When the Lights Go Out

by Mary Kubica

  But I couldn’t go back to billing at that moment.

  I needed to get away.

  I got behind the wheel of my car and I drove and drove.

  I drove to the chophouse, needing to see Aaron, desperate suddenly to see him, for him to hold me in his arms, to stroke my hair and tell me everything would be all right. If I’m being honest, I was scared of the person I was, scared of the person I’d become. I was quite terrified, if Aaron didn’t put a stop to it, of what I might do. My thoughts were scattered, sown like seeds in my mind, and there was no telling which ideas would bloom, the sensible ones like going home and putting myself to bed, or the misguided ones where I return to the hospital and force myself into Joe and Miranda’s room, screaming like a lunatic, demanding that they give me their child.

  I left the car parked haphazardly across parallel lines on the street outside, nearly a block from the chophouse. Parking in town was never easy to come by. I stepped from the car, my ankle giving on me as it sunk deep into a crater on the street. I shook it off, kept moving, feeling the ligaments beneath my shoes begin to ache and swell.

  It had begun to rain outside, the sky darkening. The restaurants, the gift shops, the galleries that lined the street radiated light. They beamed from the inside out, while outside people scattered like roaches in daylight, hiding under canopies and slipping inside stores, seeking shelter, huddled in throngs beneath ample-size golf umbrellas, clutching one another, laughing.

  But not me.

  I made my way to the chophouse alone, fully intent on going inside. On speaking to Aaron. On begging him to help me, on pleading with him to take me back. I was desperate. What else could I do? The rain came pouring down, permeating my skin, so that I could feel it inside my bones. I hurried past people tucked warmly, drily beneath their umbrellas, no one offering to share. The rib of a passing umbrella poked me in the shoulder, but no apology came thereafter, as if it was my fault, as if it was my shoulder’s fault for getting in the way of this man’s umbrella.

  I closed in on the chophouse, smelling that scent that always followed Aaron home and into bed with us, that coiled around us while we slept. Grease, Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of meat.

  But before stepping inside, I caught a fleck of Aaron through the restaurant window, seeing his face through the small partition that separates the kitchen from the dining room. A flyspeck only, but in that flyspeck, there was a lightness about him, a nimbleness, a radiance to his skin. Rain streaked down the window, but I peered past it, watching as a smile danced on the edges of Aaron’s face. In the very same fleck some other man made a wisecrack, I could only assume, because then Aaron was laughing, laughing!, the edges of his lips reaching upward to the sky like he hadn’t done in years. Aaron was laughing and it was beautiful to see, an openmouthed laugh, nothing curbed or restrained about it, and I saw in Aaron’s eyes a felicity that I hadn’t seen in quite some time. Never did he press his hand to his mouth to hide the smile, but rather chuckled with all of his might.

  Aaron was happy. Aaron had found his happy place.

  Unlike me, his heart had healed and he was no longer broken. He was whole.

  Oh, how I wanted to be there beside him, laughing too.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to shatter what had already been fixed. I’d ruin him, that I knew, if I stepped foot into the chophouse, as I imagined the laughter drawing to a sudden close if I walked in, that lovely smile vaporizing from his face at the sight of me.

  And so instead, when a hostess poked her head outside and asked if I’d like to take a peek at the menu, I shook my head, scurrying the other way like all the other roaches, seeking shelter indoors from the rain.

  It was an upscale restaurant where I went, fine dining with a bar attached, the kind where one might have a glass of wine while waiting for their table to be set. This hostess offered a table, but I strutted straight past her and to the bar—sopping wet, leaving a trail of rainwater behind me as I walked. I climbed onto one of the tall stools and ordered a chardonnay to drink. A chardonnay! The glass came to me full to the rim, a generous pour at the hand of a bartender with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, a man who must have been six years younger than me, barely old enough to be serving alcohol at an upscale establishment. And yet here he was, and in the moment I felt suddenly old, much older than my twenty-nine years, but that didn’t matter. That was the least of my concerns.

  With the wine he also brought a dish towel, which I used to towel dry the ends of my hair.

  The first sip of wine tasted like battery acid to me.

  It choked me on the way down, burning the lining of my esophagus so that the bartender raised an eyebrow at me and asked if I was all right. I pressed a hand to my mouth, nodding, but I wasn’t sure that I was all right. The wine settled in the pit of my stomach, and the feeling was a mix of repulsion and nausea, along with a warmth and prickling that I quite liked.

  And so I had another sip, wanting the warmth and prickling to have its way with me, to help me forget about Aaron and the miscarriage, all those wasted months trying unavailingly to create a baby.

  How stupid I’d been in believing that with Dr. Landry’s help we could outsmart nature. Aaron and I were infertile; that was the nature of the beast. That couldn’t be changed.

  The universe was laughing at me for my arrogance and my vanity.

  I took another sip of wine and this time, I didn’t choke.

  I thought of my baby, of my unborn baby. Of my dead baby. I wondered what she would have looked like had she had a chance to grow full-term. Would she have looked like Aaron, with dark hair and light eyes, or would she have looked like me?

  Would she have been a she, or would she have been a he?

  I still think about her all the time.

  Had she been a girl, I would have named her Sadie.

  I raised my glass to my lips and swallowed a mouthful, wondering if she ever crossed Aaron’s mind.

  Wondering if I ever crossed Aaron’s mind.

  By the second glass, the wine was no longer battery acid to me. It quenched that hunger, that thirst, like nothing else in the world was able to do. It spilled through my veins, anesthetizing my arms and legs, dulling my senses. I hadn’t had a drop to drink in quite some time and so it didn’t take much for the room to start to blur at the edges, for the stool to feel insecure beneath my seat.

  With every sip thereafter I became a more youthful version of myself, someone more energetic, someone more carefree.

  With every sip I became blissfully forgetful, forgetting at once that I was a soon-to-be divorcée, a woman who would never have a baby.

  It was a quiet night, a Tuesday night, and so the bartender happily filled his free time speaking to me—about what, I hardly remember anymore—and, after that second glass of chardonnay was poured, I plucked a credit card from my purse, one that wouldn’t be denied, and the bartender started a tab for me, telling me his name was Josh.

  “You have a beautiful smile,” he said to me, and I blushed, grinning, and he pointed at it and said, “Yup, that’s the one,” while smiling his own beautiful smile. For whatever reason I dug a tube of lipstick from my purse, a light shade of pink, and applied it to my lips, leaving light pink prints around the rim of my wineglass that he filled each time with a bountiful pour.

  I unbuttoned the top button of my blouse, leaning farther over the bar, fully aware of just how pathetic it was, me, a lonely, depressed woman hitting on a bartender in a near-abandoned bar.

  I had become a cliché.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, setting a bowl of nuts before me, a single finger brushing against my skin as he did, and I told him that it was Eden. He equated it to the garden of Eden, in other words, paradise, and I smiled and said I’d never heard that before, though of course I had, from each and every one of the lowlifes who came before Aaron when they
were trying to pick me up in bars far less classy than this.

  “What are you doing here all by yourself, Eden?” he asked while swirling a dishrag in circles before me.

  I shrugged my shoulders and said that I didn’t know.

  What was I doing here?

  I reached for my glass and downed the last few drops. At once it was refilled, and I downed that too, scarcely able to recall what came next.

  Only bits and pieces stayed with me until morning, a montage of what may have occurred. Sliding from the barstool with the third glass of wine. Laughing at myself as strange hands helped me to my feet, refreshing my glass. A face far too close to mine. The deep groove of dimples. Words whispered in my ear.

  “Wait for me,” he said.

  Standing on the street corner in the dark autumn night, I leaned against a streetlamp that didn’t give off an ounce of light. Getting absorbed by blackness until even I wasn’t sure if I was still there. It was raining still, a fine mist in the air, one which seemed to levitate and not fall.

  And then suddenly there were lips on my neck, hands kneading my skin, though who they belonged to, I couldn’t see. It was far too dark to see, but it didn’t matter to me. I knew only that my extremities were numb from the alcohol, and it was cathartic to me, strange hands wandering along the landscape of my skin, exploring the valleys and hills with a certain vehemence I’d never felt before. A body pressed against mine, pinning me to the streetlamp, whispering breathless words into the lobe of an ear.

  “Where’s your car? I’ll drive.”

  I heard the sound of an engine gunning, the stars coming at me at a dizzying speed before the world turned black again, and then the scratch of facial hair on my cheek, a hand groping at my chest with the impatience of a sixteen-year-old boy. A hasty man pawed at me, tearing at my blouse. What buttons remained clung to the fabric by strings, as he pushed me into the back seat of the car, moving with the deftness and agility of someone who knew what they were doing, of someone who had a history of strange women in the back seats of cars.

  I felt the force of my skirt getting thrust clear up to my rib cage. The scratch of a fingernail as he tore at my panties, pushing them aside. The sound of a moan, my own forced moan tolling through the airless space because, even with the continuous thrust of his hips into me, I felt nothing and I wanted more than anything to feel something, to feel anything, because feeling something was far better than feeling nothing, and in that moment all I felt was nothing. Nothing that mattered anyway.

  Instead, hot breath on the lobe of my ear. Handfuls of hair being clenched between hands, tugged consciously or unconsciously, I didn’t know. Reggae music on a car stereo.

  He panted out a name in rhythm, “Anna, Anna.” Did he think that that was my name, Anna, or was there another woman in his life, a woman named Anna, and he was only pretending that I was her? I replied with “Yes, yes!” deciding that I would be his Anna if that’s who he wanted me to be. A seat belt buckle drilled a hole into the small of my back, plastic plunging itself into me with every thrust of his hips, leaving its mark, though still I felt nothing, nothing at all, not until finally a spasm tore through him like a lightning strike and he collapsed against me, and then there was the weight of him, no longer supported by his own hands.

  The weight of him. That I felt.

  And then weightlessness.

  A car door opened and closed and then there was silence.

  He was gone.

  I woke up in the morning in the back seat of my car, parked at the far edge of a public playground parking lot, beneath the shadow of a tree, my skirt still thrust clear up to my rib cage, the rest of me exposed, hidden only by the dewdrops that had settled on the windows overnight.

  jessie

  My heart beats inside me like a cheetah. I’m screaming.

  “Psst. Hey you, hey, Jessie.”

  There’s a hand at my shoulder, rattling me. It’s gentle, but insistent. I jerk away from the hand, arms flailing. I’m no longer falling.

  A mouth presses closely to my ear, speaks in a breathy voice. A stage whisper. “Earth to Jessie,” she says, and it’s a numbing voice. A hypnotic voice. The perfect opiate.

  I imagine where I am. On the grass. Body in bits on the ground, bleeding and broken, hardly able to move. In the distance, the sound of an ambulance’s wailing siren as my father walks away from the scene unscathed.

  The voice says it’s okay, it’s okay, three times or more while stroking my hair. I can’t open my eyes. And yet I see her, a woman hunched over me on the lawn, while others crowd around her. She’s gawking, her eyes fixated on the most gruesome parts of my battered body. A leg that bends backward, organs that protrude from the skin.

  I know the voice. I’ve heard it before. But I can’t place it.

  I’m swimming beneath water. Sounds are muffled above my head. The dropping of a needle onto an old vintage vinyl record. Voices talking. A measured, high-pitched ping. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, ping. Voices in the background. Talking. Saying things like morphine and slipper socks and ice chips.

  When I go to open my eyes, they’re sealed shut. Taped down. Impossible to open.

  My hands rise and I’m surprised to find that I can still move them, my arms and hands. That they’re not broken after all. Not shattered into a million pieces across the concrete.

  I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and rub hard, wiping the crusty discharge. Inside, my heart pounds hard. A song begins to play. Quietly. Background music. It’s a song I know well because it’s Mom’s favorite song.

  When I finally get my eyelids to lift, all I see is yellow. A blinding yellow light.

  And that’s when I know that I’m dead. That’s the first clue.

  The yellow light charges my eyes. It stuns and overpowers them, making them close again because I can’t stand to keep them open; it hurts too much. I blink repeatedly, trying to adapt to the light. To orient myself, to find a reference point, to figure out where I am.

  The second clue that I have that I’m dead is Mom. Because Mom is also dead. And yet, as I open my eyes, she’s here, sitting five or six feet from me. She sits upright, on some sort of reclining armchair with castors on its feet, her gaunt legs propped on the chair’s footrest. She’s dressed in a roomy gown that slips carelessly from a shoulder, the hair on her head merely fuzz, as it was the last time I laid eyes on her alive. Which is why I know this is some sort of afterlife we’re stuck in. Mom and me.

  The room around me is blue. Blue walls. Blue sheets. A comforting, pastel shade of blue. I’m not on the lawn after all. I’m not outside, lying in the shadow of the building from which I fell. Rather I’m in a room, on a bed.

  A woman stands beside Mom, lathering lotion onto her arms and hands, massaging the purplish, blotchy skin. I know who she is because I’ve seen her before, at the hospital before Mom died. She was Mom’s nurse, one of them anyway. A woman named Carrie who was more religious than any about applying lotion to Mom’s hands and feet, about turning her so she didn’t get bedsores. Even when I begged for them to leave her alone so Mom could sleep.

  She looks over at me and says, “Well, it’s about time,” and that’s when I know that we’re all dead. Mom, the nurse and me. They’ve just been waiting for me to arrive.

  I know how Mom and I died, but I wonder, how did she?

  “That stuff knocked you out cold,” says the woman who squats on her haunches beside me, a second nurse. Her hand rests on my shoulder, the very same hand that only moments ago rattled me, mouth purring into my ear, Psst. Hey you, hey, Jessie. Earth to Jessie.

  “What stuff?” I ask, feeling dazed and confused. Behind me, from a record player, Gladys Knight sings to me. There’s the greatest sense that I’m still falling, though I’m well aware that it didn’t hurt when I hit the ground. That when I crash-landed into the co
ncrete beside the apartment building, I felt nothing. I don’t even remember it happening. I must’ve been dead by then, I decide. A heart attack, a broken neck.

  The room whirls around me. I push myself up so I sit, perpendicular, no longer lying down on a bed. There’s a puddle of blankets on the floor, a pillow beneath my head. The second woman rises from the ground beside me and pulls the strings of a window shade so that they rise. I’ve seen her before. She’s the same woman who kept me company the night before Mom died, and now she too is dead like me. How can that be?

  How can we all be dead?

  More blinding yellow infiltrates the room, making it hard to see much of anything clearly. But Mom. I see Mom. My eyes go back to Mom. To Mom sitting there. Mom, in the flesh. No longer listless. No longer bed bound. She looks sleepy still, her eyes glazed over, and yet on her face, a smile. “How about some ice chips, Miss Eden?” Nurse Carrie asks, offering a single piece of ice from the end of a spoon.

  “The clonazepam,” I hear, and it takes a minute to realize the nurse is talking to me, that I asked a question and she’s answering it for me. “The stuff doc gave you to sleep. He’ll be happy to hear it worked. You needed a good night’s sleep. You were dreaming,” she says. “Calling out, kicking in your sleep. Must’ve been one hell of a dream.”

  And as I finally start to get my bearings, I realize where I am. I’m in Mom’s hospital room. Mom. Who sits six feet from me, upright, sucking on a cube of ice. Not six feet under, but six feet from me. No longer ashes, but now whole.

  The clonazepam. The melatonin. That I remember. My own bloody, inflamed eyes. The doctor, concerned, offering something to help me sleep. Watching a newsmagazine show on the TV, a story about identity theft, while waiting for the pills to kick in, the nurse tucking me into bed, telling me about her daughter, dead in a car accident at the age of three. The purple swimsuit, her daughter collecting shells from the sea. That I remember.