by Julia Dahl
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For my sister
PART 1
CLAUDIA
The details of whatever happened were gone from her mind, but present all over her body. Claudia dropped her hand below the stiff dorm bed and felt for a water bottle. It was nearly empty, but she sucked the liquid down and it was enough to get her sitting. Upright, there was pain. Her skirt was bunched around her waist, and her underwear was gone. She stood and as she took off the skirt she noticed it was damp. Claudia brought it to her face, then recoiled: unmistakably urine. But the bed wasn’t wet. In the corner of the room she found a pair of shorts. She pulled them on and dragged herself across the common area to the bathroom.
When she sat on the toilet Claudia cried out. The sting was shocking and prolonged; the soreness deep as a canyon. She was going get a UTI. Do I have a pill for that? That was the first question she asked herself. And the answer was no. She’d used the last one when she hooked up with Ben Herman over Christmas and never managed to call in a refill. So, it was going to be a call to her family’s doctor, who might mention the request to her mother. Or a visit to NYU’s health center. The health center made her think of herpes. Did he use a condom? That was the first question she couldn’t answer. Because, who was he?
There was no paper on the roll and when she looked down she saw blood. Claudia feebly wiggled her hips and pulled up the shorts.
When she filled up the water bottle at the sink Claudia had to confront the mirror. Her lip was split and had bled onto her chin. Her right eyelid was purple, swollen half shut. She stood in the windowless bathroom for a long time, waiting for the shock to fade. Waiting to find something familiar in the face there. But the familiar was gone.
She ran the water until it was warm, cupped her hands beneath the tap, and brought them to her face. Twice, three times. She rubbed lightly and the caked red on her chin loosened, ran pink into the sink. Where can I hide until this goes away? As much as it sucked, the dorm—mostly empty for spring break—was probably best.
She pushed aside the moldy shower curtain and turned the tap to hot.
EDIE
Claudia was supposed to be in the room for the birth. The doula had suggested Edie Castro choose one person to hold each leg, and she’d picked her new husband, Nathan, and her little sister. But when Edie called from the backseat of the taxi traveling up First Avenue, Claudia’s phone just rang and rang.
“It’s me,” Edie said to the voice mail. “My water broke. I’m on my way.”
She hung up and texted the same message.
A contraction came and she stretched back, trying to straighten her legs, as if she could make the cramp spread out; curl her toes instead of her writhing middle. Nathan reached for her hand and hit the button on the app to record the duration of her pain. It was just after midnight. Outside the windows the lights of the city smeared by. They pulled up to Emergency and Nathan jogged in to get a wheelchair.
Edie texted her parents and Claudia again from the intake area. Once they got in a room, Nathan set up a laptop and a speaker, but there were only four songs on the birth playlist they’d started back in January. Neither of them were ready for this.
But Claudia didn’t rattle. When Claudia got here, it would be all right.
An hour passed and Edie lost count of the strangers coming in and going out of the room, looking at the monitor she was attached to, helping her squat over a bin to pee. Finally, just after dawn, the doctor asked if she felt like she should start pushing. At 7:07 a.m., a 5-pound 9-ounce little girl came shooting out into the world, squint-eyed and crying. Edie was crying, too, her arm thrown over her eyes. They sewed her up and put the baby on her chest. Edie looked down and saw the hair on the girl’s head. What was she supposed to feel? What was she supposed to do? Where was Claudia?
The nurses took the baby to be inspected, and Edie and Nathan were alone in the room for the first time since they’d arrived. She was supposed to have given birth in their little rental house in Poughkeespie with the midwife she’d chosen. She was supposed to be surrounded by candles. She was supposed to be able to lay her head back on her own pillows and gaze at the photographs she’d taken of the places and people who made her feel happy and strong. But that plan dissolved when her mother had announced that if Edie didn’t have the baby in the city, at “the best” hospital, she’d lose access to her trust fund. So now she was shivering in a room where the lights never seemed to go down and the machines never stopped buzzing. She closed her eyes and asked Nathan for a blanket.
“I can’t believe how great you did,” he said.
Edie kept her eyes shut. She tried to give him a smile but it probably looked like a wince.
“Have you checked my phone?” she asked.
“Claudia hasn’t called. But I looked at her Instagram.”
Edie opened her eyes. “What?”
“She went out last night.”
“Let me see.”
He handed her his phone. Claudia’s last post was a selfie (#staycation #springbreak #nyc) uploaded at 11:04 p.m. from a bar on Bleecker. An hour before Edie texted from the cab. Her sister looked drunk in the photo; her eyelids low, her mouth captured in a scream-smile. Yes! Look at me! I’m having so much fun! They’d talked about this exact thing two days ago. Two days! I could go at any time, Edie said. Make sure you have your phone. It was hard to wrap her mind around it: Claudia had missed the birth. All the arrangements, the fucking class they took together—and her sister just got wasted.
The nurses wheeled the baby back in a plastic bassinet, swaddled tight and sleeping.
“Has someone started you expressing yet?” asked the nurse. Edie shook her head. The nurse told her to squeeze her breast. “Like you’re trying to get frosting out of a tube.” She held a tiny plastic cup beneath Edie’s nipple, but nothing came out. “Keep trying,” said the nurse. “It can take some women a while. Kept switching breasts.”
A few minutes later, Edie’s father, Gabriel Castro, peeked in the door.
“Can I come in?”
Edie pulled her gown back up over her shoulder. Her dad’s hair was rumpled; he was wearing a Pavement T-shirt, jeans, and an old pair of Vans. Millions of dollars and half a dozen Grammys after leaving dusty Central California, her dad still dressed like a boy who’d just gotten off a cross-country bus. Six months ago, Edie’s mom, Michelle Whitehouse, had announced that after more than half a life together, she was leaving him. So that boy was now almost fifty, graying, and alone. As far as Edie could tell, her dad hadn’t left the family’s town house in a month. But when Nathan set the swaddled child in her father’s arms, he giggled. He couldn’t contain the happiness the little person she’d made gave him. That was something, thought Edie. Had she made the right decision keeping the baby? This was a check in the “yes” box.
“Does she have a name?” Gabe asked.
“I think Edie wanted to wait till you guys were all together to tell ev
erybody,” said Nathan. He looked at Edie, who shrugged. What was the point of a big reveal? Claudia was probably passed out in some asshole’s bed, and her mom, well, she could go fuck herself.
“Lydia,” said Edie. “Lydia Castro McHugh.”
Gabe looked down at the baby and put a finger on top of her ear, just peeking up from the swaddle. “Hello, little Lydia. Welcome to New York City.” He looked up at Edie, eyes glassy. “It’s a beautiful name. She’s beautiful. Nathan, we’re surrounded by beautiful women.”
Nathan smiled. He was sitting beside Edie and he leaned forward, kissed her on the cheek. For the next hour, Gabe held sleeping Lydia. He paced the room, he sat on the pink-and-blue loveseat, he whispered in her ear as he looked out the window at the city below. It was Saturday, and traffic on the FDR was light. The sun shone off the East River and the Roosevelt Island tram carried people across in a glass capsule. When Lydia woke and started to cry, he handed her to Edie and asked, “Where’s your sister?”
TREVOR
Claudia Castro walked right into him as she came out of the elevator. Trevor was in sleep shorts and shower sandals. He’d run out of toothpaste and was headed to get some at the Rite-Aid on University.
“Whoa!” he said. She stumbled back, her sunglasses falling to the floor. Trevor took in her broken face. “Oh my gosh, are you okay?”
He bent down to pick up the glasses.
“I’m so sorry,” he continued when she didn’t answer. “We’ve got a first aid kit in our room.”
“I’m okay,” she said, taking the glasses without looking up. “Thanks.”
She walked past him. Limped, actually. Favoring one leg, bent slightly at the waist like she had a cramp. Trevor watched her go—he couldn’t help it. Perfect little half-moons peeked beneath the edge of her shorts. Her butt was small, but it moved just enough that he felt it. After the drugstore, he got in the shower and rubbed one out before church.
On his way back to the dorm, Trevor stopped at a café on MacDougal and ordered coffee and a blueberry muffin—everybody likes those, right? Unless she was gluten free. Or vegan. Trevor didn’t know many vegans in Canton, but a lot of the girls he met since arriving in New York had some dietary restriction or another. Either way, it was a gesture. Her roommate, Whitney, who he’d been hooking up with for a couple months, was big on gestures. Hopefully Claudia was, too.
“It’s Trevor,” he said after knocking at her door. He smiled into the peephole. “I live down the hall. We bumped into each other earlier.”
Claudia opened the door just a few inches. She was still wearing the sunglasses, but they didn’t cover all the wounds on her face.
“There’s cream and sugar in the bag,” said Trevor, raising the coffee.
She looked puzzled, like he’d changed the subject.
“I’m Trevor,” he heard himself say again.
Claudia accepted the coffee and the brown paper bag with the muffin inside.
“Thanks,” she said, and shut the door.
At the little desk in his bedroom, Trevor tried to focus on his paper for Comparative Religion. He was writing about the concept of nirvana in Buddhism. It had to be six pages and use at least four primary sources, but he gave up after two hours and barely a page. He was supposed to be imagining a life free of spiritual poison, but all he could see was Claudia Castro’s face.
She knocked on his door that evening.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m Claudia.”
Trevor smiled, too big, probably. But whatever. He was happy to see her.
“Are you going back out?” she asked.
“I could.”
“I’m sorry to ask but is there any way I could give you some money to go to the drugstore? I can’t find my phone and I don’t really want to run into anybody.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.” She handed him a hundred-dollar bill and a list handwritten on the back of a subscription card for Marie Claire magazine. “No rush or anything. I just…”
“You don’t have to explain,” said Trevor. “Do you want some dinner, too? I was gonna get ramen.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. It wasn’t exactly a lie. He had been planning on ramen for dinner, but the plan involved microwaving a dollar-packet from their common room cabinet microwaved with bathroom sink water, not the $20 bowls they sold at the Japanese place down the block.
“Sure,” she said. “I’d take some rice and veggies. Thanks.”
An hour later, Trevor knocked on her door.
“Delivery.”
“I really appreciate it,” said Claudia. She was still wearing the sunglasses.
He paused after handing her the food. He wanted to ask what happened. Somehow, he sensed he could help.
“Do you want to come in?” she asked.
They ate at the coffee table. Claudia was quiet and he looked around the room for something to talk about. Trevor had been here to hook up with Whitney, but they spent most of the time in her bed. For Whitney, Claudia was the Holy Grail of roommates: rarely there. She’s rich, Whitney told him as an explanation. On a chair near the window Trevor saw an oversized leather portfolio case and he remembered that Whitney mentioned Claudia took art classes. But he didn’t know anything about art and he didn’t want to say something stupid, so the silence continued until Claudia asked why he was still on campus over spring break.
“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on.” Again, not a lie, but not the whole truth. The whole truth was that he hadn’t raised enough money to go to Costa Rica and build houses with his church group. His parents would have liked to see him, but going home was exhausting and flights expensive. “What about you?”
“Obviously, I should have gotten out of town.”
She didn’t elaborate. He noticed her water glass was empty so he got up and refilled it, then gathered their takeout detritus and bagged it.
“I should go to bed,” she said.
“Cool. Thanks for dinner.” Stupid, he thought. I brought it to her.
CLAUDIA
After the boy from down the hall left, Claudia called the security desk downstairs and was told, for the third time, that no one had turned in her phone. It had been twenty-four hours and she still had no idea how she’d gotten back to bed, or who she’d been with past eleven o’clock the night before.
She’d blacked out only one other time, on Martha’s Vineyard last summer. After a graduation dinner at a restaurant near their seaside estate, Claudia’s parents had allowed her to stay and drink with her twenty-two-year-old sister, Edie. The bartender made key lime martinis and after two they stumbled down to the yacht club at the Edgartown harbor. Alcohol, the great equalizer: The prep school kids from Boston and New York were sharing a bottle of vodka with the barbacks and servers who worked on the island. The last thing she remembered was accepting someone’s coat around her shoulders. The next morning, after she woke up in a deck chair, her sister informed her that at some point she’d announced to everyone she wasn’t going to let anybody fuck her until college.
“You said it was going to be the ‘Summer of Blow Jobs!’” howled Edie.
“No, I didn’t,” said Claudia, although it sounded like something she might say, especially if she was drunk.
“Nathan is a witness,” said Edie.
“It’s true,” said Nathan, Edie’s scruffy boyfriend from Vassar. He’d spent the summer with them and knocked Edie up that August, right under their parents’ noses.
They were all sitting in the breakfast room, a wall of French doors flung open onto the stone patio. The pool, the grass, the sand, the ocean, the blue sky: Claudia could stand up and run straight into the horizon from the table.
“You were pretty messed up,” said her sister. “I thought you went off to puke, but you never came back.”
“You didn’t try to find me?”
“I figured you’d go home, and I was right.”
“I don’t even remember getting here.”
&nbs
p; “You probably blacked out,” said Nathan.
Before that night, Claudia had assumed people who said they didn’t remember what happened when they were drunk were lying. Or at least they weren’t being literal. The idea that she’d said and done things she had no memory of was disturbing—and, in the case of her alleged Edgartown exclamation, mildly humiliating—but sitting alone in her dorm room now, staring into the black hole in her mind, she realized she hadn’t even considered how lucky she’d been that night on the island. She could have fallen off the dock, hit her head on one of the night-silent boats, and been washed away by the black water. She could have tripped stumbling home and gotten hit by a sleepy driver. She could have been raped.
Claudia took three Benadryls and slept for twelve hours on the shitty dorm mattress, dreaming of banging on doors and falling down stairs. In the morning the fear became more acute: the infection was coming. She needed the pills and she needed to find her phone.
Trevor knocked about an hour later, while she was working up the courage to go outside.
“I’m on my way to the library,” he said. “I can pick something up if you want.”
He was very good-looking: symmetrical features, clear skin, dark brown eyes, a hint of muscle beneath his T-shirt. As he waited for her answer, Trevor fiddled with the chain on his neck, revealing a simple gold cross. A week ago, Claudia would have considered hooking up with him, even though she was pretty sure her roommate already was. A week ago, she would have taken in his scent and imagined what he tasted like. She might have smiled and flirted and wondered if he could make her stop thinking about Ben for a little while. But not now. Now there were whole pieces of her that seemed to have been swept away. Why couldn’t she remember? Claudia looked at Trevor and thought: I need to get outside.
“I’m gonna head out, too,” she said. She looked around. Wallet, sunglasses, hat. Was that all she needed? “Maybe the sun will feel good.”
