As they waited out a light to cross Beacon Street, however, Rachel saw two dead girls standing in the middle of the overpass that led to the Esplanade. The one in the faded red T-shirt and the jean shorts was Esther. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widdy. The two girls stepped up onto the overpass guardrail. Traffic streamed off Storrow Drive and flowed below them as they dove headfirst from the rail and vanished before they hit the pavement.
She didn’t tell Brian. She made it back to the apartment without another hitch and they drank some champagne. They made love and had some more champagne and lay in bed and watched a harvest moon rise over the city.
She saw the two girls fall from the overpass and vanish. She catalogued all the people who had vanished from her life, not just the big ones, but the small, everyday ones, and she experienced a sudden grasp of what she feared most out in the world—that they’d all vanish on her one day, everyone. She’d turn a corner and the wide avenues would be empty, the cars abandoned. Everyone would have snuck out some galactic back door while she paused to blink, and she would be the only person alive.
It was an absurd thought, something a child with a martyr complex would marinate in. Yet it felt elemental to understanding the core of her fears. She looked at her newly minted husband. His blinking lids had grown heavy with sex and champagne and the gravity of the day. She knew in that moment that she’d married him for entirely different reasons than she’d married Sebastian. She’d married Sebastian because subconsciously she’d known that if he ever left her, she wouldn’t give much of a shit. But she married Brian because although he left her in small ways—enough that she could trust the imperfection of that model—he’d never leave her in the big ones.
“What’re you thinking about?” Brian asked. “You seem sad.”
“I’m not,” she lied. “I’m happy,” she said, because it was also true.
It was eighteen months before she left the apartment again.
12
THE NECKLACE
The weekend before he left for London, fast approaching their second wedding anniversary, Brian and Rachel rode the elevator down from the fifteenth floor and left their building. It was raining—it had done nothing but rain that week—but the rain wasn’t heavy, more like a mist she’d barely notice until the wet found her bones, similar to the weather the night they’d met. Brian took her hand and led her up to Mass Ave. He wouldn’t tell her where they were going, only that she was ready for it. She could handle it.
Rachel had left the condo a dozen times over the last six months, but she had done so when the environment was at its most controllable—early mornings and weekday evenings, often in the coldest weather. She went to the supermarket but, as before, only in the early morning hours of a weekday, and she always stayed in on weekends.
But here she was, out and about in Back Bay late on a Saturday morning. Despite the weather, Mass Ave was crowded. So were the cross streets, Newbury in particular. The Masshole fans of Red Sox Nation were out in force, the team trying to squeeze in at least one home game in a week when the rest had been rained out. So Mass Ave was teeming with red or blue T-shirts and red or blue ball caps and the people who wore them: studly young frat-boy types in jeans and flip-flops already hitting the bars; middle-aged men and women with competing beer guts; kids darting in and out of the fray along the sidewalks, a quartet of them sword fighting with toy bats. Cars sat in traffic so long the drivers turned off the engines. Horns beeped and horns bayed and jaywalkers weaved through it all, one guy shouting, “Ti-tle town, ti-tle town!” every time he slapped a trunk. Beyond the sports fans—obnoxious or otherwise—were the yuppies and buppies and the urban hipsters so recently graduated from Berklee College of Music or BU to a daunting lack of prospects. Farther down Newbury would be the trophy wives with their duck lips and their purse dogs, sighing at every slip in customer service before demanding to see someone’s manager. It had been so long since Rachel had risked entering a crowd that she’d somehow forgotten how overwhelming it could be.
“Breathe,” Brian said. “Just breathe.”
“Exhaust fumes?” she said as they crossed Mass Ave.
“Sure. Builds character.”
It was when they reached the far sidewalk that she realized what he had in mind. He turned them toward the Hynes Convention Center subway stop.
“Whoa.” She clamped her free hand over his wrist.
He turned with the tug, looked into her face. Smiled. “You can do this.”
“No, I can not.”
“You can,” he said softly. “Look at me, honey. Look at me.”
She looked into his eyes. There was a part of Brian that could inspire or grate, depending on her mood, a can-do attitude that bordered on evangelical. He preferred music and movies and books that, in one way or another, reaffirmed the status quo or at least the idea that good things come to good people. But he was no naïf, either. He held enough empathy and wisdom in those blue eyes for a man twice his age. Brian saw the bad in the world, he just chose to believe he could dodge it through force of will.
“You win,” he’d said more times than she could count, “by refusing to lose.”
To which she’d replied, more than once, “You lose by refusing to lose too.”
But she needed that part of him now, that mix of Vince Lombardi and self-help guru, that relentlessly upbeat (sometimes just relentless) attitude that her cynical self would have deemed far too predictably American were her husband not Canadian. She needed Brian to out-Brian himself now, and he did.
He held up their entwined hands. “I will not let go.”
“Shit.” She heard the suppressed hysteria in her voice even as she smiled, even as she knew she was going to do it.
“I will not,” he repeated, “let go.”
And the next thing she knew, she was on the escalator. No modern wide escalator, this. The escalator at Hynes was narrow, black, and steep. Definitely not up to current code. She feared that if she leaned forward for any reason, she’d bring herself, Brian, and everyone in front of them tumbling to the bottom. She kept her chin and head up, spine straight, as they descended. The lights dimmed until the descent felt like part of some primitive ritual, one of fertility perhaps or birth. Behind her were strangers. In front of her were strangers. Faces and motives shrouded in the dim light. Hearts beating like the tick of a bomb.
“How you doing?” Brian asked.
She squeezed his hand. “Hanging in there.”
A single drop of sweat left her hair by the temple and slid behind her left ear. It found the back of her neck and rode the line of it into her blouse where it dissolved against her spine.
She’d last suffered a panic attack on the same elevator she and Brian had taken down from their condo this morning. That had been seven months ago. No, eight, she realized with some pride. Eight, she thought, and squeezed her husband’s hand again.
They reached the platform. The crowd wasn’t too thick once it cleared the narrow escalator. She and Brian walked a quarter way down the inbound side of the platform and she was surprised to discover her hands were dry. Through most of her twenties and early thirties she’d traveled extensively. Descending into a dark tunnel with hordes of strangers to board a tube packed with even more strangers hadn’t even registered on the threat scale back then. Same thing with going to concerts and sporting events and movie theaters. Even in the tent cities and refugee camps of Haiti, she’d had no issues with panic. She’d had plenty of other issues over there and immediately upon her return—alcohol, Oxycontin, and Ativan sprang immediately to mind—but not panic.
“Hey,” Brian said, “you with me?”
She chuckled. “I think that’s my question for you.”
“Oh, I’m here,” he said. “I am right here.”
They found a bench built into a wall that sported a map of the MBTA routes—green line, red line, blue line, orange, and silver, crisscrossing like veins before branching out on their own.
S
he kept both her hands in his now and their knees touched. People would look and see an attractive couple, clearly connected.
“You’re always here,” she said to him. “Except—”
“When I’m not,” he finished for her, and they both chuckled.
“When you’re not,” she agreed.
“That’s just travel, though, babe. You can come with me anytime.”
She gave that a roll of her eyes. “I’m not certain I can get on this train. I’m sure not getting on a plane.”
“You’ll get on this train.”
“Yeah? Makes you so sure?”
“Because you’re stronger now. And you’re safe.”
“Safe, uh?” She looked out at the platform and then back at his hands, his knees.
“Yes. Safe.”
She looked at him as the train blew into the station hard enough for the air to muss Brian’s unruly hair even further.
“You ready?”
“I don’t know.”
They stood.
“You are.”
“You keep saying that.”
They waited for the exiting passengers and then stepped to the threshold where the car met the platform.
“We go on together,” he said.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
“Want to wait for the next one?”
The platform was empty. Everyone was on.
“We can wait for it,” he said.
The doors started to close with a whoosh and she jumped on, pulling Brian with her. The doors snapped back as they passed between them, but then they were in the car, a pair of old white ladies giving them annoyed looks, a young Hispanic boy with a violin case on his lap giving them a curious one.
The car lurched. The train headed into the tunnel.
“You did it,” Brian said.
“I did it.” She kissed him. “Wow.”
The car lurched again, this time as it maneuvered into a turn, the wheels screech-clacking. They were fifty feet underground traveling twenty-five miles an hour in a metal can along tracks that were over a hundred years old.
I am down here in the deep dark, she thought.
She looked at her husband. He was looking up at one of the ads above the doors, his strong chin tilted up with his gaze.
And I am less afraid than I would have imagined.
They rode the train to Lechmere, the last stop. They walked in the mist into East Cambridge and had lunch at a chain restaurant on the ground floor of the Galleria Mall. She hadn’t been in a mall for as long as she hadn’t been on the subway, and as they waited for the check, she realized the mall wasn’t an accident.
“You want me to stroll through this mall?” she said.
He was all innocent surprise. “Why, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Uh-huh. This mall of all malls? It’ll be filled with teenagers and noise.”
“Yup.” He handed the waiter his credit card on the small black tray.
“Oh dear,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“And if I said the subway was enough daredevil shit for one day?” she asked.
“Then I would respect that.”
And he would, she knew. He would. If asked what she loved most about her husband, she might have to say his patience. It appeared, at least when it came to her affliction, bottomless. For the first couple of months after her last attack, the one on the elevator, she took the stairs up to their apartment on the fifteenth floor. And when he was in town, Brian wouldn’t hear of her doing it alone. He’d huff and puff up those stairs with her.
“On the bright side,” he said once, when they paused to rest between ten and eleven, their faces sheened with perspiration, “we almost bought that unit on the twenty-second floor in that place on Huntington.” He lowered his head, took a deep breath. “I don’t know if it would have led to divorce, but we’d definitely be in mediation.”
She could still hear the echoes of their laughter in the stairwell—light and weary, threads of it rising toward the roof. He’d taken her hand and led her up the final five flights. They’d taken a shower together and then lay on the bed naked and let the ceiling fan dry what the towels hadn’t. They didn’t make love right away, just lay there holding hands and chuckling at the absurdity of their situation. And that’s how Brian looked at it—as a situation, an act of God foisted upon them, so beyond their power to change it that to try would be like trying to change the weather. Unlike Sebastian, as well as some of her friends, Brian never presumed that the panic attacks were within Rachel’s control. She didn’t have them because she was weak or self-indulgent or prone to drama; she had them because they afflicted her, like any malady of the body—the flu, a cold, meningitis.
When they did make love, it was as the last of the day bled out into the dusk beyond the bedroom window. The river turned purple and then black, and making love with Brian felt, as it sometimes did when they were connecting on every level, like they were drifting over thresholds of bone and slipping through walls of blood, like they were fusing.
That day became a standout that she would string together with other standouts, one after the other, for eight months, until she could look back on the state of her marriage and realize there had been far more superior days than inferior ones. She began to feel safer, sure enough of herself that one day three months ago, without warning anyone—Brian, her friends Melissa and Eugenie, her shrink, Jane—she took the elevator again.
And now here she was in a mall, riding down an escalator into a maelstrom of bodies. Teenagers mostly, as she’d predicted, on a Saturday of all days, and a rainy one, the kind of day mall managers prayed for. She could feel eyes on them—real or imagined, she had no idea—and the press of bodies as they passed and she could hear so many disparate voices, so many snatches of conversation—
“. . . said you ’fronting now, Poot . . .”
“. . . pick up, pick up . . .”
“. . . and, like, I’m expected to just drop everything? Because he happens . . .”
“. . . not if you don’t like it, of course not . . .”
“. . . Olivia has one and she’s not even eleven yet.”
She was surprised at how calmly she took in all these souls hurtling toward her, past her, and streaming on tiers above and below her with their aggressive need for goods and services, for the itchy satisfactions to be found in acquisition for its own sake, for human connection and disconnection in equal measure (before she quit counting, she noted twenty couples where one was ignoring the other to talk on a cell phone), for someone, anyone, to tell them why they did it, why they were here, what separated them from insects moving underground right now in colonies that bore a remarkable resemblance to the three-tiered mall in which they found themselves wandering, roving, stalking on a Saturday afternoon.
Normally, it was just this type of thinking that preceded a panic attack. It started with a tickle in the center of her chest. The tickle quickly became a piston. Her mouth would turn Saharan. The piston would transform into the sparrow, imprisoned and panicked. It would flap its wings—whomph, whomph, whomph, whomph—in the hollowed-out core of her, and sweat would sluice down the sides of her neck and pop on her forehead. Breathing would feel like a luxury with an expiration date.
But not today. Not even close.
Soon she even gave into the pleasures of a mall, bought herself a couple of blouses, a candle, some overly expensive conditioner. A necklace in the window of a jewelry store caught both their eyes. They didn’t even speak about it for the first minute, just exchanged glances. It was two necklaces, actually, a smaller one within a larger, strings of black onyx bead balls, the chains white gold. Not expensive, not even close, probably not even something she’d pass on to a daughter, should she and Brian ever have one, and yet . . .
“What’s the pull?” she asked Brian. “What do we like about this?”
Brian looked at her for a long time, trying to sort through it himself. “Maybe becau
se it’s a pair?”
He slipped it around her neck in the store. Had a little trouble with the clasp—it was too tight but the salesman assured them that was normal; it would loosen with use—but then the beads draped themselves over her blouse, just below her throat.
Outside the jeweler, he ran his palms along hers.
“Dry as a bone,” he said.
She nodded, her eyes wide.
“Come on.” He led her to a photo booth under the escalators. He inserted the required coins and pulled her into the booth with him, made her laugh by feeling her breasts up as she was pulling the curtain closed behind them. When the flashbulb flashed within the booth, she pressed her cheek to his and they made goofy faces, sticking out their tongues or blowing kisses at the lens.
When they were done, they looked at the strip of four panels and the photos were as silly as she’d expected, their heads half out of frame in the first two.
“I want you to sit for another strip,” he said. “Just you.”
“What?”
“Please,” he said, suddenly somber.
“Okay . . .”
“I want to mark this day. I want you to look in that lens with pride.”
She felt silly in the booth alone, could hear him out there inserting the coins. But she felt a sense of accomplishment too; he was right on that. A year ago, she couldn’t imagine walking out the front door. And now she was in a jam-packed mall.
She stared at the lens.
I am still afraid. But I am not terrified. And I am not alone.
When she came out of the booth, he showed her the strip and she liked what she saw. She looked a little tough actually, not the kind of woman you’d fuck with.
“Every time you see these pictures or you wear that necklace,” Brian said, “remember how strong you are.”
She looked around the mall. “This was all you, babe.”
He took her hand and kissed the knuckles. “I just nudged.”
She felt like weeping. She didn’t know why at first, but then it hit her.