Page 28 of Roadrunner

“I’m prepared,” I said. As much as anyone could be.

“If it turns out the brain is incapable of—”

“I’m prepared.”

He glanced at the clock. “I need to—”

“I’ll be in the waiting room.”

“Someone will find you if there’s anything to report.”

I made myself smile and turned to go.

“Missus MacAfee?”

“Yes.” I didn’t turn around.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

A hand touched my shoulder and I opened my eyes. Martina stood over me in caramel slacks and a blue cashmere cardigan, dressed like it was any other fall afternoon, her face doing something I’d rarely seen it do. Worry didn’t belong on her. She sat down beside me anyway, wearing it.

I pressed my cheek to the back of her hand. “Hey.”

“I came as soon as I could.”

I hated, a little, how much of what I felt about all of this had nothing to do with anyone but me.

“He looks like hell, Martina.”

“I’m sure he does. That’s not the same as not improving.”

“They said he might be paralyzed. Completely.”

I put my elbows on my knees and looked at the floor. “Do you think this is karma? Catching up with him?”

“I think when people do bad things, their life becomes the punishment,” she said. “This is what came of the life he chose.”

“Atonement.”

“If you want to call it that.”

My mind went, unbidden, to the coat closet off the country club’s east ballroom, eleven hours into being Joshua’s wife.

I could still find that closet with my eyes shut. The give of the door when it wasn’t latched all the way. The smell of it. Wet wool and cedar blocks, and underneath that, a woman’s perfume I didn’t recognize and would smell again, unexpectedly, in department stores for years afterward, each time with the same lurch in my stomach. I’d gone looking for my wrap, nothing more sinister than that. I was still in my wedding dress, still faintly drunk on champagne and the high of having survived a four-hundred-person ceremony without crying in front of my father.

I remembered the sound before I understood it. A belt buckle. A woman’s voice, low, saying a name that wasn’t mine.

I remembered opening the door anyway, because some part of me already knew and needed the rest of me to catch up.

I remembered Joshua’s face when he turned around. Not shame, not right away. Something closer to irritation, the annoyance of a man interrupted mid-task, as though I were the one committing an offense by opening a door at my own reception.

I remembered walking back into the ballroom in my wedding dress with my wrap still missing and a smile arranged on my face, because four hundred people were watching. I had already learned, in eleven hours of marriage, that whatever else happened, the smile came first.

I’d told no one. Not Martina, not that night. I’d stood at the head table and cut a five-tier cake and let people toast to my happiness while some new, cold, competent part of me quietly filed the whole evening away under things I would deal with later. That part of me would go on filing for the next ten years, until there was nothing left in me that hadn’t, at some point, been filed.

Most women would have walked away that night, still in the dress, and never looked back. A belief that Joshua could and would change, combined with the unique circumstances surrounding our wedding, and a version of myself that badly needed to believe leaving my father’s plans a second time wasn’t possible. That let me walk back into that reception instead and keep smiling.