"That'll be eleven dollars. You pay before you eat and we don't do cards no more."
He reaches into his pocket and fishes out a tenner along with a couple of dollar bills and slides it across the dusty counter as the man pushes an entirely unappealing burger on a grimy unwashed plate in his direction.
He picks it up, eyeing it with a vacant look.
Eleven dollars for what looked like a lump of horsemeat stuck between two pieces of bun.
Food has certainly changed connotation in a shockingly short duration.
Some other time, he'd have found the capacity to be enraged, or at least amused at any rate. That a dive like this could get away with charging that kind of money for something that barely makes it to the right side of edible.
Today he simply eyes his food, if one could have the audacity to call it that, deciding if he wants to eat it after all.
He's not hungry. He seldom is nowadays. But a future meal is right now nothing more than a question mark and he does need to feed himself now and then, indulge these inconvenient needs of his body.
He's not superhuman after all, despite having bent space-tie continuums.
If he closed his eyes, he can almost taste the last home cooked meal he'd eaten, taste every ingredient.
Saffron, garlic, rosemary and extra virgin olive oil.
Early on in their relationship, it is decided he should be the one to handle the cooking, especially so after Etta, the baby inevitably forcing the kind of discipline that children often do just by existing, in which takeout menus get replaced by recipe books and late junk food dinners eaten out of Styrofoam containers in front of the television get swapped for punctual and wholesome meals around the table.
Olivia doesn't care much for the activity and is strictly average in terms of her culinary skills. She can make a good salad and some fairly decent breakfast by way of eggs or pancakes. But she leaves the serious cooking to him, trading him for laundry duties which she claims he doesn't know the first thing about.
He's happy to do it. He likes taking care of his family.
He thinks about dinner a month ago. It's a beautiful evening. Unusually perfect weather for October, crisp without being too cold, nice enough to have dinner outside on their back porch, and that's exactly what they do …. They have Paella that night, with a bottle of Navarra rose. He makes it for Olivia because she loves Spanish food.
It's the last meal he shares with his family.
0-0-0
With a resigned sigh, Peter bites into the burger, demolishing it in three swift bites. He eats fast so that he doesn't actually have to taste whatever it is that comprises his dinner tonight, signaling for coffee even before he's swallowed his last bite.
He gazes around the diner idly as he waits , his attention drifting to a mother with two kids, a baby in her lap and a little boy next to her. She's cutting up pieces of what bears a faint resemblance to fried chicken into child sized bites as the boy bangs with his plastic fork on the greying formica surface.
She looks frazzled, annoyed, frustrated and mostly just tired. It's like recognizing a kindred soul, he knows those signs too well. That irritation that comes from coaxing and codling a stubborn child who simply would not yield. He has waged those battles countless times and lost almost every one of them, over stringed peas that would remain uneaten and toys that never got put away.
He watches as she sighs, tells the boy to quit it and shakes her head when he ignore hers. As if on cue, the baby in her arms starts to fuss.
"Cody, I am not going to tell you again." She yells now, loud enough for him to hear, along with everybody else in the diner. She immediately looks embarrassed, feeling everyone's eyes on her, judging her.
Their eyes meet and he gives her a sympathetic smile, which she returns almost gratefully.
Peter watches the poor woman looking like she wants to breakdown and cry right there, as the kid sullenly begins to pick at his food and make a face signifying his displeasure.
He feels bad for her. She's obviously struggling to make ends meet. The frayed jacket she has on has clearly seen better days and the baby's crusty, stained onesie looks like it needs to have been thrown into the laundry three days ago, except he's not quite sure she has a second one to spare , and from what he could make out, she's gotten the cheapest item on the menu.
And one big order of nothing for herself… she'll go hungry that night to make sure her son eats.
He feels like walking up to her and offering to buy her a meal, but he suspects all that will do is serve to make her feel smaller than she perhaps already does, make her realize that her difficulties weren't quite so hidden as she believes.
People do have a right to their dignity, if nothing else.
She needn't worry he thinks. People don't take notice… of anything at all. He only sees her because her pain is not that different from his own.
He knows what it feels like to fail as a parent, knows how hard it is to be in a position to not be able to do the right thing, the best thing for your child.
It's probably killing her, to have to watch her son suffer through a meal that could neither be filling nor satisfying, knowing that it's all she can afford right now.
It's remarkable really, that ferocious maternal instinct, an anthropological drive cultivated over centuries of human evolution , over famine and food shortages and scarcity that prompts mothers to ensure their offspring's sustenance.
He thinks of his own wife and her attention to their daughter's nutritional needs, something that bordered on the fanatical, despite her completely lackadaisical approach towards her own wellbeing of course. The way she read every book there was on the subject and made shopping lists only after researching every and each item. Each box she picked up at the supermarket was scrutinized till kingdom come, and only after it passed her ridiculously high standards could it be permitted into the Dunham approved list of things Etta was allowed to put in her body… one that even Walter knew not to deviate from.
Pressed for time, he once makes the mistake of grabbing a happy meal at McDonalds and he's fairly sure she really wants to kill him that day, when she catches sight of the empty box in the car.
Hell would have to freeze over for Olivia to even consider let Etta eat in a place like this.
He swallows hard as he remembers… then.
Hell was right now, hell was everything and everywhere.
Dear god please…. he prays desperately, he finds himself doing that an awful lot lately, years of hard held rationalism suspended for a meager hope that there's a supernatural fix after all to the world's problems…. because he'll try anything at this point.
Please please please…. don't let her starve. Please let someone be feeding her at least.
It's a feeble plea, he supposes, carrying so little conviction and such a desperate hope that it could get easily lost in all the white noise that people direct towards some deity or another on a minute by minute basis.
He may not be a creature of faith, but he's not blind to its power. He understands its remarkable ability to let people hope for the best, to believe that there's light at the end of a tunnel.
He wishes he could feel some of it, even just a little bit.
It would make the pain ever so slightly more bearable.
But atheist or not, it's not much to ask the big guy…. or whatever Alpha and Omega that makes this world go around, to make sure a child doesn't go to bed hungry.
Is it?
Except countless children did, everyday all over the world, their numbers always growing and no higher being had come to their rescue yet…
He tries not to think of it, because it paralyzes him, renders him beyond incapable. The thought of it. The awful thoughts… the worst possibilities.
He changes gear, thinks about his next step. At this point he's no better than dead weight. Exhausted to a point where he simply has to admit it to himself. From the cracked window of the diner he can see the neon sign for a motel, where he supposes he'll crash for a few hours, try and get some shuteye if only to avoid falling asleep at the wheel, when he hits the road again in a few hours.
Another night of this. Peter thinks glumly.
Another shelter ticked off a list that only seemed to grow even as he kept crossing out items every single day.
Whoever imagined the notion of the open road to be romantic clearly never actually spent their days and nights driving on derelict inroads through broken down, one horse towns, all over Massachusetts and Maine and Rhode Island and New Hampshire and even Vermont and…. he'd just really like to go home at this point.
He's had enough, of these seedy underbellies that would never make the cover of a fall foliage tour brochure, of soulless interstates and freeway billboards, each one identical to the one that comes after…
Of having to search the faces of children day in and out, his heart in his mouth, looking for those familiar pair of blue eyes, while unfamiliar ones stared back at him with the same hope and desperation.
That someone had come for them at last.
He's confident in the beginning, foolishly so, in his abilities to bring her back from wherever she was lost to. After all, he was Peter Bishop, con artist extraordinaire, the man who had struck the unstrikable deals in Central America and swindled warlords in Africa, who had wangled tenure track employment at MIT, without a high school diploma to show for it.
He dealt with the extraordinary for breakfast, for lunch and then for dinner, conquered it, and reduced it to nothing more than a witty quip, a great bar story to be shared with friends, provided they had the necessary clearance levels of course.
He's the man who bridged the fucking universes together….
Surely he could find his own daughter.
So he sets out, a plan on a napkin and… a Little Mermaid backpack.
For when she's found and would surely need her familiar comforts.
A change of clothes, juice boxes and gummy bears, a Faber Castell 64 pack tucked away with a sketchbook and a Nemo plush toy.
That's how certain he is, arrogant really, of finding her.
The napkin burns a hole in his pocket and in his conscience, creased several times over, it bears witness to his failures and his hubris, an infinitesimal weight that bears on him like the mariner's Albatross.
The backpack hidden under the passenger seat, out of his sight, which is where he puts it after three days and the sixth shelter.
He's not that far really, from home but this is not the New England he knows, or likes.
No.
It's Boston with its quintessential character, its quiet charm and undeniable Irishness. That unusual quality of a small town in a big city, home of the old money, the first citadel of the New World that wore so much of the old . Its Fenway Park and Quincy Market and Back Bay and even Arlington, which Walter disliked for reasons he'd yet to make clear to him. It's Cambridge… with its college town quaintness and European flavor and its little streets with red brick buildings. Where you can go on a run in the mornings along the Charles and were guaranteed to bump into at least one Nobel prize winner on your way. Where you can hide in some café at Harvard Square and while away an afternoon or two, reading obscure books and research journals.
Its Boston he's always loved, more than New York, more than any city he's been to. It's a loyalty tied to his childhood, to the only home he's known.
It's where he had wanted to raise his daughter. To give her her sense of roots, to give her that undeniable sense of security he'd always felt there, even when his life was being threatened by Big Eddie.
Except it doesn't exist anymore. It's just a place in his head. The city, on a slow but sure path to ruination, his house nothing more than empty walls and Pottery Barn furniture where no one lived.
There are no safe places anymore. There is no home.
He knows this. He knows this.
Damn it, he should be used to all of this by now. After three weeks of awful food in greasy dives, nights spent in sleazy motels, gas station rest stops….
After all, he did live like this for ten years. Rootles, nomadic, in and out of towns and cities.
He should be used to it. And what right does he have to complain anyway. How dare he really?
When his little girl was out there somewhere, scared and all alone, waiting for him to come find her.
What kind of a man would reminisce about white picket fence comforts at a time like that? He thinks with disgust.
The kind of man who let this happen in the first place of course, the voice in his head sneers at him.
The smell of cheap perfume and stale cigarette smoke assaults his senses, breaking him out his thoughts, as a woman sits down on the chair next to him. She sets her shabby purse on the counter and begins to pull out things one by one, stopping to sort every time she found some money or change, which isn't all that often.
Carefully, she counts out the wrinkled dollars in her hands and recounts them, her eyes scanning the menu twice, before she asks the waiter for coffee.
"Four fifty. You gotta pay first." The waiter from earlier says in that same disinterested voice.
She nods, and begins to count the amount from the scarce pile of bills, her fingers trembling ever so slightly.
"Let me get that for you." Peter says then, motioning to the man, who simply shrugs and pulls a cup from behind the counter.
The woman turns to him instantly with a small smile. She doesn't even bother with a protest.
"Well aren't you just Santa Claus tonight?" She drawls with a pleasantly surprised look, as the cigarette dangles from her fingers loosely.
"It's nothing." He shrugs, as he sips from his mug, slapping down a couple of more dollar bills on the counter as the waiter pours some Joe in a cup for the woman.
"I've had some pretty low days, but having to double think a cup of crappy coffee might be my lowest point yet you know." She smiles in a somewhat embarrassed way as she picks up the mug. "You'd think this were Starbucks or something for this kinda money."
"It's fine." He says.
"If you say so. So does my guardian angel come with a name?" She asks looking at him curiously.
"It's Peter."
"Well thank you for the coffee Peter." She says raising her cup to him with a wink before taking a purposeful sip.
"It's no problem."
"Don't you want to know my name?"
"If you want to tell it to me."
She smokes carelessly, rules are a laughable notion right now. It doesn't bother him anyway. Never having picked up a cigarette in his life, he's spent many hours in the company of those who did to a point where he doesn't even notice it anymore.
"Maureen. It's Maureen." She smiles crooked. She has an interesting face, one could call it pretty if it was absolutely necessary but why be so cruel?
They both sip in silence after that. He has nothing to ask her, nothing he's dying to know.
He knows Maureen and every other woman like her, their stories whispered into his ears in places of disrepute like these all over the world in Memphis and Belfast and Cairo and Hong Kong. It's a strange propensity he has for attracting women like her, hurt by men, by life, by fate, women who masked their injuries behind facades of provocateur, and concealed the pain in their eyes with come hither stances. They sought him in unusual numbers, looking for something…validation, escape, comfort even…
0-0-0-0
"You're a magnet for damaged souls." He remembers Tess whispering lazily, her eyes vacant, empty, sated, looking at the ceiling above them as they lie in bed.
In Michael's bed, in Michael's house with Michael's girlfriend with Michael off in New York doing something for Big Eddie…..a recipe for stupid if there ever was.
"Yeah?" His fingers play with her navel, busying themselves with that perfect right curve of her waist, that irresistible mole at the slope.
She shrugs. "It's the pain Peter….it leaves a mark on people like us. We learn to recognize it in each other."
He smiles.
He's crazy about this girl, to a point where it should seem ridiculous. A matter of principle, Peter doesn't chase after the committed, not that he does much chasing, lucky in the department since puberty did him a solid and slotted him into the 'utterly fuckable' category. He's 27, doesn't believe much in the sanctity of anything, let alone that of relationships. Love is a child's game, played by adults, an amusement that helps reduce the emptiness of life.
But he won't be the one night stand that breaks up a happy relationship, make believe as it is. Let the naive have the security of their delusions, he thinks.
Only Tess is not in a happy relationship, if anything she's deeply unhappy and hides it behind sultry allure and top notch concealer , miserable in a web of viciousness that surrounds her – which is why he finds himself pinning her to the wall of a supply closet twenty minutes after they meet in Big Eddie's bar.
They fuck twice desperately and recklessly with half of the mob down the corridor along with Michael and even though he's known her for less than an hour, Tess Amaral gets under his skin that night… and stays there for the next three years.
He falls for her fast and he falls for her hard, in a most stupid way, risking life and limb for any and every chance to be with her. Its monumentally unwise what they're doing. He could find himself at the bottom of the river if anyone found out and more importantly, he's putting her life in danger for nothing more than acts a paid gigolo could perform, pleasures of the flesh that are not worth anybody dying for.
Except he's never learnt not to play with fire.
"You think you're damaged?" He ignores the comment, makes it a question. His fingers traverse downwards…. halting at the sight of her inner thighs, marred with cigarette marks where no one could ever see.
The bastard was a man of inhuman cruelty. His acts of violence not instigated by bursts of rage but by calculated attempts at petulance.
She laughs that throaty drawl, full bodied, flippant. Her hands carding through his hair, the scent of Escada, rubbed earlier on her wrists, as she looks at him with a thoughtful languid stare, her gaze pure amber.
"Yeah… I wouldn't be with you if I wasn't would I?"
"You're not with me remember. I am just the guy you drag into bed every time your boyfriend's not looking."
She'd laughs again, louder, heartier, emptier….
"Yeah you're just the guy." She'd whispers, pulling him up for a fierce kiss.
He gets lost in her all over again.
"I could be more you know." He says to her later that night, almost sure she's fallen asleep, the closest he'll ever come to telling her what she really means to him.
"I wish you could be too." She mumbles, pulling his arms around.
He slinks away two nights later without saying anything.
Oddly, he finds himself longing for her sight tonight, for Tess Amaral to come walking through those doors, and take a seat next to him so that he could talk to her and laugh with her, if only for a little while.
Seeing himself through her eyes will be refreshing.
She saw the truth in him that no one else ever had, not even Olivia who always saw more than he was, expected more than he could give and willed him into being just that by the sheer force of being who she was.
No, Tess saw him for just what he was, flawed and weak at a fundamental level, incapable of offering anything real. The man who promised the world and never delivered .
That's why she never asked him for more, never took him seriously all those times he asked her to leave with him , while he fumed and flustered and raged at the cigarette burns and bruises that kept showing up in places on her body, absolutely helpless to do anything because how could he confront Michael over wounds he had no business seeing in the first place.
It makes it easier to disappoint people when they're counting on you to do just that.
You should have pushed me, he tells her in his head. Pushed me to be better, to do right by you.
"Nobody ready to take a bloody credit card any longer and people charging whatever the hell they feel like… makes life hard, especially when you're in-between jobs."
Maureen grimaces and Peter braces himself. The complaint is meant to reach him, he knows.
"These bald whackos have fucked everything up." She sighs unhappily.
"They certainly have." He nods, without looking at her.
"It's like one of the sci-fi movies you know." She shakes her head. "Buildings disappearing into nothing, people bleeding from their ears and dying on the streets. I don't even know what the hell is going on. They're saying on the news its some kinda invasion or something. That they're everywhere."
She looks at him thoughtfully. "Nobody knows though, who these people are do they? Do you?"
"No more than you do."
He lies.
"So where you from? Peter…"
"Boston."
" I am from Tallahassee myself. That's where I grew up. Its home."
"You're a long way from home." He comments.
"Moved to New York to be an actress. Wanted to be a big name in show business."
"Did you make it then?"
"Oh absolutely." She gives him an empty smile, her eyes screaming a story that was entirely too predictable . "Haven't you seen all those posters on Broadway with my name on them? It's why I come to these shitty diners you see. Escape the crazy fans."
He doesn't say anything at her comment, choosing instead to stare into his empty coffee cup.
"What about you? You ever wanted to be an actor?"
"Not really. No. I have put on my share of acts though."
"It's a shame. You look like you could be one you know. With those eyes of yours. You've got nice eyes. Did I tell you that already?"
"No."
"Well you do Peter. " She nods decisively. "Very nice ones. I like the color. It's your best feature."
He gives her a small smile, not sure how to react.
"And I like your jacket." Her hands moves boldly, without hesitation to caress the leather sleeve. "Looks expensive."
"It is. It was an anniversary present from my wife. "
"You're married?" There's surprise in her voice, her hand drops sharply.
"I am married." He repeats in confirmation.
"You don't look the kind." She eyes him skeptically, eyes drifting to his hand where she doesn't find the evidence of matrimony. "You know the marrying kind."
"I didn't think I was either …" He nods in agreement, the heat of the metal from his wedding band rests against his chest, strung through a black chord and hid under his shirt for safekeeping.
"So what changed your mind?" She takes another long draw from her cigarette. "Did you get the girl pregnant?"
"Pretty much." He shrugs.
It's the truth at its most basic level he supposes. No point in explaining the nuances of his complicated relationship with a complete stranger.
"It's really the only reason any man ever really wants to marry a woman." She shakes her head. "Especially when they're not the marrying kind."
She leans a little closer to him then. "Is she pretty at least, your wife…"
Peter smiles, despite himself, despite the situation he found himself in.
"She's beautiful."
"Like…in what way?"
"In every way there is."
"Lucky you." She rolls her eyes. "And you love her of course?"
"Very much so."
It hasn't felt like it lately, he doesn't tell her. He leaves out that it's been a week since he actually spoke to Olivia, or heard from her.
That he's not even sure if he's ever going to see her again.
"Figures." Maureen shrugs, draining the last of her coffee, stands up. She puts a hand on his shoulder. "Well Peter….if you decide you don't love your wife all that much, I am right across at the motel. Come find me."
"I don't think so. But thanks." He mumbles straight-faced, trying not to laugh. There's nothing remotely funny about any of this. But it really is hilarious he thinks to be hit on by a woman given the state of mind he's in.
In another time, he would have found himself calling Olivia and sharing a laugh with her.
He watches Maureen leave into the darkness and suddenly, more than anything he wants to hear the sound of his wife's voice. That reassuring quiet cadence that always made him feel better.
You still have her. A tiny voice reminds him. Everything is not lost. You could go and fight this with her instead of sitting in a dive like this and avoiding the truth.
As if on cue, the phone rings and he picks up without even looking.
"Liv?"
"Peter… its Walter."
"Walter…"
"I've found something. It's time for you to come home son."
He does.