Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  Our faces swollen and damp, Emily and I finally quieted enough for me to say, “Seriously, this is good news, right? You’ve finally ditched the bitch.”

  “And you have the best support group around,” Emily said. “Look at us: Jane and I have both had disastrous relationships—Jane survived a fucking sadist for Christ sake—and I survived Jane. Chicks will be fist-fighting us for your number once you shave, get a haircut, and buy some new clothes. You really need to toss those shorts, Ryan. My god.”

  At the head of the table, Audrey had finally caught our contagion and was trembling with laughter. Her little body squeezed like an accordion as she howled. No doubt it was the idea of Emily or me supporting anyone’s recovery that set Audrey off.

  “This is your chance, Grey. This is your chance to be happy.”

  He grinned then and dashed the last of his sangria. That evening, Grey and I challenged nine foosball games against Emily and Audrey and lost every one. They beat us two of the games without allowing us to score a single point. Some support group.

  Later, while they re-matched at table tennis, Grey and I dragged chairs into the rubber trees and stared at the slash of moon. He’d grabbed a bottle of Jameson from the cabinet and we traded it like a compliment. From the neighbor’s yard came the husky gulp of a toad.

  “It’ll be strange to be single,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re no longer single.”

  I looked over at him, but he continued staring at the sky. In my hands, the Jameson bottle already felt insubstantial. The air colder now, I’d thrown a sweatshirt on and pulled my legs against my chest to ward off chicken skin. Still wrestling crocodiles, I thought.

  “It’s a moral failing,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Divorce.”

  “How can you say that? Grey, you two didn’t have a fucking chance. You live in completely different places—figuratively and literally.”

  “I should have tried harder.”

  “Yeah, you should have moved to the east coast, where they measure lives in floor space and luxury cars. Miserable beaches, toll booths, three-piece suits; Christ, what a scene.”

  “I expected her to live here despite her ambition. I had this concept of love and I refused to change it, even with both of us so miserable. She’s getting remarried in September, some attorney at the Justice Department.”

  In the dark, the leaves of the rubber trees fluttered slowly like heavy wings. I know no way of healing, I wanted to tell him. You’re better than all of us. You deserve a garden, and some rational girl.

  The ping-pong ball pock-pocked on the table behind us and I heard Audrey laughing. Handing Grey the Jameson bottle, I curled my arm around his, partially from cold and partially because I felt so impotent. Beyond us, the frog croaked unpleasantly.

  When the orderly rolls me into Dr. Mya’s office, the doctor doesn’t greet me or acknowledge my presence though I’ve arrived on time. At her desk, she sits in a slump, staring at the opened file, twirling her pencil through her fingers like a miniature baton. Hair flat and lifeless, her clothes disarranged as though she’d dressed in her car and randomly applied her makeup at stoplights. Could the good doctor possibly have a hangover? Or nicotine withdrawal perhaps—I thought once I’d smelled a faint trace of cigarettes when she’d walked past me. Spectacles in her right hand, she appears bleary-eyed and irritated.

  “Who kicked your ass?” I ask cheerfully.

  She gazes at me a moment before sliding her spectacles back on. Does she need them, I wonder, or are they simply another artifice?

  “Oh, Jane, good morning.”

  Hesitantly she half-stands, then drops to her chair again. She has the symptoms of a hangover. I try to imagine a Benson & Hedges dangling from her mouth as she tosses back a double scotch with a practiced grimace, clad in Olivia Newton-John leather pants and a dirty cowboy hat. Somehow that image won’t reconcile with her knee-length navy skirt, cream silk blouse, and Girl-Scout sensibility, despite the fact that her hairstyle this morning parrots heroin-chic.

  “Good morning. Seriously, what happened to you?”

  She smiles at me wearily, closes the file in her hand, and moves around the desk to take the chair across from me. She isn’t wearing stockings; maybe she had dressed in her car.

  “Late last night, I was paged about your visitor.”

  “No such thing as off-hours for a mind doctor, huh?”

  Her eyes flash at me overtop her spectacles—a grilling look as if expecting to catch me at something—so I grin at her. In her hand, the pencil chokes.

  “Jane, your recovery team—”

  “My recovery team? What is this, Mission Impossible?”

  “Your recovery team has reached an impasse of sorts. Have you spoken lately to your neurosurgeon?”

  “We don’t really talk. He just tests me.”

  “He has recommended that you be transferred to St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Center to begin physical therapy. This is a positive recommendation: he believes your recovery is progressing well—that your concussion no longer requires intensive monitoring. ”

  “Well, that’s kind of him. So the impasse?”

  “Your orthopedist believes the pins in your right leg should be protected by a cast, after all. He wants to remove the intramedullary rod and have you in a cast for at least two months. In his opinion, physical therapy can’t begin in earnest until the removal of the casts.”

  “Sounds like I should be discharged, maybe with a large prescription of codeine. How about it?”

  “From a certain perspective, Jane, where you go once you leave this facility is your problem. But as far as your recovery is concerned, where you convalesce is vital.”

  “To be strong, to be well.”

  “What?”

  “Convalesce. It’s really a beautiful notion.”

  Dr. Mya runs her pencil along the edge of the file in her hands. I fight the urge to smooth her hair. Her office smells of anise. Behind her, the wooden blinds drawn over the windows inhibit even the semblance of a world outside the hospital.

  “Despite your impressions, Jane, a number of people involved in your case have adopted a personal interest. The circumstances have been so unusual as to pique even the most jaded among us.”

  “How’s that exactly?”

  For a moment, I think she’s going to burst out laughing, but she manages to swallow it back down.

  “Jane, it can’t go on forever.”

  “What can’t?”

  “Think for a moment: two insurance agencies, the hospital’s accounting department, a university, and a renowned package delivery company are all involved here; these people take their financial records very seriously. They’ll find out how to contact someone who’s missing you. This charade can’t go on indefinitely.”

  She pauses, waiting for me to interject something. I consider telling her I’m a covert operative, but haven’t got the energy to play through. So I shrug.

  “When the police became involved, they uncovered nothing: no driver’s license, State I.D., phone listings, or affiliation with any community group. The two addresses on your emergency contacts list have been checked multiple times, of course: at one house, an older woman claims never to have heard of you; at the other, no one could be located until this last visit, when a gardener refused to speak with the officer beyond stating repeatedly that her employer is a woman named Emily Taylor who is currently traveling abroad.”

  Nick’s mother really is a perfect bitch; the woman believes in a parallel universe, but I don’t exist. (I’d used Nick as the emergency contact on my UPS application.) No doubt Hiromi refused to cooperate with the police believing that she was making a stand for civil disobedience—giving Emily’s name in place of name, rank, and serial number. Hiromi has an immigrant’s distrust of the police, which is lucky since she also has Emily’s contact address and phone number in Paris on the notepad in the kitchen.

  “Yo
ur colleagues have been interviewed a number of times and not one has ever been to your residence nor can any recall your mentioning a friend or relation—except for a former supervisor at UPS, and we have been unable at present to locate him as well. Somehow you’ve managed to live on this island for years and leave no physical impression.”

  “That sounds very sad.”

  She readjusts her legs.

  “As I said, it can’t last. Early this morning, I met with Dr. Grace Adams at U.H. We talked—she’s only in town today and tomorrow before a conference in D.C.—about your work at U.H., and Dr. Adams gave me the opportunity to review your employment application.”

  The moment she says “review,” I know she has found the crowbar to jimmy the trunk. My passport application, which I filed the year I turned eighteen, has my father’s address in Maui on it. Now there will be no protecting him from the inevitable official notification: Sir, I’m sorry to inform you there has been an accident. Your wife, your daughter … there has been an accident. I cannot bear for him to know how I am broken.

  “Your passport,” she says. “You used it as picture identification on your applications at U.H. and at UPS. This morning I called the police and asked them to procure a copy of your passport application from the State Department. Naturally, this process of retrieval will take longer than anyone involved would like, and I’m telling you this in blatant disregard of my own instincts, as well as the recommendations of my colleagues. Even now, with discovery unavoidable, I don’t believe you’ll help us.”

  Her eyes search me with a pleading hopelessness, a look that seems to ask me to be better than myself, to rise above the resolution of secrecy I’ve maintained like a holy vow. She wants my confession and I find to my horror that I want to confess.

  “Listen, the guy who came to see me—”

  I stop. It isn’t right to tell it like this, to drag Nick into it as if to hold him liable for my choices, to start the story in the middle. How can I explain to her that I have alienated myself from everything vital? That I walked through Manoa the night before the accident and decided to burn paintings, documentaries, surfboards, photographs like leaves in the street.

  On a cul-de-sac that night, I saw a flash of red and found another way to make my bonfire. It had seemed so simple then as I crossed the yard, and now in the room with Dr. Mya fixating on me with her serious brown-rimmed spectacles—wanting so much—I find that I can’t explain any of it, not rationally anyway. Hadn’t the accident been a bonfire of its own? Hadn’t it raged beyond any method of control?

  “I can’t—”

  She prompts me: “The guy who came to see you—”

  I shake my head. I’m standing in the cul-de-sac in the rain. Behind me, the screen door slams. Suddenly my leg burns so badly that I nearly cry out. When I look over at Dr. Mya, I find she’s talking. Something about a meeting Nick was supposed to have had with my doctors, but he never showed. I concentrate on the pen in her hand, and will myself to track what she’s saying.

  “Even during my brief interview with him last night, he seemed agitated and reluctant to give any helpful information about your case.”

  “How could he have given helpful information?”

  “He might have explained why no one knew you were married, or why the address he gave us was the same one inhabited by the older woman who’d claimed never to have heard of you. He might have told us about any other existing family members or why you’ve been in the hospital for a month and this is the first we’ve seen of him. He might have explained about the scarring on your back and wrists.”

  Her face has assumed the stern mask of a parent. She has taken a personal interest in my case. I can’t explain why this surprises and terrifies me. In fact, at this moment, her expression raises my blood pressure. My leg prickles as though it has been asleep.

  “Will you explain, please, about the scars on your back and the burn marks around your wrists?”

  Oh god. My head feels swollen.

  “Can you think of a single reason why I should?”

  “More than one. Those scars indicate serious and repeated prior injuries. Given the extent of your current injuries and the time required for rehabilitation, it is essential that you recuperate in a safe and supportive environment. Those scars, coupled with the fact that you have guarded your private life fanatically, suggest to me that your home life will be neither.”

  Animated and sanguine, her argument spurs at her. I feel suspended between my horror of her accusations and my sense of their feasibility. Her version of events—more than plausible—illustrates how dangerous Nick’s visit has been for me and for him.

  “This morning during my meeting with Dr. Adams, she told me of the informal investigation conducted last spring as a result of concerns about your withdrawn and erratic behavior. She’d suspected drugs, but as you well know, found no evidence to support that supposition.”

  Around my mind I have the distinct impression of a vise closing, squelching any chance of a logical rebuttal to Dr. Mya’s hypotheses. Rage, a throbbing beehive, hums through me: images of Nick in handcuffs, police interrogations, and a squalid trial—newspapermen barking at us, insinuating the extent of our depravity—flicker through my head. As though I’ve had a stroke, my mouth and brain stem refuse to function properly. In the cul-de-sac, it’s raining. I see a glow of white and think I may be sick. Something is trying to tear off my leg.

  In my aching head, the cul-de-sac leads to a courtroom: the judge perched above me wears a tremendous white wig and blood-red robes; the executioner with his gimp mask and blunt ax stands motionless in the corner of the room. My clothes are wet. I can smell rain even indoors. A drop and a glow of white as my leg is torn from my body.

  “Listen,” I finally shout at her.

  Dr. Mya says my name. She’s pressing a button on her phone.

  The smell of sweat and sex permeates the air around the jury; an attorney with a harness in his hand preaches about the sick, desperately immoral pit where I’ve made my bed; the judge strikes his gavel like a knell. But it isn’t a gavel, it’s a screen door. I’m running down the cul-de-sac in the rain, and then I’m on the tarmac, approaching the plane. I’ve levered myself below the cargo door and am just about to turn the latch.

  “Listen to me. Listen for Christ sake. Listen.”

  I keep shouting. I can’t stop.

  XXIII.

  I’d had insomnia for six nights in a row when Grey came to the house one Sunday morning for our road trip to Pali Lookout. Scraped raw and burning, my nerves traitored my calm demeanor.

  “No sleep?”

  I shook my head and threw my pack onto the backseat of his Honda. True to Grey, he’d packed water bottles, sushi, Funyuns, and fishcake to tide us for our half-day adventure.

  We’d spent an inordinate amount of time, just the two of us, traipsing all over the island since the Flapper Party, each avoiding the lack of Emily by talking a little more excitedly than was natural for either of us. Grey seemed more like a brother to me now than ever before and I clung to him—I know I clung to him—with all my selfishness.

  “I know it’s early, but I want to beat the tourist buses up there. When I was in high school, we used to drive the Pali at night all the time. That stupid myth about driving to the Lookout with pork and getting hacked to pieces by the guy with the claw; man, we wanted that to be true. I got laid a bunch of times by the Hawaiian altars.”

  “Serious batchi.”

  “Yeah, and now I’m married to a nun. See what happens when you defile the sacred sites?”

  “How is the nun?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her in a while actually. How’s the heiress? Any word from the dark mansion?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She’s giving me the cold as well, but I’ve heard that she’s going to Europe for a couple of months this fall.”

  “Maybe we’ll meet up in Venice.”

  “Sure. Why waste all this hostility when yo
u could share it with other countries as well?”

  “You’re so supportive.”

  He passed me the bag of Funyuns as a peace flag.

  “Meanwhile, Delvo tells me the strike may be serious after all. She’s been attending teachers’ meetings and they’re talking about a state-wide strike—all public school teachers—kindergarten through college.”

  “For money, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Is this why you haven’t been sleeping?”

  “I like money, Grey, and I need it to live. Professional instability I don’t need. Even the moderates think this strike could last six months.”

  “That’s alarming.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  I opened the fishcake and bit off a chunk as the car cruised up the Pali, and the lush green of the trees began to canopy us, parceling the sun into thin, random beams. U2 played on the stereo. I gave Grey my mother’s rabbit story:

  So there’s this boy who discovers a burrow of baby rabbits early one morning. He crouches beside the hole, studying the five hairless bodies, and debates. How would he feed five bunnies, and what if their mother returned and found the nest robbed? He decides to hide farther along the path, and wait to see if the mother rabbit returns.

  All morning, the boy waits by the path; occasionally the cry of one of the rabbits would disturb the forest. As the morning wore on, the cries became less frequent and less hearty. The boy decides to give the mother rabbit until midday.

  The sun arches and begins its descent. Along the path, the boy returns to the nest. Four of the rabbits are stiff and cold. The fifth twitches strangely. Cradling the last rabbit in his jacket pocket, the boy returns to his home.

  “What the fuck kind of story is that?”