Page 2 of Wreckage and Rain

"What?"

"There's a quartet, champagne, and I'm your wife. I'm wearing a dress that cost more than the first car we bought together." I tug, light, at the inside of his elbow, and I hate that I can hear myself doing it, the brightness I'm putting on, the not-letting-it-be-heavy, the performance of a woman who is fine. "Dance with me, Colt."

His face does it again. I used to read it as drive. For years I told myself it was just the price of loving a man whose own father only ever loved him in exchange for things, and I let it go, again and again, like one more small charge on a card I still trusted. I see it now for what it is. He is running a calculation. His wife or the room. Three minutes with me or the hand he hasn't shaken yet. I watch him do the math on me, on us, standing in a dress I wore for him, and it takes him under a second.

"Can I find you in ten? Calloway's about to leave and he's been dodging me all week. Ten minutes, I swear."

"Sure." I take my hand back off his arm. The place where it was goes cold faster than the rest of me. "Go get him."

He squeezes my fingers once, already turning, already gone, and the crowd folds over the space where he was, and I'm alone at the edge of an empty dance floor in a red dress.

And I'm seventeen again, in the gravel behind King's Diner, the asphalt giving its heat back to the dark, and there was a boy who never made me ask. He was already reaching before I'd finished turning toward him. He'd have burned the diner down before he left me standing alone for the length of one song.

I don't know that boy anymore. I don't know where he went. I just know he isn't in this courtyard, and the man wearing his face just did math on me and chose Calloway.

***

I should leave. The keys are in my bag and the car is two blocks over and every reason I have is telling me to walk out into the salt and the jasmine and go. Something keeps my feet on the floor. It isn't hope. I reach for hope out of habit and my hand closes on nothing, it has for a while. It's closer to what makes you read the whole autopsy. I want the entire picture. I want to be able to say to myself later, in the dark, that I saw all of it and didn't look away and didn't shrink it down to something easier to carry just because carrying it is breaking something in me.

She finds him before I do. I watch her come back across the courtyard and here is the detail that guts me: she doesn't look for him. People looking for someone scan, the eyes tick across faces, everyone does it, it's the most human thing there is. She doesn't. She crosses two hundred people like there's a wire run straight between her and my husband and she's just taking up the slack as she walks. She reaches him. Her hand settles on the small of his back to turn him toward the men by the fountain, light, easy,the most ordinary thing in the world, and it goes into me like something thrown hard.

I know what that spot is worth. I have lived in that spot. This way. With me. Mine. It is the most married three inches of a man's body and she has put her bare palm flat on it in front of his father's entire world and he hasn't noticed, he just goes where the hand sends him, easy, the same as he goes everywhere she points now, and he has no idea he is being steered because to him there is no hand, there is no steering, there is nothing, and not one person here has looked at me in an hour.

The question comes up out of the bottom of me on its own, before I can decide whether I'm strong enough to be in the room with it, and it doesn't even come as words. It comes as the floor not being where I left it.

Am I invisible.

And the answer has been standing in this courtyard all night waiting for me to hold still long enough to take it.

Yes.

To this family that has spent years letting me know in cream silk that I'm a stain they've decided they can live with. To these two hundred people who would all swear under oath they saw nothing because there was nothing to see, that's the genius of it, that's what's killing me. To the man who used to find me across a diner before I'd finished turning around and who tonight has said my name zero times.

Yes. I am invisible. I have been going invisible for months and the cruelest part of this is that it never happened in one push I could turn around and name. It happened a grain at a time, just under the speed I'd have caught. A cancelled Tuesday. A text that didn't come back. Her name in his mouth at our own kitchen island more and more, Cheyenne thinks, Cheyenne flagged, Cheyenne had this idea and honestly babe it's good, until I was standing in a cold I couldn't remember walking into, wonderingif maybe this was just where I lived now. If maybe the dress was the problem. If maybe I was.

***

I leave at nine thirty.

I don't find him to tell him. I don't tell anyone anything. I set the glass down half full on a tray going past and I walk out through the white lights and the magnolia that is too far open, that thick lemon-and-rot smell the flower gets right before it turns, beautiful and already going off, like everything these people touch. The night comes off the harbor, salt and pluff mud and the jasmine that grows wild down East Bay where nobody planted it and nobody can kill it, and for one block it is so sweet it stops being sweet and starts to hurt, somewhere up behind my eyes.

I drive to King's Diner. I don't consciously decide it. The place is dark, closed two hours, the lot empty, the sign off. KING'S in red script with the G that has been one bad night from going out since my daddy swore the summer I turned twenty-one that he'd fix it himself. He never did. I have never wanted him to.

My phone goes off in the cup holder.

Colt: Where'd you go? Heading home soon.

He noticed. An hour and a half after I walked out of his father's party, but he noticed, and what scares me, what actually frightens me sitting alone in this dark lot, is the part of me that feels some hope. That sits up like a dog at a door. He noticed. Like that's the bar now. Less than the bare minimum, that he just notices me.

I don't answer him.

I sit under the broken sign and I think about the girl who used to close this place with her father, the two of them not talking because they never needed to, the fryer ticking as it cooled, the floor going clean under the mop, her whole entire heart certain that love was a permanent condition. That you found yourperson and the question was answered, and it never occurred to you the answer could change.

When I get home, the house is dark except for the light over the stove I left on this morning. He's already in bed. I hear him before I'm up the stairs, that slow, even, untroubled breathing of a man who hasn't spent a single minute of his night counting anything.

I hang the red dress in the closet. I don't put it in the back. I leave it at the front where I'll have to see it.

I get in beside him. He shifts toward the heat of me in his sleep, and his arm comes part of the way across the mattress toward me and stops, and doesn't finish, and I lie on my back in the dark beside my husband's almost-reaching hand and I try to find the night this started so I can go back and stand in it and scream.