Running Into Trouble
Page 13
Helen had originally become an actuary because she was good with numbers, and predicting the likelihood of individual deaths, fires, and car accidents gave her a slightly shameful thrill. Knowing the exact moment of someone’s death was something she figured only a god could know. Therefore, knowing the chance that someone would die at any given time was very nearly divine. Her work had, until recently, given her a feeling of benevolent superiority, like she gently cradled the high-risk candidates—the bad drivers and the chronically ill—in her all-powerful hands. But now? She just didn’t care.
She wondered how long she’d be able to get away with it. Some of the sales reps had come sniffing around, looking for their risk-adjusted rate quotes. She’d easily put them off, pleading an extensive backlog. And her boss, Ralph Orphan, kept out of her way. As long as she dutifully filled out her internal time tracking sheets for the corporate accounting department, he was satisfied. Helen was allocating all her wasted hours to the sales reps and projects she most disliked.
Although she knew very well that nothing was certain, she estimated that she could coast by for at least another month. At Globus, appearances counted for a lot.
-Jennifer Champion-
Alone, lying with her foot elevated above her heart and Wretch squatting on her chest like a purring medicine ball, Jennifer flipped through a magazine. Celebrities lose weight, celebrities gain weight, birth, death, marriage, divorce, cookie recipes. Damn, she was bored. Eli was gone, she was out of books, and she wasn’t supposed to even walk for three whole weeks.
Out of desperation, Jennifer picked up the remote control and aimed it at the cursed TV. Everything was still a crackling fuzzy mess, except for one station, which seemed to be a nature show from the public broadcasting service. Unfortunately, her poor reception meant that the magnificent creatures—mountain lions—there were profiling this week were cavorting in black and white. “As human development encroaches into once-wild lands,” explained the voiceover, “mountain lions and people are encountering each other more frequently, and often with serious consequences for both species.”
Blah, blah, blah, she thought. Whenever Jennifer went running, she encountered warning signs, informing her that running or hiking alone in mountain lion country could make her vulnerable to attack. She remembered running with a group of R&M club women and seeing an especially vivid warning sign—the word warning was colored blood red and spelled out in an exotic font with wild serifs. Sue Dawson had looked at the sign and laughed. “Oh my God, now you’re supposed to have a date to run around in the woods.”
Jennifer always ignored the warnings. Scheduling a partner for every single day of the week was just too much effort, and, besides, sometimes Jennifer liked to run alone. She found it meditative. The sound of her feet striking the ground was like a metronome, allowing her thoughts and feelings to flow smoothly and arrange themselves into orderly patterns. The mountain lion stalking and killing a deer on her TV screen—animal number 230, a large male that had been collared two years ago—reminded her that she wouldn’t be running again for a long time.
Glancing between the TV and the ceiling, Jennifer felt like she was suffocating. It would be weeks before she could go outside again, and she had lots of time to obsess over two things—why Eli was being so distant after she’d bought him a freakin’ TV and how she was going to look after Nasty with a broken foot. Sure, she could visit, but what could she really accomplish?
But, before she could whip herself into an anxious, pulsating frenzy, the phone rang. Eager for the distraction, she pushed Wretch off her chest and reached around for her crutches. She made it to the phone after the fifth ring.
“Hello?” she said expectantly, hoping the caller hadn’t hung up.
“Hi Jennifer. It’s Bryony at The Organic Food Store. Are you going to be picking up Anastasia’s delivery this week? She just called here, wondering where you were. She sounds awful.”
Oh shit.
-Helen Kale-
Helen left the office early, apologetically drawing out her goodbyes and waving away suggestions that she was on her way to a “hot date” with “that hot man.” For the past two years, Helen had brought Eli as her date to the Globus corporate team-building retreat and Christmas party. Because being seen with Eli was such a thrill, Helen had looked forward to these obligatory events as much as almost everyone else in the office had dreaded them.
Her female co-workers were appropriately envious in a joking way, which had suited Helen very well until recently.
“You have fun, girl,” called the evil receptionist, who had just installed a saccharine screen saver of tiger-striped kittens chasing a balloon. She already had a cat-themed calendar and a cat-shaped mug.
“Thanks Margie,” said Helen, relieved to finally walk through the heavy Kevlar doors that functioned as a bell jar, trapping stale air in the office.
As she got in her car, Helen thought about how she was now just a few years away from becoming like Margie, an older, desperate woman who clung to the -ie at the end of her name rather than resigning herself to plain old Marge. Sure, she’d let Sue and Carol talk her into coming to a Death March planning meeting slash potluck dinner. But no amount of pretending to act normally could fix her broken life. She would just go through the motions and try not to collapse completely, lose her home, and become a burden to society.
Of course, going to a Death March meeting without Eli would be strange, painful, and awkward. Maybe she’d go for a run before the meeting and tire herself out. If she ran long and hard enough, she would become impervious to pain.
-Jennifer Champion-
Jennifer could not believe that she had forgotten to make arrangements for Nasty’s weekly grocery delivery. Sure, she'd convinced Eli to drop by and make sure she was still alive. But that was mostly to assuage her niggling guilt. Since she’d broken her foot, Jennifer had been living in a small, airless world comprised of her despair at finding out that she couldn’t run for what seemed like forever, her worry that Eli might be becoming disillusioned with her, and her irritation with herself for even caring what Eli thought of her. She was failing her friend.
“Jennifer, are you there?” Bryony cracked her gum impatiently into the phone.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“So what are we going to do about Nasty’s box? I’d take it over myself, but I am totally swamped. I’ve got blue hairs with expired coupons who are threatening to sue the store because they couldn’t read the font.”
Blue hairs was Bryony’s term for aggressively frugal older folks for whom coupon clipping was both a high art and a science. For a fraction of a second, Jennifer acutely missed having a “real job.” Sure, working at The Organic Food Store had sucked, but it had sucked for everyone—even the manager who had to deal with some mysterious and arbitrary thing called Corporate—pretty much equally. And they also had a common enemy: the customer, an evil, irrational beast that lived on free gourmet cheese samples while paying with expired credit cards or large volumes of change.
“Jennifer, can you hang on for a second? I think it’s some kind of insurrection.”
“Sure, OK.”
Jennifer was relieved that Bryony had to deal with some heinous problem. It gave her a chance to think about what in God’s name she was going to do about Nasty’s groceries. Eli was out running—and, of course, he didn’t have a cell phone—so asking him to pick them up was out of the question. There were the usual suspects from the R&M club—her social mainstay until the “incident” that had brought her and Eli together so quickly and intensely. But she felt that calling one of them would be painfully awkward and might raise questions that she didn’t want to answer. Like “Why did you sleep with Helen’s boyfriend?” and “So you were buying a television?” and “Can you still do the Death March this year?”
“Jennifer, are you there?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’ll come down to get Nasty’s groceries right now.”
“Great. ‘Later.”<
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Somehow delivering the groceries herself seemed like the only solution. She figured that she could get Bryony to carry the boxes to her car. And then, when she got to Nasty’s, she’d wait for Eli to arrive. Or, if he’d already been there, she supposed she could somehow drag them inside. Nasty was eating so little now that she could probably do it without braking her good foot. Maybe she would bring them in one can of soup at a time.
Jennifer, although she hadn’t taken a shower or changed her clothes for more than two days, didn’t bother to clean herself up. The water in her shower changed temperature randomly, oscillating from icy cold to scalding hot and back again. Ensuring a survivable water temperature required constant vigilance, and she didn’t think she could keep her cast dry while continually manipulating faucets. Besides, now that she had committed to driving a car with her right foot in a cast, she wanted to get going as soon as possible, before she could change her mind.
With a backpack slung around her shoulders (she thought she could use it for ferrying items between her car and Nasty’s kitchen, if it came to that), Jennifer crutched out of her apartment so quickly that Wretch had to leap out of her way. Once Jennifer was outside, she slowly made her way down the five steps separating her from the gravel path to the parking lot. She did this by balancing on one foot while carefully placing both crutches on the step immediately below her, swinging herself down, and replanting her left foot.
At the bottom of the stairs, her arms were trembling. She was so concerned about falling on her face that she gripped the crutches so tightly that she lost feeling in her fingers. After taking a moment to recover herself, Jennifer placed her crutches onto the gravel path and attempted to swing herself forward. But instead of providing a stable base, the left crutch slipped, causing Jennifer to come crashing down onto her left thigh. Ouch, ouch, ouch, she thought. If I have screwed up my other leg, I am the dumbest person in the whole world.
Fortunately, neither turned out to be true. Jennifer realized that she was more startled and generally embarrassed than actually hurt. Her gray sweatpants now had a stain on the rear, but she gave it only a fleeting thought. The rest of her was looking so ragged that an additional bit of damage was barely noticeable. After picking herself up, she got to her car and slid herself in.
Since her right foot was covered in a hard shell of a cast and wouldn’t be especially useful for modulating applied pressure to the gas and brake, she flung it over the gearshift and rested it on the passenger seat. Although she was awkwardly balanced, she turned on the ignition and put the car into reverse. She used her left foot to gingerly press down on the gas. So far, so good.
-Eli Hawthorne-
As Eli approached the address for Nasty’s house, his paced slowed considerably. He had enjoyed leaving the stuffy confines of Jennifer’s increasingly claustrophobic apartment for clean air and an open road. But now he noticed the constricted feeling in his throat that he got whenever he had to do something that, for whatever reason, he’d really prefer to avoid entirely.
Eli vaguely remembered Nasty from his days as a regular at the Uvula. In his mind, she was that loud, emotionally promiscuous girl who would tell you her life story if you even glanced in her direction. Her face was roughly attractive, full of hard aggressive angles that bespoke her background in high fashion, and startlingly naked. Nasty’s mercurial moods advertised themselves through her expressive features that could shift within seconds from beatific, wine-lit beauty to haggard, drunken sorrow. Eli had found Nasty’s obliviousness to what people thought of her to be so painful to watch that he had consistently avoided her, even though Matt and a few other guys had told him she was an easy and quite adventurous lay.
He also recalled her talking a lot about her terminal illness. “Want another drink?” the bartender would ask. “Sure,” she’d say, “I’m dying anyway.” “Want to grab a smoke outside?” some young snowboarded would say. “Abso-fucking-lutely,” she’d reply. “I already have lung cancer.” In fact, she’d talked so much about her cancer and how it meant she had to live for the moment, to pack every last nanosecond with as much intensity as possible, that Eli had always assumed she was lying. When Jennifer had spoken to him about her sick friend, his first reaction was: “I can’t believe she was telling the truth!”
Having slowed to a walk immediately across from Nasty’s house, Eli attempted to ignore a squashy, awkward feeling in his stomach and deliberately crossed the road. He quickly stepped into Nasty’s forlorn, neglected yard and began striding through prickly brush and tickly grass towards her front door until an unexpected movement in the tangle of vegetation to his left caused him instinctively to freeze. When looked in the direction of the moving bushes and rustling sounds, Eli was simultaneously exhilarated and terrified.
A heavy feline head poked itself out from between two large shrubs—each about 3 or 4 feet tall with a mixture of brown and gray leaves—and turned itself in Eli’s direction. Then a powerful, muscular body carried by strong legs with enormous, pancake-sized paws surged ahead. The cat turned its head towards Eli, seemingly to think for a moment, and then, apparently concluding that Eli wasn’t a suitable dinner, loped out of the yard and across the road. Eli watched as the cat disappeared into the trees.
“Hey…”
Eli gasped, startled by a rough yet wasted voice and a series of rapid-fire coughs. He turned around and saw Nasty, a gnarled, gaunt figure wrapped in a fuzzy pink bathrobe. She was standing at the top of the stairs heading into her house like the hostess to the damned, clutching her oxygen tree. Worried that she was going to keel over right then and there, Eli leapt up the steps and took her arm, hoping to steady her balance. She felt unnaturally light and breakable, like a piece of bone china.
Up close, Eli could see the dark circles under her eyes, outlining the sockets in her skull. He could also smell her burnt umber scent compounded of cigarette ash, perspiration, and deep-rooted decay. If Nasty hadn’t been coughing so hopelessly and convulsively, Eli would have pulled away, putting some distance between himself and her sickness. Although he knew intellectually that cancer wasn’t contagious and that the correct, humane response to illness was compassion, some primitive part of his brain recoiled at Nasty’s wasted appearance and moist cough.
When at last she finished coughing, Nasty absently wiped her mouth, leaving a bright red stain on the sleeve of her robe and a rust-colored smear that ran from the corner of her left lip to the bottom of her chin.
Horrified, Eli asked, “You’re coughing up blood. Shouldn’t we get you to a hospital?”
Nasty shook her head to indicate no. “I see you met…my lion,” said Nasty, speaking deliberately in a near whisper to avoid irritating her throat.
“Yeah. Pretty impressive. Majestic.” And pretty scary, thought Eli.
Nasty nodded. “I put out…some raw chicken…for him last week.”
Oh my god, Eli thought, she is totally insane. He was no wildlife expert, but everyone knew that feeding wild animals was a completely boneheaded idea. When he was 11 years old, just a skinny, hyperkinetic kid, his mother had taken him camping at Yosemite. They had driven together for three whole days in an ancient purple Chevy Nova that left a puddle of oil in every rest area parking lot they’d stopped in. At the campsite, he mostly built fires and burned small objects—books of matches, his mother’s old paperback romance novels—while his mother drank bourbon or slept off hangovers.
After four days in the campsite, Eli woke up to a crashing sound followed by crunching and snorting. At first he nudged his mother in her sleeping bag. But she just moaned and mashed her face deeper into her pillow. Her face was puffy and streaked with the mascara that she refused to take off before going to sleep; she’d just trowel on a new layer in the morning. To young Eli, her skin looked as soft and moist as overripe fruit. Staring at it and listening to the strange noises outside, Eli decided that expecting his mother to protect him was useless. So he took a deep breath and poked his head out of the tent,
half expecting to be attacked.
Instead, he saw what looked to be a medium-sized bear, pawing through their large cooler of food. He was relieved to be watching a bear instead of one of the psychos his mother told him about. After about five minutes, the bear, apparently sated, stopped eating and looked off in the direction of the woods. Suddenly, Eli didn’t want the bear to go. His trip with his mother—part of her court-mandated visitation—had been one of the loneliest weeks in his life. So he took a granola bar from its wrapper and called to the bear. “Hey bear,” he said. “Want some food?”
The bear, which was evidently familiar with human handouts, trundled over to Eli and took the granola bar from his hand. Thrilled at being so close to the animal, Eli unwrapped eight more granola bars until he heard more noise coming from the woods. “Is this a mother bear with cubs?” he wondered. But instead it was two park rangers, one well-built and wearing shorts one size too small like a gym teacher and another a stocky, bearded man with a gut that lapped over his belt.