Touch

by Courtney Maum

  “So how’s he doing?” Sloane asked.

  “His lungs seem to be improving. But can you imagine? Steroid shots? In his lungs? I can’t stand it,” she said, her eyes welling, despite her earlier humor. “I bring him into the world and the first thing he gets is pain.”

  What could Sloane say? That Leila shouldn’t blame herself? That she was sure everything would turn out fine? Well, she wasn’t sure. She had no itching, no inkling, no lava in her gut. Her fabled intuition was either disabled by the radio frequency of hospital equipment or Sloane had absolutely no sixth sense when it came to the outcome of a struggling human life.

  “Leilee,” Sloane said, stroking her sister’s arm underneath the well-worn cotton of her hospital gown, which was covered, incongruously, in a parade of ducks.

  “Do the kids know?”

  “Jesus.” Leila sighed. “Harvey’s dealing with that, thank God. Mom offered to talk to them yesterday about it, you can imagine how that might have gone.”

  “She seems like she’s in really bad shape.”

  “She’s worse than me!” Leila exclaimed. “She’s worse than Harvey! You know with Mom, though, it’s like every fucking grandchild is another chance at life.”

  Sloane sat silently, her heart beating fast. She had two things to say to Leila. At any moment, a nurse could come in, her mother could come back with a platter of hot food. It was pummeling through her, the knowledge that this might be the only opening she’d have.

  She would start with the easy news. Which would make Leila laugh.

  “So, Leilee, I have something to tell you,” she said, pulling her hand off her sister’s arm.

  “Oooh. Yeah? Has Roman been arrested?”

  “Arrested?” Sloane scoffed. “No. But it’s . . . it’s something like that. I mean, I might have, like, a beau?”

  “I’m sorry, a bow?” she gasped. “Which kind?!”

  “I mean, we’re not at that point yet.” Sloane reddened. “We haven’t even had a . . . I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it, it’s just that, he said he might come by today and—”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a hot flash of a minute. So, basically yesterday, you’re kicking out your husband, and now I’m meeting your boyfriend? Like this?”

  “Well, he probably won’t come here, we were just going to meet—”

  “Who is this guy?” Leila insisted.

  “He’s a colleague?” Sloane said, with a little flinch.

  Leila wanted more details, so Sloane parsed together what she could, painting a portrait of a Jin who had been supportive of her off-brand ideas from the moment she’d started at Mammoth, and how the relationship had built from there, instead of how it had actually started with them schtupping at his mom’s. But even while Sloane was telling Leila the horrendously girlish details (she mentioned “really handsome” twice), she was distracted, nervous, kept watching the clock. It was now or never. Had to happen before Margaret arrived.

  “There’s something else,” Sloane said, feeling her face redden.

  “Oh my God, you’re getting married!”

  “No!” Sloane said, shocked. “What?”

  “You got fired,” Leila said, nodding fiercely. “Because of him.”

  “No,” said Sloane, scrunching up her nose. “Actually, I quit.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. Listen, Leila, listen. There’s something I have to . . . I want to give to you.”

  “Okay,” said Leila, warily.

  Sloane really looked at her sister, both for the first and zillionth time. This face that had widened and slackened and thinned over the years, but the eyes always the same. The eyes she’d smile into as they burrowed underneath a fort on Sloane’s top of their bunk bed, the bed Leila had always wanted, that Nina sometimes slept in now.

  She wanted her sister. Needed her sister. Thinking nothing bad could come of this, Sloane reached into her bag.

  In her hands was the loaf-of-bread card she’d bought, and penned, and never sent to Leila all those years ago. She held it in her palm like something without wings.

  “There’s a saying that newborns come already bearing bread,” Sloane started, trying to keep her voice controlled. “Which . . . which isn’t really apropos right now, so I’m sorry about the picture, but it’s . . . it’s something I wrote for you back when you’d had Nina.”

  “Nina,” Leila said, her voice a little edgy. “If I recall, you sent me some Frenchy outfit with a necktie that would have strangled her if she’d worn it.”

  “Okay,” Sloane said, managing to keep her mouth shut; that hadn’t been the gift. “It’s just that I never sent you this.”

  She handed Leila the card. Leila caught a glimpse of the penmanship inside, and her complexion clouded.

  “Sloane,” she said.

  “Just read it,” Sloane went, biting her lip.

  Sloane read along in her head with her sister as Leila’s eyes tracked the words:

  Dear Leila,

  I can’t believe that you’re going to be a mother. I mean, of course I can—when I think about the years that brought you to this place, I know why you’re going to be a mother and I know why you’ll be a great one.

  You’ve always been the grown-up sister in the family, the caring, responsible one. You’re a nurturer, too, but you never smother. You listened to me growing up, even when you didn’t understand my problems. You listen to everyone, and you act, you show up for things, you help. In so many ways, you have been my big little sister, and a role model for the person I can’t quite become.

  She could tell when Leila reached the third paragraph by the hardening of her jaw. Leila pushed her hair behind one ear, then the other, while Sloane’s heart pounded.

  I have wanted for so many years to say sorry. You will be a mother; you will have your own triumphs and heartbreaks. In so many ways, it seems too late to say sorry, now. I don’t expect you to forgive me—I wouldn’t even know how to put into words what I would want you to forgive. You were only eighteen when Dad died. I’ve had to get to thirty to understand how young that is. I didn’t listen, I didn’t act, I didn’t show up, and I didn’t help. Dad was my best friend, Leilee, and I ran away. I know that you think I’m running away, still. But I’m happy in Paris. I’ve never been as strong as you. I’ve never been as open. That’s why I could never be a mom. After the accident, every fiber in my being said I had to live somewhere Dad hadn’t. Nothing here reminds me of him, nothing reminds me of us. I’m with a man now who couldn’t be more different than Mom, and Dad, and you, actually, and that is what I need. It isn’t right, it isn’t kind, but this is what healing has ended up looking like for me.

  I’m sorry for destroying our friendship. I regret making it so that you had to rise above the grief and be the bigger one. I don’t actually expect you to forgive me, but you’ve always been nobler than me. Maybe one day you will understand that this is me being weak, it isn’t me wanting to hurt you. And I’m so sorry that I did.

  This isn’t even a good apology, and there’s no room left on this card. I love you, Leilee, I’ve always loved you, and I’m excited and a little jealous of your life. One day soon, I hope to share it with you, the way we shared everything before.

  Your sister,

  Sloane

  Sloane stayed quiet as her sister finished, her chest a drum about to burst. She knew that Leila was rereading it, not ready to lift her eyes from the page. It occurred to Sloane that maybe this hadn’t been the right moment, that she had no right to be there while her sister read it, and then her sister looked at her.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she cried, wiping under her lashes. “Nine years later? What is wrong with you? Why didn’t you just send it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s so fucked up,” Leila s
aid, her chin trembling. “You know how much I needed to hear this? Do you?”

  “I don’t,” Sloane stammered. “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t send it. You not sending this is almost worse than you never having apologized at all. No—” Leila said, wiping at her eyes again, this time with a fist. “Maybe I don’t mean that. But Sloane, this is—” She pressed her lips together. “I wanted this. So much.”

  “I know,” Sloane choked out. “Something’s . . . wrong with me.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” said Leila. “But so what? What if something ‘goes wrong’ with you again?”

  A little noise came out of Sloane’s throat, guttural, infantile. She stared down, ashamed. She could feel her sister deciding what to do, and she knew that she deserved nothing.

  “Oh, for fucking hell,” said Leila, opening her arms. “Come in and give me a hug, I can’t move or my stupid stomach will split open.”

  Sloane started to cry. But she moved to her, she moved to her, her forehead near her sister’s, the chalky smell of her hot scalp.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sloane said against her cheek.

  “Just don’t be an asshole. Don’t do this again.”

  Sloane sank into the fragile surety of it—tentative, but pulsing. That maybe almost everything could be righted.

  “Oh!” exclaimed a sudden voice behind them.

  Her mother, joy spreading across the long plains of her face.

  “Bad timing?” Jin, beside her, mouthed.

  33

  I can’t believe you came,” said Sloane, fork poised over the phosphorous deli ham in her chef’s salad.

  “I know,” Jin said. “We really do choose only the finest places to dine.”

  They both ate a little, then he asked if she’d been online.

  “Online?” she said, incredulous. “I’m kind of . . . dealing with something here.”

  “You’re trending,” he continued. “Or, your resignation speech is.”

  “What?” she balked.

  “Someone must have recorded you. They’re trying to find out who. They went through all our cell phones. Dax is out of his mind, of course. It’s made his company look like it’s in total mayhem.”

  “Someone recorded me?” she repeated, shocked.

  “Here.” He took his cell phone out and called up an audio recording with thirty-seven thousand shares:

  . . . human touch is endangered. You think the future belongs to the type of people who are going to sync their fridges with their smartphones, but people are ready—not tomorrow, but now—to be vulnerable and undirected and intimate again . . .

  Sloane threw the phone back at him like something hot. “I don’t want this. I don’t want this! I can’t think of this right now!”

  She had apologized to her sister, and her mother had seen. She wanted to be anywhere but inside her head.

  “It was just uploaded this morning,” Jin said, putting the phone away. “Hashtag: #IntimateAgain.”

  “And yesterday, it was #sexisdead,” Sloane muttered, unimpressed.

  “You don’t think they’re going to be jumping at the bit to sign on to a movement that says more sex instead of none?” he asked.

  “Can we not talk about this, here?”

  Jin’s eyes softened. “Do you want to talk about it?” She knew from the change in his tone of voice that he was referring to her sister’s baby. And her sister, too.

  “I don’t know if I want to talk about it,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about this.” She gestured toward his phone. “I really just need to live in denial about the Mammoth thing until they come and pry Anastasia out of my hands and make me think about it. Or maybe they’ll tow her—I mean, she has agency. She’s autonomous. She might try to stay.”

  “You know, I’ve met your family now,” Jin said, chewing. “I should probably have a proper introduction with your car.”

  “I wouldn’t call walking in on two crying thirty-somethings meeting them.”

  Jin put his hands up. “There’s still time.”

  “You’re such an optimist. You’re not worried about being seen with a persona non grata?”

  “You’re very much grata,” Jin said. “Promise. Look online.”

  Sloane sunk her fork tines into the last crunch of romaine, its edges tinged with dark.

  “Listen, I’ll come back tomorrow,” Jin said, with a brightness that felt forced. “We’ll have a proper dinner. Somewhere that’s not this.”

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said.

  Jin arched his eyebrows. “Do what, exactly?”

  “Pity me.”

  “Oh, Sloane,” he said with a tired sigh. “What are you doing to yourself?”

  • • •

  Internet searching her own name, apparently. #IntimateAgain was the seventh trending topic in the nation, #sexisdead was number two. Sloane scrolled the recent headlines associated with her, most of them combining what Jin had called her “resignation speech” and her Tusk appearance. “Acclaimed Trend Forecaster Tells Mammoth CEO: Change Course, or Else.” “Sloane Jacobsen Proclaims the Death of Social Media: Social Interaction Is Next.” “Jacobsen to Mammoth: You’re Making Humans Worse.”

  Afraid of what else she was going to find on the endless steppes of the World Wide Web, Sloane traded the hospital cafeteria for the safety of her car.

  “I wish you’d let me know you were coming!” Anastasia chided. “I would have preheated. Coffee? How is your sister doing, Sloane?”

  “She’s okay,” Sloane said, settling into the backseat. “Frustrated. There’s not a lot of information yet. We’re just waiting. Coffee sounds great.”

  The internal mechanisms of the seat divider began to whir.

  “You’ve been receiving a great number of phone calls,” Anastasia reported as Sloane waited for her beverage.

  “HR?”

  “Not yet. Reporters.”

  “Apparently, I’m trending.”

  “‘Power Couple Splits Ranks!’” Anastasia exclaimed. “I heard!”

  Sloane relaxed a little, temporarily amused that Anastasia was keeping tabs on her. But then she saw the dusting of snow across the roofs of the cars in the hospital parking lot. Waiting was the universal activity at a hospital. You waited to get better. You waited on someone else.

  Sloane was tired all of a sudden, irrevocably so. She felt far away from her sister and absolutely helpless, even though she knew there wasn’t anything that could help either Leila or Little Bird right then but time and rest.

  Apparently, rest was what she needed as well because when she opened her eyes, the sun was higher and most of the snow had melted from the sea of cars.

  “Ah,” said Anastasia, as Sloane blinked her way back to herself. “Seat biometrics registered deep and even breathing. A very nice rest.”

  “Was I out for long?”

  “Ninety minutes.”

  Sloane creaked her neck. “Oh gosh.”

  She gathered up her stuff quickly, stretched her neck again.

  “I’m going to go check on everybody. See if anything’s changed.”

  “I’ll be here,” Anastasia said.

  Sloane flushed with the possibility that Anastasia was going rogue as well.

  • • •

  Back in Room 234, Harvey and her mother were in seats flanking either side of Leila, their faces upturned at the television mounted on the wall.

  “Any news?” Sloane asked, setting her bag down.

  “You!” said Leila, pointing.

  Sloane groaned as she saw what they were watching. It was the Tusk footage from her aborted interview with Roman. On the left of the split screen, Roman was holding court about the gateways to virtual reality: anticipatory computing, third-wave electronics, mental inter
face bays. On her side of the screen, her headshot accompanied by a quote: “Trend forecaster Sloane Jacobsen: There aren’t going to be any more products . . . there will be a great big trend in #unbuying.”

  “Oh,” said Leila, turning toward her. “You totally got fired.”

  “And you?” Brian Naecker, the program’s host, was asking Roman, apparently in reference to the statement she had given.

  “Well, of course that’s absurd,” Roman said. “Electronics are our airways. They keep us much more than connected. They keep us alive.”

  Brian made a crack about Roman being a good fit for Mammoth, since they were a tech company after all, before thanking him—and Sloane, he’d added with a snicker—for being on his show.

  The anchor of the news show returned.

  “Sloane Jacobsen and Roman Bellard were both hired to consult as trend forecasters for Mammoth, but yesterday, in a speech that is making the rounds of the Internet, Ms. Jacobsen resigned from her position. It remains to be seen whether Mammoth’s CEO, Daxter Stevens, will replace Jacobsen or whether Mr. Bellard alone will be guiding the company toward their annual trends conference this summer. In related news, Mr. Bellard is facing serious criticism from conservative groups for his anti-penetrative sex stance that is, as one spokesperson called it, ‘An absolute defilement of American values and a serious threat not just for the family unit, but for the continuation of human life.’ Several dozen protesters were seen picketing Mammoth’s New York headquarters this morning, seeking deportation of Mr. Bellard to his native France.”

  Up came an image of the picketers, bundled in down jackets, holding homemade signs.

  “Well, damn,” said Harvey, with a whistle. “You’ve sure been keeping things from us, Sloane.”

  “It’s not as big as—can we just turn it off?”

  “I actually don’t know if you can,” said Leila, shaking the remote at the TV. “I’ll mute it.”