And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  I drift, in those next few days. I find an old bottle of sleeping pills in Tom’s cabinet and take two at a time, until he has to shake me awake in the evenings when he gets home from work. It frightens the kids, to see their father frightened. Even Jack keeps his distance now. Tom is worried, always worried, wants me to see Dr. Shah, or my ob-gyn. I know what he thinks, that I’m defective, that there’s something wrong with my SUB. I can’t bear to tell him that he’s right.

  When I don’t want to sleep anymore, I curl up on the couch and watch Stratford Pines, or go into the yard and lie on my back in the grass and listen to the trees. I want to cry, but I’m not sure this body knows how. It’s difficult to conjure that pressure, that physical insistence. I think of the phantom tears I used to cry, the ones Cora would dab from my face with those embroidered handkerchiefs of hers. My body, always a betrayer, always giving me the opposite of what I need.

  The next few days are worse, because once the shock of it wears off, once my new body bounces right back into humming and clicking in its normal, well-oiled efficiency, I begin to feel it. Somewhere deep inside me, there is the tiniest kernel of relief. And I hate it, and love it, that feeling. Hate it because it is selfish and cruel, it puts me in league with all the women who wish their children away, who leave their infants locked in cars on hot summer days, or feed them too much cough syrup to quiet them, or abandon them in front of fire stations. And I love it too, that feeling, because it’s proof I’m still alive. That there is still something for me to want in this world, even if it’s to want all the wrong things.

  I climb the stairs to the attic, pulling out my artifacts and pressing each between the skin of my palms. There is no thrill of electricity, as if something has waved a magic wand and rendered them inert. It feels like loss, surely, as if the little embryo took the keys to my secret world when it left my body, as if it pulled all the dreams out of me as it left. But another thought occurs to me, as I sit there. Perhaps the dream world has receded because this world has begun to unlock itself. I think of all sorts of possibilities that could exist for a woman risen from the dead, all of the ideas that occurred to me in that jail cell, when I realized I could disappear. I think of open water and mountain tops. Things I’ve never allowed myself to dream, after that night in college when the stick turned pink, when the choices weren’t mine alone anymore. All of this, the accident, the transfer, even my miscarriage, have all conspired to give me the chance to do what I’ve wanted to do since I can remember. How could anyone fault me now, after I have been so torn from my life and it has healed itself with me on the outside? I have been given the world now. How could anyone fault me for leaving?

  David

  David Jr.’s arm is in a navy blue cast that reaches from his palm to his elbow. It’s a completely helpless feeling, for my son to be injured every time I see him. To be so far away, avoiding my district and all of those unanswerable questions and probably subpoenas, unable to protect him because I can’t even protect myself.

  “I’ll be home in a month, buddy. Mom says you’ll have your cast off by then,” I say, imagining the time we can spend before I return to Washington to face the Ethics Committee. Everything hinges on the FDA vote. If SUBlife passes, I might avoid charges for tampering with the study.

  Maybe I’ll take David Jr. fishing. Maybe I’ll start him out hunting, even. I started younger than him, and maybe handling a gun will give him the sense of patient confidence that it instilled in me when I first went out with a rifle over my shoulder. But David Jr. looks confused by the sentiment.

  “I thought Mom said you weren’t coming home,” he says, brow furrowed.

  “Of course I’m coming home, buddy,” I say.

  But again, he shakes his head, adamant.

  “What exactly did your mother tell you?” I ask, apprehension squaring my shoulders.

  “She said you were going to stay in Chicago with your girlfriend.”

  “My girlfriend.” There it is, I think. Beth, showing her cards through our son. A winning play, if I ever saw one. “David, go get your mother and put her on the phone,” I say, trying to keep my tone even.

  “She said she doesn’t want to talk to you,” he says.

  “Tell her she should call me in the next five minutes or I’m driving out there right now so we can talk in person, okay?” I say. David Jr. nods. “Okay, you keep your chin up son, you hear?” He nods again, and then my screen goes dark.

  Four minutes later, my phone goes off. It’s Beth. “At least I know now what it takes to get you to drive up here,” she says as soon as I answer.

  “What have you been saying to our son? You told him I’m not coming home?”

  “I figured it might be better for you to stay in Chicago for a while,” she replies, her tone controlled, dispassionate even.

  “With my girlfriend?” I ask, trying to sound both weary and condescending. “I don’t have a girlfriend, Beth. I don’t know what the hell you’ve dreamed up there.”

  “Well, then, whoever it was I heard at your place, the night David Jr. broke his arm. Connie, is it? She’s certainly pretty enough. Though, no matter how tough you think you were once, you never really had the stomach for the junkies, now did you?”

  The mention of Connie feels like a punch below the belt, like going after someone’s sister. Veins of anger open up in me. I feel like there is something hot and dark and molten at my core, and every wall I have built to keep it hidden, keep it contained, is cracking apart. I’m angrier than I should be, if I intend to continue this conversation without imploding our marriage. But maybe ending our marriage is exactly the intended purpose of this conversation for Beth.

  “Or maybe it’s Sam’s girlfriend,” Beth continues. “What’s her name again?” I jerk to attention.

  “Sam?”

  “Sam Foster, the journalist,” she says, and I begin to see, faintly, the outline of something treacherous here.

  “How exactly do you know Sam Foster?” I ask, feeling like I’m about to be sucker punched and there’s no way to get out of its way.

  “I found him through those files of yours,” Beth replies. “Ironic, isn’t it, that one of them had a journalist for a boyfriend? It never occurred to him to write about SUBlife until I called and told him all about you. He seemed pretty adamant that his girlfriend be left out of it, but you he was more than willing to write about.”

  I lean forward, resting my forehead in my palm. I’ve known Beth to be a lot of things. But this cruel, this calculating, I never knew she was capable of this. I’m almost impressed, which sickens me a bit, because I have indeed married the perfect political wife, someone who is just as capable of terrible, deceitful things as I am.

  “I’ve helped you out a lot over the years, baby,” she says. “I’ve been whatever you needed. But not this time. You lied to me, when you told me things would be different. You lied to my son, too, and you should’ve known that there would be a price for that.”

  “Our son,” I say. She doesn’t reply. “Our son, Elizabeth.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll see what the courts have to say about that,” she replies. I end the call by throwing my phone across the room. It ricochets off the wall, leaving a dent in the paint and raining pieces of plastic onto the wood floor.

  Hannah

  When I get home, my camera slung over one shoulder and a bag of takeout from Tamarind in my other arm, David is sitting outside my apartment door. My first impulse is to simply walk past him, to pretend he is so irrelevant to me that I don’t even recognize him, but the slump of his shoulders makes me pause. He has a beard now. It makes him look older, a bit more grizzled than I remember. I wonder, in these few months since we’ve seen each other, if I have changed as well. And, despite everything, seeing him is the most potent relief I’ve felt in weeks.

  “How do you know where I live?” I ask by way of a greeting. He looks relieved that I’ve acknowledged him at all.

  “Your records,” he replies. “I
had my chief of staff get them for me.”

  “Jesus, I should have guessed,” I say, still hurt and angry despite the fact that everything in me wants to throw my arms around him. “Opposition research, right? Or does Jackson do that sort of thing with all the girls you sleep with?”

  “Can I come in?” he asks, motioning to my apartment door. Part of me wonders if he’s crazy enough to think we could pick up where we left off.

  “No,” I reply. “Not until you tell me what you want.”

  “I want to apologize,” he says, running his hands through his hair. It’s longer now; he probably hasn’t had it cut since the last time I saw him. I get it. He’s less recognizable this way. “For everything I said about you, about the article. I know now that it wasn’t your fault.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. He stands, and the size of him surprises me. He’s muscled now, more imposing.

  “Hannah, can I please come in?”

  We sit at my kitchen table, though I don’t offer him anything to drink. Politeness is still a bit beyond my capabilities when it comes to David. As he looks around my place, I wonder at how little of me is reflected in this home, how much of it is the person I was when I was with Sam, the girl who didn’t mind her parents’ money, the girl who was more than willing to smooth out her rough edges for him.

  “What do you mean about the article?”

  “Is that one of yours?” he asks, motioning to a huge painting hanging above my sofa. It’s one of my favorites, one that I could never sell, the first of the series that won me my artist’s grant. It’s so detailed it’s nearly photo-realistic, a woman being dragged away by her hair, a flock of ravens doing the dragging. The background is 1920s dustbowl farmland, and all of it is bleak and desperate except for the woman’s expression. There is something there, something like surrender, a bit like peace, as if the woman knows there isn’t anywhere those birds could take her that could be worse than where she’s leaving.

  “Yeah,” I reply, glancing at him, recalling what he said about paintings when I first visited his apartment. “My version of reality, I guess.”

  “I like it,” he replies.

  “What are you doing here, David?” I ask again.

  He pauses and then nods. “I know you weren’t Sam’s source for the article. I’m sorry I accused you of that.”

  “So where did he get it?”

  “My darling wife,” David replied, shaking his head. “Lady Macbeth. I promised her everything would be different when I bought my way into the program. That’s how I justified it to her, and to myself, I guess. It would be worth it, to take someone else’s spot, because I would be a better man. I would use my influence for good.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she realized that I wasn’t going to change. Realized it before I did, actually. She was always the smart one.”

  “How did she know to contact Sam?” I ask, but then the dots connect in my head before he has a chance to answer. “Your opposition research, of course.”

  “She’s good at this sort of thing,” David replies. “She’s lived with me for long enough, she’s picked up on my talent for exacting the most damage possible with the littlest possible effort. I would be impressed if she didn’t ruin my whole life in the process. And if she wasn’t threatening to take my son away from me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and for the first time in a long time, I mean it. I realize what a colossal mess of things we’ve made, how we’ve been given our lives back only to take them apart ourselves, of our own accord. And I wonder if our SUBs have, in fact, made us more human than we were, less able to tamp down our fears and our desires, made us feel too much all at once. Maybe people aren’t meant to feel things so powerfully, as we have, and to act on them.

  “Why did you do it, David?” I ask. “Why try to keep it from passing the FDA?”

  David lets out a long breath, sits back in his chair. “Turns out, that was the price of getting me into the program. One of my corporate donors wants their drug in the next trial, so this one can’t go through.”

  “Jesus, that’s disgusting.”

  He nods. “I wish you were right. I wish it had something to do with God. At least I’d have some . . . conviction to cling to. But it was just blind self-preservation, in the end.”

  “And the crazy thing is, I understand,” I reply, remembering sitting on that bathroom floor with Sam’s arms tight around me. How riotous the fear was. How I would have offered up anything I had to the person who could spare me everything that came after. “But unfortunately for you, it’s just another of those things that I can understand, and no one else will.”

  He walks to the window, peering out over my view of Printer’s Row. “You know I always hated this city? The Democratic machine, the corruption. God, the winters. But it’s really sort of beautiful now, isn’t it? I can see why you love it the way you do.” He turns back to me. “I’ve missed you. Even when I was busy hating you, I missed you.”

  I look away, because I can’t return the sentiment. I have missed David, but in the way I’ve missed Connie and Linda and even Dr. Bernard. When I wake up at night and instinctually reach across my bed, I’m not reaching for David. I try to divert the subject from my own lengthy hesitation.

  “You know, I ran into Linda at the grocery store a few months back.”

  “Yeah, I ran in to her a while back too,” David replies, a bit of a smile breaking across his face. “I think it’s safe to say that none of us really knew each other at all, no matter how many meetings we went to.”

  “Sure, but we still knew each other better than anyone else.”

  “You’re probably right.” He looks wistful, and then he clears his throat. “So what are you going to do now? Seems like you have a pretty clean slate to work with here.”

  “I don’t really know.” I don’t tell him the truth, about how, for the past few months, I’ve been seeing everything in shades of light and darkness and texture, everything as a potential photograph. The way I can feel myself changing, when I hold my camera, when I peer through the lens. That secret bit of hope is mine for now. Something for me to cherish alone.

  “If you still want to be reckless, you could come with me to Washington. I have an apartment there.”

  “Be your mistress?” I ask.

  “Or a friend. I don’t have many friends there. Gets lonely,” he replies, though his expression hasn’t changed. He doesn’t appear as vulnerable as he sounds. He could just as easily be making small talk.

  “I’m not your friend, David,” I reply. “We were never friends, were we?”

  “No,” he replies, shrugging. “I guess we weren’t.” He brushes my hair off my shoulder, a familiar, intimate sort of gesture.

  “I’m going back there in a few weeks. I finally have to face all of this shit. And for the first time in my life, I have no idea what to say.”

  I lean forward and kiss him. A last kiss, to match all of the firsts we’ve enjoyed together. And I realize how good it feels, to be kind to David, despite all of his failings. To forgive him, a little, because of everyone in our lives, we’re probably most like each other. And it feels a little like forgiving myself.

  “You tell them what you told me,” I say. “You tell them that God put a gun to your head, and you did what you had to do to stay alive. And that not one of them would have done any different.”

  “You think that will be enough?” he asks, his face so open, his exhaustion so evident that I wish I could draw him. Instead, I rise and get my camera.

  Connie

  Harry arranges a business lunch at Cointreau, one of the new Los Angeles restaurants that keep cropping up, lasting for a few glittering months, and then dying off when everyone realizes you always leave hungry. It’s me and Jay Cunningham, whom I knew when he was John Carrion, the up-and-coming producer. It seems he’s arrived, as I spot him and Harry at a table across the room. I stride in past the well-manicured clientele, catching s
tares as I pass in my red skirt and white blouse, clothes that on anyone else would look simple, bland even. I may as well have walked in wearing a bikini, the way these businessmen are looking at me. I hated the looks I got when I was withered and sickly, the stares that were so much worse than the people who would not look at me at all. This is an entirely different feeling, but just as invasive.

  My model friends and I used to joke that Jay was so greasy he must have bathed in Vaseline, and the sentiment holds true even now as he takes my hand before I drop into a seat across from him. He’s tan, very tan, L.A. tan, almost orange. Like he’s been hitting the salon to compliment his day-to-day sojourns out in the merciless California sun. His hair is slicked back and the green of his eyes, which would be pleasant on someone else, clashes with his fake skin tone and gives him the look of a viper sizing up his dinner.

  There’s already a dirty martini in front of my plate. I raise an eyebrow at him.

  “You think I’ve forgotten what you drink?” he asks, lifting his own drink in a mock toast. I smile and pretend to sip, though even bringing the glass to my face, even breathing the fumes of it as I wet my lips, feels like huffing wood varnish.

  “Jay is trying to find someone for the indie flick he’s filming here next summer,” Harry says, motioning lazily back and forth between the two of us with a thick hand.

  “Straight to business, hmm?” Jay says, folding his hands in front of him. “He’s right. Our talent got pregnant and dropped out. Can’t shoot her pole dancing when she’s the size of Texas, now can we?”

  “Pole dancing?” I ask, though we’re interrupted by the waiter, who takes our orders and bustles off with admirable efficiency.

  “It’s a dark comedy about a single mother,” Jay replies. “Late twenties, early thirties. Struggling, with an over-bright but difficult little kid. Takes up a job at a gentlemen’s club where she meets a down-on-his-luck doctor with a gambling problem, and what do you know? Sparks fly. Now, the studio is fighting us on this, but we’re looking for an R rating so there might be some nudity. Nothing gratuitous, of course.”