PART I
What’s done cannot be undone.
—Lady Macbeth, Macbeth (5.1.68)
CHAPTER ONE
I’m at a traffic light downtown on Peachtree Street at eight AM on a Friday, the sky far too blue and sunny, and as I sit in my Corolla in last night’s clothes, waiting for the light to change, the headache buried in my skull sends out a single red tendril. I need coffee and a shower and a handful of Advil. To distract myself, I think about Marisa, the woman I met yesterday at the English teachers’ conference and drank with at the hotel bar, the woman with whom I spent the night. But now the headache is unfurling behind my forehead and I just want to get home and climb into bed and sleep for twelve hours.
At the thought, as if sleep is a key that unlocks the vault of my memory, I can hear my mother quoting Robert Frost: “ ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.’ ” That was one of her favorite quotes, reflecting her extraordinary commitment to my father, no matter how difficult that commitment became. My father had a rather different take on the issue. Once, after he had returned from Iraq, I complained to him about a promise that a schoolmate had broken, and he gave me a lopsided smile. “The best way to keep your word is not to give it,” he told me. Which, even then, I knew was a pretty cynical thing for a father to say to his thirteen-year-old son.
The twin memories of my parents are like a pair of blades scissoring my heart, and I’m grateful to be distracted by the light changing. I’m a dozen cars back from the light, so I take a moment to close my eyes and picture an actual steel vault, the door massive and open. I’m holding an old shoebox, stuffed near to overflowing, a thick rubber band securing the lid, and I place the shoebox into the vault, push the door shut with a loud clang, and spin the wheel, locking it. Then I open my eyes and drive forward, through the intersection and on to home.
* * *
MY HOUSE NEAR Chastain Park is less than ten minutes from the school where I teach but over half an hour from downtown, even going against traffic. Halfway home I pull into a Starbucks drive-through, another willing victim of globalization and convenience, and order a large latte and a croissant. I suck down the latte and manage to get croissant flakes all over myself and the interior of my Corolla, but I don’t run into a lamppost or another vehicle, which I take as a win.
I live in a two-bedroom cottage tucked behind a much larger and more imposing house owned by Tony and Gene, who rent the cottage to me. Built a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the cottage has cedar-shingle siding, dusky blue shutters, and three concrete front steps leading up to a covered concrete porch the size of a postage stamp. There are garages in Chastain larger than my home. But the neighborhood is a suburban enclave of trees and lazy, winding streets anchored by a huge public park, complete with a golf course and sports fields. My house is within ten minutes of work, a Korean dry cleaners, a neighborhood Publix, a Target, and several decent bars and restaurants, all without having to get on Atlanta’s nightmarish interstates.
By the time I get home, Tony, one of my landlords, is crouching in the flower bed on his front lawn. He’s wearing an enormous straw hat the color of a ripe avocado, and he waves at me as I turn into my driveway, which runs along the edge of his lot. Sometimes he and his partner Gene bake me chocolate chip cookies or invite me to watch movies in their in-home basement theater, which has reclining leather seats, a wine fridge, and a sound system you could hear on the moon. Tony runs some sort of IT consulting business from home, and Gene is a real estate agent who drives a new Mercedes every year. Last summer they got married and threw a post-wedding bash for all their friends and neighbors that would make Gatsby’s soirées look like a five-year-old’s birthday party. Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors, but so do kindness and empathy. I don’t always return those in kind, and today I don’t stop and make small talk like I should because I’m dirty, slightly hungover, and more than a little embarrassed that Tony is seeing me coming home after a late night, but I’m lucky to have such nice neighbors, and I need to let them know it.
I make my way slowly up the pine-shrouded driveway in my Corolla, the asphalt buckled by tree roots so that I dip and pitch my way to the end. Brown pine needles blanket the asphalt and even the roof of the cottage. Need to get up there with a leaf blower, I think, and I take undue pride in the observation, as if I were acting like a responsible adult rather than slinking away from a one-night stand and skipping the final day of a conference my employer paid for. Nothing worthwhile happens on the last day of a three-day conference, especially not on a Friday when everyone is itching to get home for the weekend, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling guilty. Then comes a memory like an echo: wet lips, a hungry mouth, a gasp followed by a throaty chuckle, Marisa’s dark hair playing across my face as she rose above me. Even hungover as I am, for a moment I feel desire slowly stirring. But overlaying this is a worn yet familiar sense of sadness. This is not the first time I have hooked up with a stranger at a conference. I’ve found it’s easier than maintaining an actual relationship. Better to make a quick exit than a prolonged good-bye. Or so I tell myself.
I walk up the steps, reaching for my house keys. Wilson is inside whining at the door. “Hold on, boy,” I say, trying to get the key in the lock. My dog is housebroken, and Tony and Gene said they would let him out yesterday—I make a mental note to get them a bottle of wine—but I know Wilson must be hungry at least.
When I get the door open, my miniature dachshund is dancing on the carpet. Usually he almost bowls me over as he runs out the front door to relieve himself on the front lawn. Today he barks at me, twice, then turns and runs to the back of the house, into the tiny hall that separates the two bedrooms. The one on the left is officially the guest bedroom but has no bed and is essentially a storage closet. Wilson turns right, into my bedroom, his paws scrabbling on the hardwood floor. He yips excitedly.
“Wilson!” I call. The last thing I need is for him to pee all over my room. I drop my workbag and follow him. “Wilson, come!”
I walk through the doorway of my bedroom and come to a dead stop. Wilson is prancing around at the foot of my bed like he’s just treed a squirrel. A woman is lying on top of the covers, looking up at the ceiling, her hands clasped over her stomach. Marisa, I think, and I am startled and excited and freaked out all at once. Immediately I realize it’s not Marisa. This woman is wearing jeans and has bare, filthy feet, and her short hair is a shade of magenta that doesn’t exist anywhere in nature.
“You named your dog Wilson?” she says, still looking at the ceiling.
Wilson glances up at the bed, then back to me, a low whine in his throat. I reach down and rub his ears and get a rapid licking from a tiny, rough tongue in response. “Good boy,” I say.
She sits up on her elbows to face me. “You did not name him after the volleyball in Cast Away,” she says.
“Tom Hanks got an Oscar nomination for that,” I say, still rubbing Wilson’s ears.
She laughs. “Jesus, that’s pathetic.”
I sigh and straighten up. “Good to see you too, Susannah.”