Chapter 10 #2
Instead, I tossed and turned for hours in the darkness, listening to the barely muted sounds of grunts and moans and curses coming through the thin walls.
I thought about the day I proposed to Amy, surprising her—even though she’d helped pick out the ring—by pausing When Harry Met Sally right after Billy Crystal finally tells Meg Ryan he loves her on New Year’s Eve.
Amy had mentioned years earlier that it was her favorite scene in a romantic comedy and that it never failed to make her tear up.
I remembered her saying that on one of our first dates, and when we watched the movie again, I bent the knee right there in our little apartment in front of our tiny TV with Billy and Meg behind me.
Amy said yes.
I kicked at the sheets. Plumped the uncomfortable pillow for the hundredth time.
I thought of my parents. My father and his heavy sighs and scowls at the dinner table.
I thought about my grandmother, the way she could lay a pearl of wisdom on me that would stick with me for years, but it never felt like lecturing.
I thought about Severine and Sophie, riding around humid summer nights after we’d finished shifts at our crappy summer jobs, laughing and talking in circles about nothing.
I crumpled the scratchy blankets and shifted on the uncomfortable mattress.
I thought about my job, about my busy, empty professional life before all this started.
It was all now oddly hazy and distant, even though only a bit over a week had gone by, for me.
All the little things that had seemed so important—the daily grind, the endless bugs and lines of code, the demands from clients, the opinions of my coworkers, the pressures on my time, the struggle to make money and succeed—now seemed incredibly unimportant.
But mostly, I thought about Lyle and the choices I’d made with him.
The times I’d been distracted with work or something inane on the Internet, instead of giving him the attention he wanted and needed.
The times I snapped at him for being a kid.
Those moments flooded over me, ones I thought long forgotten, rising to the surface as I thrashed back and forth, wishing I’d done things differently.
After I finally fell asleep, I was assaulted by nightmares and woke several times. The room was freezing cold above the scratchy covers. It took me until the early morning to fall into a semblance of real, deep sleep.
And the shitty motel alarm clock next to the bed, which I’d painstakingly set when I crawled into bed, didn’t go off.
The world slipped and I came fully awake to startled cries as my weight landed in the center of the bed. I sat up, my heart pounding, as a skinny naked guy and an even skinnier naked girl tumbled off the mattress, shrieking.
“What the fuck?” the guy shouted as he thumped to the floor. “Who the fuck are you?”
The girl screamed and snatched at the blanket, trying to cover herself as she scuttled backward across the floor. She hit the side table, sending a lamp crashing to the floor.
I rolled and fell out of the bed next to the still-naked, still-shrieking girl, my feet still tangled in the sheets. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Get the fuck outta here, man.” Naked guy had pulled himself up using the edge of the bed and pushed his hands out at me, his eyes wide and white. “What are you, some kind of pervert?”
“I’m sorry, okay, look—” I kicked off the last of the blanket and stumbled to the door.
I fumbled with the lock and yanked it open.
I slammed it closed behind me and took off down the hallway.
One of the doors ahead of me edged open and a face peeked out.
The door shut as I ran by. There was no one at the front desk, thankfully, and I pushed through the front door without slowing.
I emerged into a beautiful, chilly early-winter morning.
Cold, but not the February cold from yesterday.
Predawn sunlight speared above low mountains in the distance, and the Montana landscape before me was cast in a soft orange hue.
Evergreens rustled in a cool breeze. I stopped and held my hand against the light.
I put my other hand out to the wall of the motel to steady myself.
I’d jumped forward while I’d been asleep.
If it followed the trend, it had been close to three years.
Three years. Three more years. Almost six years all together since this all started. I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t wrap my head around it.
I rubbed my eyes and heard shouting inside the motel.
I took a breath and pushed away from the wall.
Everything was different from the deep winter night before, but I spotted the Greyhound bus station sign through the morning glare.
I pointed myself in that direction, hoping to get away from town before the people inside thought of calling the police.
I didn’t know what day it was, either the date or the day of the week, but there were plenty of cars on the road and the bus station was open when I reached it.
I was disheveled, unshaven, unwashed, and my clothing was heavily wrinkled; it spoke to the nature of American bus stations that no one gave me a second look.
Even the bored, world-weary attendant at the front desk didn’t hesitate when I presented my three-year-old unused ticket, just accepted it and gave me a stub for the bus.
I found a spot on one of the plastic chairs, waiting among the other exhausted travelers.
I did my best to ignore the rumbling in my stomach.
At least there was a public water fountain.
It was rust-stained, but the water that came bubbling out tasted fine after I let it run for a few seconds.
The bus departed a little after nine. It was a twelve-hour trip.
I sat next to an older woman who tried to engage me in conversation.
She was anxious to talk to someone, to tell her story about traveling across the country to see her daughter and her daughter’s new fiancé, whom she’d never met.
She was going to surprise them, and seemed to want validation from me, a total stranger, that she was doing the right thing.
I demurred and murmured half-hearted words and grunts.
Eventually she fell silent when she realized I wasn’t going to ease her anxiety. I was far too wrapped up in my own.
I stared out the window and tried not to think about how the cars on the freeway looked different. How the styles had changed before my eyes.
I tried not to imagine what Lyle looked like now.
I tried not to wonder how I was going to find them if they’d moved in the last three years.
I tried not to think about Amy making love to another man, her lips pressed to another man’s mouth, her legs twined around another man’s legs.
I tried, but my thoughts kept going back, like a tongue unable to resist prodding a new sore.
I overheard the couple in the seat behind me chatting about someone seemingly famous I’d never heard of.
It took me several minutes to realize they were talking about the president of the United States.
The couple went on about their disgust with some recent policy the president enacted.
They talked about wars, plural, happening in the Middle East, civil unrest in China, and how a hundred million people were starving worldwide.
There was also a new superbug resistant to even the newest and most powerful antibiotics.
It all sounded terribly important and frightening, but they spoke with an odd detachment, almost as if they’d seen the events in a movie the night before instead of hearing it on the morning news.
I couldn’t muster the energy to care about any of it.
I huddled in the seat as the world went by outside, half listening to the murmurs around me, my thoughts traveling in endless circles.