Chapter 25 — One More Time.147
The mainland, when we finally reached it, was a wet concrete jetty and a man named Gus who ran the only cab for forty miles and did not ask why two people off a midnight boat had no bags and one of them was dressed like a votive candle.
He took us to the one place with its lights still on, a motel off the coast road called the Sandpiper. Eleven units in an L around a cracked lot, a vacancy sign with the C burned out, a vending machine throwing blue across the ice box like a little roadside chapel.
Don had peeled off at the highway with a hand on my shoulder and a promise to call about the footage and a look at the two of us that I am going to keep.
Calla had gone east, toward her husband and her lawyers.
And then it was just us and Gus’s taillights and the sound of actual traffic, real strangers going real nowhere in the dark, and I stood in that parking lot and felt something in my chest let go that had been clenched since the ferry.
The room was seventy-nine dollars. The man at the desk had a small TV playing a game show to nobody and a cat asleep on the laminate, and he gave us a key.
A real key. Brass, on a green diamond fob with the number stamped into it.
Nothing about it ran on an app or a tide bond or a serene woman explaining that we had always been free.
It was a key, for a lock, that we got to hold.
Unit seven smelled of carpet shampoo and somebody’s old cigarettes and the ghost of a hundred ordinary nights, and it was, I want to be honest about this, the most beautiful room I have ever walked into.
Two queen beds under spreads the color of a swimming pool.
A landscape bolted to the wall so it could not be stolen, as if anyone would.
A Bible in the drawer and a laminated card about checkout and an air conditioner under the window that kicked on like a propeller plane.
Every single thing in it was cheap and a little sad and absolutely, gloriously true. Nothing in that room was pretending to heal me. The lamp was only a lamp.
My mother stood in the middle of it with the deepwater blue still on her and my coat still over that, and she turned a slow circle taking it in, and I watched the island start to come off her in layers.
“There’s a Bible in the drawer,” she said.
“There’s a Bible in the drawer.”
“A real one. Not about the tide.” She sat on the end of the nearer bed, carefully, like the bed might be a trick. “Sean. The bedspread is so ugly. Look at it. It is so ugly.”
“It’s the ugliest thing I have ever seen.”
“I could cry.”
She did not. She laughed instead, the real one, the one the kitchen used to be full of before any of this started, and it cracked in the middle and went somewhere wetter for a second and then climbed back out as a laugh again, and that was the whole three weeks leaving her in one ugly beautiful sound.
We were starving. Neither of us had eaten since a breakfast that by now felt like it had happened to other people, so we walked across the lot to a diner called the Coast Kitchen that was open and empty and lit like an operating theater, and a woman behind the counter called us both hon without it meaning a single thing, and that nearly finished me off too.
We ordered like criminals. Cheeseburgers, a basket of fries and then a second basket of fries, a chocolate shake with two straws that we did not share romantically so much as fall upon, coffee that was bad in the specific way that good coffee can never manage.
My mother ate with both elbows on the table and grease on her chin and her crowned-Diver hair coming down on one side, and she did not photograph any of it.
She did not arrange the plate. She did not turn the burger to its good side or find the window light.
She just ate, like a person, the first unposted meal I had watched her have in years, maybe since Rainer, and I sat across from her in a vinyl booth and felt the two of us come up to the surface one slow breath at a time.
“I keep thinking it’s going to be on the bill,” she said, around a fry.
“What is?”
“All of it. The reckoning. Like Coral’s about to walk in with a card reader.
” She glanced at the door. The door stayed a door.
“I think I forgot food was allowed to just be food. On the island everything you ate was also a lesson. The bread was about something. The water was a whole journey.” She picked up the second burger.
“This is about nothing. This is just a bad burger at one in the morning.”
“It’s a great burger at one in the morning.”
“It’s a terrible burger and I would die for it.” She chewed. Her eyes went somewhere for a second. “He’s really okay? Fathom?”
“Calla says awake and furious about the bill. That’s about as okay as anyone gets.”
“Furious about the bill.” She nodded slowly, like she was filing it under things that were allowed to be funny now. “Good. That’s the most sane thing I’ve heard in three weeks. Be furious about the bill.”
We talked about nothing and then about everything and then about nothing again.
The footage going out. What a lawyer would even do with all of it.
Whether the house would still be standing when we got home, whether the brand was a smoking crater, whether anyone she had ever known had watched her get crowned and then watched the rest. She said the word lawyer like a person trying on a coat from her old life and finding it still fit.
And under all of it, slow and unmistakable, the thing that had ridden in the room with us for three weeks and never been allowed off its leash got up off the floor and stretched.
I felt it come back the way you feel weather change.
She reached across the table to steal a fry and her fingers brushed the back of my hand and neither of us moved, and the diner got very quiet, and the woman behind the counter was doing a crossword, and my mother looked at me across a basket of fries with grease on her chin and the island finally all the way off her face, and there was nobody in the world watching us, and that was the whole problem, and that was the whole gift.
“We should go back to the room,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m so tired.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us was tired at all.
She showered first. I sat on the end of the ugly bed and listened to the water and the propeller-plane air conditioner and the real traffic, and I did not let myself think in any direction at all, because every direction it could go was a cliff.
When she came out she had a motel towel around her and her hair dark and flat and her face scrubbed back to Deb, no brand on it anywhere, and she had put on one of the shirts I’d had in my coat because we owned, between us, almost nothing, and she stood in the bathroom light in my old shirt and a towel and looked at me, and the room got small.
“There are two beds,” she said.
“There are two beds.”
“That’s new.” She said it lightly and it landed like a stone. A whole three weeks of one bed and a cult counting the inches, and here were two, and no one to perform either of them for.
She came and sat next to me on the nearer one. Not on the far one. Close, our arms touching, both of us facing the bolted-down landscape like it was a window.
“We never finished the Merging,” she said, to the landscape. “Technically.”
“Technically.”
“It’s a loose end. You hate a loose end.” A breath. “We could finish it. Properly. The once. Close the loop. For the record.”
“For the record,” I said. “Strictly administrative.”
“We did pay for the full program.” She kept her eyes on the landscape, grave as a notary. “It seems irresponsible to leave it ninety percent done. That’s just throwing money away.”
“You raised me not to throw money away.”
“I raised you very well.” A beat. “And the tide would want us to be thorough.”
“The tide’s very big on thorough.”
“It’s practically a duty.” She was fighting the smile and losing. “We get it out of our system, we close the file, and then we never, for the rest of our natural lives, think about it or speak of it or so much as...”
And there she ran out of road, because there was no honest end to that sentence and we both knew it, and we both heard the exact second the bit stopped being a bit.
That had been the last fig leaf either of us was ever going to bother to hold up, held between us so thin by the end you could read the whole room straight through it, and now it was simply gone. Not torn away. Gone.
Because there was no Coral to call the rite complete and no oil and no count and no dark to do it in and no asleep to pretend we’d been, there was no rule left anywhere in the world for either of us to hide behind.
There was a woman and a man in a seventy-nine dollar room who had run clean out of walls.
I was already getting hard at a sprint, but she was the one who crossed the gap.
That was the thing that took the floor out from under me, the same as it had on the boat, that she came to me and not the other way around.
She stopped a breath away, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off her skin, and I watched her decide to keep the bit alive a little longer, because that is who the two of us are, people who will hold a fig leaf right up to the last second of their lives.
“Properly,” she said. “We said properly.”
“We did say properly.”
And the first thing properly meant was getting undressed, which, for the first time in three weeks, we had to manage ourselves.
No one to talk us through it, no curtain, no choreography.
Just the two of us taking our own clothes off on opposite sides of an ugly bed, not quite looking at each other and not quite able to stop.