Table of Contents

Table of Contents Blog Disclaimer Not Afraid of Death The Bookstore Placing the Blame The Big Bang Emergency Five Years Dreams and Realities The Box Blood Ties Pain Aftermath Fog The Couch Claus Bouncy Candy from Strangers Rebirth Starting Over As Time Goes By That's Amore Ashes to Ashes Set Me Free Washed Away Journal Looking Ahead The Old Man Hitting the Wall Altered Reality Silent Night Epilogue Author's Note

Author's Note

Many thanks to those of you who have decided to read and, even more surprisingly, comment on this hastily-written work. I do appreciate it.

If you have any constuctive criticism -- this chapter is terribly slow, that theme doesn't fit with the rest, etc. -- please let me know that as well.

If you want to be added to a mailing list in case I ever do something crazy, like writing another novel in 30 days or less, I'll let you know. Send me an e-mail at anonymousnovelist-at-yahoo-dot-com.

Epilogue

Spring cleaning is impossible when you have school and a nearly full-time job. That’s why I’m doing my spring cleaning now, in early August, in the break between summer session and fall semester. School has forced me to accumulate an amazing amount of junk. My Spartan bedroom now has whole areas overrun with books and papers, a monument to the trees that died for my education. I’ll never be able to look at a logged forest again without feeling a sense of guilt. I bought myself a filing cabinet and some folders and tried to make some sense of the mess; it seemed wasteful to throw all of it away, yet it presented a storage nightmare going forward. Hopefully there would be a need to refer to it again later, so I wouldn’t feel so silly about saving it.

It was in the process of cleaning out the nightstand drawer that I found the letter from Nick. I was supposed to read it nearly two months earlier, but I completely forgot about it. I held it in my hands for a long time before I decided whether or not I should open it. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know what it had to say, but in the end I opened it anyway. I unfolded the white lined paper and read his careful handwriting.

Dear Angela,

If all goes according to plan, it’s now June 22 and we haven’t seen each other for six months. I hope that you had a good Christmas and that the new year has brought good things to your life. I don’t know if you understood why I left. Believe me, it’s not what I wanted. For reasons I can’t explain, I wanted to spend as much time with you as possible, in spite of the fact that you are, to put it bluntly, a complete mess. I don’t think that anyone has ever treated you well, and I’m worried that my continued presence in your life will have you leaning on me like a crutch. That’s not what you need. What you need is to be strong, to figure out what makes Angela tick. You’re so much smarter than you’ll ever give yourself credit for. You need to find that inside you and embrace it. (I’m realizing how silly this all sounds, but I think you know me well enough to understand the meaning behind the words.)

Please answer the following questions with a yes or no answer:

1. I am smart.
2. I am funny.
3. I am beautiful.
4. I can do whatever I set my mind to.
5. I believe that I will have a good life.

If you answered at least three of those with a “yes”, please give me a call. Otherwise, wait another six months and take the test again. You’ll get there. I truly believe it.

Much love,
Nick

I looked at the questions. Yeah, I thought, I can agree with three of those. I smiled. Who would have guessed that I would have come this far?

I tucked the letter away in the drawer and finished cleaning. I’ll call him eventually, I thought to myself. But that first communication is always the hardest, and I never actually picked up the phone.

It was a week before Thanksgiving and I had a terrible craving for pizza. I headed over to Vinnie’s on Market with a girl from one of my classes, and we spread out our notes and had a study group session at the corner table with a large pepperoni and two Cokes, the greasy, sugary lunch of champions. The restaurant was nearly empty in the mid-afternoon, so we stayed and studied for our last round of tests before finals at the corner table. It was then that I heard a familiar voice. I turned towards the center of the restaurant and saw Nick being seated with another EMT and a cop, all in blue uniforms. I excused myself from the table and walked over.

“Nick?”

He looked up from his menu and his eyes lit up. “Angela!” He stood up so quickly that he jostled the table, knocking over a glass of water. We mopped it up with napkins grabbed from neighboring tables and stepped away from his friends to talk.

“You look exactly the same,” I said, smiling at him.

“You don’t,” he replied. “You look wonderful.” I had gained a few pounds as a result of access to real food, and I was closer to what you would consider to be normal weight. My hair had grown past my shoulders, and Missy had set me down the path of home-color highlights that she insisted brightened my eyes and framed my face. I looked very girlie.

“Guess what,” I said. “I’m working out at the gym on a regular basis, and I can honestly say that I have not been hurled from the back of a treadmill since that day last year. Plus, I ditched the bookstore and I’m working as a waitress now, so I’m more active than I think I’ve ever been in my life. I’m making better money, too. Which doesn’t say much, but it’s better than nothing.”

“How’s school?”

“Good. Well, the first semester was rough. I didn’t have the best GPA, but I did reasonably well in my summer classes. I think part of the spring semester was adjustment, and part of it was the fact that I didn’t really like some of my early core classes. Now it’s all about stuff that I’m actually interested in.”

“Have you picked a major?”

“Not officially, but I think I’m leaning towards something with counseling. I really loved Ed Psych, and I think I would be good at helping kids overcome their problems. After all, I’ve been there.” He nodded.

“Oh! I forgot to tell you!” I didn’t know how I’d managed to let this slip. “I’m still off all meds – unless you count caffeine, which I’ll admit to abusing heavily as I pull all-nighters. But it turns out that a lot of my problems were really side effects of the drugs more than problems inherent to me.”

“No more depression?” he asked.

“Well… I have my days. I think I tend towards the dark side more than most people. But I think I’ve found ways to cope with it on a daily basis. I seem to be able to pull myself out of the funk when it happens.”

“Good for you.” He touched my arm gently as he spoke. “How’s Missy?”

“She’s doing well. She and David are talking about long-term plans after she graduates in the spring.”

“No kidding? That’s wonderful. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a good guy.”

“He is. I’m happy for her.”

“And you?” He asked cautiously. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t dated at all in the last year. I tell people that it’s because I don’t have time, with working and school, but the truth is that I haven’t wanted the distraction. I’ve got a lot to focus on.”

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” he said, a little too quickly.

“What about you?” I asked.

“There’s nobody special right now. I recently broke up with someone. It was one of those on-again, off-again things.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know those are hard.”

“The interesting thing is that this time, I’m not sorry that it’s over. I think this time it’s for good.”

“Hey Nick,” the cop called from the table. “Pizza’s here.”

“I guess I should get back over there,” he said.

“Definitely, go. Don’t let it get cold.” I took a step backwards, then approached again. “It was great seeing you. Really great.” I leaned forward and gave him a hug. He kissed me on the cheek.

I went back to the table and continued preparing for our next test. Nick and the guys finished and headed for the door. “Bye, Angela,” he called.

“Bye, Nick.”

He stepped out the door, bell rattling against the glass. He was back in a moment, standing over our table.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I would like to take you out for dinner. Can I call you?”

I thought for a moment. I meant what I’d said about not wanting the distraction. “How about this: give me a call and we’ll talk. Let’s leave dinner as an option for later.”

“Fair enough,” he replied. “Same number?”

“Same number.”

He paused for a moment. “You don’t really need me anymore, do you?”

I thought about that. “No, I don’t need you. Not like before. Now I just want you.” My study partner chuckled.

He grinned. “I can accept that.” He kissed me on the cheek again and headed back out to the waiting ambulance.

“Nice work,” my study partner said sarcastically. “Very subtle.”

But I didn’t have to be subtle, not with Nick. His eyes were wide open, and it delighted me to think that he liked what he saw. The past is the only thing we know for sure. The present is the only thing we can change. The future remains to be seen.

Silent Night

December 23. It’s the most won-der-ful time of the year, or so says the song. In all truth, it’s the most crazed time of the year, with people nearly breaking into fistfights for the last copy of Al Franken’s “Lies” on the shelf. I could tell them that there are two more copies in a box in the back somewhere, but that takes away all the fun. Anticipation of chaos and bloodshed is what keeps us going in the final days before Christmas.

I was back to work a day earlier than the medic had advised. I had bills to pay. I wasn’t just going to remain in bed until Christmas Eve. So I went to work, pulled on a Santa hat to hide my flat hair, and wandered through the store directing traffic on the fly. Humor? Three aisles back on your left. Management? Those would be all the way at the end on the right. Travel guides for Sweden? Please don’t tell me you’re going in the winter… two aisles over to your right, near the latte stand.

A small girl came running up to me and gave me a hug, wrapped around my leg like a boa constrictor. “Whoa! What’s going on here?” I reached down and tried to unwrap her from my leg as her mother approached.

“She thinks you’re one of Santa’s helpers,” she said. “She thinks she can influence Santa with your help.”

I crouched down and whispered. “Are you looking for Santa?”

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“He’s not here right now,” I said. “He’s a busy guy. He’s got lots to do tomorrow night.”

“I know,” she whispered, “but I forgot to tell him something.”

“Do you want me to tell him?” She nodded. “Ok, what?”

“Tell him I love him. Tell him that I was a good girl. And tell him that we don’t have a real fireplace, so he’ll have to look for another way to get inside.”

I promised, and even did the cross-my-heart thing, the most solemn vow an elementary school child can make. I assured her that Santa was crafty about finding new and interesting ways to get inside and deliver presents. Lots of people didn’t have chimneys and real fireplaces, but he managed to come to their houses and deliver gifts for them anyway.

The day moved quickly in spite of the chaos, and before I knew it I was clocking out. “See you tomorrow?” asked my manager.

“Same time, same place,” I replied.

I rode home on the bus, but got off one stop early to visit a parking lot full of trees. I picked out one that wasn’t too big or too small, but looked like a cozy addition to the condo. I dragged the poor thing four blocks before arriving at the building and struggling to get it through the front door. The elevator was a piece of cake, and it was just a little more of a drag to get it to our door. I unlocked the door, threw it open and yelled “Honey! I’m home!” in a singsong voice. Missy was over by the windows keeping herself busy with decorating – you guessed it – the tree that she had bought earlier that afternoon.

We sat the two trees on either side of the plasma TV and decorated them completely differently. Missy’s tree was filled with bows and colored lights and brightly hued metallic balls. Mine was white lights, hand-strung microwave popcorn garland (lightly buttered), and an assortment of ornamental goodies that I could find around the house. It was starting to feel like Christmas. Not the retail-manufactured, decorations-up-in-August kind of Christmas, but the hot chocolate and cookies kind.

Christmas Eve is a day that can make even veteran bookstore employees weep. When you’re in the middle of it, everything is crazed beyond belief. When it’s over, you are so insanely delighted to have a day off that you give no thought to the fact that in just two days, everyone will be back to return it all. “I got 13 copies of Howard Stern’s “Private Parts”. Can I return some of them? Lord, doesn’t it tell you something about yourself when 13 friends and family members get you a Howard Stern book for Christmas?

The store closed at 6:00, and after much frantic organizing, we ran for the exits like children on the last day of the school year. I met Missy at home and she encouraged me to come with her to the city cathedral for Christmas Eve services. I had only been to church a few times, so I wasn’t familiar or comfortable with it, but she insisted that it was an event of unparalleled poetry and beauty, so I went.

If you’ve never seen the inside of a big old church by candlelight, I highly recommend it. There’s a beauty and tranquility there that makes it easy to understand why people want to believe. The minister’s voice booms authoritatively from the altar; the candlelight casts magical shadows on the walls and the stained glass; and there is nothing more beautiful than the sound of human voices singing in unison. Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.

Missy and I each held our candles as we sang, playing with the hot wax as it made puddles on the top of the candle and trailed down the sides like a hot waterfall. How old are we? Clearly not fully mature adults.

“For unto us, a child is born,” said the minister, with his deep, rumbling cadence. “Unto us, a son is given.” The Christmas tale is a lovely story, really, one of birth and life in the face of adversity. I was surprised to find myself filled with hope, letting go of the pain of recent years and looking ahead to the future. Tonight, in the glowing candlelight, I wasn’t afraid of what was ahead. Missy put her arm around me, once again playing the role of caretaker, and gave me a squeeze.

When the service ended, we walked down the front steps of the cathedral. I could see my breath in the light of the full moon as I wrapped my scarf around my neck and we headed for home.

Altered Reality

Sleep came easily tonight, and with the sleep came dreams that could have been memories.

Again I was a little girl, two or three years old. I had a small handmade doll that a friend of my parents had made for me, a gingham cat that I carried with me everywhere. One night, while asleep in my crib, my parents heard me crying softly. I was still mostly asleep when my mother came in to check on me. “What’s wrong?”

“The kitty cat scratched me,” I replied.

She assumed I was dreaming, tucked me in kissed me goodnight and went back to bed. She heard me crying again half an hour later. “Angela? What’s wrong, baby?”

Again I said, “The kitty cat scratched me.” This time she was puzzled. I shouldn’t still be having the same dream after this long. She turned on the light and when her eyes adjusted, she saw the red scratches on my neck and arm. Looking at the doll, she discovered that a small pin that had held it together during stitching had remained inside and now worked itself loose to scratch me. I never felt the same way about the doll again after that night.

That dream led into another. I was older now, maybe nine, before my mother came back to die. My neighbors invited me to go to the lake for the weekend, and in spite of the fact that I wasn’t exactly best friends with their kids, I went anyway. We rose along in the station wagon, and I sat sideways watching the power lines beside the two-lane highways. Wires droop down, swing upward… pole. Droop, rise… pole. The ebb and flow of the wires was like watching waves crash and recede. Eventually the rhythm put me to sleep.

I’m in the back of the car, and as dreams go, I’m now the only person in the car. I’m still in the very back of the station wagon, and when I realize there’s no one driving, I have to climb over the seats to reach the steering wheel. Except every time I climb over a seat, another one appears between me and the wheel. The car swerves and I jolt myself awake.

I can hear my breathing in the dark room, heavy and rapid. It’s 3:12AM, but there are still cars on the road. I can hear the cars stop and start at the traffic lights. I listen for a while, imagining where all these people are going at this hour. My eyelids grow heavy and I enter a faraway world.

I’m in my grandmother’s kitchen, except I’m all grown up and she hasn’t aged a bit. She’s baking pies today, and needs my help cutting apples. I sit at the kitchen table, peeling and cutting, and we talk.

“How are you, my angel?” she asks.

“I don’t know, grandma,” I say. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was going to make things right. But they’re no better. I’m just making a mess of things.”

“How?” she asks me. “Have you hurt someone?”

“No,” I replied. “Not unless you include me.”

“Do you believe you’re doing the right thing? Or are you just doing what you’re supposed to do?”

“Oh, what I’m doing is far from what I’m supposed to do,” I tell her. “Everyone’s advising me against it. But in spite of the fact that it made me sick, I think it’s the right thing to do.”

She patted me on the hand. “Good for you, dear. You’re a strong one. Your sister could learn a lot from you.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not true. She’s living the right life for herself.”

“But it’s a boring life,” grandma said. “She’s never taken a risk.”

I thought about that for a moment. She was right. Susan always walked the straight line, as though someone were looking over her shoulder, waiting for her to make a wrong move. It wasn’t right.

“Grandma, what if I tried to teach Susan to have some fun?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No, my angel. She needs to learn that on her own, just as you need to learn how to be strong and stand on your own two feet.” She rose from her chair, walked to the counter, and handed me a gingerbread cookie. “Here. Throw this against the wall.”

“What?”

“I’m the one that’s old and deaf. Why do you keep asking ‘what’”?

“I just don’t understand why I’m throwing cookies at the wall.”

“You’ll see.”

I wound up and pitched a sidearm, split-finger ginger man fastball at the kitchen wall. It hit with the sharp shattering sound of the glass that my parents broke while they were fighting on Christmas. I felt my heart skip a beat, then pound loudly in my ears.

“Here,” she said, handing me a dustpan and brush. “You’ll feel better once it’s cleaned up. It will give you closure. You have the control now, Angela. Don’t forget it.”

She left me alone in the kitchen, sweeping up broken ginger shards from the discolored linoleum with the dustpan and brush. By the time I had finished, it was late and she had vanished. I looked at her cookies sitting on the counter, and there were several of them lined up in a row marked, “Angela.” The first was me in a green velvet dress, like that Christmas. There was a cookie of me in a formal dress that looked remarkably like my dress for the homecoming dance in high school. There was me in khakis and a polo. There was a ginger version of myself at 24, broken into pieces. Looking ahead, I saw that the cookies reassembled themselves; there was a cookie with a smile, a cookie in a graduation gown with an honors stole, a cookie with a wedding dress, a cookie with a baby. It was amazing. Did she know things about me that I didn’t? How did she know so much?

I awoke to find myself alone again in my room, but swearing that I could smell the aroma of freshly baked goodies and apple shampoo.

Hitting the Wall

Writing is the sort of experience that can go one of two ways: it can drag you down into the darkness, or it can serve as a catharsis, freeing your mind from daily life. Tonight, I found catharsis.

I practically pushed my father out the door tonight, not to be mean, but because the urge to write was so strong that I felt like withholding the words would result in physical pain. I raced to the kitchen to grab the notebook I had used before, and started scribbling, I barely looked up from the paper when Missy and David left for dinner, and wrote long into the night when my pen ran dry and my hand twisted with a painful cramp.

When I finished, I practically threw the pen and paper onto the table, like I was tossing away a hot potato. I was drained. I dragged myself upstairs and fell into a deep sleep, fully clothed, without even bothering to crawl under the covers.

I dreamed of things that I couldn’t remember as memories, but seemed plausible enough as though they actually might have happened. I was 13, terrified of singing the solo in the holiday performance for our school choir. I was in a terrible velvet dress that my sister had borrowed from a friend. I began to sing, my voice stronger than I could have ever anticipated, and I wished my father could have been there to see me. But tonight, I saw him at the back doorway, peering in from the outside. Was it really him? Had he really been there? Maybe he had. Maybe Susan had told him how much it meant to me to have the moral support. But then again, maybe this was just a dream. Even so, I wanted to believe that he was there, that he cared enough to take an hour off from work and see me.

Fast-forward to high school, and a beautiful guy – absolutely gorgeous, with light eyes and dark hair – asked me to the homecoming dance. Did my sister talk him into it? He was the younger brother of a friend of hers. Regardless, for two weeks until he stood me up on the night of the dance, I was happy. I was as truly, joyously happy as any teenager could be. And maybe, rather than dwelling on the fact that he stood me up, maybe I should have been focusing on the fact that someone out there had been kind enough to try to bring that sort of happiness into my otherwise surly adolescent life.

I awoke at 6:00, daylight starting to creep in through the windows. I had only slept for four hours, but I felt invigorated and alive. I changed into something vaguely athletic and walked down to the gym in our building. It wasn’t much of a gym really, just a handful of treadmills and bikes, but it would serve my purpose without having to freeze in the morning air. I started the treadmill and began to walk at that awkward pace as the machine accelerated. Before long I had to break into a light jog, then a faster run, then a sprint. I was never much of a runner, but that moment held a lifetime of compressed energy. I ran and ran, one foot after another, strides lengthening. I felt like a racehorse, with graceful strides and a heaving chest as I gulped as much stale gym air as I could manage in each breath. I felt free and alive.

Someone opened the door, and as I turned, startled, to see who it was, I lost my pace, stumbled and fell right off the back of the treadmill, hitting my head on the cinderblock wall. She came running towards me. “Oh my god! Oh my god! Are you all right? Oh my god!” I can’t say that I was unconscious, really, but I was barely responsive. I could see her and hear her, but I couldn’t answer any of her questions. I heard her dialing her cell phone to call for an ambulance. Oh no, I thought, not again. I’ve had enough to do with ambulances for a while. But I couldn’t say that. All I could manage was a sound that most could have only been interpreted as “Wahhhnnggghh.” She was talking to the dispatcher. “I watched her shoot right off the end of the treadmill. She hit her head on the wall. Oh, it made the most horrible noise!”

She asked me for my name, but I couldn’t talk. She asked what unit was mine, and even though I couldn’t get the words out, I could move my fingers. “Three?” she asked. “One?” Eight? No, seven? Three-one-seven? Are you in 317?” Something in my eyes must have said yes, because she said she would be right back, and ran off to wake Missy. I slumped sideways, trying to get more comfortable. My head was throbbing. I had a hard time thinking about anything but the pain, but every once in a while there was a glimmer of humor and irony. “Feeling good, are you?” I thought. “Why not go to the gym and do something good for yourself?” Boy, was I kicking myself now.

Missy, dressed in a satiny robe, and David, in boxers and a t-shirt, appeared in the doorway with the gym lady. Missy crouched down beside me. The gym lady ran for the front door to direct the medics to the right area. I leaned my head on Missy’s shoulder. “The look in your eyes is really scaring me,” she whispered. “But I have a feeling that someday we’re going to look back on this, and it’s going to be funny. Falling off the treadmill like a catapult.” The corners of my mouth turned into a grin just before I slumped forward, unconscious.

I awoke to find a tall blonde guy in a blue EMT uniform peering into my eyes with a penlight. “Hey!” I said, pulling away. “Don’t touch my eyes.”

He stepped back, startled. “Excuse me?”

“Eyes. Off limits.” I’d had a fear of people messing with my eyes since childhood.

“I’m just checking to see if you have a concussion,” he said. “As hard as it is to imagine, you don’t seem to.”

I thought for a moment, wheels still turning slowly inside my brain. “That’s good, right?”

“You bet.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“6:54.”

“So what time can I go to work?”

“Thursday.”

“No, the time. Not the day.” I paused. “Wait a minute. Thursday? No, can’t do it. It has to be today.”

He shook his head emphatically no. “No way. You’re liable to get dizzy and black out at a moment’s notice.”

“No!” I whined. “I can’t miss any more time at work!”

“No choice,” he said. “Sorry.”

I started to cry and Missy came running. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re going to fire me. I just missed two days with less than a week until Christmas. At some stores, that’s grounds for public crucifixion.”

“So? You’ll find another job.”

“What if I don’t? How will I pay the rent?” I have to feed the cat!”

Missy hugged me and pushed my hair out of my face. “It’s ok,” she said reassuringly. “It’s going to be ok.”

“No it’s not!”

“Angela, now’s not the time to worry about this. You have a screaming headache and you’ve been scared half to death this morning. Just relax, let go, and everything will be fine.”

I sniffled loudly. “Everyone always has to take care of me. I can never take care of myself.”

“No, that’s not true,” she said. “Everyone has phases where they give help, and phases where they need help. The tables will turn soon. You’ll be the one in control.”

She signed some paperwork on my behalf and sent the medics on their way. She and David helped me upstairs, back into my room and into bed. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll go to work for you. No issue with finding subs.”

“Don’t you have plans today?”

“Not really,” she said. “I turned in my final paper yesterday and all that’s left to do is send David to the airport at 8:00. I can easily make it in to the store by 8:30.”

I hugged her and whispered my thanks. She eased me back onto the pillows and tucked me in. “Rest,” she said. “I’ll be back by 6:00.”

I heard her downstairs calling Nick while David showered. They were out of the house five minutes early. I drifted away and had dreams of ringing phones. As it turned out, they weren’t dreams.

Nick let himself in at noon, and came upstairs to check on me. “Hey,” he said, gazing at me from a distance. “I’ve been trying to call.”

“Oh. That was really the phone?”

“Yes.” He came closer and, unable to stop himself, flashed a light into my eyes. “No concussion.”

“That’s what Ken told me.”

“Ken?”

“Yeah, the guy who looks like a Ken doll.”

He laughed. “That’s Hans. No kidding. His parents escaped from East Germany when he was two.”

“Really?” I thought about that for a moment. “Most people have trouble getting their two-year-old out to the store. How did they manage to escape a whole country with a toddler?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never really talked to him about it. But it is interesting, isn’t it?”

His face grew serious. “Listen, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Yeah? What?”

He paused for a moment, and then began to deliver a speech that he had clearly practiced many times before. “I just don’t think that this is the right time for you. Or for us. I think you have a lot of stuff going on in your life right now, and I’m just a distraction. I’m keeping you from the real work at hand, which is getting your shit together and figuring out your life. I think you have real potential, but as long as you have someone to cling to, you’re never going to fully realize it. Does that make sense to you?”

I nodded. “Odd that you should say that, “ I said. “As it turns out, I was going to have a talk with you about how I needed to find myself and figure out what’s going to happen going forward. The only difference between my speech and yours is that I thought I could do it with you by my side. But if that’s not what you want…” My voice trailed off. We sat in silence.

“Look,” he said, “I didn’t want you to think…”

“Nope, don’t worry about it.”

“I wrote you a note.”

“In case you couldn’t bring yourself to say things to me directly?”

“No, it’s not that at all.” He handed me an envelope marked June 22. “That’s for six months from today. When that day comes, I want you to open the envelope, read what I’ve written and decide if you want to call me or not.”

“Ok, sure.” I opened the drawer of the nightstand and stuffed the envelope inside. “Ok, then. Well, have a nice Christmas. I’ll see you around.”

He looked uncomfortable. “This isn’t goodbye forever,” he said. “That’s not the intention.”

“Of course not. I completely understand.” I didn’t, not really, but he didn’t need to know that.

He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. I patted him on the hand. “Can I have the key back, please?”

“Oh, sure.” He slid it off his keychain and sat there looking at the collection, now one key smaller. I tossed the loose key into the drawer with the envelope.

“I’m really tired,” I said. “It’s been a rough day. Do you mind?” I pointed towards the door, indicating that he should leave. He stood, took a few steps, turned back, said nothing, then walked out, closing the bedroom door behind him.

He’s not the key to my happiness, I told myself. I am the key. And I’m going to figure out how to make my life better if it kills me.

I rolled over, turned on the radio to a classical station, and drifted off to the sounds of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

The Old Man

If you had asked me to pick the three people least likely to show up at my door, I probably would have picked, in no particular order, Vladimir Putin, Brad Pitt and my father. Putin and Pitt didn’t show up tonight. I’ll give you one guess to figure out who did.

I stared out the peephole for ages. I recognized him instantly, even though I hadn’t seen him since I left home six years earlier. He looked different. Older. I couldn’t get over how much gray I saw in his beard. I was still staring when he rang the doorbell again, and I was yanked back to reality; I suppose I had to answer the door rather than just staring at him through a small hole.

I pulled the door open slowly, giving him time to run away. He didn’t. I didn’t say anything. We stood face-to-face for what felt like an eternity until David came down the hallway and broke my trance.

“Hey Angela,” he called from down the hall.

“Hey David.” He had reached the doorway now, and stood awkwardly in the hallway wondering if he should step past us and into the condo. I looked him in the eye. “David, this is my father, Pete. Dad, this is my roommate’s friend.”

They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries before it occurred to me to invite them in. The three of us seated ourselves awkwardly in the living room. Missy called down from upstairs. “David? Is that you?”

David leaped at the chance to leave this tense scene. “Yes, it’s me. Can I come up?”

She poked her head out and gave me a strange look from behind my father’s head. “Sure,” she said. “Come on up. I’m just doing my hair.” She mouthed, “Are you ok?” and I nodded. David was sure to fill her in when he got upstairs.

My father and I were left alone in the living room with nothing but our silence to share. “So,” I said, and then stopped. I could hear a clock ticking. “So how did you find me?”

My father coughed and cleared his throat. “Your old landlady gave me your forwarding address.” Ah, that explains it, I thought. Helen never could keep a secret. I should have known better than to give her my forwarding information, but she was a friendly woman and I thought I might want to keep in touch with her. I never thought that she might be giving my information away.

“So what brings you here?” I didn’t feel like wasting time with pleasantries. It was all too bizarre not to want to get down to details right away.

He cleared his throat again. “I had some things I wanted to talk about with you.”

“Are you dying?” I asked the question a little too abruptly and callously.

“No!” He paused, as if wondering what might be going on in my head. “I wanted to tell you that I was getting married.”

“Oh.” I suspected that I should feel something, anything, but I was empty inside. I barely knew this man who supplied half of my genetic material. Was I supposed to be happy for him? Sad? I didn’t know what to feel, so I felt nothing.

“Is she nice?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, a little too emphatically. “She’s the best.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Let’s see.” He began to count backwards. “Four months.”

“And you know her well enough to marry her?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. I’ve never known anyone that well. What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?” he asked.

“Knowing someone like that.”

“I don’t know.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. It just takes its shape. It is what it is.”

His attitude seemed so resigned, so laid back. I wondered what had happen with the uptight basket case that had been my only parent for most of my life.

“Are you still working two jobs?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, just the factory. Day shift.”

I nodded. “Good. Because with that two job system, you don’t have any time to find a wife. Or a kid, for that matter. I was lost in that house for years.”

He shook his head sadly. “I did a terrible job with you and your sister. I just hope that I’m better with Carol’s babies.”

“Wait a minute. Is Carol the girlfriend? Is she pregrnant?”

“Yes, she’s my friend. And no, she’s not pregnant yet.”

“Yet? Oh for god’s sake….” I tried to put my selfish feelings out of the way and present something rational. “Do you know how old you are?”

“54.”

“And she’s how old?”

“36.”

Great. Just lovely. An 18-year difference and the possibility that she might still be fertile. Great. Susan must be having a coronary.

“So what are you looking for from me? My blessing? Fine, you’re got it. It’s all about your happiness now. Mom’s been gone for 14 years.”

“What I want is for you to come to the wedding,” he said.

“Hmmm… I really don’t know about that. I’ve never been a big fan about watching others make lifelong promises and exchange metal bands.” In truth, weddings were, in my opinion, an excuse to make a really extensive Christmas list of cool toys and goodies, and ask other people to buy them for you. Great scam, but hardly worth the big party associated with it.

“It’s very important to me,” he said.

“Why? I barely know you. I don’t know her at all. And I’m not on speaking terms with my sister. So what incentive do I have to join this little soiree? Because it seems to me that it’s just an unnecessary trip to the suburbs.”

“I’m still your father,” he said gruffly.

“No. You’re really not. You’re my genetic donor, but you have never really been a father. There’s nothing fatherly about you.”

“I worked two jobs so you and your sister could have good lives and go to good schools. I did everything for you.”

“You were never home. I was alone. Mom was gone because of me, and you were never there.”

“Angela, listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. She was dying. Cancer is unstoppable if it’s got someplace to go.”

I knew that he really believed it, but to me, the most important thing, the one thing I never got, was a hug. All I wanted at age six was to be loved. Instead, the guilt that accompanied my mother’s first departure came from all angles, especially from my father. Your mother leaves you and your father rarely comes home: what’s a kid to think? I was certain that I had done something terribly wrong to make the adults stay away. Eventually, the other kids stayed away, too. I grew increasingly convinced that I was broken, some sort of bad luck charm that made people leave. This feeling was reinforced by my second-grade best friend; she moved away and never wrote again, in spite of swearing that we would be friends forever. I was never the same after that. I didn’t trust anyone.

“Angela? Angela, don’t you know that I’ve always loved you and tried to do the best for you? It broke my heart when you left home.”

I said nothing, but wheels inside my head where turning at breakneck speed. All I could hear was one phrase repeated over and over, as though by some deranged parrot: It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.

“Dad?” I said, quietly. “Dad, I’m scared.”

“About what?” he asked.

“Everything. Everything is changing. The world is always different. And it seems like the only thing that doesn’t change is me.”

“You change. You’ve changed lots of times since you moved out. They may be small, incremental changes, but that’s not the point.”

“I don’t know that I do,” I said, fearing the status quo as much as anything. “I feel like I’m exactly the same as I was at 18, 20, 28….”

“That’s not how you gauge change. You measure it when you learn something new or have fun with friends. It’s less scientific than some methods, but interesting nonetheless.”

I didn’t want to listen to his philosophies on life, but then something occurred to me: I had never listened to them before. I wondered if he had ever talked to Susan and not me. Somehow I doubted it. She wasn’t the type to listen to life philosophy. She was a creature of experience, pure and simple. Listening to someone else’s ideas was not her strength, nor was it mine.

“So, professor, how do I change my life?”

“Start small,” he advised. “Maybe it’s just as simple as trying something new. Like attending a family wedding.”

“Nice try,” I said.

“I’m serious. Angela, this isn’t easy for me. I know I wasn’t the best father. I know that. But I want you to be the best person you can be, and hopefully, at the very least, you can be friends with me.”

I looked him in the eye. “You really mean that, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to be friends with me?”

“Because I’ll never be able to go back and be the father that you needed and wanted. Nothing can change that. But I can try to be the friend that you want going forward.”

“Why now?”

“Because I realized that life can’t be lived in the past or in anticipation of the future. It has to be lived in the present.”

I went pale. “Where did you hear that?”

“I don’t know.” He paused. “Actually, I do know. I had a dream last week where a wise old man told me those words. Life can’t be lived in the past or in anticipation of the future.”

I started to shake. “What’s wrong?” He looked deeply concerned.

“A few nights ago…” I stopped to collect myself. “A few nights ago, I wasn’t well. I was sick. Hallucinating. And I had a dream where a wise old man told me the exact same thing.”

He looked at me with disbelief. “No, that can’t be.”

“I’m serious!”

“So who’s trying to tell us something?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, shaking. “It’s a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the one who drove more than an hour to get here, tracking me down at two apartments. What’s it a sign of?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Life’s too short to waste it with work and petty arguments. That’s why I’m here.”

“Always look on the bright side of life, as the Pythons would say?” My teeth were chattering. I was really rattled by this conversation.

“Maybe that’s the essence of it all,” he said. “You’ll get what you look for. Look for bad, you’ll see the bad. Look for good and you’ll see the good.”

I thought of my childhood, sitting on the banks of the creek. It was a polluted mess, filled with old tires, shopping carts and miscellaneous garbage. But when the sun was at just the right angle in the late afternoon, you could look into the water and see the reflection of the trees and sky. At those moments it was the most beautiful body of water, a peaceful mirror reflecting the beautiful parts of the world.

“Don’t look in the creek. Look at the reflection,” I mumbled.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” What if I had withdrawal symptoms because I expected to have them? What if my job sucked because I expected it to suck? What if my relationships didn’t last because I expected them to fail?

Tonight I would start something new. Like Moses bringing down the tablets from the mountain, I had my own principles of living that I needed to try out. I couldn’t wait for my father to leave so I could be home alone with my thoughts. All I needed was a piece of paper and a pen.

Looking Ahead

Four shopping days left until Christmas. Every lunatic shopper on the planet is battling for a spot in our parking lot. I was nearly run over by two minivans and a sedan on my way from the bus to the store. The weather had turned downright blustery, and the combination of my shivering and dizziness left me feeling a little dazed.

With my cast gone, I had moved back to cash wrap, leaving the info desk behind for some poor, unfortunate sucker. The drawback was that I didn’t have a seat behind the register, so after all my time in bed, I had to return to work and stand under my own power for eight hours in a row. It’s harder than it sounds, believe me.

I had made it through most of the morning, with only one wave of barely-controllable nausea. That’s never a good moment, when you’re standing in front of a customer, wondering if you’re going to vomit in front of them. But I managed to excuse myself and crouch behind the counter, pretending I was looking for more holiday shopping bags. One of the other cashiers looked at me strangely, but with a series of deep breaths I was able to compose myself and pop back up with a festive shopping bag and a smile.

I spent my lunch break at the market, buying Christmas goodies for the two people in my life, Missy and Nick. For Missy, I got a bag of Kona coffee – I don’t understand how coffee could possibly be so expensive, but they told me it was good – and a box of hazelnut biscotti. Nick was harder to shop for. Was he going to give me a gift at all? How did I balance between the look of “Oh no, I should have gotten her a gift,” and “this is all she gave me?” I ultimately bought some fancy semi-sweet chocolate and some long fondue forks, hoping for a night of sharing. I stood in the checkout line, pleased with myself for being the only person in the world who could do all of her Christmas shopping at a market.

The afternoon was nonstop chaos, with long lines and people trying to combine membership cards with coupons and discount codes to swing some sort of miracle deal – one guy was convinced that with all of his coupons he could get the da Vinci Code for $3. What he didn’t realize was that his $15 off coupon was for purchases of $150 or more. Live and learn.

Other than the usual kiddie books and humor (Dilbert and Dave Barry always do well this time of year), the most popular item was one I wouldn’t have expected: leather-bound journals. Are there that many people who like to write? In this era of computers and Palm Pilots, does anyone really put pen to paper anymore? Maybe the answer was no. Maybe the gift-givers just ran out of ideas and liked the rich look of the leather. There was no way to know for sure.

By the time the day had ended, I was completely exhausted. I went back to the break room to clock out, and decided to just sit down for a few moments. Those few moments led to a twenty-minute nap on the break room table. I felt a little foolish when I realized that someone had seen me sleeping, but they all knew I had been out with “the flu” for the last few days, and they weren’t going to criticize, especially since I had managed to complete my shift.

When I finally stood up to head home, my body felt like lead. I wrapped myself in my cardigan and scarf, grabbed my market bag and shuffled through the lot. Stalkers watched and waited, signals flashing, to see which car I would get into. I usually liked to weave from one aisle to another to screw with their heads, but I was too tired tonight. I walked in a direct line and rested on the bus stop bench, winded. I pulled my scarf up around my ears and tried to keep the wind from blowing down into my sweater, but there was no mistaking the chill in the air tonight. It was feeling more like Christmas than any night yet this year. The white lights twinkled on tree trunks lining the street of our little retail district, giving it a festive and inviting atmosphere that they only seemed to care about once a year.

The bus was late, stuck in the rush hour traffic. Two others at the bus stop were complaining, but I didn’t mind. The three steps up into the bus seemed hopelessly daunting when you considered my level of energy, or lack thereof. But by the time my bus arrived, I had managed enough strength to climb the steps and lurch towards a seat in the middle. I quickly drifted off again, and woke to feel my head jerking upright, like I had just dozed off in the back of high school history class. I saw a man in the sideways handicapped seats looking at me strangely. I rang the bell to signal for the next stop, and stood in the shadow of the bus exhaust for a few moments before walking home. By the time I arrived on the 3rd floor, I practically had to crawl to 317. In one motion, I opened the door and made a beeline path for the couch. I couldn’t move from fatigue, but I wasn’t at all sleepy. I would occasionally doze off for what probably amounted to thirty-second intervals but, like the two previous nights, I was unable to fall asleep and stay asleep.

I remained flat on the couch for several hours, staring out the window, too tired to turn on the television. When Missy finally came home, she was astonished to find me there.

“Are you exhausted?” she asked.

“Yes, desperately.”

“Why not go up to bed?”

“Because I can’t sleep.”

“Wow,” she said. “What a mean combination of side effects.

I grunted with agreement and disgust. Why did I feel like this? I thought I could handle detox, but this was awful. “Not only do I feel bad,” I told her, “but I also feel terrible emotionally.”

“Isn’t that normal?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s been a long time since I battled the depression head-on, and at least then I had the advantage of not being dizzy and nauseous.”

“Do you think it was a mistake to stop the medication?” she asked.

I sighed. “Long term? No. This was the right thing to do. But it’s making for a really shitty short term existence.”

She asked if she could get me anything, and I declined. “Can you do me a favor? Can you answer the door if David gets here while I’m changing? Are you strong enough to get up?”

“Yeah, I think I can do it. Big date tonight?”

She shook her head. “Little date. I don’t really want a big date right now.”

“Why not? He’s hot.”

She grinned uncontrollably. “True enough, but still… I want to take things slowly. Nothing like being burned by a control freak to make you question if you want that level of involvement in your life.”

“He knows this?”

“Yep, we talked about it.” She paused for a moment. “It would be so much easier to just sleep with him.”

I laughed. “Get it out of the way and move on with the practical aspects of the relationship?”

“Exactly. You spend your early years trying to fight the boys off and preserve your virginity, then you realize that it’s just easier to get the sex thing out of the way and then figure out whether or not the guy’s interested in sticking around. Or, in my case, interested in watching your every move. But when the lure of first sex is hanging over their heads, you never get a clear view of what things will be like. Unfortunately, I just don’t know that I’m ready to get that involved right now.”

I pondered that for a moment. “Interesting observation. So I wasn’t a slut in my past lives, I was just being practical?”

“It all depends on your perspective,” she said. “And my perspective passes no judgment on you.”

“I knew there was a reason why you were my roommate,” I said. “Because you’re the only one that would even begin to take that perspective.”

She sat beside me and put her hand on my leg. “Do you have regrets?”

“God, yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’ve made some big mistakes in my life.”

“But you learned from them, right? You learned lessons that have shaped who you are. And that’s a valuable thing.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t so sure that there was value in my mistakes. She continued. “Look, the past is the past. You can’t change it. Your job now is to live life in the present, and try to look forward to the future, based on the lessons learned from your past.”

Her perspective touched me. “But that requires some amount of hope,” I told her, trying to sound sarcastic, but failing miserably as my voice cracked.

She leaned forward. “Don’t you see? You do have hope. You’re looking forward. You wouldn’t have stopped the medication if you didn’t have hopes and plans for the future.”

She looked at her watch and realized she was running late. “I have to go get ready. Will you stay here in case David arrives while I’m upstairs?” I nodded.

The doorbell rang, and I slowly walked to the door, opening it without checking the peephole. It was at that moment that I stood face to face with my catalyst for change.

Journal

On Monday morning, after a long night of insomnia and boredom spent staring at the moon through the skylight in my bedroom, I finally managed to walk downstairs to the kitchen under my own power. My legs were shaky, but it felt good to use them again. It had only been a few days, and I was so weak. I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must be for people who are bedridden for any length of time.

Nick had been staying at the condo, sleeping on the couch in the living room, just in case I needed him. I had heard him leave before dawn, heading home to change and go to work. But he didn’t leave before being sure to leave his cell phone number and various instructions stuck in various places around the house on Missy’s bright pink sticky notes. I discovered them, one after another, as I wandered to the kitchen. “Don’t drink caffeinated beverages,” said one. “I’d stick with toast today,” said another. “Drink something with a bit of sugar,” said a third. I poured myself a glass of juice and shuffled to the couch to watch TV.

Nick’s backpack was sitting beside the coffee table, unzipped, along with his pillow and carefully folded blanket. I reached into the open bag, pulled out the shirt and held it close to me. It smelled like him, clean and soapy, and made me feel at ease.

I’ve never been the kind to look through other people’s things. I’ve house-sat for people, and never even looked into their medicine cabinets over the course of an entire weekend, so you can imagine my surprise when I felt an uncontrollable urge to rummage through his bag. I was even more shocked when I came upon his journal. I didn’t even know he kept a journal, but I guess there was a lot that I didn’t know about him. I opened it without hesitation and began to search for interesting tidbits. I read the last entry, slowly, having trouble focusing on the handwritten page with my dizziness. It was written the night before.

Sunday

I spent the whole day here at Angela’s place. She’s been in really bad shape, but she’s turned a corner and I think she’ll be ok in the long run, assuming that she’s strong enough to fight off the demons that she went on the meds for in the first place. Missy was scared to death, but I’ve seen this sort of thing enough times to know that while she was going to be miserable for a while, she was ultimately going to be ok.

I’ve spent a lot of time here with her this weekend, not that Angela’s aware of it. As I sat beside her bed, watching her sweat and shake as the medication left her body, I wondered what I was thinking. Why was I here? Don’t I know better than to get myself involved in this sort of thing? The answer, of course, is yes. So why did I hold her hand as she slept and hallucinated? Why did I sleep on this awful couch last night, and probably will do so again tonight? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was permanently wrecking my back to be here.

I don’t really have an answer for why I stay. I ran away once, that day in the ER, but when we crossed paths again at the bookstore I had this weird feeling that this was some sort of destiny, which I absolutely didn’t believe in until that moment. I watched her trying to take care of the stoner guy, trying to make him comfortable in spite of his burns. Here she was, this girl with more than her own share of problems, and she cared for and held this guy like he was the only person in the world. You rarely find that kind of caring, and never accompanied with a smile and a laugh that makes the world seem light. It’s amazing that her laugh seems so free and happy when I know that her reality is anything but.

She’s fighting really hard to change her life. She’s had a tough one, I’ll grant her that. And to still have a sense of humor after all that… well, it tells you something about a person.

Ok, I’ll admit that it’s not just her sense of humor and her caring. Yes, she has nice tits (and they look even better when she’s naked), but that’s not the reason why I’m here. I’m here because I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be. I don’t know how she feels about me. She might not even be interested, I don’t know. But I do know that, at the very least, I want to be friends with her. And when you want friendship even more than sex, that’s saying something. Not that I’d turn down a chance at sex, but that’s another story.

I helped her undress and take a bath today. It was all I could do not to crawl into the tub with her. She looked so innocent in there, arms floating in the water, hair drifting around her, and I just sat back and admired the view. If she felt any shame at being naked, she didn’t show it. On the other hand, she was probably too exhausted to truly care. She fell asleep in the tub, just for a few minutes, but long enough to be completely serene in the water. I wondered if she was dreaming. When she opened her eyes, she looked at me as though she fully expected me to be there, watching her in the bath water. She smiled dreamily and rested her head on the edge of the tub, enjoying that split second before the dizziness returned. It came back in a flash, and she asked me why I insisted on spinning her tub around. I thought she was hallucinating again, but she gave me a sly wink, and I knew she was kidding.

So back to the question at hand, the question I keep asking myself, the question that friends and family will all ask eventually: why am I here? The fact of the matter is that I really don’t know why I’m here. I just know that for now, this is where I feel like I should be.

I stopped reading and carefully placed the journal back in his backpack. I was glad to see that he was conflicted about being with me. Too little conflict, and he wouldn’t really be facing the reality of what he was going to have to deal with. Too much conflict and he would have run away by now.

I sighed and sunk into the couch, watching The Price is Right, the ultimate sick day television show. It’s just not the same without Rod Roddy and his frighteningly loud jackets, though.

Missy came home at noon. “What are you doing out of bed?” she asked in a voice that was intended to be stern. Oh, how cute. I didn’t know Missy could even do stern.

I looked around like I was watching for the keepers. “Shhh! They think I have a day pass!” She laughed. “How was your weekend?” I asked.

“You mean the part I didn’t spend holding a bedside vigil for you?”

“Yeah, the other part.”

“I spent some time with David last night. I figured it was ok since Nick was staying with you.”

“Good idea. How are things going with you two?”

“In all honesty…” she paused. “They’re really great. Too-good-to-be-true great. I keep wondering if I’m missing something obvious. Like the fact that he’s a serial killer or something?”

I thought for a minute. “Is he local, or is he going home for the holidays?”

“Sort of local,” she said. “He has his own apartment here, but his family isn’t here. He’s flying back for the weekend.”

“Ah, the true spirit of Christmas: fight the crowds, fly home and pick fights with family members who will be the source of all melancholy for the following days.”

“You’ve got it,” she said, laughing. She poured herself a glass of juice.

“You’re not supposed to drink that,” I said. “Too many calories, remember?”

She looked at the glass, then took a drink. “Calories be damned,” she said. Then she went back to the fridge to check out the nutrition info on the label. “Oh god,” she said, dumbfounded. “Do you know that this has 180 calories per serving? Damned evil juice people.”

“Oh my god,” I yelled, practically shooting myself off the couch. “The cat! Where’s the cat?”

“No, don’t worry. I’ve got her. She’s still hanging out in my room. The activity and trauma was too much for her to take.”

“You let the hairy beast into your room?” It seemed ridiculous to battle over a cat, especially one like this. “You do know that everything you own will be covered in long, white cat hair.”

“Yep, I know, but she was too upset to leave her in your room. I think she thought you had some really bad hairballs.” She paused for a moment. “What are you doing today?”

I pointed to the Punch Game on Price is Right. “This is everything on a sick day.”

“Uh-huh. Looks boring to me. Ok. Well, I need to go out and do some Christmas shopping. Do you need anything?” I said no; after all, who did I have to buy gifts for, other than her? She grabbed her purse and keys, gave me a kiss on my forehead and bounced out of the room.

I was alone again with Bob Barker. I felt like calling someone, but there was no one to call other than Nick, and I wasn’t going to call him while he’s on duty if it wasn’t an emergency. I thought about calling my sister, but I didn’t have her number at the office. She was careful to give me only selected access into her life. The last thing she wanted was for me to call and be disruptive.

I decided that I wanted to swim, but the condo pool was too far away, and I wasn’t sure if it was heated or not. I slowly climbed the spiral staircase, marveling at the vertigo I felt when walking on circular stairs and filled up the tub with warm water and a packet of fizzy bath crystals. I undressed, and examined my naked body while leaning against the sink for support. Nick was right. I do have nice breasts.

I eased myself into the water, turned on the whirlpool jets, and decided that this was better than any afternoon at the pool, regardless of the weather. All I really needed was a good book, but reading is never easy when you’re dizzy.

I don’t know how long I had been in there, but the water had gotten cold and I was drying myself off when I heard Nick come in. “Hello?” he called from downstairs.

“Up here!” I called back.

He wandered into my room and stood in the bathroom doorway. I wrapped myself in the towel. “Hungry?” he asked. “I brought pizza for dinner.”

I felt my stomach rumble. I wasn’t sure about food, but I was definitely hungry. “It wouldn’t happen to be from Vinnie’s, would it?”

“Of course it is,” he said. “Nothing but the best for you.”

“Give me a minute, I’ll be right down.”

I came downstairs, slowly, wearing a long, silky robe that Missy had left for me. My wet hair was combed back out of my face. I took my place on the couch and shivered from a chill.

“Come here,” Nick said, warpping his arms around me. “Feel better?”

I nodded. It always felt better when he was near.

He turned on the TV and found a silly movie starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. He covered us both in his blanket, feet meeting in the middle. I realized that I must be easy to please, because pizza and a movie seemed like an ideal evening.

And as I sat there, I wondered if he was trying to take another look at my breasts. I hoped so.

Washed Away

I felt fine at work on Wednesday, although every thought and every twinge made me question if it was the early stages of withdrawal. By the end of the workday, I was starting to think that maybe I was ok after all. Maybe I would be one of those people who had an easy withdrawal period. It seemed possible to me. The evening was uneventful. I called and left a message for Nick, and went to bed early to read a magazine. I felt my eyelids getting heavy as I read, and eventually put the magazine aside and crawled under the covers.

Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday. I usually had the day off, but I switched shifts with one of the other regulars so she could go see her grandson’s school play. Again, I waited for hell to begin, but nothing had happened. I came home, watched some television, and after dozing off on the couch a few times, I opted for bed.

I awakened at 4am, soaked with sweat. I felt mildly nauseous, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I tried to fall asleep again, but the sleep was intermittent at best. By the time daylight crept through the window, I felt worse. But since it was my day off, I had the opportunity to stay in bed as long as I wanted. I tried to convince myself that it was just a coincidence, and I actually happened to catch the flu on the same week I stopped the meds.

I heard Missy’s door close as she went downstairs for breakfast. It was a fairly quiet week for her, with most of her finals finished and nothing but a paper left to write before the end of the semester. She went to the kitchen, and then came back upstairs. She must have noticed that I didn’t start the coffee yet. There was a quiet knock at the door. “Angela? Are you ok?”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah,” I yelled weakly. “I’m ok.”

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah.” She entered and approached my bed.

“Wow, what’s wrong?”

“Just trying to kick the meds,” I said, shaking under the blankets. “Really, I’m ok.”

She mumbled something that sounded like, “Uhhhnnnggh,” and reached out to take my temperature. “Wow, do you know how cold and sweaty you are?”

“I can guess,” I said.

“Give me your wrist?” She held out her hand and I handed my wrist to her. She looked at her watch and counted my pulse. She looked a little uptight. “Do you have Nick’s number around here anywhere?”

I nodded. “I tried to call him last night. His number is downstairs by the kitchen phone.”

She headed for the bedroom door. “Can I get you anything?” I shook my head and crawled down under the blankets again.

I heard her downstairs on the phone. “Nick? Hey, it’s Angela’s roommate, Missy? She’s in some bad shape?” There was a pause. “Yeah, she said that?” Another pause. “So what do I do for her?” Long pause. She mumbled something I couldn’t understand. Pause. “Ok, I’ll stick around, then? I heard the phone go back into its base, and could hear her pacing on the tile floor.

I decided that I should really go brush my teeth to get rid of the hideous metallic taste that had been taking over my mouth. I got about three steps from the bathroom door when I went down in a heap. I heard Missy running through the condo. She was standing over me in a heartbeat. “Where are you going?” she asked.

I tried to tell her about my teeth, but instead I started to cry. Since I had started on the meds, I had cried at most of the appropriate times, but often it was a shallow cry, tears streaming down my cheeks without the underlying emotion. This was a sobbing that came from deep inside me, tears that had been unlocked from the darkest recesses of my psyche. I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t breathe. I thought that my organs were being wrung dry. Missy tried to pick me up and drag me back to my bed, but I was dead weight, and she succeeded in doing little more than shifting my position.

I could feel my chest heaving with the effort of the tears. Missy, visibly scared, rubbed my back and tried to comfort me. “Shhh… it’s ok… shhh… don’t worry, it’s all right….” Her hands felt so small and distant through the sweat-soaked t-shirt that I had been sleeping in.

It seemed like hours before the tears tapered off. Missy stayed beside me through it all. I felt so drained that I could barely help her lift me back into bed. She went to the bathroom and got a cool washcloth for my forehead. I still quivered with an occasional sob, but I had no tears left; I was probably completely dehydrated. I lay motionless in bed, weak and dizzy.

“Do you feel better?” she asked. I couldn’t answer. I was shaking, and too tired to say anything. “Do you think you can sleep?” I nodded. She adjusted the washcloth on my forehead and told me she’d be back to check on me in a little bit. She left the bedroom door partially open and went downstairs. I heard her call Nick again, but this time she got his voicemail.

“Nick, it’s Missy. It’s been a bit of a scary morning. Her pulse is racing, she’s dizzy, and if there were awards for hysterical crying jags, she’d be an Olympian. I’m a little worried. What happens if she blacks out from hyperventilating?”

I noticed that she wasn’t up-talking anymore. I wondered if I’d scared her so badly that her entire speech pattern had changed.

I remember looking at the clock and seeing that it was just past 9:30. I closed my eyes and when I woke up again it was shortly after 10:00. What I didn’t immediately realize was that it was more than 12 hours later. I had slept through the entire day. I woke with a pounding headache, muscles that ached worse than any flu I had ever had, and the sense that something beneath my skin was crawling and trying to escape. I tried to sit up and reach for the light, but I was too dizzy and slumped limply onto the nightstand, knocking the lamp to the floor. Missy came running to the door.

“You’re awake!”

I couldn’t say anything. I just tried to pull myself off the nightstand. She came over and helped me back into bed.

“Are you thirsty?”

I thought about it for a moment, and nodded. I wasn’t sure that I could sit up to drink, or that I could keep anything down, but I did feel like I was completely dry. She ran downstairs and returned with a water bottle with a built-in straw. I sipped slowly, and the water felt startlingly wet on my tongue. I tried to swallow, but my throat was so dry that I actually choked. The ensuing coughing fit forced me to sit up, which only aggravated my dizziness and nausea. I started to gag, and Missy ran to grab a trash can in case I got sick. She sat on the bed with me and rubbed my back, telling me that everything was going to be all right. I wasn’t sure I believed her. Even her touch on my back hurt, but I let her do it because I needed the comforting. I took another sip of water, then another. My throat felt better, and I tried to speak in a hoarse whisper: “Why did I do this to myself?”

She whispered back. “Because you want to be better. You want to be strong and healthy.”

I laughed weakly. “This is the path to health? Feels like the path to hell.”

She smiled. “Nick says that the worst will be over by Sunday? But you’ll have lingering dizziness and nausea for a few weeks.”

I looked her in the eye. “Am I hallucinating, or are you not doing that up-talking thing anymore?”

She thought for a moment. “I guess not. I started doing it to piss off my parents. Somehow it automatically goes away when I have to be an adult.”

I closed my eyes and started to drift away. “I like you better as a grownup.”

“Me too,” she replied softly.

I slept through the night and straight through until noon on Saturday. When I woke, I found Nick sitting in a chair near my bed. I thought I was dreaming.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m on guard duty this afternoon while Missy works.”

I nodded. “Water,” I whispered, reaching my arm out from beneath the blankets. He handed me the bottle and I drank several gulps.

“I feel awful.”

“I warned you.” He pulled the chair close to my bed, and pushed my matted hair from my face. “It’s the hardest way to do it.”

“What day is it?”

“Saturday, around lunchtime. Missy called you in sick.”

“Hmm, she didn’t think I could work like this? Wonder why?” The room was swirling. “So when does the dizziness go away? And if you don’t have an answer, ask the guy next to you.”

“Yeah, you’re doing just about as well as could be expected. Hard part’s over, though. Symptoms will linger, but your skin won’t burn and crawl past today.”

“How did you know my skin was burning?”

He leaned in and winked. “I’m a professional.”

I stared at the ceiling for a moment, watching the world spin. “I have a killer headache. Can I have some Advil?”

“Nope. Not yet.”

I groaned. “When?”

“Next Tuesday.”

“Oh my god, no!”

“Ok, that was a bad joke. Sorry. But you really shouldn’t put anything else into your body right now. Except food.”

The thought of anything more than water made me sick. “No food yet. Please.”

“Ok, but you have to eat dinner tonight. No arguments.”

I closed my eyes and imagined myself on a boat, rocking with the current. When I was very young, I went fishing in the bay with a friend’s father and uncle. It was hot and the current was fairly strong, so the boat never really settled down. I remembered being afraid that the boat would tip over, leaving me alone in the water, far from shore. But of course, everything was fine, and we came back to shore with three big fish and four bad sunburns. My boat rocked and rocked in the summer heat, and I could hear the sounds of other motorboats in the distance.

I opened my eyes to see daylight streaming through the curtains. I had slept through the night. I felt slightly less dizzy and nauseous than I had before, and I managed to sit upright under my own power. Missy entered my room with a gentle knock. “Look at you! You’re not horizontal!”

“It’s the little things that mean a lot,” I said.

She handed me my sports bottle. “I made you a smoothie.”

“The powerboat,” I said, putting it all together.

She looked confused. “No, it’s a sports bottle. Are you still hallucinating?”

I laughed. “No! I was having a dream. There were powerboats. I think it was the blender.”

She looked relieved to know that I wasn’t confusing everyday items with boats. I held the bottle, comforted by it’s coolness. “Drink it,” she said.

I put the straw to my lips and tasted the most wonderful combination of fruits. “This is amazing,” I told her.

“It’s just frozen fruit. Nothing fancy.”

“Trust me, when you haven’t eaten, it’s something pretty close to heaven.”

“You look so much better,” she told me.

“I still feel weird, but compared to yesterday, this is easy.”

She fluffed my pillows and helped prop me up comfortably. “I have to leave for work in about 15 minutes. Nick’s on his way over here right now. You should have seen how he took care of you yesterday.” She smiled. “He’s a keeper if you want him.”

“We’ll see if he wants me after seeing me like this,” I said.

“He does.” She smiled knowingly, and skipped over to the bathroom to grab my hairbrush. “Here, use this. You want to look as good as you can after two days in bed.”

I pulled the brush through my hair, wincing as I did. My hair follicles hurt. I’d never felt anything like this before.

The doorbell rang, and she bounded down the stairs. “She’s awake,” I heard her say. “And drinking a smoothie.”

His head appeared in my doorway. “Knock-knock.”

“Come on in,” I said, suddenly very excited to see him. “Did you bring your friend?”

He looked at me strangely, then remembered my double-vision of the day before. “No, I’m hoping he stays away.”

“Me too,” I said. He sat on the bed and smiled at me. I felt like everything was going to be ok.

“Are you still dizzy?”

I nodded. “But I think I can stand up. I need a shower.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” he said forcefully.

“Why?”

“You haven’t stood up since Thursday. The combination of your weakness and the hot water could cause you to pass out.”

“Can I take a bath?”

“Only with supervision.”

I shot him a look of mock horror. “Nick! Are you trying to make a pass at a patient?”

“Not at all,” he said sarcastically. “However, since I have had dinner with you, the parameters have changed slightly.”

He filled the tub, came back to help me out of bed and walked me to the bathroom. I stood still while he gently undressed me, and helped me ease into the warm water. He sat on the edge of the tub and gazed at me admiringly while I let the water surround me, healing my pain and washing away my sins.

Dizzy, nauseous, weak, and with three days’ worth of bed head, I managed to land myself a guy.

Set Me Free

Nick came over Tuesday night after I got home from work. He brought a bag filled with all kinds of cutting tools, large and small to remove my cast from my left arm. We spent a few minutes in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, hacking through the plaster and setting my arm free. When he took the cast off, I was horrified by how pale and withered my arm looked – imagine the wrinkly white skin that occurs beneath a Band-Aid, and then multiply that effect to cover your entire arm below your elbow. It was pretty foul. I immediately took my wrinkled arm to the sink and gave it a good washing for the first time in weeks. The warm water felt good on the freshly-released skin.

My wrist had become incredibly stiff from being held in one place, and it hurt to move it. Nick pulled a flexible elastic brace from his bag and told me to wear that for additional support if it was too uncomfortable. I stuck the brace into my pocket and spent the rest of the night with my arm on a heating pad like an old arthritic woman, wriggling my wrist in circles, trying to overcome the stiffness and regain motion.

As was the plan for the evening, we decided to make use of the extraordinary television and surround sound setup to watch a movie. Missy was out for dinner with David, her graduate student teaching assistant that she had hooked up with at the party a few nights before, so we weren’t interfering with her plans by being in the living room. I still wasn’t comfortable calling the place my own, especially when she was around. I still felt like I was just a visitor in her home, and I rarely came out of my room without an invitation.

I had told Nick that I wanted to watch something funny and silly, and he brought “This is Spinal Tap” with him for our viewing pleasure. “There’s such a fine line between clever and stupid.” You can’t help but laugh at them, especially when they’re taking themselves so seriously.

When the movie ended, I slipped the DVD back into its case. I had been debating all night, and I finally decided to tell Nick about my plans.

“Can I talk to you about something?” I asked.

“Anything. Of course you can.” He leaned forward with such a look of sincerity. I wanted to just hug him and make him swear that he would stand by me through all the rough spots in life.

“I’ve made some decisions,” I said. “They’re decisions about my medications.”

He looked a bit concerned, and understandably so. “What kinds of decisions?”

“I don’t want to take them anymore.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He rattled off a handful of meds that I took. “And also Luvox,” I said. “Don’t forget the Luvox.”

“Do you understand the significance of what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

”Do you realize that you could be sick as a dog for up to…” he did some math. “You could be sick as a dog for up to three weeks, and still not be fully normal for a month after that. And once you’re ‘normal’, how do you know that the depression won’t get you? It’s a huge risk.”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I won’t know for sure. But I do know that I hate medicating myself. I want to get away from that. I want to feel again. I want to laugh and feel it deep inside me. I want to cry.”

“And I can appreciate that. I can. But I have some serious worries about what can happen when you come off even one of those medications, but all of them…” his voice trailed away. “All of them at once?”

“Yes,” I said. “I want my body to know what it feels like to be clean. Why go through six different phases of withdrawal? It’s like getting rid of your wisdom teeth: you can do them one at a time, or four at once. I prefer four so I don’t ever have to do it again.”

“As your friend, I understand. As a medical professional, I really have to advise against it.”

I was crushed. I wanted him to say he was proud of me for trying to be strong. I wanted him to say he would stand beside me and support me through this. There were a lot of things I wanted to hear. “I advise against it” was not one of them.

I curled into a tiny ball on the couch, pillow clutched to my belly, crushed by his lack of sympathy. I wanted him to leave. “If you’re not with me, you’re against me,” I said bitterly, meaning every word.

“That’s not true. I’m with you.”

“No, you’re not. I thought for a moment, and then stood. “I think it’s time for you to go home now.” He stood slowly and casually strolled through the condo for the front door.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I’m always there for you. You know that. He kissed me on the cheek and left his cell phone number on the table. “I think you’ll need it. Call me.” He started to walk away, and stopped. “Please tell Missy. She needs to know, in case something bad happens.”

I closed and locked the door behind him, and went straight to my room. I slept fitfully that night, constantly awakening to street noises or the sound of my cat purring like a motorcycle in my ear.

The next morning, before work, I lined them up very carefully on the counter, one pill after another, until they formed a line of tiny pharmaceutical soldiers. They seemed so inert when they sat there, which seemed like a startling contrast to the power they secretly held inside. Reaching forward with my right hand, I began to flick them, one by one, in the direction of the toilet. Ping! Ping! Sploosh! Ping! Ping! There were far more misses than hits, and I knelt on the floor, reaching behind the toilet for one that had bounced wildly, feeling the cold porcelain against my bare shoulder. I counted the remaining pills in her hand, one by one. Sixteen. I thought about lining them up again, but I’d grown bored with that game. I opted for dropping them into the toilet, one by one, just to watch them dissolve. I wondered how long it would take for each to break down in plain water, knowing that the process would be infinitely faster in the acidic environment of the stomach.

I watched the various colors release and melt in the toilet, colored patches on a white porcelain base. With a flush, they were gone, just a memory that may or may not have ever existed in reality. And what, exactly, is reality, especially when you’re that medicated? With a flick of the handle, the water swirled in and the pills were gone.

Now all that was left was the fear of the withdrawal. There was nothing that could be done but watch and wait. I left a note for Missy – “Stopped taking meds. Nick fears withdrawal symptoms. If I get sick, you’ll know why” – and went to work.

Ashes to Ashes

Missy was out at class and I was home alone. I was reading the newspaper and listening to a new radio station that advertised itself as “a classic mix of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and today”. Why not just say, “we couldn’t settle on a format, so we’ll play whatever we can get our hands on”? Elvis led to the White Stripes, which led awkwardly to Luther Vandross, and then to The Doors.

The opening chords of “Riders on the Storm” caught my attention, with the synthesized raindrops in the background. I always loved Jim Morrison. All my life I felt like his lyrics were so powerful, as though they spoke to me through time and disatance. It probably had something to do with our shared depression and tendency towards self-medication with alcohol and street drugs. He was only 27 when he died in Paris. I always wondered if I would make it that long. Looking back now, I felt so happy to know that I had kicked those bad habits. Ok, I had transferred my addictions and need for medication from street drugs to prescriptions, which were only slightly safer, but at least I knew what to expect from them. I could probably go on like this forever. The question was whether I wanted to. I lacked highs and lows. Even when I laughed I felt like I only experienced the laughter superficially, not deep in my soul like I once did. I wanted to overcome that. I didn’t want to be the morose, brooding poet type. I made a decision to fight that tendency as much as possible.

The next song was Erasure, “Oh l’Amour”. I hopped up off the couch and tried to dance around in some 80s-inspired reverie, but it just didn’t work. There were dead Palestinians staring at me from the newspaper, fears of terrorist plots, international crises about AIDS and other incurable diseases. It just didn’t feel right to be dancing and enjoying myself when there were so many problems in the world. I slumped back to the couch. I hated this feeling.

I went to the kitchen where Missy had set up a small desk with paper, pens, pencils, markers… anything that you might need to be creative at a moment’s notice. I started to write.

I was never the kind to keep a journal, but the psychologist, who I don’t trust at all, suggested that this might be a good idea to help me face and get in touch with my thoughts. She said it nearly two years ago, so I don’t know why on earth I’m even considering trying it now. Yet here I am, willing to give it a try.

I’m feeling dark today. I should be in a fabulous mood because I had a great date with Nick last night, but I’m not. I came home singing, and Missy thought that I was so happy. I guess I sounded like it. It’s strange. It’s like my body still struggles to be happy even when my soul doesn’t want to cooperate and feel the joy. Do other people feel this way?

I’ve stopped cutting my fingertips with the knife. Mostly it’s because I live here now, and I’m deathly afraid of getting blood on the white carpets. Whatever it takes, I suppose. But the knife has been in the drawer since I moved in. I've stopped wearing bandages on nearly every fingertip.

I think I was 14 when I first thought about killing myself. I wonder if everyone thinks about that at 14, about what the world would be like without them. Would I be missed? Would anyone even notice if I was gone? I spent amazing amounts of time plotting how I would do it, when and where. What was better, carbon monoxide or slitting my wrists? Should I poison myself with arsenic or take a bottle of pills? Do I get a gun, or walk in front of a bus? I think that I was saved in the end by the dizzying array of choices and my inability to make a decision. That’s the irony of a good severe depression. You lack the energy to follow through on any of your disturbing, morbid thoughts. Or maybe, deep beneath it all, I just wanted to see what would happen next, like an overstimulated child who's crying on the outside, but hates the thought of falling asleep and missing something.

I stopped the street drugs, all but alcohol, when my shrink put me on the cocktail of meds. Prozac, Luvox, Lithium… I’m not entirely sure that half of my problems today aren’t caused by interactions of the meds. Each is scary in its own right. Put them together, and you have to wonder if you’re really the person you think you are. I feel like some kind of a robot controlled by pharmaceutical companies; my brain is not my own. I want to be free, but I’m more afraid than you could imagine. Cutting myself off could cause more problems than I’m prepared to deal with. I would need to have a strong support system to pull this off, and with the half-lives of these drugs, it could take as much as two weeks to be clean enough to not have to fear withdrawal symptoms. Damn. I’m really afraid of this.

I don’t know if anything will come of this thing with Nick. I like him. God knows I like him a lot. Clinically speaking, he knows what he’s getting into more than any guy I’ve ever met. He knows what to expect. He knows that I’m unstable. He knows about the baby. He knows that I have a crappy minimum-wage job and no college degree. But he also knows that I want more out of life, and that has to count for something, right? Besides, I’m still 24. I’m entitled to still be sort of fucked up about stuff. If I was 30 and still a mess, that would be different.

God, what if I’m still like this at 30? I need to really start thinking about the future. The baby taught me that much, and for that I am forever grateful. I want to be a good mother someday. Before that, though, I need to kick the meds and learn to stand on my own two feet. And it would also help to know the father. God, that’s embarrassing. I can’t believe that I got pregnant from a nameless one-night-stand. If there was ever a situation that gave you a shot in the ass to get your life on track, this would have to be a pretty dramatic example of it.

I wanted to cry for that baby, a baby that wasn’t conceived in love and didn’t find a suitable host to carry it to term. How much worse of a situation can you envision? Someday I will do better, and I will do it to honor the memory of the child that I lost. Yes, I know that I would have aborted it if I hadn’t miscarried, but I had already lost it to the prescription drugs. I believe that’s why it didn’t make it; the toxins in my body were too much for it to handle.

I have to accept that this is my life. It’s not a dress rehearsal for opening night’s performance. I’m not a teenager anymore, and it’s time that I came to accept the fact that I can’t spend my life waiting for something to happen. This is it. Think about that for a second. I have to start living in the moment, looking for the good things, and trying to make something of myself. It’s not going to be easy; nothing worthwhile ever is. But it’s worth fighting for. It's the most important thing I've never done.

I’ve always hesitated to get involved with people. Friends, lovers, family… they’ve all been kept at arm’s length while I tried to live my life on my own. My relationships have always been so poor, and I never wanted to admit to myself that it mattered. I never wanted to face the fact that I was with the wrong person. It’s easier to be alone by choice than to be lonely in the arms of a lover.

It’s 3:15pm. It’s time. It’s time to take my life into my own hands. It’s time to be strong, to be my own empowered woman, to be myself. What does that mean? I have no idea, but I’m going to do my best to figure it out. It’s a little early for a new year’s resolution, but I’m going to give it a shot. Make a plan and stick to it. School starts on January 24. I have a little more than a month to pull myself together. Breathe deeply. Think about what you want. You’re standing at the cliff. You can either walk back down the way you came, or you can take a flying leap into the unknown. What’s it going to be?

I looked at the pages of scribbled notes, half-illegible with my terrible handwriting. I ripped them from the legal pad, folded them in half, and thought for a moment. I needed a symbol of change. What could I do to make this real?

I went to the kitchen to put the notebook and pencil away, and found my idea. I took a candle from the kitchen table and placed it in the sink. Then, as though I were in a Catholic church, I made a wish and lit the candle. I took the five pages of yellow legal paper, covered in my scrawled writing, and set the corner on fire. I watched the flames engulf the words. I dropped the last piece into the sink just before it singed my hand. The embers glowed brightly around the edges, still alive with fire and heat. I watched until the last one stopped glowing. I extinguished the candle, moved it back to its place on the kitchen table and whispered “ashes to ashes”. My words had been sent to the universe in wispy curls of smoke. I was committed to making a change. I would take two days to plan my attack. My new life would commence on Wednesday.

Breathe deeply. Feel the air. Stars exploded, the universe expanded and through some miracle, here we all were today. I felt a glimmer of hope deep inside me, as though the stardust was trying to break through to the surface.

That's Amore

The restaurant was decorated in a combination of Christmas and Italian kitsch. White lights and garland hung from the ceiling. The tablecloths were red and white checkerboard. The walls were adorned with posters of Lamborghinis and maps of Sicily. The tables were accented with chianti bottles and plastic grapes. The employees all had heavy accents and yelled at each other in Italian in the kitchen while Dean Martin sang “That’s Amore” to set the mood. I loved it.

We ordered a large cheese and pepperoni, and an order of garlic bread to start. I was pleased to hear him order a Coke instead of wine or beer. I didn’t want to feel pressured to drink tonight. I ordered the same.

He told me that working on the ambulance, he knew of every exceptional hole-in-the-wall eatery in the city. If you ever needed to know of a good, cheap place to eat, ask an EMT or a cop. They knew all the best places. In addition to this place, he told me about a taco stand on the south side of the city that was so popular, cops would come in from other precincts to eat there; a burger joint about three blocks over that served them smothered in fried onions; and a deli that made sandwiches so large, you could easily take home half or more for lunch the next day. I wondered how I had managed to live in the city for so long without discovering any of these places. Then I remembered that I was too poor to eat out, although my cash position was slowly improving with my new lower rent. It didn’t seem possible that I could live someplace that was so dramatically nicer, yet be paying less per month. I was waiting for it all to come crashing down. It had to. Things couldn’t possibly be this good.

The pizza came and it was to die for, the perfect blend of sauce, cheese and meat on a thin crust. I made a mental note that I would be coming back here someday.

We talked as we ate, and he seemed very interested in my return to school.

“What do you think you’ll be majoring in?” he asked.

I had to chew before answering. “Honestly, I don’t know yet,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in an academic environment, and I think I want to try several things before deciding on any one.”

“Like what?” He slid another slice of pizza onto my plate before serving himself.

“Well, I liked to write when I was in school. I don’t know if I’m any good, though.”

“You won’t know until you try,” he said, signaling the waitress for a refill on our Cokes.

“True, but of course writing is so deeply personal that it’s hard to build up the courage to expose yourself to that sort of criticism. Because it’s not the work they’re criticizing. It’s you. It’s the way you view and experience the world.”

“But you can’t take it so personally.”

“I know I shouldn’t, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who isn’t fundamentally insecure about what they write. What will people think, they wonder? It controls every word that comes from their mind. They're putting their soul on the page.”

He thought for a moment. “That’s really interesting,” he said. “I wouldn’t have seen it that way.”

“Maybe it’s just me,” I said. “But I don’t think so. Even though math or physics might be more intellectually demanding, writing is the most emotionally challenging major.”

He stopped me. “Not necessarily. Medicine, nursing… these are professions that are emotionally challenging.”

“True,” I said. “You’re dealing with very emotional situations every day. But those are externally emotional, dealing with other people's health and feelings. It's about stepping outside yourself and connecting with others. Writing is about dealing with your inner emotions – your demons, your insecurities, your hopes and fears – every day of the week, and putting them on display for others to see and judge.”

“Interesting. So you think you want to be a writer?”

“No,” I laughed. “The more I talk about it, the more I think I want to be something where emotion doesn’t come into play at all. Like an accountant.”

“Please don’t take offense,” he said, “but you would make a lousy accountant.”

“Why?”

“You’re too creative. The numbers would be too rigid for you.”

The waitress came to clear our plates. The momentary break led us down a new conversational path.

“Tell me about your family,” I said.

He thought for a moment. “I don’t know what to tell you, really. My parents are still together, married for 32 years. I have a sister who’s two years older, and she’s married with a son.”

“The boy you were buying the book for?”

“Yep, that’s the one. Joshua. Josh. He’s a great kid. I learn a lot from him.”

“Does your sister live nearby?”

“On the north side of town, near the park. It’s good, because I get to see Josh a lot. I’m his favorite uncle.” He paused. “Of course, I’m his only uncle. But he hasn't realized that yet."

“And he’s your favorite only nephew, of course.”

"Of course. We're a match made in heaven."

He talked at length about growing up not far from here in a neighborhood that was later leveled for an urban redevelopment project. The new houses are beautiful, with none of the problems that the old neighborhood faced, but they lack a certain charm that the old places had. His parents met graduation night. She was a friend of a friend who attended a nearby school and had come to the graduation party. They talked for hours on the patio and were married less than three months later on Labor Day weekend. His sister made her grand entrance into this world the following Christmas Eve, and he was born two and a half years later in the summer of 1976, just shortly before the big Bicentennial celebration. I did some quick math to realize that he was four years older than I was. Not a bad age difference.

He went to community college right out of high school, got his LPN degree, and while he loved medicine and helping people, he hated being confined indoors with sick people all day long. He decided to parlay his medical knowledge into a career that got him out of hospitals and out into the fresh air. He had been working on the ambulance for almost five years now, and was perfectly happy to continue doing it for as long as his back held out. It was usually a bad back that forced you to find a different line of work. He was one of the more senior members of the crew, so he got to pick some of the better shifts and avoid the overnights where you dealt primarily with DUI accidents, bar fights and late-night domestic violence.

I liked to listen to him talk. He was a good storyteller, and by the end of his memoir, I felt as though I had known his friends, family and coworkers for years.

He looked at his watch. “It’s nearly midnight. What do you say to me taking you home? I hate to cut the night short, but regardless of whether I got here late or not, I still have to start work at 6am.”

“Hurry up, then! Let’s get moving! The last thing I want is to have a fatigued medical professional out on the roads in the morning. Come on!” I grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out the door towards the car. He laughed, took my hand and pulled me closer to him. He put his left hand on my face and gave me a quick, gentle kiss. I felt my legs turn rubbery.

We drove back to my place in silence. He pulled up outside the building and I thanked him for a lovely, albeit short evening. I leaned in to give him a peck on the cheek, still not sure what to make of the kiss outside Vinnie’s. He turned his head so my lips met his. I was secretly pleased. When I pulled away, he asked if he could see me again. I suggested that perhaps he should have my phone number for next time, and I gave it to him.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve already got a plan for next time.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“How about I give you an early Christmas present?” He paused for effect. “Why don’t I cut your cast off for you?”

“How did you know I wasn’t planning on going back to the doctor?” I laughed.

“I could just tell. It’s been seven weeks; you could have had it removed at six. And I didn’t want you to be stuck with that thing on until you were old and gray.”

“Yeah, but it’s handy in the city,” I said, trying to sound serious. “It can be a very good weapon.”

“You’re just going to have to carry a gun like all the rest of the ladies,” he said, jokingly.

"Hmm, me with a gun. Does that frighten you as much as it frightens me?"

"You're probably right," he laughed.

I caught a glimpse of the dashboard clock. “It’s getting later and later. You have to go!” I kissed him quickly and hopped out of the car. I rode up in the elevator singing to myself. “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore….”

As Time Goes By

I spent three hours on Saturday night trying on every outfit in Missy’s closet. We were not the same size at all. I was about four inches shorter, evidently all in the legs judging by how every pair of pants dragged on the floor, and I was just shaped completely differently. She was curvier than I was, very feminine in all the right places. My figure was more of what you would describe as boyish. Some of her pants dropped right off my hips. This wasn't easy. I had the kind of body ideally suited for minimum-wage khakis and a polo.

We finally settled on a skirt and a nice sweater, an outfit that looked polished and put-together without looking like I had spent three hours ransacking her closet. Missy taught me a variety of styles for how to do my hair, and I settled on a low ponytail that was simple and sophisticated, and hid the unruly waves that dominated my head.

I was a lost cause at work on Sunday. Missy and I arrived with the now traditional dozen Sunday donuts, a tailored mix of favorites based on scientific donut sampling (the jelly donut was always the last to be eaten; while no one admitted that it was their favorite, the white-iced French crullers always vanished in the first round). I barely even nibbled at mine, an old-fashioned cake donut with white icing and toasted coconut that caught my eye in the shop; I couldn’t stop thinking about my date, and my stomach was tied up in knots.

I remembered being in high school, when I was probably 16 years old, and practically bouncing off the walls because I had been asked to the homecoming dance. From the moment he asked, I had run all around the empty house singing the Banana Boat song, of all things, the first song that popped into my head. Day-O, Da-a-ay-O. I had long ago told myself that dances didn’t matter, which had been absolutely undeniably true until the moment I had a date for one. He was supposed to pick me up at 6:00. I was dressed and ready to go thirty minutes early. 6:00 came and went. 6:30. 7:00. 8:00. I called his house once and left a message on his answering machine. At 9:00, I locked the front door, turned off the porch light and went to bed, staring at my ceiling in silence, unable to sleep, depressed and numb. By Monday I learned that he had gone with someone more popular than me. As the story went, he had forgotten that he had asked me when the opportunity arose to take Jennifer, and he felt really bad about leaving me home alone, waiting. But I didn’t want to be a pathetic vision in everyone’s minds. I pretended not to care, and told people that I had forgotten about him, and had actually gone away for the weekend to visit my sister at college. Anyone who knew me would have known that was a lie. Fortunately for me, no one knew me.

The workday took forever. Christmas was fast approaching, yet it seemed like everyone was at home, waiting for the last minute panic sales to kick in. What they didn’t seem to realize was that bookstores don’t really offer those “50% off everything” sales that you find at department stores and boutiques. Nonetheless, there was little traffic in the store, which meant fewer people to watch, and nearly no one had a question for the bored info desk duo. We sat there all day, impatiently fidgeting, watching the clock.

When 6:00 rolled around, Missy and I clocked out and practically bolted for the door. We made it back to the condo in record time, and she immediately got to work on making me look lovely without looking like I was trying too head to get his attention. At 7:45, I looked at Missy, who was applying eyeliner as I flinched and blinked. She had unbelievable patience and kept going.

“He won’t come,” I said.

“”You are such a dork!” she exclaimed. “Why wouldn’t he come?

I shrugged. In my experience, guys didn’t usually need a reason.

When he hadn’t arrived by 8:15, she started to look nervous. I, on the other hand, felt oddly comforted by the thought of being stood up, a twisted satisfaction in the knowledge that I was right. We sat in the living room watching television. By 9:00, I had curled up onto the couch in a wrinkled heap, not caring what I looked like. By 9:30, we were sharing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and watching Casablanca on TCM.

“What does she see in him?” I asked, mouth full of ice cream. “Look at him,” I said, waving my spoon at the TV. “Ingrid Bergman is so young, so vibrant – she practically glows when she smiles. Humphrey Bogart is a cynical, withered old man. I just don’t see the attraction.”

Missy tried to protest. “Come on, don’t ruin it for me? Suspend disbelief for a while? It’s a classic love story? You're just supposed to believe?”

“Now if they had Cary Grant playing the part of Rick, now that I could understand….”

“Just shut up and watch the movie?” she said, laughing. I swiped the pint of ice cream from her hand and dug in. I was fishing for a big chunk of cookie dough when the doorbell rang. I looked at Missy, and she leaped from the couch.

“No, Missy, don’t!” I whispered loudly as she ran for the door. She peered through the peephole and nodded. Before I could protest, she opened the door.

“Hi,” Nick said, sheepishly. “Is Angela home?”

I had slid down onto the couch, hoping to hide myself. Missy wasn’t going to let me get away with that. “Sure, come on in?” She stepped back and allowed him to enter the room. “I don’t believe we’ve met? I’m Missy?” She extended her hand to shake his.

“I’m Nick,” he said. “Nick the Asshole. I want to apologize for showing up so late.”

“Let me get Angela?” Missy said. “Angela?” she called loudly, as though I had managed to escape to another room. “Nick the Asshole is here?”

I had hoped to hide silently on the couch until he went away, but her singsong voice announcing the arrival of "Nick the Asshole" made me laugh, giving away my hiding spot. I was forced to sit up straight and smooth my skirt down, trying to look presentable. I rose from the couch.

“Nick,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “What a pleasant surprise!” The sarcasm dripped from my pores like a cold sweat. He looked increasingly uncomfortable and mortified.

Missy politely excused herself. “”If you don’t mind, I’ll finish watching this in my room? It was nice meeting you, Nick? She gave me a playful punch in the arm. “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid?” she said, and scampered off with a giggle. Nick and I stood in awkward silence for a moment before it occurred to me to ask him to come in.

We walked into the living room and sat on the couch in front of the large plasma TV. He looked around, impressed. “Beautiful place you have here,” he said.

“It’s not mine,” I replied. “It’s Missy’s. I rarely come out of my room. But it is lovely, isn’t it?”

Humphrey Bogart was drinking himself into oblivion in the café, while Sam played “As Time Goes By” on the piano. I reached for the remote to shut it off, but Nick stopped me. “No, leave it on. It’s a good movie.” We sat in silence as Ilsa came in and saw how Rick had been so devastated by the loss of her love. Nick turned to me.

“Can I explain?”

“I don’t know,” I said, unable to hide my sarcasm. “Can you?”

"I can," he said. “First, let me apologize.” He waited for me to say something, but I was sitting silently, arms crossed.

“I was on my way over here, and I admit that I was running a bit late,” he said. “I was driving down the expressway and a car spun out about a quarter-mile ahead of me, hitting three other cars before slamming into the median. The accident was pretty horrific, and I knew there were injuries. I called 911, but I also got out of the car to help stabilize the victims. I would have called, but I only had your address, not your number. I called information, but your number on record is you old apartment number, which as you know is disconnected. I didn’t know your roommate’s last name to ask for her.”

I felt my attitude softening towards him, but I still said nothing.

“So I managed to stabilize the driver of the main car. He was pretty badly hurt, but I managed to keep him still until the ambulance arrived. One of the other vehicles was a minivan filled with kids coming back from hockey practice. They were going to have to go to the hospital to be checked out anyway, but I helped bandage cuts and bruises for the ride over to Community General. I finished as quickly as I could, and headed over here. I got lost twice along the way, but here I am now. I’m so sorry.”

I nodded, unable to speak. Maybe he wasn’t such an asshole after all. So why, then, did I feel more of an urge to cry than I had all night? I swallowed hard and fought the tears. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

“For what?” he asked.

“For coming. For not giving up and staying away. For trying to call.”

He smiled. “So, I see that you’ve already been double-dating with Missy, Ben and Jerry. You’re probably not hungry, are you?”

“That depends,” I said. “If you’re offering pizza, I could be ravenous.”

“That sounds wonderful,” he said. “I’m starving. Have you ever been to Vinnie’s on Market? I’d argue that they have the best pizza in the city. The place is a dump, but the food is amazing.”

“Sounds perfect for a late meal,” I said, my stomach now rumbling with anticipation. “Let me just stop upstairs and tell Missy that I’m going.”

I ran as quickly as I could up the spiral staircase, and found Missy sitting at her door, peeking out. “Sorry?” she said. “I was listening to the whole thing? I couldn’t help it? I just wanted to make sure you were ok? I wanted to be able to rush to your rescue if you needed me?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for keeping an eye on me.”

“Be back by midnight or your carriage will turn into a pumpkin?” she said. I curtsied like a princess and ran back down the staircase.

Starting Over

Saturday was bitterly cold and rainy, with a blustery wind blowing in from the north. I carpooled to the store with Missy; it was preferable to waiting at the bus stop in the rain. We rode in relative silence, although I could tell by her bouncy demeanor that things had gone well with her guy the night before. She was glowing with excitement, and I felt buoyed by her attitude. I had my doubts about living with her at first, but in all honesty, her optimism was doing good things for me.

It wasn’t until we were stationed at the info desk that she started talking. I learned that her lovely man’s name was David. He was one of the teaching assistants for her chemistry professor, and she had met him in passing in the chemistry department’s wing of the science building. She thought he was charming, bright and handsome, and when he approached her at the party, she was just delighted. She had been trying to work up the courage to ask him out for weeks.

I asked if she had brought him back to her place that night, but she said no. She wanted to take things relatively slowly, although she did lose track of at least an hour while making out with him in the kitchen. She giggled like a teenager. She was utterly luminous when she spoke of him, and I hoped that he was as delighted by her as she was enamored with him.

She volunteered information on Brian, my couch friend, without my asking. They had dated for six months the previous year. He was funny and lovely and nearly everything you’d want in a boyfriend. The problem was that he was also insecure and possessive, the latter trait being the one that ultimately drove her insane. He expected her to call every time she got to her destination – the library, a friend’s house, class – and sometimes he would even call her at the location, not her cell phone, to check on her whereabouts. “I never gave him any reason not to trust me,” she said, “but his last girlfriend had really messed with his head? And I didn’t want to have to pay the price for that anymore, you know?” I knew exactly what she meant.

She reached under the desk and pulled out a few sheets of paper that looked like some sort of form. She handed them to me. A quick look told me that they were the necessary application forms for January enrollment at school. She had filled in as many of the blanks as she could, minus my Social Security number and high school GPA.

“Why are you giving me this?” I asked.

She looked sheepish. “You’re a smart girl, you know? And I hate to see you spending the rest of your life working at a bookstore for minimum wage? So why not try school again?”

“Money would be the first reason. Time would be the second.”

“You’re more than eligible for financial aid? I went to the finance office on Friday and talked it over with a counselor? You could basically go for free?”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It seems a little farfetched that they would want to give scholarship money to someone who was, at best, a mediocre high school student.”

“You’re older now,” she said, “and the fact that you’ve had the same job for six years shows commitment and longevity, which they like?” So they think you’d be a good candidate?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Are you sure it’s not too late to apply?”

“Rolling admissions? You can still give it a shot?”

I thought about it for a moment, then put the paperwork down to help a customer. When I finished, I quietly picked up a pen and filled out the rest of the information, sealing the papers into an envelope.

“Come with me Monday? We can deliver them in person? You’ll have an answer within the week?” She seemed to have it all planned out for me.

“And what will I be majoring in?”

“Nothing yet? Take your basics and see what calls to you, ok?” If she could just get rid of that up-talker voice, she would really give a much better impression. Her head was actually screwed on straighter than her words would ever indicate.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ll try.”

We went to the dean’s office early on Monday morning. Missy had evidently spoken with the dean directly, so we bypassed the traditional admissions process. The dean sat us down in his office, and chatted for a while. He turned to me and said, “Miss Farber, you have five minutes to tell me your life story. I don’t want to just hear the highlights, like when you were elected to the position of class treasurer your sophomore year. I want to know what makes Angela Farber who she is.”

The summary version of my life was easy to tell. I was born in the suburbs 24 years earlier, the second child of a factory worker and a housewife. My first few years were happy, or perhaps just relatively so compared to the latter ones. My mother walked out, unannounced, when I was six, and returned to our home just in time to die of cancer four years later. My father worked two jobs, and was never around. I barely know him to this day. I drifted through life, was a loner in high school who took solace in drugs, alcohol and other lonely people. I tried community college for a semester at 18, but it never really clicked. I’ve been working full-time at the bookstore ever since. Case closed.

He nodded through the story, and I felt like he was making mental notes in the same way that the shrink jotted comments in her notebook when I spoke. He asked only one question after: “Are you the same person as you were when you went to the community college?” I said no. I knew that I had changed since, even if the outward circumstances of my life didn't give that impression. He smiled, thanked me for my time, and rose to escort us out of the office.

I asked Missy if she thought it went well. She said yes, but I wasn’t so sure. I know I was sensitive about these things, but I felt like he was judging me, deciding whether or not I, as a human being, was worthy of a second chance. And the fact of the matter is that everyone deserves a second chance, unless they’ve molested children or murdered their pregnant wife. I hadn’t done either, so I thought I should be entitled to a pretty good shot.

The following Saturday, Missy drove home at lunchtime to check the mail. She said she was waiting for a package, but I knew that she was waiting to see if I heard from the college. She came back with a letter in her hand. I held it for a moment, pondering the fact that I was standing at a fork in the road, and whatever happened with this letter was going to determine the course of my life in the short- to mid-term future. Missy was bouncing beside me. “Open it, or I’m going to take it from you and do it myself?”

I ran my finger underneath the flap of the envelope, and unfolded the letter. It was a full letter, but what I saw was this:

Dear Angela,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been granted admission for the Spring semester. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. We are also pleased to tell you that, based on your financial and academic circumstances, we will be offering you a combination of scholarships and grants that will fully cover your academic costs for the year. Additional fees, such as books and supplies, will remain your responsibility.

Welcome to the class of 2009!

Sincerely,
Michael Barker, Associate Dean

Missy leaped up and down and squealed for joy. My cheeks were flushed with pent-up energy. I knew that this was fabulous news, but for some reason I wasn’t as excited about it as I should be. It’s one of the symptoms of depression, the lack of emotion, but of course the meds are supposed to fix that. Evidently they weren’t doing their job, because this was far and away the best thing that had happened to me in months – possibly years – and I still felt flat. But I put on a happy face and Missy never knew how I felt inside.

She broke out of the box and ran around to tell everyone my good news. Employees came by throughout the afternoon to pat me on the back and wish me luck, which is why I didn’t think it was odd when a voice to my right said, “Congratulations.”

I said thank you without turning my head as I finished typing a search into the computer. I looked up and nearly lost my balance when I saw Nick, the EMT, looking back at me.

“Whoa! Wow! Hi!” It was all I could manage.

“Hi,” he replied, smiling. “Sounds like things are going well for you.”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, they are.” I had a moment of realization. “Wait, how did you hear? Did I get accepted because another candidate was run over, and you were sent to save them?”

“No! I was over in the children’s section, looking for a book for my nephew, when I heard her telling someone that Angela was accepted to college for the spring semester.”

“No detective work on your part,” I said. “The news just came to you, out of the blue.”

“It’s the best way to hear good news,” he said. He had the best smile, the kind that made his eyes sparkle, and the corners of his eyes crinkle at the edges. It was charming.

“So, a book for the nephew, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s turning four, and since I don’t know anything about kids… do you think this is a good book?”

I took a look at his selection. He chose “The Rainbow Fish”. It was one of my favorites, and I told him so. “”It’s a great book about sharing,” I told him. “Another funny one, although probably too advanced in its humor for a four-year-old, is ‘Click Clack Moo: Cows Who Type’. Save that for his fifth or sixth birthday.”

I noticed that he said he knew nothing about kids, but I thought I’d probe anyway and ask more questions. “So, any kids of your own?”

“No,” he said. “None for me yet. But I’d like to have a family. I’m just looking for the right woman.”

“I wish you luck,” I told him. “It seems like nearly everyone is on the quest for that person. I have a theory about dating. It’s the theory of compatible weirdness.”

“The what?” he asked, laughing at the name.

“It’s true. Hear me out. You walk into a party and there are maybe 10 women there, just for the sake of argument. They will be short and tall, fat and thin, well-educated and poorly-educated. You could look at their resumes and decide that woman #3 is right for you, but maybe she has quirks that you can’t stand. However, your buddy might think that her habit of never putting the cap on the toothpaste, or forgetting to lock the doors, might be endearing rather than enraging. So you might be better off with woman #7, because you can live with her quirks and she can live with yours, even though her paper stats might not be as good. You’re compatibly weird.”

“So you’re saying I’m weird?”

“We’re all weird,” I replied. “The trick is finding someone who doesn’t notice how weird you are.”

He laughed. I loved to hear him laugh.

“So I was wondering,” he began, and then stopped to allow me to answer a customer’s question. When I finished, he resumed his thought. “So I was wondering if maybe you would like to go out for dinner with me tomorrow night. Just to find out what kind of weird you are.”

For a moment, I wondered if he was kidding. He didn’t appear to be. My palms started to sweat and my cheeks flushed. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Didn’t I scare you away once already?”

“Truthfully?” He paused. “Yes. But there’s something you’re not taking into account.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re not taking into account the fact that for reasons I can’t explain, I can’t seem to stop thinking about you.”

My cheeks were so hot, I thought they were going to burst into flames. “Reallly? Oh, well, that’s interesting…” My voice trailed off as my brain shut down, rendering me speechless.

“There are three bookstores that are closer to my apartment than this one,” he said. “I came here because I hoped you would be working today.”

I waited for my knees to buckle and send me crashing to the ground, but they held strong. He continued. “So, what time should I pick you up at your place? 8:00?” I nodded. He smiled broadly. “It’s a date, then.”

He walked away towards cash wrap when my senses returned. “Wait! Nick!” He turned and walked back towards me.

“Don’t tell me you’re canceling on me.”

“No!” I said a little too quickly. “I moved. I’m living at 225 Oak St, #317.”

“Good thing you told me,” he said. “I’d hate to get to your old place and think you had ditched me.”

He tapped the desk with the book and turned away again. “See you tomorrow, Angela.”

“See you tomorrow.”

I watched him pay and leave. It was only then that I sunk back into my chair and noticed a grinning Missy at my side. “No worries?” she said. “Have I got the outfit for you….”

Rebirth

My first days living in Missy’s condo were surreal. I had more space in my single bedroom and bathroom than in my entire studio apartment, and quite possibly the entire floor of my building. My white cat and I wandered in circles in the large space, not entirely sure what to do with ourselves. The cat nearly blended in with the eggshell-colored carpet, which proved somewhat dangerous, as I came close to stepping on her more than once. All of my belongings were transported across town in a single trip in Missy’s small, two-door car, mattress strapped to the roof. I was half tempted to move my mattress into the walk-in closet and live in there, creating a perfectly reasonably sized living room out of the bedroom space. There was an endless supply of natural light, from large windows and skylights. I needed no artificial lighting for the daylight hours, which was such a contrast from my old apartment I barely ever used the lamps I brought with me. I felt like I was living in an entirely new universe, not just a new residence.

I’d gotten home from work a few hours earlier, and Missy invited me to join her at a party later in the evening. I declined, because I just didn’t see that I was going to fit in with the kind of friends that she would have. Besides, we both had to go to work in the morning. But, being Missy, she said that she wasn’t taking no for an answer, and we were leaving at 10pm. It was now 9:45 and I was staring into my closet, cat purring like a motor at my feet, trying to figure out what someone would wear to a college party. I was guessing that sexy, yet casual was on the menu. I gazed into my closet and saw that I honestly had nothing to wear. There were three pairs of khakis for work. I had one pair of ripped jeans and a pair of yoga pants I’d received for Christmas three years earlier. None of this was acceptable bottom-half clothing. For tops, I had my big, burly cardigan, an old, oversized sweatshirt jacket, six bookstore polos and a variety of logo tees from other people’s vacations. The “Cancun” shirt in 70s colors was a personal favorite, and had been worn so often that the colors had faded to pastel versions of themselves. I sighed and sat down on the floor, cross-legged. I tried to stick my index finger up into my cast to scratch an itch, but couldn’t quite reach. After reaching for a wire coat hanger to do the job, I stopped myself and tossed it to the other end of the closet. The last thing I needed was to scratch myself bloody underneath the cast.

There was a knock at the door. “Come in!” I shouted. She bounded into the room.

“Where are you?” she asked. “Are you ready?”

“Not exactly,” I replied, and she followed my voice into the closet. “I don’t think I should be going.”

“Why would you say that?” she asked, sounding hurt. “Can I pick something out for you?” I nodded. She surveyed the scene, held up an index finger as if to say, “wait” and bounced out the door. She returned with a tank top that was cut down to there, and a pair of low-rider jeans. “Will you try these on?”

I tried to protest and tell her that I didn’t want to borrow her Armani-quality clothes. I tried to tell her that I couldn’t afford the dry cleaning involved with returning the clothing to its owner. I tried to tell her that I shouldn’t go. She listened to none of my arguments, and proceeded to my bed where she sat, scowling at me, arms crossed. I closed the closet door and got changed. The jeans were about three inches too long, but the tank top looked good. I stepped out of the closet and she applauded. “Yay! Are you ready?” I told her that I needed to run a brush through my hair and find a pair of shoes. Before I knew it, she had dragged out an arsenal of tools and products. I was impeccably coiffed and wearing a pair of strappy heels that were a size too large, but manageable.

I had run out of excuses, other than the social awkwardness that I always managed to carry with me. It was time to go. She tossed me a jacket. “We don’t want you getting cold, do we?” she asked. It was tight over my cast as I pulled it on, but I loved how it felt warm and wooly, and stuffed my hands into its deep pockets. Riding downstairs in the elevator, she smiled at me. “You look good?” she said.

I didn’t say anything, but I felt pretty for the first time in ages.

The taxi dropped us off at the door of a large old house just off campus. I could hear the bass line of the music from out on the street, and wondered if the neighbors were going to call the police. It took me a few minutes to realize that all of the houses were filled with students, and no one really cared about the music, the crowds or the beer cans on the front lawn.

Missy grabbed my hand and led me through the crowds of gyrating dancers to reach the kitchen. This was the source of all the world’s beer, it seemed, judging by the two kegs and countless coolers filled with cans on ice. It was also where we found several of her friends, who all spoke like she did. Welcome to the cult of up-talkers.

“Oh my god, Missy? You look fabulous?” said one blonde who was, in my estimation, wearing far too much makeup.

“Thanks! Guys? I’d like you to meet my friend, Angela?” She pointed to me in the same way that Vanna White points to letters on Wheel of Fortune. She then pointed at each of her friends and rattled off names.

“Angela, this is Mindy?” a tall brunette who looked bored with the whole evening; “And Kelsey?” the blonde with too much makeup; “Debbie?” a shorter brunette wearing a sparkly shirt; “And last but certainly not least, Kristie?” Kristie looked the most like Missy, blonde and perky in an undeniably bouncy kind of way. They were probably both captains of their respective high school cheerleading squads. Their names all ended in “y” or “ie”. I could see that I was going to be known as Angie by the end of the night if we spent much time together.

They talked amongst themselves, randomly reaching out to fix each other's hair, like a group of social monkeys on a National Geographic special. Missy offered me a beer. I declined. “Oh come on? Please? For me?”

I shook my head. She looked offended. I leaned close to her ear and whispered two words, “Recovering alcoholic.” She pulled back, surprised, but didn’t press the issue any further. She immediately went to the fridge, found a can of Coke, and poured it into a red plastic tumbler.

“Here,” she said, handing it to me. “No one will know, ok?” She smiled. I couldn’t help but like her at moments like these, when she felt like she was conspiring with you to keep some huge secret.

It wasn’t exactly true that I was a recovering alcoholic. I’ve never gone through a 12-step program or anything like that. But I did come to realize that alcohol was causing a lot of problems for me, and I had stopped drinking about a year before, with the exception of one night a few months ago when I went to a bar and ended up coming home with a guy whose name I didn't know; we knew how well that situation worked out for me. I was especially cautious not to start again in an unknown setting. I just wasn’t comfortable with what might happen as a result. The way things had gone over the last few months, I couldn’t take the chance of ending up in bed with some stranger.

Missy and the girls snaked their way through the crowd, looking for men. I followed behind, surveying the scene. Guys approached them from every angle, offering hugs and kisses; even more checked them out from a distance. They were quite an attractive bunch. I stood a few feet away for a while, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable in the heels. I flagged Missy’s attention and pointed to a couch in the corner to indicate that I was going to be over there if she wanted me. She nodded and waved and gave me a thumbs-up sign. I flashed the same sign back.

I curled myself up on the couch with my legs tucked under me. I still had the jacket on over my slinky top, and had no real intention of taking it off and drawing attention to myself. I watched people come and go, embracing, dancing, talking and kissing. I liked my perch on the edge of the world. I could feel the energy of the scene, but without the anxiety that came with actually having to participate in it. I was never much of a fan of crowds, but I did ok one-on-one.

I didn’t see the tall, blonde guy approach, but suddenly he was sitting on the other end of the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, beer bottle in his right hand. I wondered where he had found a bottle of beer in a party that was clearly cans and kegs. He must have known the residents of the house and gotten access to their private stash. He caught me looking in his direction and raised his beer in my direction. I mouthed the word, “cheers” and tipped my cup towards him. We both took a drink. I resumed my survey of the dance floor, particularly intrigued by a seemingly mismatched couple, brought together by nothing but proximity, music and alcohol.

Blonde guy was saying something to me, but I signaled that I couldn’t hear over the thumping hip-hop bass. He scooted closer. “Are you a friend of Denise?”

I shook my head no. “I don’t know anyone here, really,” I said. “I came with a friend.”

“Oh,” he said, looking dejected. “Where is he?”

“It’s not a he,” I told him. “I’m here with my roommate.”

His eyes brightened. “Female roommate?”

“Yes,” I said. “You’d probably like her.”

“Oh yeah? Why do you say that?”

I smiled. “She’s blonde, like you. You could look like Barbie and Ken together.”

He laughed. “I’ll keep her in mind for next Halloween.”

I scanned the crowd. “She’s around here somewhere. You can start planning your costume now.”

He shook his head. “No, thanks. Right now I’d rather talk to you.”

I was a little surprised, as I always tended to be when guys showed an interest. You would think that someone who had as many sexual encounters as I had would have been more of a pro at this sort of thing, but the fact of the matter was that I was still as socially awkward with guys as I had been when I was 15. This was especially true when I didn’t have alcohol to lower my inhibitions.

“So. Uh… are you a student?” I had such great conversational skills.

“Yeah, a senior. Pre-med.”

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “What kind of medicine do you want to specialize in?”

He started to laugh. “Well, much to the dismay of my parents, I don’t actually want to be a doctor to heal the living I’m hoping to be a forensic pathologist.”

I thought for a moment. “The docs who study corpses for the police department?”

“Yeah. It’s the same basic training – you still need to learn how all the body systems work in a living organism, so you can tell what went wrong when you see them dead.”

“So the gunshot wound isn’t obvious enough, huh?”

He laughed again. “It’s not always that straightforward.”

“I guess not,” I said. “It never is on TV, anyway.”

Missy saw us and bounded over to the couch in big, bouncy steps. “Oh my god? I can’t believe that out of all the people in this party, you are talking to my ex?”

I looked at the blonde guy, who had shrunk about two sizes and was nervously chugging his beer. “So,” he said, “Missy is your roommate? What a coincidence.”

I grinned sheepishly, feeling terrible about having brought them together. “Yeah, I just moved in this week.”

“That’s great,” he said. “Great place.”

Missy grabbed my hand and pulled me from the couch. “Goodbye, Brian.” I waved.

“Wait,” he said, grabbing my other wrist. “What’s your name?”

“Angela.”

“Beautiful name, Angela. I’ll see you around.”

Missy tugged at my hand. “He’s nothing but trouble,” she said with conviction.

“He’s cute, though.”

“Yeah, he’s definitely cute?” There was a hint of a smile for a moment. “But bad, very bad?”

We went back to the kitchen, where it was slightly quieter. “Did you meet anyone interesting tonight?” I asked.

“Maybe? I’m not sure? I’m waiting to see if he comes to find me?”

“He will,” I said. “He’d be a fool not to.”

“There are plenty of fools around here.” She got another beer and poured me a new Coke. “How old are you?” she asked,

“24.”

“Wow, you seem older?”

“Thanks. Make me feel ancient in the middle of your college party.”

“No! I didn’t mean it like that?” You look like a student? But you act so much older? Like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders?”

“Sometimes I feel that way,” I said.

“Why?”

“I had to grow up too fast. My mother died when I was young. I had to learn to take care of myself at an early age. I didn’t learn quickly or well.”

She looked saddened by this news. “I’m really sorry?” she said.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “This is a party. Let’s talk about something better.”

“You’re right? It’s a party?” she said. She turned away from the fridge and found herself face-to-face with the guy. Her guy. The guy she had hoped would come find her. He was about six feet tall with dark hair and a lingering hint of a summer tan. He looked stunning in jeans and a white shirt. She tried to stay calm and seem aloof, but her bouncing foot gave away her excitement to me. He stood very close to her and whispered into her ear. She grinned. His mouth drifted from her ear to her neck, and I saw a chill run through her as he kissed the spot just below her ear. Her arms raised and rested lightly on his hips, as though guided by an unseen force. I knew that I should look away, but their movements were so slow, so choreographed, that it was like watching poetry. It felt like a dream.

They were dancing now, slowly, intertwined in their embrace. The party ceased to exist. They heard their own music, and swayed rhythmically to it.

I backed away until I reached the doorway. I left them alone in the kitchen, and I turned and walked away. I stepped outside into the crisp autumn night, and walked four blocks to the nearest bus stop, where I caught the next bus home to the condo.

Candy From Strangers

Sunday mornings always start slowly. No one leaps out of bed to shop at the bookstore in the early hours of the day, and the long-time employees, aware of this, start out their days with a comparable amount of lethargy. We wander into the break room at half speed, punch our time cards, and drift around reading newspapers and sipping coffee. We barely speak to each other, and I would have thought that I would have spoken for everyone if I said that we all liked it that way.

This is why this Sunday was so hard to adjust to. It was ten minutes to opening, and Missy danced through the door like a big ray of sunshine. “Good morning? How are we today?” She floated past us – khakis again perfectly pressed, girlie hair in bows – clocked in, and pulled a box of donuts out of her bag. “I didn’t know what everyone liked, so I just got a variety?” My mouth watered at the sight of them. It had been ages since I’d eaten a donut, which seems silly since they’re only $0.59 at the supermarket. The staff descended on the box, grabbing their favorites in a sugar-anticipatory frenzy. I chose one that turned out to be both glazed and cream-filled, more calories than I’d eaten in the last month. My body danced for joy at the incoming fat and sugar. What a treat!

We each scattered to our neutral corners, gnawing away on our pastries like vultures after the kill. Looking at our faces, you would have thought that it was common for employees to steal food out of each other's mouths. I noticed that Desmond bore a striking resemblance to a squirrel gnawing on a nut. It would have been a wonderful moment if Missy hadn’t started singing, “Here Comes the Sun” in such a perky manner that even Paul McCartney would have seemed depressive in comparison. We all stopped eating, mouths full, and stared. I noticed that she didn’t up-talk when she sang. This fact struck me as being very interesting. I wondered if anyone had ever done a study on the behavior of up-talkers.

“Five minutes until opening,” someone called from outside the door. “Who the hell is singing?” The night manager had picked up the Sunday shift. This was his first introduction to Missy. He stood in the doorway and made some lame joke about how he thought that the Beatles themselves were playing in the break room. She giggled. We cringed. It was such a surreal morning. She drove us nuts, yet she brought treats. Was she good or evil? I felt strange, like I was dealing with those strangers with candy that parents and teachers warn you about when you’re a child.

The night manager was assigning duties for the day. “Mike and Desmond, you’re at cash wrap. Stacey and Bryant, you’ll be restocking. Angela and Missy, you’ll be working info desk.”

“You want both of us at the info desk?” I asked. Someone laughed at the tone of my voice, which probably sounded a little more high-pitched and hysterical than I had intended.

He looked up from his clipboard and grinned. “Yes, I do. I think you could learn a lot from each other.” He looked at his watch. “Ok, people. Let’s go. Doors open in one minute.”

Missy was staring at me with a huge grin, delighted by her luck. She absolutely loved the info desk yesterday, she told me, and would absolutely love to work with me and learn the ropes. Absolutely. I, on the other hand, was absolutely terrified by the prospect of being trapped with her all day. She had all of the energy in the world, and I felt eerily like roadkill when I spent too much time with her. She was the deer, bouncing lithely away across the road. I was the possum, dead on the double-yellow line.

I sighed, went to the sink to wash my hands, and wandered out into the store, still drying them on a wad of completely non-absorbent brown paper towels. I stepped into the box and took my seat at the computer. The phone rang almost instantly, and hardly stopped ringing all morning. Missy helped the ones who showed up in person, and I must admit, she did a good job of keeping them informed and entertained. She seemed to be most popular with old women who, I heard at least three times, were just delighted by her “spunk”.

She went to lunch first, and I had a positively delightful hour of relative quiet while she was away. She returned with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses to share. Again, my mouth watered at the sight of treats. I looked at her strangely. Why was she bringing food? No one ever shared food at the store. It made me suspicious. I wondered if I could trust her. I decided that even if I couldn’t, I’d still eat her food. I was popping my second Kiss into my mouth when she said it.

“Oh my god, I forgot to ask? How was it?” She was gazing at me with the utmost sincerity.

“Good,” I said, savoring the velvety feel of milk chocolate on my tongue. “I haven’t had any in a long time.”

She looked at me in shock. “Wow, I don’t know what to say? That’s so personal? I’m surprised you chose to tell me?”

I was confused. “Wait. Personal? What’s personal?”

“You know,” she said. “Telling me about what you’ve had.”

I was baffled. “Aren’t we talking about the chocolate?”

She started to laugh at an ungodly decibel. People all over the store turned to look. “Ha! You thought I meant the chocolate? I meant your date? And I thought you were telling me that YOU HADN’T HAD ANY IN A LONG TIME?” She practically shouted the last part. I cringed, but it was kind of funny, especially the more I thought about it. I started to giggle.

“Well, I can see why you looked at me strangely.” My giggles had now turned to full-fledged laughter. We were both trying to stop laughing, but each one fed off the other. As soon as I tried to stop, she would start laughing again. I couldn’t stop. My sides hurt.

Bryant came by to see what was going on, and I held out a kiss towards him. “Bryant,” I said, snickering. “Have you been getting any… chocolate lately?” We were hysterical again, and Bryant took the kiss from my hand, shaking his head. “You ladies are very strange.”

It was 2:00, and I had to make use of my lunch break to compose myself. I walked to the market, as I often did, and got to try some new chips and guacamole, as well as a sample of a clear soda that tasted like black cherries. On my way out, I caught a glimpse of another woman handing out samples of chocolate chip cookies. This was my lucky day! I hadn’t eaten so much during daylight hours in months. Not a damned bit of it was healthy, but at least it was something!

I returned to the store, and she smiled when she saw me coming. I smiled back, in spite of myself. Ok, she was irritating, but she had a giving heart, and a good sense of humor. We spent the rest of the afternoon talking in between customer questions.

“So,” I began, “you’re a student?”

“Yeah, a junior?”

“Studying what?”

“Biochemistry?”

I was flabbergasted. You don’t get to use that word often, yet there it was. Flabbergasted. How could a pigtailed up-talker be a biochem major? “What made you choose that?” I asked.

“Oh, probably to piss off my parents?” she said. “My father is a CEO and my mother is the editor-in-chief of a magazine? I went the scientific route just to be rebellious? Dad wanted me to be a business major and mom wanted a journalist?”

I was shocked. Who studies biochemistry to be rebellious? Oh, I guess the answer is perky upper-class nerds. She leaned over the desk and stretched, and I realized that she was wearing designer khakis. I didn’t even know Donna Karan made khakis.

“So if you don’t mind me asking, why are you working at the bookstore?”

“Because I love retail?” she said, smiling. “I love meeting all the people?”

I shook my head and chuckled. “That’s amazing,” I said. “Because we all pretty much hate it.”

“So what would you rather be doing?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe going to school. Working somewhere else. Can’t afford to not work, though, so school is almost impossible.”

“What are you working for?” she asked.

“Rent money. Utilities. Food. Medications.”

“So what if you didn’t have to worry about most of that? Would you go to school?”

“If I found a sugar daddy? Sure, I’d go to school.”

“It’s settled, then.” She said, crossing her arms matter-of-factly. You’ll move in with me?”

“Whoa!” I don’t even know you! I just met you yesterday!”

She smiled. “You will soon? Come on, just come over and see the place? I promise you’ll like it?”

We made plans for me to come over the following afternoon, on my day off. She only worked on Saturdays, Sundays and for the occasional last-minute subsitution, so she had plenty of time on her hands when she wasn't in the lab.

I spent that night sitting alone in my apartment. Would it be better or worse to share a place with someone? It was hard to tell. I liked my privacy, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to every so often. The cat was never listening to a word I said. Like now, for instance. There I was, talking to myself, and the cat never even looked up. Damned cat. Show some respect for the hand that feeds you!

I got to her place around 4:00. It was a nice-looking building from the outside, but that’s never a guarantee of what’s inside. I entered the lobby and took the elevator to the third floor. I walked down the hall, looking for 317. I knocked on the door and there she was, wearing glasses and hair pulled back into a bun. It’s wasn’t what I expected at all.

“Come on in?” she offered. Stepping through the door, I was stunned. The windows faced out onto a park and went floor to ceiling and beyond. I stepped in closer past the kitchen. The place was two stories tall, with bedrooms upstairs. I turned and looked at her, unable to say a word. “Come on up,” she began. “Your room would be up here?”

We climbed the spiral staircase and came to the landing, a spacious area large enough to have a reading nook with a huge comfortable chair and some bookcases. She opened a door. The laundry room. It alone was probably larger than my entire apartment. “I have a washer & dryer and several racks for drying sweaters?” She smiled brightly, as though the laundry was the selling point. We stepped back into the reading nook, and she took me to the door to the left. “This is your bedroom?” she said. It was a second master suite, complete with its own bathroom – huge, with a separate whirlpool tub – and the largest walk-in closet I had ever seen.

I turned to look at her. “I’d be more than happy to just live in the closet. Really. It’s more than enough space for me.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Don’t be silly? The whole room is yours?”

I thanked her, but politely declined. “I love the place. Really I do. But I can’t afford it.”

“Why not? I haven’t even told you how much it is?”

“Trust me. I can’t even afford to be visiting here.”

She laughed. “Look, here’s the deal? I want $250 each month to pay for utilities and some food? The rest of it is paid for?”

“What do you mean, 'paid for'? Did someone buy this place for you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I did?”

“You did WHAT?”

“Oh, you know, I bought it with my savings? Didn’t want to live in the dorms? They were too noisy?”

“But how do you afford the mortgage on a place this size?”

“Umm, I don’t think you understand? I bought it? Outright?”

“Jesus Christ.” I sat down on the reading chair. I do not believe this. Missy the bouncy goofball bought an expensive condo with money from her savings account. “How is that possible?”

“You remember the 90s?” she asked. “Stocks? Yahoo? Cisco? Sun? I invested all the money I got for holidays and babysitting and sold high?”

“Unbelievable. I’m impressed.”

“No big deal? Just lucky?”

“Are you sure you want a roommate?” I asked.

“Absolutely!” No up-talking. There was certainty in her voice.

“I have a cat,” I said, trying to find a reason why this wouldn’t work.

“I love cats!” she said, clapping her hands with glee.

I thought for a moment. “If you're sure.... Ok, then. It’s a deal.”

“Great! Want to move in next Monday?”

As I left her building and headed for the bus stop, I wondered how it was possible that my luck was turning around. I waited to be hit by an 18-wheeler, or struck by lightning, but neither happened. Maybe things were going to be different now. Maybe I had a chance to really change things.

Bouncy

Saturday is the worst possible day of the week to start a retail job. Well, there are worse days – Black Friday, for instance, or the week before or after Christmas – but in terms of average everyday choices, you would be wise to avoid a Saturday start. It’s typically incredibly busy, and the last thing you want is to be thrown into the fire right from the start. Anyone with half a brain knows this, which immediately made me suspicious of the new girl who started this Saturday. A quick look around at the reactions of others told me that she was immediately written off as an imbecile.

I hadn’t known that there would be a new employee starting today. It seems that they fired our most unreliable college guy, and instead picked up what would probably be an unreliable college girl. But whatever I may have expected was completely wrong.

Bookstores tend to draw the dark, depressive and brooding type. We’re the kind who went through goth phases in high school, wore black eyeliner and black clothes. We dyed our hair black (obviously) or Kool-Aid colors, just to rebel. We were not the cool kids. We had a mysterious attraction to Edgar Allan Poe and depressing poems. We may look different today, but the bulk of us still harbor memories of that teenage depression. Some of us have yet to outgrow it.

This is why I was surprised when Missy walked – no, bounded – through the door. Her khakis were pressed. Her brick-red polo seemed brighter than anyone else’s. She had pigtails, for god’s sake, and a smile that had serious potential for blinding customers who weren’t wearing proper eyewear. She was like Buffy the Bookstore Slayer. Most of us stood and stared at her, shocked. She wasn’t one of us. She was a cheerleader, a sorority girl, an outsider in our midst. I slumped over and pretended to beat my head against the desk. One of the older employees, a recently-divorced aging hippie, laughed at my actions. “My god, I was thinking the exact same thing,” she whispered in passing. Two of the guys at cash wrap stared at her, dumbfounded. I wondered if she realized that she was working in a bookstore and not giving campus tours. I half-expected to see her walking backwards through the store with a group of tourists behind her: “And to my left, we have our extensive collection on world religions,” she would say, and they would snap pictures and talk excitedly amongst themselves.

Our manager, the bitch woman, was taking her around to “meet the team”, as she liked to say, as though we worked together in a cohesive unit, not a loosely-defined group of individual misfits. Missy was shaking hands, pumping vigorously at limp arms connected to baffled long-time employees. It was hilarious to watch. But now they were coming towards me, and it became somewhat less funny with each approaching step.

“Angela, I’d like you to meet Missy,” my manager said.

“Hi, Missy.” I held out my hand.

“Oh my GOD!” she said, way too loudly. “What HAPPENED to your ARM?” Before I knew what hit me she was touching my left arm, still held in its sling. “Does it hurt?”

“Uhh, no. No, it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s been a few weeks.” She was in my personal space, and I was completely freaked out. I found myself backing up until I had literally backed myself into a corner of the info desk. Employees gathered at a distance to witness me squirming and laugh.

“So what HAPPENED?” she asked again.

“I, uh,” I just wanted her to back away. “I broke it.”

“Oh my GOD! How?”

“I, uh… I fell.”

“Wow? That’s, like, so terrible?” When she stopped asking questions, I realized she was an up-talker. Every sentence ended as though it were a question. It was a nightmare of perkiness unfolding before me.

“Yeah, thanks. Hey, listen, I really need to get back to work.” I pointed to the customer waiting to ask a question.

“Ok, sure? That’s great? I’ll see you around?” She bounded off at the hip of my manager, who was looking increasingly uncertain about her choice of employees. I reached below the desk for three quick pumps of antibacterial lotion. I could tell that I was going to need to budget for several new bottles of the stuff if she stuck around.

I managed to make it through the first half of the day without any direct contact, but at 3:00 it was my turn to teach her about the info desk. You know that old saying from Westerns: there isn’t room in this town for both of us? Try sharing a confined space with Miss Perky America. I started with the basics.

“Ok, so this is the computer. It’s got a basic web-style interface where you can type in the author’s name, the title of the book or just general keyword information to find what the customer is looking for.”

“Oh my god?” she said in her perky little up-talker voice. “This is so cool? It’s just like searching through the card catalog at the library?”

I was trying to listen closely to make sure I didn’t miss a question, if there was one in there. I was pretty sure that there wasn’t this time.

“Yeah, like the card catalog. So you just type in what you need and hit ‘Enter’ to get the results. It will tell you what section it’s in, and how many we have in stock, assuming that they’re actually shelved where they should be.”

“That is, like, so cool?” she said, practically bursting at the seams with excitement.

“Ok, great. Look, you have your first customer.”

She squealed – literally squealed with glee – then tried to compose herself. “Good afternoon? How can I help you today?” Her foot was tapping wildly as she tried to contain her energy. I glanced around the room and looked for a sympathetic face. Matt, up at cash wrap, gave me a knowing glance. I shook my head.

The customer was fumbling in her purse. “I’m looking for this book,” she said, handing Missy a rumpled newspaper clipping.

“The Best Sex I’ve Ever Had?” said Missy quite loudly as she typed. The woman looked around, hoping that no one else heard her. “Oh, yay! We have two copies? Come with me?” She hopped down out of her info desk seat and made her way through the aisles like an old pro. I stood in stunned silence, not able to tell her that she wasn’t actually supposed to leave the desk. I heard her voice in the distance. “Found it? YAY!” The woman reappeared from behind the shelves and slunk quietly towards the register.

“How was I?” she asked as she bounced back into the box. It was like working with Tigger. All she needed was an orange tiger suit and a bouncy tail. It seemed sad that Halloween had already passed.

“Good. But, uh… we don’t actually walk the customers to the books. That would leave the info desk unattended. We write down the information and point them in the right direction.” I tried to speak slowly, out of some primal need to try to control her pace with my own verbal cues.

“Oh my GOD? I should have known that? I am so, so sorry?” She looked deflated.

“Hey, no problem, it’s your first time. Good instincts.” A passing employee snickered. I shot her a look that screamed “Help me!”

Another customer approached, and Missy tried again. “Good afternoon, sir? Lovely sweater you’re wearing? How can I help you today?” He mumbled something that I couldn’t understand. “You would like a history of the Crusades? Cool!” She typed in a few words and hit return. She wrote an author’s name in big bubble letters on a piece of paper. “I think you would like this one best? It’s in our world history section? Over to the left? See the sign?” He thanked her and walked away. She jumped up and down.

“I did it, right?”

“Yes, you did just fine.”

”AWESOME!” She tried to give me a high-five, but I realized too late and left her hand hanging in mid-air. I felt a little bad for her.

“Are you comfortable here alone?” I asked. “If you are, I’d like to run off and use the ladies room.”

“Oh my god, that’s so great? I can totally handle it?”

“Good. I’ll be back in a minute or two.”

“Wow! The responsibility is huge, but I'm up to the task?”

“Uh, yeah. Ok, be right back.” I went to the ladies room and spent five minutes hiding in the stall, absorbing all the peace and quiet that I could manage. I heard someone enter and realized that I couldn’t hide in there forever. I went out to the sink and washed my hands carefully, trying not to get my cast wet, but a quick move in the wrong direction left me with something that felt like a wet sponge, with moisture slowly creeping up my left arm. Ewww.

I returned to the desk, and found perky little Missy engaged in a deep and seemingly thought-provoking conversation with an attractive guy in his early 20s. She was bent over, elbows on the desk, staring dreamily at him while he discussed the virtues of Dungeons & Dragons. I stepped into the box and claimed the only seat for myself. I answered questions for two customers while Missy remained engrossed in her conversation.

“That is just SO unbelievable? Isn’t that unbelievable?” She turned to look at me. “Isn’t it?”

I hadn’t been paying any attention, but I agreed. “Yeah, definitely,” I said with little conviction. “Wow.”

I answered the phone, helped another customer, and still she talked with the cute guy. Finally he said his goodbyes and headed for the door. She stared after him, sighing. “Isn’t he a doll?” she said. I wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a question, but I added my “Uh-huh” in the hopes that it would prevent the conversation from being prolonged.

“He’s an English major? Can you believe it?”

I didn’t know what about that statement was hard to believe, but I didn’t want to dive any deeper into this conversational abyss. I waved to catch the attention of my manager, who approached cautiously.

“I think that Missy should really spend some time getting to know the store, so she can help with reshelving. Would you like to show her the Children’s department?” Children’s was a nightmare. It required attention twice a day to deal with the tornadoes that passed through. It was the only job that even competed with the info desk for title of Worst Assignment.

“Angela, that’s a great idea,” my manager said. “Missy, I think you would love the exposure to the kids.”

“Oh my god? I totally love kids?” She was beaming. As she bounced off to Pooh corner, we all grinned silently. If she hated it, she would end up quitting. No loss to us. If she loved it, then none of us would ever have to work the Children’s section again. It was a win-win situation for all of us.

For hours afterward, until it was time for my shift to end, I could hear her back there. “That is SUCH a great book? I just LOVED that when I was a kid?” At one point, I heard her reading part of Charlotte’s Web aloud.

A night-shifter came by to relieve me of box duty. “I hear we don’t ever have to do Kiddie Hell ever again.”

I smiled. “This just might be our lucky day.”

He grinned. “Only if you can find noise-isolating ear plugs; do you think they make versions specifically to block the sound of her voice? I can hear her from here.”

I patted him on the back. “Good luck.” I punched my time card and practically ran for the door. The sounds of traffic were soothing. I relaxed on the bus stop bench and planned my activities for the evening. Laundry, dishes, change sheets, clean litter box.

“Hey!” There she was, beside me. I jumped a bit, startled.

“Uh… hey.”

“Do you want to come to a party tonight? Near campus? It’s, like, totally cool?”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “Thanks for the offer. I really appreciate it. But I have a date tonight.”

“Oh my god, how awesome is that? Have fun and I’ll totally see you tomorrow?” And she bounced away again. Yep, she was definitely the human incarnation of Tigger. I watched her walk away with a sense of wonder. How could anyone be so happy about everything? I wondered if she was on too much medication. More than likely, the culprit was too much caffeine. I’ll buy her a decaf latte tomorrow.

Claus

What’s the first memory of your childhood? I have snippets of early memories – being in my crib, looking at the piggy bank on the bookshelf, for example – but the first real memory I have, one tied to an event, was a Christmas when I was probably three or four years old. We went to visit my mother’s parents, the first and last time I ever recall seeing them. They were cute old gray-haired people who, in my memory, looked like what Santa and Mrs. Claus would look like in their regular clothes.

My grandmother baked enormous gingerbread cookies, decorated with frosting and candy buttons. My sister sat on the floor in her Christmas dress with a green-suited ginger man, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV while grandpa slept in the recliner. I sat in the kitchen with grandma as she baked and fed me an endless supply of cookies and milk. She talked to me like I was another adult who knew how to bake cookies. “Now, let’s see, what should I add to the batter this time?” She would take a finger full of batter and sample, and then let me do the same. “Do you think it needs more vanilla?” She would look at me so intently, and I knew that my answer was very important. I would think hard, with all the seriousness of an expert pastry chef before responding, “Yes, more nella.” She asked me to sing Christmas carols for her, and I tried to do the best I could with my preschool skills: “Jinga bells, jinga bells, jinga all away! Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open say!” She picked me up and danced with me in the kitchen as I giggled and clapped.

But then I heard their voices rising in the other room. My parents were fighting again, screaming at each other with a power I hadn’t heard in a long time. She threatened to take her girls away from him (we were always her girls when they fought, as opposed to when we did something wrong; we were his girls when we were bad), and he threatened to leave her on the side of the road on the trip back. There was the sharp shattering and impact of glass hitting a wall. I became frightened and withdrawn, curling up into my grandma’s chest, trying not to cry. I knew that crying made mommy angry. Grandma rubbed my head and danced with me. “Shhh, no tears. Don’t cry, Angela. You’re grandma’s little angel.” I threw my little arms around her neck and breathed in the smell of her, like freshly-baked cookies and apple shampoo.

My mother stormed into the kitchen and grabbed the rolling pin, spinning around to face my father who was just a few steps behind. “Don’t you dare touch me!” she screamed shrilly. He stepped closer. She swung the rolling pin. There was a sickening thud as the wooden pin made contact with his head. He went down to the floor in a bloody heap, writhing in pain. “No!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Daddy! Daddy!”

My mother pulled me from my grandmother’s arms and ran through the house, grabbing my sister by the wrist and half-dragging her to the front door. She tried to put me in my coat, one tiny, stiff arm at a time, and the faster she moved the more I tensed. Susan put on her own coat and picked up my mother’s purse from the floor, clutching it with all her strength. My mother gave up on zipping my coat and scooped me up again, fumbling with her car keys in the door locks. She told my sister to latch me into my car seat, and we backed out of the driveway at top speed without being buckled in. “Don’t cry,” Susan whispered, her own lower lip trembling with fear and repressed tears. “Don’t cry.” I put my thumb into my mouth to stay quiet.

I looked at my mother in the rearview mirror, and saw that she had been crying. Her mascara had left long black streaks from eyes to chin, and smudges where she had tried to wipe the tears away. Her eyes were on fire, as she muttered to herself. “Bastard thinks he can do that to me. He’s wrong. Fuck him.” She rolled down the window, with cold, sharp wind filling the car. “Merry fucking Christmas, asshole!” she screamed as we drove down the street.

I’ve never liked Christmas since, although I still retain a fondness for Santa and Mrs. Claus. They seem like a safe haven in an otherwise frightening world.

The Couch

Have you ever been through therapy? I’ve only been to one psychologist in my life, so I feel like I’ve had a very sheltered experience. I wonder if I should shop around for them, like I’m trying to get a good deal on a car or appliance. You know, check a few out, hop onto their couches, see if I like the office décor. But when you come right down to it, that takes much more time, money and energy than I’m willing to invest.

Mine doesn’t have a couch. There are large blue chairs that look comfortable from a distance, but always leave me feeling small and vulnerable. The first time I sat in one, I thought it was trying to swallow me whole. My knees were practically up to my chin as I sunk down into it. She sits across the room in a firm leather desk chair in a lovely shade of brown, next to a beautiful mahogany rolltop desk. It’s clearly an antique, and I fight the urge to go over and roll its top up and down, looking into its little drawers and hiding places. But instead, I sit in my blue chair, with my knees at my chin. Most of the time there’s silence.

I want her to ask probing and insightful questions that get to the root of my problems, as though we’ll one day have a breakthrough and I’ll be magically cured. Most of the time she asks questions that just feel nosy and intrusive. Right now I’m trying to see how long we can go in complete silence. I watch the second hand tick on the clock on the wall. She stares at me. I have to admit, she’s stronger than I am. I guess that’s why she’s the doctor and I’m the fucked-up patient. I resolve to tell her nothing about the pregnancy.

She’s taking notes, or maybe making her grocery list. It seems to me that her shopping list would feature such life necessities as merlot and brie. I should invite her to my apartment for a lovely meal of ramen noodles and tea. She would probably be horrified.

I grow bored with my game. “So,” I ask casually. “Any plans for Thanksgiving?”

She looks up from her notes and smiles. “I’ll be having dinner with my family,” she replies. I wonder if that means a husband and kids or parents and siblings. “And what about your family?” she asks. “Have you been in touch with anyone lately?”

I shrug and say nothing. Oh, what the hell, I might as well tell her about Susan. “My sister came to visit a few weeks ago.” I say it casually, as though she drops in every so often. She knows that this isn’t the case.

“Reallly.” She says it in such a way that the first half of the word seems twice as long as the second. And her intonation does not imply that it’s a question. More of an I-knew-it statement, as though she had been expecting me to say it. “Rrreeeally.”

She made a note in the margin of her notebook. Was it a note about me, or a reminder to pick up filet mignon?

“Yes, rrreeeally.” I tried to mimic her intonation. She made another note. I kicked myself for being sarcastic.

“And what, may I ask, prompted your sister to return to your life at this time?”

“My arm,” I lied. “I needed some money for medical expenses for my arm.”

“I seeee.” She let the word trail off. More notes.

Silence again. I stared at the framed certificates on her walls. They weren’t just diplomas. There were also certificates of achievement for running triathlons and marathons in cities all around the country. This woman just wasn’t normal. But I guess if you had to listen to people’s problems all day, you’d seek an outlet of some kind. I guess it was better that she was an athlete than an alcoholic. Although for all I knew, she might be both.

I thought about an alcoholic runner. Can you imagine running drunk? The mental image made my stomach churn. That was definitely not advisable. I hoped she was just an athlete.

“How did your sister’s visit go?” she said, interrupting my vision of vomiting distance runners with whiskey bottles in hand.

“Fine, thanks. It was good to see her again. Of course, it was slightly awkward, but it was good. She had to get back to her house and her husband, so she didn’t stay very long.”

“I see.” Still more notes.

“She’s going to have a baby,” I told her.

“How nice,” she replied. “How does that make you feel?”

“Fine, I suppose. I think there’s part of me that feels old. I find myself wondering how we got to be old enough to have kids.”

She cleared her throat. “I believe you are aware – I hope you are aware – that the female can begin to procreate at the onset of menses.”

“Oh for god’s sake, I’m not an idiot,” I said. “Of course I know you can get pregnant at 13, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t seem weird to have a full-grown, undeniably adult sister who’s married and pregnant.”

“Hmm.” Scribble, scribble. “I sense some hostility.”

“Towards you, not her,” I said. “You treat me like an imbecile.”

“On the contrary,” she replied. “I treat you the way you ask to be treated.”

I resumed my silence. This was ridiculous. I wanted to kick myself every time I walked through that door. I didn’t know why I came, other than for renewals of my medications. And there were many days where I was fairly certain that I didn’t even want that anymore. Yet those moments would pass and I’d find myself with my large glass of water and a lineup of orange prescription bottles. I always took them in the same order, from left to right. Round, oval, oval, capsule, oval, round. I was so tired of it all. I wondered if I could possibly be any worse without them. I always wondered that. But it was fear that kept me tied to the medication.

“How is your OCD?” she asked.

“My what?” I hadn’t been paying attention.

“Your OCD. Your compulsive need to wash your hands. I can imagine that it’s particularly challenging when you have a cast to keep dry.” She smiled with an artificial sweetness. I think she was delighted to think that I was challenged by the cast. Although it’s possible that maybe I was just projecting these evil characteristics onto her, just because I hated her.

“I don’t wash my hands as much anymore,” I said, half-lying. I chose not to tell her about the antibacterial lotion.

“Good. So would you say that your symptoms are improving?”

“I guess so. Yeah.” Anyone who really knew me would know that this was not the case.

“Good,” she replied. “Let’s cut your Luvox down to 50mg and see what happens.”

“Let’s say for the sake of argument that ‘what happens’ is that I’m unable to live a normal life because I’m obsessed with hand washing,” I said. “What do we do then?”

“Then we’ll change it back at your next appointment,” she said.

“So I get to spend two months at the sink until our next appointment?”

“I doubt it will be that bad,” she said with that evil grin. No, stop it. She’s not evil. She’s really trying to help. I think. God, what if she is completely malicious?

“Words clearly spoken by someone who’s never had this problem,” I replied.

Silence again. This time I had no desire to speak at all. I thought about getting up and walking out, but I know from past experience that she won’t hand me my prescriptions until the hour is up. Since that’s the only reason I come here, I have no choice but to stay. I watch the clock again. Tick. Tick. Tick.

She sits patiently with her hands folded in her lap, giving me a hint of a smile. I notice that her lipstick is feathering slightly into the wrinkles around her lips. This pleases me. I like to know that even the well-educated among us don’t have the good sense not to wear bold lipstick colors when our skin begins to fail us. She reminded me of my grandmother, who always wore a too-bright shade of pink that feathered out of her lips and onto the surrounding skin. I wanted to give her a different, more respectable color of lipstick for her funeral, but the fact of the matter was that she just didn’t look the same without it. We applied the gaudy pink over the neutral rose.

Three minutes left to go. I wondered if I could tackle her and swipe the prescriptions from her hands. These were great visions to have. They made me feel like I had control over the situation for just a moment or two.

I could hear her next patient enter the waiting area outside the door. I wondered who it was. Was it a male or female? The footsteps sounded heavy, so I decided that it was a man. Was he old or young? Hmmm. Middle-aged, I’d guess. Not young enough to have a spring in his step, but not so old that his feet shuffled. I imagined thinning hair, a growing belly, and glasses that looked about a decade old. Yes, that was my guess. I couldn’t wait to go out and see how close I was to reality.

At exactly 2:00, she said, “Well, I hope that this session has been helpful for you. Here are your scrips. Would you like to go ahead and schedule your next session for two months from now?”

“Yes,” I said with resignation. “Two months.”

“Is 1:00 still good for you?”

“Yes, fine.” I wanted to get out and see the next patient.

She handed me an appointment card for January 11. I thanked her and opened the door.

There he sat, reading Scientific American. Male. Check. Middle-aged. Check. Belly. Check. Thinning hair? Hard to tell. He had it shaved, along with a goatee. Glasses? No. Damn. Well, I was pretty darned close.

I made eye contact with him, nodded my hello and made a break for the door. I needed to find a restroom so I could wash my hands.

Fog

I had only two days of having my sister back in my life, and much to my surprise, I desperately missed her now that she was gone. I couldn’t believe that the end of our silence, and the ultimate return to it, could have such an effect on me. But I wrote part of it off to hormonal surges after the miscarriage and tried to ignore the emotional emptiness that I felt.

I wandered through the next few days in a fog, half-blind to the world around me. I went through the motions at work, not even minding the fact that I was still stuck at the info desk. People asked stupid questions, and I just smiled and did my best to answer. Suddenly, the job was easy. I didn’t even freak out when the man came to ask if I had a copy of “that vampire book by Dan Rice.” I admit that I clenched my teeth and muttered, “Anne” under my breath, but he didn’t notice so it didn’t matter. Overall, it was entirely too calm and easy. I got angry about nothing.

It was two weeks after the miscarriage when the bizarre and unthinkable happened. It was early evening on a Thursday night, and I picked up a shift from one of the college kids who was clearly faking illness when he called. How could I tell? Perhaps it was the sound of the party in the background while he faked a cough. But I didn’t care. I could use the money. I was again working the info desk when I thought I smelled a familiar smell. Nah, I thought. It can’t be. But the smell became unmistakable. I called for a coworker to report to the info desk.

“Do you smell that?” I asked.

“Aren’t you supposed to have all the answers, info girl?” He laughed as he said it. He laughed at nearly everything he said. I thought it was nice that someone found him to be funny.

He stopped for a moment, and his eyes grew wide. “Hey! Someone’s smoking!”

“Not just smoking, genius. They’re smoking something special.” I rose from my chair. “Sit here. I’m going hunting.”

I followed my nose from aisle to aisle. The sheer number of shelves, combined with the ventilation system in the building made it hard to track down the origin of the smell. They were in the cookbooks section, of all places, trying to come up with recipes to address their munchies problem. To me, it seemed so much easier to just go to the convenience store. I found the three of them huddled on the floor, reading recipes for desserts. A shorter guy was fixated on the photo of the baked Alaska.

I wasn’t exactly sure what the store protocol was for dealing with this. Normally, I would have asked them to leave, but obviously a woman with only one good arm wasn’t going to wrestle three stoned students out of the bookstore. I went off to look for the night manager who, like most night managers, was nowhere to be found on the sales floor. By the time I found him in the break room and brought him to the cookbooks section, things had gotten out of control.

While the carpets in most businesses are treated for flame-resistance, they can’t do much for the books. And a carelessly-placed joint can send a cookbook up in flames pretty quickly. Unfortunately, when you’re stoned, you don’t react very quickly, so when we got to the aisle, they were staring, dumbfounded, at the sight of half-a-dozen cookbooks engulfed in flames. One girl was nearly in tears. “My cookies!” she cried. “I loved that recipe!”

The night manager screamed an impressive array of profanities and ran for the break room to get the fire extinguisher. The taller of the stoned guys stood up, and proceeded to trip over the burning stack of books and land in the middle of the aisle with his ankles in the flames. Within seconds, his pants were on fire. Can you imagine the rest? Yes, rather than helping, his friend started laughing and chanting, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” I tried to convince the human torch to stop, drop and roll, but he wasn’t hearing it. I wanted to try to squelch the flames with his jacket, but with one arm strapped to my chest in the sling, I was afraid of doing more harm than good.

The manager returned, breathless, with the fire extinguisher in hand; he doused the stoner and his cookbooks, leaving the aisle covered in white foam that looked like a bastardized version of the holiday Santa display at the mall. By this time a small crowd had gathered to witness the book-burning bonfire in aisle 17, so there were plenty of people offering their “oohs” and “ahhhs” at the scene. When the fire was out, they applauded and whistled. I asked if anyone had called for an ambulance, and someone said that they had. The guy was fairly seriously burned, and he was going to need medical attention. The books were reduced to a charred heap, and his friends were left in a wide-eyed, slack-jawed state of shock and horror, not entirely believing what they had just witnessed. I wanted to hope that they would have the good sense not to smoke again, especially in a bookstore.

I tried to make the guy as comfortable as possible as I heard the ambulance approach outside. I had his head in my lap and I stroked his hair, which was greasy enough to make me cringe and want to run for the antibacterial lotion behind the desk. But I tried to think of his pain and I stayed, trying to comfort him. His friends were clinging to each other, trying to make sense of it all through the marijuana haze.

“Please step aside,” I heard someone tell the crowd. And there he was. Nick. Our eyes met for a moment, but I looked away, humiliated.

“Jesus, those are some nasty burns,” he muttered. “What’s his name?”

”I don’t know.” I looked up to find his friends, but they were gone. “Did anyone see where his friends went?” No one had. The guy was crying in my lap, and hadn’t spoken a word yet.

“Hey man,” Nick said to him. “What’s your name?”

He didn’t answer, just continued to cry. “We’ll look for ID after we get him on the gurney,” he told me. I nodded.

He dressed the burns and eased him onto the stretcher. His partner, an older man this time, wheeled him out to the ambulance. Nick pulled off his latex gloves and reached out a hand to help me up. I took it.

“How are you?” he asked, as he packed his triage kit.

“I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” I still couldn’t really look at him.

“Good. Busy.” He paused, as if to decide whether he should ask more. “Have you found a good doctor yet? You really need to take care of the little one.”

I shook my head. “No. I… I don’t need one.” He looked at me with a knowing look. “No, not like that. Miscarriage.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “When?”

“Fifteen days ago.” I was shocked to realize that I had been keeping track of the days.

He reached out and touched my broken arm. “And how’s this feeling?”

I smiled. “Better. Three more weeks with the cast, then I’m back to normal. Whatever normal might be.” He laughed. He had a beautiful laugh.

We stood and talked for a moment while his partner took vital stats and info from the patient. “Shouldn’t you be going?” I asked.

“He’s not critical. You have to finish the paperwork on the stable patients before you can take them to County.”

“Oh.” I thought for a minute. “Is he going to be ok?”

“Sure. The next few weeks will be unpleasant, and he’ll have some scars, but more or less he’ll be fine.”

I nodded. Sometimes the scars are ones you see, and sometimes you get burned on the inside. I didn’t know which was preferable.

He walked halfway to the ambulance before turning around. “Angela?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

I looked confused. “For what?”

“For not being able to stay with someone I found so charming and funny.”

“Oh!” I said, cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

“Until we meet again,” he called.

I smiled. “Until then.”

I watched the ambulance pull away. I hadn’t noticed the police arrive, and I was ushered into the break room to give my report of the incident. I knew I was supposed to take it seriously, but my mind was on other things. I felt light and alive, like the fog had lifted and the sun had come out to warm the world.

They asked me to help them make composite sketches of the guy and girl that accompanied our guy, now nicknamed Burning Man. I suggested that it might be easier to just ask him what their names were, but they were certain that he was too savvy to give them that information. I wasn’t so sure.

I did a fairly accurate composite of the woman, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the features of the guy. I felt bad. I didn’t want him to be left out of the fun police experience, but I just couldn’t remember anything more than a short, skinny guy in a ski cap.

I suggested that they hit the local eateries to find these two, but I don’t think they took me seriously. Too bad, too, since I’m reasonably certain that they could have found them quickly at either the 7-11 or the local supermarket. Not my choice to make, though. It’s their investigation, not mine.

I got back to my info desk with about an hour left until closing. The crowds had long-since dispersed and it was a quiet Thursday night at the store. I slouched in my seat, made myself comfortable, and counted down the last 53 minutes of my extra-long day. And I thought of Nick and smiled. Sure, I knew I had screwed up any chance I ever had of dating this guy, but he was still charming and still made me smile in his presence. Some days, that’s enough to carry you through.

Aftermath

When I returned to the apartment, everything felt different. It was the middle of the day and I couldn’t stand how dark the room was. I went around turning on every light, including the one over the stove. Even so, it still felt dark and dismal.

Susan had cleaned the bathroom, washed my clothes and put new sheets on the bed. She bought extra pillows and it felt like I was crawling into some sort of childhood fort. I snuggled beneath the flannel sheets and tried to generate some warmth, but none would come. I had been freezing cold since the ambulance arrived, as though I had somehow lost my internal thermostat in the miscarriage. In spite of the flannel and the blankets, I shivered.

Susan and I had barely spoken a word to each other since I was admitted to the hospital. They kept me overnight for observation – not standard practice, it seemed – because they were afraid that the depressive woman would be a danger to herself after that sort of trauma. But they had nothing to worry about. I didn’t have the energy to harm myself. All I wanted to do was sleep. She watched me from across the room, as though she was afraid to approach. Standing and staring. I couldn’t close my eyes knowing that she was there.

“Do you want to watch TV?” I asked.

“No, thank you. I’m fine here.”

“Uh-huh. Do you realize you’re standing in my kitchen and just staring at me?”

She averted her eyes, as though I had just caught her doing something she shouldn’t do. She looked down at the floor and shifted her weight on her feet, wishing that she had worn something more comfortable than these worn-out flats.

“Oh, for god’s sake, Susan. What? What’s going on? Can you talk to me?” I had to break her out of this. I couldn’t have her just standing there.

“Nothing. I…” There was a moment of pause. “Nothing at all. Really. I’m sure of it..”

“Susan, do we need to talk about this?” I meant it sincerely. I had just reconnected with my sister, and I did not want something to break us apart so soon. It felt good to have someone in the apartment. Someone whose name I knew. Someone female.

“No. Not at all. Nothing. Nothing to discuss.” She said it too lightly.

I turned on the TV and found a handful of low-quality soap operas, as well as a few talk shows. It seemed that the station with the best reception was always Telemundo. I once again vowed to one day learn Spanish so I could appreciate this quirk of television.

She was staring at me again.

“Susan! Come here. Now.” I said it with authority, or so I thought. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“What are you, my mother?” she asked, and her eyes began to well with tears.

“Oh god, no crying. Is this about mom again? Jesus, Susan, I’m sorry about all of that, ok? Does it make you feel better?” I wanted to tell her that I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but that was another story for another time.

“No,” she sniffled. “It’s not that.”

I was tired of playing this game. “Then what is it?”

“It’s not the right time.” She was shaking hear head repeatedly, the motion of denial.

“Of course it is. Just tell me. You’re acting so immaturely.”

“I’m trying to protect you!” she cried.

“From what?”

“Reality.” Susan could be so cryptic sometimes. I hated that.

“And just what about reality can’t I handle? Is there some sort of magical big sister power that prevents you from having any trouble handling things?”

She was mumbling under her breath. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. And then it struck me as to how odd this was. Susan never mumbled. She was a public speaker, and I’d never known her to talk in a voice low enough that neighbors on all sides couldn’t hear. She was theatrical and outgoing; she did not have what parents like to call an “inside voice”. So as you might expect, this behavior had me really freaked out.

“Susan, if you don’t get your ass over here to talk to me, I’m going to beat you senseless with my one good arm.”

“I can’t,” she said softly, almost cowering in the corner. “I can’t.”

“Susan, is this about the appointment I scheduled?”

“No.” Her voice was almost a whisper now.

“Then what is it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t handle it.”

I thought about this for a moment before speaking. “You know something? A week ago, I would have thought you were right. But after two hospital visits in a week, I’m thinking that I can handle more than I thought I could.”

She turned her back to me. “Ok, but I don’t want you to freak out.”

“You’re freaking me out now. Is it worse than this?”

She stared ahead, silent for a moment. “Ahm megmap,” she mumbled.

“What the hell was that? Speak English.”

“I’m pregnant, Angela.”

I sat up in bed. “That’s great, Susan!” I hoped that my sincerity resonated in my voice. “Come here. Let me give you a hiug. That’s great! When are you due?”

She turned from the wall, tears staining her cheeks. “You’re not angry? I was so sure that you would be angry.”

“Angry? Why on earth would I be angry?”

She sniffled. “Because you couldn’t keep yours.”

“Oh god, that’s not even the same situation. You’re married. You have a good life. You have stability. You aren’t on a cocktail of psychologically-altering medications or living on a minimum-wage salary.”

“I thought you would be mad,” she said as she approached the bed. “I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid of your reaction.”

“You have to tell me. I have to know that I’m going to be an aunt. Besides,” I said, “You’ll be a great mother. You did ok raising me.”

She burst out crying. “Oh god, no! I did a terrible job with you. That’s what I’m afraid of!”

I started to giggle at the thought of it, which burst into a full-blown belly laugh. It was true. Look at me. What had I done with my life? And as a teenager, I was such a terror. “I am so sorry,” I said as I gasped for breath. “I didn’t mean to upset you with that comment. I meant well!”

Her cries gave way to giggles. “’You did ok raising me,’” she said in her best mimicking voice. “If that’s the best I can do, this kid is fucked.”

I laughed even harder, and the feeling was contagious. Before I knew it we were both on the bed howling, with the cat sitting on the floor wondering what was wrong with these people. But then again, isn’t that the cat’s perspective 90% of the time? She struggled to her feet. “Stop it,” she cried. “I have to pee!” There was nothing funny about that, but it made me laugh even harder. “Stop!” she cried as she ran for safety. I could still hear her laughing behind the bathroom door. It felt good to laugh. I hadn’t had a good laugh like that in a really long time.

When she emerged, and things were calm once again I told her to sit down next to me.

“I’m scared, Susan.”

She put her arm around me and stroked my hair. “I know you are.”

I was overcome with a wave of self-pity. “Why do I have to feel like this? Why can’t I be normal?”

“Oh sweetie,” she said, continuing to play with my hair. “What you don’t seem to realize is that you are normal.”

“No I’m not,” I said, indignant. “If I was normal, I wouldn’t have eleven prescriptions for drugs to straighten out my brain.”

She stopped for a moment, and left her hand resting on the crown of my head. “No, that’s not true. Everyone feels the same things. It’s all about how we deal with them from there. Some of us tackle them head-on. Some of us need meds.”

I thought about that. “So are you saying that I might actually be like everyone else if I got off the meds?”

I felt her shrug. “Maybe. When was the last time you were drug-free?”

“Prescription or street.”

“Ugh, Angela! I don’t like to think about the street drugs. But ok, give me both.”

I thought for a minute. “Prescription drugs have been for six years or less. I started with the Prozac and worked my way up from there. Street drugs… I think I was 13 or 14 when I started that.”

She took a deep breath when I said 13. I didn’t know if I should apologize for it or not. I decided against it. What’s done is done. And it wasn’t her fault that I was a screwed-up kid. As I’ve said before, I blame that on my mother.

“See, here’s what I’m afraid of: it’s been, like, a decade since my brain was on its own, functioning without chemical assistance. Maybe that’s a bad thing, or maybe I sought to self-medicate myself because there was a real need for it. Maybe it’s entirely possible that I really couldn’t deal with reality.”

“By that logic, I should be an alcoholic,” Susan said.

“No heroin for you?” I asked.

“Good lord, please don’t tell me that you ever did needle drugs.”

“No,” I lied. It had been years, but I’d done more than my share when I was younger. The prescriptions took away the desire for the high, though, and I’d been basically street-clean for about six years.

She didn’t believe me, but kept her opinion to herself. “I prefer to use legal drugs to self-medicate.”

“Oh, right. Hence the alcohol. Couldn’t have Ms. Volvo-driving Suburbia visiting her dealer in the projects.”

Her body stiffened. She was offended, but I thought it would pass quickly.

“Oh, come on, Susan. I was only kidding.”

“It wasn’t funny,” she said sharply.

“You need to lighten up about it,” I said.

She stood up, pushing my upper body out of her way. She grabbed her sweater and purse and headed for the door.

“What, no goodbye? Just walking out?”

“I don’t even know you anymore,” my sister said.

“Why should that bother you now?” I asked. “You never did.”

She flung the door open so quickly that I expected the knob to blow a hole in the plaster. Instead, it merely left a knob-shaped impression in the wall.

“Susan!” But she was gone, out the door and down the steps. Damn her! This time I was the one swearing that we would never speak again. I’m not going to let her get away with making me feel guilty.

Pain

Disclaimer: this is the worst-written thing that's ever come from my brain. I know that. But the pace of National Novel Writing Month is too intense to go back and fix it now. Roll with it. Get the general idea and move on. Hopefully the next chapter will read better.

I may have lived an unconventional childhood, but I still had dreams. I thought that I would grow up and marry my high school sweetheart, have a happy little house in suburbia where I would be a member of the PTA and hold bake sales for the kids’ school. It would be everything that I never had, and I would do it brilliantly. But I never had a high school sweetheart. I never really had a boyfriend, nothing more than a string of one night stands and wishes for more. I didn’t outgrow it. I grew older, graduated from high school, but never evolved into the adult that I wanted to be.

I watched my sister cleaning my apartment, like the good wife I thought I could be. She had everything I wanted, even though I would never admit as much to her. What we know in our hearts and what we speak to others can be two very different things.

I wanted to help her clean, but she wouldn’t permit it. My back had been bothering me all day, and it felt a little better when I sat down. It also seemed to be therapeutic for her to create some order out of chaos in my little world.

“Don’t you have any real food?” she asked, looking at my nearly empty closets with nothing but cat food and ramen noodle packets.

“Define ‘real food,’” I said.

She looked completely exasperated. “Fruits. Vegetables. Even canned veggies would be better than the crap you have in here.”

She was removing all of the food and dishes from the cabinet to clean the shelves. “You do realize that the cat eats better than you do.”

I nodded. “I would never let an animal suffer.”

“Angela! Listen to yourself! You’re more interested in caring for an animal than yourself?”

“Of course.” It seemed logical to me. “You knew that I took in every animal in the neighborhood when I was a kid.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t know that you would care for the animals over your own health and wellbeing.”

She continued to scrub and clean. The entire apartment – all 350 square feet of it – smelled of artificial pine cleaning products. It was unpleasant, but better than the smell of ammonia. Ammonia always made me ill, and I refused to let it be used in my presence.

I stood and grabbed window cleaner, using my one good arm to clean my single window to a streak-free shine. I quickly realized that I preferred it with the grimy film to hide the dark view of the solid brick wall across the alley. The alley was completely devoid of direct light except for approximately forty-five minutes around high noon.

I don’t think my sister could understand how I lived in someplace so small and dismal, but on a barely-more-than minimum-wage salary, and with an array of prescription medications to purchase every month, there wasn’t enough money to afford anything more than a dumpy studio apartment and college-student food.

“Can I help you out financially? Mail you a check each month?” She was sincere. After years of silence, she really did want to help. I was flattered.

“In general? No. I’ll figure out how to make it on my own. But I do need money… you know. Now.”

She took a deep breath. “You know how hard this is for me.”

“Yes.”

She sat down at the tiny table, rag in one hand and cleaner in the other. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “I don’t believe in it.”

“I know.” I felt it deep in my heart. “I don’t, either.” I sat at the table next to her, rubbing my achy lower back. I must have slept in some sort of twisted position the night before.

“Then why this? Why not adoption?”

“I can’t, Suzan. I just can’t. Do you know how many chemicals I have coursing through my body on any given day? Those alone would be enough to cause permanent harm. Add to that the fact that I don’t eat right and can’t afford proper prenatal care….”

“But we can arrange for proper care.”

“The drugs?”

She thought for a moment. “Are you sure they’re that damaging?”

“I’m on a test medication that can cause irreparable harm, and two on the commercial market that can do some really bad things to neurological development.”

She swallowed hard. I could tell that it was difficult for her to accept. Somehow it was easier for me, because I dealt well with facts. Seeing facts in black and white in a book made it all clear for me. I knew that the damage had been done from the first cells, and even if I could go cold turkey on the meds there wasn’t any way to protect the baby at this point.

“Do you need me to go with you?”

I was caught off guard by the question. I never considered that I would have anyone there with me. “Yes,” I whispered.

She took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze. “Well then, if you know that this is the right decision for you, then we have to do it.”

She grabbed the yellow pages and dialed the phone for me as I made the appointment for the next afternoon. I could feel my heart pounding as I spoke to the woman in scheduling. My throat tightened and my palms began to sweat. I knew this was the right choice to make, but it didn’t make it any easier. It still wouldn’t be what I wanted. I hung up the phone and fought back tears.

Susan went to the stove to heat some water for tea. I went to the bed with the cat, which seemed unusually friendly. She wandered in circles around me, rubbing against me at all angles. This wasn’t her usual behavior. She must have sensed my tension. I grabbed the remote and turned on the small TV to watch the latest decorating show. Susan continued to clean while the kettle heated up and I dozed off sometime between the designers’ presentations of their grand plans and the second commercial.

Susan woke me a few minutes later when she brought my tea. I sat up on the bed, and knew instantly that something just wasn’t right.

“What?” she asked. “You’re making a weird face.”

“Nothing,” I said without much conviction. “It’s just… nothing.”

“Nothing?”

I shifted my weight on the bed, but that didn’t help. It wasn’t just my back that was hurting now. I had the worst stomach cramps that I could ever remember. “I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

“Drink the tea,” she suggested. “The warmth might make you feel better.”

I took a sip, but quickly put the cup down and staggered for the bathroom. Susan’s voice followed me.

“Ange? Jesus, Ange, what is it?”

I didn’t know. Suddenly, the cramps were horrific. I struggled to pull down my pants with my one good hand, not a task that was designed for speed. What I saw shocked me. “Oh my god!” I shouted. “Oh my god!”

“What? Ange! Talk to me!”

I couldn’t focus. I sat down hard on the seat, losing my balance halfway down. I tried to breathe normally, but the pain and shock were too much. I heard myself gasping.

When Susan finally decided to barge into the bathroom, she was unprepared for what she saw. My pants were covered in blood, and my face was white as a ghost as I sat motionless on the toilet with my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees for support.

“Oh my god, Ange. I need to call a doctor.”

She ran out of the room. I couldn’t manage the energy to stop her. I felt lightheaded. I tried to sit up straight so I could reach the sink for some water, but the world went black. I don’t remember hitting the floor.

I awoke to find Susan standing over me, while the butch-looking EMT from a few days earlier was feeling for a pulse. I tried to speak, but nothing came out.

“Shh!” The butch lady was surprisingly gentle. She asked my sister to try to find me some clean underwear, a new pair of pants and a maxi pad for the ride to the hospital. Suzan did as she was told and changed my clothes like I was a child. Once again, I found myself on a gurney. I heard very little of what was going on, but I did hear one word that caught my attention: miscarriage. I lost the baby? I was shocked. Did my body know that there would be something wrong with it? Did it know better than I did? And then I did something that surprised me: I said a prayer for the baby, and apologized to it for being such a poor and unprepared mother. I promised I would do better next time. I lost consciousness again.

Blood Ties

I have no choice in the matter. I can’t raise this child. Besides, with all the meds that I’m taking, there’s a good chance that the kid would end up developmentally fucked up and completely damaged. I looked it up in the medical reference books at work. I would be lucky if the kid was born without three arms and two heads. I can’t let that happen.

I spent about two hours sitting cross-legged on the floor with the phone in my lap, dialing anywhere between three and seven digits of my sister’s phone number, dreading the conversation that would take place. But what was I going to say? “Hi, it’s me, I know we haven’t talked in a couple of years, but I need some money.” No, that just isn’t going to work. I can’t talk to her. I can’t face her disappointment and anger directly. A letter is the only way to handle it.

I dug out the box of good stationery that she had bought for me when I was in college. I don’t think I ever touched it before now, except to move it from apartment to apartment as I shuffled my way around the city. I wonder if she'll remember that she gave it to me as a gift.

Sitting down on my bed, using the phone book as a desk, I wrote eleven drafts before coming up with the final version, ridiculously chatty and pathetic, but I didn't know how else to handle it.

Susan,

Hi. How are you? How’s life at home? Is Bob treating you well? Do you hear from Dad much?

I broke my arm the other day when my bus was rear-ended in the rain – fortunately they tell me that the guy’s insurance will cover my medical expenses, although I doubt that I’ll get anything for the inconvenience and discomfort of having my left arm strapped to my chest with a sling for the next six weeks.

But that’s not why I’m writing. It seems that the arm is the least of my problems. When they did my blood tests at the emergency room, they discovered that I’m pregnant. I can’t have the baby, you know. I’m on too many meds and I’m too fucked up anyway to bring a new life into this world, so I need to find a way to get money to take care of things. I never imagined that I would have to make this decision, and yet it suddenly seems like there’s no other decision to make.

I know you’re reading this and you’re probably torn between the fact that you don’t believe in or support this decision, and the fact that you probably feel more strongly than I do that I shouldn’t ever be allowed to have a child.

I think you understand that if I could do this through any other means, if there wa any alternative to going through you, I would be doing it that way. You know that you’re the last person I would ask to help me. I don’t need a lecture, or any special thoughts that will make me feel any worse than I actually do. I just need money. That’s all.

Hope your life is as perfect as ever.

Take care,
Ange

I sealed and stamped the envelope and ran it to the mailbox as quickly as possible, hoping that I wouldn’t chicken out and tear up the letter into a million small pieces, like postal confetti. But there it went, down the blue chute, and that was it. I took a deep breath, turned my back on the mailbox and ran for my building, suddenly realizing how cold the autumn winds really were.

I had almost forgotten the letter until early in the morning, three days later, when I heard the banging on my door. I saw her through the peephole, angry and pacing outside my door. I pulled the door open a crack, leaving the chain attached. “What?” I asked.

“What?” she shrieked. “What! How can you possibly ask me ‘what’?” She was wagging her finger at me, and I felt a strong compulsion to grab it and rip it off. “Let me in,” she snarled.

I stood there for a moment, head to toe in flannel pajamas. There was a draft coming in from the hallway, so I was inclined to just close the door and go back to sleep. I started to push the door shut, and she jammed her foot into the space. “Don’t you dare close the door on me,” she seethed.

I stared blankly. “I can’t take off the chain unless I close the door first. Do you want to come in or not?”

Her face showed her doubt that the door would ever reopen. She pulled her foot back and the door closed with a click. I was tempted to just leave it that way, but I unlatched the chain and opened the door, turning my back on her and shuffling back to my unmade bed. The cat had curled up in the warm spot I had left behind, and I sat cross-legged beside her.

She followed me into the room with all of the force of a tornado ripping through a trailer park, slamming the door behind her. “What! What!” She couldn’t even get the rest of the words out.

I snuggled up against the cat who, under the circumstances, realized that the same person who whacked her with a cast in the middle of the night turned out to be the most normal member of the family. She yawned and began to clean the fur on her paws. I admired her ability to completely ignore the tornado and the conflict it brought into our home.

My sister’s finger was still wagging at me, like I was some preschooler being scolded.

“What is the meaning of all this?”

I thought about that for a moment. “The meaning? I thought the meaning was fairly clear. Did I miss something?”

Her mouth was moving at something close to the speed of light. I actually wouldn’t have been surprised if her mouth had gotten here before her, leaving her body behind in its haste. I chuckled to myself at the thought of staring through the peephole and seeing nothing but her mouth, bitching and complaining and criticizing without the backup of a body, which was probably still outside in the car, double-parked.

“And you think this is funny?” she asked, incredulous.

“No,” I said. “Really I don’t. I couldn't find it any less amusing if I tried.”

“You’ve got a baby, you stupid, immature bitch!” She was on a roll now. When she was angry, she could curse like a truck driver, a complete switch from her usually proper suburban demeanor. She was barely even in high gear yet, and still she was flying off the handle.

I grabbed my pillow and pulled it close to my belly for some sort of strange, polyester-filled emotional support. Some people have security blankets, others have security pillows. That’s perfectly normal, isn’t it?

She went to my kitchen and grabbed a new white plastic garbage bag and started loading all of my worldly possessions into it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“You’re coming home,” she barked. “You’ll live with me.”

I laughed so hard that I snorted. “The hell I will!” I said. “I’ll have the baby and live in a cardboard box on the street if I have to, but I am not – and I do repeat – not coming to live with you. Period.”

She wagged the finger again. “You lost that right when you went out and got yourself pregnant. Do you hear me?” Yeah, I hear you, and so does everyone else on the 14th floor.

"Lost the right to live independently? I don't think it actually works that way."

She continued shoveling my few possessions into the bag, until I reached out and whacked her wrist with my cast. “Stop it.” I tried to sound authoritative.

“How dare you…!” She bellowed each word as though it were a separate sentence. "How. Dare. You!"

“Just stop, Susan. Stop. Look at yourself.” She was rubbing her wrist, as though I had taken a swipe at her with a sledgehammer. “Do you ever wonder why I don’t keep in touch? It’s because of this shit. It’s because you think you have all the fucking answers.”

“I know a hell of a lot more about life than you do,” she shouted.

I shook my head. “Somehow I find that very hard to believe. I’d argue that I did more living before I turned 18 than you’ve done in your entire life.”

“Smoking pot should not be confused with living.”

“A college degree should not be confused with living.”

“You always resented the fact that I was smarter.”

“No!” I was serious when I said that I didn’t. “I just resented the fact that you thought you were my mother.”

She gasped. “I could never replace our mother. She was a saint!”

I looked puzzled. “I'm sorry. A saint? Who are we talking about? The woman who left us?”

“She had her reasons for leaving."

“And I have mine for being angry and bitter.”

“You never took any of the blame for what happened to her.”

I was shocked. “Blame? I was six years old when she left! What did my six-year-old self do?”

“Not when she left. When she came back.”

“So I caused the cancer?”

“No, but you let her die. You didn’t give her the love she needed to keep on living.”

“You’re insane,” I said. “Love wasn’t going to defend her against advanced cancer. She was already dead when she walked through the door.”

“You don’t know that! She could have lived!”

“I do know that she was terminal. I have no doubts.”

“You let her die!” she cried out.

“I did not!”

“I hate you!” She was shouting at the top of her lungs now.

“Why? Because of mom?”

“Yes!” She softened slightly, on the verge of a breakdown that she didn't want to have in front of me, of all people. “She would still be here if you loved her enough.”

I shook my head. “No, Suzan. She was dying. It was cancer. It had nothing to do with either of us.”

That was when my sister began to cry, and I realized that she was finally and for the first time dealing with my mother's death fourteen years after the fact. She fell onto my bed, sobbing. I held her with my good arm and stroked her hair. She remained there for hours, until I finally begged her to move because my leg had fallen asleep under the weight of her head. I got up and shuffled towards the bathroom, dragging my leg behind like something from Dr. Frankenstein’s basement laboratory. When I returned, she was giggling.

“You’re quite a sight with your broken arm and numb leg.”

“Glad I could be your comic relief.” The leg was starting to cramp as the feeling returned.

She rose to meet me in the tiny kitchen area, and put her hand on my shoulder. “What can I do for you, Ange?”

I was shocked to hear those words. "I... I need your help."

"I'm here for you," she said.

And that was the moment that I rediscovered my sister.

The Box

There’s the pain that you feel and the pain that you see.

I went back to work the next day, my arm in its cast and my blue sling draped across my chest. I caused quite the stir when I walked in before the store opened, with everyone making a fuss over the injury and wanting to hear the story again and again. But they had absolutely no idea of the pain I felt inside, an aching inside my heart that wasn’t about to heal anytime soon.

It was decided that with only one good arm, I wasn’t much use at re-shelving duties. It was also evident that I wasn’t going to be able to slide books into bags, a two-handed task if ever there was one. This is how I ended up with the dreaded duty: info desk.

To customers, the information desk is a gleaming beacon in the middle of the store, a monument to the advanced power of computer searches and bookstore employee knowledge to find what you’re looking for. For example, the customer asking for “that funny book by that guy on that show on NPR on Saturdays” combines employee knowledge (David Sedaris often appears on “This American Life” on Saturday afternoons), and a search of the computer for a list of his works. It tells you that Me Talk Pretty One Day can be found in both literature and humor, while Holidays on Ice can actually be spotted in our special, two-months-to-Christmas, rushing-the-holidays display in the middle aisle. A little added knowledge can also lead the customer to the latest issue of the New Yorker, which features an essay by Mr. Sedaris.

To employees, the info desk is a nightmare of moronic inquiries and complaints. During the first half hour this morning, I was subjected to the following questions:
• “Where is that novel that Oprah wrote?”
• “Why doesn’t Howard Stern have a cookbook?”
• “Who can I complain to about the coffee from the latte stand? I burned my mouth on it because it’s too hot.”
• “Do you have any hard-backed books with red covers? I want to decorate my living room with them.”
• “Where are my socks?” Yes, this was an actual question. When I asked what he meant by that, he replied, “You are an information desk, aren’t you? Where are my socks?”

The info desk employee also gets to answer the phone, which presents questions like:
• “Are you open?” Yes. “What time did you open this morning?” 10AM, sir, and we’re open until 10PM. “I didn’t ask how late you were open. I asked what time you opened. Pay attention.” Silly me, I thought the closing information would have been more useful at this point in the day.
• “If I buy a burrito at the shop next door, can I bring it into the bookstore so I can read while I eat?” Sure, and why don't you just smear salsa all over whatever book you want to read.
• “Can you recommend a book for an intellectually advanced newborn? I want to make sure she’s reading at her proper level.” Uh, newborn's can't read. "Maybe not the newborns you know, but I assure you, mine is different. She'll be going to Yale." Great.

Adding to the joy, the desk-worker can’t abandon her post to use the restroom or, say, wash her hands. Rummaging through the cabinets below, I see a half-used bottle of antibacterial hand lotion. A-ha! Someone else has my germ fixation, too. I felt better as a result of the revelation, and more stable as a result of the germ killing power. Even better, the lotion seems to work better than worrying about keeping the cast dry during handwashing.

By 1PM, I’ve reached the outer limits of my patience for humanity, and fortunately it’s time for my lunch break. I don't actually eat at lunchtime. I can't handle ramen noodles twice a day, so it's easier to save them for dinner. I would desperately love to peruse the shelves during my downtime – even employees find hidden gems when they have the time to look for them – but I know that I’ll never be off-duty while dressed in the store’s polo. So I resign myself to a walk outside.

The rains from yesterday have cleared, and we’re left with a crisp, cool autumn day, with dead leaves skidding across the parking lot. My cardigan is still drying on the radiator in my apartment, so I’m left with an oversized sweatshirt jacket with a broken zipper. I wrap the jacket across my bad arm and tuck it into the shoulder strap of the sling; the other arm wraps around like a straightjacket. Further circumstantial proof that I’m insane, as though I really needed it.

I walk to the small grocery store on the other side of the lot. I didn’t bring any money with me, for obvious reasons, but sometimes they give out free samples of yummy stuff. It’s the only reason to go there, especially when you’re living on my ramen noodle budget.

Today I got to sample unfiltered apple cider that reminded me of going to the orchard when I was a kid, and pumpkin spice bread. The old woman who was distributing samples was generous with her servings, and when she wasn’t looking I grabbed a second piece of bread. That should stop the growling in my belly for a while.

My belly. I reached down and touched the area just below my belly button. There was something in there. I tried not to think about it, but there it was. I couldn’t hide from this forever. I either had to figure out a way to raise a child, or figure out a way to raise money to end it before it really began.

I never thought of myself as the abortion type. Not that there is a type, really. I just thought that I would value the sacred importance of the fact that life had been created inside me. But I also always assumed that I would be in a long-term relationship with someone I loved when I got pregnant, not alone in the city with the child of a one-night stand with a guy whose name I either didn’t know or couldn’t remember. It never even occurred to me that things could work out this way. Now I suddenly understood what all of those women had been talking about. And for as much as I was glad to have the choice, I hated the fact that I had to make this decision. It was no one’s fault but my own, and I had to take the responsibility. God, all the drugs that I take for my fucked-up brain. They can't be good for it.

I wondered why I hadn’t known that I was pregnant. I hadn’t been sick. I hadn’t felt much different than I normally did. My period had never been regular, so its absence didn’t set off any alarms. In fact, it hadn’t even occurred to me that it hadn’t come. You never want to be the last to know about these things, and there I was, just as shocked as anyone in the ER that day. So there you have it, the course of my life decided by a printout from a computer with a positive result. What does it know? It’s not like the computer knows anything about me. How can I let its answers dictate my life? I felt so self-righteous and indignant, as though the computer were passing judgment rather than just reporting the facts.

I checked my watch and realized it was time to head back to the box. The warm sun on my face felt good, in spite of the cold wind that swept across the lot and left my ears and cheeks red. I returned to my perch at the info desk and stared forlornly at the clock on the wall, wishing that it was closer to 6:00 than 2:00.

”Excuse me,” a voice said from beside me. “Do you have any books about the Marines?”

I turned to him with a weary smile and forced my best retail voice. “Sure we do,” I said with artificial cheeriness. “Let’s see what the computer has to say. Computers know everything. They can change your life, you know.”

Dreams and Realities

The first night after the hospital was surreal. I had just dozed off and was awakened at 3AM by the sounds of a pair of men repossessing a car on the street below. You can't really appreciate the amount of noise that a tow truck can make until you’re awakened to the sounds of scraping metal chains and hydraulic pumps in the middle of an otherwise quiet evening. It’s a sound so loud and disturbing that you wonder in your grogginess if the end of the world has come like Apocalypse has always said. It’s an awful sound that reminds me of destruction.

I always wondered why they did the repossession at night. During the day, the noise and activity of the city would mask the events on our little street. I would guess that no one would even look twice at a tow truck at 3:00 in the afternoon. At night, however, our entire building – and possibly the entire block – was aware that this silver minivan was being taken away. The owner came out of the building and began shouting profanities at the repo men, as though offending their mothers was going to stop them. I tried to ignore the noise and retreated into a fitful sleep.

Dreams are a funny thing. I usually remember something about mine, but that night they were exceptionally vivid and intertwined, in spite of the fact that none of them made any sense whatsoever. It began with incorporating the sounds of the shouting neighbor, that much I can relate to. Before long I was at a baseball game, a large concrete stadium with the bluest sky and greenest grass you've ever seen. The problem with this ballpark was that all of the fans and players were quiet, frozen in their tracks, with just this one guy standing in the next section over, shouting at the top of his lungs, flailing his arms angrily, cursing at the players and screaming at the fans. His anger frightened me, and I tried to call to him, to stop his shouting, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed; this is never a good sign in a dream. And of course, once I realized that I couldn’t move, I was completely terrified that something horrible was happening. Terrorists. Murderers. I didn't know exactly what evil lurked beneath the surface of this shouting man. There was a strange feeling of something brushing up against me, just out of sight of my peripheral vision. I knew instantly that it was an evil agent of the screaming man. Something bad was about to happen. I had to save myself.

I woke myself up screaming, and scared the living daylights out of the cat, which had been trying to curl up behind me and settle in for the night. Not exactly an evil agent, unless you have a terrifying fear of cat hair. There is, of course, no way to properly apologize to a wronged cat. She leaped to the foot of the bed, stared at me for a moment, and when I reached out to stroke her soft fur in an effort to put both of us at ease, I inadvertently whacked her in the snout with my cast, which I had forgotten. She shook off the indignity of the whole evening, and jumped off the bed to curl up in the corner, away from the lunatic that was huddled under the covers shivering.

A door slammed outside and I heard the tow truck pull away. I tried meditative breathing exercises I learned in a therapy session to slow my heart rate and enable myself to fall asleep again. I listened to the distant sounds of traffic and didn’t realize that I had finally drifted back into unconsciousness. I was back at the ballpark, but this time there were security guards to take the shouting man away. I felt empowered, and much more at ease when he was removed from the area, and I leaned back in my hard plastic stadium seat to stretch my legs.

In a flash, the scene shifted, and I was back on the gurney with Nick’s partner pushing me through a darkened corridor. I repeatedly asked her where I was, but she didn’t speak. Finally, I irritated her enough that she snapped, “You know exactly where you are. You’ll be living here with the rest of the fallen women.” She gave the gurney a shove and it careened through a set of swinging doors and into a room that was bright as noon in the desert with the glow of fluorescent lighting. I sat up and looked around. There were women everywhere, on the floor, on bunk beds, and even sitting under tables. Every one of them held a small, helpless baby, sweet and tiny and smelling of powder and cleanliness.

An alarm sounded and suddenly the women were surrounded, knee-deep, by ever-growing piles of dirty diapers and discarded bottles. The babies grew larger, louder, more demanding. There were hundreds of them. Thousands. The room went on for as far as the eye could see. The babies grew larger and the women grew smaller, more wrinkled and haggard. One turned to me, with dark circles under her eyes and her face creased into a permanent look of anguish. “Welcome,” she said.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Hell,” she replied. “They never grow up. They never get better. They just scream and shit and shred your nerves for the rest of eternity.” She handed me her baby, which looked like a newborn infant, yet was now the size and weight of an eight-year-old kid. I struggled to lift him. He screamed with that pained wail that only babies can manage.

“Why is he crying?” I asked her. “What does he want?”

I looked around and she was gone. There was no one left in the room but me and the thousand babies. I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t prepared for this. How was I going to care for them?

The lights went out and I was alone in blissful silence. It was midnight in a park, and I was sitting on a bench. A police officer was having me view a lineup of suspects. They came by in groups of six.

“Do you recognize any of these men?” He had a deep voice, like James Earl Jones.

I shook my head no. The next group came through. He asked the same question in the same way. The answer was no once again. This went on and on, as though the tape was rewinding and replaying. Tall men, short men, white men, black men, well-dressed men, scruffy men. Nothing. I recognized no one.

He gave me a puzzled stare. “Do you actually have any idea what the suspect actually looks like?” I shook my head and began to cry. “Do you have a name? Even a first name would help.” I shook my head again, sobbing. He looked disgusted with me. “How is it possible that you could sleep with someone without even knowing their name?” I wondered the same thing myself. God knows I’ll never do that again.

The parade of suspects continued, although this time it was like the process was being watched in fast-forward. Nothing, nothing, there’s the guy from the coffee shop, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, a guy from high school, nothing. He wasn’t there, and I probably wouldn’t be able to identify him even if he had a large neon nametag that said, “I’m the one.”

The cop said to me, “We’ve reviewed every suspect in the metropolitan area, with the exception of the very young, the elderly, and the homosexual population. It’s time for you to face facts, young lady. You’re all alone in this one.”

I knew it. I shifted my weight uneasily on the bench. I was less depressed than humiliated at that point. I just wanted to run and hide and not have every guy in the metro area know that I was knocked up by an unknown sperm donor. Damn it. How could I have been so careless?

The alarm woke me up. I curled up on my side and listened to the radio, watching the numbers on the clock tick forward. 7:01. 7:02. Time wasn’t on my side. Nothing was. I pounded the button to shut the radio off and headed to the bathroom to wrap my cast in a plastic bag and take a much-needed shower, washing the night away.

Five Years

I should have known this would happen.

Even at my five-year high school reunion, I clearly had less luck than the others in my class. Granted, five years out of school, some were still finishing college or had entered grad school, which isn't exactly a clear indicator of how your life will go, it just felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. I still lived with the ghost of my dead mother and worked at the bookstore. It wasn't exactly the life that dreams were made of.

I didn't look too bad that night. I'd saved money from my paychecks for six months to look good: hair, manicure and a new outfit that looked slightly more fashionable than my khakis and bookstore polo. It was a classic black dress, far more elegant than I was really comfortable with, but it looked so good in the fitting room of the TJ Maxx that I couldn't resist. I spent a month walking around the apartment in high heels, strengthening my ankles so I didn't break one walking into the ballroom. It was going to be a night to remember. I was going to be someone different that night. It was going to change my life.

I only went in the hopes of seeing Tom. I'd had a crush on him since the first day of freshman homeroom, and I still held out some dumb hope that maybe he would be interested in me if I had the right clothes and the right attitude. I spent half a day preparing, having my hair and makeup and nails done until I looked like someone entirely different than my normal self. But I felt good. I felt pretty -- not Natalie Wood dancing around in West Side Story singing I Feel Pretty, but good nonetheless.

I arrived fashionably late, which is to say that I spent the first two hours at the hotel bar, drinking several glasses of courage that I could hardly afford. I walked in to hear the same music that they used to play at our high school dances, which triggered flashbacks of some of my least favorite memories. I was never the girl that anyone wanted to dance with. I tried to pretend I was too cool to care, but it killed me every time a guy I liked would come my way and then choose the girl next to me to dance with. This is how I ended up spending most of my dance evenings sitting out on the loading dock behind the cafeteria drinking cheap beer and smoking pot with the other nerds. But the reunion was going to be different. I'd had five years to plan it. I had done everything right, aside from being able to come in as a success. But I really couldn't have asked for much more.

The first person I saw was our class president, a self-absorbed girl who looked exactly the same as she did at 18: perky, fashionable and invariably surrounded by people who gave the impression that they loved her, but may very well have been as phony as she had been. She glanced my way without a glimmer of recognition, but I didn't care; she wasn't the one I wanted to see.

I scanned the dance floor, looking for the guy I wanted to see. There he was, on the far side of the room, leaning against the wall with his arm over a short blonde girl I did not recognize and a beer in his other hand. I stopped, not sure if I should approach. I stood there for a moment, debating my next move. That was when Chris McKenna approached. He was still beautiful, as though he were still leading the basketball team to the league championship. He actually knew my name.

"Hi Angela." His voice was deeper than I remember it to be. "Do you remember me?"

I was stunned. Why wouldn't I remember him? It seemed impossible that he would ask such a thing. When I found my voice, I told him I did remember, and made inane conversation about what he had been doing since graduation. It turned out that he had failed some classes at school as a result of too much partying, lost his scholarship and had been working at a warehouse since he was 19. His drinking had gotten out of control, and six months before the reunion he began attending AA meetings. He was feeling good now and was thinking about going back to school. All of this was fascinating, of course, but I wasn't really interested in his life. All I cared about was Tom.

I politely excused myself, grabbed a drink at the bar and downed it in two swallows. I tugged at the hem of my dress, took a deep breath and headed across the dance floor. Along the way I was stopped by a dozen people who could barely remember my name or where they knew me from -- Mrs. Cartwright's third period geometry? Sophomore health class? -- but were more than willing to tell me their stories. Still in school, first babies, entry-level jobs. I tried to work my way through the crowd and get to Tom. It felt like it took forever to pass through the sea of phony smiles and life stories. People were patting each other on the back like old friends, not the strangers that they really were.

I finally arrived at my destination. I paused for a moment while Tom finished his story.

"... And so I said that there was no way I was putting up with that shit, and I quit. Nobody's gonna bust my balls like that." His beer hand swung for emphasis. She chuckled politely, but I could tell that she was looking for an excuse to run. I smiled and offered it.

"Tom?" I said, my voice cracking. I cleared my throat, and she excused herself and ducked away to head for the bar. "Tom," I repeated with more confidence in my voice. I extended my hand to shake his, as though we were conducting a business deal. Awkward! What was I thinking? He turned and looked at me, his eyes glassy from drinking.

"Amanda?" He said it with a slur.

I was heartbroken. "No. My name is Angela. Angela Farber."

"Oh yeah, Angela. I remember you." He clearly remembered nothing.

I was crushed. I smiled weakly and turned away, disappointed and pained by the fact that he didn't recognize me, and he grabbed me by the arm. "No, baby. Come here. Stay." He tried to pull me closer, and I could smell the beer on his breath even at arm's length. I pulled away and he grabbed for my dress. The seam split and he was left with my dress in his hand, while I was left standing in front of my entire class in my bra and black stockings. I was humiliated. My face quickly passed from pink to red to purple. Most people laughed. One guy I didn't recognize wrapped his jacket around me. I tried to run from the room and twisted my ankle, but I kicked off my shoes and kept going. There I was outside the hotel, nothing but underwear and a borrowed jacket.

I heard through the grapevine that my appearance at the reunion was the most talked-about moment of the evening. That's the story of my life: every time I try to get laid, bad things happen. Whether I'm stripped nearly naked or end up pregnant, it all seems to have the same result: loneliness and shame.

I haven't been back home since that night. My sister called the next morning -- word travels fast in that town -- and gave me hell for the experience. I shouldn't have gone there. I shouldn't have been drinking. I should definitely not have tried to talk to Tom. And when was I planning to return that guy's jacket? She just added insult to the emotional injury I had already suffered, and I absolutely blew up. I would tell you that I said things I regret, but they were really things that had been brewing within me for a long time. They all came spewing out with incredible force and anger. We haven't spoken since.

Emergency

If I had to break my arm, be treated by an EMT and hauled off to a hospital, Nick was definitely the medical professional to have by my side. I didn't care about the pain anymore. I just had fun with him, laughing and joking all the way to the ER.

We pulled up to the hospital doors and his partner opened the doors from the outside. I started to get up from my bed, but he stopped me. "Uh-uh. No way. You're riding into the ER on this lovely gurney. No arguments." I wonder what made him think I would protest this. Could it be the fact that being wheeled into emergency for a simple broken arm seemed like complete overkill? I sighed, knowing that there was nothing I could do about it, and settled myself in for the ride into the hospital.

The rain was still coming down hard, and Nick gave me a blanket to shield myself from the rain. I pulled it up over my head, giving the illusion of a ghost needing medical attention.

"That's a good look for you, Casper," he said.

"Don't make fun of me. You're the one that gave me the blanket."

I heard the automatic doors open and the pattering of raindrops on cotton stopped abruptly. I peeked out from beneath my blanket, surveying the scene before me. The ER wasn't very busy in the middle of the day. There was a middle-aged man in one observation area, and a young boy in the process of getting a bright blue cast put on his leg. Medical professionals milled around in scrubs, chatting and using their downtime to catch up with files and administrative issues that had long been ignored in the periods of chaos. Nick wheeled me into observation room three.

"Are you comfy?" he asked. "Can I get you anything?" I told him I was fine. He patted my leg. "Not to worry. We're going to get you the best doctor this place has to offer. That's not saying much, but hey, you can't screw up putting a cast on an arm." He winked and walked into the hallway. I couldn't help smiling.

The next few hours were busy ones. Phlebotomists drawing blood in spite of protests that a broken arm really didn't require bloodletting. Orderlies rolling me to Radiology for X-rays to make sure that it was a clean, simple break and not something that would need surgery. An exciting meal of hospital turkey and cold green beans. Yum! A handful of questions about my fingertips, and why four of them had bandages on them; I tried to make up a reasonable excuse, but they knew I was lying. Hey, what can they expect? They know I'm on just about every psychologically-altering drug that a psychologist can prescribe. It's not like we're pretending that I'm stable.

Nick had long since gone back to work. "Off to save another damsel in distress," he said. "But I'll be back before you know it." And he was. By the time I was eating my hospital-cooked meal, he had returned, sitting by my bedside and marveling at the perfect roundness of mashed potatoes dispensed with an ice cream scoop. We were laughing and having a good old time when the doctor returned.

"So," I asked, "is it time to put me in a cast yet? Because in spite of my love for this gourmet food, I really feel that I must be going."

He leaned against the cabinet that housed the bandages, syringes and other miscellaneous hospital goodies, arms crossed, with my chat tucked under his armpit. "We'll fix up that arm in a moment. But before that, I have a few questions for you."

I had told the arm-breaking story to everyone who came into the room. Everyone from the attending nurse to the orderly asked me how it happened, so I was in no mood to tell it again, and I told him so.

"I don't have questions about your arm," he said. "I want to discuss proper prenatal care. Have you been taking vitamins? Folic acid?"

I felt Nick pull away from the side of my bed. I dropped my fork into the mashed potatoes. The room fell completely silent. I could hear the sound of a nurse in the hallway, discussing lab results with a doctor. I couldn't move. The doctor began to speak again. I know this because I saw his lips moving. But I didn't hear a word. Nick stood up and walked towards the door. I stared at him. He turned to look at me, disappointment and hurt in his eyes. I couldn't speak. Pregnant! Oh dear god, how could I possibly be pregnant? I couldn't catch my breath. The doctor darted forward and placed an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. Nick vanished from the doorway. I began to cry again, for the third time today.

The doctor left the room and I was alone for several minutes, sucking oxygen through the mask in hysterical gulps, before a young nurse returned. She smiled warmly and began to gather the tools needed to apply the cast. I couldn't speak. My eyes were puffy, my face salty from dried tears. She approached my bedside and patted my hand. "It's ok, sweetie," she said. "You'll be ok. You're strong." I felt anything but strong. I felt weak and helpless and alone. And now there were two of us. Oh god, oh god, oh god.... I could feel my throat closing again as I struggled for breath. This time the oxygen didn't do enough. I blacked out right in front of the nurse.

When I regained consciousness, there were three of them standing over me: two nurses and the doctor. "Rough day," he said, more as an observation than sympathetic reassurance. I nodded, still choked up. I hated the feeling of the oxygen mask on my face. I pulled the mask away.

"Are you...?" I stopped, not really wanting to know the answer.

"Am I sure?" he asked. "Yes. The bloodwork is conclusive."

I stared into the distance. "Well. That's.... That's a surprise."

"You'd be amazed by how many unplanned pregnancies we see," said the dark-haired nurse. "I don't know if it makes you feel better, but you're far from the only one."

I nodded, knowing this was true, but hating the fact that it happened to me. Everything was blurry and confused. Nothing made sense. I didn't know what I was going to do.

Stepping outside the hospital door into the rainy afternoon, I began to walk home. By the time I arrived I was soaked to the bone, with the exception of the cast which they wrapped in plastic before putting it in the sling. The cat meowed her protest at my absence. I had forgotten to feed her before I left the house. I opened a can of cat food, tried my best to dish most of it into her bowl with my one good hand, and headed to the shower to get warm and stop my teeth from chattering.

Wrapped in my robe, I sat and gazed out the window, watching the brake lights as traffic went by. There was only one thing to do. I dried my hair, grabbed jeans and a sweater and headed for the bar where I met the one-night stand who was now the father of my child. I didn't know what to say to him if I found him. Fortunately, I never had to come up with a good way to broach the subject, because I never saw him again, in spite of going nearly every night for two weeks. I was completely alone.

The Big Bang

The ride home from the bookstore seemed to take forever. Traffic was awful as a result of the rain, and cars were jockeying from lane to lane in the hopes of being one of the lucky three to make the next light in the backup.

The bus was packed – they tend to be on rainy days because no one wants to walk – and the combination of overly-refrigerated bus, body heat and humidity had left the windows fogged. In spite of the fact that it was midday, it was so dark outside from the storm that I could barely see anything but my own reflection as I looked across the old woman in the window seat. She took this as an invitation to begin talking, something I did not want to do.

It took six light cycles to make it through the next intersection, and in that time I had heard all about her grandchildren – they never call or write – her ungrateful daughter, her arthritis and her friend’s recent diagnosis of colon cancer. The mention of cancer made me squirm in my seat; she took no notice of my discomfort and continued to talk in great detail about chemotherapy and her friend’s symptoms and side effects. The bus suddenly became smaller and smaller and I thought I would die from the claustrophobia if I didn’t get out at the next stop. I leaped up from my seat, pulled the signal cord, and as I made my way into the aisle, it happened.

BANG!

The bus lurched forward and I, unattached to anything, went flying down the aisle, barely slowing my fall by trying to grab onto someone’s denim-jacketed shoulder with my right hand. I hit the floor hard on my left arm, and the distinct cracking sound that echoed through the bus left no doubt in anyone’s mind that my arm was broken.

I lay on the floor in agony, partly from pain and partly from the horror of being on the unclean floor. I really needed to wash my hands. A large black man helped to sit me upright and as the bus driver radioed for help, he removed my wet cardigan, pulled back my oversized polo sleeve, and built me a makeshift splint with a magazine and his gray scarf. My arm hurt like hell, and was beginning to swell, but the stabilizing pressure of the splint seemed to take the edge off momentarily. For such a big man, he had such gentle hands.

The entire bus was watching me. I self-consciously sat cross-legged on the floor with my new buddy and medic, tears leaking down my cheeks for the second time today. I could hear the sirens in the distance as the police and ambulance wove in and out of the traffic to reach us. A man in the back of the bus complained about the fact that we had stopped while the bus driver did battle with the SUV that rear-ended us. Who would have guessed that anything so comparatively small could have that kind of effect on something as large as a bus? But then I realized that the bus probably wasn't even damaged, and if I'd had the good sense to remain seated, I wouldn't be in this position.

The police finally arrived and the bus was filled with the strobe of the lights on the cruiser: red, blue, red, blue. The officer spent his time outside the bus filling out the accident report. I sat silently crying, wondering how on earth I was going to pay for the visit to the hospital that was invariably going to occur. I couldn't even call my doctor, since I neglected to pay the bill the last time and they'd turned over my account to a collection agency. Damn it. Why do these things happen to me?

The red and blue lights were joined by an array of amber. The ambulance had arrived. Through the front door walked the most beautiful man I had ever seen, tall and strong, dressed head-to-toe in the navy blue uniform of the local EMT service. He was followed by a butch-looking woman with a crew cut that the Marines would have adored.

“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, crouching down to join me.

I pointed to my arm. “I picked the wrong time to stand up, I think.”

He chuckled, and began to unwrap my splinted arm. “Let’s give this man his stuff back, shall we?” I nodded, and he handed the man his Car and Driver magazine. “Good work, man. Way to keep the arm stable.”

“I was a boy scout,” said my medic buddy. “They taught us that when I was a kid.”

The EMT nodded. “I wasn’t in the scouts for long, but I learned a lot of handy lessons like that, too,” he said, applying a more official-looking splint and sling to my swollen arm. This one didn’t have the hard edges like the magazine, and I was happy for the change, even though moving the arm hurt like hell.

“Ready to go for a ride in my chariot?” the EMT asked me?

I shook my head. “I think I’d better walk. I don’t think I can afford the ride. In fact, I think I should just skip the hospital altogether.” I rose to leave the bus, and he stood in my path.

“Nope. Sorry, doesn’t work that way.” He smiled to reassure me. “I have no choice but to take you to the hospital. And don’t worry about paying. I suspect that our friend in the Escalade will be taking care of that.” He pointed to the activity that was visible through the side door of the bus, and the cop’s conversation with the driver that rear-ended us didn’t seem to be going well for the driver.

We exited the bus to the sound of a standing ovation. I smiled. “Hey, if I knew that this was what it took to be popular….”

He laughed. “I like your sense of humor.”

We climbed into the back of the ambulance, and he took out his clipboard to start jotting notes. “Name?”

“Angela Farber.”

“Angela. The angel. Very nice name. Address?”

“714 East 35th Street, apartment 14B.

“Person to contact in case of an emergency.”

“It’s a silly question to ask at this point. Haven’t most people already had the emergency by the time they get here?”

He laughed again, a clear, loud laugh. “I suppose you’re right, but I need this information for the hospital. Who should we call?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really have anyone, I guess.”

He looked surprised. “No boyfriend?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I broke up with my last boyfriend a few weeks ago. Not that it was much of a relationship.” He didn't really need to know that it was nothing more than a one night stand with a guy I met at the bar. Uninspiring sex. Hardly worth getting undressed for.

He nodded and moved on. “Family?”

I shrugged again. “I guess you could use my sister as a contact. She’s not local, though. And we don’t really speak.”

The butch-looking driver appeared at the door. “I checked out the rest of the passengers. No other injuries. Are you ready to roll?”

“Let’s go,” he said, reaching for the door. He looked at me with a glint in his eye. “You might want to belt yourself in, just in case we get rear-ended.” The last word was partially obscured by his laughter.

I lightly punched his leg with my good arm. “Nice bedside manner! Are you always this nice with your patients?”

“Only the funny ones,” he said, still chuckling.

The siren began to wail and we pulled out into traffic, slowly making our way to the county emergency room. It was going to be a slow ride through the rain and traffic, but I didn't mind. I was having the best time I'd had in ages.

Placing the Blame

I blame it on my mother.

It took me years of therapy to get to that point.  I blame it all on my mother.  I blame a lot of my problems on the fact that she left when I was young, and I blame even more on the fact that she didn’t come back until she was dying, and made me endure that hell.  I didn’t even want to look at her.  All I saw was a bald head, bloated cheeks, hollow eyes.  I didn’t see my mother anymore. I just saw the shell that the chemo had left behind.  I spent most of my time out in the yard trying to avoid her.  The horrible stench filled the house as the chemotherapy ensured that nothing she ate actually made it all the way to her stomach.  My sister said that all she really wanted was to hold me one last time before she died, but I wouldn’t let her.  I thought it was cruel that she came back and left me with her sickness as her memory and her legacy. It was worse than leaving without a word.  I was ten years old.

My sister, in spite of the fact that she was older, more aware, and more involved with my mother’s sickness and care, seems to have let it all go, like it didn’t have any effect on her.  She managed to remain a top student, be named cheerleading captain and homecoming queen, and go off to a top college in the northeast.  I struggled through school, drank heavily, smoked pot, had more meaningless sex than I care to remember, and barely completed my one and only semester of community college.  I’ve been at the bookstore ever since, and I blame it on my mother.

On those rare occasions where I would actually try to build a relationship with a guy, I would invariably have to go home and meet his family.  The home-cooked meal was welcomed – any meal is welcomed when you live on my budget – but it always led to that awkward conversation about parents.  His mother would ask, “And what do your parents do?”  My last parent dinner saw me, way beyond the legal limit for alcohol consumption at a family event, answering this question with, “My father works two jobs to ensure that he never has to come home and face reality, while mother’s emaciated, cancer-riddled corpse is six feet underground at St. Stephens cemetery.”  That didn’t go over very well.  His mother’s face twisted in an attempt to hold back tears, and she ran to the kitchen to try to compose herself.  His jaw nearly hit the table; I'd neglected to mention it to him, either. We broke up soon after when he told me that he couldn't trust me to be honest with him. I wasn't surprised. I wasn't disappointed by the outcome.

After that debacle, I went through a string of men of various ages, none of whom lasted more than a week. There was the guy who wouldn't have sex unless he was blindfolded, which didn't do much for my self-esteem. There was the college student who had an exquisitely talented tongue; the only problem was that he was far too stoned to be interested in sex all that often, a pity when you find one who can do it so well. I also spent a weekend with a man older than my father, who wined and dined me, bought me expensive gifts, and only managed to get it up once.

These hollow relationships never amounted to anything and each one left me lonelier than I had ever felt before. I spent my solitary nights sitting alone in my apartment with my cat, playing with the knife and wondering what reason I had for continuing with my life. And I blame it on my mother.

When she left, I was six years old. It was my first day of kindergarten. I came home, dressed in my little plaid dress, and she wasn't there. The door was locked and I had no place to go. I waited on the front steps for hours before my sister came home, and we waited together until after dark. My father finally arrived home close to midnight and found us asleep together on the front porch, waiting for someone who would never come. He knew immediately, I'm sure, but I didn't. Every day I waited for her to return, to braid my hair and make my breakfast. But days turned into weeks and I learned to make my own breakfast and brush my own unruly hair. I soon outgrew my old clothes and took to wearing oversized hand-me-downs from my sister, who in turn borrowed clothes from her friends. My father largely ignored us, so my sister and I lived a fairly independent existence.

Christmas passed, then my birthday, her birthday and another Christmas. I stopped hoping for cards or gifts or phone calls. I just tried to forget her entirely. It was four years before she returned, out of the blue, standing at the front door with large gold hoop earrings and a bald head that reminded me of Mr. Clean. I didn't even recognize her. Her face was puffy and bloated from months of chemotherapy, her eyes looked dull and vacant like those of a doll, and her smile looked weak and distant. I felt like she was looking through me, trying to see the life she left behind. My sister stood behind me, tall and looking newly grown up as she passed into her teen years. She welcomed my mother with open arms. I stood rigid while she wrapped her bony arms around me. The hot sunlight of that summer day was so starkly different from the cold breath that she brought into the house.

They had given her two months to live, and she wouldn't even last that, but she brought an air of death into the house with her first steps across the threshold. My sister spent the summer playing nursemaid, making sure that she took her medications and drank plenty of fluids, until my mother's body refused to accept her help. She died on a humid summer day with no breeze. I clearly remember a large housefly buzzing through the living room as she lay on the couch, her breathing labored and heavy until it stopped altogether. My sister held her hand and wept. I walked outside and sat on the steps, listening to the sounds of the normal kids out playing. I knew that I was never going to be normal again.

The funeral was sparsely attended. Not many people even realized that she had come back. The few people who knew her from before felt awkward about coming to an event so personal. They whispered thoughtful comments about death and loss and moving on, but they didn't realize that I'd lost her years before, and with the exception of fresh bitterness, I had already moved on.

Fourteen years later, I sit alone in my apartment, playing with the knife and blaming my mother.

The Bookstore

I arrived at the bookstore a full 27 minutes after the hour. I looked completely ragged, both from the agitation of the bus ride and the fact that it had finally started to rain in torrential sheets. I had to run across the parking lot, dodging cars, with my sweater pulled over my head as an umbrella. Note to self: wool blends do not make effective water-resistant coverings. I feel bad for sheep who are stuck out in the world with nothing but a wool blanket of fur covering their little sheep bodies. My teeth are starting to chatter, an annoying little habit that happens every time I’m cold and wet.

I barrel through the door, shaking myself dry like a dog, when I see my manager heading my way. Oh great. I’m going to be in so much trouble for being late. I don't want to deal with conflict today. It’s the fourth time in the last two months that I've arrived late, and it hasn't reflected well on my performance reviews. Yes, sadly, I have worked here long enough for performance reviews. I may be the only person in the history of the company that can say that. My mind starts racing as I try to come up with a better story than my bathroom time warp and the evil bus driver pulling away and leaving me on the curb with Apocalypse, when I hear her say, “What are you doing here?”

“I know, I’m late, but it was such an ugly morning,” I said, trying to fish for a better excuse. I should have been thinking about this on the bus.

She looked at me strangely. “Actually, you’re about 23 and a half hours early. You’re not scheduled to work until tomorrow.”

Damn it! No! “Today’s Wednesday?” I asked with a whimper.

“No, Tuesday,” she said. "Wednesday is still half a day away."

I started to cry, but tried to make it look like I was wiping rain droplets off my face. She didn’t buy it for a second. She looked like she was taken aback by my behavior. “You’re soaked,” she said, with a quiet reassurance that I’d never before heard in her voice. “Come on back to the break room. I’ll get you a dry shirt and some hot tea.” I was shocked. She usually seemed like such a bitch. But I guess your attitude has to be different when you’re playing the role of manager with late employee and when you're playing the role of human being with dripping-wet girl leaving puddles on the entry tiles.

She led me to the back room and took my sweater. I was still shivering. The store always had the air conditioner cranked up a little too intensely. Not enough to make you completely freeze as a customer, but enough to encourage you to visit the latte stand for a little added warmth. Brilliant marketing.

I quickly washed my hands with hot water and the awful pink soap we had at the store. She went to the closet and got me a clean brick-red polo, brand new, wrapped in plastic. “All I have is an XL. Sorry. But it will keep you dry,” she said, tossing me the bag. I turned my back from her to change, self-conscious about the size of my breasts, or lack thereof. I felt the wet cotton release from my back as though I were peeling the skin from a banana. The new shirt went over my head and covered me like a tent. The shoulders were so broad that the short-sleeved cuffs nearly came down to my wrists. I felt like I was carrying around a dozen yards of extra material. The body of the shirt was long enough that I considered belting it and wearing it as a dress. I wasn’t complaining, though; the extra cotton knit was keeping me warmer than I would have expected.

I sat in the hard, industrial break room chair, rested my elbows on the table and ran my fingers through my wet hair, unlocking knots as I went. She approached with a foam cup trailing a tail of tea bag string. “Drink this,” she said. “It should stop your teeth from chattering.” I took a sip and scalded my mouth and tongue, and felt the hot liquid travel through my esophagus down into my stomach. The sudden warmth was as shocking as the cold, and I shuddered again. But the chattering stopped. I ran my tongue along the damaged roof of my mouth, knowing that this would hurt like hell in a few hours. Self-inflicted oral injuries are the worst, because you have no one to blame but yourself. I picked up the cup of tea and tried blowing on it to cool it off. Steam rose from the white Styrofoam and fogged my rain-spotted glasses. I felt quiet.

“Better?” she asked, hopefully. I nodded. “As long as you’re here and in uniform, do you want to work today? I had one of the kids from the college bail out at the last minute. All-nighter for exams did him in.” I nodded again, not really in the mood to speak. “Ok, you can work on re-shelving the books. Start over in self-help. No one will bother you.” I nodded again, knowing the wisdom of being able to hide behind the cart for the entire day. “Ok… well, then… back to work.” She smiled, but her smile became forced and awkward as she once again became Manager Woman and left Human Being behind. “Come out when you’re ready.”

The door clicked shut behind her and I blew on my tea some more, watching the ripples move through the liquid. I hate tea. I just took it to make her feel better, and now I have this burn in my mouth. Why did she have to pick tea, of all things? And why did I have to take it? I walked across the room and dumped it into the sink, leaving a golden-brown stain behind. I washed my hands slowly, caressing the bubbling foam, and watching the sink fill with bubbles that washed away my tea stain. Time to face the world.

The door between the break room and the store is heavy steel. I always wondered if it was there to protect us from the customers, or to just remind you that the door is your last line of defense against the stupid. I turned the knob, put my weight behind it and pulled. Muzak immediately filled my ears. Phil Collins. It was almost enough to make me want to retreat into the break room. But I fought through it and went out into the world.

The store was still quiet. Weekday mornings, especially rainy weekday mornings, don't do much for bringing the readers through the door. I approached the cart in self-help, staring at the titles. Because of our alphabetical filing system, “When a Young Spouse’s Death Leaves You with Small Children” was nestled snugly between “A Primer on Death and Dying” and “Fido is Gone: Surviving Pet Loss”. “Bl” comes before “Br”. “My” comes after “Ma”. There’s a rhythm to alphabetical filing that I’ve always found comforting. I was so absorbed in organization that I didn’t see the feet approach.

A large man with dirty tennis shoes was standing over me, clearing his throat in an effort to get my attention. I think my oversized XL shirt was made with him in mind. I looked up. “Doya ha da opabook?” I swear I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I squinted my eyes and cocked my head to the left, trying to translate in my head.

He spoke again, slowly, like I was an imbecile: “Do. You. Have. The. Oprah. Book?” I shrugged. “I’m not sure what you mean. The new book club book? A cookbook that she endorsed? A book about Oprah?” He had no answers. “How the hell should I know? It’s for my wife. She told me to get the Oprah book.”

I untangled my crossed legs and stood up to lead this man across the store to fiction. “Fiction. New. Oprah’s new book should be in here,” I said.

He looked at me. “Which one is it?”

I shrugged. “Look for one with the Oprah’s Book Club label,” I said. “I don’t know which one your wife wants.”

He wrinkled his face in anger. “Nice job, loser,” he began. “You work in a bookstore and you don’t even know what Oprah’s latest book is. What an ass.”

I shrugged again, poking at the burned spot in my mouth with my tongue. “Thank you for your kind words,” I said. “And many thanks for shopping our book store for all of your Oprah-related needs. If there's ever another celebrity whose advice you follow when choosing literature, I certainly hope you'll return to our store.” I turned and walked away, going back to my filing.

But no! I was spotted now, unprotected in the main aisles. The customers were coming to seek me out and make me miserable. “I heard about a book on the radio,” said a woman with long gray hair, dressed like a hippie. “But I don’t know the name or the author. I don’t suppose you were listening to NPR yesterday at 4:15?”

“I want the book my coworker is reading,” said another. “It has a beautiful blue cover and is about a woman and this man. Do you know the one?”

“Do you know of a good book for a newborn baby?”

“Do you have any books about how to tell your married boyfriend that you’re pregnant?”

“Do you have any erotic novels?”

The last one was the final straw for me, probably because it happened in conjunction with Celine Dion on Muzak, enough to make even the strongest person completely ill. I ran to the break room to hide from them. I just couldn’t handle their questions anymore. That’s when she sent me home. She said I wasn't working to my potential. Whatever. I was at the store a day before I was supposed to be. So what if I looked like a mess and acted like I didn't care about the customers. How was I any different from the college students who came through?

I grabbed my wet cardigan, held it up over my head, gradually opened the door and made a run across the parking lot to the bus stop.

Not Afraid of Death

It's not death I'm afraid of.

I never understood why people feared it. It's just the absence of everything, a vacuum, nothingness. Life, on the other hand, flat-out terrifies me. I don't know if it's the twists and turns that seem immense and complex and frightening, or if it's a fear of being alive and lonely. I've spent many an evening, alone in my apartment, sitting in the tub at 3am, hoping to overcome the wretched force of insomnia. There have been nights where I couldn't take it anymore, couldn't stand the silence and the loneliness. Those were the nights that I sat with the knife in my hands, fondling its sharp precision, nicking my fingers as a test to see if I could make the blood flow. For reasons I don't understand, I never actually went for my wrists. Maybe I just didn't have the follow-through that was necessary to make it happen. But it was enough to scare the wits out of my shrink and get me put on meds.

I'm now taking a cocktail of pills, mind-numbing concoctions that help me sleep, wake up, fight my lows and balance my highs. The odd side effect of all of this is an absolute compulsion to wash my hands at every available opportunity. They took away my emotional range just to make me obsessive-compulsive. Somehow I don't think it's an improvement.

The odd part of sleeping again is that I have dreams. I remember a time when my dreams were crisp and clear, but since I started the meds I feel like I'm watching everything in slow motion, as though everything happens behind a gauze curtain. There's no clarity, no meaning, no memorable moments, just a vague sense of hearing something in the distance. For all I know, my dreams may be nothing more than the neighbors fighting or the cats staging their nocturnal musical special (live from the alley... a special feline presentation).

I have no sex drive, either. I could masturbate for a week and never get off. At first it was frustrating, but then I guess one of the meds kicked in full force. Now I don't care. I want nothing. I need nothing. I feel so un-American in my lack of want. But at least I sleep. I sleep a lot, if you must know. I'd be perfectly content to do it full time.

I woke to the pulsing alarm, and wished I'd set it to wake to music. My heart was pounding out of my chest. I should probably have taken an anti-anxiety pill, but instead I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and somehow lost twenty minutes as I stood there naked with a mouthful of foam from brushing. My right hand, toothbrush in tow, had long since dropped to my right side, leaving toothpaste marks on my outer thigh; I didn't notice.

Eventually I realized that my feet were cold on the tile floor, which jerked me back to reality. I finished with my teeth and opted against a shower, deciding instead that it was too cold to get wet and that I really wanted to pull on my sweatpants and thick wooly socks that I once bought for a hiking trip to Yosemite that was canceled because of a freak early-season storm. That was the last time I tried to do anything good for myself, although I don't know if climbing Half Dome counts as "good for you" or "extreme sport". Having not accomplished it, I don't feel qualified to decide.

As I wash my hands carefully with antibacterial soap, I try to remember what day it is. It's not Monday, I'm pretty sure. Tuesday? Wednesday? When you work retail, it doesn't matter. You don't have weekends anymore, just random days off. If it's Tuesday, I have the day to myself. If it's Wednesday, I have to go to the bookstore. I decide, reluctantly, that it is Wednesday, and I let the wooly socks drop to the floor in disappointment. I pull on a pair of wrinkled khakis and a brick-red polo with the store's logo on it. The collar is misshapen and faded from too much washing. I guess they don't expect anyone to be there long-term, so they don't invest in high-quality shirts. I've more than overstayed my time there.

I'm still cold in the short sleeves, so I pull on the Stained White Cardigan. It's a classic, oversized cable knit that looks like it's trying to swallow me whole. There are coffee stains on the right side, near the bottom, from that unfortunate leaky-cup incident at the latte stand. I hadn't realized that the cup wasn't properly sealed at the bottom and I'd lost a third of it to my sweater before someone finally pointed it out to me in the break room. The dry cleaner couldn't get the stains out, and I was depressed that it was ruined, but I decided to wear it anyway. It was still my favorite sweater. Come to think of it, it's my only sweater. And since it's white, it does a good job of hiding the cat fur.

I long ago realized that my wardrobe could no longer include any black. Something had to go: the black pants or the white cat. I couldn't let the cat go; it was the only thing I'd ever met that seemed less interested in the world than I did, and I felt that we were kindred spirits. So out went the black, replaced by neutrals that are utterly devoid of personality. The transition came at the same time I started on my cocktail of meds. It seemed like an appropriate switch, as I had also become utterly devoid of personality.

I glanced at the clock and realized that it was infinitely later than I thought. Shit. I'll be late for work again. I stuffed my feet into my shoes, leaving the laces untied, washed my hands one last time, grabbed my keys and ran out the door in the hopes of catching the 9:27 bus. But of course, I knew that I would miss it. Not just miss it, but be close enough to see it pulling away as I ran frantically down the street, waving my arms in the hope that the driver would see. I suspected that they saw all of the runners clearly, but opted not to pick them up as part of a strange power-trip pact among bus drivers. They knew that they would never get anywhere in the world -- it's hard to get anywhere when you have to stop at every corner -- so they tried to find power in making others' lives as miserable as theirs.

I was about a block and a half from the bus stop when the 22 bus passed me. I started to run after it, and in my head I could hear the driver laughing at me. Go ahead and laugh, asshole. We both work dead-end jobs and live in crappy apartments. If it makes you feel better to prove your superiority to me, then be my guest. I don't really care.

The bus was waiting, idling beside the waiting bench. I got close enough to read the ad on the side before he closed the doors and pulled away. I heard people on the bus yelling at him to stop. He kept going. Jerk. I flipped him off with both middle fingers and threw myself onto the bench in a heap. The next bus wouldn't come for 12 minutes, and the wind was blowing to herald a coming storm. I knew I would be at least 15 minutes late for work. Damn it! Do they hire nothing but assholes at the Public Transit Administration? And do they not realize that they sound like idiots calling themselves the PTA? It sounds like an organization where parents and teachers should be holding bake sales to raise money for sports and computers, not a public transportation system.

I pulled the sweater around me like a bathrobe, shielding myself from the wind and blowing leaves. A homeless man was approaching from down the street, talking to himself loudly about the second coming of christ. He refused to tell anyone his name, and all the locals knew him as Apocalypse. He was always preaching, mostly to himself, about the end of the world and a vengeful god that would send his child down from heaven to destroy the boundaries between earth and hell. I have no idea if any of this is factually accurate; I never read the bible and have no intention of doing so, in spite of the fact that I love to read. I just know that Apocalypse makes a pretty compelling case. Except for the fact that he's nuts and hears voices, I think he'd make a good prophet.

The next 22 bus appears, and I fumble for my pass in my pocket as I climb the stairs. The bus starts moving before I find a seat, and I lurch towards an empty row. I fall into the aisle seat without any hint of grace, banging my elbow on the metal pole on the way in. Tingling pain radiates down my arm like electric shocks. This is just what I need today. With my luck I probably broke my elbow. I try to sit quietly and not think about all of the germs on this bus, and how much I need to scrub my hands clean.

Blog Disclaimer

This is supposed to be my entry for National Novel Writing Month, and I can only hope that I can crank out the 50,000 words needed over the next 30 days. The challenge? I don't think I'm going to write in anything close to a natural order of things. We may have to do some chapter rearranging later. Keep that in mind as you read. Also remember that there is no time in this schedule to a) edit, or b) write for quality. It's killing my editorial sensibility. I may go back and repair it later, if I'm not painfully sick of it by November 30.

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.