Three Years of Marriage, Less Than One Call From His First Love

On the night of our third wedding anniversary, Stan James left me at an abandoned tollbooth in a downpour so he could go pick up his first love.

I clutched his sleeve and begged him not to go.

He pried my hand off.

She can't manage without me right now. Don't put yourself in the same league as her.

Forty minutes later, a truck lost control and plowed into the tollbooth.

I woke from the coma remembering my parents, remembering my friends, remembering all twenty-eight years of my life.

Everything except Stan James.

He came to me holding our marriage certificate, eyes red, and told me we'd been childhood sweethearts for fifteen years and husband and wife for three.

Later, when he saw me smile at another man, he stood at the far end of the corridor and, all at once, his tears fell.

But he could spend every year that followed and never once win back a single turn of my head.

Rain hammered the windshield.

I fit an old cassette tape back into its case.

The words on the cover had faded, and only one line was still legible.

For Viola Delgado, age ten.

It was the last recording my father ever left me.

It had taken me six months to separate the tape where the damp had fused it together. Tonight only the final restoration was left, and Stan had promised to come with me to the center to hear the finished version.

Tonight was also when he'd promised to get Agatha Winfield out of our lives.

We'd just cleared the North Loop overpass when his phone rang.

The screen showed a single word: "Agatha."

Stan glanced at me and didn't answer right away.

I gripped the tape case tighter.

"Take it."

The call connected. Agatha's crying came through in broken pieces under the rain.

"Stan, the power's out at the theater."

"I'm locked in backstage, my phone's almost dead, I can't breathe."

Stan's hands clenched hard on the wheel.

"Where's your assistant?"

"I can't reach her."

"Don't be scared. I'm coming."

By the time he hung up, the car had already turned toward Riverside Theater.

I watched the red line on the navigation stretch long again.

"Call the police first."

"She's claustrophobic. She can't wait for a patrol car."

"We can go together."

Stan was silent for two seconds.

"She's not stable right now. Seeing you would only make it worse."

For three months now, he'd always had a reason like this.

Agatha had just moved back to the States and couldn't stomach hotel food, so he brought her congee in the middle of the night.

Agatha's wrist hurt from rehearsals, so he canceled my center's opening ceremony to take her to the hospital.

Agatha couldn't sleep when anyone brought up their breakup back then, so when they met, it was better if I didn't call.

Every time, there was a reason.

Every reason mattered more than I did.

I turned my face to the window and looked at my own reflection in the glass.

"Stan, tonight is our third wedding anniversary."

His brow pressed down low.

"I know."

"You also know my father died in rain exactly like this."

"Viola, she's locked in a dark room. You're sitting safe in a car."

His voice was clipped, the ranking already settled in his head.

"Stop turning everything into a comparison."

I said nothing more.

The road ahead was sealed off by floodwater. A traffic officer waved a light stick, routing cars to detour through the old tollbooth.

Stan checked the time again and again, and the car went faster.

Agatha sent another voice message.

She was crying his name.

When he finished listening, he slammed on the brakes.

That tollbooth on the roadside had been out of use for years. A single white light with a bad connection was all that lit the canopy.

"Wait for me here."

I thought I'd misheard.

"What?"

"The theater's right up ahead, twenty minutes round trip at most. Taking you the long way is too slow. I'll grab her and come straight back."

Outside, the rain came down like a wall.

Most of the tollbooth's glass was broken. There were no shops nearby, and no gas station still open.

I turned the phone screen toward him.

"Six percent battery left. You can't get a ride out here."

Stan opened the glovebox, pulled out an umbrella, and pushed it at me.

"You can stay dry in the booth."

I didn't take it.

"I'm not getting out."

He looked at me, and the urgency in his eyes turned to impatience.

"Agatha's already having an attack."

"She has an assistant. She has theater staff. She can call the police."

"But she'll only let me come!"

The car went quiet.

I've known Stan James for fifteen years.

The year I was fourteen, my father went missing in a flood, and it was Stan who sat with me outside the police station, holding me, telling me that no matter how hard it rained after that, he would never leave me alone.

The year I was twenty-two, when Agatha left without a word and he drank until his stomach bled, it was me who stayed at his bedside.

At twenty-five, he asked me if I wanted to get married.

He said we'd known each other too long, that we could never really be pulled apart.

And I actually took those words for love.

I looked at the man in front of me and suddenly wanted to know: all those years, when he was holding me, who was he really seeing.

My voice shook, and my hand slowly loosened on the tape case.

"Stan, I'm asking you one last time."

"Are you going to leave me here?"

He avoided my eyes, got out, and opened my door for me.

"Don't make it sound so dire."

"Twenty minutes. I promise."

Rain poured into the car and soaked half my dress in an instant.

I didn't move.

He bent down and grabbed my hand, hurried and rough.

"Viola, Agatha really can't wait."

He hauled me out of the car, and my shoes went into the standing water.

The umbrella never opened. The wind flipped it inside out.

Stan set my bag and the tape inside the booth and turned to go.

I chased two steps after him and caught his cuff.

"I'm scared."

Saying those two words, I threw away the last of my dignity.

He looked down at my hand.

"You're not a child anymore."

"Agatha's the one who could actually get hurt."

He peeled my fingers loose.

The door shut, and the taillights vanished into the rain.

The white light over the booth flickered twice, then died.

I stood there, afraid even to breathe too hard.

The sound of the water from the year I was fourteen came rushing back into my ears.

My father had pushed me onto the rescue boat and gone back for the tape that held the first cry I made when I was born.

He never came back.

Stan knew what I was afraid of was never the rain.

What I was afraid of was being left behind.

Four percent battery left.

I dialed his number.

The first time, no answer.

The second time, he cut it off.

The third time, he sent a voice message.

"I'm driving, don't be difficult. I'll come back once I've got Agatha."

I held the phone to my ear and listened to it twice.

Rainwater ran down off my chin. I couldn't tell if I was crying.

Far off, a truck came toward me.

Its body swung sideways all at once.

A shrieking horn tore through the rain, and the headlights swept straight into the booth.

I wanted to run, but my legs were pinned in place, as if by the flood from the year I was fourteen.

In the last second, I hugged that tape to my chest.

The glass shattered with a loud crash.

Somewhere far off, someone shouted.

"Get out of the way!"

Then the world went completely black.

When I woke, the whole room smelled of disinfectant.

My mother was slumped over the edge of the bed. Her hair had gone much whiter.

The moment I said "Mom," she jerked awake.

She grabbed me and held on, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

"Viola, you're finally awake."

I tried to lift a hand to pat her, but my right arm wouldn't move.

The pain dragged from my shoulder up to the back of my skull, and I couldn't hold in a gasp.

The door banged open.

A man rushed in.

He was terribly thin, his shirt crushed into wrinkles, his jaw dark with stubble.

When he saw my eyes open, he froze in the doorway.

The next second he came toward me, eyes red.

"Viola."

"I'm here. I'm back."

He reached out to hold me.

I flinched back on instinct, and the monitor shrieked at once.

"Who are you?"

The man's hand stopped in midair.

My mother's crying stopped too.

He stared at me for a long moment, then forced a corner of his mouth up.

"Don't play around."

"You've been out for twelve days. The doctor said you might be a little confused when you woke up."

He took another step forward.

"I'm Stan James."

The name left nothing behind in my head.

I looked at my mother.

"Mom, why is he here?"

The color drained slowly from Stan James's face.

The doctor arrived quickly.

He asked me a dozen or so questions.

I knew my own name, my ID number, my home address.

I remembered the year my father died, the year my mother closed the cassette-tape repair shop.

I remembered my college classmates, the equipment at the sound restoration center, even the three case file numbers I'd taken on before the accident.

The doctor pointed at Stan James.

"And him?"

I looked at him carefully for a while.

"I don't know him."

Stan James suddenly turned and drove his fist hard into the wall.

The doctor asked him to step out.

The tests took the whole day.

Right temporal-lobe contusion, retrograde amnesia, and a strong trauma response.

The doctor said memory isn't filed away by person, and my case wasn't common.

"She hasn't deleted one particular person from her mind."

"It's more likely that every memory connected to this one person has been blocked off by the trauma."

Stan James asked through the door.

"When will it come back?"

The doctor gave no definite answer.

"Maybe a few days. Maybe many years. Maybe never."

That night, Stan James brought a marriage certificate.

In the photo I was leaning against him, smiling, happy.

The official seal was real.

The date was three years ago.

I touched my ring finger, where a faint pale band still circled the skin.

"You're my husband?"

Stan James stared at me, hard.

"Yes."

"Were we happy?"

He barely paused.

"Very."

My mother stood by the window and didn't turn around.

I saw her press a hand to her mouth.

Stan sat down on the edge of the bed, rushing to tell me the story of our lives.

"We lived across the hall from each other. We walked to school together, all the way from middle school."

"You were scared of thunder. Every time it rained, you came and knocked on my door."

"When you finished college and started at the sound restoration center, I went with you through three cities collecting old cassette tapes."

"On our wedding day, you cried until your makeup was ruined."

He told it in detail.

So much detail that I could almost piece together another Viola Delgado in my head.

But in every picture, his face was blank.

I tried to take his hand.

My body recognized something before I could. The instant my fingers touched him, my stomach heaved.

I turned my head and threw up.

Stan's hand froze against the sheets.

While the nurse cleaned me up, he stayed outside the door the whole time.

The door wasn't shut all the way.

I saw him with his head down, one hand pressed hard over his eyes.

The next day, he brought a whole box of things.

School-uniform photos, movie ticket stubs, the wedding album, and letters I'd written him.

On top sat a blue voice recorder.

"You use this for work."

"You like to keep the sounds that matter."

I pressed the switch.

Inside was my own voice.

"Stan James, you left your socks on the couch again."

In the background, a man laughed lazily.

"Mrs. James, a recording isn't evidence."

My voice was laughing too.

"Then your punishment is doing the dishes for a week."

Stan watched me, a small, careful hope surfacing in his eyes.

"You hear that? That's us."

I listened to a few more clips.

The woman in the recording loved him.

But her happiness couldn't reach me.

All I could do was listen the way I'd listen to a stranger's life, judging whether she'd been far from the mic that day, whether the background noise had run over the limit.

I handed the voice recorder back to him.

"I'm sorry."

"I don't feel anything."

The light in Stan's eyes went out.

Still he wouldn't leave.

When I did my rehab exercises, he waited by the door.

When my head ached at night, he stood at the nurses' station, asking again and again whether they could increase my medication.

My mother told him to go home and rest. He only said he was fine.

Everyone kept telling me he hadn't slept a full night in twelve days.

As if twelve days were enough to prove he was a good husband.

But the moment I heard his footsteps come close, the sound of a car door slamming shut rose up in my ears.

I didn't know where that sound came from.

Not until the traffic officers returned my things from the accident.

The bag held a shattered phone, a warped wedding ring, and the cassette tape I'd shielded against my chest.

There was one more thing with it: a silver voice recorder.

The officer said they'd found it in the corner of the tollbooth. The casing was broken, but the memory card was still inside.

Julian Shaw restored the last file for me.

He was the first person to rush into the tollbooth that night, and he was my colleague.

The file ran fifty-one minutes and thirteen seconds.

It opened with rain and the beat of the wipers.

Then I heard myself ask a question.

"Stan, are you going to leave me here?"

The room was so quiet that only the soft hum of the machines remained.

Stan shot to his feet.

"Don't listen to it."

He reached out to grab the earpiece.

I held the play button down.

The him in the recording sounded impatient.

"Twenty minutes. I promise."

"You're not a child anymore."

He paused.

"Agatha's the one who could really get hurt."

The car door shut.

The tires rolled over standing water, farther and farther away.

After that came the sound of me dialing three times.

When the third call was cut off, his voicemail came through, clear as anything.

"I'm driving. Stop it."

Stan's face went a frightening white.

"Viola, I didn't know there'd be an accident that day."

"I really only meant to be gone twenty minutes."

The recording kept going.

His twenty minutes passed.

Thirty minutes passed.

At forty minutes, a truck horn blared out of nowhere.

I heard myself cry out for my dad.

Then the crash, the shattering glass, and Julian's voice screaming for help in the rain.

Stan lunged over and yanked the earpiece out.

His hands shook so badly he could barely grip the cord.

"Enough."

"Please. Don't listen anymore."

I looked at him.

Only in that moment did I understand why my body was afraid of him.

My mind had forgotten, but it still remembered who had left it behind.

"You said just now that we had a good marriage."

Stan opened his mouth, and not a single word came out.

I took the marriage certificate from under my pillow and set it in front of him.

"Mr. James."

"Let's get a divorce."