by Emma Young
“You don’t know?” I say.
He shrugs. “I didn’t read anything about it. She wasn’t arrested that lunchtime. That’s all I know.”
“Maybe she got away with it.”
“You don’t get away with something like that.”
“Maybe they didn’t press charges,” I say.
“Legally, they have to. Had to.”
“You didn’t write her story?”
“No . . . maybe I should have.”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
He looks at me. “I know her story. I should have told it.”
Unable to stop the fervor in my voice, I say, “I don’t think all stories have to be told.”
For a few moments, he just holds my gaze. I have no idea what he’s thinking. He sighs. “They got frostbite on their feet.”
“. . . Who?”
“The man from North Korea and his mother. They got frostbite on their feet. But they made it to Vientiane. His sister had escaped to Seoul five years earlier. She flew to Vientiane, and there was this incredible reunion. They couldn’t stop crying. They were all out and their nightmare was over. But the day they were set to fly to Seoul together, his mother developed a fever. The gangrene in her foot had infected her blood. She died in the taxi on the way to the airport.”
I half whisper, “What was he doing here?”
“He married a woman who lived in Newton. She was in a car crash.”
“Did she make it?”
“I don’t know. One conversation. Thirty minutes on a bench. Then he had to go and visit his wife, and I had his story to write for the next day. Then my section editor ditched it for something on a woman who’d become a butt model after having cosmetic surgery on her ass. He’d overheard her talking about it on his train journey home.”
For a few moments, neither of us speaks. Then I ask, “Do you like what you do?”
“I like what I do. Bostonstream’s not exactly where I plan to be forever.” He looks at me. “I thought I was supposed to be interviewing you.”
I glance over at the nearest bench, which is facing the water. Beside it is a slim concrete lamppost, which I’m noticing because the bulb’s flickering on. There’s a line of them, I realize, all along the path, right to the wood.
The bench is vacant.
“How about this,” I say. “You ask a question; I ask a question.”
“That’s not exactly the standard interview format.”
“Then call it a . . . structured conversation.”
“A structured conversation?” There’s a glimmer of a smile in his eyes.
That smile cuts me deep. In the weeks leading up to the surgery, I listened to one particular song over and over. I focused on a single line. I’d obsess over it and what it meant for me and what I would become. It’s about how if you look into someone’s eyes, you can see their soul.
If the material eyes are a conduit to the immaterial soul, or mind, or whatever you want to call it, then I’m in deep trouble. Which was why I decided the lyric was all wrong. But now I’m looking into Joe’s eyes, in the hospital park, this late afternoon, and I’m thinking: Yeah, I’m in trouble. Now let me count the ways.
13.
There is a plaque. Of course there is.
In Loving Memory of Carol Anne Goodman, 1952-2016
I leave a space for it. It seems wrong, somehow, to blot out that loving memory with my still slightly sweaty back. Maybe Joe feels the same way because he sits on the other side of the plaque, angled toward me, satchel on his lap, pen and notebook resting on top. In the artificial white glow from the concrete lamppost, he might look a little more exhibit-like, a little less real, but there’s an energy coming from him that lights me up from inside.
I have no idea what time it is. Mum said she and Dad would come by my room at six. If I’m not there, what then? They’ll look for me in the gym, the rec room, maybe they’ll knock on the other doors in my corridor, and then what? They’ll alert security. Someone will find me. I have goose bumps, I realize. The breeze is coming off the harbor again and it’s cool.
Joe says, “Are you cold?”
I might feel touched, I suppose, that he’s noticed. But I’m not sure I’m ready to be touched. So I say, “As opening interview questions go, that is a little bit lame. The answer is yeah. My turn: Are you from Boston?”
He doesn’t smile. I think, You’re too used to Elliot. Elliot is not like most boys. Lighten up with the playful insults.
He says, “I’m from San Francisco. So you haven’t been here long enough to lose your accent. How long have you been in the hospital?”
“. . . About seven months.”
“Seven months?”
“Why did you come to Boston?” I ask him.
“Family reasons,” he says. “Seven months? When did you come to the States? What happened?”
I focus on the patch of mostly bare earth down by my feet and listen to the empty call of gulls out over the water.
After a few moments, he says, “In this park, if I ask someone what they’re doing here, usually they can’t wait to get it all out. I think everyone else they know has had enough of hearing about it, and here I am—”
“A shoulder to cry on.”
“Someone who’s interested when no one else is anymore. Maybe also because I’m not from around here, so I’m not the normal world, and we have that in common.”
“What’s the normal world?”
He shrugs. “Revere Beach. The Red Sox.”
“I had to have this brain surgery,” I tell him. “I was unconscious for a while. The rehab took a long time. I’m still under observation. Back to the format.” My eyes jump again to his face, almost against my will. “Have you read Frankenstein?”
“I’ve seen the movie. One of the movies.”
“So which is more scary: Dr. Frankenstein or his monster?”
“Dr. Frankenstein,” he says. “Of course.”
“Not the green flesh and the scars and the mismatched body parts?”
“Not the brilliant but irresponsible mind? The ‘who cares what might result from my reckless actions’ attitude?”
“Is that your question?”
He says, “What brain surgery?”
“Actually, it’s not something I really want to talk about.”
“Okay . . . then let me go again: Do you miss home?”
Eyes still on him, because now I can’t take them away, I nod.
“What do you miss most?”
I think of saying the creamy stuff in Greggs vanilla slices or Ski Sunday, or women in their sixties in parkas sucking on cough drops. The types of things I say whenever Elliot asks me. Instead, I find myself telling him a heartfelt truth. “Belonging.”
My body is not English. The cells in these hands, in these feet, in this heart, these lips, were generated by Hershey’s bars and hickory-smoked bacon and Egg Beaters and T-bone steaks and whatever they drip-fed Sylvia while she was lying, suspended on the cusp of death, in her hospice. I fold my arms tight across my chest. The breeze swells the hair follicles in my arms. She was at home here, in America. Whoever she was.
“What do those words in your tattoo mean?” I ask him.
“Ad astra? To the stars.”
“Is that your star sign?” I gesture at the tattoo.
“It’s a constellation. Not mine.”
I raise an eyebrow. Whoever’s it is must mean something to him.
“Are your parents here?” he asks.
I nod. “Are yours?”
“Dad is,” he says, frowning at the ground.
The tension level suddenly seems too high. I revert to an extraction technique of the sort perfected by Elliot. “So . . . issues of the day. What’s your opinion on croissants crossed with doughnuts?”
He looks up sharply. “What’s your opinion of the Fox News coverage of Mexican immigration?”
I say, “Siamese kittens in flamenco dresses: freeing-occupied-France-right or i
nvading-Iraq-wrong?”
He smiles. Oh, it goes right through me. And just for a moment, I completely forget about the strange way I came into this new life. Just for a moment, I’m sitting on a bench, awkwardly but to a degree successfully making my way through a not-very-relaxed conversation with a not-very-relaxed guy, and then I see something.
That woman. That woman with the leaflets.
She’s over by the wooded area, the fall leaves engaged in what seems to me—as an English person used to life’s grays and browns—an embarrassingly rampant display of color. The lampposts are lighting up the trees. She’s looking up at the vulval reds and the jaundiced yellows, the surging oranges and the sickening greens, but I don’t feel that she’s genuinely appreciating the trees. I feel that she’s there because she’s watching me. My newly blooming happiness shrivels to a knot. Almost aggressively, I turn to Joe and say, “Do you think I’m pretty?”
He frowns.
“It’s a simple question.”
He says, “I don’t know if pretty’s the right word—”
Tears spark at my eyes. He’s not sure if I’m pretty? It hurts more than I might have expected.
I get up from the bench and walk fast toward the trees. My right leg’s dragging a little because of the ongoing weakness, and I know he’ll notice, but I want one of the woman’s leaflets. I need to know what she’s doing out here. I’m covering the ground in uneven strides. She spots me. Lowers her gaze from the ludicrous kids’ coloring set of a canopy. I hear feet in the grass behind me.
“Rosa!”
I glance around. Joe.
I turn back—and she’s hurrying into the trees. The shadows suck her up. I’m shaking. She’s stumbling away. She’s gone. Joe reaches me. Touches my arm. Needles pierce my skin.
“When I said—”
But I’m not listening. Who is she?
I notice something in the grass. My vision blurry, I bend, pick it up. I force my eyes to focus.
Shakespeare in the Park
As You Like It
The Savannah Company
Dixon-Dudley Memorial Park
September 23, 7 P.M.
$15
Shakespeare in the Park . . . What had I been expecting? Religious invective? A rant against doctors playing God? A photograph of me? Shakespeare in the Park. Paranoid. I’m paranoid.
The shaking gets worse.
Joe says, “Are you okay?”
I jerk my eyes to his face. I’m trying to keep my right hand together, but I’m failing. My thumb and forefinger separate. “I thought she was watching me.” The leaflet flutters down to dead leaves. “I don’t know.”
“Do you know her?” he asks.
I shake my head. I can’t look at him.
“When I said I don’t know if pretty’s the right word—”
“Yeah,” I say quickly, “forget I said that.”
“I can’t forget it.”
“I don’t care.” I don’t care? My cheeks burn. Six-year-olds say I don’t care. “Really.”
He’s watching me. My blurry gaze fixes on those words. Shakespeare. Shakespeare. The letters are swimming.
He doesn’t give me any warning. He could say, Who cares what might result from my reckless actions? But he doesn’t. He just puts his arm around me, and my body convulses. I feel—I feel . . .
I’m freezing. My flesh is gripped by cold. I’m falling. I’m sinking, and I’m freezing, so cold I can’t feel temperature, only pain. And more pain. And terror. Then something very different: disappointment. It’s overwhelming. A blackness descends, like the end of the world.
When I return to regular consciousness, I’m still standing in the park. Joe is holding my arms.
“Hey,” he says urgently. “Rosa? Are you okay?”
I blink. My eyes won’t reopen. Then they do.
He says, “I’ll help you back to the hospital.”
“I’m okay,” I tell him. And I am. I think. I’m light-headed now. Just dizzy. I take a deep breath. Normal, I tell myself. I squeeze the fingers of my right hand together. They form a loose fist. Everything’s normal. If I think it, it must be so.
“What happened to you?” he asks, searching my face. “Was it an accident?”
What can I say? In theory, though I’d never actually do it, I could explain my part in the story that culminates in the surgery, but what about Sylvia’s?
Eighteen years old, in a coma, brain so badly damaged that she’d never wake up.
I cannot explain to Joe what happened for two irrefutable reasons: because he’d be so freaked out he’d run a million miles, and because I have no real idea about her.
I shake my head, say nothing.
14.
“Mammaries.”
Dmitri grins. “Two points per letter. Eighteen points. And thank you very much.”
I’m in the recreation room. It’s like an oversize living room, with laminate flooring, six leather sofas, a selection of colorful canvas beanbags, and the contents of the Christmas wish lists of maybe twenty teens with Hollywood-high expectations.
There’s an air hockey table (it helps repair damaged hand-eye coordination, Jane told me), a pool table, an electronic dart-board, a karaoke machine, an electric guitar with earphones, a half-size bowling alley, a cabinet full of board games, and ten gaming consoles.
Jared’s on an Xbox with a new kid from Connecticut who got electrocuted in his dad’s wheelchair repair workshop after a battery charger exploded. A couple of vehicle-accident girls are over on the air hockey table. Dmitri, Jess, and I are in one corner on beanbags, playing Super Big Boggle (The Biggest Boggle Game EVER!).
Somehow, I managed to get back to my room from the park just a few minutes before Mum and Dad turned up with pizzas.
They didn’t stay too long. Mum looked tired. Dad really wanted to get back to finish up a chapter of the book on plant communication that he’s working on while I’m here, and Mum’s on her surgical contract with the hospital.
“How’s progress?” I asked him.
“Think growth rate of a red oak rather than a sunflower,” he told me, a little sadly.
After they left, I didn’t feel like being alone. So I went to the rec room and found Jess pulling out all the board games from one of the cupboards. Super Big Boggle was her idea. When Dmitri asked to join us, I was suspicious. But not for long. So far, he’s got suck, tit, butt, ass, and now mammaries.
I’d tell him to go and get off by himself, but I need a distraction, and Jess, who I thought would blush at all this, is smiling.
“Dmitri, you are such a virgin.”
“Oh, Jessica,” he croons, “you could be the one. My special one. My first.”
On her next turn, she gets cock.
“And funny!” he says. “I didn’t know you were so funny.”
She flashes me a smile. When she thinks cock, she thinks of Elliot, I realize (he’s used that insult often enough around the gym). And I think of Top Gear. Jeremy Clarkson, I suspect, would play Super Big Boggle like Dmitri. I feel an urge to call Elliot. But it’s 8:26. He’s probably out with Aula, with his fake ID, in a trendy bar somewhere.
This floor is divided lengthwise by a corridor. The rec room’s on the land side, rather than the harbor side, and has a strip of small high windows. Through them, I can just about glimpse the flashing lights of planes curving away toward the Atlantic. And I realize that I no longer have the wish to be on one.
“Rosa. Time’s nearly up.” Jess nudges my arm.
My flesh tingles. I remember Joe’s touch.
Just a few hours ago, Joe’s arm was around me. And I was freezing . . . and fainting. Should I have told Mum and Dad? Or Dr. Monzales? Was it a seizure? I don’t know . . . maybe. No. Maybe.
I summon all the mental energy that isn’t self-focused and manage to find boat and play.
I guess I don’t have much to spare.
Dmitri grins. Triumphantly, he reads out, “Gropes. Not a nine, but yeah, not bad
.”
“What are you playing?”
I look around. Jared’s turned from his screen. He’s watching us.
“Go back to the zombies,” Dmitri calls back. “This is a word game.”
“I’m pretty good at words,” Jared says.
“Dmitri is amazing at words,” Jess says. “You want to hear his list from this round?”
“He’s too busy killing dead guys,” Dmitri says quickly.
“I’ve got time,” Jared says.
Jess smiles at Dmitri. I guess he deserves payback for the lewd comments. “The way you got ma—”
Of course, she’s going to say mammaries. But I’m pretty sure Jared would use this to embarrass Dmitri. “Yeah,” I say, stopping her. “Maximally was an incredible score.”
Dmitri looks at me, surprised, then beams. But I like him. And if Joe is a little intense but interesting, Jared’s intense and a little off-putting. And there really was a meeting on graphic wall design, like he told me. I heard one of the nurses talking about it in the gym.
Jess shakes her head. She starts to list her words from the round, but I don’t hear them. I’ve noticed a streak of green and an aura of animosity over by the door. Jane. If I don’t look at her, she can’t see me. If I don’t look at her . . . If I don’t look at her . . .
Who do I think I’m bargaining with? Either way, she turns and vanishes. But there’s something about the way she turns that triggers a vague memory. Of a shadow. Where—in the park? Someone vanishing into shadows.
Was Jane there for the surgery? I wonder. Did she shave Sylvia’s head and disinfect her scalp? Did she wipe the debrider clean of damp, fresh fragments of Sylvia’s skull? Did she help carry my de-brained body away to the incinerator? Did she read Sylvia’s records? Does Jane know who she was . . . ?
I look at my slender hands. My mind floods with questions. Were these hands kind? Or cruel? Did they stroke, or hit? Did Sylvia have a sister or a brother? Did she help them with their homework? Did she ride bikes with them and make toffee apples? Did she like supernatural movies, or did she cover her eyes? Did her mother collapse when she heard what had happened? Did her father stand vigil over his daughter’s stricken body? Was Sylvia unconscious from the outset, or did she gradually slip away? What happened to her?