Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

But spring hit, and she could hear voices, unhurried and pleasant, return to the street along with the shouts of children, the clack of stroller wheels along the sidewalk, the squeak and snap of screen doors. The house she’d purchased with Sebastian was thirty miles south of Boston in Marshfield. It was a seaside town, though their house sat a full mile inland, which was fine because Rachel wasn’t a fan of the ocean. Sebastian, of course, loved the sea, had even taught her to scuba dive back in the early days of their courtship. When she finally admitted to him that she hated being submerged in liquid as potential predators watched her from the depths, instead of being flattered she’d temporarily conquered her fear to make him happy, he accused her of pretending to love the things he loved in order to “trap” him. She’d retorted that one only trapped things one wanted to eat and she’d lost her appetite for him a long time ago. It was a nasty thing to say, but when a relationship collapsed with the speed and severity of hers and Sebastian’s, nasty became the norm. Once the divorce was final, they would put the house on the market and split any profit to be had, and she’d need to find another place.

Which was fine. She missed the city, had never taken to having to drive everywhere. And if her notoriety was difficult to escape in the city, it was impossible in a small town, where gazes came steeped in gradations of provincialism. Just a couple of weeks back, she’d been caught out in the open while pumping gas; she hadn’t realized until she pulled in with a bone-dry tank that the station was self-serve only. Three high school girls, reality-TV-ready in their push-up bras, yoga pants, satiny blowouts, and diamond-cut cheekbones, exited the Food Mart on their way to a boy in a skintight thermal sweatshirt and distressed jeans, who pumped gas into a pristine Lexus SUV. As soon as they noticed Rachel, the trio started whispering and shoving each other. When she looked over, one of them reddened and dropped her gaze but the other two doubled down. The dark-haired one with the peach highlights mimed someone guzzling from a bottle and her honey-blond partner-in-bitch screwed up her features into a pantomime of helpless weeping, then wrung her hands in the air as if freeing them of seaweed.

The third one said, “Guys, stop,” but it came out half lament, half giggle, and then the laughter broke from all their pretty-ugly mouths like Friday-night Kahlúa vomit.

Rachel hadn’t left the house since. She almost ran out of food. She did run out of wine. Then vodka. She ran out of sites to surf and shows to watch. Then Sebastian called to remind her the divorce hearing was scheduled for that Tuesday, May 17, at three-thirty.

She made herself presentable and drove into the city. She realized only after she’d gotten on Route 3 heading north that it had been six months since she’d driven on a highway. The other cars raced and revved and swarmed. Their bodies gleamed like knives in the harsh sunlight. They engulfed her, stabbing at the air, surging and stabbing and braking, red taillights flashing like furious eyes. Great, Rachel thought as the anxiety found her throat and her skin and the roots of her hair, now I’m afraid of driving.

She managed to make it into the city, and it felt like she was getting away with something because she shouldn’t have been on the road, not feeling this vulnerable, this hysterical. But she made it. And no one was the wiser. She left the garage and walked across the street and appeared at the appointed time at Suffolk Probate and Family Court on New Chardon Street.

The proceedings were a lot like the marriage and a lot like Sebastian — perfunctory and bloodless. After it was over and their union was, as far as the Commonwealth was concerned, legally dissolved, she turned to share a look with her newly minted ex-husband, a look if not of two soldiers who’d found a modicum of victory in walking off the battlefield with their limbs intact at least one of common decency. But Sebastian wasn’t across the aisle any longer. He was already halfway out of the courtroom, his back to her, head up, strides long and purposeful. And once he was through the doors, the rest of the people in the courtroom were looking at her with pity or revulsion.

That’s who I’ve become, she thought, a creature below contempt .

Her car was parked in the garage across the street, and from there it was two right turns and a merge onto 93 South to head home. But she thought of all those cars merging and speeding, tapping their brakes and switching lanes with violent jerks of the wheel, and she turned west into the city instead and drove over Beacon Hill, through Back Bay and farther on until she reached the South End. She felt okay during the drive. Only once, when she thought a Nissan was going to pass her on the right as she approached an intersection, did her palms sweat. After a few minutes of driving around, she found the rarest of all things for this neighborhood, a parking spot, and pulled into it. She sat there and reminded herself to breathe. She waved on two cars that mistook her for someone who was about to depart, not someone who’d just arrived.

“Turn off your fucking engine, then,” the driver of the second car yelled, and left a burnt-rubber vapor in his wake that smelled like a smoker’s burp.

She left her car and wandered the neighborhood, not entirely aimless but close, remembering that somewhere around here was a bar where she’d once spent a happy night. That was when she was still in print journalism with the Globe . Rumors had circulated that the series she’d written on the Mary Ellen McCormack housing project might be nominated for a Pulitzer. It wasn’t (though she did win the Horace Greeley Award and the PEN/Winship for excellence in investigative journalism), but she didn’t care in the end; she knew she’d done good work, and back then, that was enough. It was an old-man bar with a red door called Kenneally’s Tap, tucked on one of the last ungentrified blocks in the neighborhood, if she remembered correctly, the name itself a throwback to a time before all Irish bars had to sound vaguely literary, like St. James’s Gate, Elysian Fields, the Isle of Statues.

She eventually found the red door on a block she hadn’t initially recognized because its Toyotas and Volvos had been replaced with Benzes and Range Rover Sports, and the functional bars on the windows had been replaced by filigreed ones with more substantial aesthetic appeal. Kenneally’s was still there, but its menu was posted out front now, and they’d gotten rid of the mozzarella sticks and the deep-fried chicken poppers and replaced them with pork cheeks and braised kale.

She walked straight to a free chair in the far corner near the waitstaff station, and when the bartender found her, she ordered a vodka-rocks and asked if he had the day’s paper lying around. She wore a gray hoodie over a white V-neck T-shirt and dark blue jeans. The flats on her feet were black, scuffed, and as forgettable as the rest of her ensemble. It didn’t matter. For all the talk of progress, of equal footing, of a post-sexist generation, a woman still couldn’t sit alone at a bar and have a drink without drawing stares. She kept her head down and read the Globe and sipped her vodka and tried to keep the addled sparrow in her chest from flapping its wings.

The bar wasn’t more than a quarter full, which was good, but the clientele was a lot younger than she’d counted on, which wasn’t. The old-timers she’d expected to find had been reduced to a quartet of geezers who sat at a scarred table near the back room and slipped out for frequent smoke breaks. It had been naïve to think that here, in the trendiest of all Boston neighborhoods, the shot-’n’-a-beer crowd could have held the line against the single-malt cohort.