Just Breathe

“You never knew how I felt about a lot of things. Take infidelity. If you knew how I felt about that, you probably would have left me before fucking someone else.”

His cell phone rang again. “I have to go to work,” he said, and went to finish dressing.

He emerged from his dressing room a few minutes later looking as neat and polished as an Eagle Scout. “Listen, Sarah,” he said. “We have to deal with this. Just…take it easy. We’ll talk about it some more tonight.”

She stood at the window and watched his large, shiny truck disappear down the rain-slick road. After he was gone, she stayed there, looking out at the gray day. Her mind worked sluggishly, weighed down by disappointment and a slow-simmering rage. She sorted through the things Jack had said, and found a grain of truth in one thing: they had been so focused on wanting a baby that they didn’t notice they had stopped wanting each other.

It was a lame, overused excuse for infidelity. And Jack was a grown-up. It didn’t excuse what he had done, or justify his demand for a divorce.

She took a deep breath. So she was, what, supposed to hang around all day waiting for him to come home and kick her to the curb? Good plan.

Chapter Three

The empty prairie, crisscrossed by a grid of startlingly straight roads, rolled out like a vast wasteland in front of the hood ornament of the GTO. It was remarkable, Sarah thought, how quickly the suburban sprawl of Chicago gave way to the broad gray-and-white checkerboard of the heartland at its most bleak.

In the late afternoon, her phone sounded off with Jack’s ringtone. She picked up without a greeting. “I’m leaving,” she informed him.

“Don’t be stupid. We agreed to talk about this.” Jack’s voice was sharp with both anger and distress.

“I didn’t agree to anything, but I guess you missed that part.” When had he stopped hearing her? she wondered. And why hadn’t she noticed? “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Are you kidding? We’ve barely begun to discuss this.”

“The next time you hear from me, it’ll be through my lawyer.” As if she even had one at this point. She felt like such a phony, talking about “her” lawyer. But even just a day after discovering her husband with another woman, she had a clear vision of what her future held—legal counsel.

“Come on, Sarah—”

She gunned the engine to pass a semi.

“My God.” Jack’s voice squawked in disbelief. “Don’t tell me you took the GTO.”

“Fine. I won’t tell you.” She threw the cell phone out the window. It was a stupid, childish gesture. God knew, she would need a phone in the days to come.

She stopped at a RadioShack and acquired a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone, strictly for emergencies. She bought it with a brisk and icy calm, as if she did such things every day. As if she were not on fire with panic inside. There was a brittle outer shell around her and inside, a clockwork brain directing each step she took with passionless efficiency.

It was as if she had rehearsed the act of leaving her husband a hundred times before—pack a bag, burn CDs with all the personal data she might need, all the dark, sad-voiced music she might crave along the way. She’d had no trouble pulling the records—a simple step. She knew exactly where everything was. One of the terrible virtues of Jack’s illness was that it had forced them to keep all their affairs in order and well documented. Now their affairs—all but the extramarital one—were still in perfect order, including her separate bank account and the title to the GTO.

Driving through nowhere, she spared a thought for some of the things she had left—Waterford crystal lamps. An Italian leather sofa, the Belleek china and serving pieces, a set of Porsche forged cooking knives, a flat-screen TV. Maybe one day she would miss some of those things, but so far, she didn’t even want to think about them. Like a wild animal in a steel-jawed trap, she was willing to gnaw off a limb in exchange for a swift release.

Sarah stopped for gas in a town called Chance. She went to the ladies’ room to change clothes and discovered that she had stuffed her suitcase with far too many A-line skirts and blazers and had forgotten certain key items, like a hairbrush and pajamas. Maybe she should have spent more time picking the right kind of clothes to bring on her journey. But when you’re running out on your marriage, she thought, you didn’t really take time to shop or plan ahead. You didn’t even take the time to think.

She tugged a purse-sized comb through her hair, scowling when she hit a snag. Her hair was at that awkward in-between stage, neither impressively long nor sassily short. Jack claimed he liked her hair long and silky—“my California girl,” he used to call her.

“Can you take a walk-in?” Sarah asked the woman at the counter of the Chance, Illinois, Twirl & Curl.

“What do you need, hon?” Heather, the stylist, scrutinized her in the mirror.

Sarah touched her hair. “I want to be ritually shorn of the person I never was to begin with.”

Heather grinned as she led Sarah to a chair. “My specialty.”

It was a relief to lie back over the sink, close her eyes and surrender to the warm stream from the hose and the creamy texture of the shampoo. The familiar perfume of the salon comforted her.

“You’re a natural blond,” Heather remarked.

“I was experimenting with being a redhead but it didn’t work out. I’ve gone through every shade of brunette, too. Always looking for something different, I guess.”

“And now?” The stylist finished with the shampoo, then combed smoothly and effortlessly through Sarah’s hair.

Sarah took a deep breath and stared at her reflection in the big round mirror above the counter. The slicked-back hair made her look strange and unfinished, like a just-hatched chick. “Maybe I’ll think better with short hair.”

She heard the hungry rasp of the heavy scissors and with the first snip, she knew the decision was irrevocable. A cool breeze touched her neck, and a lightness lifted her, as though nothing anchored her to earth.

At a Wal-Mart outside Davenport, she bought a velour jogging suit to sleep in. The zip-up jacket and elastic-waistband pants were the perfect togs for terrible-looking roadside motels with sleepy desk clerks who had to be summoned by a bell on the counter.

At the state line, she caromed into a new-and-used car dealership so vast that its lot covered acres.

The GTO would fetch a handsome price, more than enough for a more appropriate car. She wouldn’t miss the muscle car in the least and felt nothing when she explained that she wanted to trade it in. She had presented the car to Jack with so much love in her heart. Where had that love gone? Was it possible for it to simply disappear?

Poof, rubbed out like a mistake she made in her comic strip.

The question was, what car was appropriate? A car was a car, a way to go from point A to point B. All of a sudden, the issue seemed to matter. If she couldn’t pick out her own car, what hope did she have of mapping out her own future?

Her footsteps dogged by an overeager saleswoman named Doreen, she strolled the lot, trying to tune out Doreen’s constant, upbeat patter about the can’t-miss attributes of every car they passed. “Here’s a beauty,” she said, indicating an ultraconservative Mercury Sable. “That’s actually the same model I bought after my divorce.”

Sarah ducked her head and tried to resist hunching her shoulders. Had Doreen somehow guessed that she was fleeing her husband? Was she wearing the unwarranted shame like a scarlet letter on her chest? She nearly ditched Doreen then and there. But she needed wheels, and she needed them now. At least, Sarah thought, she wasn’t dealing with a guy wearing a plaid sport jacket and too much aftershave.

There was a slight reprieve when Doreen’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen and said, “Sorry. I’m afraid I have to take this.”

“You go right ahead,” Sarah said.

Doreen turned aside and lowered her voice. “Mommy’s busy,” she said. “What do you need?”

Sarah slowed her steps as if to check out a silver hybrid. In actuality, she was checking out Doreen, who had been transformed in seconds from yappy high-pressure salesperson to harried single mom. Overhearing Doreen trying to referee a sibling dispute on the phone, Sarah realized there were worse things than being divorced. Like being divorced with kids. What could be harder than that?

All right, she thought, Doreen would get a commission from her. She grew more serious about her search, but all the cars seemed the same—bland, practical, ordinary. When Doreen got off the phone, Sarah said, “You’ve got every car in the world here. And none of them seems right.”

“Why don’t you tell me a little more about what you’re looking for? Do you need four-wheel drive? A sports car…?”

The sodium vapor lights came on over the parking lot, buzzing to life in the late-afternoon twilight. Sarah thought about Doreen’s kids, waiting for her to come home from work.

“I’m leaving my husband,” she said, the words frosting the air, seeming to hang there a moment like a speech balloon from Shirl’s mouth. “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” For some reason, it helped to tell this stranger the truth. “It seems like I should have the right car. I want…I’m not sure.” She offered a self-deprecating smile. “Maybe I’m looking for a magic carpet. Or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With a drop top and a great sound system.”

Doreen didn’t bat an eye. “Hold that thought,” she said, and consulted her electronic inventory tracker. “We need to hurry.” Her voice was edged with urgency now. “This won’t last another five minutes.”

Mystified, Sarah followed her off the lot, back to a shop where cars were being prepped for market. “We’ve got a one-year waiting list for this. It was some woman’s dream car, but she traded it in after owning it for just a few months.”

They found a mechanic in an insulated jumpsuit under the hood of the cutest midnight-blue-and-silver car Sarah had ever seen. “You have a Mini,” she said.