Gary’s Way

After you betray him, you will try to explain yourself. You will sit at his computer, the one he fell into and never returned, and you will stare at the screen inches from your face, but your fingertips will hover above the very keyboard he could never leave and you will feel like the woman who drives her friend to an AA meeting and then goes drinking for days.

No, you will not write to him on this machine. You will not.

You’ll pull a sheet of paper from the printer. It’s where he made so very many copies of his diatribes—the ones he mailed to senators and state representatives, to mayors and town managers, to city commissioners and selectmen and members of local and far-away school committees.

You will hold a ballpoint pen, the logo of his company etched into its shaft: Bostco Precision, Inc. That’s what drew you to him in the first place, that unlike those fallen boys from before, Gary knew who he was and had steady work, work he’d been doing since he was twenty-one years old. Five mornings a week for twenty-five years now he has walked into a large, lighted room filled with machines that make other machines and he knows how to run them as well as he knows how to run you. That’s what you will think as you write:

Dear Gary,

You will stare at those two words for a moment or two. You will try to think about the word “dear.” But the regional office of the FBI is only miles away and maybe they will bring him here before they take him elsewhere and so you will feel the need to hurry.

But this is what he has done to you for years. Left you feeling monitored and anxious as you fry a steak on the stove, as you open the electric bill and write on the envelope the date its payment is due, even as you wipe yourself after peeing, his eyes on your hand and face as he pauses with his razor at the mirror, a razor that he will replace after using it only once. For that is Gary’s way. Everything must be done with great precision and care and with the sharpest and most efficient tools possible.

And so, as you sit there at Gary’s computer desk in the summer camp you have tried to make a home four seasons of the year for seventeen years, the keyboard pushed aside so that you can write him your—what? Confession?—the word “patriot” will come to you.

Dear Gary,

Maybe I don’t know a lot.

Is that true? Do you not know a lot? Or are these just the words Gary would whip at you like chains?

You don’t know jack shit, Jean Marie.

Open your eyes, Jean. Jesus Christ.

You’re a lamb about to get slaughtered, honey, and you don’t even know it.

He said this with a smile, a mean smile because he’d been drinking again with his new friends who wore camo and smoked cigarettes and didn’t shave and drove big Ford or Ram trucks, except for that small lawyer who ran ultramarathons, one hundred miles straight, his face always shaved, his cheeks flushed with disciplined blood, and he would have been handsome if not for the hatred in his narrow eyes.

You will cross out that first sentence and you will write: I think what you did was so wrong. I think what you did would make your father ashamed of you.

That part will hurt you to write. It will hurt because it will bring you back to your father-in-law, who was always so kind to you, treating you, Jean Marie Doucette, like a special gift his son was lucky to receive and if he were ever to lose this gift then he would lose his one chance at happiness.

It was something Gary’s father never seemed to find. Not since before he was nineteen, anyway, and sent to that part of the world he never wanted to talk about, that orange chemical giving him the three cancers that finally killed that sweet man.

Your father was a patriot, Gary. You and your friends are just—

The buzz and cry of a chainsaw will come from across the lake, and you will look out the kitchen window through the pines to the gray ice covering the water. You will know that one of your neighbors to the south is cutting a hole into that ice for fishing and this will frighten you, the thought of a square in the ice and that cold, black water exposed.

Fear will move into you then like a virus and you will think how unbalanced Gary’s new friends are. Their guns and their flags and their survival shelters. You will think how you need to hurry.

Up against the legs of the kitchen table is your packed suitcase. Your mother gave it to you when you were going off to culinary school. All those cooking shows on TV when you were in high school, you thought you wanted to be a chef, the one in the kitchen creating nourishing pleasure for others. At that school, you fell in love with soups, with their various stocks and how just about anything that grew out of the ground could go into them. But your teachers were harsh or didn’t seem to care at all, and your classmates, it soon became clear, were the kinds of kids in high school that had few friends, which was the case with you too, and soon this journey to a new and glorious you felt like a wrong turn and then the work got harder and you didn’t really want to be a chef anymore.

One weekend a boy from New Hampshire was visiting his friend, Sid, on campus. Sid was huge and laughed too hard, and his friend was tall and skinny in a wool sweater, his hair cut short, not for any style, he would tell you later, but for safety at work. Over too many cans of beer and some vodka nips too, the two of you sitting close together on the ratty couch of Sid’s dorm room, the Black Eyed Peas singing about rocking their shit, a joint going around, this boy Gary’s eyes held a steady kind of light you’d never seen before. It seemed to come from a deep knowing that what he was doing was what he was born to do, and it was like walking lost through the night woods and just before the panic came there opened before you a clear dry path, the warm windows of a house up ahead.

You and your friends are just—

Criminals, you will write. You will remember their many meetings right there in your own, small living room, though most of them used to be held online in their various chat rooms until the lawyer, James, made them all worry about their “cyber” being “compromised,” and so they began to meet in each other’s houses or apartments.

You will recall some of the wives and girlfriends then. Big girls or scrawny ones in their t-shirts with their leader’s face scowling from their breasts, most of these women staying quiet while their angry men went on and on about how they—these white men—had all been wronged. How their leader, who should still be running the free world, had been wronged. How they needed to take their country back. Now.

The chainsaw will go quiet out on the lake, and in that quiet you will hear your own telephone voice tell the lady in the FBI office what you told her just one hour ago. “My husband is one of them.”

Your face will heat with shame, and now you will shake your head and read your own word on the page before you: criminals.

Even Gary?

How many nights after those meetings would you lie in bed next to your husband and ask him if he really believed everything that had just been said in their own home?

“I mean about Jews, honey. Do you really hate Jews? After all they’ve been through?”

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Jean.”

His back would be to you when, for years, your back would be curled into his chest, his long arm resting on your naked hip, his heart beating slow and so steady against your ribs.

A car will pass by on the road in front of your house. It’ll be early on a Wednesday afternoon in January and you will have called in sick at Good Health Eats where you’re the baker of gluten-free, dairy-free, organic treats. Another wave of fear will roll through you and then an aching sadness, for you know you cannot go back there where Gary’s friends would so easily be able to find you, and you know, too, that after today, unless you report all of them, they will come hunting you.

“Why are you so rude to them all the time?”

He’d said this to you in almost a whisper after making love to you, and as he pulled himself out and away, you knew he’d wanted to ask that earlier but didn’t because then the mood would be gone and you wouldn’t have wanted to do it with him, though you had not wanted to do it with him for a very long time anyway. Not since he started spending hours at this desk in front of this computer reading all about our country’s “enemies,” who looked to you like regular anchor people on TV, like movie actors and famous athletes, like judges and lawyers and professors and school teachers and doctors and nurses, some of them Black, some of them Jews, some of them from south of the border, just men and women living their lives one messy day at a time.

Criminals.

Now that square of icy black water will be in the center of your chest and it will have a fire burning over it and that fire will be the constant movie playing in your head, the one Gary took and showed you so very proudly, as if the ugly act that he and his “brothers” had committed had been brave and beautiful and not mean and ignorant and so very wrong.

“Policemen, Gary? Cops?”

“Collaborators, Jean Marie. Wake up.”

You were standing in the kitchen. Outside, snow fell lightly over the lake and your and Gary’s small deck, covering it in white. He was holding his phone out to you, and he had the volume turned as loud as it could go, and he must have been standing only two or three feet from what he had filmed because you could see the fear in the policeman’s eyes, the way he squinted and his shoulders hunched just before some big man in a wool cap punched him in the face. But it was hearing Gary as he filmed this that you had to get away from. “Hit him! Fucking hit him!”

And the thing is, as you pulled on your coat and rushed outside, not bothering to grab your hat or gloves, not bothering to zip your coat either, it came to you that you’d never heard your husband ever yell like that before. Ever.

And then he was calling to you from the front door. “Jean! Jean Marie!”

Like you were a child, like you were a little girl who was disappointing daddy by not doing what he said. You kept moving, and as you walked as fast as you could down the frozen road dusted with snow, all the other camps in the bare trees closed because very few reasonable people lived here all year long, you thought of what your own father had said to you at your wedding reception.

It was small and held at a function hall off the highway. His tan suit was too tight on him and his lined face had no color in it, but he was dancing with you to a Frank Sinatra song you knew he liked and so you chose for him, though your dad, who’d worked for the post office his whole life, had never done anything his way. Just before the song was over, everyone watching you both, the smells of perfume and roast beef in the air, he glanced over at your new husband in his rented tuxedo, waiting, and your father leaned in close and said, “Be sure to live your life, too, sweetie.”

You were confused and a bit hurt by this, but you smiled and held your daddy close, and then, only two years later, he was dead, and maybe men can see things in men that women cannot, the way women can see things in women that men have not a clue about.

You began to get cold on that walk. You stopped where the road dipped down closer to the water and you zipped up your coat and flipped the collar up to your ears and you stuck your hands into your empty pockets.

The snow fell lightly on your face, and you had not noticed that your hair was getting wet. You just kept hearing Gary’s voice yelling what he had in that movie he’d made from his phone.

Such rage. Who was this man yelling for that other man to hit that cop? He was a stranger to you.

Then you found yourself on the same road close to the water that you had walked after each of your miscarriages. All three of them.

Gary tried in his way to comfort you. The first time, he had bought you flowers, a sad mix of dyed roses and carnations, and he cooked that night—frozen peas and macaroni and cheese from a box that he served you in front of the TV because you told him you didn’t want to talk about it. The second time, he had held you for a long while on top of your made bed, the windows open because it was July, and through the screens came the smells of pine sap and the warm asphalt shingles of your camp, and you could hear a motorboat out on the water, the taunting laughter of little kids on a nearby dock. The third time, it was winter again, like now, and Gary had just shook his head at you and looked down at the kitchen floor then walked over and hugged you once, too tightly, and all he’d said was, “You ready to hang it up, then?”

Like wanting a baby had been only your desire.

“Hang it up?” you had said to him, and then you were crying and walking down this very road through the oak and pines, the boarded-up camps on the water making you feel boarded up, and why didn’t your husband want a baby as badly as you did?

Because he does not love me.

It was a voice inside your head. It was the voice you had when you were very young and looked at life as if it were a fair and predictable story, if you only found what role you were to play in it and then played it as well as you possibly could.

But what if you never found your role? Or the role you did find should have gone to someone else entirely?

Dear Gary,

I think what you did was so wrong. I think what you did would make your father ashamed of you. Your father was a patriot, Gary. You and your friends are just criminals. But why, Gary? Why did you let this happen to you?

What are you even talking about, Jean? You will think of how many times he has said this to you.

The changes in him came slowly at first and then all at once, and it started when his company laid off most of their employees and cut his hours in half. Not that he and you needed the money. Gary had been so careful over the years that he had enough put away that he could retire early if he wanted to. There were no kids to put through college, and your camp was paid off. But Gary did not like that the company he’d worked for since he was a kid was slowly dying, and now that he had half the work week to sit around for the first time in his life, he was on his computer reading about what he became convinced had caused this: “bad” trade deals and illegal immigrants, cheaper products imported from China, big banks and tax shelters that favored “the elite.” And then he found chat rooms where other men with too much time on their hands were trading stories and hurling blame, and in the beginning, Gary would share all of this with you. He would stand there in your kitchen telling you these things in the freshly righteous tone of one who’d just discovered both society’s disease and its cure.

You had never seen this side of Gary. He had always lived so privately, taking pride in simply living responsibly and with great care. What other people did or how they lived seemed to be none of his business. Except for you. You were clearly his business. All that constant monitoring over the years, the way he would watch you as if you did not do anything correctly or efficiently: like not cleaning the kitchen while you cooked them a meal; like not paying each bill the day it came in and not later just before it was due; like not turning off every light in a room that you were no longer in, even if you’d left the lamp on in the living room because you were returning to it with a cup of tea; like not coming right before he did, even though he’d attended to you with the proper technique, or so he thought, and because he could never bear to fail at anything, even making love with his wife, you would say nothing and pretend to come. You were well on your way to becoming a pretender.

You had seen over and over again this Gary. But this new Gary Landry, he had turned his desire for precision and exactness outward. He now wanted the entire country to start doing what was right and correct. And what was right was to shave away the parasites on the system, those who’d crossed the border lawlessly to steal jobs, those millions on welfare and food stamps, especially the “gangstas,” the word he used instead of the other you could not believe you were hearing in your own home on those meeting nights. He and his new friends even went after gay people who they were convinced were “taking over”—them and the Jews. Anyone who was not like them was taking over, and what was being lost?

What used to be. Or what they were convinced used to be. Which was a kind of purity, one that had to be saved by any means necessary.

And then came their leader. You only knew him from his TV show, which you’d never watched, but when he won it all and Gary’s hours got cut in half, then he really started listening to this man.

A car will slow out on the road and your heart will go still behind your sternum. You will look out the window and feel foolish for taking this long to write to your husband, for when was the last time he was ever this considerate of you? The car will look familiar to you. It will be a gray sedan of some kind. A Lexus maybe, and now your heart will burst into a mad flutter because it will be that lawyer James’s car and you will be holding your breath as it turns into your short driveway, its tires rolling over snow, his car blocking yours.

You will sit more still than you have ever sat in your life, and you will feel as exposed as if the roof and walls of your home have been lifted away. James will rise out of his sedan, his eyes on your car and your front door, and then he will be walking to it in a sleeveless down vest and white shirt and blue tie, his hair combed back wet, and you will stand so fast that Gary’s desk chair will fall over onto the rug behind you and you will grab your letter to him and fold it twice, shoving it into the front pocket of your jeans. Now James will be knocking on the door and you will be walking to it, the taste of lead in your mouth, a lead pipe that your heart is squeezed into.

For a moment you will consider not answering that door.

But your car is out there and this James will know you’re home and so why wouldn’t you answer your own door? The knob will feel so cold to you. You’ll turn it and pull it and James the lawyer will say hello and he will call you by your name and his narrow eyes that would be handsome on anyone else will take in your un-made-up face, your hair still damp from what you saw as your last shower in this house. He will glance down at your breasts behind your sweater, at your legs behind your jeans, at the black Asics on your feet that you bought for standing long hours at work. And as he does all of this, he will be talking to you in the voice of a cautiously hopeful man who senses that great success is near.

He will be giving you instructions of some kind, but you will not quite take in what he is saying because you will not like how he is looking at you, which is the way he has always looked at you—like you may be useful for something but nothing as important as what he and Gary and the others are doing. And now, his hands in the pockets of his down vest, he will narrow those narrow eyes further, and he will say, “You all right, Jean Marie?”

“Yes.” Your voice will sound small to you, like if you don’t stay quiet, all will be revealed.

“You look a bit pale.”

“I’m fine.”

He will nod slowly. He will unzip his down vest and reach into its inside pocket for an index card. “I was going to slide this under your door, but you’ll tell your husband, right?”

At his hip will be a black holster and the black handle of a pistol, and he will look down at your crotch and then at your feet and then at the small coatroom behind you. He will seem to notice for the first time that you have opened the door only halfway. You will take the index card from him quickly so he does not see your trembling fingers.

“My place at eight. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“And tell him no posts or texts, okay?”

“Right.”

He will be staring at your face, and you will see something you never quite let yourself see before: that if you invited him in and led him to the bedroom, he would undress you and take whatever he could, and he would trust you to say nothing.

Now he will lift his chin slightly. “You’re with us on this thing, Jean, right?”

Your face will feel like it has burning insects crawling across it. You will try to swallow to speak but cannot.

“Maybe you’re just quiet. Is that it?”

“Yeah.” You will smile at him. You will smile like the pretender you are. “I don’t like to talk too much.”

He will nod slowly at this, taking you in like you may have something valuable to contribute after all. You will feel cold, your nipples hardening under your bra, and you will want to close the door.

He will smile again and nod at that index card in your hand. “I feel like Paul Revere.” Then he will turn and walk to his gray sedan and he will back out onto the road, looking at you once through his passenger’s window as you close the door and lock it.

You will stand for a moment in the coatroom. You will read what is written on that index card in your hand:

Stay off your devices. Post nothing. Esquire’s place, 8:00 p.m. You will lower that card to your side and you will look at Gary’s leather jacket hanging from a hook. You will look at one of his fishing rods leaning in the corner. You will look at your winter boots, set so carefully under the bench, and you will sit on that bench and set the index card there and you will untie your Asics and pull on those boots.

In the kitchen you will wrap your shoes in a plastic garbage bag. You will open your suitcase and push them onto your rolled clothes and you will zip the suitcase shut and pull from your pocket your letter to Gary. You will see again James’s gun on his hip. The creased paper in your hands will be shaking. Paul Revere? And you will hear again the rage in Gary’s voice, Hit him! Fucking hit him! You will hear again the rage in your own living room on those meeting nights, words and sounds that you would often try to escape by going up to your bedroom and closing the door, but you could still hear those voices, the conviction in them, the absolute certainty that they were correct in all they were spewing.

And you have for so long been incorrect, Jean Marie. But now you are in great danger, and you will rush to the trash container under your sink, and you will push Gary’s letter down onto his damp coffee grounds from this morning, and it will hurt you to see them. It will hurt you to picture Gary at one of his machines in his safety goggles as the men in FBI jackets, maybe coats and ties, but all with guns, as they—what? Handcuff him? Walk him out of the room of machines that for so long has been his kingdom?

No, you will think as you climb the stairs to your bedroom, this has been his kingdom, this camp you have tried to make a home. Wishful thinking, your mother would say. Isn’t that just wishful thinking, honey? That you so wanted this to feel like a home, which it did sometimes, maybe often, and for years. Back when your tall, calm husband was not so critical, back when he was nearly as sweet as his father and came home from work looking so grateful to have you there waiting for him. You both used to laugh a lot then. You used to tell each other silly jokes and take walks along the lake at sundown, and you had your dog, Julie, for eleven years, too—the love you both shared for that retriever, whose death seemed to hurt Gary even more than it hurt you, which made you love him more. And even though he told you that you didn’t have to work, what else were you going to do? So there were your part-time jobs: working at the bookstore at the mall before the whole place closed down; working as a receptionist for the young chiropractor who kept hitting on you, even though he was married and so you quit; there was studying for your realtor’s license and never finishing because you got pregnant again. There were those months between your pregnancies and the black loss that seemed to encase you in wax so that you could barely get out of bed to walk downstairs into your small kitchen looking out over dirty water.

But there were meals to cook, and even though you dropped out of culinary school years ago, you still loved what could be done with raw ingredients and an oven or stove, and it has been your job at Good Health Eats that has shined a light through the fog of all your “wishful thinking.” For there, in that small, busy kitchen of warm women, two of them gay, all three of them daily praising you for your “wonderful work,” for your “scrumptiousness,” for your “yummy talents,” it is here where you have come to feel like some dried up old sponge that just needed some warm water to open back into fullness.

The bedroom will be cold, the shade on Gary’s side of the bed still pulled down halfway. On the bedside table will be his phone charger and a book by a famous radio personality who has known the king for years and who loves the king.

You will pull Gary’s drawer open and you will reach in and touch his pistol. It will feel hard and cold and you know that if you take it with you there will be no coming back here. Because if you do steal your husband’s loaded gun, which he bought only a few months ago, taking it three times a week to a rifle range where he “trained” with his “brothers,” then you will have to admit that you are afraid of him too.

The day of their “victory,” you watched it on TV. You weren’t going to, but you’d gone into work early and baked two dozen California Girl muffins and a dozen peanut butter cookies and another dozen gluten free macaroons you topped with organic cherries you’d soaked in agave. What was there to do after your shower but flick on the TV while your tomato soup heated on the stove?

It was on nearly every station, and at first you weren’t sure what you were seeing. The crowd looked like one big, black-and-red organism pulsing for those tall, grand windows and doors. Individual tentacles that were men were climbing those stately granite walls, and then this organism punched through window glass and door glass and shoved open those doors that had looked so strong to you, and when the organism pushed into those hallowed halls, you felt your stomach rise up to your throat for this was like seeing your own mother stripped and beaten; this was like seeing men dig up your father’s grave and pry open his coffin and start kicking his corpse.

You could not turn off that TV fast enough, and then you were nearly running along the lake, your arms crossed in front of you, your chin down because there was a cold wind blowing across the ice through the trees and into your face, and it was as if you were being told that your home was on fire and what are you going to do to save it?

There was Gary’s excited, drunken call from the hotel that night. “Did you see it, babe? Did you see what we did?”

From behind him came laughter and the loud, triumphant voices of men who could not be more impressed with themselves. You hung up.

You will grab the handle of Gary’s gun now, and you will be surprised at how heavy it is, though you held it once before, when Gary showed you that small switch that keeps the trigger from pulling. “This is the safety,” he’d said in his instructional voice, the one he’s shoved into you over and over again throughout these years. You will check to make sure that switch is in its correct place, and as you carry that gun quickly past the bed you’d made so perfectly just before calling the FBI, you will avoid looking back at your open closet, his side full, yours half empty, though you are leaving behind so much, and maybe, you will think as you descend the stairs, maybe if he had treated you differently when he came back home, maybe you would not be doing this.

The next day was a Tuesday and you were at work all afternoon. Because you could not get that horrible organism out of your head, because you could not get your husband’s so very happy telephone voice out of your head, you began to cry while pouring buttermilk into a mixing bowl and then the owner, Valerie, walked by.

“Jean, honey, you okay?” Valerie—with her square shoulders and short, gray hair and kind, blue eyes—put her hand on your shoulder and you tried not to but you told her everything. Her wife Maggie came in then, two women who’d made a life together and were not taking over anything as far as you could see.

Then you were wiping your eyes and saying, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Leave him,” Maggie said. “Come live with us.” And she pulled from the fridge a bin of alfalfa sprouts and walked back out front.

“Seriously, Jean.” Valerie said. Her arm was around your shoulders, and her skin smelled like aloe vera and the Marlboros she was still trying to quit. “We’re here if you need us.”

When you got home, Gary’s new pickup was in the driveway. The sun was going down, and there was a rosy light through the pines and bare trees along the lake that made you think of the end of things.

You had to sit there a minute or two in your car. You checked your eyes in the mirror and then you were inside your kitchen and Gary’s duffle bag was on the table and he was still in his coat and when he saw you his face filled with what it used to when he saw you again after a time away, like life was good but so much better with you in it. He hugged you to him and kissed your cheeks and lips and then he held you at arm’s length so that you could see his face. Did he not remember that you’d hung up on him? “History, babe. We made history.”

And because his feeling about this was so strongly correct, you could say nothing in the face of it. On the counter was the bag of Chinese food he’d picked up as a surprise so you didn’t have to cook, and as you both sat down to eat, he never stopped talking, sparing you nothing of his part in that many-headed beast that had defiled all you never knew you cared about till now—this country, this place so big and wide and deep it should be able to hold so many different kinds of us without any trouble at all.

Only as he broke open his fortune cookie did he seem to see you for the first time. He hadn’t shaved in a day or two, and in the soft glow of the overhead light, his stubble was gray and white and you knew that you did not want to grow old with this man. Your face felt like it was slipping from whatever held it in place, and you could feel the tears coming. He said, “What’s the matter, Jean?”

At first his tone sounded almost caring, like he was genuinely concerned. But no, it was his tone of careful scrutiny, and there was something darker and sharper in it, too: suspicion. And all you did was start to cry and scream, “I can’t believe you!” and rush upstairs to your room where you curled on the bed and where he soon stood over you yelling. “Don’t be a sheep, Jean Marie. Jesus Christ, wake up!” There were more words. Loud, angry words from your husband, the stranger, but it was like hearing fat raindrops land on the roof above you for they could not touch you. You no longer cared whatsoever what Gary Landry thought of you.

There was the roar of his new truck’s engine outside, then he was gone, and when he crawled back into bed hours later, your back to him, you could smell the whiskey and then his big hand was on your bare leg and you pulled away, and he said, “So be it.”

Those three words were some of the last he said to you, for he became quiet after that, especially after he showed you that video of him filming a policeman getting punched in the face—how all you did was want to get away from it, and him, as fast as you could.

He spent a lot of time out of the house, and if he was on his computer when you came home from work, he’d tap the keyboard quickly to make anything he’d been doing on it disappear.

The way you seemed to be disappearing right before him. You, his wife of seventeen years, he was now treating like a collaborator.

You will be in the coatroom now. You will set Gary’s loaded pistol on the index card on the bench, and you will pull on your parka and wool cap. You will pick up the gun and zip it into your side pocket, and you will begin to feel like everything you’re doing is wrong.

Last night, you let him make love to you. He had just gotten into bed, and he did not pick up his book by the radio personality who loved the king. He did not check his phone for any important messages from his brothers. He switched off his bedside lamp and turned to you and said, “I wish—”

“What?” you said. “That I was more like you?”

He said nothing, though you could feel there was so much he wanted to say, starting with, yes, he’d always wished you were more like him.

And because you knew what you would do today, you let him touch you, and you let him open your legs with his hand, and then you let him inside, where you no longer were anyway.

You will zip up your parka and feel the weight of your husband’s gun in your pocket. As you walk through the kitchen to the computer desk, you will not know if you’re taking this gun to protect yourself or to keep any of Gary’s new friends from it, which may be another way of protecting yourself. You will see the desk chair on its back on the rug, and you move to pick it up from where it fell, but then you stop yourself. Let it stay there where it does not belong.

In the kitchen, Gary’s washed coffee mug will be sitting upside down in the drainer. You will look past the sink and out the window through the pines and bare maples to the gray stretch of ice over the water. You will imagine walking out onto that ice. You will imagine it breaking open beneath you and that black water pulling you down, and you grab your suitcase, which is so very light, too light to carry the past seventeen years.

In the coatroom you will stop and set down that suitcase. You will pick up that index card from “Esquire” and carry it to Gary’s desk. You will take that pen from his dying company and write on the back of that card:

I’m sorry, Gary. But you should be sorry too.

You will start to write the word love, but that will feel wrong, even though you cannot say you no longer love your husband.

-Jean

Outside, the air will feel colder to you than just moments ago when James the lawyer stood at your door. You will place your suitcase on your back seat, and just before you sit behind the wheel of your car, you will smell wood smoke from a fireplace, a wisp of white rising from the chimney of one of the cabins to the south. You will stare at this a moment. You will think that if the wish for a home had a scent, this would be it.

And then you’ll be on the highway, the sky a bright gray. You will wonder if all the money you saved as a baker will be enough. It was supposed to be for your and Gary’s “extras”—a new boat motor, maybe a vacation somewhere warm—but you will not be afraid, wondering if you have what you need, for unlike the girl who got on that bus to culinary school six hours away so many years ago, her mother and father waving to her from under the portico of the station, you know who this Jean Marie is and what she can do.

Snow will be on both sides of the road, but the highway will be clear. A big pickup truck will pass you on the right. It will cut in front of you and then into the left lane and on its rear window will be a sticker of the king’s name. You face will grow hot. It will be hard to swallow. There will come the hollow-boned feeling that what you’re doing is futile, that your husband’s new friends are everywhere. But then you’ll feel Valerie’s arms around your shoulder, her wife’s invitation for you to come live with them, and you would do it if you wouldn’t be putting them in danger. You will see again that obscene organism invading all that should be held dear.

My husband is one of them.

Yes, you had felt shame at your betrayal of Gary, but you had felt something else too—that what you had done was right. That what you had done could not be more correct.

You will be hungry now. You will glance down at your gas gauge and see that your tank is nearly empty. It is something your husband never would have allowed, such a lapse in proper planning. But up ahead is a service plaza, and you will pull into its parking lot and you will lock your car. You will walk past a woman holding the hand of her toddler, a round-faced Asian girl in a pink wool cap. But the mother is a blonde, her hair pulled back in a hurried bun, and you will think the word motherhood.

You will begin to feel it in you as a renewed possibility.

But you’ll also feel the weight of your husband’s gun in your side pocket, and as you step into the plaza and walk past the fast-food restaurants and their competing smells of french fries and doughnuts, of sizzling meat and brewing coffee, you will feel as if what you carry can only carry you back to what you’re trying to escape.

In the ladies room stall, you will pee and wipe yourself and your husband will not be there to make sure you’re doing even that the way it should be done. You will pull the heavy gun from your pocket and you will wrap it in toilet paper, using nearly half a roll that you will have to pull free so slowly and carefully to keep it from separating into useless squares.

You will flush then carry that wrapped gun to the trash bin near the hand dryers. At the sink the blonde mother will be holding her bundled daughter to the faucet so the little girl can wash her hands. The woman will glance at you watching them both. She will smile at you and you will smile back, pushing your husband’s gun through the shiny metal door and letting it fall into a softness you can feel inside you, one you can still feel, hours later, as you drive west to wherever it is that you’re going.

A shiver of fear will pass through you, but you’ll shrug it away, for you’ve seen how that feeling can so easily turn into something far worse. The sun is low over a black ridge of trees that must be New York. You turn on your headlights, and wherever you’re going, you know there are still good people out there, and when you find them in the true heart of this land, you will know it.