by Adam Klein
Looking down the clean, white corridor, I thought: Fancy. It was unimaginable my mother would find her way here, a place as sterile as this. Like a good hotel. Outside the rooms were carts with lunch trays, aluminum-covered and stacked one on top of the other. I imagined white foods on each tray, delivered by a nurse in white. I looked into the rooms where other patients were recovering under plastic tents. I imagined what the high of perfectly clean air would be like, and assured myself it would be a light-headed but not a woozy experience, like a space suit where the pressure and toxicity of the environment are siphoned off. Her face had the pallor of a yellow bruise, her eyelids closed but fluttering like moths that had landed perfectly over sunken pits.
There was no one else in my mother’s room. It felt like a hundred degrees when I entered. There was a large window and a view of the city, barely observable through the blinding-white light that filled the window’s frame. A side panel in the glass was slightly cracked. That’s how the fly must have come in. It buzzed around my mother’s shaved head and landed on the red scar incised in a circle at the top of her skull.
‘Mother,’ I whispered, wanting to have her hear me, but also hoping not to wake her. ‘I’ve come to visit you. It’s me, Carrie.’ It was something like a movie, but less satisfying. I didn’t believe the characters, not the concerned one I was playing, and not the injured one my mother always played. I sat down in a plastic chair next to her bed. I opened my purse and ran my hands through the items I’d carried. I came upon the toothbrush case and looked around the room and at the door to make sure no one was there. I unsnapped the lid and looked closely a plastic Bill had provided, loaded already with the resin-brown liquid. The closest I would get to perfectly pure air.
There was a small bathroom attached to my mother’s hospital room. I went into it and closed down the toilet seat. There were wide gray tiles on the floor, a bathtub with attachments to help a patient move in or out. It looked untouched – a bottle of mouthwash sealed on the sink, two white towels and a facecloth folded neatly. I pulled the belt from my pants, took the syringe from my bag, and settled down on the toilet. The dope was amber. I leaned back and watched my blood rise like a ribbon up the tube, then plunged the contents into my arm. I felt as though I’d been wrapped in gauze and placed in a small box. I thought this must be how my mother was feeling, and the terror of her appearance fell away. Perhaps she would feel like this for some time.
I called Bill from the hospital room, collect. ‘I can’t stay,’ I told him. ‘She’s under heavy anesthesia. The doctor says she may not wake up for several hours.’
‘Are you loaded?’ he asked. I thought he sounded angry.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘You just sound it.’
That I’d lied, and that the truth was obvious, didn’t stop me. That my mother would never emerge as the person I knew, or wanted to know, didn’t stop me. ‘Can I come back?’ I asked, suddenly crying. I promised I’d get work, find some way to be better than I’d been. I’d proven an obligation to my family. I was human now, with real ties to people. That much I’d shown him. I could go back and ask him to hold me, make it all go away. He would make it all go away. And when he needed it, I’d make it all go away for him too.
We lived together for six years before he died of an overdose. There was never any pretense – after that last visit to my mother – of my caring for her one way or the other. Bill was my family. He never asked me to leave him again.
‘Ellen’s buried in the cemetery where we took our last bike ride, in Burlington. It’s beautiful there; rolling hills and so many trees. It’s not like a cemetery at all. We weren’t morbid; that’s not why we used to go there. It’s more like a park. I haven’t seen her grave, haven’t been back since,’ Hannah says.
‘Probably best not to go. Not right away.’
She leans back against the tractor door and draws her knees up. ‘Ellen believed people could change. You believe that, don’t you? That people can change?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘If they feel they have to. If they let themselves.’ What is she thinking, poor girl? What is she hurting herself with now?
‘Have you ever met people who remind you of someone you’ve known before? I mean, even the way they talk, or the way they think about things?’
‘I think so,’ I say, cautious now. I’m not ready to be compared with her dead friend.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘you remind me of her. It’s uncanny, but I felt it right away. All the strange things you keep on your desk. Ellen used to cut out paintings too. I don’t mean to offend you. In fact, I mean it in a good way, but Ellen just had a hard time fitting in. She could never do an office job like you. She sort of lived in her head.’
‘How so?’ I ask, thinking: I wish my casework could keep me out of my head, keep the details of others’ lives from mixing with my own, muddying the waters.
‘She was always making stuff up about her past, about who she was. It was endearing for a while. I don’t mean that you do that. You seem more like you withhold. She fabricated. Big difference.’
Yes. And she’s dead. You can sum her up however you like. I’m not dead. Remember that.
‘Now you’re upset,’ she says.
‘No, I’m not upset.’ But I’m thinking: Why should I tell you anything, everything? And the point I reached with Victor: Now you’re not my client. Here are my keys. Take everything, just don’t leave.
She lights a cigarette, then goes on: ‘Things happened really fast between us. I think we needed each other. Neither of us felt afraid of the world when we were together. We didn’t have to overcome anything to be understood. We took these long walks. We could see Iowa City way off behind us, and we’d be following the railroad tracks out of town, and we weren’t bored together, even though we spent a long time not talking, and neither of us asking where we were going or how long before we went back. And she always wore these dresses – dresses and combat boots – and it was funny to see her climbing over fences with them.’
She reaches forward to push King’s blanket in my direction, then pulls her knees up and rests her chin on them. ‘I remember how good she was at breaking into buildings. She had an intuition for unlocked windows, and we’d scout out these old manufacturing plants and abandoned schools and stores. It was always the high point of any trips we took, breaking into some place. Taking something with us. We broke into a high school in Sioux City once.
We drew pictures of each other in chalk on one of the blackboards. I drew her crouched down with a wound on her knee, and she drew me with a slingshot. It sounds silly, but we drew alike, and we could elaborate on each other’s drawings the way we could each other’s thoughts. And I took a picture of that drawing with one of the Brownie cameras I was collecting before we slipped out the window. We were fearless together; she found an unlocked window in me and she clambered in with those heavy boots.’
She stops here to run her cigarette in the tractor’s large, metal ashtray, to bring its burning end to a point. ‘There was a lot I didn’t tell her, trying to keep things simple between us. We were attempting to live like kids, without responsibility and without concern for consequences. She behaved as though she hadn’t grown up, even though she was just three years younger than me. On the other hand, I was trying to recapture something. Something I didn’t have originally, because my childhood was never simple. My upbringing wasn’t about sharing secrets. It was about keeping alliances. And Ellen couldn’t have known that, because I tried to reflect her exuberance, and because I genuinely convinced myself I could see the world the way she did. I was dishonest from the beginning, but I told myself that she was too innocent, or at least unwilling, to imagine it.’ She turns to look outside the window just as a star falls, cutting perfectly across the sky like the silver tip of scissors through black crepe.
And then we were high, as high as I thought we’d ever get – and it felt like helicopters landing on my head, this great whirring and
gusting that could lift me off my feet and drop me as easily, and my eyes flashed open, blind, white like a surveillance beam from inside – and I asked Victor if it was worth it, the kidnapping and the mayhem and the jewelry she wore.
Victor slapped me so hard I fell from the chair. Oh, well. I’d been crawling for months, it seemed. Crawling.
‘Don’t start with me now,’ he hollered, his face like the masks in the window. My father’s friends playing a trick. See if she jumps. But she’s down now, possibly for good. ‘Did you ask me to fix you, get you high?’ he hollered. But I was crying. Crying for her. And then I spit it out, angry at him, ‘Of course I asked for it.’ And Victor’s face then – so human, so horrible – because he knew he could not do to me what he’d done to her. The whole mess was at his feet. And just as I picked myself off the floor, I knew I would have to gather him up too, and never let him know how pervasive the damage was, how desperately he needed me.
Hannah puts her hands on the tractor’s large steering wheel, bracing herself, as though controlling this enormous piece of machinery. Her body changes when she clutches the wheel – she assumes a kind of haughty masculinity, as though she were surveying the land, master of it.
Keeping one hand on the wheel and turning toward me, she says, ‘She made me so angry once that I just told her the truth. Of course, I later realized there were a lot of things I didn’t mention. I shared a small part of the truth. It’s not like anyone gets much more than that. Anyway, we were sitting on the edge of my bathtub, and she was wiping the excess hair dye from behind my ears, and I remember feeling really good about her touching me.’ I notice Hannah’s brief glance at my face, as though she’s looking for some kind of response. But I’ve practiced the impartial listener. I listen like the dead.
‘There was always this kind of pressure between us, because we were so close. I can’t say it was really about sex, but I think there was a feeling that it could have happened. I had my back turned to her, and she said, “I’m still a virgin.” For some reason, I was really angry at her for saying that. It caught me off guard. I’d seen her birth control pills. Her compact fell out of her purse once, and I thought to myself: Well, I wonder who she’s fucking?
‘So, I told her I’d seen the pills. I knew she wasn’t a virgin. She was so furious when I brought it up to her, as though I’d broken a code between us. It was like I wasn’t supposed to know she was having sex; it ruined something we’d created together, the possibility of imagining ourselves innocent or without desire. She wanted us to remain free of guilt. I have to say, she wasn’t the only one who wanted that. I wanted it too. But I wanted to know why we couldn’t be innocent even if we’d done things we weren’t proud of, or had sex for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong person. I mean, those were basic things I thought we should be able to own up to.’ She looks away from me. I notice how distracted she becomes, thinking about these things.
‘But when she was helping me dye my hair, and touching me the way she was, I had the feeling she wanted me to initiate something, that she wanted me to make a move on her. Of course, she would only let it happen if she could remain unsuspecting. It would be something I’d have to take responsibility for. She could maintain being a child if the experience just happened to her. And then she could forget it the way children forget. It would be just another new thing in a succession of first experiences.’
Victor and I stopped having sex after a while. It was so much more intimate to share blood, drugs, despair. Sometimes it felt like we were the last people alive, that the whole city had died in their sleep, but we were up and wired. Sometimes it seemed that we were the only two who’d died, slipped behind some curtain. It seemed like we didn’t have to talk for days at a time; thoughts passed between us as though they were there in our blood. Can you pass delusions that way? Can you pass evil? But Janine‘s not dead, I remind myself, though a part of her must be. Easier to think her not too much alive.
Janine had called it God. God got her clean. Intervened. But what if it wasn’t God? What if it were simply the course of despair, ridden out, worn down like anything else in nature? For good or bad, it all has to end. Nothing has an interminable sustain. It breaks. It’s like fever. Even misery comes to its end. What if that was the only point of God: to put an end to things? Wouldn’t that be good enough? I think that would be grace, and redemption, and the other words we think we know the meanings of.
Hannah reaches inside her pocket and pulls out two caramels, hands me one. There’s a part of me that wonders about our eating candy, sitting in this tractor as though we were kids who needed to find a place to go other than home. I wonder if Ellen wasn’t the last person she did this with, and whether she felt she was only going along with it, then. But the simple intimacy we acquire by being somewhere we shouldn’t, eating candy as though we’d just stolen it, is undeniable. And I see that she’s comfortable talking here, that I’ll get more from her here than at my desk.
She sticks the cellophane wrapper back in her pocket. ‘Ellen decided she had something she wanted to tell me. I guess she felt that one truth deserved another. That’s when she mentioned Stefan, her painting teacher. I told her how I watched him sometimes coming and going from his house. I told her of this silly infatuation I had with him, and we’d laughed about it. I took her once to the park across the street from his house, to look out at him while he sprayed his sunflowers.
‘Then she told me how Stefan had asked her to model for him. She blushed when she told me she’d agreed to do it, the way she had when he noticed us in the park. And I saw it then – the first time we went to watch him from the park – how she didn’t take her eyes away the way I did, but lingered long enough to telegraph to him “I’m watching you,” before she followed me down the hill.
‘And when she told me that they’d been sleeping together, I was struck by a double pang of jealousy; I had been the one to first point out his features to her, to mention the sleep on his eyelashes that made it seem like he’d always just gotten up. And she’d never appreciated those things until I’d shared them with her. I began to suspect – and I’m sure it was just my own imagination – that she was studying me, taking parts of me into her own life. I know that sounds strange, but I remember looking at the photograph I took of our drawing on the blackboard, and her drawing of me was surprisingly similar to the way I’d drawn her. But I had always drawn that way, and what seemed like this natural affinity suddenly seemed like studied emulation.
‘I thought maybe she told me about the two of them because I was unresponsive to her when she said she was a virgin, that maybe she wanted something sexual to happen between us and thought this would make me jealous. I don’t know. All these thoughts came at me at once, and I thought all of them might be true, but none of them seemed to bring a revelation, or suggested a way I could respond to her.’
She looks at me with a pleading expression it seems impossible to console, then turns and fixes her expression on King’s blanket over my knees. ‘That all seems so long ago.’ She laughs at the absurdity of her own statement. Nothing has ever been more present for her.
In the distance we can hear what sounds like a group” of drunken students, singing intentionally off-key, and I feel a sudden rush of gratefulness to be high up in this tractor, over the frozen gouges.
‘C’mon, let’s get out of here,’ Hannah says, noticing my grogginess. I’ve adapted myself to the tractor’s seat, my head resting against the window.
‘Your teeth are chattering,’ she says. She wants to drive. She claims she hasn’t been in a car since Ellen took Stefan’s out for a joyride. ‘She took the keys out of his pocket after they’d had sex. She took some money too. The money was given; he preferred her not asking for it. When she told me these things, I went along with it. I thought: She’ll fuck it up, and I wanted to be there when she did. I consciously put the fact that I was hurt behind me. I stopped trying to figure out if she had intended to hurt me, or she didn’t. And what the
hell? Now she wanted to take his car, and I would ride along vicariously. I thought: I’ll just watch how this unfolds. “He has money,” she told me. This was one of his attributes that she’d noticed. It didn’t take my pointing it out to her. The car was an old Buick Park Avenue, sleek black with red pinstripes, black leather interior. That thing was so gorgeous.’ She bites her finger for emphasis.
‘Ellen picked me up at The Deadwood. We drove out of town so we could show off, but there were nothing but fields and farmhouses and not a single farmer, so we drove back, honking the horn. Finally, we stopped in a gas station just to see someone admire it. This young kid came up to the window, didn’t say anything. He had this dirty rag in his hand, and asked if we wanted him to do the windows. I couldn’t believe he had nothing to say about the car, it was such a specimen. So finally I called him to the window. I asked him, “You know how we got this car?” He finally looked it over. “Nope,” he responded. I said. “We killed some dumb farmer a ways back. We took him out into his field and shot him with his own gun. Now, we’ve still got that gun, but we don’t have a whole lot of cash. May I suggest you let us ride out of here, so we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to?” That guy was suddenly more observant than he’d probably ever been. He just waved us out of there; I could see him nervously looking at the license plate as we drove off.
‘Ellen was amazed, but she’d played along. I looked over and saw her looking stern-faced, straight ahead. She asked me why I did it, and I told her, I can’t pull into a gas station without thinking of In Cold Blood. I was also thinking of Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve always loved true crime stories. Anyway, we both laughed when we pulled out of the gas station. It was such a rush, totally worth it. But Stefan was so pissed when we got back, and, of course, he didn’t even know about the gas station incident.
