The Spare Room

The Spare Room

Chapter One

I’ve chosen Amtrak’s quiet car, so I stifle the urge to sob, to scream, to whimper in exhaustion or screech in fear of the strangers around me.

It’s wild how quickly I got used to staying home. Now riding a largely vacant train feels complicated and draining, like navigating a foreign country. Virgo meows on the seat next to me, and I unzip the carrier to scratch her ears. Mike didn’t want me to take her—­he even reached for her carrier as I headed for the door.

Reach for me. Fight for me. I’m the one you should keep from leaving.

My breath hitches, and a sob plucks at my throat. I look down at the sandwich I bought before boarding, but my stomach has that hollow, wrung-­out feeling from crying so much the past three days. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel hungry again.

While I sat in the cavernous belly of Thirtieth Street Station, the vibe was fearful, hushed, crackling with distrust. Masked travelers eyed one another warily. It seems like a lifetime ago that we moved freely and breezily breathed in the air, sucking it into our bodies like milk-­drunk babies. I’d felt relieved to board the train, but then a man sat behind me and now he’s eating a salad, infusing the car with his hot breath.

Did I think this through? It’s been sixteen hours since I shelled out $59 for a one-­way ticket from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. It might not sound like much, but my personal bank account isn’t bulging. Mike’s company funded our move; his new salary and signing bonus have been carrying us through my unemployment. The sandwich was another stupid $12.

But of course, my mental math is just a distraction, an anxiety more comfortable than the true problem that looms.

I gaze out the window, where pretty houses and church steeples poke out of the distance. Sabrina has a meeting at my arrival time, so her husband, Nathan, will pick me up from Union Station. I feel a squeeze of fear every time I remember this fact. I’m nervous enough to see Sabrina, and now I’ll have to start this bonkers open-­ended visit by finding a stranger in a train station.

My phone buzzes in the seat pocket. Mike. Hope crackles—­has he changed his mind?

“Hello?” I keep my voice low. I shouldn’t have picked the quiet car; a woman a few rows up turns to glare.

“Kelly. Hey.” He swallows, and all the molecules in my body hold still. “Uh—­I can’t find the laundry detergent.”

My insides drop. “What?”

“I’m trying to wash the sheets and—­”

“Under the kitchen sink. With all the other cleaning products.” Everything about the image fills me with sadness: Mike helpless in the hallway, peering at the washing machine; the fact that he’s already cleaning our bedsheets, ridding them of my scent. I hear the clunk of a door springing open.

“Found it. Sorry to bother you.” Static fizzes and moisture coats my eyes.

What happened to us? I want to scream. We’re supposed to be planning a life together.

“The train okay?” he asks.

I whisk away my tears. “Yup. Text me if there’s anything else, okay? I shouldn’t be on the phone.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I hesitate. “I’m sorry too.”

“Look, let’s not—­” He cuts himself off, clears his throat. I know I screwed up. I thought we could move past it, but now I’m less sure than ever. “Text me when you get there. Bye, Kelly.” He hangs up before I can reply, and I feel a plunge of despair.

This is not how I pictured year 34. It was supposed to be the best one yet, the year when life finally began: I had a fresh start in Philadelphia with my sweet, successful fiancé. A wedding planned, the real-­life incarnation of a Pinterest board I’d been secretly updating since long before I met Mike, the invitations sent, the venue—­a rustic barn near my parents’ house in Illinois—locked down.

Others have it worse. I’m not sequestered in a field hospital, a ventilator controlling my lungs. My body wasn’t shunted into the back of a refrigerated truck.

But this? It sucks. It really, really sucks.

I blame myself—­Lord knows I’ve beaten myself up enough—­but the caterer bears some responsibility too. Our other vendors were so understanding: We get it, no one’s holding gatherings. But the farm-­to-­table eatery we’d hired wouldn’t stop blowing up my phone, demanding we secure a new date or lose our deposit. My future father-­in-­law was underwriting the whole affair, and Mike refused to call him about it. I attributed it to Mike’s overwhelm—­or even his laziness, in my less-­kind moments.

We fought about it. We fought about lots of things. And then, three days ago, he cracked my life in two, snapped it like a wishbone.

I catch myself worrying a nail over the gash in my palm. A gash of shame, a scabby reminder of the ugliness that poured out of me last week.

I snatch my phone back up, then reread the casual text that stopped me in my tracks yesterday. I still can’t believe it’s real, not something I hallucinated: “You should come stay with us.”

Heart pounding, I’d given the “ha-­ha” reaction. But Sabrina doubled down: “I’m serious! We have a spare room. And Lord knows, we could use the company.”

That’s when my hands started shaking. I was alone in our bedroom in Philadelphia. It faced the street, with bars over the windows ostensibly to keep the riffraff out, but they made it feel like a jail cell too.

“That’s so nice of you!” I replied. “But I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

She began typing back right away. “It wouldn’t be an intrusion at all—­honestly, Nathan is such an extrovert, he is DYING for someone to talk to who isn’t me. (And as an introvert, I am dying for him to have someone to talk to who isn’t me, lol.) No pressure but it’s a serious offer! Maybe for a week or two? Could be good for both of you.”

Both of us. Something my mom drilled into me, a lesson gleaned from forty-­plus years of married bliss: You and your partner are a team. You make decisions together. When I floated the idea, he jumped right on it.

But I wanted him to fight for me. To beg me to stay.

Crying in a mask is disgusting. Even the thud-­thud-­thud of the train over the tracks can’t cloak my shuddery breath. The fabric pulls as tight as a gag with every gasp, and tears and snot soak the inside. More people turn and glare. I hear my mother’s voice: Get it together, Kelly. Get a grip.

I send Sabrina an update: “Passing Baltimore!” I should be texting her and Nathan both, but I’m still intimidated by him.

It’s hard to believe that three weeks ago, I didn’t even have Sabrina’s number. We’d followed each other on Instagram for years, but for whatever reason, her photos rarely showed up on my feed. And then—­bored with the pandemic that just wouldn’t quit, blissfully unaware that a grenade was about to blow up my life, I found myself scrolling through that roll of happy people. And the algorithm threw in a wild card: an update from Sabrina Lamont.

She’s perfect. I knew her as Sabrina Balzer in high school, a tangential friend in the same nerd-adjacent clique, though we never hung out one-­on-­one. I remembered her as mousy and quiet; she hadn’t crossed my mind in decades. But jeez, I thought, look at her now.

Thick brown waves spilled like rapids over her shoulders. She had a Frank Lloyd Wright face, sharp cheekbones and a square jaw, with sculpted brows and leprechaun-­green eyes. It was a selfie from an outdoor lounge chair, and behind her stretched a sparkling pool the color of sapphires.

That night, I let the world darken as I tapped my way around her online presence, feeling that grubby rush of indiscipline, the same waterfall of want that has you finishing the pint of ice cream or wrenching off a scab, exposing the ink-­red underneath. I found old blog posts by her and news articles about her and read them hungrily. I unearthed images of her at a gala and clicked through all eighteen red-­carpet photos.

We all have Instagram friends we’re obsessed with, right? I couldn’t get enough of her glory: her mansion an hour outside D.C.; hikes through the Blue Ridge Mountains; Throwback Thursdays to glitzy events with her husband, Nathan, who was tall and broad and more cute than handsome with his thick red-­blond beard and aquiline nose. A power couple. And sure, he had some high-ranking government job she referenced in captions, but she was no trophy wife; she’s a goddamn New York Times bestselling author, which, Christ. What? How.