Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Luckily there was a trash barrel nearby. She took four steps and threw up in it.

As she walked back toward the apartment she shared with Brian, the people she passed stared brazenly at her with contempt and disgust and something that she could only identify as appetite. They contemplated nipping her as she passed.

A Scientologist accosted her at the next block, shoved a pamphlet in her hand, and asked if she’d like to take a personality test, she sure looked like she could use some good news, ma’am, might learn things about herself that would—

She wasn’t ever positive but suspected she might have thrown up on him. Back at the apartment she found specks of vomit on her shoes, but when she’d puked into the big barrel she’d been certain it had been all net.

She removed her clothes and took a twenty-minute shower. When Brian came home that night she was still in her robe and almost to the bottom of a bottle of pinot grigio. He made his own drink, single malt with a single cube of ice, and sat with her in the window seat overlooking the Charles and let her talk it out. When she finished, the disgust she’d expected to see in his face — the disgust that surely would have lived in Sebastian’s — wasn’t there. Instead, she saw only... What was that?

Good Lord.

Empathy.

Is that what it looks like? she thought.

He used the tips of his fingers to brush her wet bangs back and kissed her forehead. He poured her more wine.

He chuckled. “You really puked on a Scientologist?”

“It’s not funny.”

“But, babe, it is. It really is.” He clinked his glass off hers and drank.

She laughed, but then the laugh died and she thought of who she’d once been — in the housing projects, in the prowl cars on ride-alongs, in the halls of power, in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and that endless night in the squatters camp in Léogâne — and she couldn’t connect that Rachel with this one.

“I’m so ashamed.” She looked at this man who was better than any she’d ever known, certainly kinder, certainly more patient, and the tears came, which only deepened her shame.

“Ashamed of what?” he said. “You are not weak. You hear me?”

“I can’t even walk out the fucking door,” she whispered. “I can’t even get in a fucking cab.”

“You’ll see someone,” he said. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll heal. In the meantime, where would you want to go?” His arm swept the apartment. “What’s better than here? We’ve got books, a full fridge, an Xbox.”

She dropped her forehead against his chest. “I love you.”

“I love you too. We can even do the wedding here.”

She took her head off his chest, looked in his eyes. He nodded.

They got married in a church. It was a few blocks away. Only their closest friends attended — on her side, Melissa, Eugenie, and Danny Marotta, her cameraman in Haiti; on his side, his business partner, Caleb, Caleb’s wife, Haya, a stunning Japanese immigrant who was still struggling to learn English, and Tom, the bartender from the bar where they’d met. No Jeremy James this time to walk her down the aisle; she hadn’t heard from him in two years. As for Brian, when she’d asked if he wanted his family there, he shook his head and a darkness settled on him like an overcoat.

“I do business with them,” he said. “I do not love them. I do not share the beautiful things in my life with them.”

When he spoke of his family Brian didn’t use contractions. He spoke slowly and precisely.

She said, “But they’re your family.”

He shook his head. “You’re my family.”

After the wedding, they all went for drinks at the Bristol Lounge. Later, she and Brian walked home through the Common and the Public Garden, and she’d never felt better in her life.

As they waited out a light to cross Beacon Street, however, Rachel saw two dead girls standing in the middle of the overpass that led to the Esplanade. The one in the faded red T-shirt and the jean shorts was Esther. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widdy. The two girls stepped up onto the overpass guardrail. Traffic streamed off Storrow Drive and flowed below them as they dove headfirst from the rail and vanished before they hit the pavement.

She didn’t tell Brian. She made it back to the apartment without another hitch and they drank some champagne. They made love and had some more champagne and lay in bed and watched a harvest moon rise over the city.

She saw the two girls fall from the overpass and vanish. She catalogued all the people who had vanished from her life, not just the big ones, but the small, everyday ones, and she experienced a sudden grasp of what she feared most out in the world — that they’d all vanish on her one day, everyone. She’d turn a corner and the wide avenues would be empty, the cars abandoned. Everyone would have snuck out some galactic back door while she paused to blink, and she would be the only person alive.

It was an absurd thought, something a child with a martyr complex would marinate in. Yet it felt elemental to understanding the core of her fears. She looked at her newly minted husband. His blinking lids had grown heavy with sex and champagne and the gravity of the day. She knew in that moment that she’d married him for entirely different reasons than she’d married Sebastian. She’d married Sebastian because subconsciously she’d known that if he ever left her, she wouldn’t give much of a shit. But she married Brian because although he left her in small ways — enough that she could trust the imperfection of that model — he’d never leave her in the big ones.

“What’re you thinking about?” Brian asked. “You seem sad.”

“I’m not,” she lied. “I’m happy,” she said, because it was also true.

It was eighteen months before she left the apartment again.

The weekend before he left for London, fast approaching their second wedding anniversary, Brian and Rachel rode the elevator down from the fifteenth floor and left their building. It was raining — it had done nothing but rain that week — but the rain wasn’t heavy, more like a mist she’d barely notice until the wet found her bones, similar to the weather the night they’d met. Brian took her hand and led her up to Mass Ave. He wouldn’t tell her where they were going, only that she was ready for it. She could handle it.

Rachel had left the condo a dozen times over the last six months, but she had done so when the environment was at its most controllable — early mornings and weekday evenings, often in the coldest weather. She went to the supermarket but, as before, only in the early morning hours of a weekday, and she always stayed in on weekends.

But here she was, out and about in Back Bay late on a Saturday morning. Despite the weather, Mass Ave was crowded. So were the cross streets, Newbury in particular. The Masshole fans of Red Sox Nation were out in force, the team trying to squeeze in at least one home game in a week when the rest had been rained out. So Mass Ave was teeming with red or blue T-shirts and red or blue ball caps and the people who wore them: studly young frat-boy types in jeans and flip-flops already hitting the bars; middle-aged men and women with competing beer guts; kids darting in and out of the fray along the sidewalks, a quartet of them sword fighting with toy bats. Cars sat in traffic so long the drivers turned off the engines. Horns beeped and horns bayed and jaywalkers weaved through it all, one guy shouting, “Ti-tle town, ti-tle town!” every time he slapped a trunk. Beyond the sports fans — obnoxious or otherwise — were the yuppies and buppies and the urban hipsters so recently graduated from Berklee College of Music or BU to a daunting lack of prospects. Farther down Newbury would be the trophy wives with their duck lips and their purse dogs, sighing at every slip in customer service before demanding to see someone’s manager. It had been so long since Rachel had risked entering a crowd that she’d somehow forgotten how overwhelming it could be.