Trail Running

Derek didn’t come in last night. Kate knows where her husband is, though. Under the kelp-green sod, awash in blue light.
          She double knots the laces of her running shoes and heads out, reaching the hills and the gathering running group at daybreak. Most of the others have arrived by car. She exchanges hugs with several women she knows, their skin cool against hers. No one asks about Derek.
          They set off, Kate quickly pulling to the front with Gabie, a colleague and another inveterate track-and-fielder. Gabie updates Kate on her long-distance relationship with Dr. Arnold, the podiatrist. Kate hasn’t told Gabie—and won’t tell her, not ever—how she let Dr. Arnold pull a Louie C.K. in his hotel room at last year’s Orthotics Technology Conference. Dr. Arnold doesn’t seem to have revealed his pervy side to Gabie, which has made Kate wonder what it is about her that gave him the confidence to go down on his knees after only knowing her for an hour at the conference afterparty. She remembers walking on her heels to the hotel tub to rinse her spunked toes, the water so hot she mistook it for cold.
          A runner passes them with the barest of nods—Jennifer, all sinew and bone. Her thin ponytail whips between her shoulder blades. They watch her reach into her waist pouch and chalk her inner thighs without even slowing.
          “Ugh,” Gabie says. “Does she have to Road Runner it every time?”
          They pass the sprinkle of chalk on the trail, sidestep gleaming coyote scat and furry gray remains, then continue uphill. Quail burst from the brush near Jennifer, causing her to flinch. Gabie snorts.
          Kate has never told anyone, not even her online therapist, that she was planning on leaving Derek a year ago. But then his mother died. An only child, he paid off their mortgage with the inheritance, had the kitchen and bathrooms remodeled, and began excavating for a pool—until the neighbor kid drowned in one, making it distasteful to put in their own. Derek had a new crew continue the dig while another fabricated an underground bunker, complete with a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a tunnel to an entrance shaft in the corner of the garage. Kate imagined Derek was building a lair, like one of those diabolical monsters she’d read about. She’d succumb to chloroform and find herself chained underground for a decade or two, satisfying his lusts. But no. After quitting his job, Derek turned the bunker into a studio for his product review channel. Her grubby mole man with his thinning hair and slightly oversized front teeth rediscovered his native habitat. Now, on the nights when Derek does come to bed, she detects the scent of earth that should not have been disturbed. She imagines clay still packed under his nails.
          The morning sun is quickly dialed to scorching as Kate and Gabie leave the trail and reach the rim road. Traffic nudges them onto the sidewalk. Kate remembers her therapist’s instructions to say no, thanks to intruding thoughts and to focus instead on the people around her. She imagines she is Jennifer—fast, confident Jennifer running far ahead. But as she does so, Jennifer staggers and buckles onto all fours at the curb. She is whining like a dog when they reach her. They are soon surrounded by the others, some of whom flag a passing truck that takes Jennifer away, a couple of runners piled into the bed. Kate and Gabie walk slowly from the remaining group. They don’t break back into a run until they are on the dirt trail again, well out of sight. Kate runs all-out, past the yellow mustard, the sickly oaks, the one white kite hovering in place over the scrubland waiting for a meal to flinch. Gabie can’t keep up. Kate is Jennifer and she has done nothing nothing nothing wrong.
          At home, the front door is barricaded by packages addressed to Derek’s LLC. She leaves them be. Derek doesn’t come in that night either, nor is he in the house when she leaves for work the following morning, the front door still blocked by boxes.
          At work, Gabie steps into her cubicle. “Beep-beep. Did you hear? Jennifer had her appendix removed. She’s probably happy to shave off a couple of ounces.”
          Kate arrives home to find new deliveries atop yesterday’s boxes. Odd white smoke rises from the new flue on the garage roof. She opens the floor hatch in the garage. A red glow paints the bottom rungs. Days without a word from Derek have made her feel neglected, but now, taking a deep breath and descending, she feels she’s been the negligent one. What if Derek has been struck down, like Jennifer?
          An oily fug hangs around the lights as the tunnel opens into the studio. Derek is not at his unboxing desk where a dozen vape pens sit plugged into charging cables. One vape pen at the end is a black husk surrounded by scorched desk. She takes a sip of air. Under the reek of burned plastic, she detects the corkscrew scent of weed.
          She discovers Derek passed out on the floor behind the desk, his chubby fingers clasped around a vape pen. He doesn't come to until she’s carrying him down the tunnel.
          “Smash that like button,” he mumbles.
          She’d like to smash him in the gut for making her worry. But at least she worried.
          In the house, she forces him to take a shower. He emerges pale and uncombed. He eats what she puts in front of him then says he needs to return to the studio.
          “Only for a bit,” he says. “Get some fresh air circulating.”
          He comes back in the night, after she’s been asleep for hours.
          “It’s blowing up,” he says, assaulting her with the glare of his phone.
          In the video, Derek sits at his desk opining about the vape pens. Not in a million years would she have thought to marry Influencer Derek. Between tests, he does a little palette cleanser with pickle and dill-flavored potato chips. Derek hates pickles, but not sponsors.
          She closes her eyes. Derek shakes her awake again. Murder crosses her mind. On his phone, the defective vape pen flares with a brightness that momentarily confounds the camera. Derek gives out a high-pitched yelp which he’s edited to replay again at a slower speed, then slower still, his cry as deep as a lion’s roar. In the video, he falls off his chair.
          “You might have had a concussion.” Kate reaches for his head, but he jerks away.
          “Keep watching.”
          His many cameras capture her arrival. She lifts Derek from the bunker floor and bears him sideways down the tunnel. Her expression is fierce, her captured words fiercer. “Fucking mole man.”
          At breakfast, Kate pulls up Derek’s channel and sees that tens of thousands of viewers have watched her deadlift him. Moleman himself makes a rare appearance as she’s putting together lunch before work. He wants to submit the video to the local news. She nixes the idea with one look, not caring how many interest vectors it would light up or the exposure it would bring to his channel.
          When he’s underground again, she looks at the backyard and wishes a pristine pool met her eyes, or that Derek had turned the bunker into a personal speakeasy where no matter the hour, no matter the tragedies next door, they could have fun with future friends.
          At the Orthotics Technology Conference the following month, Kate doesn’t see much of Gabie or Dr. Arnold; the pair are busy in one or the other’s hotel room. She is busy, too. The company’s new rapid-fab orthotics are catching the attention it’s her job to attract. After scheduling a press release, she pulls up Derek’s channel and watches him livestream his in-depth air fryer review.
          “Who are you?” she asks the screen.
          She’s told Derek repeatedly that she didn’t get married to sit alone in the evenings while he’s underground. It’s not the 1800s and she’s not a miner’s wife. His response has been that she could see him all the time if she quit her job and they worked together—which shows how little he comprehends the delicate ratios needed to endure a marriage. Her therapist has suggested that Derek’s time underground may be his way of mourning his mother’s death. He’s practically in the grave with her. And the woman did love her Home Shopping Network.
          From Gabie, Kate learns that Jennifer is undergoing chemo for a tumor discovered during her appendectomy. Kate didn’t know that Jennifer was a cancer survivor, though Gabie did. Kate’s therapist says Gabie’s callous dislike of Jennifer could be an attempt at protection; people often turn away from those they are afraid to lose. What Kate learns from Jennifer’s cancer, and from the woman’s drive and strength, is that you have to go it alone. Also—you can’t win.
          Derek isn’t at home when she returns from the conference. He’s at a paid gig in Phoenix speaking to aspiring streamers. She descends into his studio. The monitors and lights are on, the cameras trained on his desk where three versions of a child’s toy sit side by side, each with a set of tiny moving steps that lift little plastic penguins to the top of a slide. Something has gone wrong with two of the units: the penguins are stuck at the bottom of one, and the other set of steps isn’t moving at all. A thought comes to her: when Derek gave his two weeks at work, the company offered to promote him into the custom prosthetics division. He could have helped real people instead of carrying out battery run-down tests of a crap toy. She shoves the tortured penguins aside, then stares into the camera lens.
          “This is Molewoman,” she says, contemplating a confession of her unhappiness.
          Comments stream in before she says another word, some criticizing her for ruining the penguin experiment in its 47th hour. Another demands that she reveal her (o)(o)s. She does not feed the trolls.
          Above ground, she pulls the garden hose into the garage and feeds it down the bunker entrance. On the way to the house she stops to turn the spigot as far as it’ll go. A pinprick of water tickles the inside of her palm.
          She browses listings for furnished apartments she can’t really afford. She considers the city where Dr. Arnold lives and imagines the look on his face were she to show up at his house in open-toed sandals. It makes her laugh, then grimace. The last thing she wants is a doomed overcorrection. “No thanks,” she says aloud.
          When she checks the bunker that evening, she finds that the nozzle was set to the off position. A small puddle gleams at the base of the rungs, nothing more. She brings a towel and dries up the water. The penguins are still mounting the stairs. She imagines herself five years from now and can see two likely scenarios: 1) alone, but just as lonely, and also broke; or 2) here, maybe with a kid or two. Their father will be gone most of the time, working double shifts down in the mines. She will have affairs on the weekends when she says she’s out long-distance running.
          She drops the towel. Twists the hose’s nozzle. Lets the water burst forth, reaching as far as the penguins, the cameras, the monitors, Derek’s name in fake neon on the fake brick wall behind his desk.
          Derek returns from Arizona the next day as she is making dinner. She watches him emerge from the garage only a minute after entering. He doesn’t look angry. She takes her hand off the chef’s knife, then touches it again. He enters the kitchen and stands there, silently.
          “She was just a channel groupie,” he says. “She asked me to unbox her. Test her. It was a joke, then it got out of hand.”
          He thinks she already knows, she realizes. He thinks she’s already begun taking revenge.
          She does the worst thing she can imagine. She goes to him and puts her arms around him and holds him. He begins to sob, his hands barely touching her. She can feel him shrinking in her grasp. She holds him tighter and makes sure he feels misery’s full, inescapable force.
          Her therapist says that another way of reframing Derek’s infidelity is that it’s a sign he’s done mourning his mother’s death. That he’s ready to reengage with the world. Kate cancels her subscription.
          She doesn’t leave him, nor does she make him quit his channel, though she hopes the algorithms will turn their back on him and force a return to regular work. She makes him take up trail running. She allows him to test running shoes, but he can’t bring a selfie stick or any cameras. He obeys. Because without her, what is he really? Nothing but bluster and streaming data. Moleman. Her Moleman.
          When they run, she and Derek are usually at the rear of the pack—he’s not in the best of shape. But were either one of them to go down with an unexpected pain, the other is there. It’s the hard work of duty that helps you survive, not love, she now believes. Entire weekends pass now when Derek doesn’t go underground, their lives temporarily braced and granted a little more time before the inevitable collapse. In the mornings, she wakes with him beside her, the wheat-colored sunshine dancing in the drapes like night will not return.