Hannah Pittard: Listen to Me

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 butterflies 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.