And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  “You look tired,” she says by way of greeting. It’s forever our function, it seems, to evaluate and comment on each other’s physical appearances. She glances down at her kids. “This is Katie and Jack. Kids, this is Hannah. She’s a friend of mine. From the hospital.”

  I give them a little wave, trying my best to portray normality as best as I can, as if I’m the person who must confirm for them that their mother wasn’t abducted by aliens or grown out of a pod. It makes me wish I’d showered today, rinsed some of the thick grease out of my hair. They look at me blankly, unimpressed in the way only children can be.

  “Why don’t you two go get those ice cream bars that you like, hmm?” Linda says, shooing them toward the freezer cases. She sighs when they’re out of earshot. “I hope it’s ice cream bars they like. It’s so hard to keep up with all of it. Jack’s cutting me slack, but it’s still eight years’ worth of stuff I don’t know.”

  “It’ll get easier,” I reply.

  “Sometimes I get the distinct sense that Katie is angry with me. And I can’t tell if it’s because I was paralyzed in a bed all their lives, or if it’s because I decided to wake up and change everything without asking them first.”

  “They probably just need more time to adjust,” I say, because I have little else but platitudes to offer Linda. I am as lost as she is, knocking around my empty apartment, watching daytime TV in my pajamas, sleeping in taxing, fitful shifts. This is the first time I’ve ventured outside in days, and it’s only to replenish my stores of peanut butter and potato chips. I have yet to find this body’s upper limits when it comes to the consumption of junk food, but I’m not one to back down from a challenge. “I’ve been watching Stratford Pines,” I say, offering a consolation for my lackluster advice.

  “Oh, isn’t it great?”

  “It is,” I say, because while it is indeed a terrible show, there’s something satisfying in its simplistic melodrama. It’s easier to think of the world as a place where love and hate and betrayal are threads that do not cross, instead of existing in a constant jumble, a knot I cannot even touch, much less try to untangle. “I’m trying to figure out who the stalker is.”

  “If you’ve been watching as long as I have, it gets pretty easy to figure out,” Linda replies. “But I won’t spoil it for you.” I’m struck by how different she is now, how present and capable compared to the woman who would barely speak after the transfer.

  “Have you heard from any of the others?” I ask. I imagine Linda and Connie meeting in a coffee shop, or in the bright sunlight of a park somewhere. They’re not at the hospital, at least, not on Thursday afternoons. I know because I’ve been going there, staking it out, just in case I spot one of them. But no one comes. Week after week, I stand there alone.

  Linda shakes her head, looking pensive, wistful even. “No. I haven’t heard from either of them. Not since the last time. You?”

  I shake my head. “Though, I keep waiting for a call from David’s lawyer, for violating the confidentiality agreement. Ruining his career.”

  Linda smiles a little. “I think you underestimate his feelings for you,” she replies, and I wonder how much she knows, how much she has suspected.

  “It’s harder, isn’t it? Doing this on our own? I never would have expected it could get harder.”

  “It won’t always be like this,” she says. “Give it time.”

  I’m not sure if she’s even aware that she’s handing my same useless platitude back to me. But I can see something in her now, a patience, something that makes her seem older than I remember. It’s motherly, that way about her.

  There’s not much else to say, but we both linger a little longer. It feels good, running into Linda in the long drudgery of my daily life, like finding money in the street. Something unexpected and a little bit thrilling, a change of luck. Linda must feel the same way because neither of us seems to want to leave.

  “Maybe you and I can meet and talk, once in a while,” I say, desperate to keep some connection to the three people who know me better than anyone, even when they don’t particularly know much about me at all. “Watch some Stratford Pines?”

  “I don’t know, Hannah,” Linda says, drawing a hand across her stomach. “I’ve haven’t had as much time to keep up with it as before. You know, with the kids.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Of course, I understand.” She gives me a squeeze on my arm and wheels her cart away from me. I blink hard, waving again at her kids as I pass them. They eye me with unguarded suspicion.

  I glance back at Linda just in time to see her slip a package of trail mix into her purse. She tucks it under her arm and goes back to consulting her shopping list like any other mother on a grocery run. But she’s not. She’s not like everyone else. She’s a woman who lived in a white-walled room, unmoving, for eight years. I think that Sam was right, that it has to have an impact, everything the members of our groups have had to endure. So, while I myself don’t steal anything from the store, I can understand the impulse.

  David

  I work my way back up to Scotch. It takes time and a lot of dedication because my taste buds have reverted back to the days when I’d drink sugary sodas and dump a long succession of creamers into my coffee. But as the months pass I move from faux wine to Jack-and-gingers to Old Fashioneds and then there I am, finally, sipping Scotch and hating it in some hipster bar on Lincoln Avenue. The lady bartender has an intricate tattoo of a mermaid running from her shoulder to her elbow. It makes me think of that painting of Hannah and, though the bartender is nowhere near as pretty as Hannah, I find myself chatting with her for a little too long. She has a silver ring in her nose and bleached-blonde hair, and she laughs heartily at my jokes, which are subpar at best. I wonder if she’ll go home with me if I ask. And then I do ask, more to quell my own curiosity than anything else. She smiles.

  I buy another drink, running down the clock until this tattooed little college dropout is off work, and I catch my reflection in the mirror above the bar. I’ve been avoiding mirrors since the transfer, since the self that I imagine when I close my eyes and the self I see in the mornings are two very different men. But now it looks like all the working out has paid off, because I can see muscle definition through the sleeves of my shirt. I’ve let my beard grow back. It’s easier, now that my new face has been splashed all over blogs and newspapers and magazines, because people don’t recognize me as easily with facial hair. It’s too unexpected. They don’t make the connection; politicians never have facial hair. I don’t look like me, not really, but I don’t look that bad either. It’s no wonder this little bartender is interested.

  There are three missed calls from Jackson on my phone. He is in such a constant, furious state of damage control that I’ve begun ignoring him so I can get drunk in peace. The people of my district are furious with me for taking part in a treatment that involves human cloning. The rest of the country is furious that I bought my way into a clinical trial from which I should have been disqualified. The guys in my caucus and the Republican leadership are incensed that I’d get caught trying to tamper with an FDA study. People are talking about recall elections. People are talking about hearings in front of the disciplinary committee. I’ve been accused of everything from corruption to blasphemy to murder, ostensibly of the person whose life should have been saved in place of mine during the pilot program. I’ve done my best to ignore most of it. Beth is holding up like any good political wife would, keeping a stiff upper lip and shaking off the media attention with her trademark WASP-y coolness. It’s Jackson who can’t seem to let our presidential dreams go.

  Jackson has been insisting lately that we sue Hannah for breach of confidentiality. She’s from a wealthy family, it seems, and my impending political fights look like they might be costly. But thinking of attacking Hannah brings with it an exhaustion I can’t understand, much less handle. How can I explain it to Jackson, how badly I want to hurt this girl and how sick it makes me when I think of it—simultaneou
sly. I justify it to myself by considering the fallout that could happen if she reveals our affair to the public on top of everything else. I could lose my family, all that I have left, if she takes that sort of revenge. Going after Hannah would be breaking the cease-fire. Mutually assured destruction. So I ignore Jackson’s calls. And I get drunk in peace.

  It bothers me, a little, that I’m attracted to the bartender because she looks like Hannah. It’s not unexpected, by any means. I’ve been hate-fucking girls who look like Hannah from one end of Chicago to the other for months now, since the article came out. What bothers me is that the hate has begun to soften, while the attraction remains. I find myself scrolling through the handful of text messages we exchanged while we were together, mostly arrangements of times and places where we would meet, but still, it feels good to see something she’s written. I’ve gone back twice to the Museum of Contemporary Art to look at that painting of her, naked and lying in some lousy painter’s sheets, and the hate and want and jealousy I feel is like getting hit by a linebacker. It makes me feel weak, to still want her despite everything.

  I take the bartender home and fuck her from behind on the living room sofa, watching the birds tattooed on her back dart about as she moves. She and I share a cigarette when we’re finished, and that makes me want a drink. It’s a disappointment, like everything is a disappointment, every moment another signpost of my failing, my squandered chance for redemption. But it also feels good, like slipping back into my favorite leather jacket for the first time each winter, its fit perfect even after all those months of waiting for me. I’ve missed this part of myself, I find, the part of me that revels in surrendering to my vices. The boy who yelled into the wind at ninety miles an hour in a borrowed car. The part that Hannah dug up from where I’d buried it. The part of me that was never meant to stay dormant for very long.

  Hannah

  When I can no longer stand the sight of my couch, surrounded as it is by empty glasses and takeout containers, its quilt permanently wrinkled in the shape of a nest for my little body, I decide I need a project. I clear out my studio on a Friday morning, the kind of day where the city seems painfully bright, all sun-bleached asphalt and piping-hot glass. I box up my supplies, unplugging the fridge and throwing away the abandoned water bottles and the single beer that I had left there. I wrap the canvases in heavy paper and twine. Everything else goes into boxes that I tape shut and label, trying not to focus too much on one object or another because it will be too hard that way. If I allow memories to start slipping in, I’m sure I’ll be lost.

  I do pause, however, on the antique Minolta I find behind a stack of canvases. It’s a film camera from the 60s, an old SLR with a heavy metal body and a short, wide lens. It was my grandfather’s, I think, though I can’t really remember why I have it here. I’d used it for a while in junior high while I took an introductory darkroom class at a community college one summer, but I don’t know why I’d have brought it to my studio. Yet, here it is, and when I check there’s still film inside.

  I get the photos back a week later in a thin paper sleeve, with the negatives tucked in back.

  There’s a photo of my old room in my house in Lake Forest, with its large vanity mirror and the huge classic rock posters on the walls. There’s Lucy, so young it nearly takes my breath, all fresh-faced teenage beauty, with her dark hair falling around her like billows of smoke. There’s a photo of Candice, my best friend in junior high, playing her cello in a nondescript schoolroom. There’s one really excellent photo of my art teacher, with his white mop of hair and his kind, deep-set eyes. A couple are of objects, like an arrangement of flowers on our kitchen table or a stack of books on my desk. There’s an earnestness to the photographs, as if I was really trying to convey something with them, though I can’t remember what it was. Yearning, probably. Yearning for a life more like the one I have now, silly, foolish child that I was.

  I stop when I find the photo of Sam. At first it feels insignificant, as if it would be strange not to find a picture of my boyfriend amid a stack of my old photos. It takes me a moment to realize that the photo is out of place, that it shouldn’t be there, that he was not mine yet, back then. But still, there he is, at seventeen, shooting me a grin from under a stocking cap, with a plastic cup in his hand. He’s in front of a campfire. I vaguely remember the night, a party my sister threw when my parents were out of town, the only time I was allowed to creep out of my room and explore the world of my sister’s teenage friends. I stumbled upon a couple kissing in the living room and ventured outside to find Lucy. I must have found Sam instead. And I must have had my camera.

  I don’t remember taking the picture. But I remember him sitting there in front of the fire pit on our patio. He smiled when he saw me.

  “Aren’t you cold?” he asked, motioning to my pajama pants and the light jacket I had wound around me. I nodded, unable to speak for fear of saying something childish or stupid.

  “Here,” he said, taking a flask out of his jacket and unscrewing it, adding a bit more of its contents to his party cup before handing the thin metal container to me. “Take a little sip, just a little. It’ll warm you up.”

  I did as I was told and it burned like battery acid and tasted just as bad, and I coughed into my hand as soon as I swallowed it down. Sam smiled.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, taking the flask back from me and refastening the cap. “Don’t tell your sister, okay?”

  “I won’t,” I whispered.

  “Don’t tell me what?” I heard Lucy approach behind me, ruffling my hair a bit before crawling onto Sam’s chair with him.

  “Hannah and I are going to run away together,” he said, winking at me, and I must have been crimson from head to foot from my blush and the heat of the booze and the campfire.

  “Just as long as you call me from wherever you end up,” she said, pressing her mouth to the side of his neck. Then everything was hot inside me too, scorching from the fire and whatever I drank and the total futility of being twelve and the shocking intensity of my own jealousy. I went back to my room and watched out my window as the fire flickered on the faces of the people around it, unable to hear what they were saying. Holding that moment with Sam like the bright hardness of a gem inside me, knowing that no matter what passed between Sam and Lucy, he would always be the one who drew me into adulthood for a quick moment on our back patio. He would always be the first to take my hand and lead me forward.

  I never told Penny that the shot of raspberry vodka we took together in our freshman dorm wasn’t my first drink. I never told her that someone had gotten to me first, already broken down that barrier for me. It felt good, like a warm little secret, a perfect sliver of time I could hold on to that belonged to Sam and me and to no one else. Something a bit wrong and just a little dangerous, and so much better of a secret because of it.

  And I realize that in all the years Sam and I were together, we never spoke of that moment. The memory of it had faded by the time we were together, been eclipsed by so much else, and the realization that we’ve both lost that bit of our shared history hits me harder than the anger that still wells within me when I think of him, think of his article, think of his abandonment. It scares me a little, to consider how much you can lose simply in the process of living on.

  I buy film for the camera, black and white film from an online store because so few camera shops carry it anymore. I buy a bulk box of it, stashing it in my fridge and snapping whole rolls of it at a time. I’m hesitant with the camera at first, with its ancient light meter and the confusing shutter speeds and f-stops. The mechanics of it make me pause and consider what I’m trying to capture, if it needs a shallow or deep depth of field, if I want the image to appear grainy or smooth, if I want to capture motion or freeze it in a split-second. The camera, in all of its clumsiness and cumbersome settings, makes me look at the world again. To look at the world in a way these eyes have not yet, not ever, seen it.

  Linda

  There�
�s a little figurine of a dancer on one of the shelves, and it glitters under the fluorescent lighting of the store. It looks beautiful and lonely, standing there, frozen in the middle of its most graceful pose. I don’t even hesitate as I slip it into the front of my jacket. It’s one of mine, it’s there for me; I can tell just by looking at it.

  The trouble comes when I’m leaving the store. I can hear the commotion begin among the salesgirls, the notes of intensity in their voices, harsh whispers, someone hitting all the wrong notes on a piano. At first, I’m truly mystified as to what the trouble is. Then the security guard approaches.

  “Forget something, ma’am?” he asks. He’s a middle-aged Hispanic man, and he looks like he could be very kind, the sort of man who would shovel his neighbor’s driveway, if he wasn’t looking at me as if I might bolt at any moment.

  “No, just going home to my family,” I say, and smile, the way Connie would. The way she does to make people trust her. But it doesn’t seem to work because he says something into the little radio clipped to his jacket, and I hear the crackle and buzz of a voice coming over it in reply.

  “Can I see what’s in your jacket, ma’am.” He says it like it’s not a question. And I know that I should hang my head and comply, to pretend like I was going to pay for the figurine all along, but the moment seems so hilariously impossible, so out of sync with the normal order of my life, that I think I must be dreaming. Dreaming, or having slipped across some thin membrane into my secret world, where exciting things do happen. Either way, I know the best course of action is to run.

  It’s David who gets me out of lockup. I can hear the CPD officer at the desk on his phone, his tone apologetic, a child being admonished.

  “Right away, sir,” he says over the line and then hangs up the phone. He disappears through the door to the outer office of the police station, and I remain where I am, of course, locked in a concrete cell that smells like a port-a-john. I don’t really want to touch anything. It’s like sitting in one of the more dilapidated L stations, a place you know is contaminated with all sorts of human waste. My fingers are still tinged gray from the fingerprint ink, and I think about what Hannah once said, that our fingerprints are probably different from those of our old bodies. It gives me a strange stirring of freedom within my chest, the thought that I’m anonymous here. No ID. No credit cards. Nothing in my wallet but some cash and a couple of business cards. Just the little bit of something inside me, just me and her. I could be anyone, I think. If I disappeared right now, if I left this station and hopped a train and kept going, no one would ever be able to find us. There wouldn’t even be pictures of me to post.