Baggage Check Page 13

  “No,” Rebecca said definitively. “He hasn’t. The last time we had lunch was three or four months ago. I remember he returned that sweater of mine you had borrowed, so I am sure you knew about it.”

  Marci nodded, wiping more tears. “I didn’t really think it could be you, honestly.”

  Rebecca couldn’t hold back the laugh. “Uh, thanks.”

  “I’m sorry.” Marci laughed. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, I think you guys had your chance, you know, back when he and I were apart, and if he had wanted—”

  “If he had wanted me, he would have chosen me then, when I was throwing myself at him. But he picked you.”

  Marci nodded again, looking down. They had never spoken so frankly about what had happened four years earlier. In fact, at first they had scarcely spoken at all. Marci had punished Rebecca’s treason by excluding her from the wedding—which for Rebecca was a blessing of sorts anyway. How would she have stood and smiled in some blue monstrosity while Jake married someone else? Then when things cooled, it had been too much of a sore spot, painful for both of them.

  “We’ve never talked about this,” Rebecca observed.

  “No.”

  Suddenly it was as though Rebecca could see—after years of fumbling around in a dark cavern—that the way out had been right in front of her. Dangerous, maybe, but necessary. “Marci, you can ask me anything. I’ll be honest with you.”

  Marci raised her head in surprise. Then she hesitated. “I don’t know. It will feel like I’m confirming information Jake has already given me. Like I don’t trust him.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “So you brought me here to ask if I was sleeping with your husband because you trust him?”

  To Rebecca’s surprise, Marci laughed. “God, I am such an idiot, aren’t I? I know I shouldn’t blame the pregnancy, but the hormones really do mess with you.”

  “It’s okay,” Rebecca said. “I can imagine.” She held Marci’s gaze. She wanted to be done with this: to release herself from the unspoken tension, and the middle school ridiculousness between herself and her friend, once and for all.

  “The truth is, it’s not Jake I don’t trust. It’s me. I’ve been the other woman in a relationship, and I know how easy it is for two people to slip into something wrong, especially when the marriage is in a rough spot.”

  Rebecca nodded. She never heard the full story, but she had known Marci had an affair with a married man before she moved back to Atlanta, and that the affair was part of why Jake had called off their original engagement. At the time, Rebecca had been of the definite opinion that Jake should run like hell from someone who would get involved with another woman’s husband. But she had to admit: at the time, she had been hoping when he ran like hell, it would be into her own waiting arms. And that was before Jake had become another woman’s husband.

  “I just can’t help feeling,” Marci said, the tears flowing fully now, “that if Jake is seeing someone, that I … I deserve it. Like it’s karma or something.”

  Rebecca hesitated. She put her hand on Marci’s. “No,” she said. “No. You don’t deserve it.”

  She was ashamed, even as the words left her lips. Hadn’t she been the one nursing feelings for Jake herself? Would she really have turned him down if the opportunity presented itself? She couldn’t say for sure. But Marci’s pain was so palpable, the words just came in response. “Life is just … complicated. And love is worse. Nothing is as simple as we always believed when we were little.”

  “You’re right,” Marci said, wiping her eyes. “I know you are.”

  Rebecca stared out the window, trying to give Marci a moment to discreetly pull herself together. Tears made Rebecca uncomfortable, and public tears were worse. It was strange to have Marci so vulnerable in front of her. The chicken had come to the fox for advice. But maybe I’m not the predator after all, Rebecca thought.

  “Thank you. I really appreciate you being so nice,” Marci said after a minute. She heaved a sigh. “And you seem to know about relationships. Don’t take this the wrong way, but how have you never—?”

  “I don’t know,” Rebecca said. She didn’t want to hear the end of that question. She lived with it every day. For a moment, she felt brave or reckless—she was not sure which. But she said it. “I’m glad we’re talking, Marci. I won’t be upset if there’s anything else you want to ask me.”

  “Okay.” Marci stared at her cup for a moment. Then she said suddenly, “Did you try to seduce Jake while he and I were broken up?”

  Despite the redness that was rising in Rebecca’s face and the clenching in her stomach, she would not allow herself to drop Marci’s gaze. “Yes.”

  The other woman nodded. “But he didn’t—”

  “No. We kissed. For a few minutes, I thought maybe … but, no. His heart was broken. He loved you. Loves you. It’s always been you.” As she said the words, there was a cavern opening up inside Rebecca’s chest, dark and deep, and horribly empty. A truth that she had been carrying around with her for years but refused to acknowledge was finally dawning as she repeated the words. “You two belong together. I never had a shot with him. And I find it hard to believe anyone else does, either. Marci, there has to be another explanation.”

  “Thanks,” Marci said. There was a pause, and then her voice was gentle and tentative. “Rebecca, how long have you been in love with him?”

  At first, Rebecca didn’t answer. An old instinct told her this was a trap, that she should protect the soft center of her feelings with the same half truths and misdirections she always had. But when she looked at Marci’s face, she was surprised to see kindness written there. Sympathy, even. Marci knew something about hopeless love, didn’t she? Suddenly, Rebecca felt exhausted. It was a bone-deep tiredness that weighed down her limbs and pressed her into the seat. She was tired of fighting, tired of hiding, tired of trying to do the right thing and never knowing what that was.

  “A long time,” she said finally. “A long damn time.”

  18

  Early Monday morning, Rebecca loaded her car, dropped off the sad little plant with her neighbor, and headed back to Alabama. This time she had added a large suitcase to her familiar carry-on bag, with enough clothes to get by for two weeks without having to go to the Laundromat. She had packed her cleaning supplies, a giant can of insecticide, and a box of rubber gloves in a laundry basket and loaded her iPod with traveling music for the car. She was not entirely sure what to expect; she had no idea if she could be helpful. She only knew there was nothing for her in Atlanta right now, and she had to at least try to do the right thing, whatever that was.

  She had called her dad over the weekend, and he had agreed that she could stay in his house indefinitely so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the Super 8. “Rebecca,” he’d said before hanging up. “Don’t forget you have a life, too. It’s okay to live it.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” She had a feeling the permission he was offering was as much for himself as for her. She accepted it without voicing her response. But what is my life? Is any of it meaningful?

  The hole that had emerged in her chest at the coffee shop was still there, but today the emptiness no longer scared her. It was the place where she’d been cradling a hopeless love, a lost cause. In Alabama, there was a mess to clean, and maybe it wouldn’t help anything, but it was something she could do.

  She went to her dad’s house first, where the key was under the mat as promised. The little two-room bungalow was stark and white everywhere, but basically clean except for a fine layer of dust on the minimal furniture. There was no liner in the trash can, and only condiments in the fridge. She would run to the grocery store later. Richard had not been here in a while, she realized.

  The bed was freshly made, however, the sheets smelling of some kind of floral softener. Someone—Sonia?—had at least made sure she had clean sheets. She pulled out a bleach-stained pair of cut-off denim shorts and a ratty gray T-shirt from some long-forgotten sorority car wash. She
changed in seconds, folding the khaki pants and button-up shirt she’d worn on the drive, and leaving them across her suitcase on the bed. She felt like a visitor in her father’s house, but that was fine. She felt like a visitor everywhere.

  When she pulled up in front of her mother’s house ten minutes later, she had to gather her courage with a deep breath. “You can do this,” she said out loud. “Just stay for ten minutes and you can leave.”

  With the time allotted, she tried to assess the condition of the house. The piles of detritus that cluttered the front rooms only worsened as she pushed her way into the interior, wearing a mask and holding a can of insecticide in front of her, like a wooden cross in a graveyard known for vampires. She had put vapor rub under her nose, the way she’d seen cops and medical examiners do sometimes on Law & Order. It seemed to help with the smell but made her upper lip tingle unpleasantly.

  Filling the rooms and lining the walls, there were loaded trash bags and cardboard boxes, and large plastic tubs in a variety of colors and sizes. Piles of magazines and newspapers were everywhere, sometimes in great stacks with strings around them, and other times scattered as though someone had been reading them just before leaving the house. Clippings filled open spaces on the walls—recipes, news stories from around the world, local sports recaps. Rebecca also began to notice that alongside the trash and bins, there were plastic bags from stores, some of which seemed to still have new items in them. Comforters in various colors and men’s suits and children’s clothes—boys’ and girls’. Perhaps Mom had intended these as gifts for someone? She’d heard of compulsive shopping and wondered if that had become part of her mother’s pattern.

  When she reached the cluttered hallway to the house’s three bedrooms, she hesitated. Rebecca tried to remember the last time she had been in her childhood bedroom—sometime during college, she thought. Soon after that, her parents had converted it to an office-slash-“craft” room, which meant that her father had built a small desk in the corner where he played Spider Solitaire and paid the bills, and her mother filled the rest of the space with crap. Now, she could see the glossy white chest of drawers that had been hers since she was a baby still against the far wall, surrounded by an unfathomable amount of junk. An ancient exercise bike with clothes draped across it and hanging from its rusty handlebars, some of them still in dry cleaning bags. A wrought iron chandelier with frayed wires emerging from the top and cobwebs joining most of the spires. A stringless guitar painted a deep red, covered in dust. A rusty metal box of Tinkertoys she didn’t remember from her childhood.

  It went on and on. There was a path on the stained carpet between the door and the computer, which she supposed her mother must still have used sometimes. Her mom had an email account she used about twice a month, mostly for acquiring and distributing chain mail. Overall the room was cluttered, but more with piles of stuff and less garbage. This won’t be so awful, Rebecca thought.

  Her parents’ room across the hall, however, was an unqualified disaster. The minute she walked in, she realized the cats had been more present here than anywhere else in the house. The unmistakable stench of cat piss mixed with a sickly sweet honey smell, which reminded her of Jimmy Banks, who had a ferret in sixth grade. There was rotting garbage everywhere, some of it in bags, some of it sitting out. There was food on paper plates beneath wadded paper towels, and even under the bed. The bed was pushed against the wall; the far side could not be seen for all the newspapers and blankets and boxes, books, beverage cups, and cat toys. Closest to Rebecca there was a sliver of open bed—where she could see the sheet and pillow her mother slept on. Even this area was spotted with clumps of black cat hair. Vomit threatened in Rebecca’s throat as she pictured her mother trying to curl up on this tiny space to sleep. She turned and went quickly out, careening across the hall. She stormed into the room she’d been silently forbidden for years to visit.

  Cory’s room was the worst in the house. Not because of rotting garbage or insurmountable piles, but the opposite. The room was exactly as it had been nineteen years ago. Dusty, but otherwise untouched. The bed was neatly made. Cory’s childhood teddy bear, Simpson, sat between the pillows as though waiting patiently for his owner to return. If his owner had not been killed, the poor bear would have been tossed aside two months later when Cory went off to college at Auburn. Of course, their mother would have insisted on keeping the damn thing anyway, in the attic at least, along with some of the countless baseball and football trophies that still lined the walls.

  His cleats and shoes were lined up on the floor of the closet, neater than he had ever left them in his life, and all his clothes and uniforms hung in a row above them. She could see a baseball glove rotting to paper on a hook with Cory’s lucky number, 22, painted on it. Not such a lucky number if you didn’t even live to see it.

  Before she had walked in the house today, Rebecca had promised herself she would be strong. She had thought if she could last ten minutes in the garbage and roaches, that meant she could handle the house for half an hour the next day. Then an hour, and then step by step, however many days it took to clean it out. But now she felt defeated; she sat down hard on the dusty carpet of her dead brother’s room and cried.

  “How could you do this?” she screamed at a picture of Cory on the nightstand, in which he was pointing at the camera with a football extended in his hand. He had the same arrogant grin that always got him out of trouble, plastered there forever. “How could you do this to her? To us?”

  She stood, went to the nightstand, and flung the picture against the far wall. The sound of the breaking glass was both horrible and satisfying. She tore down the hook with the glove on it and sent them both hurtling after it. “Why? Why? Why?!?” she screamed again. “You knew this would happen, you reckless idiot. You knew you were going to get yourself killed and ruin our lives. Mama always loved you best. Now she needs you and you’re gone. What am I supposed to do without you?”

  Tears of rage fell unheeded as she tore down one trophy after another, slamming them on the floor or against the wall so that the fake gold baseball and football players came loose from their marble plinths and hung by the black screws that attached them. She pulled out drawers and tossed them, splintering the wood and scattering clothes around the room. Notebooks full of baseball cards, an old record player, Star Wars toys that were probably worth something on eBay. They might be the only things in the house that were valuable, but Rebecca didn’t care. She pulled them off shelves and threw them against the walls, where they left pockmarks on the faded blue cowboy wallpaper.

  The tantrum lost its appeal in short order as rage and grief turned to despair. How could her entire family abandon her? She had always been a good girl; why did she get left alone with the mess? They were hiding from her, all of them. Her father at Sonia’s lake house, her mother lost in her own mind, and Cory himself in the sweet oblivion of death. Rebecca alone was left to face the pain. She clenched her fist around a small action figure she barely knew she still held, not caring that it dug painfully into her flesh. She flung open the bedroom door with a bang and pushed her way down the hall and back out the front door.

  A guttural moan emitted from her as she sat down hard on the concrete steps to the front yard. She allowed her head to sink into her hands in unruly sobs. It was in this state that Alex found her, pulling the patrol car into the driveway so quietly that she scarcely noticed he was there.

  He sat down next to her on the porch steps, silent. Rebecca could see his boots on the ground through her hands and the bottom of his pant legs—synthetic khaki with a dark brown stripe up the side. She could feel that her face was a snotty, streaky mess under her hands, but she was helpless to do anything about it. The sobs were convulsing out of her in painful, guttural bleats. She must’ve sounded like a dying sheep, and she did not want to humiliate herself in front of Alex. But she simply could not stop.

  He put one hand on her shoulder, but said nothing. They sat like that for a while, the afte
rnoon marred only by her sobs, until there seemed to be nothing left inside her to cry out. When she was down to heavy breathing, he handed her a white cloth handkerchief, reaching between the crook of her elbows and knees so that she wouldn’t have to raise her head. When she had cleaned her face, she raised her head.

  “Thanks.”

  He nodded. “So what did he do to you?”

  “Who?” she asked, thinking of Cory. Or her father. Or Jake. Maybe all three.

  “The Jedi Master.”

  She followed his gaze to her other side, where a Yoda action figure lay facedown on the concrete step, a broken plastic cane in his hand. She had not even realized that she brought it with her. “Huh.”

  “Did he pretend not to be Yoda, and trick you into saying mean things about him, only to reveal that he really was Yoda after all? ’Cause I hate it when that guy does that.”

  She laughed, sniffled, and wiped her nose again. There was a pause. He was watching her. “Who carries a handkerchief, anyway?” she asked, holding it up. “I didn’t realize you were sixty.”

  He smiled back. “Well, when women crying on doorsteps came back into fashion, I thought this would be a good trend to follow.”

  He extended his hand to take it back, but she balled it up in her fist. “I’ll wash it for you,” she said. “It’s the least I can do. Did the neighbors call again?”

  “Yeah, they said it sounded like someone was breaking things and screaming, and that you seemed to be crying on the front steps. That part, I’ve verified myself.”

  “I can verify the rest,” she said. She stood up and adjusted her jean shorts. Alex glanced quickly away when she noticed him watching.

  “Are you okay?” he said, pushing himself up to stand in front of her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just battling a few ghosts.”

  He put a hand on her cheek, wiping it with his thumb. “Dirt,” he said softly.