A Series of Events
by Kyra Kondis
Margerie is just settling into bed when she hears a knock at the door. She picks up her phone, and sure enough, there are three missed calls from Jonathan. She groans, pulls on her bathrobe, and pads down the stairs, but is unable to help a small smile from carving its way across her lips.
She opens the door. “We said not tonight.”
Jonathan shifts from foot to foot. Margerie tries not to look at him too much, because it would soften her up. “Come on," says Jonathan. “They’re not here and I haven’t seen you in weeks.” He raises his eyebrows innocently as if to say, What could go wrong?
What could go wrong? They could get caught, and she’d have to explain everything to Dave, and worse, their daughter, Deanna. Possibilities flash through Margerie’s mind like TV channels when Dave, who can’t make a simple decision to save his life, gets a hold of the remote. He is with Deanna visiting the University of Virginia, where Deanna is interviewing for the honors program. They will not be back for two days.
“Fine,” says Margerie. “But you’re not staying the night.”
Jonathan makes himself at home in Margerie’s kitchen, rummaging through the freezer for alcohol and retrieving a bottle of vodka. “Don’t have too much,” says Margerie. “Dave notices.” Jonathan salutes her and begins to make a drink.
Margerie wouldn’t call it cheating, what she’s doing with Jonathan, but she wouldn’t call it not cheating, either. They haven’t slept together, but they kissed, briefly, twice. Occasionally, after a hard day at the office, she drives to his apartment on the other side of town, and they watch terrible Netflix movies and spoon and eat Ben and Jerry’s. Sometimes, the thought strikes her that it’s worse, that she has never slept with Jonathan, but that there is some kind of clear and ongoing intimacy simmering between them; but at the same time, she tells herself, the sporadic nature of their relationship makes it easy to cut off, and she would never let it get to a point where she was investing more in Jonathan than she was in her family.
The alcohol makes Jonathan giggly, at first, and then just clingy. He is skinny and twenty-four, fifteen years younger than Margerie, and when they met at a bookstore while she was wearing a stained gray sweatshirt and leggings with a hole in one of the calves, he looked at her like she was captivating, which flattered her, and filled something she maybe hadn’t known was empty. Now, he spiders his hand across her stomach, and she pushes it away with her own, but lingers with his hand in hers for a moment, feeling its smoothness, its warmth.
“Margerie,” says Jonathan. He doesn’t say it this time, but he has so many times, she knows it’s implied: be with me instead. She wants to ask, why? Surely, he will soon tire of her. She is so much older than him, wrinkles in her face like tributaries while his is smooth, her body unable to move like it used to. He relocates his hand to her stomach again and this time, she doesn’t move it away. She tries to think of Dave, to prevent her from doing anything stupid, but thinking of him only makes her want to do something stupid, forms a ball like a clenched fist in her stomach that she can’t figure out how to undo.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she finally says. She is pleased, too pleased, by how happy this seems to make Jonathan.
Afterward, they lie in bed together, and Margerie is too bitterly satisfied to feel guilty. She’s just having fun — isn't she allowed to have some fun? Dave, certainly, has plenty of fun, staying out late with his coworkers at the bar on weeknights, playing video games on the weekend while she drives Deanna to soccer practice. Margerie can have fun, too.
It’s then that she sees the eight missed calls, eight voicemails; eight? Dave always texts, and usually sends the shortest texts possible; she can hardly think of a time when he didn’t respond to her with a mere, K. She fumbles around herself for the sheet and sits up in bed. “What’s up?” says Jonathan, and she gently shushes him, holding her phone to her ear.
In the messages, she can barely understand Dave, he’s so frantic; she gathers bits of information as though they are puzzle pieces, but each one of them belonging to the wrong puzzle. Deanna, he says. Went out with some UVA girls she knew from her old soccer team. Too much to drink. It was her friend. Who let her drive? Who let that girl drive? Margerie feels like the room around her is falling, falling, being pulled into darkness. She takes deep breaths and writes down the name of the hospital where Deanna is being kept. I don’t know how bad it is, Dave says on the last voicemail. God, honey, please pick up, I don’t know how bad it’s going to be.
Margerie gets out of bed and throws up in the master bathroom. “You have to go,” she says to Jonathan.
“What?” says Jonathan. “Are you okay?”
“You have to go,” she repeats. Quickly, she dresses, slips down the stairs. Aside from the empty chip bowl and Dave’s drink glass, her living room is warm and pristine, a framed photo of Margerie, Dave, and Deanna above the mantle between decorative candles shaped like roses. The urge to vomit rushes through her again like a strong wind.
“What’s going on,” Jonathan says, but she shakes her head. If she opens her mouth again, she will lose her composure, and she needs to get to the hospital. He looks at her for a second, then slinks out the door and Margerie feels as though the entire world has either stopped turning under her, or is turning too fast, so fast that it is entirely out of control.
She gets in her car and doesn’t wait for Jonathan to get in his. He can stand there in her driveway all night for all she cares. She pulls out of the driveway, uses an app on her phone that Dave had insisted they both get to turn on the house's security system, lock the doors, turn out the lights. She hadn’t wanted to get the app. They had argued about it. Why is she thinking about this now? It is an hour’s drive to Charlottesville. She looks behind her, back at her house, back at her family’s house. It’s dark, all dark.
Kyra Kondis is an MFA candidate in fiction at GMU, where she's working on a short story collection. Her work can be found in Wigleaf's Top 50, Best Microfiction 2020, and more. She's the Editor in Chief of So to Speak Journal and Social Media Editor of Pithead Chapel.
