girl at the front desk, the one who’d been painting her nails. He’d hoped she didn’t care enough about her job to bother him.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, lifting his head.
“For what?”
He opened his eyes to find Shay crouched beside him, her knees pressed together near his elbow.
She looked concerned, her long fingers resting on the couch, a few inches from his shoulder.
Close enough that he could smell her, that scent he could never describe but would know anywhere.
On a crowded subway car, in the back of a classroom, in the dark.
“I thought you were the front-desk girl.” He sat up, and Shay retreated to the closest armchair, as if sensing Joel’s impulse to reach for her hand. In the room’s dim light, her hair was the deep red of a ruby. “I didn’t think I’d fall asleep.”
“Why aren’t you upstairs?”
He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. “Carmen and I . . . we broke up.”
“You broke up?” Her brow furrowed. “Just now?”
“Just now.”
“Jesus.”
The hotel’s front door opened, and one of the couples whom Joel had sat with at the bar ambled past, the husband reaching up the back of the wife’s skirt, trying to grope her as she playfully swatted him with her purse.
When the man saw Joel and Shay, he withdrew his hand, pausing for a moment to study the scene.
Joel instantly felt guilty, though they were just sitting there together.
Shay smiled and said good night as the man’s wife pulled him toward the staircase.
“I don’t know if this is the best place to talk,” Shay said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He imagined Ken finding them. Are you trying to come up with a reason to cancel the wedding? he’d asked Joel that morning. Ken was already so suspicious, ravenous for gossip, more so than any woman Joel had ever met.
“Do you want to go upstairs to my room?”
Her hotel room was on the top floor. It was the same size as his own, which meant there was nowhere to sit but a single velvet armchair or the bed.
She and Andrew weren’t sharing quarters until the wedding night.
He was staying with his parents, in the bedroom he’d slept in since he was born.
Joel stood as she took off her shoes and filled a glass of water at the bathroom sink, taking a sip before handing it to him.
“So you broke up tonight? After you left the bar?” She perched on the edge of the bed, and he folded himself into the armchair, massaging his brow.
“I don’t know if I want to talk about this.”
Shay cocked her head, wove her fingers over her knee, and waited.
This was what they did when the other seemed hesitant, knowing that they’d always start to speak within a few moments of silence.
They could say anything to each other. Everything too cruel or vulnerable or foolish to admit to anyone else.
“I really don’t,” he protested. “Did you get my—”
“Joel,” she said, insistent.
It angered him, this assumption that everything would stay the same. That he would not have changed, when here she was in front of him—her atoms unsteady as dandelion seeds. Hair cut short, a law school dropout. About to become someone else’s wife.
“How else do you want me to say it?” he said.
“We both know—”
“She thinks I’m still in love with you.”
He hadn’t meant to say it that loudly, or to say it at all. The room was so quiet that Joel could hear the water coursing through the pipes in the walls, the muted groan of a faucet turning off. Before Shay could break the silence, there was a knock at the door.