“Connect a VCR? This is like the bare minimum of my job requirements,” Frankie said. “Do you know how many amps I’ve scrambled to fix, how many guitar plugs I’ve scrounged up?”
Ezra didn’t mean connect a VCR, because no one was that ignorant, but he stopped himself from arguing. Instead, he walked over to the broken window and wondered if he could tape it back together. There were some larger shards on the ground, and some might have been salvageable if he put them back like puzzle pieces. He squatted down, and his knees cracked. No, there were too many—hundreds, really—of minuscule shards, the ones that are nearly impossible to see with the naked eye but could still draw blood when they pierced the skin.Just like Frankie, he thought. He stood and jutted his head out the window. Still, the alleyway was quiet.
“Hey,” he heard her call from the barroom. “It’s working!”
He lingered one more moment in the silence and the snow, and then turned back toward her. He found her fast-forwarding through the frames, as various students stood in front of the camera and held up IDs as if an ID were verification of the truth. How odd, it occurred to Ezra now, that they just took everyone at their words for this. Obviously, the bouncers knew plenty of kids were breaking the law, yet they all mutually agreed to be part of the ruse.Lie to me well, and we’ll all pretend that’s enough to be mistaken for honesty.Ezra rolled the gold band on his left ring finger and considered the multitude of sins this ruse could explain away. Where had he even found a gold band last night in the first place?
“Wait, wait, I just saw me!” Frankie bounced on her toes, and the screen rewound. Indeed, there she was on screen, with Laila beside her. She wore her fuzzy fisherman’s sweater, her parka slung over her arm, and looked more pulled together than today, her hair brushed out and without the tight ache of pain ever present across her face right now.
Frankie leaned toward the TV and squinted.
“Ok, the time stamp says 5:47. I remember Laila saying it would give us an hour to catch up before the rehearsal dinner, which was at, what?” She turned toward Ezra. “Seven? Seven thirty?”
Ezra couldn’t help himself; he laughed. She widened her eyes and frowned.
“Is there something that’s hilarious about this? Being drugged, being married?”
“No one knows if we were drugged,” he answered. Frankie looked doubtful. “No, nothing’s hilarious about this at all. It’s only that—” He drifted, remembering how initially, when they were first heady in love, her loose relationship with time was adorable. Frankie was always late. To everything. Not because she intended to be rude or even meant to keep others waiting. Just because, he sensed, she’d been tethered so tightly to the rigors of her old life, that once she hit college, she found that she could be. Freedom came in many iterations, and for Frankie, no longer being micromanaged by parents manifested in all sorts of ways. Remarkably, he hadn’t even known she was a prodigy until a good nine months into their time together—and that was only by accident, when he stumbled upon her at Steinway Auditorium, and he watched breathless, like a Peeping Tom, from the back row. Even as they shared their secrets, Frankie had the freedom to keep parts of her concealed too.
“Seven thirty,” he said now. “The rehearsal dinner started at seven thirty.”
She didn’t reply. Just refocused on the TV and skimmed through the faces as they appeared in front of her. Ezra didn’tsee what use he was, a second set of eyes when she knew what she was looking for, so he again thought of Mimi and went in search of a phone. He found a darkened office through a door to the left of the bar and poked his head in, as if he worried someone might pop out and startle him. He plunked down in the rolling chair in front of a worn and notched wooden desk, found the cordless under a pile of papers, and tucked the phone between his shoulder and neck and dialed. Five rings and then straight to voicemail, and he’d already left her a message when they were at the café.
Ezra rested the phone back in the cradle and ran his fingers over the computer mouse. In front of him, a desktop breathed to life.Password protected, of course, Ezra thought. He glanced over his shoulder—Frankie was still preoccupied. He didn’t need her to know that his skill set postcollege included various iterations of learning how to crack passwords. It’s not something he ever abused, but when he dipped his foot into the tech world, he made a point of learning everything that he could: both the rules and how to break them.
“Frankie,” he called. “You still ok out there?”
“Hmmm, yeah, fine,” she called back.
With that, Ezra rebooted the computer into safe mode and typed in a variety of prompts, and soon enough, he was in. He clicked on Netscape, then to American Airlines. If Mimi’s flight had been canceled, surely they could just rebook the ticket. He set up his search terms: Kansas City to Hartford. Chicago to Hartford. Or Boston. He’d even take Boston and send her a car if it meant she could still arrive at Middleton by midnight and he could somehow ascertain that he and Frankie werenotwed to each other. And even if they were, he’d wrestlethe ring off her finger and assume he could get it annulled and still right things with Mimi. She never even had to know. Who said she had to know? He’d never thought to keep a secret from Mimi, not since the day that they met and discovered they were so alike that secrets were unnecessary. And yet. And yet.
He circled all of these notions as he waited for the search results to load.
He was surprised, when they did, that all the flights were operating on time. Hadn’t Mimi’s voicemail said that hers was canceled because of weather? Wouldn’t that mean, he realized, that she could have just flown out today? Wouldn’t that also mean, he felt himself scowl, that the airline would have put her on the first flight out?
He moved the mouse over to “Flight Status” and typed in yesterday’s date, then pulled up all the flights from Kansas City to Chicago. The dial-up internet was interminably slow, and sure, it could have been that his nervous system was completely out of whack, what with the pepper spray and the morning wake-up and the unwelcome reunion with Frankie Harriman, but part of him already knew why his pulse was racing, why he could feel his mind starting to spin. Over the years, Ezra had learned to listen to his gut, which wasn’t really something he’d fine-tuned at Middleton but later, once he had whittled himself into a bit of a professional poker player, he came to trust it inherently. His gut was rarely wrong.
And then it was in front of him.
Mimi’s flight had landed on time yesterday. But for reasons that eluded him, the woman he was about to propose to simply wasn’t on it.
ELEVEN
Frankie
Frankie needed to get out of Lemonhead, like, yesterday. First, actually, she needed a drink. The quick glimpse she’d seen on the videotape had been alarming—how had she inexplicably ended up back at Lemonhead several hours after her first stopover with Laila, and why was she leaning into Ezra, her head on his shoulder, his arm slung around her waist? Then the start of a memory she had been searching for came to her: there had indeed been a scavenger hunt, and when struck with this lightning bolt, she further remembered that—inexplicably—there had been Polaroid cameras involved, actual proof. Feverishly, with Ezra still in the back office, she dug through her purse once again. There was a zippered pocket inside the middle fold where she often tucked her passport for safekeeping when flying internationally. With everything else going on, she’d overlooked that in Homer. Her fingers grasped exactly what she already knew would be there, and she pulled out a floppy square photograph. Their faces were out of focus, and Ezra was gazing past the camera. But Frankie was turned toward him, not exactly smiling but not exactly not. Behind them, blurry but clear enough to identify, was a swimming pool. Frankie squeezed her eyes shut, willing the rest of the evening to come to her. But there was nothing. She shoved the image back into her purse and jammed the zipper so tight, she nearly pulled the slider off.
So now she was desperate to get a grip on herself. She flipped off the TV, tossed the remote into the cardboard box, and slunk behind the bar to prepare herself a cocktail. True, she’d been sober for a few months, at least until last night, but if there were ever a time for throwing back a shot, surely, it was now. Was it possible that she and Ezra had reconnected last night and somehow that had spiraled into a spontaneous wedding? She shuddered and reached for the Absolut, just like she would have ten years ago.
Ezra emerged from the back office, and perhaps it was because, in the span of fifteen minutes or so, Frankie had forgotten how mangled his face was, or perhaps his face had gotten... worse... over that respite, but either way, he looked broken. His shoulders drooped and his head hung lower, and goddammit, Frankie found herself attracted to his mess. She’d never been a fixer. She was intuitive enough to know that you couldn’t fix anyone if they couldn’t heal themselves. Or maybe it wasn’t intuition, maybe it was her childhood and its traumas that made her wise. But either way, here now with Ezra, something fluttered in her. She couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been so unkempt, and there was something honest about it, even if none of it were by choice.
“I’m drinking,” she said, and hoped her hands didn’t jitter. “I’ve decided. It’s the only way through.”
He lifted his head just enough to level her with a look.
“That seems like a decidedly terrible idea.” He flopped a hand. “So naturally, Frankie Harriman would come up with it.”
Frankie set down the Absolut with a little too much force, and it rattled the bottles on the rest of the bar.
