No Hiding in Boise Read online

  “Saha,” Evie calls, unable to contain herself.

  For a fleeting moment, I think this is just a casual visit from my best friend. We haven’t seen each other in a while. Cale seems annoyed when I have Sahana over. He goes straight to the bedroom when she arrives, turns on the TV to watch whatever sporting event will lull him to sleep. The last time Sahana visited, I said, “I bet he’s already passed out” at seven thirty, and she was so disbelieving that we tiptoed downstairs to see. Sure enough, he was asleep, snoring even, the TV still on. She couldn’t help but laugh. His eyes flickered open and he sighed, mumbled something indecipherable, and rolled away from us. I apologized the next morning, and he said, deadpan, “I’m glad you were both entertained by my exhaustion.”

  “Hi, sweetie,” Sahana says to Evie, with the same kind of smile I’ve been forcing. When her eyes lift to mine, the smile is gone and she hugs me.

  “I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says.

  Evie is oblivious—she starts babbling “Ring around the rosy” and turning in circles—but I still give Sahana a warning look.

  “Let’s talk after she goes to bed.”

  I SING EVIE the same four lullabies every night: “Hush Little Baby,” “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Tonight is no different—or that’s the lie I’m perpetuating for my daughter. By the end of the fourth song, her eyelids are heavy. I tell her to have sweet dreams, kiss her cheek, and then leave her to continue believing her world is safe, predictable.

  Sahana is in the living room when I go upstairs, sitting cross-legged on the couch. I sit next to her, let my body fall against hers. She pets the hair on my head as if I am her lapdog.

  When I left the hospital after seeing Cale, I called Sahana. In true Sahana fashion, she hadn’t heard the news, knew nothing of the shooting. When I told her what had happened, the first thing she said was, “Wait, what? Cale was at some bar in the middle of the night?” Her shock was a relief; I’d been wondering if I was crazy for fixating on this fact.

  “You must be exhausted,” she says.

  “I am,” I say. “I might just fall asleep like this.”

  “And that will be fine with me until I have to pee. Your elbow is pressing into my bladder.”

  I manage a laugh and sit up.

  “Have you heard from the hospital?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I’m assuming no news is good news on that front. I’ll go back in the morning.”

  She shakes her head in disbelief of it all.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, feeling relieved just admitting this. “Am I supposed to stand watch over him twenty-four hours a day? Is that what most wives do?”

  “In the movies, yes,” she says. “But you have a toddler and a life to manage. And you need to rest and eat and things, so I don’t see how you could stand watch twenty-four hours a day.”

  I’m grateful for this rationale. It’s what I’ve been telling myself, but sometimes only the words of another person will do.

  We are quiet for a moment, and then Sahana acknowledges the elephant staring at us in the room.

  “What was he doing there?” she wonders.

  I know what she’s asking—why was he at that bar, alone. Sahana has always been direct, blunt. When I’ve told her she needs to be “softer,” she’s said, in a faux accent, “I do not understand this ‘softer.’” Sahana is first-generation Indian American. When we were growing up, she dealt with a fair share of teasing—jokes about turbans, call centers, 7-Elevens. Boise isn’t exactly the most culturally sensitive place. She never tried to hide who she was though, never denied her heritage. One Halloween, we dressed up as a salt and pepper shaker set.

  “I don’t know what he was doing there,” I say, staring out the window, unblinking.

  “Do you think he’d been doing this for a while?” Her brows are knitted together so tightly that they appear to be one.

  “Going to bars in the middle of the night?”

  She nods.

  “I have no idea.”

  She takes my hand in hers.

  “Ang, I have to ask you something,” she says.

  I look at her. Her big brown eyes are glassy with coming tears.

  “Yeah?” I say, already knowing what question is coming. It’s a question I’ve been pondering ever since I realized Cale wasn’t in bed next to me.

  “Do you think Cale was … seeing someone?”

  There it is, the biggest worm in the rusty can.

  “I mean, I don’t think he’d go to a bar just for the hell of it,” I say.

  She sighs.

  Sahana knows Cale and I were having problems—not problem problems, but there was an undercurrent of tension, which is almost more of a threat to a marriage than a problem problem. I knew Cale wasn’t happy, but he didn’t want to talk about it, insisted he was “fine” every time I annoyed him by asking if he was okay. Sahana and I spent hours on the phone guessing at what was bothering him. We had a number of unoriginal theories:

  Maybe he misses having couple time.

  Maybe he misses having alone time.

  Maybe he’s just really, really tired.

  Maybe he’s overwhelmed by the responsibility of a child.

  Maybe he’s worried about finances.

  Maybe he has postpartum depression.

  That last one was Sahana’s suggestion—a joke, at first. We started to wonder if it was a real thing. Sahana coined it post-dadum depression.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter what our theories were because he wasn’t going to admit to anything bothering him. Sahana— who is a psychologist—said it made sense on a psychological level. Cale is an only child, raised by a single mom who worked three jobs. His mom didn’t have time for his feelings. She expected him to fend for himself, the motto of the house being “Just deal with it.” Cale’s always lived in a way that aims to disprove the notion that no man is an island. He prides himself on his independence and strength of will. Admitting to something bothering him would be admitting weakness; admitting weakness would be admitting the need for help on his island.

  “An affair seems so cliché,” I say.

  Sahana shrugs. “This is how men operate. They look for escapes—women or whiskey, usually.”

  Sahana is steadfastly single. She claims to have zero interest in settling down, has all kinds of arguments against the institution of marriage. I think it’s a front; she’s just afraid of heartbreak. Despite being a successful psychologist, she’s somewhat clueless about herself.

  “I just can’t believe he’d have the energy for an affair,” I say. I keep picturing him falling asleep on the couch before eight o’clock. Was that all an act?

  “Well, I bet you didn’t think he’d have the energy to go to a bar in the middle of the night either.”

  I try to picture the woman meeting him at the bar. What would she be like? I suppose he would want someone child-less—not necessarily younger, but childless, free. She would be a reprieve from me, someone unattached to schedules and routines, someone spontaneous, the type of person to say “Let’s go to the river” on a whim, then strip down and run in the current. This woman would help him forget the reality of his life—his life with me and Evie, with all its mundanity and the inevitable annoyances of clogged drains and cold viruses and property tax bills. I picture him laughing with this woman, his eyes twinkling the way they used to twinkle with me. I can’t remember the last time Cale and I laughed together. It must have been when he was teasing me about humming that Sesame Street song. Now I wonder if he was laughing then only because he’d fallen in love with this other woman, this other life.

  “Cale’s going to have some ’splaining to do when he wakes up,” Sahana says.

  I haven’t given Sahana—or anyone, for that matter— the details of Cale’s prognosis. She knows he’s in a coma. She knows it’s serious. But she doesn’t know what the doctor told me—that Cale will n
ot be the same person ever again. Even if he does wake up, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to say my name, let alone tell me what he was doing at a dive bar on the outskirts of downtown. If there is another woman, he might not even remember her.

  I can tell it makes Sahana feel better to be hopeful, to say things like “when he wakes up.” So I don’t correct her.

  “Yeah,” I say, “lots of explaining.”

  TESSA

  AT FIRST, RYAN BEGGED me to sleep. Now he says I’m sleeping too much. There’s no pleasing him.

  The thing is, I’m not even sleeping. He just assumes that’s what I’m doing because I’m in bed all day. It’s been only two days since the shooting. I don’t know how he expects me to be up and around.

  “Did you tell your teachers you’ll be missing classes?” he asks, sitting on the edge of the bed, sounding too much like someone’s dad—not my dad, because my dad left my mom when I was six weeks old. I’ve never asked her much about him. Once, when I was a teenager, I told her I was curious who he was. She said she’d heard he’d OD’d—heroin. A real winner, apparently. I didn’t ask anything more after that.

  “Yes, I emailed them,” I say.

  I’m taking classes at Boise State University—a twenty-three-year-old freshman. Better late than never, I guess. They have a good nursing program. That’s my goal. That’s the whole reason I moved to Boise from Bend. I told myself it would be a fresh start. I broke up with my then-boyfriend, swore off men. Then I met Ryan at an off-campus house party my second week here and moved in with him a few months later. I fear I’m that girl, the one who can’t be alone.

  Ryan stands from the bed.

  “Okay, well, I have to head to the firm, make up for missing yesterday,” he says.

  I hate how he says “the firm,” as if he’s already a lawyer, as if he has some big, important job. He’s just an intern—unpaid. His parents pay for our apartment—or his apartment; he hasn’t told them we live together. He says they’ve made it clear that they are “unwilling to fund cohabitation.”

  “I didn’t ask you to stay home and watch over me,” I snap.

  “Tess, don’t be like this.”

  He bends at the waist, kisses my forehead, diffusing my rage.

  “You want to meet me somewhere for lunch?” he asks.

  I haven’t been eating much, despite Ryan’s attempts. Still, I say, “Maybe. Text me around eleven.”

  He kisses my forehead again and says he loves me.

  He does love me.

  I’m a brat. I know that.

  When I hear the front door close, I slump against the headboard and resume scrolling through Instagram on my phone.

  I still haven’t told anyone yet about being at Ray’s during the shooting. I should have told my mom right away, but I didn’t, and now it’s just weird. As for friends, I don’t have many in Boise. I’ve been texting like normal with a couple friends back in Bend, one telling me about a guy she met, the other asking me for a recipe for pot brownies that I used to make. They’re going to think this is weird when they do find out what happened, but I figure I can blame post-traumatic stress. Ryan thinks I have PTSD, like, officially. Maybe I do. I’m just not ready to talk about it all with a bunch of people. I’m not ready to see their shock and horror. I just want to pretend like things are normal for a while. I want to scroll through Instagram and see that life goes on as usual. I want to entertain the delusion that I can forget Ray’s and just move on.

  But it’s just that, a delusion.

  I google “Ray’s Bar shooting” at least once every ten minutes, hoping to find new information. I keep wondering about Cale. I keep replaying him shouting, “Go, now.” I keep seeing his face—panicked, scared. I haven’t told Ryan anything about Cale, about how he possibly saved my life. I haven’t told him much of anything about that night—about hiding in the storage closet, about the black zip-up hoodie that I still have. I cling to it like a child clings to an old, worn blanket.

  Five pages into search results, I find a message board with the wildly inappropriate name “Shooting the Shit.” The description just says, “Thoughts and opinions on the latest mass shootings. First Amendment reigns supreme.” I click. It’s not a fancy website, just a black background with a white area featuring a wall of text. People hiding behind screen names say things like:

  If he really had a .45-caliber Glock 21, he must’ve been a terrible shot. He should’ve killed like 60 people with that thing.

  And:

  This shooting is nothin compared to Vegas. That shit was crazy.

  And:

  The shooter looks like this dude that used to work at my gym.

  I refresh the page every few minutes, watching the conversation in real time. Most of the participants seem to be gossip-hungry ambulance chaser types or gun aficionados. There’s a lot of talk about the shooter: Jed Ketcher. Some people think he was part of some terrorist group, but I doubt that. There are photos of him all over the message board, taken from Facebook or wherever else. He looks like an average white guy with premature balding. He’s not smiling in any of the photos— or, rather, people have chosen not to post any photos of him smiling. I don’t know why people are so worried about terrorists in this stupid country; the shooters are almost always white guys harboring a secret grudge or a mental illness or a gun fetish, or all three.

  I create an account with the screen name TessWasHere so I can post something:

  Why are you guys talking so much about this Jed guy? He doesn’t deserve attention. The victims deserve attention.

  Someone with the screen name JR2018 responds immediately:

  Snore. Someone cue the violin.

  Someone (LvAll21) responds:

  Shut up, JR2018. UR such a dick.

  LvAll21 responds to me too:

  @TessWasHere, I totally agree. These shooters shouldn’t get all this attention. Gotta remember the victims, RIP.

  I post again:

  Does anyone know who the injured people are?

  Someone (Boyseeeee) responds immediately:

  Ya, back a few pages. Someone posted the names yesterday. Someone’s friend’s a nurse or something at St. Al’s and she leaked the names.

  I click back a few pages and find the names:

  Kat Reynolds Cale Matthews

  Cale, the guy who may have saved my life, was injured. I don’t know how badly. There are no details—just his name. Boyseeeee responds again:

  Don’t bother calling the hospital tho. They aren’t giving out any info.

  I write:

  Thx.

  I close out of the message board and google the hospital, Saint Al’s. I’ve never been there. I’ve been to the other hospital in town—Saint Luke’s. I cut my finger when slicing limes at Ray’s, of all things. At the time, I would have guessed that would be the most traumatic thing to happen to me at the bar.

  On the Saint Al’s website, it says that visiting hours in the main hospital are 10:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., but visitors in the ICU are allowed only during a couple two-hour windows. I don’t know if Cale is in the ICU. I hope he’s not. I figure I’ll just show up. It’s possible they aren’t even allowing visitors for the shooting victims, for privacy reasons. Maybe they will let me leave a card, though. Or one of those “Get Well Soon” balloons. The website says no latex is allowed, only Mylar. I didn’t even know there were different kinds of balloons. I assume the gift shop will sell the allowable ones.

  Ryan will think it’s ridiculous, visiting Cale. It’s just that I need him to know that I’m here, able to write him a card and buy him a balloon, because he told me to run.

  JOYCE

  IT’S STRANGE TO WAKE up in Gary’s house—not in his bed, mind you; he has a guest room that he keeps for when his daughter visits, and that’s where I stay. He says I can stay as long as I want.

  I shouldn’t use the term “wake up,” as that implies I slept, which I did not. Every time I close my eyes, I see Jed’s pale face in that photogr
aph. It still doesn’t seem real to me, the whole thing, which is probably why my brain keeps bombarding me with this image of him—a way to remind me, to say, It really happened.

  I pull on a pair of jeans and a gray sweatshirt that I don’t remember grabbing when leaving the house in such a hurry. I wonder what the police have found in Jed’s room, on his computer. I wonder if they will tell me.

  When I emerge from the room, I see Gary sitting on a stool at his kitchen island, the newspaper folded open in front of him. I’m sure the shooting is the front-page story.

  “Good morning,” I say, feeling like I’m intruding on his morning routine.

  He startles, coffee sloshing about in the cup in his hand.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  He turns the paper over, hiding the headlines from me.

  “No, it’s okay. I’m just not used to having someone in the house.”

  I wonder if he’s saying this as a way of telling me that he hasn’t dated since we ended things.

  I run my hand over the kitchen island countertop. Toward the end of our time together, he’d been shopping around for the perfect slab of quartz. He wanted the look of marble, but didn’t want marble—too expensive, not durable enough. It appears he found the elusive slab, white with gray veining.

  “The counter looks nice,” I say.

  He looks pleased that I’ve noticed. “Thanks,” he says. “Can I make you some toast?”

  There is nothing appealing about food right now.

  “Just coffee would be great,” I say.

  He gets up, goes to the coffeepot, pours me a cup.

  I sit at the stool next to his, and he slides the cup across the island to me.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He resumes his seat, and I realize we must look like an old married couple on these side-by-side stools with our matching mugs of coffee.

  “Did you sleep?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “But the bed was extremely comfortable.”

  “Well, that’s good.”