Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  Back at my apartment, we have ice cream and watch Happy Feet, which is about a penguin who can’t sing his love song. The movie is surprisingly good, though Audrey doesn’t laugh when I expect. Then she asks me to read to her more from Where the Red Fern Grows, so we sit side by side on the futon couch and I oblige, though I know what Billy’s adventures with his coonhounds are likely to prompt.

  “When you get your own house, then you can have a room for your harps and we can have a dog, right?” she asks.

  “Maybe, sweetie, but it’s going to be a long time before that happens.”

  “I could teach the dog not to run into your harp.”

  “You’d be great at teaching a dog stuff, but dogs can’t always help themselves.”

  “We could put her in a cage when I’m not here.”

  “Well, dogs don’t like to be in cages.”

  “We could get her toys for her cage.”

  Only the Jaws of Life can extract me from this conversation.

  “I’m just really, really sorry, sweetie,” I say.

  “It’s not fair,” she says in a tremulous voice.

  “I know,” I say. I hug her with one arm, but she begins to cry.

  When she finally gets sleepy, I turn off all the lights in the living room and retreat to my room with audition scores and recordings to listen to with my headphones.

  Around midnight, as I’m emailing congratulations to one of my students who has just decided to attend the undergrad harp program at the University of Michigan, I hear a soft knock on my bedroom door and I jump at the sound. I open the door and Audrey stands there in her nightgown, holding her unicorn and a bath towel. She’s looking down, her eyes squinted against the light on my desk.

  “What’s up, sweetie?” I say.

  Rubbing an eye with the fist holding the towel, she silently enters the room. She climbs up onto my lap, sits sidesaddle, and begins making high-pitched, whiny noises and babbling sounds, as if she means to complain about something, but the only possible word I can pick out is “him.” She rests the unicorn on her knees, and her free hand plucks at my arm several times. The gesture is uncanny and makes me suspect she’s sleepwalking, though as far as I know she’s never done so before. Then she pulls my wrist up and holds it there. I don’t say anything and finally she lets go of my wrist and stops making noises and leans her head against my chest. She is warm and smells like she needs a bath. I consider asking her if something’s wrong. I consider asking her if she saw Milena and me. If she’s sleepwalking, she might answer but not remember answering, which would be ideal. But instead I just rock her, holding my hands around her hip to keep her slumped against me.

  I’m very glad she’s come to me, but I read on the Internet that sleepwalking correlates with subconscious turmoil.

  After several minutes of rocking her in silence, I decide that she is either fully asleep again or at least soothed. I start to pick her up, to carry her back to her bed, but she gets down and walks back into the living room without a word. I follow her in the light from my room. She climbs into bed with the towel and the unicorn, and I bend to give her a good-night kiss. She is aware enough to expect this, leaning on one elbow in the bed, not letting her head sink down to the pillow. I offer her my cheek, because it’s hard to avoid her lips if I try to kiss her—Milena kissed her on the lips a lot when she was younger, so she still tries to kiss on the lips—and she kisses me on the cheek, as if she is putting me to bed, and I say good night and she says good night.

  —

  T.R., bless his heart, babysits Audrey while I play brunch. It’s not ideal to abandon her for five hours on one of my custody days, but because of the New York trip, my weekend day fell on Sunday and things are too precarious with Vikram to bring her to the Marriott. After I drop her at Milena’s Sunday afternoon, I return home and notice something on Audrey’s unmade bed. She has written in black marker on her white fitted bedsheet: “I am Stoopid.” And below the “I” she’s drawn a stick figure of, apparently, herself, her eyes vertical slits, her mouth an upside-down “U,” her hair on the side of her head in two short straight lines, her arms extra thick and extended from her shoulders like bird wings.

  Half a bottle of Spray ’n Wash and a trip through the washing machine later, the essence remains:

  “I am Stoopid.”

  —

  Cynthia emails me pictures of the office in Denver where the documents are stored, and of their worktable spread with documents, and of herself holding her gun-shaped hand to her head, with her tongue sticking out to the side. I write back telling her that practicing excerpts can also involve sifting minutiae. I assert that she and I are “soul mates,” united in our efforts to wring meaning from tedious detail. She writes back: “You don’t know from tedious. These documents! There is no meaning! I miss you, sailor boy. I’ve been remembering our night at the Art Institute and the first time you came back to my pad. (And nursing you after all of your bar fights!) We are two crazy obsessive people, working way too hard at EVERYTHING. Thank you for being cool when I’ve been stressing. I will be a happier camper soon, I hope, and better to be around.”

  It’s strange how we seem closer in writing than we do in person. On our third date we went to Second City, laughed at mostly the same jokes, got mildly drunk, and went back to her place, where we had, on our first try no less, something very close to normal sex. It was over almost before I knew it had happened—though not in a bad way. Not at all. Remembering happier times makes me hopeful, but I worry that her reference to what happened back at her pad is her way of saying that something very close to normal sex is a key ingredient in our happiness, which of course is exactly what I’m afraid of. I write back that I know she’s been stressed and no worries on that front and I miss her, too.

  Sunday night I call her, and she tells me she took a break from producing documents to fly to Wichita for negotiations on the Cessna settlement. Apparently, it’s just about 100 percent nailed down and she’s forwarded a draft final agreement to Whitaker for approval because the size of the settlement is beyond what she is authorized to approve. She sounds happy but nervous.

  I try to commiserate with her about those awful moments when something huge and on the brink of finality is not yet over and done with. I don’t say how many of those excruciating moments I’ve endured: Philadelphia, Charlotte, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, the Lily Laskine International Competition, the Israeli International. Finalist, semifinalist, eliminated. The suspense—it always seems perfectly designed to pry open my vulnerabilities. I tell Cynthia, “It’s out of your hands now,” but the fact is, seven years ago, waiting for results in Seattle, I bit and drew blood from the meaty part of my left hand, between my thumb and forefinger. I had made the finals and played my ass off. It may have been the high-water mark of my thus-far fruitless strivings.

  “Ah, I’m getting sleepy,” she says. “You know, I wouldn’t kick you out of bed if you came through the door right now.”

  “I know what you’re saying. If you tried to leave the bed, I would grab your ankle, so, you know, you couldn’t go.”

  She laughs. “Oh, how were the bagels?” she asks.

  I forgot to go to the bagel shop she recommended.

  “Fantastic,” I say.

  —

  On Monday, I wake up at 4:19 a.m. beset with figuring out what to do about Milena and Cynthia. I pit the choices against each other in a manic rock-paper-scissors-style smackdown: At first, I resolve to (1) “choose confidence” and make things work with Cynthia, which will spill over into my harp playing and catapult me toward New York–style success; which is defeated by the fact that (2) any mental action like “choosing confidence” will, in the twitchy hands of my monkey mind, turn out to be another source of self-consciousness and therefore impotence, which will spill over into my harp playing; which leads to a desire to (3) beg Milena to take me back, solve my impotence, reassure the increasingly troubled Audrey, and make everyt
hing okay, which is undermined by the notion that (1) having to play it safe to keep my shit together is why I always lose as a harpist and will never be happy; in other words, I should “choose confidence.”

  And so on.

  This thinking wears me out yet creates wide-eyed wakefulness. It adds up to a feeling of being trapped in an airless, one-man submarine at the bottom of the ocean, and I can’t escape from these thoughts and get back to the surface. So, as I take the El downtown to have lunch with Milena after a morning of intense, fear-driven practicing, I’m still not sure what to do.

  Feeling disingenuously clean-cut in a blue button-down shirt and tan khakis, I step through a slow revolving door into the Harris Bank building on LaSalle, where I find my dear ex-wife standing near a racing electronic stock ticker like a nervous job interviewee. We’re both early.

  She starts toward me in a business suit and nylons, absolutely regulation, and, with a shy, crooked smile on her face, looking cute as hell with her sheepdog bangs.

  “All dressed up,” she says, and she laughs at me.

  But this is in fact what I want her to notice: I am different, things will be different, due to lessons learned.

  “And you’re looking lovely,” I say with a smile.

  “Hey, it’s what the well-dressed businesswoman is wearing this spring.” She smiles, pleased with her joke.

  “Where do you want to go?” I ask.

  “Let’s just pick up something,” she says lightly, leading the way back out the revolving door onto the street. “There’s a decent food court pretty close.”

  For a second, the informality is disappointing, but then this isn’t a date, it’s just us again, familiar.

  “How’s work today?” I ask.

  “Pretty good, pretty good,” she says, with something guarded yet giddy in her voice.

  She takes us across Clark and down rough marble steps to a sunny plaza at the base of a skyscraper. A huge square fountain with a grid of jets shoots foamy white water into the air while people with 401(k)s and health insurance sit eating at metal tables on one side of the plaza. We pass them and go through a heavy glass door into a thronged food court. Milena makes a beeline for Asia Express, and I follow her. She gets sushi and I get chicken stir-fry.

  Outside, all the tables are full, so we sit with our trays on the edge of a long marble planter filled with violet tulips in full bloom, a few just beginning to lose their petals. Pigeons with iridescent blue-green necks scavenge around the tables and between chair legs.

  “How was New York?” Milena asks.

  “It was good in some ways. Kind of wished I had stayed home and practiced, I guess.”

  “How’s Adam?”

  “Ahm, good and not good. I think he’s kind of in between things—not dating, not making a movie. You know, you came up, and he apologized for being a dick about you.”

  “Thanks a lot, Adam, really appreciate it.” She dips a piece of her sushi into her sauce and lifts it to her mouth with her slender fingers.

  This is as sharp as Milena’s sarcasm gets, yet underneath that, I can tell she is glad to hear this, and it has taken the edge off me going on the trip. I smile at her, and we eat more of our food. We are co-conspirators, just like any couple acting as a team, placing their friends around them just so. Milena should know about Audrey writing “I am Stoopid” on the bedsheet, but I’m not sure this is the moment.

  “How have you been?” I say. My intonation is the shameless equivalent of putting a hand on her thigh.

  “Things have been a wee bit unusual,” she says, with something like flirtation in her voice, alluding, I think, to Unusual Exhibit A: us humping in her family room.

  Suddenly her phone goes off in her purse—her ring tone is from Barry White’s “You’re the One I Need.”

  “Stop!” she says as she paws through her purse.

  As she checks the number, both of us, I bet, are thinking, It’s Steve.

  “It’s Montessori,” she says, which means she must answer it. “Hello? Yeah, hi, Rachel, what’s up?…Oh my God…But how did she get them?” Milena’s face crumples into disgust, disbelief, and her lower lip trembles. The voice on the phone is saying a lot. “Oh my God…Oh my God…What hospital?…Rachel?…Rachel?…What hospital?…Okay, I’m going there right now.”

  She closes her phone, looks at me. Her eyes quickly brim over and spill.

  “What’s happening?” I ask. “Is she okay?” I know Audrey is not okay.

  “Audrey took a bunch of Tylenol this morning—like maybe fifteen pills,” Milena gets out before bursting into tears. “She wouldn’t eat lunch.” She gasps, gathers herself. “She told the teacher she had a tummy ache. It’s toxic, really bad. They’re taking her to Children’s Memorial.”

  I make sounds that are not words, something between a cough and a moan. If she dies, I will die, too—this comes to me as an absolute certainty. I will know as soon as it happens, no matter where I am. I will lie down and shut off.

  Flagging a taxi is not as instantaneous as one would hope, but eventually we are heading up Dearborn. The cabbie goes right on Washington, and we hit every light working our way east to Lake Shore Drive. Milena sits on the edge of the backseat, hunched slightly, her knees tight together, fists on her thighs. She hasn’t bothered to get any tissues out of her purse. Her face is running with tears and makeup. The cab smells of Febreze and spoiled steak, which makes me feel more sick and short-breathed.

  I can’t believe Audrey attempted suicide, yet that is what it looks like. I remember her crying fit outside the Montessori school on the way to my father’s wake and how helpless I felt at seeing her suffering and not understanding why. I know the doctors can save her—they must—but the idea that she is this troubled is simply unprocessible; it will be the main thing to worry about for the rest of my life. I flash on the image of my always-handy bottle of Tylenol sitting next to a glass of water on the windowsill by the harp, six feet from Audrey’s bed, and a telephone pole passes through my chest. I don’t remember seeing it this morning when I practiced.

  I reach across the seat and grasp one of Milena’s hands. She puts my hand in a death grip and knocks her other fist repeatedly against her chin.

  “She was awake, right?” I say.

  “They didn’t say.”

  “They’ve got her at the hospital,” I say, as if I’m having a vision of activity in the ER. “They’re helping her.” I cover Milena’s hand in both of mine and squeeze.

  “Rachel doesn’t know where she got the pills.”

  “I think—” I blurt out. “I think she got them from me.”

  Milena pulls away, gives me the feral, openmouthed look that I remember from the time Audrey was twelve weeks old and supposedly immobile so I left her to take a quick piss and she rolled off our bed and clonked her head on the floor.

  “I mean, I didn’t give them to her!” I say. “She might have taken the bottle from my apartment. I’m not sure.”

  “She went in your medicine cabinet? How could she reach?”

  “The bottle was out. I took some and, and…I didn’t put it away. I am so sorry, Milena. God, am I sorry.” I can’t bring myself to tell her that I always keep the bottle near the harp so I can pop a few for my shoulder without interrupting a practice session.

  “You don’t pay attention!” Milena yells. She slams her fist sideways against my arm. “How could you let her leave your apartment with a bottle of pills! You don’t pay attention to other people! You are so fucking selfish!” Her face is red and crazed with streaking makeup.

  I remember Audrey coming into my room two nights ago and wish I could tell Milena about it, as if it would be a type of defense, but now it seems I’ve only dreamed that strange visit.

  The cabbie doesn’t check us out in the mirror.

  I feel so rotten I’m surprised I haven’t blacked out. My heart pauses, then picks up as if I’m sprinting again, a sign of my heart murmur under stress. My skin flushes. Am I having a
heart attack? I’m extremely alert, nowhere close to crying. Maybe I can’t cry because I’m focused. Maybe because I don’t deserve to cry. But if Audrey picked up the bottle yesterday at my apartment, why did she wait until she was at school to take those pills? And how did she get the bottle open?

  Exiting Lake Shore Drive, the cab speeds down the off-ramp before braking hard to avoid hitting a backup of cars at the light. To make the left onto Fullerton, the cab tailgates the last car through the intersection well after the light has turned red, setting off numerous angry car horns.

  But we’re getting close.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Milena whispers. She spreads her hands over her face.

  Children’s Memorial banners appear on light poles. Just past a red “Pediatric Emergency Entrance” sign, we turn and accelerate up a driveway and into a tunnel that passes all the way under the second floor of the hospital and out the other side. Halfway toward that daylight, the cab brakes—beside an entrance to the building.

  Milena has her door open before we come to a complete stop. I page through my wallet; I don’t have enough cash. Milena is already out the door and running.

  “What’s your name, your code, your badge?” I babble to the cabbie, though I can see his ID on the seatback out of the corner of my eye. “I’m five dollars short.”

  The cabbie turns around, looking down toward the money I’m holding out. “Just go,” he says in a resigned voice. He’s got a close-cropped beard, an island tuft of hair at the top of his forehead, hooded eyes that make him look sleepy. He takes all my bills. “Seriously,” he adds. “God.”

  “I’ll get it to you,” I say.

  When I catch up to Milena at the desk, she’s drawing tissue after tissue out of a box the receptionist has proffered, wiping her face, shaking. People try not to stare.

  “Take a breath, Mil,” I say softly, stepping near. I resist putting my arm around her for fear she’ll scream. “They’ve got her. This is a good place.”