Page 10 of Exit Party

One evening last week she’d come home three hours after her shift with no real explanation. She was evasive about it. There were no checkpoints around here, and there hadn’t been any serious violence in over a year. Traffic was bad but not that bad, right?

“I agree,” Ari said. “I know the store you’re talking about. It’s not a long drive. Can I ask, have you seen any behavioural changes?” This was a diplomatic way of asking whether Nico had seemed happier lately. Ari was imitating a TV show detective who followed cheating spouses as a full-time job.

“No,” the husband said, after a moment. “Same as always.”

“How would you describe her demeanour? I guess I’m asking what always means, in this case.”

“She’s reserved. I’ve always found her hard to read. I used to find that kind of hot, I mean, I appreciate a sense of mystery as much as the next guy, but . . .” He shrugged. “Sometimes mystery is exhausting.”

“Do you think she has secrets?” Ari was more interested in this woman than she would’ve expected.

“No, I know she does,” he said. “Early on, when we first started dating, we agreed not to tell each other everything. Look, it’s been a bad decade. No one’s had an easy time. Everybody’s lost a lot. So we were like, let’s move forward into the future together, let’s stay the fuck out of the past. No need to dwell on all that, right?”

“Right,” Ari said. “I don’t dwell on anything.”

“Smart. But when you live with someone, you pick up intimations of past lives, you know? Just a sense you get sometimes, or they let things slip. I know she was married before,” he said. “Somewhere long ago and far away. I don’t know where or when or to whom. It’s none of my business. But I think, and I don’t know this, I think she may have had a kid, or maybe kids plural. In some other life.”

Here in this parking lot the following evening, Ari glanced at her watch and took refuge behind a magazine. She had taken a dozen photos, but so far Nico’s secret life appeared to consist of eating a takeout salad and reading The Economist in her car.

After some time, Nico closed her magazine, set it on the seat beside her, and got out of her car. The last light of afternoon was fading now, the parking lot cast in a soft half-light. Ari tensed, hand on the door latch, ready to follow, but Nico was only leaving her car to throw out her trash. Ari didn’t move, and so made herself invisible. She watched Nico spray air freshener into the car’s interior and then open all four windows.

Nico’s car pulled out of the lot. Ari followed. She trailed Nico for twenty minutes, out onto the expressway and south, until Nico made a right turn into Willow Gardens, the gated community where she lived with her husband. Cincinnati United gunmen stood on either side of the entry road. Ari pulled over to the side of the expressway. She wished she could keep driving. Sometimes when she first came to the Ohio Republic she’d driven with no real destination, just for the solitude and motion of driving alone, but gas was more expensive now. She leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and tried to empty her mind of conscious thought. She was waiting to see if something pulled at her.

Ari didn’t think of herself as having a particularly good memory. There were years of her life that she hardly remembered, because one way to speed up time in prison is to make every day as similar as possible to the day before. But something about Nico was bothering her. She felt a strange certainty, improbable but impossible to ignore: she knew Nico from somewhere.

True diligence means following the improbable path. Her favourite line from a book she’d read as a child, a story about a girl detective. The following evening Ari was back in the same parking lot, at the same time, waiting. She liked this line of work. This is what being a detective might have been like, she found herself thinking. Why hadn’t she just become a detective, instead of turning to crime? She could’ve saved herself some trouble. It was interesting to imagine a life played out in the ranks of the NYPD. At 7:20 p.m. Nico emerged from the employee exit at the back of the complex, carrying a takeout bag that turned out to contain a barbecue sandwich. For an hour Nico sat in her car and did absolutely nothing of note. She read The Economist, using her phone as a reading light. She ate her sandwich. Sometimes she gazed through the windshield, as if considering the twilight landscape.

Ari stared at her through the viewfinder, trying to map this woman onto her life. Nothing fit, but the sense of having known her at some point was inescapable.

There was a wail of sirens from the expressway just then, and she looked up to watch a convoy pass, a long line of mismatched pickup trucks with the Ohio Republic and Cincinnati United flags fluttering. Some of the militia commanders had taken to using sirens to get wherever they were going faster, although this time of day it was hardly necessary. She watched the convoy and then when she turned back to Nico, the answer came to her, so unlikely that she had to close her eyes momentarily to absorb it. She had lived with this woman. Except the woman had been fundamentally different. Not just her name, which hadn’t been Nico, or her hair, which had been a good twelve inches longer and a different colour, or her glasses, which in Ari’s memory didn’t exist, but something in the way she carried herself. And yet the woman’s face was exactly the same. Ari was looking at her former roommate Gloria, whom she’d last seen six years ago in Los Angeles.

Ari sat up straight, blinking. Impossible, but there it was. She decided that her work was done. She would make the report to Nico/Gloria’s husband: his wife wasn’t having an affair, his wife just preferred eating sandwiches alone in her car to dinner with her spouse. There was no good reason, Ari decided, why she couldn’t suddenly come upon her former roommate here in the parking lot, in a strictly personal and nonprofessional—the word that flitted through her mind was unprofessional—capacity. She got out of her car, walked over to Nico’s car, and waved through the driver’s-side window.

Nico started when she saw her, and lowered the window.

“Ibari,” she said.

Ari stepped back. Perhaps if she hadn’t just been thinking about her time in Los Angeles with Gloria, which is to say thinking about Kareem’s party, it wouldn’t have registered. But these were the facts: although the name Ibari was on her birth certificate, in homage to a long-ago woman who’d saved her father from drowning, she had never once in her life used that name. She’d been Ari as a very small child, Aria from the beginning of kindergarten through the end of her prison sentence, Ari again afterward.

“I’ve never gone by that name,” Ari said. “Are you . . . you’re not Gloria, are you?”

Nico hesitated, as if trying to think of how to explain something extremely complicated. “No,” she said, “but I know who you mean.” Her voice was Gloria’s voice. It was unmistakable.

“You look exactly like her. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, I just saw you here, and . . . you actually have her voice. It’s kind of uncanny.”

“That is uncanny,” Nico said, but it was obvious to Ari that she was only playing along. She knew something Ari didn’t. There was one small difference, Ari saw now, between Nico and Gloria. Gloria had a scar on her forehead, and Nico didn’t.

“Can I ask you something?” Ari asked.

“Sure.”

“You’re the second person in my life who’s called me Ibari, but I’ve never used that name. Do I look like . . . is there another Ibari? Someone who looks like me?”

“Yes,” Nico said with a sigh. “You look like someone else.”

“Someone in Los Angeles?”

“Someone very far away,” Nico said. “I don’t think I can explain it.”