1

It wasn’t the broken plate that smashed everything.

No, those fault lines had been running through us and between us from the very beginning. Tearing us apart, even when it felt like they were pulling us together. Their tremors had been with us from the start, threatening our foundations. The signs had been plain to see, if we had cared to look. But we had been willfully blind to the signals, taking the seismic foreshocks as evidence of rising passion, not an oncoming tidal wave.

“Erin’s missing,” Alex said.

He was frowning as he said it, a sharp crease between his eyebrows. Normally Alex Miller, my almost-fiancé, looked a good ten years younger than his actual age of thirty-nine. His face was thin and, when he was happy, boyishly expressive, with hazel eyes full of that light of intelligence that’s more attractive than mere good looks.

But right now worry was adding lines to his face, and that light of intelligence was turned away from me, along with his eyes. Not because he was afraid of how I might react to yet another conversation about his ex-girlfriend who was back in his life in a bigger and bigger way. Because he was much more concerned about Erin than he was about me. At least, that’s how it felt.

“How long’s she been gone?” I asked.

I was proud of how calm my voice was. I thought I sounded sympathetic and supportive, not at all like a woman on the verge of screaming and throwing crockery at the person I had convinced myself I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

“She didn’t show up at work this morning,” Alex said. “And she hasn’t answered her phone all day.”

“Doesn’t she go AWOL pretty regularly?” I was pretty sure I managed to keep my voice warm, sympathetic, and non-judgmental. But it was hard.

Alex had started a hot and very heavy affair with Erin Carver when they had been serving together in the Navy. It had been, I had gathered, one of those lightning-strike, once-in-a-lifetime loves. Or it least it had been for him. I had originally thought it had been for her, too. But the more I watched her, the less I thought she had ever actually loved him. After spending a summer seeing her interact with him on a regular basis, I was starting to suspect that she had always just been using him as a shield to hide from her own problems.

My suspicions were strengthened by the fact that their great love had collapsed under the weight of Erin’s extreme, deep-seated fucked-upness. This had caused her to drink, sleep around, and disappear for weeks at a time. During my more judgmental moods, I thought that this was not how you treated someone you really loved. They shouldn’t be just another drug that you used to dull the pain. Or perhaps for someone like Erin, the drugs you used to dull the pain were what you loved most in life. You still used them, though, and then threw them away when you were done with them.

Erin wasn’t quite ready to throw Alex away yet, though. Or maybe there was still some tie between them they couldn’t break, possibly a karmic one. After cutting off all contact with each other for years, they had both ended up at the DLI, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and were now working together closely. I liked to tell myself it didn’t bother me. More and more, I was realizing I was lying.

Under other circumstances it could have been okay. Alex and Erin had broken up a long time before he and I had gotten together, while we had both been adjuncting in New Jersey. Our relationship had continued when I’d moved first to North Carolina, then back to my alma mater Indiana University, and then to Georgia, in pursuit of contingent faculty jobs, and he’d taken a job teaching Arabic at the DLI. Now I was spending the summer with him in Monterey teaching an intensive Russian course at the nearby civilian institute. Everything should have been hunky-dory.

Or so I was trying to tell myself. Alex was very demonstrably with me now, and Erin was with someone else too, another ex-servicemember named Frank McAvoy who’d taken a shine to her when all three of them had been in Iraq, and had taken his chance when they’d both ended up in Northern California.

We’d all tried to act like two normal couples who had a lot in common and enjoyed spending time together. Frank was now with the FBI and had offered to try and help me get a job there myself. Then I could leave my precarious job in Georgia, maybe move out to Northern California with Alex, and all four of us could live in peace and harmony and happily ever after.

The problem was, Alex and I both disliked Frank. I kind of suspected Erin did too, she was just even better at lying to herself than I was. Or maybe she just didn’t know how to be with someone she really loved. Maybe she’d never really loved someone at all. Maybe she wasn’t capable of it. Or maybe she had an even more tragic backstory than I knew. To my critical eyes, that didn’t make her any less of a user.

In any case, Alex and Erin’s hot and heavy affair was still casting long shadows over both of them. And then, this past May, Frank had shot Erin.

The story was that it was a stupid accident. They’d been doing some target practice together. Somehow, he’d accidentally fired a loaded handgun into her left side at point-blank range.

Fortunately, it had missed everything vital. Her heart and lungs were fine. So, she’d told me in one of the weirdly intimate conversations we’d been having recently, was her left breast. There had been some concern there would be permanent scarring and distortion. But everything was healing up nicely. She’d lifted up her shirt and shown me before I could stop her.

“This is different,” Alex said, interrupting unwelcome memories of the pink healing scar on the smooth pale skin covering Erin’s left breast. I didn’t particularly care to look at other women’s breasts. I especially didn’t care to look at Erin’s, since she and I were disturbingly alike. Clearly Alex had a type, because we were both slender and athletic, with the dark hair, blue eyes, and pale skin of a Celtic maiden in a BBC drama. Alex, it had to be said, was not alone in having that type, because we both got plenty of attention from most men and some women. I was six inches taller than Erin’s 5’4”, able to look Alex and most other men in the eye, but other than that, we could have been sisters.

So all in all, I had not been pleased when Erin had shown me her breasts. I would have said that was from my jealousy and my deeply rooted heterosexuality. I had a suspicion some of my friends would tell me it was from deeply repressed lesbian tendencies. I was 99% sure that was the kind of liberal academic bullshit that won us so few friends and allies out in the “real world.” 1% of me thought it might be true. Realistically, I was probably a 1, maybe a 2, on the Kinsey Scale. But that was normal, right? And it didn’t matter anyway because I had Alex.  I would never have to dive into the anguish and heartbreak that was same-sex dating. If things worked out the way I hoped they would, I would never have to dive into the anguish and heartbreak that was any kind of dating ever again. Right? RIGHT?

“How is it different?” I asked. From Alex’s sudden look my way, I guessed that my voice had lost a lot of its former warmth and sympathy, and the underlying fear and anger was starting to show through.

“Erin wouldn’t miss work,” Alex said. “She’d cheat on me and leave me hanging, but she wouldn’t fuck around where work was concerned. That was the only thing she could ever be counted on to show up for.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I resisted the temptation to point out that Erin couldn’t cheat on Alex now, since they weren’t together. I knew what he was trying to say. And I also knew that in his mind, maybe they always would be a little bit together. I told myself that was okay. After all, I had someone I’d always be a little bit together with too. I should be more understanding.

“Should we drive up to Salinas and check on her?” I asked.

Alex’s face relaxed into a relieved smile. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a great idea.” He looked at his phone, checking the time and probably for any text notifications. “Maybe we should go ahead and go,” he said. “If you don’t mind. We can grab something on the way if you’re hungry.”

I was starving. I was also trying to put myself on a diet. “That’s okay,” I said. “Let’s check on Erin first, and then figure out what we want to do. Maybe she just has the flu and her phone died, or something. We can bring her some soup and hit up a restaurant in Salinas before heading back.”

“Great idea. And Rowena?” An expression that was equal parts grateful appreciation and shameful guilt crossed Alex’s face. “Thanks. I know this isn’t how you wanted to spend your summer, and especially not your last weekend here in California.”

“No problem,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

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