Roxy set up her darkroom in the second bedroom. I took contract work with a construction company in La Mesa, framing houses and remodeling kitchens. On paper, we're James and Roxy Brennan, a married couple from Portland who moved south for the weather and the art scene.
On paper, we're legitimate, but in reality, I'm suffocating.
The work is fine. Mindless, physical, the kind of labor that keeps my hands busy and my mind quiet. The crew is decent, mostly guys who show up, do the job, and go home without asking questions. I blend in. Keep my head down and cash my checks.
But every night when I come home to the apartment, to Roxy working on her "legitimate" photography and art business of landscape shots, travel photos, the occasional portrait session,and her hand drawings of environments she is drawn to, I feel the void growing.
We're safe. We're invisible. We're exactly where we need to be. And it's killing me.
"How was work?" Roxy asks when I walk in on a Thursday evening. She's at her laptop, sucking on one of her lollipops, editing photos from a shoot she did last weekend. Some couple's engagement photos at Balboa Park, I don’t know how she does it. Simple Minds,Don’t You Forget About Me, plays low in the background.
"Fine," I say, dropping my keys on the counter.
"Just fine?"
"Yeah."
She looks up at me, and I can see it in her eyes because she feels it too. The emptiness, the wrongness of this normal life we're pretending to live. We’ve become those people we hate.
"I sold three prints today," she says. "Landscape stuff, sunset over the ocean."
"That's good."
"Yeah."
Neither of us believes it.
I cross to the fridge and grab a beer, twisting the cap off with more force than necessary. The apartment is clean, organized, decorated with Roxy's aesthetic of colorful throws, vintage records on the wall, fairy lights strung across the living room.
It looks like a home, but feels like a prison.
"Dom."
I turn. She's closed her laptop, watching me with that intensity that first drew me to her on the Utah roadside.
"We can't keep doing this," she says.
"Doing what?"
"Pretending and playing house. Acting like we're normal people who moved here for the weather and the art scene."
"That's the cover, it’s what keeps us safe."
"I get that, but it's not sustainable." She stands, crossing the room to me. "We're too awake. Too alive. We can't just…exist like this."
"What's the alternative?"
"I don't know yet. But there has to be something. Some way to feed the urges without destroying the cover."
I set the beer down and pull her against me, my hands settling on her waist. She's wearing one of my old t-shirts with her black leggings, her hair pulled back in a messy bun. She looks soft and domestic and nothing like the woman who watched me kill a man and thanked me for it.
"We'll figure it out," I say.
"When?"
"Soon."
She leans into me, her forehead resting against my chest. "I miss it. The road. The hunt. The feeling of being exactly who we are. I find nothing inspiring anymore."
