Demon

“I know, Sheila. But what happened tonight to cause this breakdown?” I hated the calm, measured sound of my own voice. It reminded me of the way Lucian talked to me that day in the bookstore.

“He—he doesn’t know if he’s coming back. Oh, Clay!” My name became a tight keen.

I sighed, tried to summon empathy. Had Aubrey cried like this when she left me? Had she ever shed a tear even? “Sheila, where are your children?”

“With Dan. They’re with Dan. He took them. I don’t mean he took them, but for the night.”

“All right. And you’re not worried about them, right?” I couldn’t imagine either one of them doing anything stupid when it came to their children.

“No. I’m not. I’m all right.” She inhaled sharply, her breath catching. “He doesn’t know what he wants. It’s all right. I’m not angry.”

I stared at the receiver. She wasn’t angry? She had cheated on him, and she wasn’t angry? I had to work to suppress my rage, rising like tar on hot pavement. “I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds like you have it figured—”

“You can’t hate her,” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“Aubrey. She just didn’t know what she wanted. It was a mistake. She knew it. She had to know it.”

“Sheila, you’re babbling,” I said more firmly. I was trying to be diplomatic but found it more and more difficult. I was glad I wasn’t in town where I might feel compelled to ask if I ought to check on her. I was sick of being a good guy. “You know what I think? I think you need to figure out what you want.”

Silence. And then a sniffle. “You’re right. You’re right, Clay.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Thank you.”

I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see it. I waited a moment more to hear the soft click of the line before hanging up the receiver.

25

On the morning I left Cabo, my plane sat on the tarmac for an hour. The storm had caused cancellations and delays, and now that the sun was shining again, planes were baking in line on the runway like fish laid out to dry. I glanced repeatedly at my seatmate, trying to ascertain if he was less human than he looked in his Bermudas and flip-flops, until he dropped his head back, let his mouth fall open, and started snoring.

Gazing out the window, I stared at the gray cement until I, too, dozed. I woke, dry mouthed, just before the plane began its descent into the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. I wondered if I should have kept Sheila on the phone longer or called Helen, wondered where Lucian had been these five days, what the committee thought of my book.

My book. Sometime in the last few days it had evolved from my manuscript to “my book.” I had already decided that if Brooks and Hanover didn’t take it, I would submit it elsewhere. Maybe I would ask Katrina to represent it, to take it to one of the Titans—Random House, perhaps, or Hachette.

But I needed to know how it ended.

Sitting in a bank of seats at my gate in Dallas, I reached for my cell phone but hesitated before turning it on. Pushing that button carried so much finality; either there would be a message waiting from Helen, or there wouldn’t. If there were, I might know now, before I even boarded my plane, the fate of my book. Or at least whether I should be calling Katrina.

What I would not know is how to finish it.

I didn’t turn it on. I told myself that I should welcome this limbo. I had languished in purgatory through my separation, in between appointments with Lucian, nearly every moment of the last three months. Now, perhaps on the cusp of something—some new direction—I should sit here during this layover and savor the feeling of truly being in transit. In between.

I put the phone in my bag, shoved it toward the bottom, pulled out a pen and the last few pages of one of the manuscripts I had taken with me. My legs felt swollen again, the skin tight across my calves. I had meant to walk around for a little while, but they would only swell again on the next flight, and I had promised myself I would return home with every piece of work I had brought with me finished. Every piece except my own.

My pen hovered above the page as, with the same apprehension with which I noticed Aubrey’s increasingly frequent absences in the months leading up to my discovery of her affair, I wondered where Lucian could be, where he went when he was not with me.

That’s so pathetic.

Someone was staring at me—a woman, sitting in a row of boarding area seats across from mine and one row over. Her legs were crossed beneath a long, stretchy skirt. Her brown hair was slightly frizzy, pulled back into a ponytail that gave her a girlish appearance, though a closer look at the lines around her eyes and mouth put her, I guessed, in her forties. She wore one of those fabricated pieces of jewelry they sold at women’s stores, the kind Aubrey used to disdain for looking like an antique or an art piece, though they were mass-produced and sold at exorbitant prices. Except for the jewelry, she would have fit in perfectly in Boston; she was wearing all black.

“Look at that sunburn,” she said to me, the furrow above her lip marred by a thin scar. “The committee loved what we gave them, by the way.”

I almost dropped the pages on my lap, so great was my relief. It was quickly followed by anger. “Where have you been?” I hated how transparent I was, how desperate I sounded.

“Roaming.” She pursed her lips into a little kitten mouth. “I thought you deserved a vacation before things got busy.”

“Busy? What do you mean busy? You said our time was short.”