Heat Dome

My friend Gina made all the right decisions. She pursued an in-demand degree, found a position, then job-hopped her way to a respectable salary. Who could have predicted the industry collapse and mass layoffs? Even then, she did the right things. She added certifications, hit up her network, sent out over three hundred job applications. She landed a dozen interviews, but no follow-ups. I think I know why. Gina’s default facial expression is one of mild confusion, made worse when she’s nervous. Her attempts to appear relaxed only make her look hammered. I’m the confident, good-looking friend. Gina is neither.

Gina has spent the last six months living on my couch. She works weekends as an assistant to a realtor friend who insists on Friday night drinks to gird themselves for a weekend of open houses. Worse, it no longer horrifies Gina to know that she’s basically employed as a drinking buddy. Gina could use some luck. Also, I’m getting married this summer and I need her to move out. I submit a slew of job applications on her behalf. She gets an interview but shows no enthusiasm. She says it’s hopeless. I talk her into letting me impersonate her at the interview, just to see what happens. We’re in adjacent fields—I can wing it. The interview is here in Albuquerque for a job at the company’s Georgia headquarters. Who would know?

A group of three men conduct the interview. I’m confident, but not threatening. Knowledgeable, but also inquisitive. I’m ready to tackle any challenge. I live for challenges. I laugh at their quips and add my own. I swing the conversation to sports and attest to my (sudden) love for the Atlanta Falcons. Pure icing. At the end of the interview, I take out three business cards and write Gina’s personal number on the back. I hand them over with a smile. Anytime, I say. Back outside, I put on my sunglasses and slide my engagement ring back on.

The following week, I commandeer Gina’s phone. I don’t want her answering a call from the company in her current funk. I delete all the games and social media apps on her phone. I have the cracked screen replaced and buy her a slim leather phone case with slots that one day could hold balance-free credit cards. I download business apps she’ll likely use at work and organize the app icons on her screen. I want the object she looks at more often than a mirror to be an aspirational talisman, anticipating her independence and professionalism. I bring Gina’s phone with me to work during the week to compel her to complete her digital detox. I don’t ask her for permission; being Gina has done Gina no good. She’s too defeated to put up a fight.

I have news for her when I get home from work. She is sitting at the kitchen table, one knee bobbing like a jackhammer, her hands out for her phone.

“How does four grand in moving costs sound?” I say.

She blinks a couple of times. “You got the job?”

“You got the job. Atlanta, baby!”

Her default expression of confusion gives way to elation. Just as suddenly, she begins to sob. She slides to the floor. I crouch beside her and rub her back and tell her she just needed some confidence. Her qualifications and experience speak for themselves. Which would be true in a just world. It’s best she not dwell on the reasons I have more success at interviews.

Gina maxes out her credit cards on a new wardrobe, Danish eyeglasses, a manicure, and a haircut with highlights. I can’t help but notice that she’s trying to look like me. I gift her a one-year subscription to a budgeting app.

Swamped with the onboarding process at her new job in Atlanta, Gina can’t fly out for my wedding. Honestly, I’m glad she’s not around. Her long downturn had begun to feel contagious. She isn’t even one of my closest friends. I was friends with her sister, Misty, until a brain tumor took Misty our senior year in high school. I promised Misty that Gina could always come to me for anything. I keep that promise to a point, but then lose touch with Gina after my wedding. I’m mired in work and the private obligations of being a wife and, rather quickly, a mother. After my daughter is born, I break my long abstinence from social media to share snapshots of our baby with family and friends. I dip into Gina’s posts. She’s lost weight. She’s had work done. She no longer looks confused. I feel a little hurt when I discover she’s married, but it appears to have been a private courthouse ceremony. There are six congratulatory comments, most clotted with emojis. A no-frills budget-friendly wedding like this is what I should have had—or none at all. I order Gina an air fryer as a belated gift.

I feel something new. Envy. Not just of Gina, but of so many of my past friends and acquaintances. I know I’m seeing carefully curated glimpses of lives with all the unpleasantness excised, but my life doesn’t hold even the rudiments of adventure. My life is sleep deprivation and mind-numbing routine. I blame social media for my mood and go off it again. I lose track of Gina entirely.

Several years later, I hear from a mutual friend that Gina has been charged with bribery, part of a government investigation into the company she was working for. She’s sentenced to sixteen months. I feel like it’s my fault until I learn it was a different company from the one I interviewed at on her behalf. She had moved on, but in the wrong direction.

Gina is serving her sentence at Templeton, a four-hour drive from me. I get away from my husband and daughter for the weekend and drive down to visit her. From the outside, the place looks like one of those country club prisons you hear about. There’s a grand white facade with an arched colonnade and filigree that looks vaguely Catholic. The inside is far from ecclesiastical. I prepare to encounter the old Gina again, but she’s fit, tan, and jokes with me about swapping places for old times’ sake. She’s still married, she says, which is what keeps her together. Her husband works from home and moved nearby to make visits easier, though there’s no conjugal at Templeton. It’s been three months, she says. I tell her I’m married and it’s been six. Because it might make her feel better, I admit that divorce is probably in my future. We don’t talk about her future. How it’ll be hard finding decent work with her record. How she’ll never get this time back. When I say goodbye, Gina asks if I’m driving all the way home tonight. I tell her I’m spending the night in El Paso. She asks where and if the hotel is all right and what amenities it has. And I answer her questions, pretending she’s not trying to prolong the visit.

Back at my hotel, I’m thankful for the room in a way I wasn’t when I checked in this afternoon. I’m thankful for the little coffee maker and the pods of flavored coffee. I’m thankful for the private bathroom and the bottles of shampoo and body wash. My gratitude extends to the curtains, drab as they are, and to the pillows and the clock radio that plays ocean sounds to mask the clatter from the rail yard. I check in on home, but my daughter and my husband are watching a movie. The call is brief. While I’m contemplating a raid of the mini fridge, the hotel phone starts flashing. There’s someone in the lobby to see me, a woman says.

I step out of the elevator and see a middle-aged man chatting with the receptionist. He sees me and smiles, says something to the receptionist, then walks towards me, hand out.

“Marty, Gina’s husband. Welcome to El Paso,” he says. “Gina said I just had to catch you while you were in town. Can I buy you a drink, or what about dinner? I’m starving.”

“You’re a mind reader,” I say.

We walk to a Mexican restaurant near my hotel. Marty is better-looking than in Gina’s wedding photos, with an unthreatening kindness to his face. I wonder about his political persuasion and religious beliefs, and wonder too what attracted him to Gina.

He looks across the table at me after we order. “Thanks for visiting Gina. It means the world to her. Most of our friends are back in Atlanta.”

“I feel bad it’s taken me this long.”

He waves me off. “Gina’s always talking about how good you are to her, how helpful. And look. You’re here.”

In one scenario, we continue talking about Gina over dinner. How unfortunate it is that she was the fall guy for the company. How unsympathetic the jury and judge were. Marty tells me that when Gina gets out of Templeton, she can go back to school and reinvent herself. He can work wherever life takes them. I find his optimism catching. We’re like friends by the end of the evening as he walks me back to my hotel. I see him off. In my room, I lie down on the bed and fall into a contented sleep. I’m awakened by the trains in the night. I reach over and turn on the sound of ocean waves.

In the other scenario, the one that played out, we have a couple drinks with dinner and gently talk about Gina’s shortcomings. Just little nibbles, playful observations, the kind a husband might have of his wife, a friend might have of a friend. Constructive criticism, really, were Gina here to receive it. We free up the table and move to the bar—see how considerate we are—where we have more margaritas. We talk about ourselves now, leaving Gina in her cell at Templeton. We talk about how hard it is being on your own, especially when you’re feeling alone within a relationship. Our conversation mirrors the one I had earlier that day with Gina. Three months since he…six months since I…

“I packed some shoes that are a bit small on me,” I say. “Gina might like them.”

“Yeah? She might. She says you have great taste.”

We go back to my hotel room and fuck in the dark. We don’t even make it to the bed. I wake before dawn, alone, and draw back the curtain. A huge fan of tiny clouds is splayed across the eastern sky, each heap perfectly spaced from its neighbor, as though racked there during the night for the sun to strike into chaos. I take a photo, but it doesn’t look as impressive on the screen, and I don’t send it to anyone. I remember Marty telling me, the night before, after our desperate fucking, that Gina had given him permission to sleep with me—if the moment was right and I wanted to. A gift to her husband, a gift for me. He told me this to say that there was no reason for any regrets, if I were to start having any. I asked him not to tell Gina, to instead say that we had done that other thing: parted as friends with a quick hug after dinner. The last thing I need is to become Gina’s charity case.

I put myself together to go downstairs for breakfast, but I can’t find my shoes. I look under the bed and in the closet and even in the hallway. I recount our walk from the restaurant to my hotel room for any moment when I might have removed them. I can only conclude that Marty believed my line about the shoes and took them on his way out. I drive home in hotel slippers. I don’t visit Gina again.

A year later, I get a call from Gina, asking if she can swing by. Templeton is behind her. I make an excuse, but she says she’s only fifteen minutes away and won’t stay long. She and Marty are moving west.

A van pulls up in front of our house, and Gina and Marty come up to the door, which my husband opens. It’s been a long time, my husband says, and Gina says it sure has. My husband and Marty shake hands. My daughter tears herself away from the TV long enough to make an appearance. We never have guests over.

We don’t talk about Templeton, and certainly nothing about that night in the hotel after I visited her, though I suspect Gina knows. She and Marty seem like the kind of couple who tell each other everything. We talk about old times and, as they step back outside to leave, the heat. It’s a new record for this time of the year. A hundred and twenty-one degrees. We gather around the thermometer mounted beside our front door, but only for a minute; our lungs burn. Well, we say, drive safe. Come visit, they say. It’s too hot to hug.

Once they’re in their moving van, we wave one last time and head back inside—my feet thanking the cool tile, my daughter watching TV, my husband retreating to his home office—which has doubled as his bedroom for most of the past year. My husband and I are doing the right thing: we’re in therapy, trying to work things out. We no longer fight or brood, but therapy has also given us the language to articulate our incompatibility with fierce clarity. I imagine my husband pulling away in a moving van. I don’t see myself waving.

The heat dome builds over the following week, the sky cloudless and bleached. The forces that cap temperature feel flimsy and untrustworthy. What’s to stop it from reaching 150 degrees tomorrow? Gina posts a photo of Marty in front of a giant kitschy thermometer at a truck stop. Another of Marty pouring a bottle of water over his head. I’m a weightless passenger accompanying them on their journey through Flagstaff, the Mojave Desert, Bakersfield. They head northwest to Monterey, where they’re relocating. Gina posts a photo of herself standing waist-deep in the Pacific, a V of pelicans riding the sky behind her. She’s escaped the heat dome.

How did I end up not living on the coast? I always loved the water.

This morning, I wake from the noise of my husband making breakfast for himself. I check my phone. Gina has posted a photo of a bunch of teenagers goofing around. A girl is cannonballing into a pool in the background, knees tucked to her chin, arms wrapped around her legs. It’s Misty, Gina’s sister. I feel a pang and look away, to Gina, standing at the edge of the pool and drinking a soda, her face and shoulders sunburned, her hair frizzy, a girl too young to know that she should suck in her gut. I recognize some of the other kids, guys I shouldn’t have brushed off so quickly, girls with whom I could have had more lasting friendships.

In the photo, everyone looks young and joyful. No one is unemployed and living on someone’s couch. No one is arrested or serving time. No one is finding motherhood or fatherhood overwhelming, no one is in debt, no one’s marriage is crumbling. No one there could fathom that Fate would carom the orderly arrangement of our seemingly certain futures, nor would believe how much hard, painful work will be required to keep from falling into depression. No one would imagine that sometimes, like with Misty, nothing can stay Fate’s cruel hand.

I notice I’m not in the photo. Was I sick? On vacation? Am I the one behind the camera? Then I realize the photo was taken the summer my family moved to Albuquerque. I had not yet met anyone in the photo and was probably still in New Hampshire, packing, listening to my mother tell me how much I was going to love all that desert heat. No more winters. Imagine that. No more miserable winters.

The smoke alarm goes off downstairs. My husband is cursing. I smell burned eggs, hear the clatter of the metal footstool being dragged out from beside the fridge and unfolded, the clomp of my husband’s feet up the steps under the pealing smoke detector. What was it that distracted him and made him burn his breakfast? I imagine his hand tearing at the plastic cover, his fingers grasping the 9-volt battery to rip it free and kill the noise. Any second now, silence. Any second now, a kind of relief.