by Monica Drake
They were in six lanes of traffic, where Sandy Boulevard crossed Burnside Street, when Bitchy Bitch, Dulcet’s big-eyed baby, bent, lunged, and gave a leap. She went after Sarah’s gum and turned herself into a white flag flying against the rush of oncoming cars in the dark night.
Dulcet screamed. Georgie slammed on the brakes and her tires squealed. The car fishtailed and slid into oncoming traffic. Bella woke up and started to cry.
In the back corner of her store, by the small sink, Nyla peeled off her dress and changed into yoga wear.
She vowed to be patient with Arena.
She sat at her desk and booted up the computer to check her bank account. The machine was slow. Then it read fatal error, and shut itself down.
Dead.
This was Humble’s area of expertise. When she called and got his answering service, she left a message. “It says fatal error.”
Maybe he’d come.
She wrote out small checks. Writing checks to environmental groups always helped lift her spirits, and sometimes it was all she could do.
She wrote a check to the Rainforest Alliance and one to the League of Conservation Voters. She doubled her contribution to the NAACP and to a group out to save coral reefs, then more to Save the Children. She gave money to stop the slaughter of the friendly, smiling, innocent pink river dolphin of the Amazon.
What can you do with a humanity that kills a smiling pink dolphin?
She wrote checks for a foster child in Sri Lanka, and another for earthquake victims in Haiti. She slid them into envelopes. Should a person have to pay to keep the world intact?
Ben, awkward behind his forced optimism and the mask of makeup, sat on a tall stool at a gelato shop where he tried to celebrate with Arena, because he was willing to go out and he thought somebody should throw her a party. It was the grown-up version of that Klondike bar he’d bought her once upon a time.
Sarah threw herself into the street after Dulcet, who had run into traffic after Bitchy. Dulcet’s coat flapped open, her latex organs exposed. She yelled, “Get back here, Bitchy Bitch!” She waved her hands. A second car slammed on its breaks, then drove around all of them.
Sarah said, “Dulcet, get out of the road! Dulcet!”
“Bitchy!”
“Dulcet!”
“Bitchy!”
It was a duet of women raised on the duets of Peaches and Herb.
Dulcet wobbled on her high heels, fell, and hit her knee, turning her leg into a streak of skin and blood, and still got up and kept going, back into traffic, yelling, “Bitchy!” The dog danced in traffic, another car squealed its brakes, and the air filled with the smell of burned rubber.
Nyla was dizzy. Was that from sitting for too long? There was nothing yoga couldn’t cure, along with water and clean air. Her hip was a knot and her stomach was sad.
She put a DVD in.
But when she tried to do her first sun salutations and almost fell over, she called Dulcet. Nobody answered, and then she called Sarah. She left a message, and called Georgie.
In a bar across town, Humble tormented himself with a Diet Coke. He didn’t have enough friends. Not real friends. Bars were good, because you didn’t need an invitation. You couldn’t be stood up.
His phone rang, and it was Nyla. He silenced the ring tone to let it go on by.
When he checked the message, it was only Nyla asking for computer help. No surprise there—her PC was recycled junk, old materials patched together. It wouldn’t take a small business loan to get a new computer. He laid down a five and pushed himself off the stool. He had something to prove. He wasn’t the shit they all believed him to be.
He wasn’t the shit he’d come to know he really was.
He wouldn’t even charge.
Georgie waited on the curb with Bella in her arms. She yelled, “Please don’t get killed!”
It was all she could do.
Another car swerved around Dulcet and the dog, the driver laying on the horn like a screaming voice, and all Georgie could do was hold her baby tightly and curse. A mother’s job is to keep her child safe. She sang baby songs and said a silent prayer and wanted that damn frantic dog out of the road. “Bitchy!” she called to the animal, then put a hand to her child’s ears, knowing her voice was so loud, close to those precious, fragile ears.
Another horn screamed, and Dulcet twisted her ankle, and a bus heaved its way toward them.
The store was closed but the door was unlocked. Humble knocked, as if going into a house, then opened the door anyway because it was supposed to be a business. “Computer service!” He called it out with a false formality, a joke in his voice. “Here to fix your system, ma’am.”
A paper mobile of polar bears drifted in a slow circle. From somewhere in the same direction a woman answered him. She crooned, in sweet, honeyed tones, “You’re only as young as your spine is flexible. And remember, your mind is connected to your spine. It’s all one. Flexibility is a mental journey as well as the care of your backbone.”
Quiet music played.
“Nyla?” Humble called out.
“For our next move, we’ll lie on the floor.”
Humble walked past the bistro table, around a rolling bookcase made to serve as a room divider. He saw a laptop hooked up to an extension cord. The laptop sat on an office chair, and the chair was in front of the desk, where the desktop computer rested. The whole setup was a mess of cables.
Then he saw Nyla on the floor on her yoga mat, on her stomach, tucked between boxes of paperwork. Facedown, she did the sponge, or the rock, or whatever they called the resting pose down at the 24 Hour Fitness class he and Georgie tried together once.
The woman on the DVD said, “Feel your blood coursing through your veins, fueling your system.”
Nyla’s arms were blanched. Her mat was wet.
He said, “Sorry—did I interrupt?”
Nyla’s hair was plastered to her damp cheek. Her mouth was open, and her lips were almost as white as her skin.
The DVD fitness guru said, “Your body loves you, because you love your body.”
Skoal.
Dead?
Humble dropped to his knees. He lifted her hand, and her skin was as cold as the cement floor. Closer like that, he saw her lips were ringed with a thin line of blue. Then he felt her pull her hand back. Did she? It was a small movement. He couldn’t tell—maybe it was gravity or rigor mortis, or what did he know? He’d never held a dead woman’s hand before. Panic swirled in his thick brain.
Then the hand moved again. Nyla’s lips opened. He saw the dry skin cling as she moved her mouth.
“Feel the blood run through your veins. Synovial fluid will wash your joints. This is what your body was meant to do. This is how we come alive.”
Humble said, “You’re going to be okay.” He brushed her hair back. He’d never seen skin so white it was gray, the color of aging teeth. Her eyelids flickered.
Humble wrapped Nyla’s arm around his neck. He said, “We’ll get you to a hospital.” As soon as he started to move her, he knew he was doing the wrong thing—you don’t move an injured person. Where was her injury? Was she sick? He tried to put her back down. He said, “I’ll get help.”
He reached for her hand, to unlink her arm from his neck. She wouldn’t let go. She was strong. He pushed her arm away, and she held on. She whispered, “Don’t … go …”
His face was pulled close to hers. He said, “Wait here.” She didn’t look ready to go anywhere.
Then Nyla wasn’t breathing. Or maybe she was. He couldn’t get her arm off his neck. He half-stood and she lifted off the ground. She was as thin as a ballerina, but even now she was strong. He had to use some strength to get her to let go. It was so physical, to fight against her grip. It was awful.
The yoga woman said, “It’s your job to make life glow through your system, make it glisten. Yoga is about using your body to care for your body.”
He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a phone and called 9
11 as fast as his thick fingers could tap the screen of his tiny phone.
Dulcet wrestled the dog out of the street, with a hand through its collar. She fell to the curb, long and pale and bony, a skeleton with organs on the side of the road in the dark.
Sarah helped her back to the car.
Georgie’s phone rang, and it was Humble. She silenced that call, and when she did, she saw she’d missed a previous call, from Nyla.
Dulcet was winded and windblown by the time she climbed in the car. Right away she dug through her purse, looking for her pipe. Pot was her version of a bronchial inhaler. It was her nerve medicine, her teddy bear, her comfort. Her breath was ragged. She said, “Whew! We’re all alive!” She wheezed like an asthmatic, with a little death rattle hiding in every breath.
Skoal. Bottoms up.
Once Nyla was pronounced dead, Humble couldn’t force himself to stay at the hospital. His feet wouldn’t let him. He walked. Ben arrived first, with Arena. Arena had come sliding into the waiting room, practically running, her boots soft against the linoleum. Her face was round and flushed. Her hair laced in and out of a ponytail fastener in a mix of tangles. “Where’s Mom?”
Behind her, the TV news cut to an image of a hairy baby. The mandrill had been born at the zoo. The sound was off but the closed captioning was on, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU scrolled across the bottom of the monitor.
The mandrill baby closed its eyes.
Humble tried to talk, to answer her, and he couldn’t. His voice was so thick it caught in his chest, and he said what he could then he left. He said, “She’s gone.”
He’d called everyone. He’d left messages. He told them to come to Emanuel Hospital, and that Nyla had died. He could hardly get the words out—didn’t want to have to say it again. He said it over and over again into machines. Nobody answered his calls except finally his last call, Ben, and Ben wasn’t who he wanted; he wanted to reach his wife.
He left Ben with Arena’s wail.
Humble walked out of the hospital grounds, then down Williams Street, in northeast Portland. It wasn’t far before he came to a bar, a nondescript place he’d been to before, or not, or maybe it’d changed hands; it didn’t matter—it was a counter and a wall of liquor and a guy who’d pour a beer or a scotch or both.
He followed his instincts, took steps, reached out, and pushed the door open, but he could hardly feel his body. He tried to conjure up a drive toward bourbon, but what he felt was Nyla, pale and cold and sweaty in her yoga clothes on her mat down with the dust, by her space heater and her filing projects.
Her body was still wrapped around him like it was his own; she was his date, his wife, his personal ghost. He couldn’t untwist her gray arm from his neck. It stayed crooked there like a sinker, hellbent on pulling him down. He felt Nyla’s raspy breath against his cheek, the white of her lips so close, a bone-thin woman in his arms.
What had happened to her?
She was death, hanging on. Humble was tied to a skeleton that whispered. He could smell it like some kind of hippie perfume, the earthy mildew of patchouli and musk. He sat on a fake-red-leather-covered stool at the bar. The place was full of TVs, and every TV showed a dead woman.
A drunk whom Humble didn’t even remember knowing yelled, “Hey, Dead Man!” and sloshed a mug of beer in a solo “Cheers!”
Humble muttered, “Fuck you.”
The dead woman around his neck leaned on him. She breathed her last breath on his skin, then she did it again.
The drunk guy said, “Dude, you playing?” He tipped his head. The TV flashed a dead hottie in a white baby-doll dress, her high heels falling off, thighs full of life.
The drunk said, “Come on, Dead Man! Make it my round.”
Humble reached for the remote, where it rested by the cash register. The bartender raised his eyebrows, but the bartender was small, thin, and young, and Humble wasn’t any of those things; he was in charge.
He changed channels: cop shows, hospitals—ugh. There was HBO, and even real estate was all about dead girls: a dead girl in a house for sale. He clicked through Cops and cooking shows where lovely women cut meat, red and bloody, on slabs of granite like a morgue. Vomit roiled in his gut like a storm coming in.
Then he hit VBTV, Vampire-Based TV, and it was all pale girls dead and undead all the time, and he had his own ghost clinging to his neck and that was the last thing he wanted. It was creepy.
He was ready to give up, turn the TV off, and slice his own wrist because what was the point? Live until you die.
He kept the channels moving.
Then he came to a public broadcasting station. An old man sat behind a desk talking with an even older woman. And Humble stayed with it.
The old man’s face was collapsed under a river of wrinkles. His hair was mostly gone, and what was left was gray. He seemed to be interviewing the woman, who reached for her necklace with one liver-spotted hand there in high-definition TV.
It didn’t matter what they said. It was soothing to see a man and woman who had lived a long time. They’d lived through what, World War II? The Korean War? The Nixon years and two recessions and the days of DDT, but they looked all right. They were on TV!
There was a comfort in this evidence: It was possible to survive long enough to die of age. It looked like such luxury, to have lived. They’d dodged cancer, bullets, and nuclear war, radiation and disease, diabetes and poverty. He remembered a shirt Arena wore: I ♥ OLD PEOPLE. And he did, too! He hearted old people, or at least he aspired to be one.
Nyla would never be that old person her daughter loved.
The drunk guy farther down the bar said, “What is this talking heads bullshit? What are we, geezers?”
Humble sipped a Manhattan, his shoulders hunched against Nyla’s ghost hug, and kept the remote in his own thick hand like it had ties to a destiny he might control.
Hell if that loser would take Hum’s old people away.
The drunk punk in his skinny girl-jeans made one more squawk, and Humble thought, I could kill him.
He could.
He could make a second scrawny arm hold his neck and beg. No doubt. If the kid didn’t like old people? He could rob that hipster of his own old age. Humble put his money on the counter and finished his drink.
He walked back to the hospital. With booze in his bloodstream his legs swung easily. He walked like a machine. As he got close to the hospital, he saw his wife inside the lobby. She was there with Dulcet, Sarah, and Ben. He saw their shapes through the dark glass. The window ran from the ground to the ceiling, in one efficient pane of smoke-tinted glass. He saw his friends as though they were on TV.
He stopped outside. They moved like they might leave, might go to the sliding doors, but then they stayed pulled together, a tight orbit. Arena was a crumpled body sloped in a chair. Georgie bent to put an arm around her. His wife’s mascara was all over her face. She kept wiping her eyes with a tissue, then putting the tissue back in her pocket and pulling it out again. They took turns hugging each other, and Arena. Humble felt the bar calling his name. He wanted out of there. The last thing he wanted was to cry, with a pack of criers.
A TV in the waiting room showed the news. Who in an ER waiting room could care about outside news?
Humble went on in. In the lobby, he heard it, like adding a sound track: They were all crying and trying not to, blowing their noses and then crying again. Even Ben was in tears, and he looked like he had somebody else’s makeup all over his face.
Everyone was crying except the baby—that baby who always cried. Now Bella watched the world like crying was normal, like anything was normal.
Georgie reached down and took Bella out of the car seat. She lifted the baby to her shoulder, and she cried, and then she saw Humble. Her eyes widened.
He moved closer, took the baby from her. She let him take her. He held Bella in one arm and with the other rubbed Georgie’s back. Their baby was warm, and he laid her across his chest. That baby’s breath spoke to
his heartbeat. Nyla’s ghost lifted her dead arm from his neck to make way for Bella’s soft head. The smell of her body was replaced by the scent of the baby and Georgie’s shampoo. Humble’s family warded off Nyla’s dead weight. For a moment he could forget, in that circle of safety—a child, a wife, a future—and Hum didn’t want even one foot outside that circle. Maybe for the first time, he was committed to his own marriage. He wanted in. He wanted that new family to stop time; he’d be the father of a newborn with a full life ahead of them all, forever.
Nyla had died before the ambulance reached the hospital. The IV didn’t fill her bloodstream in time, her blood didn’t regenerate fast enough. Her veins collapsed. Internal bleeding, they’d say later.
She wasn’t alone when she died, and not only with Humble. She was with that baby lodged in her fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancy.
Dulcet held Nyla’s dirty canvas bag and cried big burbling tears. Her broad shoulders shook, her face was red. She said, “We were all having such a good time.”
“Were we?” Sarah asked. Her words came out muffled and garbled. None of them could talk. Crying was their language now.
Nyla had been dead for three days when Ben came home from work with a plan. He slid his fingers over the slick surface of the photo in his jacket pocket.
Sarah was at the dining table looking over papers. She spent her days now watching the newest little mandrill.
“Are the beasts still mating?” he asked.
“Some more than others.” She stretched her arms over her head. A flash of pale belly showed. “Rats, cats, and coyotes.”
She couldn’t make herself say dog. She still had to stop herself from opening the back door at night to let in her dog, her Shadow, though the dog was dead.
