In Aaron’s head, those things were already gone, so it was easier for him to accept that before too long, there would be no compound to which we could ever consider returning.
The next day, The New York Times printed a picture of Heather and her family and their shady lawyer on its cover. The article was about how numerous states were moving toward “personhood” bills, which legally defined the moment of conception as the beginning of human life, and made any woman who sought an abortion for any reason guilty of manslaughter. It briefly covered the details of my brother’s case, Danielson v. Mathison, which would have been a stretch for Heather’s family to have won, because under the new laws being proposed, Heather would have been guilty of manslaughter and my brother would only have been eligible for some kind of conspiracy to commit manslaughter charge. It was difficult for me to decipher from the way the article had been written what the judge’s assessment of the charges had been, but it sure seemed like the case had been thrown out. The entire case against my brother was described as being a media-grabbing building block in the legislative advancement toward a personhood bill being proposed in Arizona, similar to the one in Oklahoma.
I sent Tony Michaels an e-mail asking him to clarify the events in Arizona. Aaron was indeed off the hook. There was no way of knowing if my letter to the judge had made any impact on the dismissal of the entire case, but at least my brother’s name wouldn’t be mentioned anymore in conversations about abortion legislation in our home state.
I brought my brother home a fancy cupcake and a copy of the newspaper so that he could read the article for himself.
“It’s over,” I said, hoping he’d be relieved. At least one half of our daily torment had been brought to an end.
Instead, he seemed to read the news article with interest, and then stared out the window of his bedroom with a forlorn look on his face.
“It’s not over for me,” he said quietly. “Heather still hates me.”
I finally convinced him to go to the doctor with Tony Michaels in New Jersey. Tony drove into the city to pick Aaron up and take him to the clinic in Hoboken where his college friend would discreetly examine the leg.
“You’re coming with,” my brother demanded.
I could tell on the drive through the tunnel to New Jersey that Tony was trying really hard to get on good terms with my brother. He at first attempted to talk about the Knicks’ season, but my brother was a Phoenix Suns fan and a maniac about Steve Nash. Then he tried to talk about music, but my brother was totally not into music of any kind. Finally Tony hit the right note when the conversation of Aaron’s aspiration of becoming a pediatric surgeon came up. Tony had traveled to Africa early in his career covering a story about Doctors Without Borders treating outbreaks of malaria among children. This impressed Aaron, and I relaxed a little knowing that the morning wasn’t going to be completely awkward.
Tony’s friend at the medical center, Dr. Gallagher, was built like a boxer and had a very nifty blond moustache. He looked like he should be dealing cards at a casino, with that moustache and the twinkle in his eye.
He took a tiny little electric blade to my brother’s cast and after about ten minutes of careful cutting, it split open and there was my brother’s leg: pale, sticky and stinky. Aaron had kept his eyes closed the whole time during the cutting, clenching his jaw as if he was expecting the blade to saw his leg in half at any second.
“Whew,” my brother said at the smell of his own leg once the plaster fell away.
“Yeah,” Dr. Gallagher agreed. “Skin that’s been cooped up under plaster for a couple months doesn’t smell too great.”
My brother wiped down his leg with a baby wipe and then walked down the hall, using crutches, to have his leg x-rayed.
“My brother is kind of a wimp,” I confided to Tony after Aaron had gone down the hall.
Tony cracked a smile. “I am, too.”
“How come you and Joanne don’t have kids?” I asked. I didn’t mean for it to come out of my mouth so rudely, I had just been thinking in that moment that Tony would make such an awesome dad.
Tony played with the watch on his wrist for a few seconds and said, “We’ve only been married three years, so I think we kind of missed the boat, age-wise. Joanne has a son from her first marriage, but we don’t see much of him. He just graduated from college last year and he’s trying to make it in the fashion business.”
I absorbed this, wondering why Tony’s stepson didn’t make a point of spending more time with his mom. Other people’s families were so complicated.
By some incredible miracle, my brother’s leg was fine. The break had been clean instead of a spiral fracture, and Dr. Gallagher said there wouldn’t be a need to consider Aaron for surgery to place a rod alongside the bone to help it heal properly. He was free to limp home, as long as he took it easy for a few more weeks and didn’t put any unnecessary pressure on his leg.
“You got lucky, kid,” Dr. Gallagher told him. “That’s a one-in-a-million clean break you had there. If you’re going to break a leg, that’s the way to do it.”
“Have you heard from your mom yet?” Tony asked me back in Chinatown when he dropped me and Aaron off. I lingered in the back seat of the car after Aaron thanked him for his time and got out of the passenger side to go to the deli by himself for the first time in two months. It was totally strange to see my brother out in daylight. His blond roots had started growing in and his hair was longer than it had ever been before in his life.
“Not yet,” I said.
There was more to say of course, but I left it unsaid. I hadn’t e-mailed my mother yet. I had opened up my e-mail account twice while at the store with the honest intent of e-mailing my parents. The first time, I had gotten distracted by the enormous volume of e-mail I had gotten from people at school with subject lines like where are you and I hope everything is OK. Most were from people I didn’t even really know that well. There were several from Giovanna Pasquasi, and all of them made me laugh. It had never occurred to Giovanna that her will was not the world’s command, and all of her e-mails informed me that I was in serious trouble for not getting in touch with her sooner. By the time I’d spent hours catching up on all of the gossip from Treadwell, and resisting the urge to write back to anyone, I wasn’t able to summon a sincere sentiment to send to either Mama or Daddy. Instead, impossibly enough, I found myself missing my friends at school. I missed the simplicity of getting out of bed in a clean dorm and walking across a grassy field to class.
The second time, I started to compose a new e-mail and drafted messages three different times, and deleted all of them. I waffled between emotionally imploring my parents to provide me with answers about what they’d done, and simply telling them that they were idiots not to come back and face up to their punishments.
“When I hear back from them, you’ll be the first to know,” I promised Tony.
I opened the back door of the car and looked up at our apartment building, so safe and welcoming after a strange morning in an unfamiliar suburb. It was so strange how after just three short months, the building that had been so scary and foreign to me had started to seem like home.
“Hey, Grace,” Tony said. He had rolled down his window and even though his engine was idling, he hadn’t pulled away from the curb yet.
I stopped and looked over my shoulder, digging for my building keys in my pocket.
“If Joanne and I did have kids, I would want them to be just like you,” he said. “You’re pretty cool.”
“Thanks,” I said, bashfully.
Chapter 17
Jacinda called me in a state of hysteria the night after she took her state licensing exam to become a full-fledged stylist.
“He won’t hire me,” she sobbed.
“Who?” I asked.
Joao DaSilva, Jacinda’s mentor and boss at the hair salon, had sat her down at the salon that afternoon and told her that even though she had passed her New York State exam, he wanted her to get her
GED before he would give her a real job at the salon as a stylist. Everyone who worked there, from the senior stylists to the girl who operated the cash register, had a high school diploma.
“All that studying, all those hours at the salon, all of it, for nothing,” she sobbed. “I’m going to work at Timmy’s until the day I die, just a dead-end job paying minimum wage.”
I tried to talk some sense into her. “You just passed a test that’s really hard! You can pass the GED. That’s all you have to do, and then it’ll be over.”
Jacinda was inconsolable. “You don’t understand, Gigi. I failed at high school. I failed at all of it. I can’t ever pass that test. All that stuff, algebra, biology, I just can’t do it. Orlando thinks I should go get a job at a salon in Queens or something that won’t question me about my diploma. But that ain’t my dream, girl! I wanted to work downtown. I wanted to work in the big-time. He just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that I’m good enough.”
I looked around online on the laptop at the tattoo parlor, and found a couple of courses held at night at local high schools that were specifically designed to prepare people for the GED. It was like high school, crammed into three nights a week for three months. I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere to tell Jacinda that I agreed with Joao. If everyone else at the salon was required to have their diploma, then he couldn’t make an exception for her, even though it was obvious that he loved her.
“What about this class at Washington High School?” I suggested to Jacinda the next day. I stopped by Timmy’s before I walked to the East Village with a print-out about the class. “It’s one hundred and eighteen dollars and you’d take the GED at the end of April.”
“I’m not paying a hundred bucks to be made to feel like an idiot three times a week,” Jacinda snapped. “No, thank you.”
“Well…” I sighed, surprised at myself that I was about to suggest this, “What if I go with you?”
Jacinda dropped the box of curlers she was restocking in the hair accessories aisle.
“You would take a GED prep class with me?” she said dubiously.
And that was how I ended up back in high school in New York City. I had already told Jacinda that I was taking time off from “art school,” correcting my original lie that had suggested I was college-age. She didn’t question that I might have dropped out of high school; she just seemed satisfied at the prospect of having company in the night class.
“High school classes,” Felix murmured in the back room at the Blue Phoenix when I told him. We were sharing cold sesame noodles from the Chinese restaurant across the street. “I think it’s a good idea.”
“I dropped out,” I said, realizing with horror that at that point, it was true. I had become the statistic, impossibly enough. “I didn’t really think of it as dropping out when it happened, but I never went back to class, so… I want my diploma before I forget everything. I might want to go to college.”
We split the fortune cookie that came with our noodles and its message was:
It is a good time to finish old tasks.
“That’s all yours,” Felix said, handing me the little white piece of paper.
Andy adjusted my schedule so that Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I could leave at five-thirty to make it to my class near Irving Place. On Wednesdays, I would return to the salon and work from ten until two. I’d be in class during the hours when people in the East Village ate dinner, and the tattoo salon was usually pretty quiet.
On the night of our first class, Jacinda met me outside looking nervous.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this with me,” she said.
I handed her a spiral notebook from the bag I was carrying. I had stopped at the drug store on my way over to buy school supplies, having a suspicion that it would never occur to Jacinda to do such a thing.
“You’re my best friend,” I told her. “We’re going to do this together.”
The class was painful. It was abundantly evident from our very first class why so many kids in big cities would drop out of high school. The classroom smelled like mildew, half of the desks in our classroom were falling apart, and the teacher was dreadfully boring. More than one night, the girls’ bathroom was locked, and any female who had to use the bathroom during the three-hour class had to go across the street to Starbucks. At least five guys in our thirty-person night class were seeking their GED’s in order to qualify for employment as security guards, and that was primarily because all five of them had criminal records and weren’t eligible to join the police force.
Fortunately, the entire curriculum was stuff that I had covered at Treadwell. This allowed me to at least help Jacinda with homework, because the class would have been a disaster if she had tried and failed.
By mid-February, the city was experiencing a strange pre-spring heat wave. The hostess at the Simone Renault bistro, where my brother had broken his leg, had gotten a job as the general manager at a fancy steakhouse in Soho. He was waiting tables there on the lunch shift five days a week, making less money than he’d made at the bistro, but only standing on his leg in five-hour increments. This was all kind of miraculously convenient because he was also back at the apartment building every day by three-thirty, just in time for Feng Chan to arrive home from school. Quian was still in the hospital, so our apartment had become Feng’s second home. He did his homework every afternoon with Aaron, and my brother had started taking him out on short walks to the park as part of building up strength in his leg. As much as my brother’s attention was doing wonders for keeping Feng’s mind off of his sister’s condition, Feng’s company was pulling my brother out of his deep and dark depression.
It was a huge relief for me to not have to be the breadwinner anymore, although miraculously, money was becoming less and less of a problem.
Expose Magazine had run a special feature at the end of January on celebrity tattoos, and the unicorn tattoo that Tawny had gotten at the Blue Phoenix had been voted by readers as their favorite. I had been given a design credit, and Felix had been named as the artist. People were coming in off the street randomly from time to time, asking me to custom-design line art tattoos for them. The first time it happened, Andy asked me what I wanted to charge for a design a guy wanted me to do, based on a picture of his dead German Shepherd.
“I don’t know, a hundred bucks?” I guessed. I couldn’t imagine anyone sensible would pay more than a hundred dollars for a tattoo design.
“You’re insane,” Andy told me, and then promptly told the guy that my rates began at five hundred for custom work. The guy pulled out his credit card without a moment’s hesitation.
Business at the tattoo shop picked up significantly with the warmer weather. I had promised Felix I would take the exam to become licensed by the end of the month. I was trying to apprentice whenever the front of the store wasn’t too busy, volunteering to clean the machines, restock paper towels, shave body parts to prepare them for work… whatever anyone needed in the way of help.
One night, Jane asked me to prep a client for her, a girl who had come in with her best friend to have a giant black spider put on the small of her back. I ran the electric shaver over the girl’s lower back, wiped the area down with antiseptic, and then Jane allowed me to position the stencil for her. It took me about three times as long to do it as it probably would have taken Jane, because I was especially nervous about applying it crookedly.
When I finished, I took a little stroll over to Felix’s chair to see what he was up to. It was eleven o’clock at night, the height of our usual business on a Thursday.
Felix was intently focused on some kind of Aztec design that he was tattooing as an arm band on the bicep of a guy who appeared to be passed out. The guy had two friends sitting in chairs three feet away, joking around, and the smell of beer sweat was stale in the air. I was a little surprised to see Felix’s client so incapacitated given Andy’s policy about not tattooing drunkards.
“What’s going on?” I asked quiet
ly, straddling a stool near Felix’s after throwing back a Dixie cup full of cold water from the cooler. From the looks of Felix’s progress he wasn’t going to be done outlining the arm band, never mind shading it, by one-thirty before we shut down for the night.
Felix waited a moment, deep in concentration, before replying.
“Arm band,” he said, stating the obvious.
The sound of his voice made his client stir out of his slumber and open his eyes.
And when the man reclining in the black leather chair looked in my direction, I almost fell off my stool.
I was staring directly into the most deep turquoise blue eyes I had ever seen, and I recognized them because I had seen them before six months earlier in South America.
They were Tim’s.
“I know you,” he said, definitely drunk by the sound of his slurring voice. He attempted to sit up in his chair and turn toward me, but Felix held him down forcefully with his one free hand.
“Please,” Felix commanded.
But Tim propped himself up on the elbow of the arm that wasn’t being tattooed to get a closer look at me.
“I know you!” he said again, sounding pleased with himself for recognizing me. “You’re that girl with the soccer ball. With the hot mom.”
I cringed, thankful that it was relatively dark in the studio other than for the spotlight hanging over Tim’s body for Felix’s benefit.
“I don’t know you, dude,” I said in my coolest voice. “I’ve never seen you before. Sorry.”
“Nah, I know you,” Tim said playfully. “Come on. You’re that rich guy’s kid. The guy on cable.”
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