Not now,” I whimper to myself as the Bentley slows to a stop. Not with Aubrey God knows where and my life at the point of greatest disarray it has sunk to since he left. In the dream scenario, Martin would have driven past while Aubrey and I and our hunky, successful, sensitive, insanely smitten boyfriends were romping on the front lawn together, joyous at sharing the perfection of our lives. Maybe we’d be playing badminton or some other sport that would allow the sun to illuminate our radiant complexions and stream through our golden hair and spotlight the obvious adoration of our menfolk. It would be a scenario that would leave Martin withered with envy and stupefied by the full extent of his idiocy in throwing away such paradise and the angels who dwelt within.
Not this. Not Aubrey gone and me looking like Courtney Love after a bad bender. I lick my finger and rub as much smeared mascara from under my eyes as I can. I don’t have time to do more: I have to get to the porch before Martin does and preempt any possibility of him getting a peek inside at the warehouse of untouched college supplies. He has no right to any image of my life that I don’t choose him to have. And I choose the Cape Cod version.
On the porch, I take a breath and brace myself for Martin to step from the car. But, instead of Martin, Martin’s father emerges. A second later, he disappears and Martin, sixteen years older, is there in his place. Where Martin had once absorbed light—dark hair, dark olivey skin, dark thoughts—this middle-aged man reflects it. I see now that the shielding palm in the more recent photos had also hidden hair that has thinned and turned the color of ash. A pair of silver-rimmed glasses now magnify his eyes, giving Martin, in the instant he sees me again for the first time in sixteen years, the goggling, bewildered look of a newborn.
Is he wondering why my mother has replaced me?
He’s wearing a suit that must have once been expensive. Perhaps it’s the same one he’d worn in the photos I’d seen of him palling around with Oscar winners and dodging paparazzi. Now, though, the rumpled, bagged-out suit has a Dust Bowl–soup line look, as if he’s slept in it for the past few weeks. He removes the glasses, tucks one stem into the collar opening of his shirt, and smiles up at me. A trio of lines strain around the edges of his eyes. More net his forehead. His lips, once almost girlishly plump, are less generous, more sharply etched.
“You’re looking good, Cam.”
“You’re kind of beat to shit,” I call back down to him.
The thought that these are the first words we’ve exchanged face-to-face in sixteen years runs like the steady crawl beneath a chaotic disaster story.
“You’re wearing glasses,” I point out, really saying, What about Opt Tech, Mr. Master of the Universe?
“I am.” His answer rejects my hidden sneer. He opens the trunk of the Bentley, removes a tire iron, and holds it out to me as if it were an olive branch. “Wanna hit me in the face?”
“Is that an attempt to defuse the situation?”
Arm raised, head dipped in thought, Martin hangs for a second on the upraised trunk lid. In that instant of hesitation he is transformed. Like fabric that shows iridescent from certain angles, the Martin I met on a train twenty-two years ago peeks through and again I see the young man who was seeking answers. I see the bump of glossy hair he was always pushing out of his eyes. Like Abe Lincoln, the haunted ectomorph, Martin’s wrists, hands, Adam’s apple were all too large for his gangly frame. There still is the juicy bottom lip that I wanted to kiss immediately.
Martin tosses the tire iron, the attempt at levity, back in the trunk, slams it shut, straightens up, and the iridescence disappears. He points toward the house. “You never fixed that leak.” I glance at the dribbling faucet with a beard of black fungus staining the brick beneath it.
“I had a lazy husband.”
“Must have been a loser.” He saunters toward the porch.
“Oh, he was.”
His walk—cocky, shoulders rolling—is something else that came along with Next. I’d fallen in love with his old walk, his old voice. They were tentative, uncertain. The way Martin mumbled acknowledged that the world was a place of