Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  ‘At a blood bank.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said. He considered it. ‘You don’t ever get bored?’

  ‘I mean, no more than you got bored of flipping fancy burgers at Fred Upstairs,’ I said. ‘It was the first thing I got. Anyway, I don’t have to be there forever.’

  ‘I guess you don’t,’ he said.

  It was strange not knowing each other.

  ‘Does your sister know we’ve split up?’

  ‘Of course she does,’ he said. He looked offended. ‘It’s just Mom. You know.’

  ‘I just want to be sure,’ I said, ‘who we’re pretending for.’

  We drove another five hours, and by the time he got to Ukiah, he was tired, and we decided to stop. I was feeling guilty I couldn’t drive his stick-shift, even though I’d offered to bring my car so I could share the work. Once he’d tried to teach me to drive his old car, but it didn’t work. We’d finished up yelling at each other in a field somewhere near Astoria.

  We passed a Super 8. It said VACANCY in neon letters. Johnny slowed. He said, ‘Wanna give it a try?’

  ‘Super 8s,’ I said, ‘are where people go to fuck.’

  ‘And we are absolutely not fucking.’ He said it shrilly, in mimicry of someone I didn’t know, or couldn’t recognise, and I started to laugh. At the next exit we found a place. I left him in the car while I went in. I came back with the keys, we parked the car, we stood at the threshold of the room as I fumbled with the door handle.

  I went in first. I took the bed furthest from the door, threw down my bag. I flopped on the mattress with my arms stretched over my head.

  Johnny stood with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Separate beds,’ he said. I tried to work out his tone. I rolled over onto my stomach. The room smelled like Pine-Sol.

  ‘We are absolutely not fucking. You said it.’

  I realised then, too late, that he was sad, and I was sorry I’d been flippant. He sat down on his bed, on his side of the room.

  Before we went to sleep we both fussed around some, pantomiming bedtime like children in a toothpaste commercial. I laid out my clothes for the next day at the foot of my bed. Johnny phoned his sister. I felt like I should leave the room. I showered and changed into my pyjamas. By the time I opened the bathroom door again, let all the steam rush into the cold motel room with its twin queen beds, he wasn’t on the phone any more.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked. I was towelling my hair.

  ‘She is not good,’ he said slowly, ‘and I don’t think Nina is great, either.’

  ‘You could f ly. Sacramento or SFO. You could be there in the morning.’

  ‘What would happen to the car?’ he asked.

  ‘Just park it. You can come back for it.’

  I moved to the bed where he sat, on top of the duvet. I took his face in my hands. I pressed it to my belly. I stroked his hair.

  ‘We’re partway there now,’ he said.

  I lay on my own bed again and tried to read, but I was tired, and my eyes kept moving over the same lines. One time I put down my book and looked across the room. He was staring back at me, propped up on an elbow.

  ‘Why did you come?’ he asked.

  ‘I would always come,’ I said.

  When I was a kid, my sister and I had shared a room for years. Our beds were like these ones, parallel, pressed against the wall on either side. The floor between was where we played and fought. Then came the consciousness of space, and at some point we’d drawn an imaginary line down the centre of the room. Each of us would become enraged if the other encroached on her side. A gym sock, a tap shoe, a library book. On the other hand, if one of us left something desirable in that grey area—a pack of scented erasers, a candy bar in the pocket of a jacket—it was quickly claimed by the other sister. This Ukiah motel room, hundreds of miles away, suddenly reminded me so much of that childhood room, that cold demarcation of space, that for a second I had to think about where I truly was.

  When I righted myself, I sat up and turned off the light. The switch was on the brick wall, at the midpoint between our beds.

  I was almost asleep when he said it:

  ‘You’re the only person I could have asked.’

  I thought my heart would break.

  In the morning he sat inside the car while I finished my cigarette, standing in the glare of the headlights, and when I took too long he blasted the horn. It was a ridiculous, big-dick horn. The sky was still pitch dark.

  ‘People are sleeping,’ I hissed at him through his open window. I stubbed out the cigarette and walked around to the passenger side. I slammed the door as I climbed in.

  ‘No, why don’t you shut it a little louder,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the whole town quite heard that.’

  ‘If you’re so worried about time you could have taken the fucking 5.’

  We argued about which way to go. ‘If we go through San Francisco,’ I said, ‘we will get stuck for hours.’ He said we’d miss the peak-hour traffic. He said, How many times have you ever driven this route. I said, How many times have you.

  We didn’t even look at each other for hours. He stopped in some tiny town for coffee. On the wall inside was a sign, one of those ones with the white letters that you can rearrange yourself. It said:

  CARTER’S RESTAURANT

  THE LORD OUR

  GOD IS MERCIFUL

  AND FORGIVING

  EVEN THOUGH WE

  HAVE REBELLED

  AGAINST HIM

  DANIEL 9:9

  I asked for my coffee to go and walked dozens of circles around the parking lot outside. I looked in, once, and Johnny was holding the phone to his ear, passing his other hand through the steam rising from his cup. Back in the car I said, Was that your sister, and he said, No. I knew he was lying because he sniffed, touched his wrist to his nose.

  When we were gridlocked on the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge I looked straight through the windscreen.

  ‘Johnny?’

  He took a real long time to answer. ‘What.’

  ‘Eat me the fuck out.’

  I was so mad I fell asleep, like an infant. When I woke up we were out of the city again and I was sorry for being petty. He was allowed to be mean. His mother was dying.

  In Monterey we heard the seals barking before we were out of the car. The wind was gritty; the sun poured out of the sky as if through a gash. I remembered staying with him here one summer. The motel had been right by Cannery Row, with enormous pictures of Steinbeck on the stucco walls. We’d both started to read the novel. Neither of us had finished it.

  He parked by the water. Ukiah, Brookings, Portland, Tacoma all seemed a very long time ago. He said, ‘Can we just be nice for a couple of hours? Can we please just be pleasant about this?’ I nodded. I felt ashamed in a dull way. I touched the back of my hand to his. We hooked our smallest fingers together like kids making a promise.

  We walked out on the pier. The air smelled fishy and cold. I bought us each a sandwich, fresh salmon and Philly on white bread, and we both said we were surprised at how hungry we were. The gulls made a sound like falling sheaves of paper when they took off all at once.

  We climbed the stairs at the end of the pier. There was a row of small dinghies tied neatly down below, painted in blues and whites. I could see dirty rainwater sliding over their wooden decks.

  ‘What are we going to tell your mom?’ I asked.

  ‘I think…I mean, just nothing. She thinks we’re still engaged. We don’t need to tell her anything particular.’

  Our sandwiches had come in a paper bag, and he was folding and refolding it, running his thumbnail over the creases. ‘What did you tell your mom?’ he asked.

  ‘Just what happened. Just that it ended.’

  ‘Did you go home?’

  ‘No. I just said we’d wait for Christmas.’ The sun was in my eyes.

  ‘Did you tell her it was my fault?’

  ‘I didn’t. But she would think that. Mothers always
take their children’s side.’

  He nodded then, and I nodded to the boats. We began the walk back to the car.

  Only about an hour later, his sister phoned. We were on a winding stretch so closed in by redwoods that Johnny had thrown on the headlights.

  ‘Hello, Nina,’ he said. ‘Hold on. I need to put you on speaker. I’m driving.’ He fiddled around with his cell. He glanced at me. ‘Okay. I’m in the car. With Abby.’

  ‘Hi, Abby,’ his sister said.

  ‘Hi, Neen. I’m so sorry to hear about your mom.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Johnny. Are you there? How much longer?’

  ‘We’re just about at Big Sur,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll be another five or six hours. I guess it depends on the traffic coming in.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing out there?’

  ‘We took the 1.’

  ‘You did, huh. You took the fucking 1.’

  ‘We’ll be there in a couple hours.’

  ‘I don’t know what will happen in a couple hours, John.’

  Speaking in hours. Her voice sounded just like his.

  We were out of the forest. The sky was wide and bright again. The ocean right there, where it had been all along.

  ‘I can’t get there any faster now,’ he said.

  ‘I needed you to be here faster two weeks ago,’ she said. ‘This isn’t some fucking cute road trip. I don’t know what will happen in a couple hours.’ She’d reached a crescendo. She breathed. She said, ‘I apologise, Abby.’

  She’d disconnected before either of us had a chance to respond. Johnny yanked the phone from his dash. He held it in front of his mouth.

  ‘NINA—YOU—ARE—A—CUNT!’ he screamed, with a kind of intensity that must have made his guts tremble. ‘FUCKING—CUNT!’

  ‘Johnny.’ It seemed the whole car was shaking with his fury. The air shimmered with it. I prised the phone from his white fingers. ‘Pull the car over. Stop driving.’ He must have been doing eighty miles. ‘John. Stop the car. I’m scared.’

  He pulled the car over to the shoulder. It skidded some, lurched there by the redwoods. He threw open the car door. He crossed the highway. I got out uncertainly. I shut his door and stood there dumbly. I was frightened to follow him. I had a feeling he was going to do something crazy.

  All he did was yell.

  When I say all he did.

  It was the saddest sound I ever heard in my life. There were no words, just him with the pain in his lungs, bellowing out smoke from the grief in there. It seemed to me as if all the world, the redwoods and the cliffs and the ocean and whatever birds were out there, was recoiling from him. Johnny was screaming at the ocean, and I was crying but I hadn’t realised it, and my mouth felt slack, like in those dreams where you want to speak but can’t, and then Johnny was hoarse. He took a last lungful of air, spat it out with his broken voice. He crouched on his haunches in the grass. I crossed the road. I knelt beside him.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m so sorry for you. I wish there was something I could do.’

  He stood unsteadily. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘I don’t want you driving,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t drive a stick-shift,’ he said, and flung out a hand towards the car. He sounded deranged. He had mad eyes.

  ‘Then you can fucking teach me. I don’t want you driving.’

  We stood by the roadside.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

  ‘I hate how you’ve—rigged this so I can’t escape. I can’t drive that stupid car.’

  ‘I hate how you’re acting like I plotted this. You didn’t have to come.’

  ‘Of course I did,’ I said, amazed. ‘Of course I did, you fuck.’

  I was so on edge I thought I might kill him. I said, ‘What about that motel we stayed at last Christmas?’

  ‘She’s at Cedars-Sinai. We’re only five hours away. I really just want to get there. Abby.’

  I thought of him last night in the dark, saying, You’re the only person I could have asked. I thought of him last time we’d been here, standing on a boulder hundreds of feet above the edge of the Pacific Ocean, saying, I like things that make me feel small.

  ‘I don’t want to get in the car with you driving,’ I said again.

  ‘I’ll be safe.’

  We were both destroyed. We got back into the car. I wound down the window for that cold, clean air. Brine and soil and spruces. The sky was mother-of-pearl, the ocean was silver. The engine turned over. Johnny accelerated gently, to show me he was keeping his word.

  It was almost 8 p.m. when we got to the hospital. Nina came to meet us in the cafeteria. I was moving like a puppet. I kept having to remind myself that she hadn’t heard her brother calling her a fucking cunt and screaming at the ocean. She’d calmed down, too.

  ‘I appreciate you coming,’ she said to me. I shook my head. I was sitting beside Johnny, and both of us opposite her, at one of the cafeteria tables. She looked exhausted. She looked just like Johnny. ‘She was conscious today, you know, lucid. It was the first time in a few days. I told her you were coming.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Johnny. ‘How is she now?’

  ‘I mean, she’s asleep again. But the nurses think she can hear. You can go on over.’

  He stood. I did, too.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  He touched my arm. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If she’s tired now. You know. I won’t stay long. I think I just want to be alone with her a second.’

  Nina walked him over to the Becker building, then she came back to sit with me. We were mostly too tired to talk. I didn’t want to drink any more coffee. I kept looking at her face, smooth and weary, under the fluorescent lights. She’d smile at me. She kept saying Thanks for coming all this way with him, as though the distance were the weird part of it all.

  In the morning he went straight back to the hospital. I brought in our things from the car. Last night we’d arrived and collapsed in our clothes. I went from room to room and pushed open the windows. The air was light and fusty. Something in me wanted it to be nice for Johnny when he got home. I wiped down the surfaces that had begun to collect dust, I tipped water on the houseplants. I threw out the milk, the newspapers, the blackened avocados in the fruit bowl. I stood in the kitchen until my breathing matched the puffing of the net curtain at the window over the sink.

  He was gone all day. He didn’t say much when he got home. It was already getting dark.

  ‘Nina is with her now,’ he said. ‘With the kids. I told them to come, since she was awake. Neen keeps saying she can’t believe it.’ ‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I thought I’d come home now while the others are there. If you don’t mind—I thought maybe after dinner—I thought maybe we could go back.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I would have done most anything he’d asked.

  The front yard was pretty in the cooling hour. We walked the six blocks or so, sat in a window to eat our burritos and watch the rain.

  ‘She was worse than I thought,’ he said.

  ‘Did she know who you were?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He wiped his hands on his jeans. He stacked the plastic yellow baskets one inside the other. ‘Nina said she rallied. Said she’d hung on for me.’ He laughed like he didn’t believe it.

  ‘It happens,’ I said.

  ‘She’s working tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll come with you then, too.’

  We walked back to the house, got into the car, headed straight there. I hadn’t realised I was nervous about seeing Cathy, but when we pulled into the parking lot my palms were damp and my heart was going fast. I was sad for the first time.

  ‘She’s not hooked up to anything anymore,’ he said as we waited for the elevator. ‘I didn’t know that would happen.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s how it works,’ I said. ‘I guess it is kind of shocking.’

 
‘It seems barbaric.’

  ‘It’s the best way,’ I said.

  The door to her room was open. Before I saw her bed, I saw a rubber mattress on the floor, where I guess Johnny had spent the day, and Nina before him. Nina’s kids were sitting there now, quieter than I’d ever seen them. The boy had his fingers in his mouth. I thought about how kids and animals know things. And then I saw her, crabbed and shrunken in her white sheets. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been the kind of woman you’d describe as ‘petite’; ‘diminutive’, even. In that bed in the Becker building, there was something foetal about her. She was asleep. Her mouth gaped open like a baby bird’s. I saw her heart thumping beneath her pyjama shirt—midnight blue, silk, with cream piping around the collar and cuffs. It seemed like it might tear through her chest.

  Johnny and Nina nodded at each other. The kids barely registered our arrival, but I bent down and whispered Hi, and the boy crawled into my arms. I felt his toddler weight fall against me.

  Johnny sat on the edge of the bed. He touched Cathy’s forehead, like a parent checking for fever. ‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Mom. I’m back. I brought Abby. Abby’s here.’ He had to try a few times, but eventually her lids opened and her fingers twitched. I saw the fury of her body trying to pull itself into the world.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, like he was telling her a joke. She smiled. Her eyes closed and opened. ‘My loves,’ she said. I moved to kiss her forehead. Her skin was dry.

  ‘Hello, Cathy,’ I said. I slipped my hand in hers. I think she squeezed my fingers, but I could have imagined it.

  ‘Oh, I’m so happy you’re here,’ she mumbled. ‘There’s not enough hours in a day. Or we’re greedy. I’m not sure which.’ She tried for a laugh. Her chest was heaving in an obscene way. Nina and Johnny were looking at each other with something I registered as wonder, shaking their heads, wide-eyed. I realised this was the best, the most alive, they’d seen their mother. Nina whispered, She hasn’t spoken since the weekend.

  ‘You look beautiful, Cathy,’ I said.

  ‘I just wish I got to see more of all of you,’ she said. ‘Yes. He’s always so busy, isn’t he, Johnny. What do you suppose he does all day?’ I almost laughed. Her eyelids flickered. Her heart thumped away obstinately.