“I’m sorry,” Diane said.
She fled past Cindy, out the front door, and felt the sudden relief of the winter chill. She leaned against the cold exterior and wiped at her eyes, not caring that her hands were filthy with tank water or that her fingers came away sooty with mascara.
Cindy emerged, letting the heavy door slam behind her. She dug around in her purse, and for a moment, Diane thought she was about to pull out a Kleenex. Instead, Cindy produced a cigarette. The way she lit it, the way she took a deep, desperate drag from it, made her look ten years older. The act, which ran counter to all of Diane’s expectations of a vegan artist and former surrogate, startled her into the numb aftermath of her weeping.
“That was really fucking weird,” Cindy said, looking Diane steadily in the eye.
The openness of her assessment felt somehow more congenial than critical.
“I fucking agree with you,” Diane said. “I’m not usually like this. I really am sorry.”
“Okay,” Cindy said, still wary but soothed. Diane knew there was no coming back from this.
“I can’t believe you smoke.”
“I quit for the pregnancy,” Cindy said. “I’d hoped it would stick, but, here I am.” She leaned her head back, exposing her neck, and let out an exquisite exhalation that sent the smoke moonward.
“I’d hoped it would be you, that you’d be our surrogate,” Diane said. “When I met you, it seemed right. I was going to ask. Not tonight, but someday, maybe after we knew each other better. I know that’s weird to say now. It’s too much.”
“I figured you didn’t just want to hear about Neva.”
Diane felt awkward and ashamed.
“There’s a really good agency in Jackson,” Cindy said.
Diane knew this. She’d done her research. Everything was so contractual. The surrogate sometimes lived a few states away. It would be like the pregnancy never happened except in emailed photos and, if they were lucky, a couple of doctor’s appointments. She realized now that she had dreamt up a future based on a forced friendship with a stranger who would want her to be there each step of the way, each living vicariously through the other.
“Why did you come?”
“I thought I could do this for money, but I can’t. What I did, I did because I loved my sister, more than anything. But this?” Cindy gestured at the space between them with her cigarette, the tendrils of smoke like pernicious sage. “This would have been a transaction.”
“What changed? Is it because of our work? Or what I just said? I don’t usually snap like that.”
Cindy shook her head. “Stop.”
“Is it because of a girlfriend? But,” Diane paused, “you’d be helping people.” She regretted it immediately. She could see the way Cindy became closed to her. Her fingers tightened on her cigarette. Her eyes narrowed.
“You know, some people don’t have the money to try all the things you’re trying, right? Some people just have to accept the hand they’re dealt. Your husband, would he understand if you just never had a child?”
“This is what I want,” Diane said.
“Okay,” Cindy said, “I believe you.” She said it like a dig.
“You don’t even know me.”
“Exactly.” Cindy stomped out her cigarette. “Thanks for dinner. I’m going to walk to the house. Good luck hanging my nest.”
Diane watched her walk down the gravel drive toward the house in the distance, where she would climb into her rusted sedan and disappear.
That night, Diane opened another bottle of wine. She had nearly finished the first glass when she felt Kyle nuzzle the nape of her neck and slide his hand across her waist, grazing the paunchy skin beneath her navel. He was always placing his hand there, and she was always telling him to stop. She pictured the gesture as a subconscious desire to cradle her womb, to coax their future child from her.
“Don’t,” she said, peeling the fabric of her shirt from his hands and lowering it back down. She felt the rough spots on her skin and raised her top again to look.
“Stop worrying,” Kyle said. “Let’s go to bed.”
But she knew he didn’t really want to sleep, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the strange shiny growths on her skin.
“I’m not ready yet,” she said.
She poured herself a bath, an excuse to be alone, and held her phone over the tub’s rim so she could safely scroll through various images of lesions that matched her search terms. She couldn’t say which image would settle her, stop her compulsion to load more pictures, but she needed to keep seeing possible answers.
She couldn’t remember falling asleep. One minute she was searching the aftermath of various Mohs procedures, including an aesthetically disappointing T-flap procedure on someone’s forehead, and the next she was taking a knife to her own skin, now rough to the touch. She scraped and scraped at her belly, leaving piles of silvery strips on the concrete floor of the hatchery, and the raw skin bled. She ran her hands over her slick stomach, then up and down her sides until she could feel the prominent ridges forming, bony plates rising to the surface. Something roiled within.
She woke in tepid water, her phone on the tile floor with a cracked screen. At first she felt relieved that it had all been a dream, but the two blemishes remained. She toweled herself off and observed the sodden tissue drying out, turning to pert, fibrous scales. She scratched one, and when she failed to remove it with her fingers, she took tweezers and pulled it away, revealing red, shiny dermis beneath. She felt a moment of satisfaction, like she was whole again after removing the alien piece, but when she glanced up, Kyle was standing in the doorway with a look of repulsion.
“Why did you do that?” he asked.
“It’s just a scab,” she said.
It was closer to dawn than dusk by the time she pulled the ladder to the living room wall by the fireplace. She took three steps before she realized there was no way to ascend higher without asking Kyle to hold the base, but he had already gone to sleep. When she had told him that Cindy had guessed her intentions and left in a hurry, he shrugged. “It’s not surprising,” he had said. He knew not to say the other part, the part that she knew he was still thinking: that they should try again, but they should try it his way.
She descended the ladder and looked at the blank space above the mantle. Before the sky lost its darkness, she decided not to wait any longer. She placed the driftwood in the fire and watched the nest go up in flames first, like the kindling it was. By sunrise, the driftwood had burned to ash, leaving behind a crown of barbed wire, molten and glowing in the hearth.
THE NEIGHBOR’S CAT
The cat is crying again, has been crying for days, always from the neighbor’s patio below so that its wail carries through the bathroom window into the musty bedroom of their apartment. To be fair, the cat didn’t wake Shelly. The screech of chair legs dragging and the collective singing of soccer songs from the bar next door woke her. Now the drunks are outside, chanting and whooping, waiting on the predawn bus that stops below their bedroom window. But the cat — human-sounding, mournful — keeps her awake.
Shelly slides out of bed, careful to leave Paul to his sleep. With his hair mussed and his face smashed into his pillow, she can see the thinning halo of early baldness. She doesn’t think he’s noticed the change yet, but she knows it will bother him when he does.
In the tiny bathroom, she climbs on top of the toilet and pushes open the French windows. She has to lean her head out to see the patio of the unit below, a square of brown tile enclosed on three sides by concrete walls stained charcoal by the smog. The fourth side overlooks a three-story drop to the back of the beer hall where, every dawn, someone hoses kitchen detritus down a large grate-covered hole, conjuring the scent of stale yeast and hops. Shelly notices her breath turning to mist. In the middle of the patio, surrounded by buckets, brooms, mops, and a tattered vinyl chair, the cat moans so that his fluffy white body expands then deflates impressively.
In the States, Shelly would knock on the door and demand that the owner let the cat in. Or she’d call an animal rescue, or take the cat herself. But she doesn’t really speak Spanish, and she doesn’t know the local laws.
The cat looks up with amber eyes and meows. Shelly turns away and latches the window shut. After the fresh air, the stench of the sewage drain in the middle of the tile floor is stifling. This bathroom always leaves her feeling dirty. When the shower is on, the water hits the toilet so that each time she washes herself, she has to remember to take the toilet paper off the roll and put it on a shelf across the room. There’s no tub or shower door, just a plastic curtain dangling from flimsy fishhooks on a clothesline that does nothing to contain any splashing. The violet-tiled wall shows black streaks where dirt has collected from dried rivulets of water, which is mystifying since the pressure is too low to ever fully rinse the shampoo out of her hair.
She washes her hands in the hot water, cherishing a moment of warmth. In the bedroom, she finds Paul awake, swiping the screen of his smartphone.
“The bus stop?” she asks.
He nods.
“That poor cat,” she says.
Paul reads the text on his phone.
“We should do something,” she says. “It’s supposed to dip down to freezing tonight.”
“The cat has fur,” he says. “We’re in the same temperature without fur.”
“But we at least have a roof and walls. Would you let Atticus stay out all night when it was freezing?” Atticus was the dog his roommate had back in Kansas City, where he used to work in college admissions before he decided on a graduate program in Argentina.
Paul lowers his phone. “ What can I do? It’s not my cat.”
“Just talk to her. Maybe she doesn’t realize how cold it’s going to get.”
“You can talk to her too, you know.”
Paul had been less than helpful with the language barrier. Part of her wondered if it was tough love. Maybe he was pushing her to use what little Spanish she’d already learned. But sometimes, like now, she wondered if he was just taking advantage of her monolinguism to avoid any conflict that would inconvenience him.
“You know I can’t understand anything if she talks back at me,” she says. “Please?”
“I don’t care enough about the cat to jeopardize our relationship with the landlady. You know how hard it was for me to find this place.”
That was the other thing. He was always reminding her that he had to do everything now. He had to do the apartment hunting. When the oven stopped working, he had to arrange for its repair. He even had to help her find out where she could take language classes in town. She used to be independent. She used to call restaurants to make their reservations because it made him nervous to talk to strangers. At parties, she would mingle with Paul in tow, enabling his introductions. She liked being a source of comfort, assuaging his social anxieties. She was good at it, but now she depends on him for nearly everything, and he’s not always gracious about it.
“I need to get my run in,” Paul says, putting down his phone.
She watches as he pushes aside the covers and pulls his jogging gear over his goose-pimpled skin.
“Want to come with?”
One of the soles of her running shoes has a crack, and her foot hurts for days each time she wears them. To replace them here, with the import taxes, would be too expensive, and she doesn’t yet know the local brands or sizing, or how to ask for what she wants in any specific manner. And she’s tired. She can never sleep more than a few hours here.
“It’s not even light out,” she says.
The apartment borders one of the diagonals, large avenues with busy traffic and littered medians. Even at this hour, she can hear the storekeeper below as he unlocks the metal security grate that protects his windows and spools it back like a garage door. Paul takes the antique key out of the ashtray and unlocks their front door. There are so many locks in Argentina. Shelly can’t even go outside without first unlocking their apartment door with a large lever key and then unlocking the door to the building with a different key with large toothy bits at the end.
“Did you leave me a set of keys?” she asks.
“It’s in the bedroom.”
He slides the door shut and locks her in.
The night hovers near freezing. Shelly lights the oven and leaves it open for heat. She conjugates Spanish verbs in the kitchen, writing the same word over and over in her notebook. Later, they cook pasta with too much butter and stuff themselves for warmth. They wear their coats at the dining table — a collapsible card table with faux leather glued on top. Paul downloads a detective show, and they prop his computer on top of a stack of his textbooks to make it feel more like a television. His books are all about human rights violations.
When the broad-shouldered cop creeps through the shadows of the suspect’s house on the screen, they hear a woman wailing.
“Is that the show?” Shelly asks.
Paul puts it on pause and listens. The wailing intensifies.
“I think it’s the cat,” he says.
After dinner, when Shelly brushes her teeth, she leans out the window. The cat just stares and stares up at her.
The cat develops a worrisome hoarseness. Shelly invites a new friend from her language class over for tea. They are stumbling through their poor Spanish when Melissa gestures for silence.
“¿Qué es eso?”
A strange, rhythmic croaking comes from outside.
“El gato debajo grita.” Shelly feels proud of her sentence, and then — noticing Melissa’s concern — recalls that the words signify something real.
“It’s the neighbor’s cat,” she explains. “There’s nothing we can do.” But she feels like she’s lying. She remembers her cousin’s cat, Elmor, and how his arthritis got so bad he had to have painkillers every day, special pills that came from the vet. One day her aunt substituted a human dose of acetaminophen, not realizing how incompatible it would be, and they found Elmor in the playroom, struggling to breathe. They were too late.
“He sounds weaker,” she says to Paul when he returns from his classes at the university.
“Who?”
“The cat. I really think he might be dying.” They sit in the kitchen, sipping wine, listening. Indeed, the cat’s yowling grows faint, yet more urgent.
“It’s raspier,” she says, “like it’s sick.”
“It probably just has a common cold or whatever it is that cats get.” He pours himself more wine, dribbles some onto his hand, then delicately licks the drops from the web between his thumb and index finger.
“This is just like when I had dysentery in Chile and you kept insisting that I was overreacting.”
“You still don’t know that’s what happened.”
“Or when you insisted on taking the bus to Santiago even in the middle of winter. When I told you that was a bad idea, you laughed. You said people never have a problem on that route.”
“That was an unusual weather pattern.”
“Dariela said it was a fifty-fifty shot that we’d make that pass in July,” she says. “You acted like I was being crazy for worrying about it.”
“Please stop bringing that up.”
“It’s relevant,” she says, “to the cat.”
“Have you noticed that you tend to fixate on what’s wrong?”
“There just happens to be a lot that’s actually wrong, Paul.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.” He holds her hands in his and really looks at her. “I hope it isn’t.”
She remembers their time in Missouri as easy. She would return from class or teaching and find him already home from the office, brewing an afternoon batch of coffee with her mug waiting on the counter. They would share accounts of their days — commiserating over the tedium, celebrating any minor success. Their lives overlapped enough in scope and routine that Shelly believed in their inherent relevance to each other. They were, she had thought simply, co
mpatible.
Paul squeezes her thigh, then kisses her. She thinks about refusing him, but she wants things to be better between them. He takes her to bed, and she forgets about the cat until after, when her thoughts are drifting toward sleep and a soft mewling rises up from the patio.
Shelly translates and transcribes a series of possible sentences that she will need: “The cat is too cold.” “Can you take the cat inside?” “The cat could die if you don’t take the cat inside.” That last one is particularly troubling as she hasn’t yet studied subjunctive or conditional moods. She then writes down various possibilities of how the landlady might respond, in hopes that she will therefore be able to prolong the conversation toward actual understanding.
After Paul leaves for class and before her next English tu toring session, Shelly resolves to confront the landlady. She can feel the slick sweat on her palms as she knocks on the pale wood. A man opens the door.
“¿Qué?” he says, abrupt and rude.
Shelly asks for Angela, and he widens the opening so that she can see the back of a woman in a satin robe, the fabric sliding down her arm and exposing her shoulder. She wipes at her unseen face and turns, red-eyed and smiling. The man’s eyes, Shelly notices, are clear and dry. She thinks, if they’re fighting, he’s steering the ship. Angela tightens her robe and shuts the door behind her, leaving the man in her place. She kisses the air near Shelly’s cheek.
“¿Cómo andás?”
“Bien. ¿Y vos?” Shelly hated the automatic nature of the greeting. She felt like it was false advertisement for a language proficiency she lacked.
“Bien …” Angela laughs and points self-consciously at her clothes, saying something Shelly can’t follow. She imagines it’s an apology for being undressed, so she smiles and gestures — not a problem.
Shelly launches into her script about the cat. Angela stops smiling. There’s something guilty about the way she stares at her tightly clasped hands, but perhaps that’s a projection. What she does know is that Angela keeps saying she can’t — No puedo. But she says a lot more than that.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 6