Listen to Me Read online

  They were both still in grad school when Mark first took Maggie to his parents’ farm. “They’re eccentric,” he’d said more than once on the drive from DC. They’d been talking recently about moving in with one another, though they hadn’t yet talked about rings. “My mother can be competitive,” he said. “Plus you’re a knockout, so Robert will be overly attentive, which means Gwen might act out. Also, she’s going through an astrology phase, so fair warning.”

  In fact, when Mark and Maggie arrived, Gwen had been so welcoming, so immediately receptive, that Maggie had wondered briefly at his capacity for accuracy. But as the night wore on—and after several bottles of wine had been opened and poured—Maggie did begin to see glimpses of the so-called eccentricities. For starters, at midnight, when she was so tired she nearly fell asleep on the couch, instead of being allowed to go immediately to bed, she was walked by Gwen into Gwen and Robert’s bedroom.

  “Come, dear heart,” his mother had said. “I want to show you something.”

  Maggie tried to linger in the doorway—she’d rarely stepped foot into her own parents’ room—but Gwen took her hand and pulled her to the bed. “Sit here,” she said.

  Maggie did as told, though she felt her presence in their bedroom was inappropriate; she couldn’t say why. She longed to be in the company of Mark and Robert; longed to be in a common living space, where meetings between strangers were customary and formal.

  What Gwen showed Maggie that night was a deck of Tarot cards. “Have you ever had your palms read?” asked Gwen. “I’m a newbie. I need practice, and I can only read Robert’s so many times. Do you mind?”

  “Oh,” said Maggie. She looked at the door to the bedroom. “I’m so tired.”

  “This won’t take long,” she said. “Besides, you should always please the mother. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “Is it?” Maggie said.

  “You’re a hoot. Now let me read.”

  Maggie could no longer remember the cards Gwen read for her, but she remembered the way her stiffness gradually fell away. By the end of the reading, she was sitting cross-legged on Mark’s parents’ bed, her back against their pillows, gabbing about her life back in DC.

  When Mark finally came to fetch her, it was nearly two in the morning, and any fatigue she’d felt earlier had been spirited away by Gwen’s exuberance. He leaned in the doorway watching them. “You’ve made a little girl out of my Maggie,” he said.

  His mother threw a pillow at him. “I’ve seen her destiny,” she said. “See, look. I’ll show you.”

  As Gwen proceeded to move the cards about on the bed, lining them up and explaining them all over again now to her son, Maggie watched Mark and Mark watched Maggie. Neither of them was listening to Gwen. Their focus was singular, intense.

  “The point is,” said Gwen, rising suddenly, causing Maggie to bounce slightly, “it seems you’ve found the one. It’s in the cards. Your future; your doom.” She brushed her hands together as if wiping away crumbs. “Now out. The two of you. I’m old and tired. Tell your father it’s time for bed.”

  Mark and Maggie slept that night not in his boyhood bedroom but in the guest cabin (the guest cabin!), its windows high and open. They pulled the mattress from the bed and centered it in the middle of the room, close to the fire, so that Maggie could take in the handiwork of Mark’s handmade canoe as he told her stories of the wilderness just beyond their walls. They didn’t have sex that night, but they held hands and fell asleep naked, and Maggie, in her final moment of consciousness before giving herself up to sleep, had thought, The one. I’ve found the one.

  “I could drive,” said Maggie. She reached over and touched Mark’s leg. Gerome stretched and shifted so that his head was now weighing down her wrist, as if he could indefinitely keep her there. She moved her arm away gently. The dog sighed.

  Mark scratched between Gerome’s ears but didn’t take his eyes off the road.

  “When we need gas,” he said. “I feel good right now.”

  “But you like to watch the windmills,” she said.

  He glanced over and gave her a smile. “You watch them for me,” he said.

  Lately, this was how it went after a squabble like the one they’d had that morning—a slow, sweet back-and-forth of trivial politesse and minor deference. They behaved like people unfamiliar with one another, people entering anew into the world of social contracts. The intimacy would return eventually. It always did. It mostly always did. But first the quiet back-and-forth.

  Sometimes, since the mugging, Maggie thought they behaved like a couple who’d lost a child, the way they’d be overly kind and curiously formal with one another. There was never an apology, never any blame after one of their spats, as though the thing they couldn’t mention was a dead child. And, yet, there was no dead child. It had always been just the two of them. The two of them and Gerome.

  Before the mugging, their fights would invariably lead to sex. One would yell, the other would scream, but within moments there would be laughter—it was only life after all! What was there ever to be so truly angry about?—and from laughter with the two of them there was only the shortest of walks to sex. Maggie didn’t suspect she and Mark were necessarily unique in their sustained chemistry so many years into their marriage. In fact, she rather liked the idea that other couples might be as frisky as they behind closed doors. But—inappropriately or not—she did take pride in their sex life, and so in the months following the mugging, she occasionally found herself pining for the energy that had once seemed a permanent fixture in their bedroom life.

  In high school Maggie had gone steady with only one boy. On three separate occasions she’d thwarted his attempts to have sex. After the third attempt—they were in the backseat of his mother’s station wagon; she could remember the coldness of an open magazine against her thighs—the boy had turned gloomy. “Are you a prude or something?” he’d asked, pulling back abruptly and leaning dramatically against the door. She’d answered honestly, as honestly as she could at any rate. She’d told him no, she didn’t think she was. “It’s just that I can’t see falling in love with you,” she said. “I can’t picture it in my mind.”

  What Maggie could picture—not then, but these days, and somehow more vividly than ever—was the mugging. It wasn’t a memory she purposely sought out; was, in fact, one that she’d gone to great lengths to sort through and move past. But in the glossiness of the photographs that those two detectives had placed before her, she’d encountered a trigger, and the trauma of her own incident—the fear she’d felt when she finally understood, the helplessness of that nanosecond between awareness and loss of consciousness—came back to her, lodging itself in the periphery of her temporal lobe. And now it was always just there—above her, over her, behind her—that awful little man and his terrible gruff voice. Lady. Lady.

  She’d been in a good mood that night. She’d gone down to River North for a ladies’ luncheon—Women in the Workplace—where she’d given a short talk on her rise to success: the necessary sacrifices, the powerful rewards. She’d stayed longer than she intended, mingling with guests, drinking champagne. By the time she phoned Mark, he’d already left campus and was headed home. “I went by the store,” he said. “I’m making dinner. If you leave now, you’ll be home just as I’m pouring the first glass of wine.”

  She’d walked to the Red Line at Grand with a few other women, parted ways with one-armed hugs and side kisses, then walked down to the underground platform. The train arrived almost immediately. She secured a front-facing seat by a window and passed the twenty-minute ride marveling at her reflection and its hazy little smile. She liked the sensation—the out-of-body, atmospheric quality—of being slightly buzzed while also being hurdled atop the city at fifty miles an hour. At Berwyn, she’d nearly skipped down the stairs she was feeling so boisterous, so generally good about herself and her life. (She hadn’t skipped, obviously, but she’d had the feeling, which in turn had caused a youthful sensation of bu
tterflies and inexplicable happiness. Life was just so satisfying sometimes.)

  When, a few blocks later, a man approached her, she thought nothing of it. People were always telling her, reassuring her, that bad things happened (a) to bad people, (b) when good people behaved poorly, or (c) when any kind of person ignored obvious warning signs. She was largely inclined to agree, though she understood it was a surface-level analysis at best, one that didn’t, for instance, take into account the Joseph Heller adage, which she also agreed with: Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. On the night it happened, she hadn’t been behaving poorly and for a fact she knew that she wasn’t a bad person and there’d been no credible warning signs. She’d been so naïve then, so painfully trusting. A fully developed Loyalist, a level One, would have been more vigilant. If only Gerome had been with her.

  Mark’s phone rang. He pulled it from his jacket pocket and handed it to Maggie. Gerome stood, stretched, then dropped down fully in the backseat.

  “Who is it?” Mark said.

  The fact that he was willing to hand his phone to her like that, that he didn’t seem nervous there might be a name he didn’t want her to see—well, it made Maggie feel foolish for suspecting him earlier that morning of thinking of someone else. It made her feel foolish for suspecting him ever. Of course there was no one else. She was his Maggie.

  “If it’s my mom, do you mind taking it?” he said. “If you don’t want to, I completely understand.” The strange Ping-Pong of over-articulated etiquette was still in effect.

  Maggie looked down. It was, indeed, his mother.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Mind reader.” She answered the phone.

  “Gwen,” she said. “Hi. Mark’s driving.”

  Mark nudged her and then, in a whisper, he said, “Tell her we might not be there until tomorrow.”

  Maggie shooed away his hand.

  “Have you cleared Cincinnati?” said Gwen. “Robert and I have money on this. I think you’ll have passed Cincinnati.”

  Robert and Gwen put money on everything. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it wasn’t. When they put money on Mark’s tenure, for instance, it was not funny at all that Robert had bet against.

  “I wish,” said Maggie. “I hope you didn’t bet much.”

  “Darn,” said Gwen. “Robert knew you’d get a late start.”

  “And how,” said Maggie.

  Mark turned down the radio.

  “Actually,” Maggie said, “Mark thinks we’ll need a hotel, but I don’t know. We might make up time.”

  “Tell her we haven’t even made Indianapolis,” Mark whispered.

  Maggie shushed him. To Gwen, she said, “What do you think? Do you think we ought to stop if it gets too late?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Gwen? You there?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Robert is saying something. Hold on.”

  Maggie held the phone away from her ear. Robert must have been in another room because Gwen was shouting at him and he was shouting something back.

  Mark furrowed his eyebrows, as if to ask, What gives?

  Maggie shrugged.

  In front of them, a Mack truck filled with pigs veered onto the shoulder and into the rumble strip. The trailer fishtailed into the left lane, narrowly dodging the debris of a commercial tire strewn across the highway.

  “Fuck,” said Mark.

  He tapped the brakes. Gerome sat up. Maggie put a hand on the dog’s withers. The truck recovered its course.

  “Shh,” she said. “It’s okay.” Her heart was racing a little. Double tires always sounded worse on a rumble strip.

  “Fuck,” said Mark. “Did you see that?”

  Maggie massaged Gerome’s shoulder.

  “Dead tire,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “It looked like a carcass.”

  “A carcass of rubber.”

  “Close call,” he said.

  “Good driving,” she said.

  He reached over, squeezed her thigh. She squeezed his hand. Yes, she thought. See? The intimacy always returned.

  She leaned back into the seat.

  “Wait,” said Mark.

  “What?”

  “The phone.”

  It was on the floorboard.

  “I completely forgot,” she said. “I must have dropped it.”

  A small tinny voice was calling their names through the speaker. Maggie picked it up.

  “Hi,” she said. “Hi. We’re here. Gwen?”

  “I thought you’d had an accident,” she said.

  “No, no. We’re here.”

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  (In fact, the amygdala, not the heart, is the seat of emotion. It is an almond-shaped region in the brain that speaks, on occasion, to that hollow muscular organ.)

  Maggie said, “I don’t know if you heard me—”

  “Robert says to turn on the weather station. He says there are storms in Ohio and West Virginia. They’re having outages. Statewide. He wants you to be safe. This is big. They’re saying tornadoes. Tor-na-does.”

  Ninety-three million miles overhead, the sun was gloriously and uproariously on full display. The sky out the sunroof was bright blue. There wasn’t a single cloud. Maggie gazed ahead. What was the distance of the horizon supposed to be? Two miles? Three? That couldn’t be right. Indiana was so flat, so ruthlessly flat. Surely she was seeing something closer to ten miles, maybe even twenty miles into the distance, and as far as she could see, the skies were clear.

  “We’ll probably get a hotel,” said Maggie. “It’s what Mark wants.”

  “Men and their hotel rooms,” said Gwen. “Just let us know. Love to Mark.”

  The line went dead.

  She handed Mark his phone. “Madness,” she said. “Sheer madness.”

  “Did she hang up on you?”

  “As always.”

  He reached over and touched her cheek. “It’s technology,” he said. “It’s made assholes out of all of us.”

  They were passing the final few rows of turbines. Maggie looked out the window again. No matter how often they made this drive, no matter how many times she scanned the tops of the towers, she’d never—not once—seen a person up there. She could make out the little doorways; identify the safety fences wrapped like toothpicks around the gearboxes. But she’d never seen a person, and it never failed to disappoint her.

  To her right was the exit for Purdue University, where Mark had interviewed just after finishing his dissertation. He’d been offered the job and the school had flown them both out from DC for a weekend visit, an unsuccessful attempt to woo Mark away from the Chicago offer he already planned to accept. Maggie remembered little of Lafayette itself. Of the hotel, on the other hand . . . They’d stopped after the faculty dinner to buy beer at a nearby gas station, and Maggie, when Mark wasn’t looking, sneaked a travel-pack of condoms into her purse. When Mark went to pay for the six-pack, the man behind the counter asked if he was also planning to pay for the condoms his girlfriend had stolen. Poor Mark had been caught completely off guard. Maggie, near the exit, shook her head and blushed.

  The cashier held out his hand. “Either way, ma’am,” he said. “Leave ’em or pay for ’em. But you can’t just have ’em.”

  Maggie approached the cash register—she couldn’t look at Mark—then removed the travel-pack and slid it across the counter.

  “Looks like you were fixing to get lucky,” the cashier said to Mark.

  Maggie wanted to vomit she was so embarrassed.

  Mark picked up the condoms, studied them, then put them squarely on top of the beer. “Looks like maybe I still am.”

  The cashier shrugged. “At least she knows to wrap it every time.” He winked at Mark. “Good for you and for her.”

  Mark picked up the beer and shoved the condoms into his pocket. “She’s my wife,” he said.

  “Sure she is.” The man nodded, looked at Maggie,
then grinned. “My wife’s always buying condoms. Always.”

  Back at the hotel, they’d howled with laughter.

  “He thought you were a prostitute,” Mark said.

  “Impossible,” she said. “Look at me.”

  They’d rolled around on the bed a little. But out of nowhere, Mark had paused, his hand behind Maggie’s ear, and said, so seriously she could’ve died, “Do you steal things often? Is this something we need to talk about?”

  She’d nuzzled her mouth against his neck. She was mortified and yet, at the same time, found she was also overcome with lust, with love, with an exact and perfect balance of the two. “Never,” she said. “Never.” They’d fallen asleep on the covers that night, both condoms in the travel-pack successfully and happily put to use.

  Maggie turned in her seat and watched the last of the turbines disappear from view.

  “All gone,” said Mark. “Only five hundred seventy-seven miles to go.”

  Somehow it was already three o’clock.

  4

  After the Indianapolis beltway, they stopped at the first gas station with green space. Mark had done as instructed and tuned in to the AM weather station. His father was right: there were alerts and advisories and warnings for everything east of Cincinnati. Blackouts had started. Towns off 64 were already being declared disaster zones. The storms had originated in the east and now were headed west. They were headed directly toward Mark and Maggie—that’s how she’d put it anyway, Mark wouldn’t be so histrionic—which meant US-35 would probably be black, too, by the time they crossed into Ohio.

  Maggie proposed checking her computer, just to see the full extent of what they were getting themselves into. But Mark balked. They’d had a good stretch, the two of them. Where they were, the sun was still shining. Gerome had been quiet, Maggie had been sweet, and Mark had lucked into a miraculously uninterrupted set of the Stones and Petty. But then, pulling into the station, gassing up, Maggie had to go and suggest getting out the computer and researching the storm, as if what her phone could access wasn’t already enough. “There are probably pictures,” she’d said. “We could see what the devastation looks like.” It was her use of that word—devastation—that had immediately soured his mood. She sounded like one of those news anchors, delirious with the possibility of tragedy.