“Why isn’t she fighting this?” Sara had cried to Dr. Zarrani.
“She may be very depressed,” Dr. Zarrani had said. “But she wants to get better.”
Sara wasn’t convinced. Irene seemed pissed off, not depressed.
“This is so goddamn demoralizing!” Irene shouted at least once a day, as if it were all Sara’s fault. She was cranky not to have time to get to the studio anymore. She sketched in bed and on the couch while they watched endless reruns of ¡Vámonos, Muchachos!, but half the time she fell asleep after drawing just a few lines. Then she’d wake up in an even fouler mood, as if she’d just been cheated out of valuable time.
“This is fucking torture!” she screamed, throwing her charcoals across the room.
Sara wanted to tell her that she’d get on the phone to the UN right away. File briefs under the Geneva Conventions. She’d throw one in for herself while she was at it. Because it was torture for Sara to see her best friend in this state. Torture to be barely sleeping, to be missing work, to hardly ever sleep in the same bed as George or have a meal that wasn’t takeout. Her only social interactions, besides complaining to the boys and yelling at her interns over the phone, were during the brief times she walked to Duane Reade.
Lately she’d begun lingering, just to have the breathing room.
Sara stared at the cardboard sleeve that held the six individual Assure bottles together. It had a nice picture of an elderly woman on it, looking full of life and ready for a hot night down at the Old Folks’ Home Ballroom, doing the Buffalo Shuffle with a nice half-blind Vietnam War veteran with some Viagra squirreled away among the cataract medications on the nightstand. Sara pushed pack after pack to the side, looking for the Double Boost, muttering to herself, Good for you, Grandma. Go down swinging. Young at heart. Golden years and all that jazz. But if you could just leave a little Double Boost for my friend here, who is young at heart and young at body, still quite squarely in her Regular years, that’d be swell.
At the pharmacy window, there was just one man in line, an older man wearing a ridiculous green spandex unitard, propping up a bicycle. Magnanimously, he gestured for Sara to go ahead of him to the counter—the pharmacist was somewhere in the back.
“She’s getting my things already,” he explained, as Sara thanked him. Setting her heavy bag down on the counter, she checked her wristwatch. Good. She would make it back by four-thirty.
“Aren’t you a little young for those things?” the man said, gesturing to the Assures. Sara looked down at Grandma Golden Years, then back up at him. He looked a little as if he’d rolled right out of an Assure commercial: Senior citizens, on the go!
“Picking them up for my nana,” Sara lied. She didn’t quite know why she felt the need to lie—she didn’t even call her grandmother nana, and she lived in Marblehead, two hundred miles away. “Don’t ask me why, but she loves these things.”
The man cringed, cutely. “There’s a café near here that makes wheatgrass shakes. I’m totally addicted. I’m there three times a day. Drinking grass, for God’s sake!”
Sara laughed because his teeth were tinged a faint wintergreen color, and his breath smelled faintly like a lawn mower.
“Picking up?” the pharmacist asked her, a round-faced Polynesian woman with black, unmoving, implacable eyes. BETTIE, said her ID badge.
Bettie, Sara thought miserably. “Bettie!” she said cheerfully, “Could you ring these up for me?”
Bettie’s face was immovable, as it had been the Thursday before, as it had been the Thursday before that. “If you’re not picking up a prescription, then you have to take your purchase to the front.”
Sara spoke sweetly, though under her breath she cursed all the Betties that ever were. “They’re a little backed up right now, and my—my nana, really needs these.”
She wasn’t beyond pulling out the cancer card when it might help in this type of situation—the cancer card had gotten her into it, after all. But she didn’t want the nice bicycle man to know she’d lied about her nana.
“Doctor Von Hatter? Your total comes to thirty-four fifty with the Big Apple discount card.”
But the bicycle man made no move to take his bag from Bettie. “Why don’t you help this nice young lady first? There’s no one else waiting.”
Sara smiled appreciatively, but Bettie just stared at the doctor. “Thirty-four dollars and fifty cents.”
“Charles always rings me up back here,” Sara insisted.
“Charles isn’t here on Thursdays.”
“Yes, but—look. I pick up prescriptions here twice a week for Irene Richmond. You remember me? Prednicen-M? Zofran? Vicoprofen? The one percent hydrocortisone cream?”
Bettie stretched a hand toward her. “If you have an authorization to pick up for Richmond, I can check to see if she’s due for a refill.”
Sara knew Irene wasn’t due for a refill on anything until Sunday.
“This is ridiculous,” the old man said. “There’s no one on line here but me. Zofran and Prednicen? Why don’t you help this young lady so she can take care of her nana?”
Bettie shook her head. “She’s not special. She can take her purchases to the front.”
Even as the bicycler continued to try to reason with the pharmacist, those three words stuck in Sara’s side like tiny prickers. For she was special, and had always believed it. She was more punctual, and she was better prepared. Driven harder and by purer purpose. Kinder to others and more loyal. Always recycling and never littering. Better behaved and never hypocritical. Harder working at the office, tipping more generously, and possessing of a thousand pardons.
And yet she couldn’t save Irene just by trying hardest or being best. Because no one was immune to tragedy. No matter how respectfully Sara lived, death could not respect her in return. She, Irene, all of them were susceptible to collapse, regardless of preparations or punctuality or propriety. None of them were special.
Doctor bicycle man was getting angry now. He’d seemed so nice, and now here was this rage bubbling up. Even he was just another angry person in this claustrophobic fucking city—
Like her. She was furious all the time now. At Dr. Zarrani, who had seemed so on top of things initially but was now proving hard to reach and sounding hapless in the face of the usual treatments failing. At Luther, for allowing one of the city’s greatest newspapers to become a purveyor of garbage, and at the people who preferred escaping into garbage to caring about real news. At herself, for editing said garbage as if it mattered how uncluttered its sentences were. At Jacob, for refusing to settle down and forever distracting himself from the beautiful poetry she knew he could write if he would allow even a sliver of joy into his worldview. And even at Irene, for her completely unacceptable, irrational, disrespectful, nonsensical, whatever-may-come attitude toward absolutely everything in her life, right down to dying—
And there, standing at the back of a Duane Reade while a spandex-clad septuagenarian argued with an apple-faced pharmacist, Sara first realized that Irene was going to die.
She wasn’t getting better, no matter how many pills Sara crushed, no matter how rigidly she held to the color-coded schedule, no matter how she arranged the cells in the Excel spreadsheet. Their final tally was always the same: Irene was dying—and fast—and to Sara, knowing this was like seeing the line at the bottom of the bill. The balance, to be paid in full, for all the disappointments listed above.
“Never mind,” Sara said, picking up her bag back again from the counter. The bicycle doctor looked as if he were going to try to convince her to stand her ground against this abuse of power—but Sara’s ever-patient smile disarmed him, “Really, no problem.”
For I am not special, she thought, as she turned her back on Bettie, who was again asking the doctor for the $34.50 he owed for the prescription co-pay. Sara passed back up the Makeup, Travel Size Shampoo, Children’s Toy aisle t
oward the front of the store, and she even intended to do just as she’d said—wait in the line in the front like everybody else. But her feet guided her instead toward the door. She slipped the Internet coupon into the tote bag and pulled out her sunglasses. A stock boy paused as he dutifully unloaded tubes of toothpaste from a gray box onto the shelves. Did he know what she was about to do? She smiled at him and—so easy—he smiled back and stepped out of her way.
She walked directly out the front door, not pausing to look back when the little door alarm went off. The harried cashier in the front, dealing with the still-long line, didn’t look up, and neither did the stock boy. Her heart pounded; she felt wonderfully dizzy. There was sidewalk beneath her feet, and she felt like herself again. At the corner she had to pause for the WALK signal to come on. She’d never stolen so much as a Chapstick in her entire life. The tote-bag straps strained against her clenched fingers, yet it seemed to weigh nothing at all.
It was only three more blocks to William’s apartment, but something caught her eye: an M5 bus going downtown to South Street/Whitehall Station. Before she quite knew what they were doing, her feet angled away from their initial target and carried her to the bus doors just before they sighed shut. She pulled off her sunglasses so as not to seem rude when she smiled at the driver. She set the bag down on the ground and pulled her wallet out while he closed the doors and began accelerating out into the spotty traffic along Fifth Avenue.
“Oh!” she said, as she looked into the wrong pocket in the wallet. “Oh no! My card fell out!” And she looked up at the driver; it took him barely a heartbeat to reassure her. He handed her a little pamphlet from the side panel. “Go on in. It’s okay, miss. If it was a monthly, you just call this number, and they’ll replace it.”
“Thank you so much.” She felt a snug sensation, low in her throat. The driver was pleased to help a damsel in distress, and she was pleased to have pleased him, and also pleased not to have paid for the ride.
She sat down and looked out the window, past her reflection at the city rushing by. Windows reaching up into the stratosphere. Tunnels under the pavement, ferrying trains at breakneck speeds. And everywhere in between people walking every which way, wanting every which thing, all living and dying in some mysterious measure. Sara closed her eyes and shut the city out. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, but she didn’t answer it. Either it was Irene, or George, wondering where she was. I don’t know, Sara thought. When she’d get back. I don’t know. Where the medicine was. How to measure the urine or how to get the gunk out of the tube. I don’t know. The phone stopped buzzing. Sara didn’t check the message. Letting go of that last thing she thought was under her control was a high like no other. Realizing it never was. That nobody ever had control over anything.
Sara rode the bus all the way down to Whitehall Station. There, it went around the block and began to carry her back up again.
OCTOBER
George stared at his smooth white coffee cup, determined that, by the time he finished it, his life would be forever changed. Before this burned Starbucks coffee, he’d been George Murphy, jovial drinker, perhaps at times a little weak willed, not just with alcohol but with many things: sleeping past his alarm, eating at the McDonald’s drive-through when he was in a hurry (and also when he wasn’t), spending too much money on things he didn’t need (at this he glanced guiltily toward the bulging Barnes & Noble bag on the seat beside him), and listening to the same rock music he liked in college, even though he knew it put him in an angry mood. Before this cup of burned coffee, yes, he’d been a man of bad, unbreakable habits. And yes, he, like the rest of them, had begun to go a little crazy with everything that was going on lately.
But after this cup, an entirely new George would emerge. A George more like these other productive and wholesome people at the bookstore café! A George who listened to peaceful, acoustic, harmonious songs like the one playing overhead, “Not Worth Fighting” by Envoy. This would be the soundtrack of the new, punctual, in-shape, fiscally responsible George.
Most important, the sober George. He wouldn’t have another drink. These days it brought him little of the weightless joy it once had. More often than not, now, it just weighed him down more. It made him hazy and slow-witted. It was hard to admit it, even just to himself, but it had cost him a potential job at Harvard. He’d been lucky enough they’d called him, but now it had been weeks. Who was he kidding? He’d been so wretchedly nervous before the interview that he’d popped into a bar to calm down, thinking it might help to be around some people. He’d just had one beer. Full of confidence, he’d walked into the room where Drs. McManus and Schwartz from the physics department were waiting to interview him. Then, paralyzed by the certainty that the men could smell the suds on his breath, George had found himself barely able to answer even their simplest questions about the collapse of 237 Lyrae V.
Well, no more. That was the old George Murphy. Forever he would look back on that moment as the turning point—well, as a turning point that had then led to this turning point—to this cup of burned coffee, after which nothing would ever be the same.
Because now he had a reason to turn it all around. And screw his own well-being and his own future—those had been proven to be woefully inadequate to the task. That’s why he’d been put between this rock and a hard place. Thank God it wasn’t Sara.
“Thank you,” he said out loud.
No one in the café even turned their head as he spoke to himself. They were all busily tapping away on their laptops, earbuds shoved halfway down their eustachian tubes. He heard no clinking of glasses or gurgling of taps, just the occasional bulldozer burping of the milk frother, and the jackhammer grinding of the Frappuccino machine. Otherwise, eerie silence prevailed throughout the café. When you said a prayer from a barstool, you could count on the guy two down from you to raise his glass and say “Amen.” Drunks were just polite that way.
George’s mother had always believed that a prayer had to be said out loud to really warrant heavenly attention. As a boy, he had said his nightly “Now I lay me down to sleep” at a normal volume, as if speaking to someone on the other side of the bed. The habit had stayed on at college. Jacob was a night showerer, and so George had been able to keep it up without him realizing. Once Jacob had come back for a forgotten razor blade and come quite close to catching him. “Talking to yourself, Georgie-boy? You know some people would say that’s a bad sign, but I recommend you really engage with those voices in your head. It’s important to listen. You really want to do exactly what they say.”
What a bastard! But God, how George loved him. No one else made him laugh so hard. He and Irene were like the siblings George had never had. And now God was taking her away from him, from all of them, and George hated His ever-living guts for it.
But he had to do it. He had to give Him what He wanted. In the end, Jacob hadn’t been the reason George stopped praying. Nor had he been at all persuaded by the “evil liberal atheist communist professors” Grandpa Earl had warned him about. No, when the professors spoke about the cosmos being big and him being infinitesimally small, it had only reassured George of his irrelevance before forces he could never hope to control or understand. First Darwin and then Nietzsche had failed to kill his God.
And then, during a seminar on Einstein and relativity, George had had a real epiphany: for every observable phenomenon, there were a million unobservable ones. So many things that his senses told him were true were only illusory: the straightness of time’s arrow; the existence of only three dimensions; the solidity of rocks and the fluidity of water. Every simple, rational phenomenon was eventually unexplained by something wildly problematic and complex. He had no trouble believing that God and heaven could exist within the vastness that his brilliant professors couldn’t define with formulas and hypotheses. And George believed in miracles and coincidences and mysterious ways. But he also believed that no matter how good a person he’d tried to be
in every other respect, God had no mercy on he who’d begun having a nip of J&B each night while his roommate showered, instead of praying the Lord his soul to keep.
Now it was time to make a new bet. Now it was all on his shoulders. Irene needed him, and George had been stone-cold sober for three days. Not such a long time, but it was a start. He slapped his palm on the little café table. Then he said a quick Hail Mary, successfully spooking an old Chinese couple sitting at the table next to him. He polished off the last of his coffee and crushed the white paper cup in his hand. He lifted his shopping bag, and the plastic dug into his hand as he carried it across the street between the honking, blaring cars trying to get onto Queens Boulevard. By the time he got to the other side, he’d be a new man.
Across the street Irene and Mrs. Cho spoke amiably on the steps outside Super-Wellness Spa & Nails!, owned by one of William’s aunts. George approached with a wave, hoping they hadn’t been waiting long. Spiritual revelations were important and all, but Irene couldn’t risk getting the flu, and September had ended with an unsparing cold front coming down from Canada, sending everyone scrambling for air-conditioner covers and pulling wool sweaters out of deep storage. Everyone George encountered seemed to be coming down with something, and Sara was Purell-ing everyone’s hands every five seconds, so Irene wouldn’t catch pneumonia.
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