What We Never Had

by Zach Wyner

  “I’m out of here,” you said, a cold, firm cruelty supplanting your sloppy fury. You pointed at her bag. “Get one of your other boyfriends to lug your shit around, you ungrateful fucking whore.”

  You marched away, drove off without looking back. You accelerated past your street, swerved onto the freeway and headed west at ninety miles an hour. You tore through Valley Village, Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys. When you reached the 405 interchange, traffic slowed you to a crawl; you yelled and pummeled your car’s roof with your fist. You exited the freeway and parked on a shady side street. Giant palm fronds bent and swayed with the wind, pointing long accusatory fingers.

  Like any powerful emotion, while inside it, your fury felt greater than any emotion that had ever come before it. However, once outside its immediacy, it became more recognizable, identical, in fact, to the first time she had broken you—back when she wasn’t totally reliant on others, before she’d blown through all her savings and Toyota of North Hollywood repossessed her car. You couldn’t remember why she’d stormed out of your apartment that night, but you remembered what she’d said before she left. She was going back to her ex. If you didn’t try to stop her, you’d never see her again. In that moment, you knew precisely what you should do: lock the door, reinforce it with an armful of two-by-fours Night of the Living Dead–style, and refuse her re-entry. But even back then, still so close to the beginning, you were too hooked to let go.

  Her car door had slammed, the engine turned over, tires shrieked against the asphalt like an eagle. You grabbed your keys and sprinted outside. Your iron expression, captured by the rear view mirror as you started your car, stayed with you, as did the eerie out-of-bodiness that followed—you, watching yourself, like a character in a movie, chase her down, swerve in front of her car so that she came within a few inches of colliding with your passenger door. She reversed and began to turn, but you quickly reversed as well, blocking her escape. You yelled like a madman until June began to laugh. You lost control, yelled louder, and said vicious things until, to your horror, her laughter turned to tears. Her crying stopped you cold. Your rage vanished and what remained of you was eerily insubstantial—a shucked cornhusk left on the ground to scatter in the breeze.

  “Please,” you said. “Please don’t go.” And of course she didn’t. Instead she returned to your apartment with an intimate knowledge of the contours of your dependency, while you trailed behind with the acute sense of mortality that tickles the gut after a near-death experience, your weakest moment etched indelibly into your memory, a new label to fit into your mercurial self-image—coward.

  *

  As you pulled up to your apartment building, you didn’t recognize the man yelling into the intercom outside the glass double doors that led to the lobby. An ephemeral thought—been there, pal—flitted through your brain before you opened the automatic gate leading to the covered parking lot and forgot about him entirely. You studied your reflection in the rear-view mirror and took some deep breaths. Where did the person you were with Adrienne go when you were with June? That person was an adult, replete with principles and integrity. He didn’t scream, slouch, sigh, or stare into space. Maybe he was just an actor, imitating the patience, generosity, and confidence that looked so good on others.

  Demoralized and deflated, you walked toward the door that led to the lobby. As you gripped the knob, the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle reached your ears: shouting cut off in mid-sentence, rubber soles squeaking on the floor like high tops in a basketball gymnasium, grunts and thuds. You swung open the door and saw a bald scalp, beet red and bleeding, in a headlock administered by the thick, tan, veiny arms of the man who had been yelling into the intercom. You froze. The tan man looked up. You’d never been introduced, but recognition was instantaneous. His black eyes narrowed and he loosened his grip on his victim, who coughed and gasped a throaty, “Fucking let go of me!” and then Reno, June’s abusive ex-boyfriend, sent Bill’s oxygen-starved body sailing across the lobby so that his face collided with the bronze mailbox plates with a dull thunk and Bill collapsed like all the artistic integrity in Hollywood. Reno stared at him, crumpled there on the floor, and you didn’t hesitate. You charged, threw all your weight behind your right shoulder and landed it squarely in the middle of his chest. The air evacuated his lungs and he wheezed like an old smoker as pain rocketed down your arm, all the way to your fingertips, and together you toppled to the floor where the back of his head thwacked the linoleum. You scrambled to your feet, your right arm dangling uselessly at your side, ready to kick him if you needed to, but Reno just groaned, long and low, his eyes closed, and held his head in his hands. You moved quickly to Bill, blood trickling from the cut on his scalp and his right eye slammed shut beneath a rapidly distending mouse.

  “Bill!” His left eyelid fluttered. “Bill, get up!” You managed to pull him up into a seated position.

  “Owwww!” Reno moaned.

  Bill opened his good eye and glanced over at Reno. “Did I do that?” he slurred.

  “Time to move!” you said.

  “Can’t we kick him a few times while he’s down?”

  “Bill, can you please…” you said, slipping your left shoulder under his right arm and lifting him to his feet.

  His head drooped forward as you navigated him into the garage. “He called June a chink whore.”

  You winced. “We’ve got to intercept her before she comes back.”

  “She’s not even Chinese,” said Bill.

  You lowered him into the back seat. “Just lie down.” You carefully removed your shirt with your left hand and offered it to him. “For your head,” you said. “It’s bleeding.”

  Bill touched his head and inspected his bloody fingers. “Oh.”

  “There’s a hospital nearby.”

  His brow furrowed. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  “I think I dislocated my shoulder.”

  The garage opened like a whale’s mouth, and the blinding light of day flooded its cavernous belly. Sweat spilled off you like foam down the side of an overfilled pint. You took a right and drove by the lobby at a crawl. Reno was still on the floor, his head held in his hands. Coming directly for you was June, lugging her duffel bag like it contained the entirety of her sordid past—every busted promise, each abandoned dream. You slammed on the brakes, threw the car into park, flipped on the hazards and jumped out.

  “Hey. I know. I’m an asshole. I know.”

  “Get away from me,” she said, reaching into her purse and extracting her keys.

  “But I need you to get in the car right now, okay?”

  She kept going. You reached with your good arm but she swatted it away.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!”

  “June!”

  She looked inside and her body went rigid; her fingers, clutching her mass of keys to the homes of failed relationships, repossessed cars, and storage facilities, turned white. Reno stared at the lobby walls like a drunk, awakening from a bender. He spotted her and struggled to his feet.

  “June, look.” You pointed to Bill in the back seat of the car. She gasped. “Bill’s all fucked up. And my shoulder.”

  She looked at your arm and brought her hand to her mouth. Reno opened the lobby door and stepped outside, one hand clutching his head. You took a step back and held up your palm, signaling him to stop.

  “Enough!” you said. “Back the fuck off!”

  “You’re fucked, Josh.”

  “Reno, stop!” said June, as though she were reprimanding an aggressive dog. “Just stop.” She faced you and took your good hand. “Go to the hospital,” she said. “I can’t do this to you anymore.”

  Reno took another shaky step closer.

  “Hold it!” you yelled. “No more of this shit! I just want to get my friend out of here.”

  Reno stopped on the grass between the building and the sidewalk, about f
ifteen feet from June. “Fuck the both you. I’m here for my girlfriend.”

  Your lip quivered. “You don’t get to call her that anymore.”

  “Josh,” he smiled, savoring his rage. “I swear, dude. One more word and I’ll break your fucking arm.”

  You looked at her. “I’m sorry…for what I said before. It wasn’t…it’s not true.”

  Thick, bulging veins on the side of Reno’s neck turned purple. “Baby, you’re gonna talk to me right now or I’m not responsible for what happens!”

  She removed her sunglasses. Her face was pale but her eyes, strong and steady, focused on yours and didn’t waver. She touched your arm.

  You felt the tears coming but this was no moment to show weakness. So you did the only thing you could to stop yourself from crying—you turned your grief into anger, anger at yourself for being no better than him, anger at her for finding her composure in this torrential shitstorm.

  “We’re going to the hospital,” you said.

  “That’s good,” she said. She bent down and spoke through the car’s open window. “I’m so sorry, Bill.”

  “I’m sorry your ex is a racist scumbag.”

  “Liar!” screamed Reno. “Shut your bald ass up!”

  June whirled around. “Reno!”

  “My head hurts, baby,” he whined. “Josh cheapshotted me.”

  You grasped her wrist. “I can’t just leave you.”

  She touched your cheek. “This is my problem, baby, not yours.”

  Surreal didn’t begin to describe the moment. Suddenly you were Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca, and June was putting you on a path to a better life.

  “You’re wrong,” you said. She sighed deeply. You whispered, “Say goodbye to me, I’ll get in the car, put it in drive and then you hop in.”

  Reno flexed his muscles and cracked his neck. “Five more seconds and we’re fighting.”

  You held her slender fingers. “You don’t deserve this!”

  “Five!”

  You tightened your grip. “All this time, everything we’ve been through…it can’t be for nothing.”

  She smiled sadly, like she was looking at a memory of a person.

  “Four!”

  “Go,” she said.

  “Three!”

  “Jesus, give it a fucking rest, man!” you shouted, your voice quivering. “It’s over, all right? We’re leaving.”

  You got into your stuffy car, your slippery, quaking palm barely able to grip the steering wheel. June headed towards Reno and he held out his hands. You drove fast, filling your ringing ears with wind.

  Sprawled across the back seat, Bill oozed sweat onto the upholstery and blood onto your tee shirt. “I take it you were joking about the hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Well I don’t have insurance. Do you?”

  You hesitated. “Kind of.”

  “Does ‘kind of’ insurance cover ER visits?”

  “I don’t know. Fuck.”

  You contemplated going to your parents’ house. But there was no hiding what had happened here. You’d been in a fight; you’d sustained moderate injuries; you needed urgent care. And mother grizzlies had nothing on your dad—little matter that you were a grown man now. Your mom would try to calm him down, tell him to listen, breathe, keep a level head while you explained what had happened. After all, no one was seriously injured. And then you’d have to tell them what you’d been hiding for the past three weeks: June was back in your life. That fragile image of you that they’d held in their heads for the past few months—an adult with a respectable job that they could trust to continue making good decisions—would crumble in their fingers like an arid clump of dirt.

  You swerved into the 7-Eleven parking lot, empty again save for the silver hatchback with the bolt welded to its door. “I’m getting you some ice.”

  “I can walk,” said Bill.

  “Just stay here, man.”

  “The Wizard used to be a nurse. He can examine me. Besides, I’m fucking starving.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m so fucking hungry I could eat a 7-Eleven hot dog.”

  “I meant about The Wizard.”

  “That’s what he said.” Bill carefully peeled the tee shirt from his scalp. “This stop bleeding?”

  You looked closely at the wound. It wasn’t too deep, more of a scratch than a cut. Even you could tell it wouldn’t require stitches. “Yeah, but, what about your eye? Or your fucking brain? You could have a concussion.”

  “Nothing a chili dog can’t fix.”

  You laughed. He handed you the bloody shirt and you gingerly slipped it on, guilt roiling your belly for having enjoyed a moment of levity. “Fucking June,” you said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bill. “You said her family was all fucked up, right? Her dad died when she was really young and…”

  “I mean, what happened with Reno? How did you come to have your head wedged in his armpit?”

  Bill’s lip curled in disgust. “That fucking troglodyte pounded on your intercom for like five minutes. I told him I didn’t know who the fuck he was talking about but he didn’t buy it.”

  “Why the hell did you go downstairs?”

  “I told you. He called her a chink whore.”

  “And?”

  “And I was like, how often do I get the chance to encounter real evil? I mean, you read about, you see it on the TV, but how often do you get to see it in the flesh? I was sitting in your apartment, doing jack shit like every other day of my useless fucking life, and then Reno drops into my little sheltered world: a bona fide racist woman beater. He’s like a fucking lunar eclipse. You know if you look too long it’ll burn the back of your retinas but you can’t help taking a peek.”

  “I can’t believe I left her with him,” you mumbled.

  “So I went downstairs. He didn’t know who I was so he asked me to let him in and I wouldn’t.” A smile spread over his swollen face. “And then he must have put two and two together because his face got all red and he told me to fuck off, so I did like, a monkey dance in front of the windows.”

  You laughed; you couldn’t help it. “Ouch,” you said, holding your aching shoulder. “Fuck that hurts. Why did you dance?”

  “I don’t know. He was so fucking confused. Then I started like whooping and screeching like a monkey and I mimed throwing feces at him.”

  Laughter radiated pain down your arm. “Stop!” you said. “Stop it!”

  “Then the elevator opened and before I knew it, your neighbor lady, the one who carries around that rat-faced chihuahua in her purse, walked right past me and straight out the front door.”

  “Why didn’t you run?”

  “I did! I ran! They must have bought that fucking elevator from an old folks home! The fucking doors are programmed for people with walkers and hip replacements. My grandpa can make it down the first base line faster than those doors close.”

  You laughed until tears streamed down your face, pain piercing deeper with each gasp. Bill’s swollen face glowed.

  “Jesus,” you said. “Oh, Jesus what a mess.”

  “Let’s go inside. The Wizard will fix us.”

  You followed him, the two of you smiling like idiots despite the pain caused by your respective injuries. Stationed beneath the monitor, The Wizard and Amare munched mini donuts and watched the Lotto monitor, their sparse facial hair gone white with powdered sugar. Amare saw you first. He blinked and choked on a wad of dough.

  “You missed all the fun,” you said, heading for the frozen food section and locating an ancient bag of peas.

  “The fuck happened?” said Amare.

  At the register, you handed the bag to a visibly flustered Habib. “You have bloo
d,” said Habib, scanning the peas and nodding at your shirt.

  “It’s his,” you said, pointing at Bill with your good arm.

  “June’s psychotic ex showed up,” said Bill. “Hey.” He motioned to the donuts. “Give me one of those things, will ya?” Amare handed Bill a bite-sized donut and Bill popped it in his mouth. He sighed. “Violence makes me fucking starving.”

  You handed the peas to Bill. “Put this on your eye.”

  He pressed the frozen bag against the swelling. “How long have these been in there?”

  “Frozen vegetables are not our number one best seller,” said Habib.

  “This feels like a frozen geode.”

  Habib emerged from behind the register, took the peas from Bill and smacked them a few times on the counter, breaking apart the frozen mass. “Here,” he said, handing them back. He turned toward Amare. “You must take him to a hospital.”

  “Who?” you and Bill said in unison.

  Habib pointed at you. “That shoulder is separated. It must be put back in its place.”

  You felt hot breath on your neck and turned to see The Wizard, his head tilted in absorption, his massive hands hovering just above your shoulder. You stepped away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a subluxation. Your humerus is only partially out of its socket. Would you like me to put it back for you?”

  “No,” said Habib, coming out from behind the register. “Without an X-ray there is no way to tell if the ligaments have been damaged. Josh,” he said, touching your good shoulder and looking you in the eye. “Have you separated this shoulder before?”

  You shook your head no.

  “Habib,” said The Wizard, “I know that you are a man of great learning, but I assure you, this is a trifling injury. I’d wager all the nacho cheese sauce in the Valley on it. This can be resolved without subjecting Josh to the bureaucratic quagmire that is American medicine.”

  The truth was that you’d been kicked off the family health plan after your last birthday. At present, you were paying fifty bucks a month for a plan that covered a fraction of catastrophic injuries.