Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  Aaron grabbed my wrist hard and twisted until I dropped the keys. He leaned down to snatch them and when he stood back up I swung my arm to try to knock them out of his hand but I cuffed him square on the side of the head instead, throwing him sideways off balance. He was so calm when he righted himself that I could have sworn I knocked him sober. He turned and walked down the street and I trotted after him, trying to keep up with his long steps. I didn’t want to be left behind.

  “Don’t say another word,” he said, flat and mean. “Just get in the car.”

  I already regretted what I’d said, but I was still high with self-righteous fury so I wasn’t about to retract it yet. I practically believed my own lie. And why shouldn’t I, anyway? Why shouldn’t I fuck other people? It might even the score a little bit. It might make him feel that private humiliation of knowing that you’re not quite loved enough, not quite wanted enough, not quite important enough. It might make him hurt for a heartbeat like I hurt for him all the time.

  There were no more words. I pulled my cheap Melrose Ave. dress out of the way of the heavy car door on Aaron’s beat-up ’68 Cadillac and slammed it closed. I settled down into silence, laying the bricks of a wall of indignation between us. I was convinced he was fucking that girl Madison. And if he wasn’t already, then he wanted to. And even if it wasn’t Madison, it had been hundreds of others and would probably be hundreds more. That’s how I saw it. That’s what happens to your eyes when you spend your nights in the laps of everyone else’s husbands.

  He gripped the wheel with both hands and glared straight ahead, teeth clenched so tight that I saw his jaw muscles twitch. I could tell he was livid, but he was also wasted. He held on to make the world stop spinning. I stubbornly sewed my mouth closed as he peeled out and headed too fast toward Sunset. I wasn’t going to be the one to show weakness and tell him to slow down.

  Then there was the red light and the momentum of the car, how he didn’t stop. I think he simply didn’t see it. He was concentrating so intensely on not weaving that he didn’t even look up to see that the light was red.

  I saw it coming and tried to yell for him to stop but I’m not sure the sound ever came out. It happened fast and hard. Not slow like some people say. Not slow enough to see my life pass before my eyes, whatever that means, and anyway I’m glad I didn’t have to see that slide show.

  It was a red minivan that T-boned us. Aaron’s side completely caved in, crumpled like it was made of paper. I’ve seen the pictures. The impact was so massive that the van pushed the car forty feet and into a streetlight, which was what stopped us. My window was open is how my head didn’t go through the glass but just got banged around pretty hard. The crash tossed me sideways and I collided with the door, then the dash. It was one of those old cars with only a bottom seat belt.

  Aaron’s door crushed in so far that he was practically in my lap and when I turned to see him there wasn’t enough of him. Strings of blood hung off his face and off the ends of his hair and my first thought was his glasses—he lost his glasses. I grasped around for them but they were nowhere and anyway everything was turned inside out and I couldn’t tell where I was reaching, what I was touching. He breathed gurgly sounds and I couldn’t see his eyes through the wet, through the red. He wouldn’t look at me. There was no world outside to see, only the diamond-studded spiderweb of the windshield.

  I pushed open my side of the door as far as it would open, which was barely enough for me to slide out. I crawled away from the wreck over the glass on the pavement, which made a sound like ice dropped into warm water and seemed to crumble into dust under my weight. It didn’t hurt at all. I was fine. I reached the wall of the storefront and propped myself against it, arranging my skirt modestly over my knees, and then I saw the blood streaked across my legs, the blood smeared across my lap. I wondered whose blood it was, where it came from. I looked at the shattered glass all around me, tiny triangles of it glinting in the streetlights. It was almost pretty. I clawed at my legs because they were suddenly unbearably itchy, and that was when I noticed all the shards that were ground into the skin along my shins, my knees, my palms.

  By that time a crowd of people had gathered around. Concerned faces pushed in at me amid a sea of legs and an unintelligible chorus of low, freaked-out voices. When I saw that Aaron was still in the car, when I realized that I had left him alone in there, I stood to run back to him but I was too dizzy. I tried to crawl but the amoeba of people held me back. The sirens and the blue red blue red washed over me like forgetting and I couldn’t see clear; the scene shifted in and out of focus like I was twisting the ring on a camera lens.

  They had to open the top of the car up with one of those huge mechanical can openers to get him out. It made a sound like ripping the sky in half. It was then that I remembered to pray but my brain was all wrong. I couldn’t remember my prayers. I could only mouth, “Please, Jesus,” over and over and even that got fumbled up. My mouth was full of something that tasted like pennies.

  The paramedics took Aaron away on a gurney and he was still slick and purple and streaming in blood like he had just been born. They cut his shirt open with scissors as they rolled him away.

  They took me next to a hospital so fancy it was practically a hotel. The emergency room wasn’t some decrepit free clinic like the ones I’d seen before, but instead it was nice and clean with warm colors and framed prints of the desert. Attractive nurses floated by in pink scrubs and clogs with clever patterned socks peeking out. It was near Easter. I remember little bunny socks. And I was all right, a concussion and two broken ribs and lacerations, a lot of lacerations. Pain stabbed at my side but I hovered somewhere far away from it in an opiate haze.

  They told me I couldn’t see Aaron yet. He was still in surgery. There was no way of knowing. It would be hours. I went over everything I wanted to say to him when he woke up. I’d apologize for everything and make it right. We would do better. We would start over. I succumbed to the brain rattle and to the morphine fuzz and faded away wondering how we would ever pay for it all.

  I don’t know how long it was before I woke up. Before I could slog through the heavy waters behind my eyes and find my way to a desk to ask where he was. Every breath I took felt like shards of glass had lodged themselves in between my ribs on my right side. The feeling was so convincing that I actually lifted my gown to check. And when I looked at my stomach, fish belly pale and mottled with strange bruises, I remembered a dream I’d had. I dreamed of the accident, except that when the paramedics came I was still in the car. I was entirely bisected by a pane of glass, straight through the stomach, straight through the seat belt. I knew they could never remove it because if they did I’d split in two like a magician’s assistant after a trick gone horribly wrong.

  Dragging my IV next to me, I padded down the hallway in my bare feet to see Aaron behind the last doorway on the right. The hallway wasn’t long enough. I was at the last door on the right too fast. The hall smelled like floor cleaner and like cooked food in plastic lids and it made me gag a little. I walked in.

  What I saw was, he was smaller, sizes smaller, shrunken. My Aaron whose feet hung off the bottom of every bed. How did he shrink?

  He lay alone in a room so small it looked like a monk’s cell. There were bandages all around his basketball-sized head and over most of his face. What little skin he had that wasn’t bruised purple looked white. Not white like a white person but white like the dust on a red grape.

  His bed nearly filled the room, which didn’t smell of food like the hallway but smelled of nothing at all. He was attached to some mobile contraption—a fake set piece with mechanical breathing noises like Darth Vader and those green moving mountain range beeping lines. The front of his head was shaved and the few dreadlocks that were left escaped from his bandages like dark ropes on the white pillow. A child’s drawing of a sun with the lines bursting out around it that means shining.

  The sheet only covered him to his waist. His arm was in a brace and
a block of white plaster encased his leg. His sunken, nearly hairless chest moved mechanically up and down. He looked uncomfortable, like they had laid him down awkwardly with his one good arm partially wedged underneath him. Everything was off kilter and too crowded. His eyes were slightly open, half-moons of white. He shook epileptically. The shaking is what you don’t see on the TV comas. A thick breathing tube obscured his mouth.

  First thing I did was stand there like someone had hit me in the face.

  Second thing I did was I cried. I laid my head on his chest and cried and hoped my tears would spark him awake like the snow on the poppies in The Wizard of Oz.

  I talked to Jesus a lot in those days. That was before I stopped bothering. So the third thing I did was I fell to my knees on the cold linoleum and prayed to Jesus like I never had before. I pressed my bandaged palms together and prayed with all my heart to Jesus Christ to please save his life. Promised Jesus that if he would only be with Aaron right then, if he would only wake him up, that we’d be spiritually reborn. Just save his life and we’ll live in the light of God’s love and never stray again.

  When I talked to Jesus that was how it came out. It was etched into my brain that way after so many years at Zion Pentecostal. So when I wanted to talk my own way I sometimes talked to my pop. Because even though I knew that Jesus was boundless compassion, that Jesus was love, that Jesus was forgiveness, still somewhere I thought that maybe a dad who loved me crazy but still drank himself to death would offer forgiveness of a different sort.

  So, I prayed to my dad. Pop, I fucked up. Pop, I’m sorry I did this to me. Pop, can you help save his teeth, can you help save his hands? I didn’t mean to be this. But we’re not just this. You should see us in our dreams. You should hear him when he plays. I’m unforgivable but forgive me, forgive me.

  In my peripheral vision I saw a nurse come in and stop in her tracks, hovering there, unsure of what to do. Hadn’t she ever seen anyone pray before? I looked at his trembling body then turned to her.

  “He’s cold.”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “He’s shaking. Can we please have another blanket?”

  “He’s not cold.”

  I put my hands to his bare chest and could feel against my wrists where my bandages ended that he was warmer than I was. I was so cold that furious goose bumps covered every exposed inch of my flesh. I placed one hand to his heart and one on his belly like I was a preacher with healing powers. Like I had seen work a hundred times before back home. You may doubt it; you may think it was some kind of a sham, but you’d be wrong. I know what I saw was real. Anyone could be a healer.

  The nurse left the room.

  The fourth thing I did was that when I was done praying to Jesus and my pop I talked to Aaron. I told him that I was just kidding what I had said. I told him that God was going to give us another chance. I told him that I would learn how to love better, that I wasn’t sure how I had gotten it so wrong.

  His thin frame shook and his rib cage moved up and down to the mechanical rhythm. Up and down. I can still hear it sometimes when I’m trying to sleep. I shake my head to make it stop. When I start to hear the ventilator, I get up, go downstairs, and turn on the TV.

  After the strokes that stopped his brain, it was Aaron’s mother who signed the paper to turn the machines off. She didn’t speak much to me, but we sat together. We sat together with him when he died but that’s the part I’d rather not get into now because that’s the part that lives like an overhead projection superimposed over all of my days. When I first sobered up I actually tried banging my head on the wall to get rid of it, but the folks at the detox threatened to put me in a whole different level of lockdown if I didn’t get a grip and anyway it didn’t work, it just added a headache layer on top of the firebrand memory. Eventually what I figured out is that I can nudge it out of the way for a minute here and a minute there by pressing the rewind button and seeing instead the moment when I was on the pool table and my alive boyfriend stood in front of me and reached out his arms as if to say go ahead and fall. Fall and I’ll catch you. And that was all I had ever wanted—someone to catch me.

  Two

  I was almost saved once, when I was baptized in the waters of the Maumee River on the outskirts of Toledo. I thought that the cold dip would do the trick but almost isn’t enough. Look away for a minute and your faith will be gone and you may not get a second chance at it. That is what I think as I sit outside of Serenity in my shitty pinkthat-used-to-be-red Honda with the sun-bleached hood and the busted passenger-side door. Not so much about faith but about second chances.

  Serenity House is on the back slope of a hill in Echo Park. It is one of two state-sponsored halfway houses located in neighboring restored Victorians. I park the car on the steep grade and hope like I always do that the emergency brake will live up to its name. I got my beater car cheap from a lady whose son parked it out by the ocean and slit his wrists. She wanted it gone fast. She had it cleaned real good, though. You can only see a couple of the stains if you look. She told me the paint was faded because he was a surfer.

  The downtown L.A. skyline looks like Brigadoon in the mist—a cluster of tall, fuzzy-edged buildings floating out of a low-slung sprawl of lights that stretches forever. Walking up the street, I pass by Chandra, our ghetto princess, the one who talked me into going to beauty school. Chandra just finished getting her cosmetology license, which, in the voc-rehab system, is like being premed in college—it means you really have a future. But tonight Chandra sits in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s white Lincoln Continental and cries, her hands in front of her face, her two-inch-long acrylics stretching to her hairline. It gives me a jolt to see her like that. She’s a fighter, not a crier. I pull my jacket around me against the wet chill of the night and look away.

  I throw my fast-food wrappers out in someone else’s trash can before walking around back and climbing the few stairs up to the kitchen entrance. I opted for fries and a milk shake after Jake stood me up and left me hovering alone at the edges of an AA meeting where everyone was too bright and too loud and too pretty. I slipped out before the end and kind of felt like crying with frustration but instead stuffed my face in the parking lot of the Fatburger next door.

  It’s not his fault, really, that he rarely manages to show up for our dates. Jake lives in the men’s house next door. He qualifies for housing in a dual-diagnosis facility because he was honorably discharged from the Marines due to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. His particular flavor of schizo is characterized by paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations, neither of which was eased by his fondness for exotic psychedelics. By the time we met in a drug treatment center, before we both graduated and transferred to Serenity, Jake introduced himself as Jesus and really believed it until they got his meds straight. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Jesus, but I know he’s there, trembling underneath Jake’s skin, waiting for life to squeeze Jake too tight so he can emerge again. So I try not to squeeze. I give Jake a lot of room.

  Why would I date a guy who periodically thinks he’s the Messiah and more frequently has an audible commentary going in his head? You’d have to meet him to get it. He has the most remarkable eyes, and by that I mean not the color or the shape or anything but how they see things. And besides, we who have been branded and filed away into the state mental health system, we have to stick together. Who else will have us?

  My roommate, Violet, sits out on the back porch. She sits folded into the seat of one of the wire chairs with her knees tucked under her chin. The end of her cigarette glows with each furious drag. Violet is a goth girl with a baroque sense of style when she has the energy, but tonight she is wan and wearing black sweatpants so old they’re gray. She tugs her sleeves down to cover her fingertips so only her cigarette emerges.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey. How was the meeting?”

  “Jesus didn’t show.”

  “Jesus stood you up again?”

  “He has
issues. I try not to get too attached. How was your night, Mistress of the Dark?”

  She immediately goes listless and flat. “Fine.”

  Violet suffers from major depressive disorder in conjunction with a major suicidal ideation and a major fiending for methamphetamine. She turns inward, to her cigarette. I stand in the doorway for a minute. I wonder if there were constant awkward pauses before I got sober or if awkward pauses are one of the many new delights of sobriety. I can’t remember. Violet can be jumpy, so when I go in I hold the screen door to make sure it doesn’t slam.

  Four of the girls are gathered around the old TV set in the living room. A couple of bowls sit on the coffee table smeared with the milky remnants of frozen yogurt. I go to the front foyer to sign my name and the time. We live by the chore wheel and the sign-in sheet. Every night the other girls sit in front of the TV but I rarely join them. I use TV time to get some hours alone in my room. Other than that, there’s no such thing as alone. We share bedrooms and bathrooms and constantly talk behind people’s backs about who left the crumbs on the kitchen counter and who dropped her bloody tampon outside the trash and who is a slut and who is on a trust fund and who has a stash of pills. Halfway house living is nothing if not cozy.

  Mostly they watch The Bachelor and other such crap, but tonight they’re watching the news. Even our little family of self-obsessed drug addicts has been watching the news lately. The girls seem unusually grave. I lean against the doorway and one or two of them give me a weak hello.

  “What’s going on?” I ask the general room.

  “War,” replies Althea, a pasty, somber girl who wears vintage hats and meditates on the tarot for hours every day waiting for guidance on what to do with her life. She pays the rent off her parents’ credit card. She paid for her prescription habit with the same card before she got sober. “Again. Still.”