“Why would you pray for that?”
“They were too perfect. I mean, they lived in this cute fucking colonial right on the town common. White, of course, picket fence, wraparound porch with, yes, an actual porch swing. They sat out there on Christmas Eve in their sweaters, brought out little space heaters, and sat drinking hot chocolates. Told each other stories. Laughed. At one point the daughter, she was like ten, sang a Christmas carol and they all applauded. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Sounds sweet.”
“It was hideous. Because if someone can be that happy? That perfect? What’s that say about the rest of us?”
“But there are people out there like that,” she said.
“Where?” he said. “I never met them. You?”
She opened her mouth and then closed it. Of course she hadn’t, but why did she think she had? She’d always thought of herself as a fairly skeptical, if not downright cynical, person. And after Haiti, she would have sworn she’d been stripped of the last vestiges of sentimentality or romanticism. But buried somewhere deep in her brain lay the belief that perfect, happy—and perfectly happy—people walked this earth.
No such beast, her mother had often reminded her. Happiness, her mother used to say, was an hourglass with a crack in it.
“But you said yourself,” she said to Brian, “they were happy.”
“They certainly seemed to be.”
“But then . . .”
He smiled. Triumphantly but with a whiff of despair. “Bob always stopped off at this little Scottish pub on the way home. One day I sat beside him. He gave me this huge double take, of course, and told me how much I resembled his son. I acted surprised. Acted surprised again when the bartender said the same thing. Bob bought me a drink, I bought Bob a drink, and so on. He asked me who I was, so I told him. Told him I went to school at Fordham, not Brown, but otherwise I stuck pretty close to the truth. Bob told me he wasn’t a big fan of New York City. Too much crime, too many immigrants. By the third drink, ‘immigrants’ became ‘wetbacks’ and ‘towel heads.’ By the fifth drink, he was on about the ‘niggers’ and the ‘fags.’ Oh, and the dykes. Hated lesbians, our Bob did. Said if his daughter ever turned into one he’d, lemme see if I get this quote right, superglue her cunt. Turned out Bob had fascinating ideas on corporal punishment that he’d been employing for years, first on Scott and then on Nannette, that was the daughter’s name. Once ol’ Bob got talking, he couldn’t stop. At one point, I realized that everything that had left his mouth for fifteen minutes was repulsive. Bob was a scared-shitless coward of a monster hiding behind his impeccable blandness.”
“Whatever happened to Scott?”
Brian shrugged. “He never went back to school. Probably lack of finances. Last I checked, and this was fifteen years ago, he was working at one of the Grafton B&Bs.”
“And you never introduced yourself?”
“God no.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Once I was sure his life was no better than mine, I lost all interest.”
So, coincidence of coincidences, Rachel had just come across Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont. Maybe he was in town for a food and beverage services conference. Maybe he’d made something of himself, owned a small chain of quality inns across New England. She wished the best for Scott, after all. Even though she’d never met him, he’d become part of the fabric of her memory and she hoped his life worked out.
But how could they both be wearing the same clothes?
That was the detail she couldn’t dismiss no matter how hard she tried. Accepting that Brian’s double or near double had happened to be in the same city of two million was easy enough, she supposed, but to swallow that both men wore a thin copper-colored raincoat over a black cotton pullover with the collar turned up, a white T-shirt, and midnight blue jeans, that required the kind of faith religions were founded on.
Wait, she asked herself as she turned up Commonwealth toward her building, how did you see the blue jeans? There was an SUV between you and his legs.
The same way she’d seen the rest of him, she realized—reflected in the glass. She’d first seen his face, the coat and pullover. Then, as the confusion set in, she’d caught the back of him as he stepped into the car, ducking his head under the doorframe, pulling the flap of the coat in after him. In the moment, she hadn’t realized she’d seen all that, but on the walk home, it reassembled for her. So, yes, the Refracted Man (or Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont) had been wearing the same color jeans Brian had left the house in. Same jeans, same coat, same sweater, same color T-shirt.
In the apartment, she half talked herself out of it again. Coincidences did happen in this life. She dried her hair and went into the spare bedroom he often used as his home office. She called his cell. It went directly to voice mail. Made sense. He was either still in the air or had just landed. Made perfect sense.
An ash-blond desk sat before a window that looked out across the river at MIT and Cambridge. They were high enough that on a clear day they could make out Arlington and parts of Medford if they put in the effort. Now, though, behind the sheets of rain, it was an impressionist painting, the buildings retaining their shapes but stripped of all specificity. Normally Brian’s laptop sat here, but of course he’d taken it on his trip with him. She put her own laptop there and considered her options. She tried his cell a second time. Voice mail.
His primary credit cards, an Amex and a mileage-plus Visa, were business cards. The records were at his offices, which were through the soup and across the river in Cambridge, just on the edge of Harvard Square.
The statements on their personal credit cards, however, were easily accessible. She brought the one for the Mastercard up on her screen. She went back three months and found nothing out of the ordinary, so she went back six. All ordinary purchases. What had she been expecting to find? If she did find some irregularity, the inexplicable purchase, the mystery website, would it turn out to be clear evidence he was in Copley Square early this afternoon when he was supposed to be in London? Or would it just turn out to be proof he surfed porn sites or that her last birthday present hadn’t been tucked away a month early as he’d claimed but had actually been purchased in a mad scramble that morning?
She didn’t even find that.
She went to the British Airways site and checked arrival information on Flight 422, Logan to Heathrow.
Delayed departure due to weather.
Expected arrival: 8:25 pm (GMT +1).
That was fifteen minutes from now.
She checked their ATM statements and found no large cash withdrawals. With some guilt she realized the last time he’d used the card had been as a point-of-sale purchase—the necklace he’d bought her at the mall.
She looked at her cell, willing it to vibrate, for “Brian” to show up in the caller ID. Somehow he’d clear this whole thing up. She’d finish the phone call laughing at her own paranoia.
Wait. Cell phone records. Of course. She didn’t have his—his cell phone was provided by his company and therefore a business expense—but she had her own. She spun in the chair once and set to tapping away on the keyboard. In a little over a minute, she had her cell records dating back a year. She called up the iCal and matched dates he’d been out of town against her records.
And there they all were—incoming calls from his cell phone when he’d been in Nome, Seattle, Portland. But they didn’t tell her anything. He could have made those calls from anywhere. So she scrolled to another week—God, that black icy week in January—incoming calls from Brian when he’d been in (or claimed to have been in) Moscow, Belgrade, Minsk. And there in the fifth column of the bill were the international long-distance charges she’d accrued for answering those calls. Not small charges either (Why was she getting charged for answering her phone? She needed a new provider), but sizable ones. Ones that correlated with calls made from the other side of the world.
As she clicked back over to the British Ai
rways site, her phone vibrated. Brian.
“Hey,” she said.
An elongated hiss followed by two soft pops.
And then his voice. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey,” she said again.
“I’m—”
“Where are—?”
“What?”
“—you?”
“I’m in the customs line. And my phone’s about to die.”
Her relief at hearing his voice was immediately replaced with irritation. “They didn’t have an outlet in first class? On British Airways?”
“They did but mine didn’t work. You okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I dunno. You just sound . . . tight.”
“Must be the connection.”
He didn’t say anything for a bit. And then: “Okay.”
“How’s the customs line?”
“Massive. I’m taking a guess but I’m pretty sure a Swiss Air flight and an Emirates flight arrived the same time as us.”
Another bit of dead air.
“So,” she said, “I met with Melissa today.”
“Yeah?”
“And after? I was walking on—”
She heard a series of beep-clicks.
“Phone’s dying, babe. I’m really sorry. Call you from the ho—”
The line went dead.
Had it sounded like customs in the background? What did customs sound like? It had been a while since she’d been out of the country. She tried to picture it. She was pretty sure a ding went off when a checkpoint became open. But she couldn’t remember if it was a soft ding or a loud one. Either way, she hadn’t heard any dings during their conversation. But if the line was long enough, and Brian was still at the back of it, maybe he wasn’t close enough to the checkpoints for the dings to be heard.
What else had she heard? Just a general hubbub. No distinct conversations. Plenty of people didn’t talk in lines, particularly after a long flight. They were too tired. Too knackered, as Brian sometimes said with a faux British accent.
She stared out the window through the rain at the Monet version of the Charles and Cambridge beyond. Not all its shapes were foreign to her. Downriver she could discern the spiky amorphous sprawl of the Stata Center, a complex of brightly colored aluminum and titanium buildings that called to mind an implosion. Usually she abhorred modern architecture, but she had an inexplicable fondness for the Stata. Something about its haphazard lunacy seemed inspired. Back upriver, she could identify the dome of the main building at MIT, and farther still, the spire of the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard.
She’d had lunch in the Yard a few times with Brian. It was just a few blocks from his office and he’d met her there their first summer together, sometimes with burgers from Charlie’s Kitchen or pizza from Pinocchio’s. His office was about as unassuming as they came, six rooms on the third floor of a nondescript three-story brick building on Winthrop Street that looked as if it belonged in an old mill town like Brockton or Waltham far more than in the backyard of one of the most elite universities in the world. A small gold plate outside the main door identified it as Delacroix Timber Ltd. She’d been there three times, maybe four, and outside of Brian and his junior partner, Caleb, she couldn’t name the other employees or recall much about them except that they were young and cute, males and females, with the avid eyes of the ambitious. Interns mostly, Brian had told her, hoping to prove their mettle and get promoted to a paying position on the mother ship in Vancouver.
Brian Delacroix’s break from his family had always been a personal one, he explained to Rachel, never a professional one. He liked the lumber business. He was good at it. When his uncle, who’d run the U.S. operation from offices on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, dropped dead of a stroke while walking his dog through Central Park one night, Brian—never a source of disappointment to his family, just one of confusion—stepped into the role. After a year, he found Manhattan to be too much—“You can’t turn it off,” he’d say—and moved the operation to Cambridge.
She looked at the clock in the upper right corner of her laptop: 4:02 P.M. There’d still be someone at the office. Caleb, at the very least, who worked like a madman. Rachel could pop over, tell Caleb Brian had left something behind in his office and asked her to retrieve it. Once there, she could hop on his computer or take a peek through the credit card statements in his files. Make sure everything added up.
Was it a crime to suddenly and wholly mistrust your husband? She wondered this as she tried to hail a cab on Commonwealth.
It wasn’t a crime or even a sin, but it didn’t speak to a rock-solid foundation in their marriage, either. How could she mistrust him this fast, after she’d been singing his praises just this afternoon to Melissa? Their marriage, unlike those of so many of their friends, was strong.
Wasn’t it?
What was a strong marriage? What was a good marriage? She knew terrible people who had wonderful marriages, glued together somehow in their terribleness. And she knew fine, fine people who’d stood before God and all their friends to profess their undying love to each other only to toss that love on a slag heap a few years later. In the end, no matter how good they were—or thought they were—usually all that remained of the love they’d so publicly professed was vitriol, regret, and a kind of awed dismay at how dark the roads they’d ventured down became by the end.
A marriage, her mother often said, was only as strong as your next fight.
Rachel didn’t believe that. Or didn’t want to. Not when it came to her and Brian. When it came to her and Sebastian, that had definitely been true, but she and Sebastian were a disaster from the start. She and Brian were anything but.
Yet in the absence of a logical reason why she would stumble across a man who looked like her husband and was dressed identically slipping out of the back of a building in Boston when her husband was supposed to be on a flight to London, she had to go with the only rational answer—that the man exiting the Hancock early this afternoon had been Brian. Which meant he wasn’t in London. Which meant he was lying.
She flagged down a cab.
15
WET
I don’t want him to be lying, she thought as the cab crossed the BU bridge and rounded the rotary to turn onto Memorial Drive. I don’t want to believe any of this. I want to feel exactly as I did this weekend—in love and in trust.
But what is my alternative? Pretend I didn’t see him?
This wouldn’t be the first time you saw something that wasn’t there.
Those times were different.
How?
They just were.
The cabdriver never said a word during the drive. She glanced at his hack license. Sanjay Seth. He looked sullen in the photo, one step short of scowling. She didn’t know this man and yet she allowed him to transport her, just as she allowed strangers to prepare her food and go through her trash and give her a body scan and fly a plane. And she hoped they didn’t fly that plane into a mountain or poison her food just because they were having a bad day. Or, in the case of this cab, she hoped he wouldn’t accelerate and drive her to a remote spot at the back of a failed industrial park and climb in the backseat, telling her just what he thought of women who didn’t say “Please.” The last time she’d taken a cab, this line of thinking had compelled her to abort the ride, but this time she pressed her fists into the sides of her thighs and kept them there. She maintained a steady inhale and exhale that was neither too deep nor too shallow and looked out the window at the rain and told herself she’d get through this just like she got through the subway ride and the mall.
When they neared Harvard Square, she asked Sanjay Seth to pull over at the corner of JFK and Winthrop because Winthrop was a one-way heading in the wrong direction. She didn’t feel like waiting while the cab slogged through 4:50 traffic for another five or ten minutes to come around the block just so he could get her a hundred feet closer.
/> As she approached the building, Caleb Perloff exited it. He tugged on the door to make sure it had locked behind him, his raincoat and Sox ball cap as wet as everyone else’s in the city, and then turned to see her standing on the sidewalk below him.
She could tell by the look on his face that he couldn’t put the two together—Rachel here on the other side of the river in Cambridge, outside their offices, when Brian was overseas.
She felt ridiculous. What possible explanation could she have for standing here? She’d had the cab ride over to think about it and she hadn’t managed to come up with one viable reason she’d need access to her husband’s office.
“So this is where it all happens,” she tried.
Caleb shot her that wry smile of his. “This is the spot.” He craned his head to look up at the building and then back at her. “Did you know that the price of timber went down one-tenth of one cent yesterday in Andhra Pradesh?”
“I did not, no.”
“But on the other side of the world, in Mato Grasso—”
“That’s where again?”
“Brazil.” He rolled the r as he came down the steps toward her. “In Mato Grasso, the price rose half a cent. And all signs point to it continuing to rise over the next month.”
“But in India?”
“We get that tenth of a cent discount.” He shrugged. “But it’s also kinda volatile right now. And shipping costs are higher. So who do we make a deal with?”
“That’s a dilemma,” she admitted.
“And what about all the timber we export?”
“Another wrinkle.”
“Can’t just let it rot.”
“Couldn’t do that.”
“Let the bugs get to it. The rain.”
“Heavens. The rain.”
He held his hand up to it, a soft drizzle at the moment. “Actually, it’s been dry in BC this past month. Odd. Dry there, wet here. Usually works the other way.” He cocked his head at her.
She cocked hers at him.