Chapter Twelve
HE’S GONE WHEN I WAKE, the side of the bed where he slept already cold, and that, it turns out, is all the warning I’m going to get.
I find him at breakfast being a stranger.
It’s a small thing at first, so small I nearly talk myself out of it.
He’s polite. That’s all. He passes me the coffee and asks whether I slept well in the even, pleasant tone you’d use on a seatmate, and when Artie booms down the car wanting to know how his two lovebirds are faring, Loukas puts his arm around me for the performance.
And it is, for the first time since the platform, only a performance. His hand rests on my shoulder like a coat somebody asked him to hold.
The warmth has gone out of him so completely that I keep checking his face for the man from last night, the one who wept-adjacent into my hair and put me back together in the dark, and he simply isn’t there.
There’s only this courteous, faraway version, watching me from behind a foot of glass, every pleasant word out of his mouth shutting like a door somewhere deep in the house.
“Have I done something?” I ask him quietly, when the car’s emptied and it’s only us and the cooling coffee.
“You’ve done nothing.” He doesn’t look up from his paper. “Why would you have done something?”
“Because last night you—”
And I stop, having no name for what last night was, only the shape of it, only the print of it still on my whole body. “Last night was different. And this morning you’re...I don’t know what this morning is.”
“This morning is a Thursday.” He folds the paper with two clean, deliberate movements.
“We got carried away. It’s been a strange few days in close quarters, and we’re both adults, and I think it wise we remember what this actually is before either of us forgets and does something neither of us can undo.
” He finally looks at me, and his eyes are courteous and black and absolutely sealed.
“It’s an arrangement, Blythe. A good one.
Let’s not spoil it mistaking the scenery for the destination. ”
It’s the cruelest thing he could’ve said, and the worst of it is how reasonable it sounds, how grown, how exactly like the philosophy he recited over the eggs that first morning.
I sit there with the print of his tenderness still warm on my skin and listen to him explain that it meant nothing, and somewhere very far down a twenty-one-year-old girl in a tiered classroom hears a familiar voice tell her, all over again, that no one could ever love her.
I don’t cry. Let the record show it. I’ve been not-crying in front of this man and men like him for forty years, and I don’t break my streak over breakfast.
I should’ve known it would get worse. With this family, this train, this woman, it always gets worse.
Bettina’s party is that evening, the one she threatened over the pudding, every single thing about her, held in the lounge car with the good champagne out and the lamps low. I almost don’t go. Except not-going would be a story, and I’ve just enough pride left to refuse to be a story.
So I put on the green silk she’d sent to the cabin, the woman having of course chosen what I’d wear, and I let her girl do my hair, and I walk in on Loukas’s cold courteous arm and perform being adored by a man who informed me this morning that I was a passing view.
He disappears halfway through.
I tell myself I don’t notice, but I do, the way the tongue goes back and back to the gap where a tooth’s gone, constantly, against my own better judgment, and after twenty minutes of Artie’s stories and the young Amarillo rancher very carefully not coming near me, I go looking.
We’re meant to be a unit. The performance requires it.
And I’m apparently incapable of leaving well enough alone.
I find him in the observation car, in the dark, where the party isn’t.
I find him there with Bettina.
I see it in pieces, the way you see the worst things, out of order and too bright. Her arms up around his neck. The red of her dress against the white of his shirt. Her mouth on his.
The two of them close in the black glass with the country streaming by behind them, and the champagne still cold in my own hand, and the green silk she chose for me gone all at once into the most humiliating thing I’ve ever worn, a costume for a part I was too stupid to understand I’d been cast in.
I don’t make a sound. That, at least, a lifetime of swallowing things has taught me. You don’t let them hear it strike.
I just turn, very carefully, the way you carry something filled to the brim, and walk back the way I came, past Artie laughing, past the good champagne, past the young rancher who takes one look at my face and starts to rise, and I make it all the way to the cold gap between two carriages, the roaring place where the cars couple and uncouple and nobody can hear anything over the wheels, before my legs decide they’ve carried me far enough.
He was always going to choose her, some calm ruined voice informs me, out where the wind can have the words.
Not Bettina. Not the woman. Her specifically.
He was always going to choose the version of this where nothing was real, where it was a passing view and an arrangement and a strange few days in close quarters, and the only fool aboard this train was the forty-year-old who let a man gentle her open in the dark and mistook careful hands for a promise.
I take off the ring there, between the carriages, the wind trying to tear the words out of my mouth, and I close it in my fist so hard the old stone bites, and I stand in the roaring dark a long time, and I do what I swore at thirty I’d never do again for any man living.
I let myself want him, openly, with nothing held back. Just for tonight. Just this once, where no one can see.
And then I promise myself, with the cold clean calm of a woman who’s finally run out of road, that the moment this train reaches the next stop, with his money or without it, I’m getting off.