And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  I thought about leaving Tom a note. Telling him about the affair, about the years he wasted waiting for a wife who was already gone, even before she was still and silent and confined to her bed. But it seems doubly cruel now, to tell him all of that, and to leave as well. It was so much easier when all of our conversations were distilled down to two words. One for no. Two for yes.

  I think about leaving something for the kids, for Jack and Katie. There’s a gnawing ache within my chest when I think of them, like hunger, as if my heart is starving at the thought of them. But I still think of them as babies, as the children I had before the accident. I feel like a wicked stepmother now, the usurper of their idea of a mother, of the perfect image they’d grown up envisioning when they looked at old photographs of me. I am a woman who does not know them now.

  I will leave tomorrow. I will leave this house in the morning and board the Purple Line and head into the city. I will have my suitcase. I’ll buy a ticket for the bus. And I will be gone. No fingerprints. No ID. No pictures of me; no way to track me down. The possibility of it is so massive I feel as if I could drown in it like an avalanche of cold snow.

  Maybe I’ll get off the bus in a small town somewhere. Maybe there will be a diner, somewhere I can ask if they’re looking for help waiting tables. And maybe it will be the sort of place where people fall in love easily. Maybe it will be the sort of place where long-lost people congregate, where twins impersonate each other and babies are born to the wrong people and families are built and shatter and reform again and again. Maybe they’ll be waiting for a woman who spent eight years paralyzed before getting a new body, a woman with a world full of secrets inside her. Maybe that’ll be the sort of place I’ll go.

  Connie

  Dr. Grath’s door is closed when I get back from L.A. I’m a bit disappointed, but not altogether surprised. I wonder if he assumed I wouldn’t be coming back this time. It’s not exactly out of the realm of possibility; after all, it was only yesterday that I learned Harry was not prepared to pay for my flight back to Chicago. I had to pawn one of the necklaces he bought me, all while he left pleading voicemails on my phone, imploring me to reconsider Jay Cunningham’s offer of the lead in Almost Ruins in the strongest terms imaginable. But I don’t want it. I don’t want to be paid for.

  I knock on Dr. Grath’s door, already smelling the skunky whisper of smoke drifting out into the hallway. I hear him mumble something from inside, so I let myself in. His eyes are half-lidded and bloodshot, and he sits slouched in his chair.

  “Who is it?” he asks.

  “It’s me,” I reply, sitting on the couch next to him. The TV is off, and something in that bothers me. I wonder when he’s eaten last, or last ventured out of his apartment. “It looks like you started without me, old man.”

  He chuckles a bit, raising the joint in his right hand. “Well, you’ve been a bit tricky to track down lately. Not like the alley cat you once were, always showing up for supper. One can’t wait forever, can one?”

  “I guess not,” I reply, taking the joint from him and inhaling.

  “I thought you’d be off somewhere warm, making love to the camera by now,” he says. “Every time you leave, it gets harder and harder to imagine you coming back.”

  I hold the smoke in, letting its itch turn into a burn within my lungs before I let it out in a long stream. I contemplate my options.

  “What if I lied to you?” I ask, passing him the joint.

  “Lied? About what?” Dr. Grath’s blind eyes widen just a bit.

  “About what I look like now. You know, Grace Kelly. All that.”

  “About the cloning?” He’s confused. His wiry eyebrows try to touch like trapeze artists attempting a midair catch.

  “No, that was the truth. I just . . . exaggerated the rest a bit. A lot, maybe.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Grath says, and I can’t tell if he’s at all surprised. Maybe he’s disappointed.

  “I went to L.A. To see my agent. Hoping that he could get me an acting gig, maybe some modeling.” I sigh, trying to sound dejected. “He said he didn’t have anything for me. He said he couldn’t market a look like mine anymore. Too classic.”

  “I like classic,” he says. I laugh a little.

  “I know you do, old man. You don’t have a choice.”

  “So what are you going to do?” he asks. I shrug, though I know he can’t see it. It’s habit. A habit that was born long before I entered this body; impossible to break.

  “I guess I just stay here. My agent said he might be able to get me some more work here in Chicago.”

  “Surely you can do better than that,” he says, and I shrug again. “I know what’s going on here. You’re waiting for me to qualify for this SUBlife thing, so I can look like Monty Clift again, and we can run off together, is that it?” I smile and there are tears in my eyes, though he can see neither. I suspect he knows what I do, that Dr. Grath is one generation too old for immortality, that he will grow old and die the way people were always intended to, a death that is the sort the rest of us have always hoped for.

  And if he did get his sight back, everything would be ruined. He would see my lie, see that I am every inch what I described myself to be after the transfer, and that I gave up all the possibilities that my beauty afforded me and stayed with him, in this dingy apartment building. Because I don’t want to be bought by men like Jack Cunningham. And because even now I’m afraid of what might happen to Dr. Grath in my absence, that without me he’d drift into some final oblivion, stop eating or watching his Turner Classic Movies or going through his photo albums. That he would grow lost in this little apartment. I want to be here to keep him from drifting away. And he would never forgive me for that.

  “Exactly,” I say, turning my hand over so I hold the roughness of his palm in mine. “Exactly.”

  He doesn’t think he will ever be selected for SUBlife. He’s lying, and I know it, and I let him. I wonder if he knows I’m lying too, and is letting me just the same. Either of our truths would mean I have to leave here, to leave him behind, to go out into the world and live through all the danger and possibility afforded to a woman born with my face. I don’t want to leave. He doesn’t want me to go. So there is nothing left for us but to love each other, and lie.

  Linda

  I wake early on the morning I’m going to leave. Tom is still asleep next to me, breathing in heavy, open-mouthed snores. One of the kids is up, I’m not sure which one, but I hear the TV on downstairs. I try not to think about them. They will be better without me, without a mother like mine, silent and remote, a mother who will leave them eventually anyway, and will make the leaving their fault. I lay in a bed for years pretending I had no history, that I was no one, because my mother chose to see my tragedy and raise it with her own.

  Still, memories wash up. I indulge today, only today, because what I am about to do is such a high crime that any little indulgences along the way will be surely, fully eclipsed later. I play the game, the one I never allowed myself to play in the hospital, tracing my way back, trying to pinpoint the moment that would have prevented my accident and spared me all of this. Don’t change lanes. Don’t get in the car. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t sleep with Scott, again and again, no matter how much you want to. Don’t wish you hadn’t married Tom. Don’t marry Tom. Don’t get pregnant three months before graduation.

  That is where I must stop. Because I cannot, no matter what I do, wish away my daughter. I can remember, so clearly, that morning. Fainting after speed work at cross-country practice, how panicked Tom looked when he met me at the health center, wrapping me up with both of his arms and taking a deep breath of my hair. Anemia, they said. Could I be pregnant?

  I told them I wasn’t. There was no way, we were always so careful. But as Tom drove me home we talked about the nights when we weren’t so careful. Admitting to each other the things we couldn’t admit to anyone else, as we always did. We stopped at Walgreens on the way home, and I waited in the car whi
le Tom bought me a pregnancy test and the biggest bottle of water they had. I chugged while he drove.

  I made him wait outside the bathroom of our little apartment, because no matter how long we’d been dating, I still couldn’t pee when he was in the same room. Then I made him plug his ears and sing Tom Petty outside the door so he couldn’t hear, and he did so with such gusto that I was laughing so hard I nearly missed the stick.

  “I’ll buy you dinner if it’s positive,” Tom said when I finally let him back in the bathroom, as we sat on the counter and waited for the timer to run down.

  “And if it’s negative?” I asked.

  “No way.”

  “Cheapskate,” I said, just as the pink lines appeared in the window of the test. It was a feeling of my entire world clicking out of joint, a train derailing at high speed, running along without tracks for a few perilous moments while everyone inside held their breath, waiting for its inevitable tumble. Tom’s face fell in a small way, and I saw my first glimpse of the look I would come to know so well, the couldn’t you have done better look in his eyes that seemed to make all of it my fault. But then he took a breath and smiled, and there was resignation in his expression.

  “Well,” Tom said, “where do you want to go to dinner? And will you marry me?”

  I check again to make sure I have everything I need, ruffling gently through my stacks of clothes, the money I’ve pilfered from Tom, the hair brush and toothbrush and box of tampons. These are the things a person needs for life, I think. Not a trunk of keepsakes or a collection of stolen artifacts. These things, the practical things, should belong to a person without history.

  I leave the suitcase in its place for now. It’s too early to drag it down, to catch a train into the city, to buy a bus ticket at Union Station. It’s still dark outside. Tom is still asleep. So I descend the stairs, with my mind’s eye still firmly on the suitcase, on my escape. I’ve had good practice at this, being a woman who resides in two worlds at the same time.

  The TV is flashing a bright Looney Tunes pallet of color across the carpet, but no one is watching it. I can hear a commotion from the kitchen, and I walk in just in time to see Jack on his knees on the counter, reaching into a high cabinet and pulling something down, bringing down a glass measuring cup with it. The cup shatters on the countertop beneath him. I can see a shard of glass open up the skin of his leg, and he’s so startled by it that he teeters on the edge of the counter.

  Something kicks me forward, an impulse so ingrained that I don’t have to think before I’m moving, grabbing Jack by the waist. He lets out a little wail of surprise, then bursts into tears. I haul him over to the sink and sit him on the edge of the counter, wetting a paper towel and pressing it to the bleeding cut on his leg.

  “Mommy,” he says, between hiccupping sobs. His face is crumpled and wet.

  “You’re okay,” I say, remembering how I would say it to Katie when she first started walking, when she would plop down onto the cushion of her diaper, looking up at me with huge eyes, trying to gauge by my reaction whether it was a fall worthy of tears. I react the way I used to with her, wiping the fat little teardrops from his cheeks and kissing him on the forehead. The smell of his hair is different from what I remember, the powder and milk smell of babies. My boy. “My poor boy,” I whisper.

  “I was trying to make pancakes. For you and Daddy,” he blubbers. “I couldn’t reach the mixing bowl. I broke one of the good measuring cups.”

  “That’s all right,” I reply, checking his cut. “Don’t you worry about that.” It’s not deep, just a glancing touch of sharp glass. The bleeding is starting to ebb even now. “Oh, this isn’t too bad,” I say. “Where does Daddy keep the Band-Aids?”

  He motions to a cabinet over the sink. There are two boxes, one Cinderella, one Batman. Tom is good at this, this parenting thing. I pull out a huge Batman bandage and apply it to Jack’s leg. He seems pleased. His tears are beginning to ebb as well.

  “Why were you making pancakes, Jack?” I ask, as my phone begins to vibrate. I ignore it.

  “It’s July eighteenth,” he replies, and then he looks at me expectantly.

  “What’s July eighteenth?” I ask. He looks puzzled, then must assume I’m playing a game with him, because he breaks into a smile. My phone buzzes again, cutting into our conversation. Who on earth would be calling at this hour?

  “Your anniversary with Daddy,” he replies, clearly proud that he passed my test. “We celebrated it every year you were gone.” I nod, because suddenly I can’t speak anymore. Instead, I pull my phone from the pocket of my sweatpants, clearing my throat before I answer.

  “Hello?”

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” comes the voice over the line, a familiar voice. A male voice, his tone so wry I can picture the self-satisfied grin that must be playing over his face.

  “No,” I say, and feel myself smile, as if I were an observer of this body’s impulses.

  “So, tell me Linda, are you staying out of trouble?”

  I set Jack up with some cereal at the kitchen table and go upstairs, returning to our bedroom. I sit on the foot of our bed. Tom glances up at me when he feels the mattress shift.

  “Hey,” he says, propping himself up on his elbows. There’s a red crease in the side of his face from the pillow. “What’s up?”

  “I’m not pregnant,” I reply.

  “What?” he sits up, fast, as if there was a task he’s forgotten to handle and the result has been the loss of our child. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not pregnant anymore.” I say it slowly, trying to keep my tone even. Trying to keep from repeating it again and again until he finally figures out what the words mean, that it’s too late for anything to be done, that all of his questions are useless.

  He’s silent for a moment, staring at me aghast. “When?” he finally asks.

  “A few weeks ago. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Oh God,” he says, and reaches toward me, his arms outstretched. I put up both of my hands to ward him off.

  “No,” I say. I can see it when he changes gears, when anger pours into his expression.

  “Well, why the hell wouldn’t you tell me when it happened, Linda?” he asks, his voice a bit too loud for the quiet, lingering night.

  “Because I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I needed time,” I reply, still calm, trying to stay calm.

  “Jesus, what about what I need?” he asks, nearly shouting, his voice high, an almost comical pitch. “All of these years, all of it. I can’t even remember what it feels like to need something and to get it.”

  “What did you need, Tom?” I ask.

  “I needed,” he begins, but catches himself. He slumps a bit, his bare shoulders sagging. He’s a very pale shade of white, as if he hasn’t seen the sun in a while. Small, wayward hairs curl at odd intervals on his shoulders, the first true sign of age. He is so sad, and so decent, that he will not answer. So I do it for him.

  “You needed me to die. In the hospital, in those eight years. That’s what you needed.”

  His knobby fingers cover his face. “Yes,” he whispers. “Because I loved you. And it was awful. I just lost you, and lost you, and there was no end to it.”

  “You know, it’s funny,” I say, wishing I could cry too, to prove to him that I’m still human. But it’s impossible to conjure the emotion. For me, it’s a simple truth, one from which I did not need to hide. “I wished for the same thing.”

  “God, I wish it could have been different for us,” he says, his voice strangled. I want to love this man, love him enough at least to comfort him. But I don’t have it in me.

  “I know.” Thinking back, this is not so different from how we’ve always been, even before the accident. I’ve always been the strong one, the one who sets the course for us. It must have been so difficult for him, with me gone.

  “I know about Scott,” he says then. Scott. I think of the park bench, my children asleep in the back of our
van. “He came to the house a few weeks after your accident. I had no idea who he was, until he broke down sobbing in our living room. He said he needed to see me. That I was the only one who would understand what he was going through. We ended up talking, for, I don’t know. Hours probably.”

  He pauses, and I can’t imagine anything that might come next. It is as if my entire estimation of Tom, and everything he is capable of, has evaporated into the air.

  “It was, in a strange way, just what I needed,” he says. “To talk to someone who knew you the way I did.”

  My body is rigid with astonishment. I almost want to take my pulse, to make sure everything has not shut down from the surge of shame and confusion roiling within me. When I speak, my voice is breathless, a child’s voice.

  “Why didn’t you leave me there? Divorce me? If you knew?” I think of all the different ways his life might have proceeded without me, all of the mothers my children could have had. Mothers who were more capable and more selfless than me. Tom reaches forward and takes one of my hands. His is so warm, I feel only half-alive by comparison.

  “Because you would have had no one,” he says.

  I pull my hand from his. There is nothing else to be done, because I will never be able to love this man in the way he deserves. I think of my suitcase in the closet. I think of the world, the whole world, that exists outside this house and the people in it.

  “We can try again,” he says. “For a baby.”

  “It’s not going to make a difference,” I reply.

  “Are you going to leave?” he asks, and he looks so much like his son, our son, with his red, blotchy face, that I can almost love him for the resemblance alone. Almost.

  “Did you want to have a baby to keep me from leaving?”

  He doesn’t reply. We are at an impasse, we look at each other for a long time. Finally, I blink. Once.

  “Jack tried to make us pancakes and broke a measuring cup. Can you clean it up?” I leave before he can say anything, shutting myself in the bathroom and listening as he plods down the stairs to the kitchen, where my children are eating their breakfast and trying to avoid the shards of glass.