The Marriage Pact
Michelle Richmond
1
I come to on a Cessna, bumping through the air. My head is throbbing, and there is blood on my shirt. I have no idea how much time has passed. I look at my hands, expecting to see restraints, but there are none. Just an ordinary seatbelt looped around my waist. Who strapped me in? I don’t even remember boarding the plane.
Through the open door of the cockpit, I see the back of the pilot’s head. It’s just the two of us. There is snow in the mountains, wind buffeting the plane. The pilot seems completely focused on his controls, shoulders tense.
I reach up and touch my head. The blood has dried, leaving a sticky mess. My stomach rumbles. The last thing I ate was the French toast. How long ago was that? On the seat beside me, I find water and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. I open the bottle and drink.
I unwrap my sandwich—ham and Swiss—and take a bite. Shit. My jaw hurts too much to chew. Someone must have punched me in the face after I hit the ground.
“Are we going home?” I ask the pilot.
“Depends on what you call home. We’re headed to Half Moon Bay.”
“They didn’t tell you anything about me?”
“First name, destination, that’s about it. I’m just a taxi driver, Jake.”
“But you’re a member, right?”
“Sure,” he says, his tone unreadable. “Fidelity to the Spouse, Loyalty to The Pact. Till death do us part.” He turns back just long enough to give me a look that warns me not to ask any more questions.
We hit an air pocket so hard my sandwich goes flying. An urgent beeping erupts. The pilot curses and frantically pushes buttons. He shouts something to air traffic control. We’re descending fast, and I’m clutching the armrests, thinking of Alice, going over our final conversation, wishing I’d said so many things.
Then, suddenly, the plane levels out, we gain altitude, and all appears to be well. I gather the pieces of my sandwich from the floor, wrap the whole mess back up in the wax paper, and set it on the seat beside me.
“Sorry for the turbulence,” the pilot says.
“Not your fault. Good save.”
Over sunny Sacramento, he finally relaxes, and we talk about the Golden State Warriors and their surprising run this season.
“What day is it?” I ask.
“Tuesday.”
I’m relieved to see the familiar coastline out my window, grateful for the sight of the little Half Moon Bay Airport. The landing is smooth. Once we touch down, the pilot turns and says, “Don’t make it a habit, right?”
“Don’t plan to.”
I grab my bag and step outside. Without killing the engines, the pilot closes the door, swings the plane around, and takes off again.
I walk into the airport café, order hot chocolate, and text Alice. It’s two P.M. on a weekday, so she’s probably embroiled in a thousand meetings. I don’t want to bother her, but I really need to see her.
A text reply arrives. Where are you?
Back in HMB.
Will leave in 5.
It’s more than twenty miles from Alice’s office to Half Moon Bay. She texts about traffic downtown, so I order food, almost the whole left side of the menu. The café is empty. The perky waitress in the perfectly pressed uniform hovers. When I pay the check, she says, “Have a good day, Friend.”
I go outside and sit on a bench to wait. It’s cold, the fog coming down in waves. By the time Alice’s old Jaguar pulls up, I’m frozen. I stand up, and as I’m checking to make sure I have everything, Alice walks over to the bench. She’s wearing a serious suit, but she has changed out of heels into sneakers for the drive. Her black hair is damp in the fog. Her lips are dark red, and I wonder if she did this for me. I hope so.
She rises on her tiptoes to kiss me. Only then do I realize how desperately I’ve missed her. Then she steps back and looks me up and down.
“At least you’re in one piece.” She reaches up and touches my jaw gently. “What happened?”
“Not sure.”
I wrap my arms around her.
“So why were you summoned?”
There’s so much I want to tell her, but I’m scared. The more she knows, the more dangerous it will be for her. Also, let’s face it, the truth is going to piss her off.
What I’d give to go back to the beginning—before the wedding, before Finnegan, before The Pact turned our lives upside down.
2
I’ll be honest—the wedding was my idea. Maybe not the location, the place, the food, the music, all the things Alice knew how to do so well. The idea, though, that was mine. I’d known her for three and a half years. I wanted her, and marriage was the best way to ensure I didn’t lose her.
Alice didn’t have a good track record with permanence. In her earlier days, she was wild, impulsive, sometimes drawn too quickly to a fleeting, shining object. I worried that if I waited too long, she would be gone. The wedding, if I’m honest, was simply a means to permanence.
I proposed on a balmy Tuesday in January. Her father had died, and we were back in Alabama. He’d been her final living relative, and his unexpected death shook her in a way I hadn’t seen before. We spent the days after the funeral cleaning out Alice’s childhood home in a Birmingham suburb. In the mornings, we went through boxes in the attic, work space, and garage. The house was filled with artifacts of her family life: her father’s military career, her dead brother’s baseball exploits, her dead mother’s recipe books, faded pictures of her grandparents. It was like an archaeological treasure trove of a small, long-forgotten tribe from a lost civilization.
“I’m the last one,” she said. Not in a pitiful way, just matter-of-fact. She’d lost her mother to cancer, her brother to suicide. She had survived, but not unscathed. Looking back, I can see that her position as the only living member of the family made her more loving and reckless than she might have been otherwise. Had she not been so alone in the world, I’m not sure she would have said yes.
I’d ordered her engagement ring weeks earlier, and it arrived via UPS moments after she learned of her father’s death. I’m not sure why, but I slipped the box into my duffel bag as we were leaving for the airport.
Two weeks into the trip, we called a real estate agent and had him come out to appraise the house. We wandered through the rooms, the agent taking notes, scribbling frantically, like he was preparing for a test. At the end, we stood on the porch, waiting for his assessment.
“Are you sure you want to sell?” the agent asked.
“Yes,” Alice said.
“It’s just that—” He gestured toward us with his clipboard. “Why don’t you stay? Get married. Have kids. Build a life. This town needs families. My children are so bored. My boy has to play soccer because we don’t have enough kids to field a baseball team.”
“Well,” Alice said, looking out toward the street, “because.”