Listen to Me Read online

  What he liked best about getting together with Maggie those first few months of dating was the way she would—in public or private—seek out direct eye contact. At parties, at dinner, stretching in the park after a run together, he would sometimes find her watching him, which in turn would lead to him watching her, and the two of them might continue to watch each other, no words spoken at all. There was something animal about Maggie, and it made Mark feel there was something animal about him—a sensation he’d never before known to crave. She was as different as could be from his cohort at school.

  Maggie, it turned out, was from a family that was neither outrageously advantaged nor incredibly poor. Instead, hers was a lower-middle-class childhood—“more lower than middle,” she liked to say—in the “upper middle of America” (Minnesota), where she’d been raised by a “brilliant but hateful” woman and a “handsome but unintelligent” man. Her older brother was an alcoholic who’d been given the little attention her parents could muster. Maggie was the daughter they hadn’t planned on and, as such, the one who received primary blame for any money woes the family might encounter. “And we were always encountering money woes,” she said. “But it’s not as though we had nothing.”

  What was a wonder to Mark—a gift really—was the way that Maggie, rather than making him feel ashamed or embarrassed by his own privilege and upbringing, instead made him feel proud, lucky. She was always asking questions about his parents, always wanting to know more about his evening routines as a child—dinner at the table, followed by a walk in the woods with his parents, followed by reading aloud in front of the fire. Never before Maggie had he enjoyed sharing these stories, fearing always that he would be ridiculed and that his childhood might be deemed precious or out-of-touch.

  And, yes, obviously those were the early days of courtship, and early days of any relationship mellow out, soften, dilute themselves into something more ordinary, less extreme, more ubiquitously accessible. Their relationship was no different than others in this regard, except that between them they retained a sincere fondness, a genuine gratefulness that the other existed and continued to exist.

  But ever since that college girl’s death and, subsequently, the visit from the cops, Maggie had been spending most of her time at home and in a flannel robe. Mark had no idea where she’d even gotten the thing. He only knew that one day, about two weeks ago, he’d come home from work and she was wearing it. One of those plaid L.L.Bean jobs. At first it was a joke. Or Mark thought it was a joke, or at the very least something to joke about. Then one day—a week ago max—he’d been parking the car and there was Maggie, walking down the other side of the street with Gerome. She was wearing the robe. It was afternoon. It was daylight. Mark had a sudden sinking feeling that he was married to a loser.

  Maggie had an excuse for her behavior, but it was getting old. It was getting old in part because she’d been getting better. The symptoms now felt disproportionate to the cause. Like, for instance, Patricia Hatchett, who was also in the History Department, had lost a baby last year, and Mark wasn’t the only one to notice that she looked better these days than ever. He’d heard she was considering a run for chair, for Christ’s sake. It embarrassed Mark that his wife had become a completely different person just because she’d been mugged. Strike that—because someone they didn’t even know had been murdered. But what was becoming more and more apparent—and this wasn’t a happy or an easy realization—was that Mark was spending his life with one of the world’s weaklings: the type of person who gets diagnosed with cancer and, instead of going outside and taking on life, gets in bed and waits for the inevitable. He’d expected more from Maggie. My god, he’d expected so much more!

  How the mugging happened—what Maggie told Mark—went like this: she’d gotten off the Red Line at Berwyn. Same stop as always. It was getting dark but it wasn’t late. She crossed Broadway and started into the neighborhood. A man was waiting at the first alley. He asked for change. She ignored him, kept walking. He followed. It was their neighborhood—their neighborhood: middle-upper class, lots of grass!—she didn’t think anything of the fact that he was following her. She was three blocks from Clark Street. Three blocks from the coffee shop and their apartment and the dinner that Mark had made for them. By the next alley, though, the man had caught up to her. “Hey,” he said. He tapped her on the shoulder. Not even this had set off bells that she was dealing with anything more than a simple panhandler, a meager beggar. “The purse,” he said. He pointed to her bag. Her wallet and computer were inside. She laughed. “No way, dude,” she said. “Sorry.” She turned to walk away.

  She claimed she didn’t originally see the gun, but later—after a young couple had found her and called the cops and taken her to the emergency room—when they showed her photos of the bruise on the back of her neck, of the perfect outline of the butt of a gun, she said the gun had become a part of the memory. Whether it was a trick of the imagination or a real recollection had been jogged somehow, she didn’t know. But ever since seeing the photos, she remembered the gun.

  Not too long ago, as the winter yielded to spring, she’d gotten to the point where she was making jokes about the whole thing. She’d been fucking adorable with the story. Like, okay, at a dinner party five weeks ago—five weeks ago!—she’d been the belle of the ball. She told the anecdote three, maybe four times. She was a hit. A trouper. A riot. They all loved the way she’d said, “No way, dude.” Nadeem Gnechik had stopped Mark in the hallway the next day and said, “Your wife’s a goddamn battle-ax.” They shared a laugh and Mark thought to himself, Yes. He thought, A battle-ax—my wife. He thought, I’m a goddamn lucky man.

  But then, with the arrival of those cops and their photos, out came the flannel robe.

  Last week he found two bottles of mace in the dog-walking drawer and an application for a concealed carry permit. He’d torn the paper up and pushed it to the bottom of the trash.

  Just three mornings ago, on her side of the bed, he discovered a string between the mattress and the box spring. When he pulled the string, he was surprised—surprised? No, try astonished—to find it was attached to a small switchblade.

  When she got home from the clinic that night—the first shift she’d taken since the detectives—he pointed at the switchblade, which he’d set on the middle of the kitchen table, and said, “What the fuck, Maggie? What the fuck is this?”

  She’d shrugged. “It’s a knife,” she said. Gerome was crazy-eighting around her legs.

  “I know it’s a knife,” he said. What alarmed him most was how dismissive she was, how suddenly calm.

  “I could have died,” she said. She moved for the knife. Mark grabbed it before she could. “I could be dead right now.”

  “Is this about the college girl?”

  “Right now,” she said, “you could be a widower.”

  “It wasn’t even the same man,” he said.

  “It could have been.”

  Mark shook his head. What she was saying was crazy. What she was saying was downright lunatic. “But you’re not dead. You’re here. You’re right here.”

  “But what if I weren’t?” she said. “What if I weren’t here?”

  When he told her no more knives, when he told her he drew the line at weapons in the bedroom, she shrugged again. “If you don’t give it back, I’ll just buy another one. Play it how you want.” It was maddening that she refused him the discussion.

  Normal people didn’t waste their days reading about other people’s misfortunes. Normal people didn’t take a gross sort of pleasure in keeping up with local crime statistics. Normal people didn’t walk the dog in a robe. Normal people didn’t act like Maggie.

  The semester would be over in a few weeks, at which point the two of them would make their annual drive east for a couple months at Mark’s parents’ farm. His hope was to finish several chapters of his latest manuscript, a history of anonymity, which he believed—if pulled off correctly—might put him on the academic map in a m
ajor way. But Mark didn’t think he could wait another few weeks to make the drive. He was frightened by what Maggie was capable of. He’d found the mace. He’d found the application for a gun and that terrifyingly sharp little switchblade. But what might she bring home next? What might already be hidden that he hadn’t yet found?

  Mark understood—a sort of hammer-to-the-skull-type realization, as Maggie walked out of the kitchen, leaving him alone with the knife and its distressing string attachment—that his wife must be removed from the city immediately. Distance needed to be created between Maggie and her desire for blades, guns, and even the Internet. A return to nature—to Wordsworth’s meadow, grove, and stream—was essential for them both.

  When Mark went out with the dog that night, he called his mother.

  “We’re coming this weekend,” he said.

  In the background, he could hear his father knocking about loudly with the evening’s dishes.

  “Is it June already?” his mother said. “Am I losing my mind?” Then, before Mark could answer, she said to his father, “Mark says they’re coming this weekend.” Then, after a pause, she said to Mark, “Your father wants to know about classes.”

  “We’re going into finals,” he said. “I’ll get a grad student to administer them. It’s fine.”

  There was another back-and-forth between his parents, along with more clanging and clattering of pots and pans. His mother again: “Your father says that’s cheating the students.” Mark’s father was a retired professor. He’d been a trailblazer in the field of eco studies and was now emeritus faculty at the University of Virginia, something that filled Mark with equal parts satisfaction and envy. It occasionally disappointed him—thinking he’d never have a son of his own who might eventually entertain such complicated feelings about him.

  “Remind him I have tenure,” Mark said. “Is the cabin ready?”

  “It’s always ready.”

  Mark had expected pushback from Maggie when he told her, later that night, of his decision.

  Instead, she looked up from her laptop and said, “I like this on you.” She’d changed from jeans into loose-fitting sweatshorts and was sitting cross-legged in bed, on top of the covers. Wedged beneath her thigh was a copy of that test she’d taken. It was open to a dog-eared page. Several answers had pencil annotations beside them.

  “You like what on me?” Mark unhooked Gerome’s leash, and the dog went instantly to Maggie, hopping up and circling into place at the foot of their bed.

  “Spontaneity.”

  He wondered if she was fucking with him.

  Three days later and Lake Shore Drive, like they both knew it would be, was a mess.

  By the time Gerome had done everything he needed to do and by the time the car was packed, the apartment locked up, the trash and recycling taken out, they were practically begging to coincide with the weekend rush hour. And they did.

  “Fuck,” said Mark. The traffic came to a standstill at Belmont. They’d gone only three miles. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  Gerome stood up in the backseat.

  “When you’re tense,” said Maggie, “it makes him tense. Dogs are mirrors of their owners.”

  She turned around in her seat and tried to coax Gerome into sitting, but he whined and stayed standing.

  “I can’t see,” said Mark. “If he’s like that, I can’t see anything out the back.”

  “We’re not moving,” she said. “When we start moving, he’ll sit down.”

  A car nearby honked. Another followed suit. Gerome whined again.

  “We won’t be there until after midnight,” said Mark. “Plus we lose an hour. Fuck.”

  Maggie was still jackknifed in her seat, trying to calm the dog. “We’ll make it,” she said. “We always do.”

  Gerome reluctantly curled himself into a ball.

  “We can get a hotel,” said Mark, “if we have to.”

  “Gerome can’t handle a hotel,” she said. “You know that.”

  “He’s a dog. He’ll handle what we tell him to.”

  In fact, Gerome was a disaster in hotels, and Mark knew it. The one time they’d forgotten the sound machine—an attempt at a last-minute romantic getaway to Nashville last year, pre-mugging—they’d had to leave the shower running and the television on all night. Mark had tried repeatedly to initiate sex, but Maggie—normally so keen, still, after all these years—was too focused on the dog’s discomfort to focus on him. So they’d turned on the shower and the television because it was the only way Gerome would shut up. In the morning they drove back to Chicago, overtired and newly distant. But Mark, as a point of pride, liked to assume that the last time would be, well, the last time. He liked to assume the next time would be better. That’s the kind of guy he was—always looking ahead, always looking up, which was what he’d been trying to do with Maggie. But she was making it hard. The world—those cops, that college girl, the media itself—was conspiring against him.

  A few miles east of where Mark and Maggie’s car was currently at a standstill—925 feet below the surface—was the deepest point of Lake Michigan. At the bottom of the lake, pitch-black, there exists a vast world of hidden networks and drowned river channels, evidence of a catastrophic overflow from Superior into Michigan during the Holocene times, which is to say the geological epoch some 11,700 years BP, which is to say before present, which is also to say before physics, which is the time before nuclear testing, which is the time after which carbon isotopes in the atmosphere were artificially altered, rendering time—its accurate apprehension—untrustworthy.

  Maggie scratched the dog’s head and turned forward. “We won’t need a hotel,” she said. “I promise.” She adjusted the a/c vent, closed her eyes, and angled her face so that the current pushed her hair away from her forehead. “Mmm,” she said, suddenly so calm, so Zen.

  It was like—

  It was like sometimes—these last three weeks especially—he was living with a stranger. Sometimes, just looking at her, it was like he didn’t recognize a single thing about his wife.

  3

  They cleared all three exits for Gary without saying a word. Mark pretended he didn’t even notice. Maggie stared out the window as the city passed below them. Gary wasn’t just a place to die. It was, as far as she was concerned, a place to be killed. It was a place to hate your life, a place to sweat your day away in an attic apartment while you listened to dogs fight to death in the alley. It was in Gary that a shallow grave had been discovered just that spring. The body belonged to a fifteen-year-old boy. He weighed less than fifty pounds. She’d read all about it: his parents had kept him outside, in a cage. Bad things happened in Gary.

  Gerome was snoring. He had maneuvered his body so that his forearms and head were stretched onto the armrest between the front seats. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but he was only ever truly relaxed when he was touching one or both of them. Maggie ran a finger over his nose leather. Cold and wet. Gerome was a mix, which meant he was a healthy dog. When her clients asked, she always recommended mutts. Pure breeds helped the clinic’s bank account, sure, but that was it. Pure breeds—and she wasn’t shy about saying so—pure breeds were accidents waiting to happen. Boston terriers? All of them were brachycephalics, and half were born with luxating patellas. Bernese mountain dogs? Most were dead by five. Great Danes? With those hips? Don’t get her started.

  Lake Shore had added an extra hour, but once they hit 90/94, they were essentially traffic-free. Just them and the big rigs, and they were actively making good time. If they stopped only when they needed gas, there was a chance they could still make the Blue Ridge Parkway by midnight. It was possible they wouldn’t have to get a hotel. They’d wake up in Virginia to green grass and full forests. Maggie and Gerome could go for their first official farm run of summer.

  They’d only just taken the exit off 90 for 65, a hundred and some miles outside Chicago, but Mark was in a visibly better mood. He’d turned on the radio, and every few minutes he flipped throu
gh the channels. Even though Mark couldn’t find talk radio, he seemed happy. The fifty-mile stretch of turbines always calmed him down.

  “How many do you think there are?” Maggie hadn’t intended to ask the question aloud, but it was a relief to break their silence.

  “More than six hundred,” said Mark.

  She tried counting the number of turbines in a single row. She gave up at ten.

  “When it’s completed,” Mark said, “they say it’ll be the largest in the world.”

  “They must be—what?—two hundred feet tall?”

  “Closer to three hundred,” he said.

  Maggie moved nearer to her window and gazed up at the one they were passing.

  “They look like gods,” she said. “Enormous three-armed gods.” She leaned back in her seat.

  On the west side of 65, the windmills’ blades were still. To the east, they were turning at full speed. “You could explain it to me a million times—harnessing wind power—and it would never make sense. Try to imagine the first person, standing in some storm, getting rocked about by the wind, thinking, I can work with this.”

  “His name was James Blyth.”

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  “A professor in Glasgow. Late nineteenth century.”

  “Your father quizzed you as a child.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “Instead of playing in the snow, you were sitting in front of a chalkboard.”

  “Yep.”

  “You poor thing.” It was an act, of course, and one they both enjoyed. Mark’s childhood, as Maggie well knew and admired, had been spent almost entirely outdoors. He’d been given books obviously. His parents had monitored his evening reading habits closely, but during the day he’d been encouraged to engage with the wilderness. Before Mark turned ten, he’d built a canoe with his father. Before high school, he’d built another on his own. The second one was mounted, family-crest-like, on the wall of the guest cabin on his parents’ farm, high above the wood-burning fireplace.