“It is,” Nessa agrees. She smiles back, which takes effort, considering the pain she’s in.
“Summer is just around the corner.” The woman shifts in her seat to face Nessa head-on. “Let’s hope the air-conditioning works properly.”
“Right,” Nessa says. She has to be careful with women like this, lonely women, hungry for conversation and connection. She has a way of attracting them.
“The last time I was on one of these Peter Pan buses, the air-conditioning broke halfway to Boston.”
“Oh no.”
“It wasn’t too terrible because the day was cool to begin with. But on a day like this? We’d melt into our seats.” The woman mimics melting by throwing her arms and head back dramatically. Then she chuckles.
“Are you going home or leaving home?” she asks, and when Nessa opens her mouth to respond, she realizes she doesn’t know how to answer.
* * *
—
MINUTES LATER THE BUS pulls out of the depot and starts its journey down Elm Street before merging onto the Mass Pike toward Boston. Nessa gets that familiar rush in her stomach. It’s not a purely bad sensation, exactly—the Wild Thing—but it’s unsettling, and paired with the UTI, it produces a feeling of intense homesickness in Nessa.
Nessa returns more frequently than Tanya. It’s not often that they go back to Arlington together, to the house they grew up in, and this will be the last time they ever do. Nessa crosses her legs together and squeezes.
She glances behind her at the awful little restroom at the back of the bus; wonders how long she’ll be able to hold out before going back there. The woman next to her will probably get suspicious after Nessa’s third or so trip. She’ll think it’s drugs, or maybe just diarrhea. At the very least, Nessa is grateful not to be sitting next to a cute guy, or any guy at all.
Nessa resists the urge to text Tanya again, even with an update on the UTI.
Instead she texts Henry. Did you make it to Dr. Janeski’s on time?
She stares at her phone. He is the type to either respond immediately or not for hours, sometimes days, later. When ten minutes goes by with no response, she tucks her phone into a pocket of her backpack and leans her head against the darkened glass window and closes her eyes.
Nessa met Henry at Dr. Janeski’s and she knows she has to end things with him soon if she wants to keep her job with the psychiatrist. But despite Henry’s clumsiness in bed, despite the gruff way he handles her—her body and her emotions—she looks forward to seeing him.
It started a month ago when Nessa bumped into Henry at the bus stop on the corner of Main Street. At first Nessa couldn’t place him. She recognized his camo hoodie, his posture—slumped. He was tall, well over six feet, but he stood as if he was in a room with low ceilings, even though he was outside. It was Henry Alden, from Dr. Janeski’s office, she realized, as he flicked ash from his cigarette.
As she approached, she waited for Henry to notice her, but he didn’t until she was standing right in front of him. He gave her a funny smile, as if to say, Do I know you?
“Henry, right?” she said.
He nodded, still smiling.
“Nessa,” she said. “I’m the receptionist at Dr. Janeski’s office.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding. “Right, right.” His eyes jumped from her face, down her body. “You waiting for the bus?”
Nessa nodded even though she was only a few blocks from home, no more than an eight-minute walk. “You too?”
“Yup.”
“Can I bum one?” she asked.
Henry reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels and held it out for her.
For a moment they stood smoking, not talking, and Nessa could feel Henry looking at her. She thought back to Henry’s file in the office and tried to remember what was written there. She’d been the one to create the file, to make photocopies of Henry’s insurance card, write alden in capital letters on the tab, put a hole-punched intake sheet in the front of the file for Janeski to take notes on during the initial consultation.
He’d been arrested that fall for stealing a taxi, she remembered then. It was his parents, who were housing and feeding him, who insisted he see a psychiatrist. Anxiety, Dr. Janeski had written in the diagnosis section. Janeski used an inky ballpoint pen to take notes, her spidery lettering like eyelashes clumped with too much mascara. But Nessa didn’t think Henry seemed anxious.
It was inappropriate that she approached him—a HIPAA violation—and if Dr. Janeski found out, she’d be angry. It was probably the type of thing Nessa could get fired for.
Henry pulled out his phone and glanced at it. “The bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago,” he said. “I fucking hate the bus.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You don’t have a car?”
“I do,” he said. “My license was revoked, though.” He rolled his eyes and smiled at her and she thought he had a nice smile. “I get it back in six weeks.”
“Why’d it get revoked?” she asked.
“You’re gonna think I’m crazy.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
“I was really wasted,” he started. “There was this taxi sitting there; it was over on Spring Street.” He pointed in the direction of Spring Street. “The driver had gotten out, was helping this old lady carry her bags up the stairs. He left the car unlocked and running and I got in and drove away.” He smiled, bashful and proud at the same time.
“Why’d you do that?” Nessa asked, smiling.
“I have no clue,” he said. “It was stupid. I had to spend the night in jail and now I have to rely on fucking public transportation.”
“I can give you a ride home if you want.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”
“We just have to walk to my apartment, but it’s not very far.”
“Sweet,” Henry said.
They started down Main Street and Nessa liked the feeling of walking next to somebody so tall. It made her feel small and delicate, two things Nessa rarely felt.
She’d been living in Northampton for two years and she knew that tangle of streets around her home well—the uneven sidewalks; the houses painted unusual colors like lilac, pale green, sunny yellow; the gardens out front, which were just beginning to bloom again—but walking with Henry, she saw everything afresh.
“This is me,” she said, turning into her driveway, where her car was parked. She lived alone in the upstairs of a small house. The owners lived downstairs with their Doberman.
“This is where you live?” Henry asked, looking the house up and down, the same way he’d looked at her fifteen minutes before.
Nessa nodded and clicked her fob, unlocking the car.
For a moment they both stood by the car, Nessa on the driver’s side and Henry by the passenger’s, though neither one of them got in.
“What’s it like inside?” Henry asked.
“Do you want to see?” Nessa said, and Henry nodded.
* * *
—
SINCE THEN THEY’D met up once or twice a week to have sex. Usually Henry spent the night and Nessa would drive him back to his parents’ house in the morning.
He was one of Janeski’s psychopharm patients—he came in twice a month for his Xanax prescription and that was it. No talk therapy, so there was little chance of his sex life coming up, and he had promised Nessa he wouldn’t say a word. But Dr. Janeski was smart and Nessa was easy to read. For his last appointment, Nessa hid in the bathroom on Thursday morning when Henry was scheduled, so she wouldn’t be in the waiting room when Dr. Janeski came to get him.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if she was fired, she reasoned. She’d been at it for two years now, and the job had gotten old. Nessa answered the phone, faxed in prescriptions, managed the billing. It was fine; mostly boring, with brief bo
uts of excitement, and Henry, with his boyish eyes and incredible height, had been the latest bout.
* * *
—
“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF DR. JANESKI?” she’d asked Henry the night before, in bed. The symptoms of her infection hadn’t developed yet—they’d come on suddenly, only after Henry had dropped her off at the bus depot that morning.
“She’s nice,” he’d said, shrugging, and it occurred to Nessa that Henry didn’t care about his psychiatrist—what he thought of her, or what she thought of him.
After she slept with Henry the first time, she’d revisited his file on several occasions. He was thirty-three, three years older than her, and worked as a landscaper. He’d been fired from most of his jobs, usually for coming to work drunk or high. Growing up he got in trouble at school and was diagnosed, incorrectly, with ADHD. According to a prior school psychologist who’d faxed over notes, when Henry was eight his mother left the family unannounced and came back a year later with a mysterious burn on her arm and the word respect tattooed on the inside of her bottom lip. These details touched Nessa. Not because of Henry’s mother, but because they were things Henry noticed and thought about and said out loud.
* * *
—
SOMEDAY, when she has the money, Nessa will go to therapy. She understands herself well enough to know that she’s probably a little mentally ill. She doesn’t hear voices or anything like that. She’s just sad a lot of the time—most of the time—not that you’d know it, necessarily, by looking at her.
* * *
—
TWO HOURS INTO THE DRIVE, the bus pulls into a rest stop and Nessa grabs her bag and slides past the old woman, frantic to use a real bathroom. In line, she checks her phone again. No text from Tanya or Henry, but she does have one from Jesse, her stepfather.
Bus in at 12 at South Station right?
Jesse is usually the one to pick her up or drop her off to things—he’d been doing it ever since he entered their lives, when Nessa was fourteen and Tanya was twelve. She knows that he enjoys it, helping out in these concrete and distinctly paternal ways. She can picture him now. Standing in a crowd at the station, hands in pockets, scanning eyes until he finds hers, then pulling one hand from his pocket and raising it—smiling—while walking toward her. He always insists on taking her bag, even if it’s a backpack and it’s already on her back. He’s always on time.
Yes 12, she confirms. She adds a smiley face.
Then a stall finally opens up and Nessa hurls herself inside, almost knocking a woman over in the process. She slams the swinging door behind her, her fingers trembling as she slides the lock in place. She’s taken Tanya’s advice and has been drinking water all morning, and this time when she pees, she’s actually able to produce something. It’s such a relief, her eyes well up.
Lorraine Bloom pulls left into the parking lot for Menotomy Beer & Wine and lights a cigarette. It’s nine in the morning and the liquor shop is closed, the lot empty. Menotomy is on Broadway, which is perpendicular to Winter, just around the corner from their house, out of sight. A breeze passes and the grass by the sidewalk quivers, catching light. The girls will be home soon, Nessa by bus, Tanya by car. There are things to do before they arrive.
Her phone chirps. Jesse. Where are you?
Traffic, she writes back. 5 min away.
She watches the ellipsis appear on her phone, Jesse typing a response. Then the ellipsis disappears, appears again, then goes away for good. Lorraine puts her phone in the cup holder and tosses the cigarette out the window. She keeps mints and mouthwash in her glove compartment, along with a jar of peanut butter, to cover up the mint.
Lorraine rinses her mouth, eats a glob of peanut butter, and pulls out of the lot and drives slowly down Winter Street. She no longer knows any of her neighbors except for the O’Briens, the elderly couple who shares the two-family house with her and Jesse. Most of the people who lived on Winter Street when the girls were little have moved out, and at some point, Lorraine went from being the young mom of two pretty little girls to a middle-aged woman who avoids eye contact with her neighbors and sometimes smokes in their driveways before pulling into her own.
Her girls are still pretty, of course, but they’re grown up now, busy with their own lives. Tanya is beautiful in the way she’s always been—long, silky hair, wickedly high cheekbones, green inscrutable eyes like a cat’s. Her beauty is sharp and in focus, the first thing you notice about her. She looks like their father, Jonathan. And Nessa has grown into her beauty, though her daughter still doesn’t know it. Lorraine sees the way Nessa moves through the world, seeing everything except for herself—no idea that anyone might be looking at her, too. Her older daughter wears her vulnerability on her face like a milk mustache—unknowingly, cute, and just a little bit pitiful.
Lorraine can’t pinpoint exactly when she was booted out of her daughters’ inner circle, but it happened sometime when they were teenagers. Normal, is what other parents said about this sort of detachment from their mother—not that Lorraine spoke to many other parents about her relationship with her daughters. She wasn’t the type of mother to befriend the other moms or host many playdates. Was that the problem, she wonders sometimes.
But no, whatever happened during those teenage years hadn’t felt exactly normal, though nothing, she supposes, felt normal after Jonathan left.
In just a matter of months Lorraine will leave Winter Street behind. For the first time in her life, she won’t live in Arlington. She was born and raised in this town. She knows it the way you know a close family member—how it smells and what its moods are, what it’s like at its worst and its best, all the details that a visitor would overlook. She’s watched it change over the decades, from when it was a dry town with only a handful of restaurants, back when it was mostly big, Catholic families. People seemed to know each other then.
Now Arlington has everything—Lebanese food, Indian food, Mexican—Arlington’s become a destination. It has Starbucks. When Menotomy opened, the first beer and wine store since Prohibition, Lorraine and Jesse walked there on opening night and bought two bottles of the most expensive wine she’d ever drank and finished both of them on their front porch.
In 1985 Alewife Station was built and suddenly Cambridge and Boston were just a train ride away. People in Cambridge who couldn’t afford Cambridge anymore started to move to Arlington—professors, artists, students, professionals. “Snobs,” Lorraine’s mother complained, back when her mother was still alive.
One of those people had been Jonathan Bloom. A corporate lawyer, Jewish, originally from New York. “Not the city, though,” he’d clarified to Lorraine on their first date, as if it was something to apologize for.
“I’ve never been,” she said.
“Where? To New York, or New York City?”
“Neither.”
“I’ll have to take you. We’ll eat better food than this.” He nodded to the pasta on their plates, and Lorraine smiled, not knowing whether to be excited or insulted. She’d brought him to her favorite restaurant in Arlington.
* * *
—
SHE AND JESSE can’t afford to live in Arlington any longer, especially now that Lorraine is unemployed. At first Lorraine resisted when Jesse proposed the move. She doesn’t know anyone in New Hampshire and she’ll be farther away from her daughters. Besides, Arlington is home. She can’t imagine herself anywhere else. Now, though, she’s getting more used to the idea. Maybe starting somewhere new is exactly what she and Jesse need.
Jesse’s car is in the driveway and Lorraine pulls in by the curb, behind the O’Briens’ Volkswagen. She wants another cigarette badly, but she puts the pack back in the glove compartment where she keeps the mouthwash and the peanut butter. Jesse knows she smokes, but he’s also under the impression that she’s trying to quit. Their latest fight, the one they’re still coming down from, was about Lorrain
e’s smoking. Jesse came home early from work to find Lorraine in the side yard chain-smoking, a graveyard of cigarette butts scattered in the grass in front of her. Ever since she was fired from Stand Together, she’s been going through a pack a day. On a bad day, sometimes more. Recently, it seems, she’s always either smoking or brushing her teeth.
She was listening to music, earbuds snug in her ears, and didn’t hear Jesse approach. When she felt his hand on her shoulder, fear shot through her stomach. She jumped and cried out, dropping her iPhone into the grass.
“How many of these are from today?” Jesse demanded. She’d considered lying, but the risk of being caught in a lie wasn’t worth it.
“All of them.”
Jesse knelt in the grass and gathered the stubs in his palm, counting. “Eight cigarettes in one afternoon.” He looked up at her. “Why would you tell me you were quitting?”
“I am,” she said. “I’m trying. I’m addicted.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Sorry,” she said.
He let out a harsh laugh. “Don’t apologize to me. I’m not the one who’s going to die of lung cancer.” Then he tossed the cigarette butts back into the grass and stood. “You owe me ten bucks.”
“For what?”
“What the hell do you think? The pack.” He held out his hand. “Give me the rest.”
Lorraine pulled the pack from her back pocket and gave it to Jesse. There were only a few more in there anyway, and she had two unopened packs in her glove compartment.
* * *
—
INSIDE SHE HEARS JESSE in the kitchen. He’s singing and the weight lodged in Lorraine’s chest lifts and floats away.
“Baby,” he calls out.
In the hallway, Sally is asleep on her belly, tail twitching, so Lorraine knows she’s dreaming. She reaches down and gently scratches behind the dog’s ears.
Something Wild Page 2
