The Office of Historical Corrections(8)

Rena has not been to visit Elizabeth in three years. Her mother says Elizabeth is making small progress toward language. She can nod her head yes. She can recognize again the names of colors. Rena’s sister was a middle-school drama teacher, a job she had chosen because pursuing a theater career would have taken her too far away. When Elizabeth was in college, Rena had come to see her in Antigone on opening night, and though the show was not only in English but staged, at the director’s whim, to involve contemporary sets and clothing and a backing soundtrack of Top 40 pop, Elizabeth told her afterward that she had memorized the play both in English and in its original ancient Greek, which she had taken classes in to better get a feel for drama.

There had been signs. Rena had been too far away to see them, her parents maybe too close. Connor had threatened her before, but her sister did not say she was afraid of Connor. The whole week of the wedding, her sister said she was afraid of rain. All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.



* * *



—

That Rena wakes up screaming sometimes is something JT knows about her, the way she knows that he is an insomniac and on bad nights can only sleep to Mingus. There was a point at the hotel when they stopped sleeping in their own rooms and then when they stopped sleeping in their own beds, and even now she cannot say whether what they wanted was the comfort of another body in their respective restlessness or the excuse to cross a line, only that they never did cross it, and that tonight, before JT’s wedding, she does not want to wake to a strange man holding her while she cries. It is 4:00 a.m. according to the hotel clock. She dresses in the bathroom and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her. Her room is one floor down and she is ready to pass the elevator and head for the staircase when she sees JT in the hallway. All weekend he has been put together—clean-shaven, with his hair gelled and slicked into place—but the JT she sees now looks more like the man she met, like he has just rolled out of bed. He seems as surprised by her as she is by him, and his face relaxes for a moment as he grins at her and raises an eyebrow.

“Where are you coming from?” he asks.

“Where are you going?” Rena asks. She is fully awake now and taking in the scene. It is four in the morning. There is a wedding today. The groom is standing at the elevator with a duffel bag. Something has gone wrong.

“I can’t do this,” he says.

Rena thinks of Dori, surely sound asleep by now, Dori with two years of wedding Pinterest boards, Dori almost certainly having rescued herself from the sweaty ministrations of the would-be stripper and then making her friends feel better about having upset her.

“You can’t just leave,” Rena says. “You have to tell her yourself.”

“I’m going to call her,” he says. “I’m going out of town for a little bit.”

Rena moves herself between JT and the elevator to look him in the eyes. He does not seem or smell drunk, only sad. That he should be sad, that he should treat this decision as a thing that is happening to him, enrages her to the point that it surprises her. She speaks to him in a fierce whisper.

“When I met you we were trapped across the world, and you told me you were calm because you’d learned not to take for granted that anything was safe. You don’t get to be scared of a woman you’ve been with since you were teenagers.”

“I was scared,” he says. “You were calm. You were so fucking calm it calmed me down, and that was what I liked about you.”

“It’s not my fault you’re a coward,” Rena says.

“You know,” says JT, “I used to think you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”

Rena flinches. She imagines slapping him, first imagines slapping the version of him inches from her face and then closes her eyes and imagines slapping the him from the photograph, slapping the useless mask right off of him. He wants this fight. People would come out of their rooms to see her shouting in the hallway, see a parting quarrel between old friends or old lovers or JT and a woman nursing an old wound. Excuses would be formulated; they would all calmly and quietly go back to sleep. JT is giving her a reason to give him a reason to stay. Rena does not stop him. She walks past him to the staircase and hears the elevator ding before the door closes behind her. The window in her room faces the parking lot, and she sees JT cross through the lot under the flush of the lights and disappear into his car. She sees the car flicker to life before he drives off, and she watches for quite some time, but he does not come back.



* * *



—

Rena falls asleep with the curtains still open, and in the morning the sun through the windows is dusty and insistent as the banging at the door wakes her. Her body, groggy from sex and drinking, is temporarily uncooperative, but the noise continues until she is able to rally herself to open it for Dori and Kelly, the yellow bridesmaid.