The Wrong Exit

My editor called it a "career-lite assignment," which is her way of saying it won't get you a raise but it might get you out of the house. A reclusive painter on some island off the Maine coast, nobody has interviewed her in fifteen years, my name on the byline if I can pull it off. I said yes before I looked at a map.

Cassie, by the way. Forty-three. That matters later, or it matters now, depending on how you count.

The drive from my place in Rhode Island was supposed to be about five hours, then a ferry, then a whole other thing involving an island road that the assignment notes described as "impassable in weather," with no mention of what counted as weather. I packed light. One bag, laptop, a sundress for if the reclusive artist turned out to hate journalists less on a patio, and a rain shell because it was late August and humid enough that my hair had already given up by the time I locked the front door.

I threw the bag into the back seat of my Corolla, which has two hundred thousand miles on it and a radio that only gets static and one classic rock station, and I sat behind the wheel checking my phone for the fifth time. The assignment email had three attachments. I had read all three attachments on the couch the night before. I read them again anyway, standing still in a parking lot, because that is what I do instead of just driving.

Then I drove.

I regretted the whole thing by the time I hit Massachusetts. I regretted it harder in New Hampshire, where there was road work and a woman in a Suburban ahead of me who braked for no reason at all at least nine separate times. Somewhere around the third hour I started doing the math on my life, which is a bad habit of mine on long drives, and the math said I was forty-three, single for two years, and my last three dates had been with men I met on an app who all described themselves as "fluent in sarcasm." None of them were fluent in sarcasm. One of them was barely fluent in English.

So yeah, the assignment was less about the byline and more about the fact that my weekends had become a rotation of laundry, a farmers market, and texting my sister photos of my cat. A reclusive artist on an island sounded, honestly, like a vacation from my own personality.

* * *

I stopped outside Portland at a rest area, mostly because I had been nursing one large gas station coffee for two hours and my bladder had started filing motions with the court. Also I wanted a second coffee, because I am a person who makes bad decisions about caffeine.

The rest area had the usual setup, bathrooms, a vending bank, a grass strip with some picnic tables, and one water spigot with a guy bent over it filling a bottle. I came around the corner of the building at a decent clip, phone in one hand, keys in the other, doing that thing where you walk and read at the same time, which is how I nearly took out a complete stranger at the shoulders.

He turned. I turned. We both did the half-step back and the little hands-up apology thing at the same time, and then we both froze, because we knew each other. Not vaguely. We really knew each other.

"Cassie?" he said.

"Monty," I said, and my voice did something embarrassing on the second syllable, like a tire losing air.

Monty. Full name Montgomery Hale, forty-four now, which I knew because I know his birthday is two months before mine and I have always been the kind of person who remembers birthdays like a filing system. We were in the same graduate journalism program twenty years ago. We dated for about six months when we were twenty-three and twenty-four, back when I still thought I was going to save local newspapers and he still thought he was going to be a war photographer. He ended up in IT consulting. I ended up writing features for a paper with shrinking sections. Life is a real comedienne.

He looked good. That is the plain truth of it. Tall, still lean, gray coming in at the temples in a way that looked intentional even though I would bet money it wasn't. He had hiking boots on and a compact little backpack sitting on the picnic table next to a water bottle that was now overflowing, which we both noticed at the same time and which broke the spell, because he lunged for it and shut the spigot and we both laughed, and laughing with Monty after twenty years felt like sliding into a car you used to drive. Everything's where you left it.

"Okay, wait," he said, wringing out the cap. "What are the odds. What are you doing here, are you still in Rhode Island?"

"Still in Rhode Island. I'm on an assignment, some artist on an island, Harlow Island? Off the coast. There's a ferry."

His face did something. "You're kidding me."

"What."

"I'm going to Harlow Island. I booked a little cabin three months ago, solo hiking trip, I'm driving up right now." He pointed across the lot at a gray Subaru with a roof box. "That's my car."

I reacted coolly. I did not. I said, "Shut up," very loudly, in a rest area, near a family eating sandwiches, and the family looked over, and Monty laughed again, and I felt twenty-three for about four seconds, which is a feeling I had not had in a long time and which I did not examine too closely right there by the vending machines.

We stood there filling in the basics. He was divorced, no kids, lived outside Kelley, still played rec soccer and had recently torn a hamstring doing it, which he described in more medical detail than anyone needed. I gave him the shorter version of my last two years, which is that there wasn't much to tell, and he nodded in a way that didn't make me feel pitiful, which is a skill.

"Okay, so," he said, "I've got the ferry times on my phone. You're coming with me, we can caravan, there's a good exit for the terminal but the signs are garbage, I missed it the first time I drove up here in June and ended up twenty minutes inland at a farm stand."

"Caravan," I said. "Like a convoy."

"Like a convoy, Cassie."

* * *

Here is where I tell you the part I have already confessed to my sister over the phone twice.

We got on the road. His Subaru ahead, my Corolla behind, radio static, coffee number three. The highway split, the signs were indeed garbage, and I saw his blinker go left and I went left, and then a white pickup cut between us and I lost him for a solid ninety seconds, and when I caught up I was following what I believed was his car but was in fact a different gray Subaru, because apparently every third car in Maine is a gray Subaru.

I followed the wrong Subaru for eleven minutes, and Monty, having realized I'd turned off, had been circling back, down a road with increasing potholes and decreasing cell signal, until it turned into a gravel lot in front of a motel called the Driftwood Aire, the neon AIRE flickering like it was sending a distress signal. The real Monty was nowhere. My phone had one bar. It was getting toward evening, the light going all golden and embarrassing, like the whole coast was set dressing for a movie about a woman who takes a wrong turn.

I pulled in, put my forehead on the wheel, and laughed at myself for a while, the kind of laugh that's one bad day away from being something else. Then a pair of headlights swung into the lot behind me and I knew the shape of that car before it even parked.

He got out and stood there in the lot of the Driftwood Aire, hands on his hips, taking in the neon and my Corolla and my face pressed against the windshield, and I could see him doing the math in real time. I rolled down the window.

"Eleven minutes," I said. "I followed another gray Subaru for eleven minutes."

He leaned down on the door frame, and he had that expression, the one from the old seminar days when my laptop died during my thesis presentation. Not quite pity. Something warmer and more amused.

"Well. Good news, I've been behind you this whole time in a spiritual sense."

"I'm going to need more concrete news than that."

He looked at his phone, then at the motel office, then at the sun, which was getting low and orange over a line of scrub pines. The ferry, he explained, had a morning sailing that made way more sense than trying to catch the last one of the day. His cabin wasn't booked until tomorrow anyway. It was late August, humid enough that my shirt had been sticking to the seat for three hours, and the idea of one more ferry sprint and one more unknown island road in the dark did not appeal to either of us.

"So we stay here," he said, like it was obvious, and I remember thinking, fine, yes, obviously, the Driftwood Aire, a place I had chosen by accident, was going to be where I slept tonight, and that was the kind of decision my life had been making for me lately anyway.

* * *

The office was a narrow room with a ceiling fan turning at about the speed of continental drift and a rack of pamphlets for whale watches that had stopped running in September of some prior year. The woman behind the desk had reading glasses on a chain and a crossword in front of her, and she did not look up right away, which gave Monty and me a moment to stand there feeling like characters in something.

"I'm sorry, hon," she finally said, tapping the ledger with her pen like the pen was at fault. "You're lucky I've got anything. The lobster festival crowd. It's the one single left, it's got a double bed, no microwave."

"We'll take it," Monty said, and then we both stopped, because we had both done the same math at the same time, and the math had come out to one room, one bed, two people who used to date in a previous century.

I want to tell you there was a long negotiation. There wasn't. We did the awkward shuffle, him offering to sleep in the Subaru, me waving that off, both of us saying variations of "it's fine" until it was fine. The room was forty-some dollars more than I would have spent on principle, and the principle had been taking losses all day anyway.

The single, as advertised, had one double bed with a quilt that had seen things, a window air conditioner that came on with a sound like a small plane, and a very small bathroom. Monty carried the bags in from the cars. He carried mine, actually, since he was already holding his, and that is the detail that matters, so hold onto it.

We got situated. He claimed the chair by the window for his stuff and I claimed the little desk for my laptop and my notebook, and we fell into that easy rhythm of two people who have shared a newsroom, making comments about the room, the AC, the pamphlet for a ferry that mentioned "compact cars only" in bold. It was nice. That's the thing I kept noticing, how nice and how ordinary it was, like no twenty years had happened, only a long lunch break.

Then he unzipped his duffel and pulled out a rain shell, a green one, and I said, "That's mine."

He looked at it. He looked at me.

"I grabbed it at the rest area," he said slowly. "When we were loading up. I took two bags off the picnic table and I guess one of them