She turned back. “You need a refill on the root beer? We’ve got plenty.” She giggled. “I had some earlier, though I wasn’t supposed to—we got it just for you. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No. What I do mind is this.” I held up the phone and turned it toward her. It had no number keys. “What about it?” she asked. “How am I supposed to make a call when I can’t punch in or dial the number?”
She smiled. “Operators are standing by.” Then she laughed. “Sorry, I’ve always wanted to say that in real life but never got the chance. Just pick up the receiver when you’re ready and your call will be put through. You’ve got about fifteen or twenty minutes now. I’ll be back for you soon.” She blew me a kiss and began closing the door behind her, then stopped and said, “Listen, it’d be a good idea if you didn’t try to leave this room until I come back. When the Highway People call for a gathering like this, things become a bit…well, for you, anyway…things would be kind of confusing.”
“In what way?”
She thought about this for a minute, and as she did, I caught a glimpse of the young girl she’d once been, one who was now searching for a way to express in words something for which her previous life-experience had given her no point of reference. She looked almost…innocent. If I’d been a couple of decades younger, the look on her face would have really turned me on; now it just me feel sad and old.
Finally she said: “You ever wake up from a dream in the middle of the night and for a couple of seconds you’re, like, not sure whether you’re awake in your own bed or still in the dream? Some parts of the dream are so fresh in your memory that you can still see them, and for a couple of seconds it’s like the dream and the real world are the same thing, only you can’t tell which is which? Like you’re looking at a double-exposed photograph. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “Sure does.”
“Well, if you leave this room on your own, that’s what everything’s going to seem like to you. You won’t be able to tell what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Why is that?”
“Because part of what holds this all together is everyone being here and doing their jobs, living their lives. But when the Highway People call for a gathering and everyone leaves their posts, there’s, like, no glue, right? Things start to…come apart, change, whatever. But when we come back, it all snaps back into place. That’s because we know what it’s all supposed to be like. You don’t, so everything would look real screwed-up to you, and you’d get lost in a hurry, and I don’t think we could find you again.”
I looked around the holding room. “Is that why this room is so bare? So it would be easy for me to remember what it looked like?”
“Yeah. We move around a lot—the town, I mean—and we move pretty fast. Fast like” —she snapped her fingers— “that. So it’s important that you stay here in this room you know so you don’t get lost in the empty places.” She gave me a sweet, slightly melancholy look, blew me another kiss, and left.
I expected her to lock the door behind her to make sure I’d stay right where I was supposed to, but she didn’t. She trusted me. Not that it mattered; I couldn’t have found my way out of town on my own. I could maybe get myself as far as the gas station, but that’d be about it.
So I finished Nova’s superb dinner, sat back in my chair, and stared at the phone, wondering who I knew who wouldn’t hang up on me for calling at this hour. Maybe Brennert, but what could I tell him? Barbara Greer might not get too upset, but if she were being watched, a call from me would only draw more attention to her.
I sat forward and picked up the receiver to see if there was an operator waiting at the other end. I listened to the ringing, still having no idea who I was going to call if and when the operator answered. In the middle of the third ring the call was answered, but instead of an operator I got a moment of hiss, followed by a recorded voice-mail introduction:
“Hi, this is Dianne. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a message…oh, you know the rest. You’ll have three minutes after the beep, so don’t feel like you have to talk really fast. I hate that, don’t you? Okay, thanks for calling.”
This was the first time in five years that I’d heard her voice, and it almost broke me in half; clear and musical, with a subtle South Carolina accent that caused her to end every sentence on a smoothly descending note of embarrassed laughter that snuggled down in the back of her throat and wrapped itself up in something like a purr…I could almost feel her voice with my fingertips. In those few seconds it took to listen to her message, all those parts of her that I’d purposefully chipped away bit by bit in an effort to make her just another memory came together again, and there she was: her smile, her laugh, her eyes, the smell of her in the morning, the scent of her shampoo lingering on the pillow long after she’d lifted her head, the ghost of her touch against the back of my hand, and before I could even release the breath I didn’t know I was holding, the empty space in my life that had once been filled by her hummed so intensely with her absence that the last half-decade of my existence suddenly seemed inane and empty, a prolonged delusion, a vaudeville of what a life was supposed to be.
God, how I’d missed her.
Then came the beep and I began talking.
“Hi, Dianne, it’s, uh…it’s me.”
And then it hit me: I had less than three minutes. What the hell do you say to someone under these circumstances when you’ve only got three minutes, and it might very well be the last time you ever have the chance to say anything to them? For a second I flashed upon a high school drama club production of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology that I’d been in; the director had explained to us that we needed to approach each of the monologues as that character’s only chance to come back from the grave and say all the things they wished they’d said to everyone while they were still alive. “Their only shot at finally making things right,” she’d told us.
So, I thought, just pretend you’re a dead man back for a few moments from the grave. Got it? Good. Places…
“Please don’t skip over or erase this. I don’t have a lot of time. Listen to my voice. I’m not drunk, okay? What I am is in a lot of trouble, and I don’t know if I’m going to be…ah, hell, Dianne. I never stopped loving you, and I’ve never stopped missing you. I was a jerk—no, wait, that’s not quite right, is it? I was cruel and selfish and cold, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it. Don’t worry, I’m not about to ask for your forgiveness, though I’d bet you would forgive me if I asked. You were always so compassionate, and thoughtful, everything any man who had the brains God gave an ice cube would want or hope for. But me? I blew it. And I want you to know how sorry I am. I hope that whoever you’re with now treats you with all the respect and affection you should have gotten from me.
“You told me after the divorce hearing that you figured I’d go on and live my life like you’d never been a part of it. I tried. And it worked for about a week. Then one morning I got up and started making my lunch for the day and realized halfway through that I was packing yours, as well, like I used to some days, remember? I’m standing there in the middle of kitchen looking at a tuna fish sandwich and wondering if I used enough mayo—you still like lots of mayo on your tuna fish?—anyway, I’m standing there with this goddamn sandwich and realize that you’re not going to be eating it, and I started…well, I kinda lost it, and I hugged the sandwich to my chest and squashed it all the hell over my shirt…it was one of those mawkish moments that always used to make you laugh when you saw them in a movie. It was really pitiful.” I looked at the clock; I had less than a minute.