You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  A nearly full moon trembled above, eye of a dark swimmer in a darker sea. The weekend was humid, tropical almost, with an unsettled whiff of hurricane season.

  The Marlin was the town’s eternal midnight heartbeat, an old fisherman’s bar, with walls covered in pine paneling and many taxidermied ocean dwellers, dented and dusty, staring down in glassy outrage. The air was redolent of clams and beer and the scented body wash of the house sharers, the air mattress sleepers, the young office workers hunting the coast for sexual opportunity and perhaps even love. Tan skin, gelled hair, even a popped collar here and there.

  Mariah gave the bouncer a kiss and swept regally to a small table, set up as on a promontory, front and center, and canopied in fishing nets. Hyde bellied up to the bar, his man bun bobbing over the heads of the youngsters.

  Mariah scooped up my hand, held it to her hot cheek, closed her eyes beatifically. “Abby, you are in flux,” she said. “I envy you.” She leaned toward my ear and whispered, “You are rocketing toward your future.” Despite the din all around us, I heard her as if she’d said these words to me in a silent vacuum-sealed enclosure, a space capsule or a quarantine chamber. They echoed in my ear, dizziness surged through me, the vertigo that was somehow becoming familiar, the tilting and sloshing, the nausea. I squeezed my eyelids shut. You will not vomit, you will not.

  Hyde slammed down a drink in front of me, my eyes snapped open, and the smell of it—brown, cherry, something thick and medicinal—made me certain I would be sick. I pushed back from the table, gasped something about needing a breath of air. Stumbled away without a glance at them, my eyes fixed on the bar’s exit.

  Reeling now, the night air hit me like a dank lukewarm sponge, but at least it was quiet. I staggered to the dark perimeter of the parking lot, rested against the cool and unyielding butt of a pickup. Straight ahead was the beach, a faint paleness sloping down to the very edge of the world. The void.

  The void that beckoned me now, with a steady rhythmic murmur and fluttering fingers of ragged foam.

  I can’t find him again, she says. But here I find you.

  And then she emerges from the darkness with a bottle in her hand, a pair of sandals dangling in the other, just barely perceptible as red in the light filtering from the bleared moon. She shimmers, it must be the sand coating her arms and legs, but each grain seems distinct, a particle of her matter, a body barely coalesced.

  Did you see him, did you see him walk by, she says. He was here with me, until then he wasn’t.

  I haven’t seen a soul, I say.

  How has she come to be here? But then I recall, don’t I, the weekends in a huddled one-room summer shack, left to Eli and his mother when his father consigned himself to an Oregon rehab retreat? A shack of pine-green shingles rotted at the edges, surrounded by hydrangea blooms as if adrift in a cloud bank. Inside, mildewed quilts on a big bed bowed in the middle like a rowboat.

  I’m worried about him.

  And she tells me about the vials rolling out of his pockets as he stripped by the bed. About how he swore he wasn’t smoking it himself. This is how I bribe them, he said. I barter so they let me photograph them.

  It becomes a catastrophe, I say. Get away.

  She stands not six inches away from me now. I am frightened, but in my sick swoony state, I don’t dare move from the support of the car at my back. I know I will fall.

  Her breath barely brushes my face, and it is cold, oddly cold, and smells like the ocean. My legs are starting to shake.

  You have to leave him, I say.

  And who are you, to tell me what to do.

  Her eyes are so black, and then something flares in them.

  A reflection of flame. She turns, I turn, and there he is, down in the blackness closer to the water. We both see him at once. Briefly brushed by firelight, his face. Eli, lighting a cigarette, a crack pipe, I can’t see what it is. Only a glimpse of his face in gold light and the memory of him on the balcony, with a flaring match and his deep-set eyes in shadow. Holding something precious of mine in his hand.

  I feel a hole opening up beneath my feet. A destroyer, I say.

  She lays her cold hand on me. You’re on fire, she says.

  At her chill touch, my balance begins to crumble, my strength draining away. My hands search for purchase, something on the car to cling to, a handle, a bumper. But they slide across the steel.

  I’m falling, I say.

  Yes, she says.

  Then soft cold sand against my skin and darkness.

  SESSION NOTES

  * * *

  A voice mail from A. In crisis, by the sound of it. Would like to resume consultations. She says she will pay what she owes.

  But I am off for my Wellfleet month. I will see her in September.

  Dr. Tristane Kazemy, JULY 30, 2016

  Two could play at this game. This she had discovered, and so much else, while Laurin was summering in his family’s ancestral mas provençal. She had discovered that his lab assistant, the graceful undergrad Molly Jiang, was more than willing to unlock the office of the man she called “le monsieur professeur porc.”

  Slipping into his plushly carpeted sanctum on this day, Tristane discovered that Laurin had purloined the essential Willard scan. And, with his vaunted eye, he had spotted the irregularity that she had been contemplating for weeks. She saw his notes:

  There is one abnormality, congenital perhaps. Likely not significant. No impact on brain function. Kazemy’s notes theorize about hallucinations and dissociative amnesia, but these must be considered purely psychosomatic.

  A note addressed to Buccardi: Dr. K squandering lab resources on an entirely unremarkable brain, without permission, to null result. Disciplinary measures apropos?

  8/8/8/8

  ABBY, AUGUST 3, 2015

  Then I saw Eleanor Boyle in a cloud. Her voice message arrived late at night. “Abby, I know we haven’t seen each other since forever,” she said. “But fuck, something weird just happened, pertaining to you. I’m in Midtown, and I think you still are too? Come see me.”

  She worked for a casting agency on the sixty-eighth floor of a brand-new white-glass building on a silent far-western block. Her window looked out on a bank of cotton batting. She crossed an acre of carpeting with a nervous lipsticked smile, her body tilting toward me in a tight purple sheath dress. Such a vast office—I realized Eleanor must be the boss. She hugged me a bit breathlessly. I felt nervous to see her too. Reuniting after years of no contact usually feels awkward, though I’m not sure why that should be. Maybe it serves up the passage of time right there on a plate, naked and unavoidable?

  Eleanor must’ve been thinking along the same lines, because she said, “Look at us. Femmes d’un certain âge. I’m fifty in three fucking years,” said Eleanor. “And you in four!”

  “Believe it or not,” I said.

  “I haven’t managed to skydive yet. Have you?” She settled back into her white leather desk chair.

  “Is that mandatory?” I said.

  “Well, life can get a bit monotonous if you don’t take a goddamn risk now and then,” she said. She was still Eleanor, bony and leggy and profanity-inclined, her hair still in the red flapper’s bob, sleek around her head like an old-fashioned pilot’s cap.

  “Well, it is possible that I may be drawn to other types of risk,” I said. I felt propelled toward recklessness by her, just like in the old days.

  Her brows jerked up, two slender leaves caught in a sudden gust, and she gave a delighted grin. “Oh, Abigail. You wicked vixen.” She gave a little shrug. “I fuck mostly women now, and that helps.” She waved her hand toward a cork-covered wall. Headshots pinned in a grid: rows and columns of rapt eye contact, scintillating teeth. “I meet a lot of lookers. Hazard of the job.”

  “I heard that somewhere, that you’d come out.”

  “I had an insane party at that hookah club to celebrate it. I tried to find you, to invite you, I think, but you were . . . gone, it was the most bizarre t
hing.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I know. I still feel guilty about losing touch, dropping off the map that way . . . You were so important to me.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet.” She swiveled a bit in her rolling chair, then leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. The front hanks of her bob pointed toward her brightly painted mouth. “Abby, I’m thinking you’re in some kind of trouble?”

  “Um, possibly,” I ventured.

  “A cop came to see me.” She leaned forward even more and lowered her voice a bit. “Handsome as fuck. At first I thought he was snooping around about an incident we had here, one of my partners developed a hard-on for a chorus kid and took things a little too far, left us very liable, the cretin.” Her eyes glittered. “So at first this lawman was just asking about the agency, our business, then he said he’d read my bio on our website, and saw I had a degree from Western New England. And then he said, really casually, I know someone you might know.”

  The clouds roiled outside the window, making it seem like we were moving, as if we were in a ship in the sky. “Me,” I said.

  “Were we good friends, he wanted to know. Whether you’d used drugs. Your political leanings, of all things. Fuck if I know, I said. We were party girls, we liked to dance, I told him. And then I told him you met a guy, got very into him, and we kind of lost touch.”

  “True,” I said.

  “He wanted to know who the guy was, and at that moment, I thought, she’s either banging this hot cop or she’s in some kind of deep trouble.”

  I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. I thought back to when he’d asked me about myself, and I’d talked about Eleanor, my oldest friend in New York. He must’ve assumed we were in contact, and closer than we actually were. But why would he be poking around in my deep history like this? Making inquiries about me?

  “I told him that I didn’t remember your boyfriend’s name. I said, all I know is that the guy’s long gone. Dead.”

  This last word landed like a punch in my chest, and the punch unleashed a torrent. I began blurting everything—the night in the cab, the glimpses in the library and the paint store. Rock Center and the bridge and the beach. I told her about Mariah and Dennis, the fire, the detective.

  As she listened, Eleanor rested her chin in one long white hand and peered at me with a puzzled expression. When I finally stopped, she said, slowly, “You really think she burned down your house?”

  “I’ve changed my thinking about what’s in the realm of the possible,” I said. “But tell me, have you ever experienced such a thing?” She sat back in her chair and stretched her arms overhead, revealing a pale tuft of rose-white fuzz in each armpit. I searched her face for reassurance. “I mean, I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe this sort of stuff happens often to women our age, but nobody talks about it. Like night sweats, loss of skin tone, and visions of self?”

  Eleanor cocked her head to one side and regarded me silently for a long moment. Finally, folding her hands in her lap, she said, “How did he actually die, Abby? The boyfriend. I heard rumors. Suicide. Or fell off a fire escape when he was high on something. Or there was a structural collapse of some kind . . .”

  My throat seemed to close up. I shook my head. “Not a fire escape. A balcony,” I said. “I can’t remember much else. How it happened.”

  “Well damn, Abby, it’s all a strange story, isn’t it.”

  She peered at me, assessing.

  “I know.” I let loose a long, shaky sigh. “You think I’m losing my mind.”

  “You know what I think, Abby? When we were in college, Dougie Corwin gave me pot cookies on the sly,” she said. “I got so stoned, the world got strange, and I didn’t understand why.”

  “I always hated Dougie Corwin,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Any chance your teenagers are spiking your cookies?”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I said.

  She leaned forward. “This girl could be anyone. So she looks a bit like you. So her boyfriend looks a little like him. We all have our doubles, our slightly altered versions. Every other day someone says to me, oh my god, you look exactly like my fucking sister Sheila. Doesn’t that happen to you?”

  “But she lives in my old apartment,” I said, my voice oddly pleading.

  “You saw a sliver of a woman’s face through a dark doorway. And the woman immediately slammed the door on you. Was it actually her?”

  I stared at the floor. Frigid January morning, the climb up the stairs, the glimpse of her. Was it her?

  “And you believe you were her—but what does she have to say about it?” Skepticism in her voice. “Does she believe she’s going to be you?”

  I turned over each encounter in my mind. Finally, I said, “No. She says she’ll never be me.”

  A gentle knocking, then someone beyond the door said, “The two p.m. call is getting restless out here, and we’re running out of chairs.”

  “In a minute!” Eleanor turned to me, gave me a sad little smile. “Abby, has she ever even told you her name?”

  “A, is all she says.” I shook my head. “I guess she thinks I’m a stalker or a lunatic or . . .” my voice lapsed.

  “You need a therapist?”

  “I’ve been seeing one.” I didn’t tell her it was Dr. Merle the Miracle Worker.

  She rose with an expression of relief, straightened her dress, strode around the desk. “I better get out there. We’re casting a genderqueer Oklahoma!,” she said. “Tattooed ranch hands of all persuasions. Might get interesting.”

  We hugged at the door, holding each other a little more firmly and comfortably this time. “Thanks for calling me, Eleanor. For letting me know. I know this seems crazy, I’m sorry—”

  “No apologies,” she cut me off. “You just take care. Stay in touch. And Abby. If you see the younger me,” she said, “tell that gorgeous little fucker I said hello.”

  ABBY, AUGUST 10, 2015

  The detective texted, but I wouldn’t answer. A stormy torrent of messages scrolled down my phone’s screen, beginning with, “Let’s meet again, just say when and where, I’ll bring the DiFiori’s,” until the last, two nights ago: “Ghosting me?”

  And this morning I woke to realize I’d been five weeks alone. Light leaked into the hotel room in two blinding stripes, over and under the black-out curtains. I was working hard to ready the house, hoping we’d move in again by the end of the summer, get it spiffy and shining for my boys. I rose to pee and brush my teeth. But I didn’t make it to the bathroom. The floor went all atilt.

  I barely made it back to sit on the end of the bed. I crawled across the rumpled sheets to my phone.

  But who to call? Dennis would be fast asleep on the West Coast.

  The detective? No. Clearly, no longer trustworthy. If he ever had been.

  I tried Mariah.

  She arrived at the hotel in her hulking SUV, careening up under the portico where I sat slumped on a bench, a jacket over my nightgown, a pair of polka-dotted rubber boots slipped over my bare feet, and a few belongings in a plastic grocery sack.

  She rolled down the window and said, “You look like what they used to call a bag lady. What have they done to you?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever is responsible for this evil twin of my beautiful friend. Seriously, you look awful. I’m taking you in hand.”

  The SUV gobbled the FDR Drive, assorted pylons and towers gyrating past, whirling like dervishes. I was aware of Mariah chattering about this year’s art fair in Miami and a South African collector trying to court her with blood diamonds. “And I have no truck with blood diamonds, Abby, but wow they were sparkly.”

  The garage door to her carriage house rose with a flourish, and in we rolled. What a wonder, what an ultimate luxury in this city, an always-available place to park. And the storage space: cleaning tools arrayed neatly on hooks, shelves of surplus paint and thinners for her studio, cases of sparkling water and wine. I was ready to simply sleep in that organized sanct
um, sunk into the comfy leather car seat, but then Mariah was easing me out, with my arm over her shoulder and her curls brushing my face, spicy and herby smelling, like rosemary.

  And then it was morning and Hyde was bent over my bed with a purple smoothie on a tray. “Extra protein and vitamins D through F,” he said.

  “I think that only leaves E?” I drank it down, feeling sure I would vomit it up within the half hour. Which I did.

  I called Dr. Singh to consult on this latest downturn. “Your CT scan appeared clean, but if your symptoms are still troubling you, I will order a detailed MRI. But Abigail, your house, your situation, this is also psychological trauma.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m seeing a shrink,” I said.

  In fact, I hadn’t seen Dr. Merle since the single visit in May. I realized I’d never received her bill. Strange. I’d have to check in on that. In any case, after I hung up with Singh, I called her office and booked a date.

  Later, sluicing water across my body in Mariah’s pharaonic marble shower, I realized it had been a while since I’d glimpsed the girl. Had she finally quit me? Had the city reabsorbed her, like in that vanished twin syndrome I’d read about—when an ill-fated fetus is reabsorbed, boosting the odds that its counterpart will survive?

  Next, I called Dennis, who was incredulous that I’d landed at Mariah’s place. I know it made him uncomfortable. And I admit, I enjoyed that. Benjamin was loving his surf lessons, updating me almost hourly with selfies, boy with surfboard, boy on surfboard, boy with cute girl in bikini on surfboard. He resembled an adorable sleek otter in these pics, in his obsidian wet suit and his hair slicked down wet and his big laughing eyes.

  But Pete. He wanted to come home. “Grammy is mean to me; she’s always after me to weed the driveway or run to the store for Miracle Whip. I want to come home. I have work to do.”

  “But home isn’t quite functional,” I said, flinching it a bit—because the degree to which this was true shocked me, how the summer had brought us to ruin. Still, he begged me and Dennis. At last we relented and we booked him a red-eye.