“You ordered for me?”
Amy nods.
Wendy smiles. She plants paint-stained palms on the table, leans across her hot plate to plant her mouth on her girlfriend’s, not caring that they’re in the middle of a restaurant in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, not caring that people stare. Amy has always loved that about Wendy — the easy obliviousness to what other people see and think. Amy has always cared what others think far too much; Wendy is changing her without even meaning to.
#
It’s a month after that bold restaurant kiss that Amy comes home to find the door to their apartment unlocked. It’s not terribly surprising — it’s Wendy, after all, and no matter how many times Amy reminds her to lock the door, the woman’s flighty, dreamy brain just can’t seem to hold the instruction.
“Wendy?” Amy calls as she steps inside, closing the door with her butt and dropping her keys into the hand-blown glass bowl on the coffee table. “Wen?” She thinks she hears noise coming from the bedroom, so she heads in that direction. She expects to find Wendy on the bed with her sketchpad in her lap, music playing softly on her laptop as she stares out the window in pensive silence.
Wendy’s on the bed, alright. And there’s something in her lap. But it isn’t a sketchpad. It’s a face. And the sounds Amy heard? The sounds are coming from Wendy. They’re sounds Amy knows and loves, but they are private sounds, and she never thought she’d be hearing them like this.
Wendy’s eyes are closed, her head is thrown back, her mouth is open. And the face between her legs — the face that, judging from the rest of the bare body attached to it, must belong to a male — is obscured by Wendy’s thighs. Even though Amy’s never seen the naked legs and back and hairy ass before her, she recognizes the back of the head. It’s something about the bald spot, the way the wispy hair is combed over it but only poorly conceals it. It’s the bald spot that belongs one of Wendy’s MFA professors. Amy can’t quite remember his name. Not now. Not in this moment.
The bundle of textbooks and binders cradled in Amy’s arms tumbles to the ground with what might be a loud clatter, but Amy can’t hear it. She can’t hear anything anymore — she can’t hear the traffic outside the apartment, she can’t hear Wendy’s whimpers of pleasure, she can’t hear the sound of licking. The only thing she can hear is the sound of her heart, which sounds like a military marching cadence sped up to an unnatural rate. Blood rushes into her ears. Her legs water as if they are melting away from her. Without willing them to, her hands fly to her face, covering her nose and mouth.
My God, the rational part of her brain thinks, I’m having a heart attack.
When the books hit the wooden floor, the man’s head jerks up from between Wendy’s legs, and Wendy’s eyes open.
Amy can see Wendy’s mouth moving, can see words forming, but Amy can’t hear them, either.
Amy? is what the mouth looks like it’s saying.
Amy should know; she’s seen that mouth say her name hundreds of times before. Under all circumstances. For many years.
But never a circumstance like this.
Amy? the mouth seems to ask again.
There’s movement now; Wendy’s trying to get up, the MFA professor with the bald spot rolls away from her, looks in Amy’s direction with an expression on his face like a guilty child caught eating sweets. Except it’s not chocolate that smears the black-and-grey hairs of his thin goatee.
If it really was a heart attack, I’d probably be dead by now, Amy reasons.
It’s the last thought she has for a couple minutes, because she turns her back on the nightmare scene before her, intending to walk out of the room. But she doesn’t get far. She takes only one step, and somehow the world goes black.
She regains consciousness on her own bedroom floor three minutes later, flat on her back, Theories of Management and Leadership textbook digging into her spine. Wendy’s concerned face hovers inches above her own, damp palms on Amy’s cheeks. Damp palms coated in the unfamiliar scent of a stranger.
“Baby? Amy?” Wendy says. And Amy observes that she can apparently hear again, which she takes to be a good sign. “Oh — thank God. Thank God, you’re awake. When you fell, I thought — I really thought that maybe you — ”
“Get your hands off of me,” Amy says. She can hear, but she can’t see clearly anymore, because tears blur her vision. Amy blinks away the tears, pushes her girlfriend back, manages to stand on two unsteady feet. She grabs her keys from the hand-blown glass bowl, slams the apartment door on her way out.
It’s the first panic attack she’s ever had. The second one comes when she’s driving away from the apartment complex five minutes later, and she doesn’t even see the silver pickup truck until the moment before it slams into the driver’s side. The world goes black yet again, and this time it’s Grace Adler’s face that hovers above her own when she wakes — not in an apartment this time, but in a hospital bed.
“Ames? Are you actually awake?” Grace asks. “You had me worried out of my mind.”
The panic attacks become a regular feature of Amy’s life after that. They come on unexpectedly and predictably at the same time. Every time a meeting at work gets a little too stressful. Every time her step-mother calls her to give her more bad news about her father’s health. Even when it seems like there’s no reason to panic, a panic attack comes on. It comes on, and she tries to laugh at herself, Why are you doing this, now? This is stupid. Stop it, but telling her body to knock it off never works.
She tries medication. She gets counseling. But although they get fewer and further between, the attacks never leave. Neither do the scars that crisscross her abdomen, the left-over battle wounds from the car accident on the worst day of her life.
#
Back to the present
Like the rest of me, like my mother, like my sister, I have a big motherfucking mouth. And I’ve never been shy about using it. But with Amy standing there? Her feet rooted to the floor, her hands over her nose and mouth? Staring at me with these huge brown eyes full of a pain so sharp I can practically feel it slicing through my fucking soul?
I lose the ability to speak.
Not that I don’t try. I open my big mouth. I try to will a sound to come out — even a single syllable, a squeak. But nothing comes. The moment stretches out like Silly Putty, going on and on and fucking on without breaking, Amy and me and Jenny all standing in middle of Dillan’s women’s restroom in a collective, dumbfounded silence.
Amy’s the one who moves first, swaying a little as she spins on her heel and heads away from us.
“Amy? Wait,” I call as she walks away.
But of course my words are already too late.
I don’t think anything about her unsteady gate. At the time, it doesn’t even register. We’ve both been drinking, after all, and she’s smaller than I am, and the fact that she’s stumbling a little as she pushes out of the women’s bathroom doesn’t seem surprising, given everything.
But that’s because I don’t know about Wendy and the MFA professor and the panic attack and the car accident. I don’t know about Katarina or Vera or Terri. I don’t have any #throwbackthursday photos of Amy. Not yet.
Someone at this party does know about Amy’s panic attacks, though. Which is why a few seconds later, when Amy collapses, pitching forward against a table to the dramatic accompaniment of splashing drinks and shattering glass, Grace Adler is the one who reaches her first, just as she collapses to the floor.
“She’s having a panic attack!” Grace yells on the way to Amy. “Give her some space. Did she hit her head? Did anyone see if she hit her head? She’s bleeding. Oh, God, there’s blood everywhere! Somebody call an ambulance!”
Chapter 40: Don’t look at me like that. I’m serious. What? You think I can’t do it?
Monday morning
You know what I hate worse than airports? Hospital waiting rooms. There’s not a single thing about a waiting room I like. I don’t like the elevator music. I don’t lik
e the mind-numbing women’s magazines. I don’t like the chairs — which, okay, is not entirely the fault of the hospital. When you’re just fucking big, it’s hard to find a chair that’s actually comfortable to sit in for longer than five minutes at a time.
Maybe this was the hospital they took Amy to last night. But now I’ll only remember it forever as the hospital where my mom had surgery for her osteosarcoma.
“Anika. Will you please stop pacing?” Dutch says.
I stop my trek across the waiting room, turn around. Lots of people multitask, but Dutch? Dutch multi-micromanages.
“Sorry,” I mutter. I head back to a chair across the coffee table in front of my siblings, drop into it. Bounce a knee up and down.
Across from me, next to Dutch, Gerry. He’s slouching slightly down, elbows on the chair arms, hands laced across his chest. His eyes are closed, but I know he’s not asleep. He kind of looks like he’s meditating. A half-black Buddha with a baseball cap.
Next to him, PJ straightens, studies me for a moment. “So how was Grace’s wedding?”
“Shitty.”
Dutch glances over. “Don’t cuss in front of the baby.”
I shrug.
But her curiosity’s stronger than her annoyance. “What made it so bad?”
“Jenny.” I shift in my chair.
Gerry’s eyes open. Fix on me.
I hate it when they all stare at me like this.
“Are you going to elaborate?” Dutch asks.
“No.”
My gaze flits to the old-fashioned clock above her head, watching the red second hand circle smoothly around the face. I think about my dad, standing in the surgery viewing room, watching the whole procedure anxiously. He’s not supposed to be there. Viewing rooms are supposed to be for visiting doctors only, but they must’ve picked up on the fact that my dad was going to have a fucking nervous break down if he didn’t get to be as close to her as possible, so I guess they made an exception for him.
“It’s already been three hours,” I say. “I thought they said it should only take two hours?”
“Two to three,” says PJ. “They said two to three hours.”
I pull my phone out from my pocket. My property manager in Phoenix hasn’t gotten in touch yet. But I suppose that’s not surprising; it’s only about eight-thirty in the morning there.
“Should we call Becker?” I ask Gerry. “Tell him he might need to open up without us?”
“I’ll go,” Gerry says without moving from his meditative posture. “If we don’t hear anything in a half hour, I can leave and help him open.”
I shake my head. “Don’t. I’ll go. I’m supposed to meet Jenny there at eleven fifteen anyway.”
My statement earns a row of three sets of surprised, raised eyebrows and a gurgle from baby Sherry.
Dutch clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “I thought you said the wedding was bad because of her? But you’re not even waiting for the carcass to cool, are you?”
“What?”
“Jenny’s divorce. From what Jodie told me, it’s not even finalized yet. You’re swooping in a little fast, don’t you think?”
I give Dutch a look that I hope is completely fucking incredulous. This woman.
“It’s not about her divorce. I need her to sign some paperwork. I’m selling the house in Phoenix.”
“Really? Why?” PJ asks.
Jenny and I never sold the house when we moved back to Marcine. And when we split up, we kept it in both our names, even though I was the one who’d bought it and the one who was still paying the mortgage. My property manager had reliably kept a tenant in it ever since, bringing in a nice, tidy little sum of money every month. A good supplement to my income, considering that female professional athletes don’t get paid nearly what our male counterparts get.
But since the house was still in both of our names, I still needed Jenny’s cooperation to sell it.
“Well,” I say carefully, “I kept it as an investment property, and it’s appreciated in value even more than I expected it to. I’m ready to cash it in.”
Dutch narrows her eyes, immediately suspicious. “Cash it in for what?”
I hesitate under three stares. For a second, I think I’ll deflect. Change the subject. But I need to talk to them anyway, and now might be the last time for a while that we’ll all be in the same place at the same time, with nothing else to focus on but each other.
“I’m going to talk to Mom and Dad once all this stuff with the surgery is over,” I say. “I, uh, I’m going to ask them to sell me Soul Mountain.”
I get three shocked reactions simultaneously:
(1) Dutch lets go of the toy she’s holding for baby Sherry as her head spins towards me. “What?!”
(2) Gerry’s hands come unlaced from his chest and his eyes open wide. He leans forward as if he’s going to spring out of his chair.
(3) PJ’s mouth literally drops open at the same moment that his eyebrows fly upward.
“You want to buy the restaurant?” PJ asks. “Do you even know what kind of work it takes to own a restaurant?”
Now, that is just fucking offensive.
“Let me think about that a second, Peej,” I say, pretending to think. I snap my fingers like I’ve had a brilliant idea. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I know exactly the kind of fucking work it takes, since I’ve been working there on and off since I was — wait for it — thirteen.”
Dutch shakes her head. “You haven’t been working there. Okay — maybe in high school for a while, weekends and summers. But then you ran off to Rosemont — ”
“I didn’t ‘run off.’ I had a basketball scholarship to one of the best schools in the country. And worked every school break that I was home. As if I didn’t have anything fucking better to do.”
“It’s not the same,” Dutch insists. “PJ worked there all through high school. I worked there through high school and college. Every weekend. Sometimes during the week, too. And even Gerry…” She glances sideways, thinks better of completing her statement, shakes a thought away. “It’s not the same,” she says again. “You’ve never had the patience for it, you — ”
“You always said you hated the restaurant,” PJ says. And he sounds hurt when he says it, as if it’s his girlfriend we’re talking about instead of Soul Mountain.
“I do — or, did, I mean,” I say. “But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I got back. About a lot of things.” My mind flashes back to the day I asked Gerry to cover the restaurant while I hit the basketball court.
Love.
Family.
Connection.
Getting my life together.
I turn towards Dutch. “As fucking rude as you were the other day — ”
She throws her hands in the air. “Stop cussing in front of the baby!”
“Sorry. As rude as you were the other day, you were right about a couple things. My basketball career is basically over.” I look from her to my two brothers. “And I haven’t been here for you guys. Or for Mom and Dad. Not the way I should’ve. I’ve been running from Ohio for as long as I can remember, and… well, I think it’s time I man up. For lack of a better fuh… for lack of a better word.”
There’s this frozen moment where all three of them continue to stare at me in utter silence, and I would swear that when Dutch opens her mouth again, she’s going to tell me I’ve completely fucking lost it, but instead, she says,
“Oh my God, Anika. I think that’s the first adult thing I’ve ever heard you say in your entire life.”
For the second time in the past ten minutes, I give her a look that I hope is incredulous.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Gerry asks.
I nod.
“Are you sure?” PJ asks. “Are you absolutely sure you want to take this on? Restaurants aren’t easy.”
“I’m sure,” I say, trying and somewhat succeeding at pretending that PJ isn’t being more fucking patronizing than
usual. “I made my mind up a few days ago. This is what I want to do.”
“It means staying in Ohio,” says Gerry.
I meet his eyes, and an unspoken conversation passes between us. Gerry, the black sheep. Anika, the dark grey one. Gerry, the reformed junkie who had the courage to come back home, to face his demons, to pay off the invisible debts that dragged him down for so long. We have a lot in common. We both know it. We both understand why I’m doing this.
After a few seconds pass in silence, I shrug. “Ohio’s home,” I say. “Right?”
He hesitates. Nods. “Yeah. For better or worse. It is.”
I lean back, slouching low in my chair, lacing my hands behind my head. “I’ll need to go back to Switzerland, once things settle down here. I have things to clean up there. Move out of my apartment. Officially get fired from my basketball team. But then… Yeah. If Mom and Dad agree to sell me Soul Mountain, I’m coming back. Maybe buy a house.” I glance at Gerry. “I’ll need a roommate.”
He grins. Nods again, but it’s relaxed this time.
I sit back up, watch the red second hand make another trip around the clock face. I surprise myself by managing to sit still for almost an entire fucking minute before I push up to my feet.
“Speaking of Soul Mountain, I’m gonna go ahead and get there. I’m sure Becker and Emir don’t want to be by themselves for the whole lunch shift.”
“And Kiersten,” Gerry puts in. “Don’t forget she’s doing a double for us today. She’s supposed to be there by about ten-thirty.”
I manage not to roll my eyes. Fucking Kiersten. If my parents agree to me buying the restaurant, Kiersten will be one of the first things to go. That, and the bad, stained canvas paintings that are supposed to be the Himalaya Mountains. Both of them are nothing more than poor imitations of something far more fucking original. The paintings try and fail to capture the majesty of the Himalayas; Kiersten tries and fails to capture the real glory and attitude of a Strong Black Woman. She has nothing on my mother. And for that, she can kiss my Blasian ass.
Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2) Page 25
