by Emily Gould
She looked over at Daisy, standing beside him. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot and her wet mouth hung open like a frenzied dog’s. As scary as Daisy was, Laura sympathized with her, too. She also wanted someone to blame for Dylan’s death, because of how uncomfortable it was to blame Dylan. But the thing was, it had been Dylan’s fault. He’d been cavalier with everything—the feelings of people who cared about him, his possessions, his career, and ultimately, his life. Laura wished more than anything that she could see him again, smell his cigarette-sweat rankness as he bent down toward her to embrace her. But she also knew that he had been kind of an asshole. If he’d lived, he would have found another way to leave her that would have been just as final as this one. Of course she still loved him, though. How could she not?
Dylan’s father embraced each member of the Clips as they traded places on the stage, but Daisy pointedly did not. Callie materialized near Laura and pulled her gently by the arm as they, too, climbed onstage. They huddled with Davey, who handed Laura Dylan’s guitar. “I know you don’t want to play, but do it for him. It would mean a lot,” Davey said.
“What song are we even going to play?” Laura whispered. “It’s going to be a disaster, I’ve never sung any of these before,”
“Whatever you want. What’s the first song you ever heard him sing?”
It was the one she’d heard on the night they’d met, the one that had initially put her under his spell. She flashed on the memory of making eye contact with him outside, of the feeling she’d had of wanting to touch the skin that showed through the holes in his shirt. The skin that was now incinerated. Laura’s stomach lurched. Those drinks had been much too strong; she hadn’t eaten breakfast.
Still, she and Callie stood in front of the band as they played the opening notes. Callie started singing the doleful verse, and Laura began to harmonize with her, making the song sound less bombastic and more sad than its original version. For a minute, it seemed like everything was going to go okay, but then Laura’s stomach roiled again and she felt sweaty all over. She made eye contact with Callie, whispered “Sorry,” then ran offstage.
Outside the bar, she puked watery spatter against the side of the building, feeling like she might not be able to stand up for much longer. She could hear, from inside, the band’s moment of indecision and then its resolution: they continued to play, and Callie kept singing. Laura wobbled, thinking of going back in, but then decided against it. She needed to lie down and rest; she had to go to work at the bar in a few hours.
* * *
When Laura woke up, it was dark out and Callie was just getting home. The apartment was cold; the radiators hadn’t clanked on yet for some reason, and Laura burrowed into the pile of blankets, curling against the back of the couch, willing herself back into unconsciousness. Then she had the disturbing thought that she might have actually slept past the start of her shift; she hadn’t bothered to set an alarm because it had seemed impossible that she’d sleep longer than a few hours. She rushed to stand up and immediately felt dizzy again. Slowly, she made her way down the hall to the kitchen and collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. The wall clock said it was nine; she was due at the bar an hour ago.
Callie was standing by the sink, filling the Pyrex measuring cup with water and chugging it. She barely glanced up at Laura; she was drunk and seemed distracted.
“What happened to you? Are you okay? I wanted to come check on you earlier, but by the time we finished playing you were long gone, and then there were so many people there who wanted to talk.… Someone said they saw you throwing up outside?”
“I think I’m really sick,” said Laura. She put her head in her hands.
“You just haven’t been taking care of yourself. You’ll start to feel better soon; you just need some food.” She was probably planning to go back out later; it was early for her to call it a night, and Laura was sure that Davey and the rest of the band would be celebrating Dylan’s life till well into the next day. She felt disgusted by all of them. Dylan’s death was just another excuse for them to party.
“Callie, are you even sad?”
Callie was spreading butter on a piece of toast with her back to Laura. She put the toast down in front of her and took out her makeup bag and started redoing her eyeliner at the table. It had smudged, but it didn’t look like she’d been crying.
“Of course I’m sad; I liked Dylan a lot. But it’s complicated. I can’t imagine how you feel, but it’s a sad time in the world, too, and Dylan’s just one person.…”
“I feel really bad. I don’t know if this is normal for when someone dies. I feel dizzy and nauseous, and I’m worried something’s really wrong with me.” Laura picked up the toast and took a bite. She could feel it crunch under her teeth, taste the butter and salt, but then she couldn’t figure out how to make her throat muscles work to swallow. She kept chewing it, hoping she could find a way to make her face and stomach work properly before it became necessary to spit it out.
Callie put down her hand mirror and scrutinized Laura.
“Are you pregnant?”
She reminded Callie that she was on the pill, then thought back to the last time she’d had sex, in Concord. The missed days. Laura felt sweat pool under her arms and immediately become clammy in their cold apartment. She hugged her knees up to her chest on the chair and shivered. Callie had already moved on.
“I told the Clips we’d play the rest of their tour with them. Like, as part of the band, like we did today.”
She watched Laura for a reaction—waiting for permission, it seemed, to unveil her own smile.
It wasn’t forthcoming. “Wait—so the Groupies? My songs? We’re going to abandon our thing to replace Dylan?”
“Not abandon our thing. It’s just to finish out the tour—they’ve already sold the tickets, somebody has to sing. It may as well be us, right? And then we’ll see where it goes from there. If nothing else, it’ll make it so much easier for us to get a recording contract—to actually put out an album of your songs. This is going to be how you become a star, Laura!”
Laura couldn’t process what was happening. Callie was sitting there beaming, like she was delivering good news. But the piece of toast was still sitting in her mouth, saliva pooling around it. Callie was waiting for a response, though, so Laura had to speak in spite of it, sort of around it.
“If you want to do it, go ahead. But I can’t. There’s no way. I’m sorry.” She grabbed Callie’s water and took a gulp.
Callie returned to her makeup. “You just need more time to think about it. You won’t pass up this chance, I know you won’t. What are you going to do, stay here and work at the bar while I go on tour? I’m not even the one who wanted to be a musician!”
“Well, congratulations on getting to be one anyway,” said Laura, then went back to bed so that she wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore.
* * *
The days got even shorter, blurred together. Laura added leg warmers to her work uniform of black skirt and black tights. She woke every morning full of a heart-racing panic that dissipated gradually as she tried to bury herself in distracting activity. She took as many shifts at Bar Lafitte as she could, hoarding the money in a shoebox under her couch-bed. The initial mood of mania dissipated quickly, but the bar stayed busy; the customers drank harder and harder.
She passed fading posters on lampposts that people had put up looking for their lost relatives and friends, with blurry color-photocopied photographs, as though the people were dogs and cats who might turn up in a vacant lot or in someone else’s home. She wished that she could mourn with all the other mourners. Maybe then her burden wouldn’t feel so huge. Dylan had been the love of her life, but he was also just a guy she’d been dating for a few weeks. She had never even mentioned him to her family. No one knew to treat her carefully. And when she caught herself weeping silent tears while walking down the street, she knew that people assumed that she was crying for one of the other dead people, and again s
he felt like a liar.
* * *
When she finally got around to taking a pregnancy test, it confirmed what she already knew. A secret feeling, buried deep and almost beneath the level of conscious thought, was a tiny glowing ball of happiness and even excitement when she’d seen the second line appear. Part of it was just relief; the physical and emotional strangeness she’d felt lately had a concrete cause that could be resolved. But another part of it was a feeling of escape from the finality of Dylan’s death. He was still alive, in some illusory but also real way. She remembered how he’d felt and smelled, but when she tried to imagine his face, the version she called to mind was the version she’d memorized, not his true face. A baby would not be vague. A baby would keep some part of him tethered to this world, and she had the power to make that happen.
PART II
6
Laura woke up with a panicky start. Someone in her dream had been crying. Was Marie crying, or just making impatient bababa noises in her crib? Was the hour morning-like enough that she should feel obligated to retrieve her, open the blinds, and begin the day, or should she try to lie silently and fake sleep so that Marie might learn to sleep a little longer? She wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep because she’d remembered that it was the first of the month; rent was due, and she was going to be late with it again unless she asked for someone’s help, but she was running out of people to ask.
Marie’s bababas were turning into shouts. Laura rolled out of bed and crossed the room almost at a jog. She was still in the habit of rushing, even though now that Marie was almost ten months old, there wasn’t the same risk there had been when she was newborn and her cries would escalate into raspy, full-throated wailing if Laura didn’t appear within seconds. Back then, Laura would run to her as though to a bomb that required immediate, steady-handed defusing.
Marie was sitting up in her crib, and when she saw Laura, she made eye contact and smiled as though all her most cherished dreams were all coming true at once. The black muck circulating all through Laura’s body and around her brain dissipated immediately, and she smiled back at Marie with equal radiance. They beamed at each other for a moment, and then Laura picked up Marie and Marie smacked her happily in the face and yanked her hair while sucking a tiny circular bitemark into the flesh of her upper arm while making delighted, gleeful gurgles.
“Gentle,” Laura said, as though Marie could understand or care, and “Look! Outside!” as they approached the window. She pulled the cord and sunshine streamed into their small room. “Look, there’s the Laundromat. And the pizza place, and the Chinese place, and the bodega.”
Marie interrupted her pinching exploration of Laura’s tattered T-shirt and upper chest to wave to these businesses. All their graffitied shutters were still down; it was six thirty and even the Laundromat didn’t open till eight. But there were streaks of light making the dingy storefronts look somewhat appealing, at least, and soon there would be leaves on the spindly trees instead of just plastic bags flapping in the wind. The winter would be over soon. As long as she didn’t have to wake up while it was still dark out, Laura thought, she could withstand almost anything. She would never have to live Marie’s terrifyingly helpless first few months on earth again; that alone was cause enough for celebration.
Laura nursed Marie in the chair by the window instead of lying down in bed so that she wouldn’t be tempted to fall back asleep. The last time she’d done that, she’d been jarred out of her lazy drowse by a moment of cold-blooded horror as she saw Marie scuttling with lightning speed toward the edge of the bed. At first Marie focused so hard on nursing that she was almost cross-eyed, but once her initial desperate hunger was sated, she looked up at Laura as she sucked and gently whapped her chest with an open palm. Laura grabbed her hand and absently toyed with her fingers, which Marie found so funny that she stopped nursing to laugh. She laughed all the time now, usually at things that Laura didn’t see the humor in, like the face she involuntarily made when Marie pulled her hair, or at a particular page of the frankly idiotic book about penguins. But it was so good to hear her laugh that Laura offered up her hair and read the stupid penguin book every day. She was more smitten with Marie than she had ever been with anyone in her life. Her feelings for Marie made her feelings for Dylan seem even more like a distant memory. She had never glimpsed his likeness in her baby’s face, which had seemed from her first moments like a wholly original face, nothing to do with how either of her parents looked at all.
She had worked at Bar Lafitte far into her pregnancy, wearing low-cut empire-waist dresses in an attempt to focus patrons’ attention on her growing breasts and not on the bulge below. After Marie’s birth she’d tried to work nights again but had to quit after a week; she’d spent every minute at the bar in a state of barely concealed panic, imagining the ineptitude of the teenage neighbor whom she was paying to sit on her couch while she tried to smile at the tables of men who just had no idea, no possible idea, of what it was costing her mentally to make small talk with them while her daughter was probably crying for her a full half-hour subway ride away. And then she’d had to pay the teenager almost all of what she’d managed to make. It made no sense.
So she had set out to combine all her interests—making money, playing music, and being in the same room as her baby—by teaching baby music classes. This brain wave, when it had first occurred to her, had seemed like the solution to all her problems. She quickly learned a repertoire of classics about ducks and buses and monkeys jumping on the bed, wrote a couple of originals whose loopiness belied their late-night origins, put up some brightly colored flyers in the nicer neighborhoods immediately adjacent to her less nice new neighborhood—a liminal zone that included warehouses and a toxic ribbon of sludge called the Gowanus Canal—and soon she had booked a few regular gigs at toy stores and yoga studios. One of the women who ran children’s programming at a local yoga mini-chain had even heard of the Groupies, which made Laura feel fleetingly cool, linked to her old self in a way she hadn’t felt for a while. The first few months of this new career were pure bliss. Marie was still a little butterfly who could be distracted for ages by dust motes or a rattle attached to her wrist, and sometimes she would even fall asleep—just like that, with no preamble or coaxing, leaving Laura free to march around the room interacting energetically with other people’s children, hamming it up as much as possible in order to cement herself in their tiny minds so that her class might become an important part of their routine, important enough that they’d sign up for a five-class or ten-class package and enable Laura to buy another week’s worth of groceries.
But as Marie’s personality had asserted itself and her mobility increased, it was becoming much harder to both wrangle her and amuse ten other babies and their respective handlers. Instead of sitting mesmerized and clap-flapping her hands like the other babies did as Laura strummed hard and bounced around, Marie would crawl around the perimeter of the room, inevitably finding the one non-hidden cord or uncovered socket. She would open other people’s diaper bags and upend their contents onto the floor, or steal her compatriots’ bottles and drink some stranger’s breast milk from them.
She did not intend these actions to be aggressive or evil, of course. She was a little baby! Still, it was hard not to interpret her antics as a form of sabotage, especially because it was working. Attendance was down, and reenrollment was getting rarer. Laura was beginning to suspect that she would have to find another new line of work, something lucrative enough to justify the amount of babysitting it would require, but she was already treading water every day trying to fulfill her existing obligations, and it was impossible to imagine how she would find time to seek out new ones. She worried about money every waking moment, her brain ticking through a litany of options one by one and finding each mental door closed. Her mother, though delighted to have another grandchild, was so cash-strapped that Laura could not imagine asking her for anything; the $50 gift card she had sent when Marie was born had, L
aura knew, required her to cut a corner somewhere else in the budget. When she would inevitably reach the end of the mental hallway, Daisy was always there. Dylan’s family clearly had money in a way that Laura’s did not. In Laura’s imagination Daisy was always wearing the same shapeless black dress she’d worn to Dylan’s memorial, but she was sitting at a table piled high with stacks of cash, like a waitress at Bar Lafitte at the end of the world’s most successful shift. It was tempting. But Daisy was awful, and she hated Laura. Laura didn’t want someone like that in her and Marie’s new life.
Marie popped off Laura’s nipple and began thrashing around, begging to be put on the floor. Laura obliged and dressed as quickly as possible, finding her last pair of acceptably clean jeans and her second-to-last pair of underpants, all with one eye on Marie, who was grunting as she fished around between the uneven floorboards in the hopes of finding another delicious nail like the one Laura had prized out of her mouth a few days earlier. After Laura managed to clothe herself she set about the miniature wrestling match that was dressing and diapering Marie, finishing with just enough time to feed Marie a banana and make herself a cup of instant coffee before it was nonnegotiably time to strap the baby onto her front and her guitar to her back and hustle the five long and ten short blocks to her first class of the day.