The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  There is an abandoned building full of squatters next to ours. Sometimes we have to step over homeless people sleeping under tarps on the sidewalk and we crane our necks upward, listening to the fights filtering out of windows.

  Our building is of the solid brick sort and we live at the very top, on the fifth floor. I will trip on these stairs over and over, sometimes drunk, sometimes carrying bags of groceries, other times for no reason at all. In the base of the building is a little deli where we go to buy cigarettes and six-packs of Bass Ale and pints of Häagen-Dazs in the summer when our little window unit air conditioner isn’t enough to combat the sweltering heat.

  An older Puerto Rican couple lives next door to us. The wife never emerges from the apartment, and all day long the husband travels up and down the stairs carrying enormous plastic bags filled with empty bottles and cans for recycling money. For years, I’ll say that this is how they pay their rent, and then one summer when they finally go out of town I’ll sneak a peek at the rent slip when I see it wedged in their door.

  Because of New York’s rent-control laws, and because they have lived there so long, their rent is only $65. Ours, for the same size apartment, is $1,450.

  As we trudge up the stairs, to our little apartment on the top floor, I can hear the phone ringing from halfway down the hall.

  Colin fumbles with the keys, his fingers cold. The phone bleats just inside. We push through the door finally, and into the darkened kitchen. Colin is the first to reach the phone. A cursory hello, then silence. He hands it to me.

  It’s Julie, he says.

  I’m still tugging off my gloves, unwinding my scarf from my neck. Why is Julie calling? We spoke two days ago.

  Julie is one of my best friends. She is twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Georgia. We went to high school in Atlanta together and despite the disparate landscapes of London, Vermont, New York, and Athens that pepper our post-high-school life, we have remained close.

  But still we only talk every few weeks, filling the interim with fat, handwritten letters and the occasional e-mail. Why is she calling only two days after such a catch-up session?

  I hold the phone to my ear.

  Julie?

  Colin rolls his eyes and disappears into the living room.

  Claire?

  Her voice is soft, like the freshly fallen snow that drifted across the windowsill two nights ago. She continues without pause.

  Claire, I have something to tell you.

  And then she just says it:

  I’m in the hospital and I have leukemia.

  Her voice breaks here, her breathing cascading into rough whispers across the phone line and into my ear.

  Everything stops.

  What do you mean?

  It’s all I can manage.

  Her explanation unfolds like an instruction pamphlet: backward, forward, upside down, all of it connected, all of it unavoidable. My brain turns her words over and over, trying to fit them together in a way that makes sense, but it’s impossible to fold it all back together into a neat package, into something palatable.

  Yesterday, at her medical science internship, she blacked out while peering into a microscope. She was taken to the hospital, where blood tests immediately revealed an invasion of white blood cells. More than she would ever need. Millions. Trillions. Filling her up, destroying everything in their path.

  Leukemia.

  It was a simple diagnosis. The news was delivered with one brutal blow, everything shifting in an instant. Chemo, radiation, radical tests and treatments, a college semester dropped out of, a life completely changed.

  I sit on the couch with Colin after I hang up the phone. We each light a cigarette.

  I have to go to her, I think to myself. One night, a few months ago, Julie and I stayed up late, talking on the phone. Colin was at work and I had the house to myself. He had been particularly sullen, particularly controlling that week. I was crying to Julie. She was one of the few people with whom I actually talked about my relationship.

  Sometimes she felt a little fearful of her boyfriend too.

  Let’s make a pact, she said.

  I nodded, sniffling into the phone.

  If one of us ever breaks up, we’ll drop everything and be there. That way it won’t be so scary.

  I nodded again. Okay. Yes. Definitely. Drop everything.

  I think about that phone call as I sit on the couch next to Colin, Julie’s news sinking into me.

  She’s going to die, I say.

  The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

  In the months ahead I will retract this prophecy. I will remain positive, along with the rest of our friends, that Julie will in fact not die.

  But she does. Of course she does.

  Of course Julie dies.

  OVER THE NEXT YEAR I fly to Atlanta on five separate occasions to be with Julie as she undergoes chemo, radiation, and an experimental stem cell transplant.

  I sit with our friends for long hours in waiting rooms as we while away the time before we are allotted a brief and plastic-gloved visit to our beautiful friend who has lost all of her hair.

  Julie lies pale in her hospital bed, and I hold one of her hands in mine. It is near the end, January again, and the stem cell transplant did not work.

  I don’t know anyone who’s died, she says.

  I am crying, but Julie is calm. There is a sense of wonder in her voice.

  The next day when I return to her room she is unconscious, her breath raspy and shallow.

  She dies the next night.

  Her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. That’s what tragedy does to you, I am learning. The sadness and the wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. I feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into life.

  After Julie’s death I return to New York with an empty feeling, and I go about my days with dead eyes.

  Work and school, then home again to the apartment with Colin. Julie’s illness had provided a brief respite from my relationship woes. In the face of so much fragility I once again felt grateful for Colin’s firm grip.

  But now she is gone and nothing seems to matter. Winter slides into spring and then into summer again. I am on break from my classes, picking up extra shifts at Republic and tilting my head to the soft breeze that pushes through the screens in the living room windows.

  THE MONTHS SLIP by and nothing changes. Not the East Village apartment I inhabit. Not my job at Republic or my classes at the New School. Not Julie’s absence or my fear of Colin.

  At night he thrashes in his sleep. Some nights he flings himself out of bed, attacking phantoms rushing forth in the darkness, destroying the alarm clock, knocking over a lamp.

  Other nights are more predictable. He puts on Bob Dylan and just sits in front of the stereo for hours, a glass in his hand, his body rigid.

  Sometimes there is nothing. Sometimes there is punching, kicking, breaking.

  He never hits me. Not once.

  But I am still afraid.

  Daytime always brings peace. We wake close to noon, sunshine skimming across the hardwood floors, lighting all the darkest corners and warming the bottles by the door.

  I start going to Cape Cod regularly. I take the Peter Pan bus from Port Authority, through Connecticut and Rhode Island and into Massachusetts, where it crosses the Sagamore Bridge onto the Cape.

  My aunt picks me up at the bus station, my grandmother sitting up front in the car, and they drive me back home with them to the old Victorian house on the beach in Harwichport. I’ve learned how to be close with them, even though in the beginning it felt like a betrayal of my mother.

  I sleep for long hours upstairs, under the cranberry quilt, the salty ocean air soft on my skin. At night I sit next to my grandmother in her reclining chair, and we watch Jeopardy! and hold hands.

  I’ve been thinking about you, she says, and pats my arm. Her hands are cool and dry, the skin so
ft like paper.

  I take long walks out on the jetty, stepping carefully over the rocks, and remember when I used to do this with my mother.

  Mom, can you see me?

  I wish I could talk to her about Colin. I know she would help me leave him.

  Back in New York I sit up late trying to figure it out. Colin is at work, and I think about what it would be like to just leave, to disappear out the door and never come back.

  But then I think about my cat and my trunk full of journals and letters from my mom. I think about the streets of the East Village at two in the morning and about my bank account, which is almost always empty.

  I think about just telling him that I want to leave, and then I shudder with the thought. I imagine him throwing my belongings out the window; picture him hurling my cat against a wall.

  I’m not sure he would really do these things, but I’m also not sure he wouldn’t.

  One night I dream that it was really him who killed his sister. I wake up, sobbing, gasping, and, before I can reconsider, I tell him about the dream.

  He is quiet for days after that, but I’ll never again be able to shake the tiny seed of doubt about his innocence.

  I call my aunt on Cape Cod one afternoon, and when she answers the phone I break down crying. I want to tell her about Colin, want to ask her to help me, but I don’t know what to say.

  School is overwhelming this year, I say instead.

  Oh, she says, I wish I could crawl through the phone line and put my arms around you.

  When she says this, I am struck dumb with the memory of my mother saying the same thing to me once when I was seventeen and on an overnight trip, with some friends, visiting colleges. I had called her, sick and tired and wishing I was home.

  Oh, she had said, I wish I could crawl through the phone line and put my arms around you.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER I come home from work. I have stayed out later than usual, drinking with my coworkers after Republic has closed, something that Colin usually disapproves of, but I’ve been pushing the limits lately.

  Haynes had been part of the group, and it was the first time we were ever together outside of work. We sat next to each other in the booth, our knees touching, and I greedily consumed the thrill of it, not realizing how thirsty I was for something so sweet.

  I am tipsy when I stumble out of the cab on Fifth Street and clomp my way up the stairs. I fumble with my keys, struggling drunkenly to fit them into the proper locks. My efforts make a scraping sound, metallic and grating. Finally the lock turns and I begin to push the door open.

  Before I can even cross the threshold the door is slammed back in my face. A man yells loudly, flooding me with fear.

  I’M GOING TO KILL YOU! The words are garbled, forceful things.

  Someone is inside. Someone has broken into our apartment.

  I start to back away down the hall, the fluorescent lights illuminating the grimy walls, the filthy staircase.

  I’m panicking. Where should I go?

  In a split second I run through different scenarios, all with the same ending: I see myself stumbling down the stairs, being slain halfway down by whoever is in our apartment right now. I see my body slumping to the floor.

  Before I can take another step, the door opens. Colin steps out, rubbing his eyes.

  I am frozen, halfway down the hallway. The yellow light bathes us both in the sad place we are in.

  He was the one yelling. He was drunk and asleep. He thought I was an intruder.

  I am the phantom.

  A WEEK LATER I curl up on a friend’s bed, crying myself to sleep. I am house-sitting while she is away and I have been spending long hours in her apartment, trying to figure out a way to leave Colin.

  I write a long letter to an unborn, imaginary daughter.

  Don’t ever find yourself in this place, I write, tears streaming down my face. Even if I am gone and you are alone, be a stronger woman than I am.

  I go home and sit on the couch, waiting for Colin to get out of the shower. I am finally going to do it.

  I am going to leave him.

  I am shaking as I stare out at the Chrysler Building.

  He walks through the kitchen on the way to his closet.

  Colin, I call out. We need to talk.

  He stands in the doorway, pulling on pants, a shirt.

  I’m leaving, I say.

  I pause, bracing myself. But nothing comes.

  Colin buttons his pants and goes back into the kitchen, where I hear him open a bottle of beer.

  He reappears in the doorway.

  Well, he says, let’s talk.

  He listens calmly as I explain all the reasons I want to leave. I tell him how sick I am of him telling me what I can and can’t do, can and can’t wear, who I can and can’t be friends with. I tell him that he scares me. I tell him that I am sad. So very sad.

  He listens and he smokes, and we talk and after a while none of it seems so terrible and I can’t remember why I’ve been so upset about it in the first place.

  And just like that, things go back to normal for a while.

  A few weeks later I am up early one morning so that I can catch a bus to the Cape. Colin is still asleep, and when I get out of the shower all our phones are blinking with messages. I scroll through the call history on my cell phone and see that it was Colin’s father calling.

  My heart drops. I imagine that his mother has been in an accident. Or worse, that my father is dead.

  I push the buttons to call him back, but there is something wrong with the phone and the call won’t go through. I try again and again until finally I hear ringing, then Colin’s father’s voice on the other end.

  Are you okay?

  What do you mean?

  Turn on the television, he says.

  In the living room I fumble with the remote, pushing the buttons until the screen pops into life.

  The second tower has just been hit. Two great plumes of smoke pour upward into the sky.

  Chapter Six

  1993, I AM FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.

  I AM SITTING IN the back of Ms. Cusak’s tenth-grade algebra class when I meet Zoe. Technically it’s not the back since all the tables are arranged in a circle, but it’s as far as I can get from the center of the room.

  Ms. Cusak is the only thing I dislike about my new high school. Well, her and Algebra I. Sarah Cusak is in her midthirties, single, and overly tanned, with stringy hair. She is the basketball coach and the math teacher, and she constantly tries to impress upon us how cool it is to be thirty. She tells us stories about her apartment complex and the bars that she hangs out in on the weekends. She favors athletes over the weirder of us.

  Ms. Cusak will attend my mother’s funeral in two years, and the pity her presence evokes for me will somehow be worse than my shaved head and too-short dress.