Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  “In the hospital, I should’ve come see you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.”

  Angie felt the conversation set its hooves and stall. She said one of the things she’d said to Hannah in her head: “When I think of the hospital, I don’t know who I am.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t know who you are?”

  “I mean it’s confusing. I think about things I … Jesus. I mean, it’s the world that’s fucked up.”

  Jess pushed some crumbs into a line.

  “I mean, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I don’t know.”

  The door opened and shut. This time, they both turned. Sam Manning, stomping ice from his boots, raised his hand in greeting.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A Res—someone from the farm.” At least Sam was normal. Wasn’t he? She had the time he was in line to think what to say about him to Jess, but her brain felt slow. She raised her coffee and found she’d drunk it all.

  Near them, a little girl was kneeling on the floor. Two women talked at the table above. Periodically, one of them called down, “Are you okay, Liza?”

  The girl didn’t respond. She had straight bangs that fell into her eyes and a wind-up toy, an alien with arms hugged to its body and three eyes across its forehead. The little girl wound a key in its side and it ran awkwardly, body pitched forward so that with each step it teetered and seemed barely to catch itself from falling.

  Angie said, “They always make aliens look just like humans with one thing different.”

  “What?”

  Angie’s hands were jumping on the mug. She put them between her knees, pressing to still them. “Do you mean what did I say or what did I mean?”

  “Which thing is different?”

  “I don’t mean there’s a specific thing, I mean they change something.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jess looked suddenly on the verge of tears. “You’re not even acting like you’re happy to see me. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me!”

  Jess flinched and looked away.

  Sam was making his way over. He had a shambling walk—was that weird?—and blue down vest—weird?—and carried his mug carefully, watching to make sure it didn’t spill. “Hey, Angie.”

  “Hey.”

  There was a silence, then Jess introduced herself.

  “I know,” said Sam. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “You have.” Jess raised an eyebrow at Angie, who looked away. Jess asked Sam, “Do you want to sit down?”

  “I guess, for a minute.” Sitting, he looked around the café, cracking his knuckles. On his right hand, the fingers were stained dark yellow with nicotine. “How long was your drive?”

  “Four hours,” Jess said. “The roads were pretty good.”

  “You were lucky. Last night we had a windstorm.”

  “In New Hampshire, we had a windstorm last year that killed two people. A tree came down on their car.”

  Angie relaxed a little. This was a normal conversation. She was pretty sure. Sam asked about the colleges Jess had applied to, and Jess listed the places she’d gotten in and the places she hadn’t. She thought she’d go to Bates. Had he gone to college? He had. Tufts University. “But I didn’t—”

  Angie blurted, “What do you think Hannah does on these trips?”

  “Hannah?” Sam turned toward her. He was so big and so slow-moving. He said, “Are you okay?”

  “No. No. I just—right.” She lifted her mug—no, all gone; she put it down. Too hard: it skipped and started to totter and Jess grabbed to steady it. Jess and Sam had identical expressions on their faces. They looked like her parents had begun looking at her last fall, wary and assessing. She laughed loudly. “You don’t have to look like that.”

  “Like what?” Sam asked.

  “Like I’ve just run over your dog.”

  “I don’t have a dog.”

  Angie laughed again. She rolled her eyes at Jess, then saw that Sam was watching her. She froze, halfway through the motion, mouth still open, eyes wide.

  “Okay,” he said. He pushed back from the table and smiled weakly. “I guess you girls need time alone. I forgot how long it’s been since you saw each other.”

  Jess said, “Stay, it’s okay, we’ve had forever to talk.”

  Sam shook his head. Angie remembered how he’d said his sister was his only real friend. She hated the emptiness of his life. When he stood and said, “Well …” she let him walk away.

  At four, ten minutes before the van would leave, Angie and Jess stood outside the café saying goodbye. The light had become grainy; in a half hour it would be dark. Low above the latched black branches of trees, the moon was barely visible against the equally pale sky. A parked car, finned and low, its headlights left on, floated at the curb like a blind fish.

  “I have to go,” Angie said.

  Suddenly, too late, she felt how much she’d missed Jess. They used to say goodbye like this, lingering at a corner. They’d call each other sometimes ten times a night. For a moment, it seemed homesickness would knock her down.

  “Well, bye,” Jess said.

  “You have a long drive.”

  Jess shrugged. She bounced her keys in her gloved hand, looking off. Then she looked at Angie. “You’re okay, right? Are you okay?”

  How many times removed was she from okay? She nodded, tightening her coat.

  As she started down the hill from Jess, she could see—spread out through Sheepskill—other Residents, straggling back singly and in pairs. She saw the whole town as a pattern of streets, glazed with late-afternoon light, leading to the van. When she turned, Jess was still standing in front of the café, watching her. Angie gave a hearty whole-arm wave, the kind people on boats gave to people on shore.

  At the van, a few people still milled around, taking advantage of the last few minutes off-farm. She put her hand into her pocket and found, still unopened, the envelope holding her meds.

  Pretending to cough, she bent and dropped the crumpled packet in the snow, quickly burying it with her foot. As she straightened, her face burned, but no one seemed to have seen. Ahead of her in line, Doug chanted, “Thing of beauty, thing of beauty.” Someone else—low, so Hannah wouldn’t hear—said, “Shut up, Doug,” and he did.

  Angie walked hunched over through the van to a seat in the back. Two Residents talked loudly. Hannah asked, “Julie, is your seat belt on?”

  “Yup.”

  “Angie? Seat belt?”

  Out the window, the air was lined, as though with sleet: the last few moments between dusk and true evening.

  “She’s got it on,” someone said.

  Hannah backed and feinted, backed and feinted, turning the van around. They drove slowly out of the lot. Angie leaned her head against the cold, rattling window glass. She felt like a small child, as though it were years ago and she was riding the school bus. In second grade, Jess had had a brown rabbit coat, so soft that Angie had found excuses—the bus going over a bump—for her hand to brush Jess’s sleeve. They’d been best friends, by then, four months. During math time, they drew insulting pictures of each other naked. “This is you,” Jess whispered, drawing salami-shaped breasts on a straight-sided woman. “Well, this is you,” Angie whispered, and scrawled armpit hair onto her own picture, pressing so hard the pencil lines shone silver.

  The van turned a corner and Angie saw the real Jess, head down, walking to her car. Angie started to duck, but Jess wasn’t looking her way. She had her parka hood up and her arms around herself for warmth. As Angie watched, she broke suddenly into a run. Still hugging herself, she ran awkwardly, body pitched forward so that with each step she teetered, seeming barely to catch herself from falling.

  Two

  Spring air came, cold and green, through the opened window of Jordana’s office, ruffling the papers on her desk. It was seven in the morning; she didn’t need
to be here for nearly two more hours. Though the office was ugly—low pocked ceiling; the thin tremble of fluorescent light—sitting here with the newspaper and her coffee was the part of the day when she felt least sad.

  The Women’s Clinic took up the fourth floor of an office building that also held a bank, real estate offices, a tax attorney, a hair salon, and two dentists. Before moving into this building they’d rented a Victorian close to the town center, but they’d decided it was too vulnerable to protests and sabotage. She pulled open the lower drawer of her desk, propping her feet on it, and stared out the window. From the bread factory across the street wafted the thin sweet smell of baking. On the building’s side, a giant painted baker chuckled in a tall white hat. Blinking orange neon spelled out good bread, with the outline of a brown loaf floating above the words.

  Pushing back from the desk, she went into the lab room and measured more coffee into the machine. She leaned back against the counter with the bagel she’d brought for breakfast. Biting into it was as tasteless and dense as taking a bite out of the White Pages. Her jaw ached as she tried to chew; she stuffed the rest back in the bag. Coffee had just begun to spatter down into the pot, and for something to do she pulled on latex gloves and began to unload sterilized speculums from the auto-clave. She held her breath, hating the singed smell.

  Back in her office, she opened the newspaper. These days, concentrating enough to read a novel was usually beyond her; she skimmed and jumped ahead even when looking at The White Mountain Times. The fear she’d felt when Angie was first hospitalized had worn down into an anxiety so persistent it almost felt like she’d always had it—a burning pressure in the chest, squeezing her lungs. The breeze from the window thumbed the edges of the newspaper pages. When she came across one of Ben’s photographs, she felt a tiny, dim shock of pleasure. He called the paper a birdcage liner, but looking at it made her feel close to him.

  Slowly, the clinic woke around her, the muffled noises of people putting away coats and finding the day’s files and greeting one another. Four floors down, tiny people got out of cars, pulling briefcases and tote bags from backseats. A protester who came every day—he’d followed them from the old location—got off a bus, a plastic lawn chair under one arm, his Magic-Markered poster under the other. He was an old man with a roughly crumpled face and a blue parka that must not have been much protection on bitterly cold days. Because she knew what the sign said, she could read the letters from here: PLEASE PLEASE LET YOUR BABY LIVE. WE WILL HELP. Jordana spent so much time watching the protesters—some weekends there were a dozen or more—that occasionally at night she dreamed she was one of them, standing outside the clinic with a placard.

  Midmorning, in the middle of an appointment, Iris buzzed her from the front desk to say Angie was on the phone. “She doesn’t sound so good.”

  Jordana said, “Excuse me a moment,” to her client, a girl about her daughter’s age but claiming to be older; sometimes girls thought they couldn’t have abortions unless they were twenty-one. The girl shrugged and looked away. Jordana went into the labwork room down the hall. When she picked up the phone Angie was crying, a harsh, congested sound.

  “What is it? Did something happen?”

  “Everything is shit,” Angie choked out.

  Not an emergency; she relaxed a little. “Ange, that’s not true. That’s just not true. You’re doing so well there—”

  “Ma, I’m mucking out stalls!”

  “You’re getting up in the mornings, you’re working—”

  “That’s nothing,” Angie said. “You’re not supposed to even have to think to do those things.”

  “It’s not nothing, Ange.” Holding the phone between her chin and shoulder, she reached into the cabinet for a mug and poured herself more coffee. It had been on the burner all morning and tasted of scorch. Though she usually drank coffee black, she opened the lab room’s fridge. Among the small, sealed bottles for culturing gonorrhea tests, they kept a carton of half-and-half. The cream sank in her coffee and then rose, a sudden yellow bloom.

  She couldn’t keep taking Angie’s calls during work. She and Pieter already both talked to Angie every night after dinner, sometimes as long as an hour. Two or three times a week, Angie called Jordana in the middle of the night or at the clinic. It seemed like months that they’d been having this conversation. Her muscles ached with how little difference her assurances seemed to make. “Listen. Angie.”

  Angie’s hard crying had dwindled to irregular, choked sobs. “You’re so good to me. I don’t deserve it.”

  Jordana leaned down, pressing her forehead to the cool of the aluminum lab counter. She could stand anything but another conversation about her goodness and Angie’s unworthiness. But of course she’d stand it.

  “It’s so bad, Mom. It’s so—you don’t know what it’s like, it’s so bad. I can’t think about this winter, the way I was this winter. It makes me feel like my head’s going to come apart. I work and it’s horrible, and Jess came and it was horrible, and my whole life, my life is horrible—”

  “Oh, honey.” She couldn’t think of a single helpful thing to say, and she had to get back to her client, who had tried to make herself miscarry by jumping off the low roof of a garage. “It’s not that bad. I promise it’s not that bad. I’ll call you tonight. Okay? Angie? Is that okay?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You can talk to Samara if you need to.” Samara was Angie’s contact person—farm-speak for therapist—a young woman with long skirts and a pierced eyebrow.

  At $128 a day, the work therapy program at the farm cost a fifth of what the hospital did, but none of it was covered by their insurance. The three months Angie had been there had cost more than $10,000, money they’d saved for her college tuition. Sometimes Jordana found herself almost wishing that Angie would act just a tiny bit crazier, so that it would at least be clear they were doing the right thing. But then when Angie did slip and lose sight of herself like this, it was awful, nothing to wish for.

  “I don’t know why you even talk to me.”

  “I love hearing about your days. But Angie, I’m with a client.”

  “Don’t go! Please. Just another minute.”

  If Angie were a child again, not wanting to go to bed, this would be the moment she clung to Jordana’s neck with all her weight. Jordana felt sick. Her daughter had supposedly stabilized; she was due to come home in three weeks.

  Angie was crying again. “You know that fairy tale, the one with the bad sister and the good sister? And the crone—”

  “Angie, I promise, I promise—”

  “—enchants her so that whenever she opens her mouth, what comes out are toads? That’s me. That’s what I feel like.”

  “Baby, I love you. I have to go.” She kept herself from saying, Okay? Pointless to try for Angie’s permission. “I love you,” she said, waited a moment. “Angie, God. I’ll call tonight. I love you.”

  In the hallway, she had to stop for a moment, put her hand to the wall. Where was she going? Her chest tightened; she was breathing too shallowly, and when she tried to force herself to take breaths into her stomach, she couldn’t hold them. She needed to get back to her office, but Angie’s calls made her feel pulled out of her body. She rested the side of her head on her hand, against the wall, gathering herself.

  She could be knocked off balance at any moment. It could be something obvious, like Angie crying, or it could be something more oblique, like a girl begging change downtown. Worst of all, feeling glad at even the smallest thing—an unexpectedly beautiful day, the taste of sharp cheddar—would immediately remind her that she was sad. It was as though, between happiness and unhappiness, she’d discovered a trapdoor she’d never known was there, one she couldn’t close.

  In her office, the girl had both feet wrapped around the legs of her chair. She wore a navy blue dress, probably meant to make her look older but which instead made her look impossibly innocent.

  Sitting, Jordana rel
aunched her speech about tab-gen abortions. “Second trimester means a three-day process.” Pulling open her desk drawer, she found the demonstration set of lams, pale green matchsticks made of compressed seaweed. Inside the cervix they would swell, dilating it. She’d given this talk so many times her mind could unhook from the words. “Once you start you can’t go back.”

  Four months ago, when Angie had been discharged from the hospital, she’d been stabilized but fragile, so bleary with medication that she walked into walls. She slept as soon as she got home from school in the afternoon, woke terrified in the night, could barely eat. Swimming was impossible, even the relatively easy practices they did between the winter and summer seasons.

  In the third week after the hospital, Jordana had gotten a phone call at work: Angie was in the school nurse’s office, crying and unable to stop. Jordana drove at twice the speed limit through Cort’s tranquil midmorning streets. At the high school she ran, then forced herself to walk, then found herself running. The wide, empty halls echoed with her footsteps.

  Angie lay crumpled on a cot. On the other cot sat a boy with a thermometer between his lips, and Jordana had to turn away, furious at him—for seeing Angie or for the banality of running a fever, she didn’t know.

  The nurse said, “I thought at first—well, girls are very sensitive.”

  Angie’s body shuddered and bucked. She’d run out of tears. Her mouth opened and closed and opened, little gasps, almost soundless, like someone crying behind thick glass.

  Jordana knew to kneel and hold her daughter, but she couldn’t move. Up until now, she’d been going along with the doctors’ advice, hoping the medications would work. She’d thought she was accepting her daughter’s illness clearly and dealing with it practically, but now she realized that she’d been able to be methodical—checking that Angie was taking her meds on time, driving Angie to the clinic every Wednesday for blood work—because she’d held on to the secret belief that her daughter wasn’t really sick. All the rituals of sickness had been to Jordana a kind of superstition: If she was good enough, she had believed, if she was obedient to the demands of calamity, she could divert the calamity itself.