Everything verged on weeping — the heavy, humid sky, the withering crabapples, even the woman tending the bar. Perhaps it only seemed this way because Jennifer felt worn and weepy herself. The past few nights she’d had a recurring nightmare about growing old, so old a map of tears was etched into her skin, so old her mouth only moved to slowly suck in mush, so old she could recall only her oldest memories. In the nightmare, Jennifer didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know the people who surrounded her, though once she woke, she realized they were her grown children, Bella and Henry. She didn’t know how to dress herself, how to bathe herself, how to give herself pleasure. In the nightmare, Jennifer was a shell of herself, empty save for a deep longing.
“You’re too lovely to be sitting alone,” a deep, unfamiliar voice said, pulling Jennifer back into the waking world. The tall, bearded man holding a high-ball half-full of Scotch grinned down at her. “I’m Dr. Peter Sinclair,” he continued, “but you can call me Pete.” He smiled as if he’d just let her in on a secret and nodded at the empty chair across from her. “May I?”
The doctor drew Jennifer out with wine and words both fascinating and inconsequential, so unlike her conversations with her husband, which were dull and awkward, and during which she carefully chose her words to avoid upsetting him. Her talk with the doctor rolled like waves, one word after another crashing and disappearing into the next sentence. The doctor did most of the talking. Jennifer absorbed his words like the sand absorbs the ocean.
“After years in those big cities – Chicago, New York, San Francisco – I thought someplace small like Richmond would be a delightful change,” he said, draining the liquor from his glass.
“Has it been?”
The doctor took her hand and raised it to his liquored lips. “You are delightful,” he said, and Jennifer felt her skin warm. “I’ve embarrassed you.”
“Oh, no, I…it’s hot in here, don’t you think?” Jennifer took a long drink of water. The doctor ran his thumb over the back of her hand, making her skin tingle.
He wasn’t what Jennifer’s mother would call a “real doctor.” His was a “Ph” rather than an “MD.” Instead of treating coughs and broken bones and stomach aches, he dealt with dreams and demons, helping people realign their thoughts in ways that made madness bearable. Jennifer wondered whether seeing a doctor like Pete Sinclair could make it easier for her to decide which type of woman she should be, a lady who cleaned and cooked and cared for her husband after working each day, or a woman who explored the world.
The doctor leaned forward, transfixing Jennifer with his sapphire eyes. Never before had she seen eyes so blue.
“If I tell you one of my secrets, will you tell me one of yours?” the doctor whispered. Jennifer nodded, excited that the doctor wanted to see inside her. That he would share with her one of his secrets was an added pleasure. “Despite having lived in great cities across the country and visited great cities throughout the world, what I most want is to make a home with a beautiful woman.” He ran his fingers up her arm. “Now tell me your secret.”
Jennifer didn’t care that the doctor hadn’t kept his promise. Moving so close to him she saw the outlines of his contact lenses, she confided, “I gather engagements.”
“Gather engagements?”
Jennifer sat back and laid her bony hand across the doctor’s meaty one. “Each weekend I cut engagement announcements from the newspaper, and I use names and photos to determine which couples have that special magic. Pairs that seem designed to grow their families’ prestige and wealth are the least special.”
“Of course,” the doctor agreed. “But who are the most special?”
“The couples who seem mismatched – a large, pear-shaped man and a small-boned, slender woman. A woman with an aristocratic name engaged to Joe Smith. A septuagenarian marrying a man in his fifties. These are the couples who have found true love.”
“Absolutely delightful!” the doctor repeated. He kissed Jennifer’s hand and headed to the bar for another Scotch, and she trembled as she watched him flirt with the bartender. Her moment had come.
Jennifer imagined how it would happen: The doctor would return and kiss her again, on the lips this time, and the rain and thunder raging in the street would shut off the lights just long enough for her to return his passionate kiss, and it would feel like the time the foot of the housekeeper fit the glass slipper. For a moment, while she watched him laughing as the bartender poured his Scotch, she considered the rest – how never quite settling on what type of woman she wanted to be had been so hard, never knowing whether to continue rushing home from work each day to make her husband dinner or leave him to go on buying trips on the other side of the world with her business partner; how the weight of her first failed marriage had almost crushed her; how she’d wavered between opportunities for redemption but settled on the one that appeared easiest, letting herself get written into the standard suburban story. A somewhat successful second marriage of twenty-five years, two college-educated kids living on their own instead of in her basement, business at her shop booming. She’d only recently acknowledged it was suffocating her.
Watching the doctor, she realized that this wasn’t at all how she’d pictured being swept off her feet, her Prince Charming drinking too much Scotch and flirting with the bartender as Jennifer picked her fingers bloody, wondering whether her husband knew where she’d gone and worried that she wouldn’t return.
The doctor came back to their table and kissed her, open-mouthed. It was a wet kiss, his soggy tongue washing her teeth and gums with Scotch residue. She thought: “This is not it at all.” She thanked him for the drinks and conversation and walked out into the downpour hatless as the lights went off, leaving the puzzled doc at the table. But now what was she to do? Returning to her husband didn’t seem right, even though he needed her. She needed herself, freed from the weight of her marital obligations, more.
She walked in the rain, past her car beneath the dead-eyed streetlamp and the sleek new apartments that mocked her for not belonging. Her house did the same. Sitting on her front porch every morning, she heard the birds singing “not here, not here, not here.”
She walked until the rain stopped. Steam rose from the wet pavement and wrapped itself around her. Lights came out of their coma and illuminated her wet dress. She liked the way it clung to her, the outline of her nipples announcing that she’d dared to go braless. Jennifer hadn’t worn this dress since the night she conceived Bella, her last date night with her husband. They’d dined at a five-star restaurant, gone salsa dancing, strolled along the moonlit canal hand in hand. In the decades that followed, raising their children and managing her husband’s moods depleted all the money and time they’d once had for dates. And now, although Jennifer watched women her age blush when asked about empty nesting, Jennifer’s cheeks remained cool. Until tonight. Yet she’d walked away from the doctor, back into the dead heat, toward her dying marriage.
Was she afraid? She reached toward the bottom of her soul but found neither fear nor regret. Perhaps decades of other people depending on her, husband, children, business partner, had left Jennifer with an unexpected distaste for prolonged contact with anyone new. She didn’t know whether she truly desired the pleasures of a man’s flesh against hers, pleasures her husband hadn’t brought her in years, pleasures she’d planned to find tonight, as the hotel money in her wallet confirmed. She realized she didn’t want those sexual pleasures, not really, not tonight. Tonight, she yearned for a solitary moonlit walk on a sandy beach and a sweet sugar cone of ice cream covered in sprinkles. She wanted to be young and free, unchained from a husband with a diseased mind.
The bus station was within walking distance, and buses going anywhere and everywhere awaited her. She had money in her purse. How far could she get for the price of a hotel room?
The Greyhound Station sat sordid and silent in the rain. Inside, a squat man with tiny eyes sat behind the ticket counter and answered questions without a smile. Jennifer’s wallet was crammed with twenty-dollar bills hastily taken from the ATM. How ridiculous that she’d tried to hide it! Hardly anyone noticed her these days. She counted her bills, asked “How much to get to…” The tiny ticket man slid a schedule across to her without looking up. She counted her bills again, surveyed her options. DC, Philadelphia, New York City. From New York she could catch a train to Cape May, the Hudson Valley, The Hamptons.
Jennifer knew it wasn’t proper. A proper wife would buy a ticket to DC, explore a little, and use the balance of her funds to ride a bus back home where she would explain to her husband that she’d needed a little adventure, begging for forgiveness if he’d worried. A proper wife wouldn’t be at the bus station at all, she’d be heading home now, drying to damp on the drive. “One-way to New York City, please.” The ticket-taker took Jennifer’s money, handing her a ticket without ever looking in her eyes, and Jennifer wondered if he knew and judged her. It’s fine, she wanted to explain. Henry and Bella take care of him when I’m not there.
Turning away from the ticket window, Jennifer spotted her once-upon-a-time friend, Sal. In between her marriages, after he’d lost his wife, she’d spent a lot of time with Sal. They went for dinner once a week and drinks whenever their days were particularly dull. She’d told Sal things she’d never told another soul, and he had listened and nodded and never judged. Jennifer lost touch with him after she remarried. He was an old man now, jet-black hair faded white to match his goatee, wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, wrinkled hands slowly scrolling through something on his phone. Yet he still looked distinguished, the aura of his two Harvard degrees having long ago settled onto him like a second skin.
She crossed the room to stand before Sal, waiting for him to look up.
“Jen?” Only Sal had ever shortened her name, and even now the intimacy made her blood rush. “Jen! How wonderful to see you!” He rose to hug her, and Jennifer inhaled his crisp scent, the same scent he’d had all those years ago when they’d briefly been inseparable.
“Sal!” She hugged him again. “What are you doing here?”
Sal smiled sheepishly. “My fiancé lives here in Richmond, and she’s convinced me to move back.”
Jennifer felt something heavy in her chest as she forced her smile to broaden. “Congratulations!”
Sal must be over seventy by now. Twenty-five years had passed since they’d last seen each other. The evening they’d met, she’d been polishing her resume at the University library, struggling to make her M.B.A. and three years at a small accounting firm sound special. In his tweed jacket, scribbling into a marble notebook, Sal seemed the stranger most likely to give her good advice.
“The only interesting thing on your resume is the semester you spent in Kenya. Perhaps you should focus on that.” Normally Jennifer would have dismissed his suggestion as unrealistic, but Sal’s tone and the interest in his ivy-colored eyes made her ask for more suggestions, and her questions led to their friendship and her twenty-seven-year career owning and managing a shop specializing in sub-Saharan artifacts.
Now, in the dingy bus station, Sal asked, “How are you?”
“I’m…I’m—” Jennifer paused. She’d learn to lie convincingly in the years since she’d last seen Sal, but the appropriate opaque falsehood lodged in her throat.
“Trouble on the home front?” Sal had always known when her love life was ailing.
“I’m afraid trouble is too interesting a word for it,” Jennifer replied, smiling ruefully.
“You’re still with George.” Sal pointed to the ring on her finger. Jennifer nodded and looked away, her gaze falling briefly on a group of teenagers laughing in the corner. She longed to switch places with one of them, to be young and carefree and surrounded by friends instead of tethered to a man who refused to remain on his anti-depressants and relied on her to keep him steady.
“Where are you headed?” Sal looked at Jennifer’s empty hands. “Or are you just strolling through the station looking for trouble?” He grinned.
“I’m going to New York.” Jennifer glanced at the clock. Her bus departed in fifteen minutes. Sal pointed at her empty hands.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” he asked, eyes twinkling, as they used to whenever he suspected her of doing something her Catholic mother would dislike.
“It’s an impromptu trip, just for a night or so.”
“Who are you meeting?” Sal grinned mischievously.
“I’m not meeting anyone,” Jennifer answered, wanting to add, I’m going to try to find myself, but felt it was no longer proper to share such intimate thoughts with her old friend. “I’d better run before I miss my bus.” She hugged Sal quickly, her hands barely brushing his shoulders. “Great to see you.”
“Be careful up there,” he said as she turned toward the doors, and her blood beat a quicker rhythm as she walked outside where once again rain was falling.
The bus stood greyly in the rain, black mud painting a rim around its bottom edge. A man clutching his cane climbed slowly up the steps; the bus driver left his perch to help him board. Next a young man stepped onto the bus, long hair flat on his shoulders, greasy and dull. Behind the young man stood an older woman in a yellow slicker with the hood up, black skirt dropping below the slicker’s edge to just above her knees, black purse in one hand, in the other something that brought the word “valise” to mind.
“Ticket!” the driver barked. The woman with the valise handed him a piece of paper. The driver unfolded it, smoothed it flat on his knee, held it to the ghost light above the rear-view mirror. “Can’t use this.” He shoved the paper into the woman’s face.
“What?” The woman’s voice pitched high, like the chirp of a bird struggling to mate. “But I paid for it.”
“Done gone bad.” The driver’s cheeks moved in and out like the cheeks of a cartoon fish breathing. He shot a stream of dark brown liquid into a plastic UVA cup wedged into the console. “Read your ticket, M’am. Says right on the front Good for 90 days from purchase date. Purchase date’s more’n five months ago.”
The paper ticket vibrated as the woman with the valise took it back into her hands and brought it so near her face it nearly touched her nose. “Well, damn,” she whispered.
“I’d like to purchase a new ticket,” she announced in a loud, clear voice, opening her purse.
“Sorry, all booked.” The driver stared through the windshield. The woman paused and ran her hand across her eyes. Sighing, she placed the useless paper ticket in her purse, pulled the hood of her slicker over her head and turned to descend the steps.
“Wait!” Jennifer clutched the woman’s arm so hard she felt the flesh gather beneath it. “Why are you going to New York?”
The woman’s green eyes locked on Jennifer’s blue, and they held each other’s gaze for a few beats. “I’m going home.” Something in the woman’s tone told Jennifer she wasn’t returning from vacation.
“Where have you been?”
The woman looked past Jennifer, and though her gaze seemed to fall on the benches outside the Greyhound station, Jennifer could tell she wasn’t seeing them.
“I was with my husband,” the woman answered softly.
“You might as well go back to your husband now, because that ticket ain’t getting you on this bus,” the driver said.
“I can’t.”
The driver pointed a finger at the woman’s face, nearly touching her nose. “Look, lady, I don’t care what kind of little spat you’ve had with your husband. I don’t care if you go back to him today, tomorrow, or never. I just need you to get off my bus.”
The woman straightened her shoulders and lifted her head. “My husband is dead.” Her voice trembled. “We came to Virginia to settle our daughter into college, and on our first night—” She took a few deep breaths. “A drunk driver hit him as he was going to pick up our dinner.” More deep breaths. “For five months he was in Intensive Care. The tubes became a part of him. I started kissing them goodnight.”
The driver adjusted the rearview mirror, looked over his shoulder at the passengers settling themselves. Turning to the woman, he said, “Lookit, I’m sorry about your husband. Really, I am. It’s a hell of a thing, death coming so unexpected.” He turned back toward the windshield. “But I still can’t let you on without a ticket.”
The woman nodded. Turning again to leave the bus, she told Jennifer, “He told me he loved me every day of our marriage, called me his beautiful, brilliant woman.” Her bottom lip started to quiver. “I just want to be home near his things while they might still smell like him.”
Jennifer suddenly felt foolish, clutching her ticket as if it were a magic lantern. “Here.” She shoved the ticket into the woman’s hands, rushed down the steps and through the terminal. Emerging on the other side, she paused, letting the rain pelt her bare head.
“Now what?” she asked the starless sky. Digging in her wallet, she found seven dollars and forty-two cents, nowhere near enough for a taxi home. She re-entered the bus terminal and stopped inside the door to buy a newspaper. Exiting into the parking lot, she opened the paper to the engagement announcements out of habit, her eyes falling immediately on a photo of Sal and a red-headed woman who looked close to Jennifer’s age. The woman held Sal’s hand in hers, touching his elbow with her other hand. Jennifer stared at the photo as the raindrops fell harder and harder until they soaked the page and blurred the image of the happy couple. Tossing the engagement section in the trash, Jennifer held the dry inner pages of the paper above her head and walked away from the bus station, away from the street that led back to her husband, toward a sliver of sky where the clouds were beginning to part.
