“Do you mind if I check in real quick?” Henrietta asked. “I want to shower and fix my makeup before the party.”
Larry flinched into an eye roll. “They have a room under my name.”
“Everything’s under your name, isn’t it?” Henrietta couldn’t stop herself from saying.
Larry took a step toward her. “What was that you said?”
But Henrietta cut him her most charming smile and said, “I said thank you, honey. I’ll see you in an hour or two, all right?”
Larry ruffled his hair and swaggered the rest of the way into the exhibition, leaving Henrietta in the parking lot alone, baking in the Boulder sun.
After that, Henrietta grabbed her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and skedaddled down the road. She was headed for the hotel he’d booked, but only because she was frightened that he’d come back into the parking lot and see she was headed somewhere else. She knew the bus station was located on the opposite side of the hotel, about a mile and a half from where she was now. Now that she was shivering with panic, it felt like a monstrous distance, but she was strong and capable and had to make it work.
As she hurried, her bag slipping off her shoulder, sweat pouring down her forehead, she felt her life slip from between her fingers and melt across the sidewalk. With each step, Larry Johannes, as a man, as a person, as a husband, felt more and more like a made-up concept. A fiction. She laughed aloud to herself, then told herself to quiet down. She hadn’t left Boulder yet. Larry was still so close behind.
But she sensed he was too arrogant to think she’d ever leave him.
When Henrietta reached the bus station, she asked to buy a ticket headed all the way to Los Angeles, California. “It leaves in ten minutes,” the man behind the counter said, smiling. She’d removed her wedding ring and probably looked like some kind of vagabond hippie, like one of those girls she’d read about in California. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Henrietta felt stumped at that. She certainly didn’t want to leave her real name or any record that she’d been here, that she’d escaped Larry. But she was worried that the man behind the counter would ask for identification. She put the moneyon the counter for the ticket and said a loud, brash, “Jasmine. Jasmine Lee.” She’d read the name in a book once and had always thought it sounded artistic and beautiful. It sounded like the name of a woman who had an entirely different life from one called “Henrietta.”
The man behind the counter wrote her fake name on the ticket, took her money, and told her where to stand. Together with fifteen other people, she boarded the bus and held her breath before it started to roll. All the way through Colorado, she wept with fear, sure that Larry’s truck would appear on the horizon. But when she finally reached Utah, she wept with joy, with understanding that she’d managed to do something impossible.
“We’re going to make it, baby,” she whispered, both to herself and to her unborn child. “We’re going to have the kind of life we really want.”
Chapter Twenty-One
It was the beginning of April, and Reese’s second round of treatments was finally finished. Oriana watched her husband out of the corner of her eye as she drove them back home from the most recent check-in with the doctor, waiting for some indication that he was cured and they were done with this. But he was gray-faced and exhausted, still trying and failing to gain back the weight he’d lost since this had all begun.
It felt incredible that they’d learned about his cancer so many months back. It felt as though everything had changed.
On Martha’s Vineyard, it was the beginning of spring. Lawns were tinged with green, and there was a soft and fecund nature to the air, as though flowers all over the island were blooming and summer houses were being opened. The fruits and vegetables at the grocery stores were healthy-looking and plump, and Oriana had been experimenting with different salad recipes, trying to bring fresh nutrients into their lives. Meghan was growing tired of all of Oriana’s experimentation, especially when those experiments involved kale, but Meghan never refused a night of dinner at Oriana and Reese’s. She brought her husband Hugo over often, and the four of them found as much laughter as they could, given the circumstances.
When Oriana and Reese returned home that afternoon, they shared a brief yet powerful hug in the kitchen. Storm clouds brewed on the horizon, and Reese said he was tired, that he wanted to watch a movie and go to bed soon. Oriana popped them a big bowl of popcorn and tried to keep from watching Reese as he watched the movie. She had to stop watching him for signs of weakness, for signs of getting better. There was so much you couldn’t see on the surface. Plenty of people looked healthy and weren’t, and vice versa.
Reese admitted he was beat about a half-hour into the movie, and they agreed to watch the rest tomorrow. This was maybe the hundredth movie like that since Reese’s cancer treatments had begun last year. He was exhausted almost all of the time. Sometimes Oriana felt as though they were on a never-ending nightmare cruise called “cancer.” She imagined that they would never be able to get off this cruise.
But when Reese got ready for bed, Oriana poured herself a glass of wine and retreated to her brand-new space in the house: her art studio.
It was incredible to Oriana that she hadn’t worked as an art dealer in nearly two months. When her “free time” had begun, she’d needed to find a place to put her energy. She couldn’t always throw it toward Reese, as she knew he’d get overwhelmed. It was with this strange and overzealous energy that she’d begun painting for the first time. Mostly, she was terrible, and she knew she was terrible. But her artist daughter Alexa told Oriana that she had a “remarkable eye.” She said Oriana’s paintings were different from any she’d ever seen. Oriana hoped that was a good thing, although she didn’t really care. She wasn’t making art for money. She was doing it for her heart.
Oriana painted for four hours, throwing her brokenness and her emotion onto the canvas. It was an abstract painting that,to her, represented her love story with Reese. It was filled with vibrant blues and exuberant purples and calm brushstrokes. It evoked everything she’d felt when she’d said “I do” all those years ago.
It was ten thirty at night when Oriana retreated downstairs, washed her hands of paint, and poured herself a glass of wine. She felt dizzy from nonstop painting, as though she’d been allowed to enter into another world. Her phone was on the sofa, where she’d left it when she’d gone upstairs. It surprised her to see that she had multiple missed calls—some from Meghan, and others from an unknown number. She called Meghan back right away, conscious that her sister kept strange hours. Meghan answered right away.
“I saw your friend on the news,” she said, a smile in her voice.
Oriana collapsed on the sofa and tugged a blanket over her. “My friend?”
“Isabella. The journalist,” Meghan answered. “She was talking about your ex-client and favorite person.”
“Ugh. Larry.” Oriana had tried her best to shove all thoughts of Larry out of her mind since she’d cut ties with him and quit. “How are things going for him?”
“The newscaster, that lady with the bob, she interviewed Isabella about Larry’s paintings and his missing wife,” Meghan explained. “Apparently, Isabella has been searching high and low for signs of his wife. What’s her name?”
“Henrietta Johannes.”
“Yes, exactly. In any case, there’s still no sign of her. Isabella and the newscaster talked about how much easier it was to disappear like that back in 1975. The newscaster asked if Isabella had talked to the cops, and Isabella said she had. Apparently, Henrietta went missing on the first night of Larry’s very first exhibition. Can you believe that? What strange timing.”
