And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  “How old are you?” I ask. He looks at me a little suspiciously then, so I smile, widening my eyes, trying to look a bit more like an ingénue.

  “Twenty-four.” His mouth slides under my ear. One of his hands has attached itself to the crease between my ass and the back of my right thigh. “Why?”

  “Just curious.” Christ he’s young. He was in kindergarten while I was drinking in that empty swimming pool. But he’s practically glowing with that golden youthful swagger, and kissing him is like drinking in my old life, waking up that side of myself that has been sick and dormant for the past five years, or has never been awake at all. Not in this body.

  “You’ve got about a half hour before you’ll start to feel it,” he says, the hand on my leg hitching me up a bit onto his thigh, pulling me closer. “Want to go somewhere?”

  I nod, and soon we’re out into the damp streets, and he’s leading me by the hand, hailing a cab. The drugs kick in just as he’s tipping me back onto the musty futon in his tiny studio, with its dirty windows and scuffed wood floors. And just like that, everything is shining, shimmering like a mirage of water on a hot desert road. Everything seems to fit into place, with the satisfying soft click of puzzle pieces sliding together. I can see that every moment in my life has conspired to bring me here, and all of my selves—the gangly little brat of a girl, the blonde teenager in cutoffs and flip-flops drinking in the fallen leaves, the actress shooting up in the bathroom of a five-star restaurant, the invalid with the papery skin and the foam of yeast clotting in the corners of her mouth—all of them have folded themselves into me, like matryoshka dolls, each self hiding a smaller, former self. And I, at this moment, can feel them all held within me, all of those lost, beautiful girls, and everything we’ve ever wanted. I shut my eyes, reach out, but my hand collides with the skin of the boy’s chest before I can even realize what I was trying to grasp out of the empty air.

  He’s pawing at me with one hand, undoing his jeans with the other, but I’m too awash in my own euphoria, I can’t differentiate one sensation from any other. I seem to slip easily out of the present moment and into some void within myself, where all of my history is held, and when I look up to the dirty windows I can see that something is painted there, some scene of lovers or animals, something difficult to discern when it changes shape in the darkness. It’s a long moment before I realize it’s a reflection, that I don’t recognize myself, with my hair splayed out on the pillow beneath me and my eyes heavy-lidded, and this boy shoving down his jeans. He’s tan down to his waistband, but his ass looks thin and soft and very white in the reflection, and it makes the whole image suddenly ugly and I have to close my eyes. He’s sliding my underwear down and flipping me onto my stomach when I decide I’ve had enough of this.

  “Stop,” I say, as I shove his hands away.

  “What’s wrong?” he mumbles, grabbing my bare hips and trying to pull me to him as I squirm away.

  “I’m going,” I say shoving him back again and pulling my underwear back into place.

  “Come on, baby,” the boy says, his hands encircling my forearms. His grip is strong; I can see the muscles tense in his biceps and shoulders, and I know his leanness is hiding the tensile strength of iron rebar. “You can’t just leave.”

  This is the moment, I think. The delineation. Things can go badly now, very badly for me, on the whims of this boy alone. I can feel my control slipping; I can feel danger pressing in, alarm bells going off too late. But I think he sees the sudden fear in me because he releases my arms then. He looks surprised, that I could be afraid of him. But I know more about the world than he does.

  “All right,” he says, showing me his palms. “Whatever.”

  I don’t intend to let this sort of luck run out, so I pull my clothes on and stumble out into the hallway, pausing at the top of the stairs to pull on my shoes as his door slams behind me. When I’m out on the street the night air seems to hum, full of the glistening dots of city lights and the smell of rain. And I want to reach into myself, into that place beneath my sternum and pluck out that pretty teenager with her Malibu and pineapple juice and tell her see, see, look at me, and how much I have seen, and I still am no wiser than you, little girl.

  Hannah

  Sam has to fly to San Diego on a business trip, following down a lead for an important story. Of course, I think. The stories are always important, always a crusade. His leaving is a relief, after weeks of shuddering silences, of nights spent tossing and sleepless, avoiding even brushing an elbow against each other, avoiding all of the subjects we can’t talk about—my painting, our theoretical engagement, anything to do with Lucy, and, of course, his absence at the hospital—and finding we have nothing much left to say to each other. He leaves me alone, a stranger in my own body, without anyone to ground me in the subtle routines of my old life.

  Sam’s absence make the presence of David in my life seem that much more potent. Memories of that day in his apartment swarm up like bees when I’m the least prepared for them, when I’m rinsing my hair in the shower or chopping cucumber in the kitchen—which nearly cost me the tip of my brand-new finger—or lying awake in bed, trying not to think of David. How marked this body must be by the one man who has possessed it, if David is right about storing memories beneath our skin. My body is as traitorous as my mind now, reacting as it does with toe-curling insistence every time I think of him.

  I look out my kitchen window on to Printer’s Row, newly coated with a sheet of ice that makes everything glitter in the cold sunlight, and try to clear my mind of David. Watching the movement of the city in winter is always a comfort, the way Chicago seems relentlessly disinterested in its inhabitants. It makes my own difficulties feel like part of a greater pattern, a whole city of people who are walking against the blinding cut of the icy wind swept in from Lake Michigan. As if we are all struggling to make it through in a place where, not so long ago, people fought simply to outlive this cold. The people who were foolish enough to make their homes on the edge of a fallen glacier. Pioneers, I think. People who are made to endure.

  My doorbell rattles me from my wistfulness, and it’s Lucy calling from the street outside, begging entry. I buzz her up and pull on a sweater and jeans over the tank top I slept in. I glance at myself in the mirror on the way out of my bedroom and am met with the reflection of my own wan scowl. Lucy, on the other hand, appears at my door flushed and positively incandescent. Her coat hangs open around the tight fabric of her sweater, her stomach swollen and melon-ripe beneath it.

  “God, Lucy, didn’t you notice it’s still winter out there?” I ask, ushering her inside.

  “Please, I have my own internal heater these days,” she says, kissing me on the cheek and heading for my bedroom. She’s carrying shopping bags.

  “What exactly . . .”

  “Look, honey, Sam told me that you’re having some . . . wardrobe issues,” she says.

  “Sam called you?”

  “I called the other day. You weren’t up yet.” She stops in the doorway, surveying the rumpled bed and last night’s clothes still on the floor. I slink by her, picking up the few discarded garments and pulling the comforter over the twisted sheets. I’m pretty sure her three-year-old is already learning how to make his bed.

  “Anyway,” she says. “I decided to pick you up a few things.” She presses the shopping bags into my hands. “Go and try some of them on. I had to guess your size, so I just took mine and subtracted ten.”

  “It’s not your size if it only lasts nine months,” I say, setting the bags down on the bed and sifting through them. It’s a mess of linen pants and oxford shirts and cardigan sweaters, all bright colors and designer labels. The sort of thing I used to buy because it’s the sort of thing Sam likes. “What is this, the entire J. Crew catalog?”

  “Until I have a little girl to shop for, you’re it,” she says, pulling a lavender blouse out of one of the bags and holding it up to my shoulders. “Just try something on, okay? Humor me.�
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  I take it from her as she selects a pair of tweed pants to match. I drop them on my bed and strip off my sweater and jeans right there. I can feel the heat of her jealousy as I stand momentarily in my underwear. I know what she sees, the body she once had, unaltered by stretch marks and breast-feeding and pregnancy weight gained and lost. A body that has only ever seen cold winter sunlight, a tightly wound bud yet to bloom.

  “You don’t have a mark on you, do you?” Lucy asks from behind me.

  “Not yet. But I’m expecting the first freckle to show up any day now.” I pull on the blouse, buttoning it halfway up and then step into the pants.

  Lucy sighs, buttoning the blouse the rest of the way up and then pulling me in front of the full-length mirror. “You look lovely,” she says, gathering my hair back in one of her fists.

  “Come on,” I say, to cover how much my reflection bothers me. Standing before me is the sort of bland-looking, endlessly mediocre creature I endured ink and needles and piercings and countless bottles of hair dye to blot out in my formative years.

  “Sam would love you in this,” Lucy says.

  “You’re probably right,” I say, stripping back to my underwear. I think of Penny when she turned to Sam in the hospital, when she looked at my unmarked arms. Better for the country club, she’d said. Smoothing out those rough edges. “But it’s too much, Luce. I can’t accept all this.”

  “Of course you can. It’s the least I can do for you right now. I know it hasn’t been easy, coming home.” She pauses. “You’ve been back to your studio?”

  “Did Sam tell you that, too?” I ask.

  “He mentioned something. He said you had a fight.”

  Of course, he can still talk to Lucy when he can’t talk to me. I laugh a little, a dark sound, handing the clothes back to her. “I’d say we had a disagreement.”

  “It’ll get easier,” she says. It’s the sort of thing that people say like a mantra, without any conviction. Because, of course, she doesn’t know that some silences have a core, a root, and, like a weed, the silence cannot be killed until the root is torn out. Or, perhaps, she knows more about the root of Sam’s silence than she is letting on.

  “Where did Sam go the weekend before the transfer?” I ask, before I can stop myself. It looks like I’ve startled her, because she steps back a bit, a slight flinch in her otherwise calm demeanor. Her hand goes to her stomach, and I know it then, that she sees this particular question as an attack.

  “What do you mean?” she asks, going back to the bags of clothes and refolding them, even the ones that are still untouched and perfect.

  “I woke up and Sam was gone,” I say, as if explaining to a child. “He was gone for days. I want to know where he was.” He wouldn’t have stayed away unless it was something terrible, unless the guilt was so huge that he couldn’t face me after. Deception isn’t something that comes easily to Sam. Lucy, however, is a woman accustomed to getting what she wants.

  “He had the flu. You know that,” she says. You know that. He said it the same way, after I woke up from the transfer. You know I only stayed away because the doctors told me to. You know. I imagine how it might have happened. She cried into his shirt and he held her while I was there in the room. How might they have comforted each other when they were alone? “He was run down, Hannah. Exhausted. It was only a matter of time before it caught up to him. The same thing happened in high school, when his dad was at his worst.” She talks fast. Lucy is itching to leave, to not have to answer any more questions, and she makes a big production of checking her watch, feigning surprise.

  “Shit, I’ve gotta run if I’m going to make my prenatal yoga class. But are you sure you don’t want to hold on to these?” Lucy asks, holding up the shopping bags. How easily I could accept them. Become the woman I imagined, Sam’s perfect wife, vacant and bland as a sheen of dust. A girl with smooth edges, almost as perfect as Lucy, but for all the dark history and desperate impulses that have followed me into this new body. It’s a life I might have chosen, once. But I can’t surrender to it, not now that I’m beginning to understand the nature of Sam’s silence, of Lucy’s evasion. Now that I know what David Jenkins tastes like. There are too many things I would have to choke down, breathe around, to become a perfect wife for Sam.

  “No,” I reply, trying to keep the bite out of my tone. “I’m having a hard enough time recognizing myself as it is.”

  Linda

  I don’t tell them about the baby. It is too colossal of a secret, too tectonic. Instead, I tell them about the accident. I want to share something, some secret with them. Because I’m awake, now.

  “It was all I could think about,” I say, staring into my cup of hot cocoa, the fluorescent light of the hospital conference room turning it an olive green shade of brown. “After I woke up. Because it felt like it happened a second ago, even though it had actually been weeks by the time I came to. I don’t know if any of you have ever had something like that happen, something you wish you could take back so badly it makes your stomach ache.”

  I remember that sick feeling, that swarming acidic bile that was present even though I could no longer feel my arms or my legs or my lungs. The feeling was there, even though there was nothing in my body that could feel it anymore. “I went over and over it in my head. Wishing it away. I was never really religious. I mean, I went to my mother’s church when I was younger, but I never really believed any of it. But I spent weeks asking God to give me that couple of seconds back so I could do it differently.”

  David nods, looking solemn, his politician look. “I think people are right when they say he works in mysterious ways.” Connie snorts at this, but David ignores her. “He didn’t abandon you, Linda. The fact that you’re sitting here with us is proof of that.”

  “Come on, David,” Hannah says. “Let her talk.”

  How few words we have in our language. For instance, there is no word for the looks that Hannah and David share, the knowing antagonism, the intensity, the admonishment, the sort of shared expectation that sparks in the air between them. It’s the sort of thing that must be observed, the sort of thing I’m good at seeing, from those years when words were of no use to me. One for no. Two for yes.

  I spent endless hours in that hospital bed, trying to conjure the prayers I remembered from my childhood. My mother’s church held services in Mandarin, and I could hear strings of phrases in my head, though their meanings were no longer attached. Was I praying to God? To Jesus? To the Blessed Virgin? I didn’t know. I would have prayed to anyone who could have lifted me from that bed. I would have prayed to the devil himself if I’d known the words. But I don’t tell David this.

  “I had some letters in my car that I was going to mail, just bills and things, but I decided to stop at the post office on my way home. I kept thinking that I should have stopped there before I got on the highway. But I was so anxious to get on the road, I didn’t want to take the time.”

  “Where were you going?” Hannah asks.

  That, of course, is the question. The one Tom has forgotten to ask, eight years later. He asked me right after the accident, clutching the rail on the side of my bed, imploring me for an answer I could not give. But by now, the importance of my destination has been diminished by so much time. I try to remember it all. My cell phone ringing. Checking the clock in my kitchen, 3:34 p.m., plenty of time to get to Highland Park and back before Tom got home from work. Dropping the kids at Sarah’s down the street, claiming last-minute errands, a couple of hours tops. Getting on the highway. Changing lanes. Once. Twice. Checking the clock on the dashboard, 3:56 p.m. Looking up to see brake lights. Close. Too close.

  “I was going to see a man,” I say, raising my eyes to the room. “Scott. A friend of a friend who played saxophone in a jazz quartet. The man I was going to move in with, once I left Tom.” Something in David’s face twitches. I wonder if its disgust. Or maybe empathy. Hannah looks at her hands. Connie is the only one who meets my eyes. It’s impossible
to shock Connie. Maybe it’s even impossible to surprise her. But maybe she looks a little impressed, like she didn’t think I had it in me. Not the way I am now. “I was a good person. All my life, I did everything a woman like me was supposed to do. Track scholarship. Two kids. On my way to a Ph.D. And the one time . . .” I can’t finish, the anger of it closes my throat. I swallow, hard. “I guess for a long time, I was certain God was punishing me.”

  “For committing adultery?” Dr. Bernard asks, and only then do I remember. He’s writing all of this down.

  “Maybe,” I reply. “Maybe for once, just once, doing the wrong thing because it was what I wanted.”

  “What happened to Scott?” Connie asks.

  “After the accident? I don’t know. He never visited me in the hospital. I never saw him again.”

  “Bastard,” Connie says, and she seems genuinely angry. I’m flattered she feels so strongly toward someone who would hurt me. “Fucking bastard.”

  “Can you blame him?” I ask. “I was as good as dead. It was easier for the people in my life to act as if that’s what happened.”

  “Not Tom,” David says. “He didn’t forget you.”

  I think of Scott, our stolen hours in the backs of movie theaters and on picnic tables in the middle of the night, the scratch of the wood against the back of my thighs, the wanting so furious it made me forget who I was, made me someone new. And Tom, who came by the nursing home every weekend with flowers for my room. Who kept me as his wife long after our marriage had been ground down to powder and ash. And I wonder how anyone is supposed to understand love when it is always changing forms, each with its own name, in a language that cannot be spoken. One for no. Two for yes. How useless these words are.

  I toy with the idea of telling Connie, just Connie, about the baby. Connie, who cannot be shocked. We’re walking south on Michigan Avenue, and it feels good to be out in the open air after the claustrophobia of the meeting. It’s the time of year when everyone assures each other that this will be the last week of winter, though it never is. The wind is cold, and we’ve both got scarves tied under our chins, our hands thrust into our pockets. We look like mismatched twins, with our straight spines and our even gaits. I think maybe a person could pick a SUB out of a crowd, if he knew what he was looking for. Bodies that show no evidence of the burden of time or effort. How different I will be soon, with stretched skin and backaches and hips pushed wide. How altered, how lived-in this body will be.