And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  When the officer returns, David is with him. The sight of him is jarring, in this awful place, particularly because it’s the first time I’ve seen him in a suit. He looks like a congressman, though he smiles and gives me a little wave when the cop busies himself with opening my cell.

  “Terribly sorry about the misunderstanding, sir,” the cop is saying. “I have a grandmother with Alzheimer’s myself. I know what it’s like to lose track every once in a while.”

  “And of course, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself,” David says as the gate to my cell swings open. He hands the cop a few bills. “Come on, sis, let’s go home, okay?”

  I can’t help but rush to him and throw my arms around his neck. It is so, so good to see him, especially here, though I am thoroughly flabbergasted by what has happened. “Am I not arrested anymore?” I ask when I release him.

  “No, not anymore. Come on,” he says, his voice low. He pretends that he’s not as delighted to see me as I am him, but I know better. I follow him out of the building and into a very expensive-looking car.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “You had Dr. Bernard’s business card on you. They called him, but he’s at his vacation home in Michigan. I guess he thought I’d be a good runner-up.”

  “What did you tell them?” I ask, as he opens the car door for me and I duck inside. It smells like new leather. It has the feeling of the inside of a museum, of still, expensive air.

  “That you’re my mentally handicapped sister-in-law, and you wandered away from us at the mall.”

  I can feel my mouth fall open. “That’s terrible.”

  He grins at me. “Want to go back in there and tell them the truth? That you’re a cloned coma patient who likes to commit petty larceny in her spare time? Or I can have them call Tom, if you want.”

  I fold my arms over my chest. “I wasn’t in a coma. I was conscious the whole time. There’s a difference.”

  He chuckles as he starts up the car, pulling it out into traffic. “You live in Evanston?”

  I nod, though I don’t bother to inquire how he knows.

  “So what were you doing lifting a six-dollar figurine from Water Tower Place?” he asks. “This is how you spend your time now that you don’t have the support group to go to?”

  “It’s a long story,” I reply, feeling the purr of the car’s engine through my seat.

  “Well, this could be a long drive. I have to go the speed limit. No license,” he replies. I give him my best reproachful-mother expression. We cruise through Grant Park, heading toward the Lake.

  “I’m pregnant,” I say, testing it out, trying to shock him. At first I think he hasn’t heard me because nothing shifts in his expression. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “What does that have to do with you shoplifting a piece of junk from the mall?”

  I shrug. “I don’t really know. Maybe nothing. It feels good though, to do something secret. Something just for me.”

  “Most women, I don’t know, take up knitting. Read romance novels. That sort of thing.”

  “Yes, us little women and our simple hobbies,” I say, and we both smile a little because I sound like Connie. “Well I can’t knit anymore. New body. My hands don’t remember it.” I hold them up in front of me like a couple of foreign objects, their skin smooth and supple and enduringly perfect. “Don’t you ever want to do something wrong? Simply because it’s wrong?”

  We pull on to Lake Shore Drive, picking up speed, and David lets out a low whistle. “Boy, if there’s going to be an epidemic of this sort of behavior for everyone who goes through SUBlife, the program will never get past the FDA.”

  “Maybe you should have let us crazies sabotage it for you,” I retort.

  His hands tighten on the wheel. “I didn’t get a chance to explain last time. About the FDA. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Maybe if you tried to explain, we would have understood. But you were too busy yelling at her.” We both know who I mean.

  He nods. “Want me to explain it now?”

  “No,” I reply. “It doesn’t matter now.” The damage has already been done. There is no taking it back, not for him. Certainly not for me. I sniffle and realize that my eyes are full of tears. It’s as much a surprise as before, when Cora would wipe my face with tissue and not even pause in what she was saying. But I know it’s different now. I know this body feels too much for my tears to ever be involuntary. “I don’t know if I want it,” I say. “The baby.”

  He fishes in the center console and pulls out a pack of tissues, which he thrusts at me. “I think I’m the wrong person to talk to about this.”

  “Because you’re a Christian?” I ask, taking the tissues and using one to wipe my nose.

  “Because most of the time I’m a lousy parent. Even when I’m actually trying,” he says. “And yes, I’m a Christian. So I’m not the one to be discussing your options with.”

  “I don’t have any options,” I reply. “Courtesy of all the paperwork we signed. Or in my case, the paperwork my husband signed.” I can’t keep the tinge of anger out of my voice at the idea of Tom still directing the course of my life without my permission.

  “You know, someone once told me that there are two kinds of unplanned pregnancies. There are the babies you don’t want. And then there are the spouses you don’t want,” David says.

  “What if it’s my whole life that I don’t want?” I ask, before I can catch myself. I put a hand to my mouth. “Jesus, I shouldn’t say things like that. My kids.” He reaches over and grasps my shoulder. It’s a reassuring feeling, fatherly. I pull my sleeve up and dab at my eyes with it. “I imagined running away this afternoon. Just going, not looking back, not ever. Disappearing. Again.”

  “Well, I can take you anywhere you want,” David says, tapping the steering wheel with his palm. “Just say the word.”

  “The worst part is, I don’t even know where I’d go,” I reply, even though it’s a lie. I know exactly where I would go, if I could. If such a place existed.

  Hannah

  I think very seriously about selling my apartment. It seems, at first, like the smart thing to do; I’ve put so much work into it over the years that I’m sure I could make a solid profit on it. It’s difficult to wake there every morning, to live alone within its walls for the first time, that I think it might be easier to tear every last scrap of my old life down and build a new one from its rickety foundations. Sometimes I think it might be easier if everything in my life is unrecognizable instead of just my body.

  The tiny second bathroom, nestled off the room Sam used as an office, finally convinces me to stay. For no other reason, but that it would make a perfect darkroom. I buy the supplies for a small fortune online—darkroom components are terribly difficult to find now and most of what I order is second-hand and remarkably overpriced—but I’m up and running within a few weeks. The man from Home Depot looks at me like I’m crazy when I ask him to remove the toilet, explaining to me about the condo’s resale values as if I were a child, and then finally, begrudgingly doing what I ask. I put an enlarger in its place, set up a shelf of trays over the bathtub. A row of red safelights go over the mirror, which I cover with black acrylic paint so I don’t have to look at myself, my new self, in that muddy amber light.

  The rhythm of the darkroom is soothing; that I remember from the class I took when I was a kid, how easy it was to slip into the patterns of light and darkness, the timed agitation of trays of chemicals—developer and stop bath and fixer and stabilizer and water wash—the patience required to get it right, just right, before you can dare bring your print out into daylight. I lose time in the darkroom, like I used to in my studio, with my little radio blaring away on a shelf above me, the music keeping stilted time with the click of the darkroom timer.

  I spend my days scouring the city for photos, walking through its streets with my camera, snapping shots of children playing at a park with their grandmother, or an
overgrown aloe plant pressing its waxy leaves against a shop window, or a group of tight-jeaned teenagers standing under the Melrose Diner’s blaring neon sign at three in the morning. I forget to eat, some days, hunting around with film cassettes rattling in my pockets. I bring my spoils back to my darkroom and follow my days of excursions with more days spent in darkness. It’s a strange pattern into which I’ve fallen. I am both explorer and hermit. I study the faces of people and speak to no one. I am invisible, behind that camera. I have become something new.

  I sit down with a pencil and paper, trying to sketch out what I have in my head. The thin, spindly feathers, the swirling lines. The feeling of movement. But it doesn’t work, everything looks thick and flat and lifeless when I put the graphite to paper. I crumple it up, toss it into the wastebasket, and get my phone. Penny picks up on the third ring.

  “Hey.” Her voice sounds tight. These last few months are the longest we’ve ever gone without speaking. I wonder if she’s angry at me.

  “Hey,” I say to her now. “I need you to draw me something.”

  She pauses, and I can almost feel her bite back a reproach. “Okay,” she says, finally. “Okay, I guess.”

  An hour later we sit, huddled in my spare bedroom until the floor around us is littered with sheets of discarded paper and Penny’s drunk the last of my emergency coffee stash. Late afternoon sunlight cuts swirling, dusty paths through the air around us.

  “How about this?” Penny says, holding up the drawing she’s been working on.

  “I think that’s probably about as close as we’re going to get.”

  We’ve both relaxed a bit from when she arrived, when we greeted each other with forced smiles and anxious glances, testing each other out before we dove back into the deep waters of our friendship. But now, even before she speaks, I know what’s coming.

  “So let me get this straight,” she says. “You left Sam for the Antichrist?”

  “He’s not the Antichrist,” I reply, though my attempt to defend David is admittedly feeble. “And I didn’t leave Sam for him. I left Sam, and David happened to be around.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to fuck a Republican.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway. Sam’s article put a stop to it pretty quickly. Which, I assume, was his intention.”

  “Please,” Penny said, flicking her hand dismissively. “You think Sam published that article to punish David because you were sleeping with him?”

  “Why else would he single him out? Go after him like he did?”

  “Listen, I don’t know where he found out about David trying to kill the FDA vote. But can you imagine Sam, the white knight of truth and virtue, sitting on that story for any reason? Come on, Hannah, he wouldn’t be the guy you loved if he did.”

  “Even if you’re right, none of it matters, anyway,” I reply. “The article has nothing to do with why Sam left. Neither does David, not really.”

  Penny’s head drops back against the wall. “He told me what happened, Hannah. He was wrecked,” she replies.

  “Yeah, so was I.” I think back on that night and imagine how different things could have been if I’d gone to Penny in my grief instead of David. “I can’t forgive him, Pen.”

  “I know. I understand,” she says. “That’s what we’ve always loved about each other, isn’t it? That we’re both merciless, in one way or another. Kindred spirits.” She glances at me and I nod, a confirmation. “But then I think about Connor. And if it came down to watching him go through something like that and closing my eyes, I don’t think I would have an ounce of strength to keep them open. I don’t know if I could have stood it for as long as Sam did.”

  “Jesus,” I say, “would you really want to be with someone who would leave you to die alone?”

  She starts to cry then, and it’s an appalling thing to watch. Penny, fearless Penny, the one who has always been the fiercer of us, crying there on the floor of my little spare room. She claps her hands over her face. I don’t know what to do. I’m helpless before this wash of emotion from someone who is always so controlled. She wipes at her eyes.

  “You wouldn’t have been alone,” she says, her voice so tight it’s almost a whisper. “I would have made sure of it. I would have been there.”

  I take her hands and kiss her knuckles. They’re rough. Artist’s hands, made for utility, for transmission. Mine are like a child’s hands, wrapped around her dark fingers, useless and unformed.

  “I love you, you know I love you,” I say, and she sniffs, nodding, shaking off the lingering emotion the way someone else might flick away an insect. “But you’re not the one I would have needed to be there.”

  We take the drawing to the little tattoo shop on Irving Park that Trevor used to swear by when he lived in Chicago. I’d never gone there before, since I always went to a shop in the Ukrainian Village for all of my other work. But there’s no way to explain to Garry, my former tattoo artist, why all of his previous work has suddenly disappeared from my body, so I had to find an alternative. Inside this shop is a woman with long auburn hair, and she looks at the drawing, then from Penny to me.

  “You’re really jumping into the deep end for your first tattoo. You sure about this?”

  “This isn’t my first tattoo,” I say, grinning at my own private joke, and she shrugs and leads me to her chair. Two and a half hours later, I walk out of the shop with the beginnings of an ornate phoenix spanning the space from my left shoulder to my elbow, its lines like lacework in Penny’s delicate, perfect detail. It’s hot and aching when the cool evening air hits it, but it’s that good ache, like sore muscles, the kind of pain that’s born of living.

  It feels good to watch it heal during the next days and weeks. It crusts over, grows dry, as my body tries to rid itself of the ink deposited in the low wound. But the marks remain, too deep for this body to be rid of, and that feels like a triumph. Like I’m reclaiming myself, an inch of skin at a time.

  Connie

  I’m spending too much time alone. There is nowhere for me to go without our weekly group meetings, waiting for Harry to summon me back to Los Angeles. He got me a modeling job in Chicago to hold me over, a few days of photo shoots for some Midwestern makeup company, which felt briefly exhilarating until they handed me a check and sent me on my way. Now I spend hours holed up in my little apartment, the way I used to when I was sick. I keep thinking about my mother. I think about the way she was when I was a child, her ferocity and strength of will, her unyielding authority. And I think of her now, imagine her in that trailer, a dried-up shade of what she was, because of me. I want to talk to Linda, to ask her what she thinks of my depression and its source. But there’s no way for me to find her. I don’t know how to even begin trying to track her down.

  I consider confiding in Dr. Grath, but things have grown a bit frosty between the two of us since my trip to L.A. I returned so certain of my future, so sure of my impending departure from this broken-down apartment building. It’s probably only natural for us to begin to drift apart, since a more permanent separation is probably imminent. But without the group, without Linda, and now without Dr. Grath, I find myself with nowhere to turn when the familiar depression begins to plague me. All of the things I press back seem to seep forward when I’m alone for too long.

  Finally, after the third fitful week, I decide that the only way to resolve my psychic imbalance is to go to the source, so I rent a car and drive north on I-94. Within minutes, Chicago’s buildings give way to corporate offices and hotels, then car dealerships and the occasional restaurant. By the time I exit, thick walls of greenery line the highway. It’s all fast-food and auto shops and dollar stores, everything dingy with age. Compared to my silver city, it may as well be a different country.

  It’s cool and rainy when I arrive, pulling my rental car through the overgrown driveway at the trailer park’s entrance. The place feels deserted, with all of its inhabitants tucked away and not strewn around their yards
and porches, calling to one another over the din of their children. I pull up to my mother’s trailer, though it takes me a moment to figure out which one it is because this place feels smaller now and the trailer hasn’t held up very well. Its paint is peeling and the screen in the front door is torn, a piece of it dangling like a pennant within its wooden frame. My mother’s lawn chairs are still out, though brackish water collects in their seats and their metal joints show a red dusting of rust.

  I pull open the screen to knock on the door, and as I do my thumb catches on a sharp splinter of raw wood, which imbeds itself in my skin. I curse and am in the middle of prying the splinter out with my fingernails when my mother opens the door. For the briefest of moments, I think I have the wrong trailer. The woman standing there looks much too old to be my mother. Her mouth is puckered with lines, and her eyes seem to have grown smaller, surrounded as they are by skin that droops down from her eyebrows and pools underneath, hanging in bags above her cheekbones. She looks like a wax figure that’s beginning to melt in the sun. Her dark-blonde hair has thickened with gray, becoming wiry and coarse, hanging around her face in an uneven bob. For a moment I think that this can’t be her. This can’t be the woman who taught me to worship beauty the way ancient tribes worshipped the sun. But then her saggy eyes widen. And I remember that she worships something else now, especially when I see the little gold cross nestled in the rumpled skin of her throat.