Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  Outside In, the free youth clinic, was quiet and clean. Gray carpet and gray late-morning light. Two teenagers cloaked in green army jackets and a taupe odor sprawled across three chairs, making out, facial piercings clicking against each other. A blond girl with no makeup and a band T-shirt sat in a corner, legs crossed, ankle jiggling. A sick, skinny kid who was maybe thirteen, young enough to be gender-indeterminate without even trying, slouched on the carpet, hood up, knees up, and glowered wearily as if still on the sidewalk warning off predators.

  I’d been luckier than they were, and I didn’t forget it. I’d had half a great education, enough work to keep myself afloat, good health so far, and good friends abundant with love and favors and job tips and housing connections. I’d had the foundations, at least, of a family who schooled me and taught me how to work within the system, and when that net tore, my chosen family stepped up to catch me. But in this room we all shared something: broke, uninsured, and under twenty-seven.

  “Andrea Morales?”

  I followed the nurse back to a clean, quiet room.

  The nurse had her graying hair pulled back in an easy low ponytail and the corners of her eyes turned downward in a forgiving curve. “I think I have mono,” I said. She asked me about my symptoms as she measured and weighed me and looked at my throat. Then she handed me a urine cup and sent me down the hall.

  Back in the exam room, I was only a few pages into the foreign mainstream universe of People before the nurse returned and delicately closed the door behind her. “You don’t have mono,” she said.

  “Thank god.”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  It’s always obvious in retrospect. But my periods had often been erratic and light, and I never paid attention to them. Why would I? Stress had rendered my cycle unpredictable—it was not unusual for it to disappear for a month or two. I’d suffered a few waves of nausea, but it was flu season, and I’d never had a great immune system. In one very slim folder of my mind, the one labeled RYAN, I had remembered that condoms were important, because god forbid I carry an STD back over the lesbian border; but in my main operating system, I was simply gay, always had been, always would be. Pregnancy was not a possibility you even considered.

  “But I’m a lesbian,” I said.

  Kindly, she asked, “Did you have sex with a man?”

  “Just a little.”

  “It can happen on just one go.”

  “But I used condoms.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “I have to ask you some questions now as a matter of procedure.”

  Yes, I knew who had gotten me pregnant. Yes, it was consensual. No, I was not afraid of him. No, I had not told him yet.

  “Let’s get a blood draw,” she said. “Do you have an idea of how far along you might be?”

  I thought back to when the drum lessons started. There’d been the time we tangled on the basement floor, but that hadn’t led to sex in the straight sense; I was too cautious about the possibility Summer would come home. The only time it could have happened was the night I’d faked it, a month ago. I started to explain and found I could not stop. For once, confession felt like a true unburdening. The seal on my secret split, and I told the nurse everything. I talked while she pumped the armband tight around my bicep and I paused while she checked my breathing with the cool stethoscope, because she asked me to be quiet for a moment and breathe, and then I picked up again as she drew my blood.

  The nurse sat on her swiveling stool and rested her clasped hands on her knees. She asked what I wanted to do. “You do have options.”

  I looked down at my abdomen, the opening in my gown where a tender stripe of my skin peeked out. Options? It was a cluster of new cells versus me, my whole life. I’d barely even had a chance to start living it.

  “There’s only one option,” I said. “I can’t have a baby.”

  She nodded calmly and wrote down the names of three clinics.

  “Are you sure I’m pregnant?” I said.

  “We’ll have the blood test results tomorrow. We could try an ultrasound today.”

  “Would I see it? The . . . thing?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “God no.”

  I couldn’t believe it was real, even as I dialed Planned Parenthood from a pay phone three blocks from Outside In. The voice on the line was kind, matter-of-fact. They called me “dear.” They said they could see me next Tuesday. I said Tuesday sounded good. That was five days from now. How much could the cells multiply in five days? Not much, I figured. And I didn’t want to know.

  The receptionist suggested I bring a friend or partner for support. I said, “I’ll be fine.” I wanted it out, quick. The sooner it was gone, the more over this would all be. I was done with affairs. I was done with faking it. I was done with secrets. It was time to clean up my mess, all by myself. In five days I would expel this last trace of Ryan from my life. He didn’t even need to know. No one did. I would box up the whole weird affair and store it in the farthest corner of the attic. Better yet, recycle it.

  If it was even true. I bought a three-pack of pregnancy tests in a downtown drugstore and stowed them deep in my backpack. It wasn’t until nearly midnight, alone in the house, that I had the nerve to try them.

  Positive, positive, positive.

  I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. When I tried to drink from it, my hands shook so much I had to set the glass on the counter and brace myself. I walked out the front door and stood on the porch in the cool damp night. I slid my hand under my shirt and touched my flat abdomen. All I could feel was my own warm skin. Whatever was inside me was tiny and deep, secreted away.

  I started walking. My eyes were so wide they ate everything. Everything I saw, I thought, This is what I saw on the night I found out. The neighborhood was tucked into itself. Small bungalows, cracked sidewalk, lopsided fences. Green grass and bare trees. Who was born here? What did it mean to grow up here? Where were the secret places the neighborhood kids knew? The Portland horizon was close and dark with trees, a basin packed with houses, the sky plum and cloudy with city light. My eyes filled with windows and rooftops and cars and chain-link. I wanted prairie and field and a black sky with translucent cloud-streaks gauzing the moon. I wanted a single house like an answer at the end of a long dark driveway, a window glowing beacon-yellow. I wanted my mother. I nearly choked on such a want.

  The next morning I wrapped the used tests in a plastic bag and threw them into a Dumpster on MLK while walking Bullet.

  I borrowed Summer’s dog-eared purple copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. The embryo was probably the size of a lentil or maybe a pea. That was nothing! A mere legume. It hardly even existed. Five days couldn’t go quickly enough. I was seized by the urge to eradicate, eradicate.

  I opened my closet and dresser and pulled out all the clothes I hadn’t worn in more than a year. Jackets from high school, wrecked jeans from college, oversize T-shirts for bands I didn’t even like anymore, socks cross-pollinated with Flynn’s: I was like a bird who’d stashed every feather it molted. I had nested in old selves for too long, afraid I’d need them again.

  The Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center was housed in a cinder-block building on Belmont Avenue. I unloaded four bags of clothes into the free box in a soft cascade, and three street kids dove right in and started pawing around like puppies. I thought, You’re all babies. One immediately wriggled into an old acrylic ski sweater. “Looks good,” I said, and the kid gave me a thumbs-up. A surprising wave of love caught me off guard. I wanted to defend them all with knives and fists. Fuck everyone who let you go, I thought. I would never. Ever.

  I ran my fingers over the lead type on the press bed. The sweet plasticky smell of the sticky ink filled my head and throat, as if I were drinking it; it smelled strangely delicious and I wanted to suck it in, then worried that I shouldn’t even breathe it, then thought, Oh, what does it matter.

  I spread glossy gold ink over the drum of the Vandercook and c
ranked through a test run of Save the Date cards. By the time these people’s wedding arrived in September, this whole fiasco would be seven months behind me and still receding. Eventually it would shrink to the vanishing point and disappear.

  I looked down at my torso. Nothing looked different. My body was still entirely my own. It still looked like the body I knew. At this point, what was inside me was only a cell cluster. It was just knowledge, really.

  But how could I ever un-know it? You can burn the book but not the story. I did not like this thought.

  Just to scare myself, I imagined another September. Big as a house. Me, as a house. I adjusted the leading in the bed and thought of what it would be like to hold a brand-new human in my hands. What would it be like to be raised by me and my friends? To grow up here, in this rainy lush place where it almost never snowed and everyone could be in a band? To become one of those Portland kids who had always seen piercings and tattoos, who knew what a heroin addict looked like, what a gay person looked like, what a protest looked like? Who carried a bus pass and hung out on the steps at Pioneer Square, who knew how to compost and the safest way home by bike, who never carried an umbrella and never knew parental rejection? I would have liked to be such a kid.

  Get real, Andrea.

  The Breakup

  IN THE MORNING, THE PHONE RANG WITH THE RESULTS OF MY blood test: I was seven weeks along. I said, “That’s truly impossible,” with a wave of relief—clearly they had the wrong results!—until the person explained that they count the two weeks before conception. I said, “So really it’s only five weeks,” and she said, “In a way, but officially, you’re seven weeks pregnant.” I said, “None of this makes any fucking sense,” and hung up. That evening, the phone rang and at the sound of Ryan’s voice my skin seemed to turn inside out. I pictured him on a sagging couch in the studio’s break room. Or at a corner pay phone in the mild dry Austin evening, his arms bare in a T-shirt.

  “What’s up?” I said. My voice curdled; I cleared my throat.

  “I’m back.”

  “What?” The receiver grew slippery in my hand. I glanced at the kitchen. Summer had paused the hand mixer and was carefully scraping down a mixing bowl, ear turned toward the living room. He wasn’t due back for five more days. “Did you finish early?”

  “You could say that. Let’s get a drink.”

  My mouth had gone dry. “I can’t. I have family dinner at Robin and Topher’s, and then there’s some house show by Division. Is everything all right?”

  “You sound weird.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “I have to go. Why are you back early?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Good-bye.”

  He hung up.

  A minute later the phone rang again. “Just come over,” he said. It was unlike him to plead. “Have a drink with me. One round of Scrabble.”

  “I told you, I have to go to family dinner.”

  “Oh.” He sighed. “Never mind.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  We hung up. I called him back.

  “Hey. I’ll come by for a minute. But I can’t stay long.”

  As I pulled on my coat Summer leaned out of the kitchen and asked whom I’d been talking to and I said it was Ted. I said I’d broken something at the shop—which was in fact true, I’d knocked over a sixty-dollar Blenko vase, there went the day’s wages—and I’d meet her at dinner after I’d taken care of it.

  Every parking space on Ryan’s block was taken. I circled until I found one across the street from that shadowy doorway where we’d first kissed. If only I’d gone straight home from La Luna that night. If only I had grabbed an extra beer from backstage and not bothered heading over to the bar. If only someone had already taken that bar stool beside him, or I’d left a minute later and worked my way through some other opening in the crowd. If only I’d not seen Flynn and Vivian and could have coasted along in cozy ignorance for just another night. If only I hadn’t gone to the show at all, and had lingered in my den of crowd-shy sorrow a day or two longer. I rewound, replayed, rechose my own adventure. To think that if I had made one minor different move on the night it all started—that a mere minute could have sealed off this long, unfathomable tunnel I had fallen into—I never would have even known it could exist. There were a hundred ways to delete one minute of that night so that now I would be headed guilelessly to family dinner with no secrets and no in utero guest and no idea what it was like to fuck a man, an entirely other Andrea, the Andrea I wanted to believe I was, and the Andrea everyone still thought I had been all along. To undo the months that followed was far more complicated. At a certain point, you can’t blame chance. Only yourself.

  I walked slowly enough that my hair was soaked by the time I reached his front door. I let myself in.

  The apartment was warm and the familiarity of the scent jolted me. It smelled like a period in my life, already taking on retrospect. Ryan had lived there two years and still it looked temporary, with its white walls, that plain little Danish sofa, the lone shelf of records and CDs, the stereo stacked on a side table, one rug at the entryway, a thrift-store painting of a horse above the sofa.

  Ryan slouched on the couch with his repaired guitar, plucking out a countermelody to the record playing on the stereo. A suitcase lay open on the floor, half-emptied. He had showered and shaved—his hair was still damp—and dark circles shadowed his eyes. “Hello, you,” he said, and started to lift off the guitar.

  “Don’t get up, it’s okay,” I said, shrugging off my jacket and kicking off my wet shoes. “What are you playing?”

  He strummed a terse flourish. “A little song called ‘We Broke Up.’”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that. “Is that what we did?”

  “It’s not about you.” Ryan hit a low sour chord and set the guitar aside. “The fucking band.”

  “You broke up?” I stopped. “The Cold Shoulder broke up?”

  Ryan rubbed his hand across his face. “I’m so tired,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. I couldn’t help it, I hugged him, and he hugged back. His gray sweater was soft and worn thin. I could see the black T-shirt underneath. His head dropped to rest on mine for a moment.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Want a drink?” he said.

  I did, desperately. But I could not bring myself to do it. Tuesday, I told myself. I’ll drink Tuesday. A lot. I pulled away. “Water’s fine. What about the new record?”

  “The record.” He opened the fridge and peered inside as if it contained a distant view. “The record. Is four songs long.”

  They had fought in the studio: with each other, with the engineer, with the songs. Ryan cut short my dismay. “It’s okay,” he said curtly, setting two glasses down on the counter with a thunk. “It always happens. Bands have life spans. They don’t last forever. There will be others.”

  “But you loved the Cold Shoulder.”

  “Jesse wanted out. He wants his own deal. I think he thinks he can be the next Elliott.” Ryan gave the ice tray a sharp twist and the cubes popped loose, a sound like joints cracking.

  “What about the songs you recorded?”

  “Either we’ll make a posthumous EP out of it or they’ll just be the Great Lost Recordings. The record label’s going under too. Mercury bled them dry.” It was happening more and more these days: the vampiric deals the majors had struck with the small indies were collapsing. It was bad enough to see your homegrown culture stolen and sold back to you in facsimile at the mall. Even worse when the original pillars of it then started to crack. Story of the decade. The nineties could break your heart.

  He allowed my sympathy but it seemed not to touch him. He handled it all like a journalist, detached, merely reporting, and focused on pouring the water into my glass as if measuring it precisely. He said, “At
least the band went out on a high note. We never stuck around long enough to get bad.”

  “You got to have only the good part,” I said.

  “Yeah. Story of my life, right?” His laugh was light and bitter as beer. “Speaking of. Here you are.”

  “I’m definitely not the good part.” My voice caught in my throat.

  He asked what I meant. I said, “You don’t want to know,” but then of course he did, and I wasn’t prepared to talk my way out of it.

  My hands slid deep into the pocket of my sweatshirt and met over my abdomen. I took a deep breath.

  Ryan’s face when I said those two words: realization, then narrowed eyes, then fear, and then he turned away and walked to the stereo, where the record had spun out and the needle circled, thk . . . thk . . . thk . . .

  He knelt. “Fuck,” he said with each precise move—“fuck,” resting the player arm in its cradle; “fuck,” a gentle snap of the wrist to settle the record in its sleeve; “fuck,” easing it into the cover; “fuck,” done. He shelved the record and sat back on his heels, his back turned to me. “What next?”

  “The obvious,” I said.

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  “They have a sliding scale,” I said. “I can do it.”

  “No, let me help. Fuck. You probably hate me now.”

  “Why would I hate you? It’s not like it’s your fault. Unless there’s something I don’t know. Should I?”

  “No! I was careful. We were both careful. Weren’t we?”

  “Well, I slept with someone who could get me pregnant, so that’s on me. That was optional, and I did it.”

  “That’s me. I’m always optional, aren’t I?”

  I said I didn’t mean it to sound like that and he said well it did. I said, “Wasn’t I just as optional to you?”

  “Clearly you think so,” he said.