by Cubed, Magen
“How is who?”
“Glen. The dentist.” If confronted, Kyle wouldn’t admit that he had asked around and found out from Ben. That would have been pathetic. He couldn’t handle that right now.
“His name is Tim.”
“Same difference.”
“He’s okay. We’re not that serious, though.”
He shrugged. “Sorry, I guess.”
She smirked. “No, you’re not.”
“Not really.”
After three more blocks, Amanda pulled to the curb outside Kyle’s building. He unbuckled his seatbelt with his thanks and ducked his head to climb out. She caught his wrist.
“Hey.”
“Hey what?”
“I’m glad you made it.”
“Yeah, me too.” It was only a partial truth.
If asked, he would say that her car didn’t linger outside his building, and that he didn’t watch her drive away. That would imply more than he wanted to deal with. He undressed, running a hand through his hair and retreating to the bathroom. In the mirror, he inspected himself for evidence of the crash.
The planes of his chest were smooth and clear of the bruises he expected to find. His arms were untouched. His fingers were still nimble. He sighed at the horrific doubt this left coiled in his belly and instead dwelled on the familiar safety of Amanda and her dirty, blue hatchback.
Chapter Two
I.
Adam Harlow had an appointment at 10:00—the same appointment he had kept for the last six months. At 9:03 on Monday morning, he got on a train bound for Camden, not feeling up to the challenge of driving through morning traffic. Had he started up his beloved Betty and pushed his way into the city, none of this would have happened. He had another group session with Dr. Bell to look forward to that Monday, in a room tucked away at the VA hospital. He would have been tasked once more with telling the group how he still saw guys with their brains blown out whenever he closed his eyes. There would be another evaluation with his therapist, and a new family of medications to try so he could finally stop shaking whenever a car backfired. Tugging at the dog tags around his neck, he took a deep breath. “I can do this,” he whispered to himself. “I can do this. I can do this.”
If Adam were lucky, Dr. Bell wouldn’t call on him to talk to the new members about the improvised explosive device, Afghanistan, and the day he tried to eat a gun and punched his ticket home instead. He had already told the story a hundred times before to the revolving cast of faces that came and went every few weeks. It didn’t need retelling. Three men had cooked in the sun while he bled into the sand and waited to die. Three men died and he didn’t. Six pieces of shrapnel tried to cut him in half, but missed. There was no God around to make sense of that.
On the train that morning, there was another guy standing at the railing; Adam remembered that much clearly. The man was older than Adam—maybe old enough to be his father—and wet in his dark eyes. He was gorgeous in a tired kind of way and grayed at his temples and the edges of his beard—gorgeous in a way that, in another time and place, would have made Adam fidget. He let his breath out, felt stupid, and looked away. There was no point in thoughts like that—in people he met on the street. People were beautiful and complete; he was a framework of scars and metal pieces, too broken and ugly to survive much longer.
At 9:17 there was a crash. The weightlessness of panic followed as the car turned over and over, putting the sky at Adam’s feet all over again. God didn’t show this time, either. When the world went black in the snap of tendon and bone, Adam knew it was for the best.
By Tuesday morning, after Adam slept intermittently through surgeries and stitches, he and his companions were moved from the critical care wing. When Adam awoke again in the afternoon, he found himself in a new room. The other four survivors had been relocated to separate rooms at opposite ends of the tenth floor. They were all poked and prodded, fed and fluffed by parades of doctors, nurses, and family members. The local news channels hovered on the grounds outside, hungry for the chance to interview the Camden Five. Lily McDaniels of Channel 8 fame hadn’t stopped hounding the hospital for the chance to interview the war veteran and PTSD survivor behind door 1014. She said it would make a fantastic personal piece. Adam never returned her calls.
The counselors had come to talk to Adam first. Given his condition, they said. He was a priority, they said. He ignored them just like he ignored his parents, brother and three sisters when they came to see him. Feigning sleep, he kept his back to the door and waited until he could no longer hear them breathing and weeping. It put a black and empty feeling in his gut to lie there and know how it hurt them. This wound was different from the one left by shrapnel and glass, yet the idea of talking to them hurt even more.
Once he got back on his feet, he left his room to wander the hallway where the other survivors were being kept. With the help of a walker, he peered through half-open doors to watch the others with their families and friends. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know their names, but he felt compelled to look. A teenage girl with a bandage on her cheek spoke broken Spanish into her phone and tried not to cry. Next door to her was the waitress’ room. She had a daughter with leg braces and a family that came by every day to crowd around her bed with tears in their eyes. Then there was the guy at the end of the hall with his tattooed arms, severe haircut, and no visitors. Adam always tried to stay out of his line of sight.
The guy in the expensive suit was in the room across from Adam’s, much to his cautious excitement. His paper gown showed the dips of his collarbone and the slimness of his wrists. He also had a wife who never left the hospital. She remained close at all times it seemed, leaning over at his bedside to run her delicate fingers down his chest. She was a statuesque woman with long, red hair and a serious nature that made Adam feel like an intruder. He scurried out of her way whenever their eyes met in the hall. He tried not to look directly at the couple in their room; it wasn’t his to look at. He always kept moving whenever the wife left the room. She’d look at him pointedly as she closed the door behind her.
On Saturday morning, the doctors signed the release forms and Adam was free to leave. He changed into the spare clothes his brother, Jamie, had left for him, gathered up his wallet and obliterated phone, and called for a cab. The local news teams were now pushed fifty feet away from the hospital entrance, held back by police barricades. Pushing against the plastic hurdle, the competing stations were eager to catch a glimpse of the Camden Five lined up on the curb outside—now in proper clothing and waiting for their respective rides to pull up and take them home. Five strangers in a quiet row, their eyes far away or turned to phones. Adam stared at the ground and waited for his cab to drive him back to his one-bedroom hovel in Jonestown. Getting in and giving his address, the hospital sped away in the cabbie’s crooked rearview mirror. He didn’t look back.
Adam made his calls to Bob from Bob’s Repair and Restoration. He stopped by the office to pick up his care package of get well cards from Darlene. He thanked her profusely when she came around from behind the desk to hug him, and he tried not to feel completely hollow. Home was quiet and cold by the time he got there. The bamboo in the kitchen window sat sallow from neglect. As predicted, the phone blinked at him from the coffee table with twelve messages from Mom, Jamie, Carol, Shana and Deborah—all frightened and pleading, praying to God via voicemail that Adam had driven into the city.
The sentiment made his heart jump. His fingers itched over memories of broken glass and screaming in the dark. He forgot about the box of cards and well wishes. Instead he found a spot between the bed and the wall to hide. All six feet and two inches of him folded inward like a wounded bird. Tugging at his dog tags, Adam remembered his mantra. He breathed through the panic and the hum of blood in his ears, and he said, “I can do this.”
II.
Clara Reyes was always running. She ran for nineteen years from the ghost of Lawrence Reyes, still haunting the childhood home she sh
ared with her mother Doreen and her abuelita. The sky was blue the day her father died, as Clara remembered staring out the passenger side window of her mother’s station wagon on the way to the hospital. It was the kind of blue that signaled the start of summer, when the cicada song echoed in the shaggy trees of abuelita’s backyard and Clara’s shadow became long. There were no clouds. Blinking at the sun made white spots in her vision. Any other five-year-old would have laughed, but Clara was mesmerized by the patterns emerging behind her eyelids.
In the driver’s seat, her mother cried softly, wiping her eyes at stoplights and yield signs, but Clara didn’t yet know why. No one told her that her father was dead until she saw the doctor in the emergency room. He was a lanky man who was gaunt in his face despite his young age. There was blood on his blue scrubs, and he tried to lift Clara’s mother up as she slipped to the floor. Unable to support her own weight, the particles in her mother’s bones separated until she began to vanish into the cold, white linoleum. Clara had decided on linoleum as she superimposed layers of understanding over this scene at various later dates, because it was the easiest to clean blood off of.
The research assistant internship at the Bern Super Collider sat under her bed every night, waiting to whisper in her ear over breakfast and coffee. It would look amazing on her transcripts—a beautiful addition to her book of accomplishments. The book was of her mother’s design, nestled safely away on a shelf in California. Heavy and bound in thick leather, the journal’s pages were filled with the newspaper clippings, confirmation letters, scholarships, and blue ribbons that had paved the way to Clara’s collegiate career. Hundreds of students applied for the Bern internship each year, but only three of the best and brightest minds in the country were selected. The position could make or break a career, and Clara wanted it so badly that she could feel it in her fingers and toes. So, she put in her application and scheduled her interview with doctors Lassiter, Graham and Miyazaki, and she held her breath until Monday morning finally came.
She would make her mother proud, she told herself. She would accomplish everything she had set out to do when she told her mother she would be a scientist—because if she didn’t, Clara didn’t know what to make of herself anymore. At the hospital that Monday morning, strapped to a gurney and held down by strange arms, she could only think to ask that her mother not be contacted about the crash. On the curb, she called her mother again and begged her not to come to East Brighton and to save her paid time off for the holidays; for her abuelita not to worry any more than she already had.
The EBC School of Sciences campus in Camden seemed even larger than usual as Clara strolled the empty mall. Its buildings moved away in a parting sea of glass and concrete. As she walked, the world seemed to slow, a surreal fishbowl she found herself swimming around in circles. People in the mall moved away from her, too. They were just a few fuzzy faces in the gray light filtering between the trees. They pulled away like time and gravity had before, when the train turned all around her. Just nerves, Clara assured herself. She tried not to dwell on the sick, strange feeling that had gathered as a lump in the back of her throat.
Her apartment at Baucher Hall was a tiny dorm she shared with a psychology major named Padma. Padma kept long nights and stayed out most of the time between her fifteen-hour course load and work-study job at the campus bookstore. Clara was fine with that, just as she was fine with a cold apartment, an untouched fridge, and all the lights out. She left her door locked anyway when she couldn’t afford distraction. There was little time for friends with her schedule. After the crash, such practicality had lost its meaning, her loneliness a straining reminder of the 494 people who had died. Standing in her pure-white living room and looking at her immaculate sofa and kitchenette countertops, she told herself not to cry again.
Padma wasn’t home yet. She had classes until 3:00 and a shift at four. Alone, Clara locked her bedroom door, held her phone, and sat on the foot of her bed. She wanted to call her mother back and tell her that she had been wrong and nothing was okay; that she needed her to get on the first plane out. Instead, Clara left the phone on the nightstand, took two pills from her stash in the medicine cabinet, and cried herself to sleep for the first time since she was five years old.
III.
Norah Aroyan got up every morning at 5:00. She woke Hannah with a rustle of the covers and a pat on her small back, herding the seven-year-old to the bathroom to brush her teeth and hair. After a shower came breakfast—sometimes eggs and toast, other times cereal and a store-bought muffin. Norah helped Hannah put on her clothes and leg braces. She wrangled her daughter’s explosion of school supplies into her My Little Pony backpack. As Hannah colored in pages of doodles, Norah put on her makeup, uniform and apron. Some mornings, she took a moment to cry before she went to work, but she never let her daughter see that.
Each morning, Norah passed the same growing stack of bills on her very small table in her very small kitchen. She counted the cash in her envelope, calculating how much money she needed to make during her shift. From there, she calculated how much she could keep aside for groceries and how much was already spent on rent and utilities. If she were lucky, she wouldn’t have to call her mother to ask for money again. If she were on a winning streak, she could start paying back the money she already owed her parents. Hannah didn’t know about any of this, either, and Norah wanted to keep it that way.
On that particular Monday morning, Norah didn’t make it to work on time. She was late on the rent again, as the diner’s lunches began thinning out from a steady service to a slow crawl. After calling in late, she locked herself in the bathroom. She found Chris’s number in her phone to call him. After one ring, she hung up and dialed her sister Diane instead.
“Just a hundred and fifty bucks. I swear, I’ll pay you back as soon as I pick up a dinner shift. I just need this today.”
On the other end, in her lovely home on the east side of Somerset, Diane sighed. “Norah, you know it’s not about the money. Me and Will are good for it.”
“Don’t start, Diane, please. I’ll pay you back. I promise.”
“We have a guest room here. There’s plenty of room for you and Hannah.”
“No. I need a loan, not charity.”
“It’s not charity. Stop being a child.”
“Look, I’m going to pay you back. I’ll come to your house and shove it through your pet door if I have to.”
Diane sighed again. “All right. But if you need anything else—”
“I know.”
By 7:00, Hannah’s lunch was packed and the budget was sorted. With keys, jackets, and backpack in tow, Norah and Hannah walked hand-in-hand down the four blocks to John Simmons Elementary. Hannah’s braces made click-clack sounds every step and Norah always made her mind her posture, warning her not to sag into her backpack or overcompensate too much. Hannah was in a constant state of retraining, relearning, and rehabilitation. Her brain was easily bored by a body pulled out of shape by spina bifida, eager to dismiss her limitations whenever possible. At 7:30, Norah headed for the Briar Avenue subway and slid her card to get into the station. She opened the Go Nightly Diner Monday through Friday, working the breakfast rush from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and lunch from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Then, she had to cash out and pick up Hannah.
After dropping Hannah off at school, Norah met Diane at her job at the dentist’s office to pick up the cash—plus the extra fifty her sister snuck into the envelope. They silently agreed not to speak of it, and Norah dashed for the subway to make it to work before the end of the breakfast rush. The day shift manager, Rod, had already blown up her phone with empty threats by the time she checked it at 9:10. She sat in the back of the last car and tried to get her blood pressure down. Then, hearing the first crunch of steel as the train careened off the tracks, all Norah could think was what would become of her daughter without her.
Hannah built a fort with two makeshift beds under a starry, blue canopy the night Norah came home from
the hospital. She told her mother they were camping in the Ozarks. She had wanted to say that they were camping in the Appalachian Mountains, but she couldn’t pronounce it right yet, and she had seen pictures of the Ozarks in her geography textbook. It seemed like a sensible second choice. After the procession of concerned family, assuring phone calls, and pans and pans of baked dishes, Norah was happy to camp anywhere.
“What was it like?” Hannah asked. Her eyes narrowed into slits behind thick, plastic glasses. Her little fingers were busy stringing together the second in a procession of flower crowns. She had learned the craft from her older cousin, Temperance. Norah was already wearing the first attempt, which was made of blue and orange paper flowers. “You know, the accident? Was it scary?”
Lying on her cot, Norah stared up at the make-believe sky. Something about the question made her mouth dry; her tongue stuck to the roof of it. “Of course it was scary. But I wasn’t scared. I was just worried about you.”
“You didn’t get scared?”
“Nope.”
“Was it because you didn’t get hurt?” Hannah carefully alternated between the colors of her paper flowers—pink to yellow to white. “Billy Thompson said you didn’t get hurt and that it wasn’t fair because his dad got hurt on the train and he didn’t come back like you did.”
“I did get hurt.”
“Yeah, but you came back okay.”
Sitting up, Norah sighed. “I’m really sorry about your friend Billy.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“Okay, well, I’m still sorry. And you should be, too. Sometimes, stuff happens and you can’t control it, but you still have to be a good person about it. Billy and his mom are going through a lot right now, and you need to remember that.”
Looking down at her crown, Hannah frowned with scrunched shoulders. “I’m glad Billy’s dad died, because that means you lived instead. That’s bad, right?”
Norah pushed a wayward piece of mousy-brown hair from her daughter’s face. “It’s not bad, honey. You can still be happy, even if other people are sad.”
