When she saw Travis again, back at his bar, it was almost a month later. She recognized his face but couldn’t place it.
“How’s your pirate?” he asked, and the night came back to her.
“Out to sea,” she said.
Travis poured her a free beer. It was Thursday, and football season, so she had to compete for his attention with the television behind him. Lyssa had grown up without a team—her mother didn’t believe in televised sports and there was no one else in the house to put them on, so Lyssa’s one allegiance was to a college basketball team an ex had played for—but Travis’s loyalties were evident from the jersey he wore. She adopted his team for the game, shouted at the screen at the appropriate times, marveled at the magic of sports: how easy it was to become invested, how picking one team over the other was enough to make things interesting, just a matter of making a choice. When Lyssa showed up for Travis’s Super Bowl party a few months later, she was wearing a team shirt she’d ordered online toward the end of playoffs and had owned for only weeks, but both her fandom and their relationship felt true and legitimate, rich, even after their team lost, with the discovery that sometimes all it took to become something was to want it. The wanting felt like joy, but the joy was there because she’d assigned it to herself, and she didn’t fully trust it. Certainly, the trick to everything couldn’t be that cheap.
By the time her mother was first admitted to the hospital, the joy had started to feel like effort and Lyssa was working up the nerve to break things off, but Travis showed up in the lobby with flowers and a teddy bear, so it was too late then. Closer to the end, her mother ran out of the only painkiller that worked and Lyssa had to go to work. Travis offered to pick up the medicine and bring it by the house. Lyssa picked her mother’s medicine up from the pharmacy all the time, and she never showed her mother’s ID and rarely got asked for her own, but Travis was a man and a good three shades darker than she was. The pharmacist accused him of having a fake ID and asked him to come back with two other forms of ID and the patient. The patient was recovering from surgery. The patient could not get out of bed. The pharmacist said the patient’s ID would not suffice. Travis argued, then he tried to call the doctor, then he cried. He was not a man who cried, but he had seen the condition he’d left her mother in.
The pharmacist called security and security asked him to leave. When he didn’t, because Lyssa was still at work and her mother still needed the medicine, the two security guards pinned him to the ground, pressing him into the dirty red carpet and twisting his arm behind him hard enough that his shoulder was strained for days. It was only because just then the manager who knew who her mom was and had seen Travis with her before came back from her lunch break and asked what was going on that the cops didn’t get called. Travis didn’t tell Lyssa any of it happened. He said he’d hurt his shoulder lifting a keg. Lyssa only heard about it because the manager apologized to her the next time she went to fill a prescription. It had taken her a minute to even understand what she was being told, to gather that when the manager said, I’m so sorry, she didn’t mean about everything Lyssa already knew was happening to her.
She called Travis from the parking lot and asked why he hadn’t said anything. He said she had enough to deal with. Lyssa asked if he was OK, which felt stupid—it had been weeks already, and she knew for herself that his shoulder was better, had watched him, limber and shirtless, play in a pickup game just that weekend, though of course that wasn’t exactly what she was asking, and anyway, he said he was fine. Later, when she told him what the doctor said, she half hoped he’d say, Well, if it has to be tomorrow, we have a baby tomorrow, but he just listened quietly and said, “If that’s what you have to do to be healthy, that’s what you have to do.”
“That’s sweet,” her cousin said, when she tried to explain. “He wants you alive more than he wants you knocked up. Could be the other way around.”
Lyssa was unsatisfied with these being her only options. She told Travis she was going to go through with it, then finally broke up with him. Lyssa went back to the doctor one more time to tell him no to the surgery for now, but she promised to come back and let them monitor her risk levels. So far, she had found a reason not to be at every scheduled follow-up and blood draw. Lyssa couldn’t remember walking around without suspecting that something inside of her wanted her dead. What future had there ever been but the imaginary?
* * *
—
She was still not getting any younger. Maybe she wasn’t getting much older either. In the dim hotel light, Lyssa noticed a green smudge she’d missed on her arm. The director was still talking to her, more interested than she was in being awake. She rubbed at the spot on her arm while he spooned her. She asked if it was true the pop star felt like a monster when she came up with the video concept.
“Who knows how she feels?” he said. “But she didn’t come up with the concept.”
“You did?”
“Her manager did. He’s also the one who told the press her ex thought she looked like a monster. He thought she needed something to spark her. I was skeptical, but she was actually fucking magnificent today. It worked.”
“For you,” Lyssa said.
“We’ll see.” He breathed into her neck until he fell asleep.
In the morning, the director ordered them room service breakfast and, after eating, went off to wrap things up at the shoot. Lyssa lounged around in the bathrobe and watched the hotel cable until it was late enough that she was worried the director might be back soon. The next day, work was closed for a deep cleaning, paid for by the pop star’s people, though for months they kept finding glitter everywhere anyway. The children at birthday parties were mostly delighted, the wedding guests less so.
* * *
—
The day the pop star’s video launched there was a birthday party on the top deck, and Mackenzie was upstairs corralling a dozen tiny princesses. After declining for weeks, Lyssa had gone with Mackenzie and her friends to happy hour the night before, back to Travis’s bar, where she had seen him with a new girl, felt a warmth for him as she’d watched him teach the girl how the bar’s old pinball machine worked, steadying her hands at the flippers. Now she felt tender and hungover. Mackenzie laughed from upstairs. A wayward child—one of the princesses’ brothers, wearing one of the paper captain hats they gave boys under six—wandered into the gift shop. He picked up a plastic replica of the replica and looked up at her with wide blue eyes. The hat tilted sideways on his head.
“Do you know this boat sank?” he asked.
“I do,” Lyssa said. “Where are your parents?”
“If I’d been there, I would have fought that iceberg. I wish I could find that iceberg and kick its ass.”
“Well, it turns out we’ve been fighting the ice for a long time now, and the ice is definitely losing,” Lyssa said. “If you go back in time, you can tell the iceberg Antarctica is already melting and doesn’t know it yet.”