The Girls from Corona del Mar

by Rufi Thorpe

  The nurse pushed the IV pole toward me after she hooked the catheter bag on. “Just make sure she doesn’t get tangled,” she said, and moved out of the way so that Lorrie Ann and I could scoot toward the bathroom.

  Every step, I could tell, was its own agony, but she made it to the bathroom. The nurse had gotten the hot water running in the shower, which was really just part of the room, so Lor could walk right into the spray once she got her hospital gown off. As I was untying the little ties behind her back, Lorrie Ann said, “I’ve missed you.”

  I put my mouth against the back of her neck. “I’ve missed you so much it feels like it’s crushing my internal organs.” I could also smell the unique smell of her skin, which of course I had memorized deep in the cells of my childhood, but had not been conscious of until now: the smell was sweet, like baby powder, and faintly bitter, like Swiss chard.

  “I’m so scared,” she said. “I’m so scared that this is normal. That you can just have all your organs unpacked from your torso and a baby ripped out and then you are expected to stand up and take a shower. The surgeon wasn’t nice. Did you know that? That they can just be rude to you right after they do that to you? It’s insane. I’m on a lot of painkillers. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. “Let’s wash your hair.”

  I helped her pull down the weird mesh disposable underwear and get rid of the monster pad that had done nothing to absorb all that blood but just sat there between her legs like a fucking sofa. I could tell she started feeling better when we got her in the water. She actually laughed when I first lathered up her hair. “This feels so good. I didn’t think anything could feel good ever again.”

  I tried not to look at the staples that went up her belly like she was some Frankenstein office document. They weren’t gory or anything. Really, it was their neatness that was upsetting, their inorganic regularity.

  I got completely wet helping her shower, but I didn’t mind. To feel the lather, thick and sweet in her long hair, to help her turn under the hot spray, to watch her splash her face again and again like a duck diving down underwater, to help her become clean so that no part of her was bloody or oozing, all of this was more intimate and more satisfying even than sex.

  When we got her out of the shower, the nurse gave me a fresh hospital gown, and we dressed her, then got her into bed. She closed her eyes the minute her head hit the pillow. “I’m not sleeping,” she said, “I just have to close my eyes.”

  “All right,” I said, as I pulled her hair out behind her so that I could comb it out, “keep them closed.”

  “I’m not sleeping,” she said again, just before she fell asleep.

  “Of course not,” I said, and kept combing.

  The baby. Zach. What to say about the baby? He seemed just as much the hairless, pink neonate as any other recently born being. His legs were a little stiff, and his fists were always clenched, but most babies clench their fists. The stiffness would only get worse; Dana would jokingly call him the Christ child because his natural position was highly reminiscent of crucifixion. But when he was first born, he really did seem almost completely normal. The only noticeable, really noticeable, difference was that when he drank from a bottle he splashed and sputtered and choked and gasped and managed to get formula absolutely all over his face. But we all thought it was kind of cute. I don’t think any of us really knew what was coming. Not really. Not even after the brain scan came back bad. The doctors kept making seesaw motions with their hands: it was impossible to know how completely Zach would recover. Some babies suffered massive traumas and grew up normal; others suffered seemingly minor brain injuries and wound up with debilitating cerebral palsy. In the face of such endless equivocation, Jim’s reality became our reality: there had been a miracle. The boy had lived.

  As to the details of what happened to Lorrie Ann, what had happened during Zach’s birth, I didn’t understand enough about labor and delivery then to ask intelligent questions and piece together what had gone wrong. I knew that she had been induced and that her labor had stalled and that then she had passed out and an emergency C-section had been performed. That was why her stitches went straight up her belly instead of side to side. The only hint I really had about how awful things had been was from Dana.

  We were eating chili fries together in the hospital cafeteria. Jim was upstairs napping with Lorrie Ann. Zach was, of course, in the nursery. There was a lot less to actually do than I had imagined, and it was still only the first day. By day three, I would begin to feel completely useless. But at that moment, it felt profound to be eating chili fries with Lorrie Ann’s mother in the hospital. Perhaps the word “profound” makes me seem immature or egocentric, but I was immature and egocentric. I was only eighteen. I felt like a grown-up in a way I never had before. It was quietly, tightly thrilling. I wanted so badly to be capable, capable of being Dana’s confidante, capable of being Lorrie Ann’s true friend.

  “I swear,” Dana said, “hospitals just weren’t like this when I had Lorrie Ann and Bobby. Something’s not right about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just, I seem to remember my doctor being there for, not my whole labor, but definitely long stretches of it. Her doctor came only to perform the surgery. Otherwise, it was just this silly little nurse. Sweet thing, but couldn’t have been older than twenty and not exactly bright.”

  I would find out later from Lorrie Ann that this nurse had been wearing shimmery purple eye shadow that reminded her of My Little Pony. The girl had been almost completely incapable of getting the fetal monitors that were strapped to Lor’s belly to pick up anything. Every time Lor shifted in the bed, they would go offline and the girl would come and tighten, always tighten, the elastic bands. Lor had bruises and even small lacerations on her belly from these straps, that’s how tight the girl had them, and still she couldn’t pick up the baby’s heart rate clearly. Several times an older nurse had to come in and do it for her.

  Dana stared off into space for a bit, twisted free a chili fry. “It was like being in a nightmare,” she said finally. “A nightmare where everyone is trying to be polite and doesn’t know what to say.”

  For some reason this observation frightened me in a way that no amount of Lor’s blood in the shower ever could.

  “Poor Jim is ready to declare that asshole surgeon some kind of saint,” Dana said drily. “Sweet boy, but—”

  “A little eager to please,” I supplied.

  “Exactly,” Dana murmured, then pushed the chili fries away from her. “Stop me before I finish these. Jesus, I love chili fries.”

  Perhaps the most disorienting thing about that trip was seeing my own family. I hadn’t told my mother I’d be coming. In fact, I hadn’t even really planned on seeing them. I hadn’t thought about where I would be staying, having just assumed that I would be somehow needed at the hospital twenty-four hours a day. When Jim and Dana made it clear at the end of the first day that I should go “home,” I began to wonder exactly where home should be. I knew vaguely that I could pay for one or two nights on what was left of the new credit card’s available balance, but I couldn’t afford at all the two weeks I planned to stay. The only sensible thing to do was go home-home, and yet I did not want to.

  Though Lor and I had always joked that I had a stone for a heart, I knew really that what I was trying to describe was a profound fickleness, a weird detachment from reality and other people. I could love someone profoundly and still hurt that person mortally. I had to actively, consciously try not to hurt the people I loved. I was, in some sense, simply too free. It was easy to not tell Lorrie Ann I was applying to Yale. It was easy even, in a mechanical sense, to schedule that abortion and break my toe. It was easy to wash down Lorrie Ann’s blood-crusted and bloated body, to gently soap her bruised hips.

  But what had not been easy, even for me, was to leave my brothers. Every day I kept myself from imagining what might be happening to them. I
trusted my mother to take care of them not at all. The moment my mind landed on Max or Alex, when I remembered something they said or did or a look they often gave, my inner self would leap back as if burned. I did not want to go home to my mother’s because I was afraid that their clothes would be dirty, that she wouldn’t be home or if she was that she would be passed out, that they would hug me too tightly and whisper-beg, as they had when I first left, for me to please please stay. If what was in my mother’s house was too bad, I would not be able to return to Yale at all. I could leave once, but it would be beyond even me to do it twice. I knew all this as I pulled up in front of my old house in the little green rental car, which had an engine as high-pitched and feeble as an ailing mosquito.

  But what I found was disturbing in a completely different way. I pressed the doorbell and my little brother Max, who was the oldest, answered. “It’s Mia!” he screamed, and clamped his little arms around me, pressing his face into my stomach. Inside I could smell spaghetti sauce. There was a new lamp in the living room. My mother came out from the kitchen wearing an apron. An apron! When she kissed me, there was not even the smell of wine on her breath.

  It turned out that without me, everything had been fine. They had been thriving. My belief that I had been the glue that was keeping our entire little family together turned out to be a complete delusion. In fact, they all seemed much happier and at peace than when I had lived there. Even the bathroom was squeaky clean, with a new and really lovely shower curtain, cream with pink and brown flowers, satiny and rich people–ish.

  I could have cried.

  The next few days were frankly a little boring. In the mornings, I would head to the hospital, where more and more I received the impression that I was actually in the way. I was rarely alone with Lorrie Ann, as Jim and Dana were ever present. Even Bobby swung by every day, bringing In-N-Out burgers or burritos for everyone. Eventually, Jim stopped me in the hall outside Lorrie Ann’s room. “How long are you gonna stay?” he asked.

  “I figured I’d get some lunch around one,” I said.

  “No, I mean in California.”

  “Oh, I’m here for two weeks.”

  “Two weeks?” he asked. “Wow.”

  There was an awkward pause. I could hear Dana laughing inside Lor’s room, and Lor murmuring something that made her mother laugh even louder.

  Jim blinked his round, wet little eyes. “The thing is, Mia, I’m not sure this is really the best time for a visit, you know? Lorrie Ann’s trying to recover, we’ve got the baby to take care of, it just isn’t the best time for, like, guests, you know?”

  I stared at him. “I guess I don’t think of myself as a guest, Jim.”

  “Ach! See now?” he said. “Don’t get offended. Lorrie Ann knew you’d get offended. Listen, it’s just that we think it would be easier once she’s been discharged and we’re home if it’s just me, her, and the baby.”

  I had pictured myself doing things like grocery shopping for them, fixing dinner, taking out the trash, but I suddenly realized Jim was capable of doing all those things. He was, after all, a chef and could probably make much better dinners than I could. Each time I was faced with a bell pepper, I had to re-derive the best method of slicing it. What really hurt was that Lorrie Ann had been part of this decision, but had opted not to talk to me herself. “You do it,” I imagined her saying to Jim.

  “Okay,” I said. “No problem.”

  In fact, it was better for me to go back earlier: less time to fall in love with my brothers and their micro-suede skin, less time to fight with my mother and her new domesticity, less work to make up at Yale, less money to spend on the rental car. But on the plane back to New Haven, I felt jilted. I knew it was irrational. They were a family. They should be together and celebrate their new son, who had miraculously lived. It just hurt to finally understand that I was not part of that family, that it would now be Jim and not me that Lorrie Ann wanted when she was in trouble. I wondered whether the flight attendant would card me if I ordered a scotch. Beneath me, America was visible only as a series of gray and brown rectangles, innumerable and strange.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dead Like Dead-Dead

  After Yale, I attended graduate school at UMich and got a dog by mistake. What I mean is, my first year I had a roommate who got a pit bull puppy that she named Space Cake and who then promptly disappeared off the face of the planet, leaving me with the puppy and her part of the rent to pay. Space was solid white, and her pink skin shone through her creamy fur, making her look like a piglet. Her eyes were pinky blue like a white rabbit’s.

  That dog ate everything nice I owned. Space devoured cell phones, designer sunglasses, shoes. She loved most to suss out and remove the metal fettuccine curve of an underwire bra. Her mouth was pink and wrinkly and wet like a vagina. It was like being the owner of a small, sensual monster. She would angle herself wearily, then suddenly flop, completely limp, into your lap. Her body smelled wonderfully of yeast, and in her eyes was a terrible knowing, as though with her bloody pink eyes she were saying that her fate was entirely in your hands and that she would surrender as willingly to violence as to pleasure.

  After she had been mine almost the whole year, Space got hit by a car on Washtenaw Avenue near Carpenter. It was a busy street and one I usually avoided walking along, but on that night I was in a hurry to get back home and change so I could go out on a date. It was already dark. I should have been paying more attention. I was distracted. We were walking toward another woman and her dog, a mirror image of ourselves, really, and Space suddenly stopped as I kept walking and her collar pulled right off her neck. I felt the tug, turned to look, and reached out my hand just as she bolted into traffic. She was hit twice, but made it to the other side, limping badly. I could still see her even though it was dark because of her white fur. The headlights of passing cars were a strobe. “Space,” I kept screaming. “Stay there! Space! Stay!”

  But she didn’t. She ran to me. She was hit three more times on the way, and the last time she was hit so hard that she skidded on her side maybe fifteen yards past me. The woman and her dog who were our mirror image were both frozen, watching all this, horrified. The woman had her hand over her mouth. She had very curly hair, the kind that is difficult to take care of without it getting frizzy, and it was undulating around her head in the wind. When I got to Space, she was not moving, but her eyes were darting wildly about. I dragged her by her ankles farther to the side of the road, and knelt beside her. I tried to lift her head onto my lap, but the bottom side of her face was missing. She began shaking in such a way that I guessed she was having a seizure.

  “She’s not dead!” I screamed at the woman who was watching us. “Oh God, she isn’t dead!”

  I would have given anything to be able to kill Space, but I didn’t know how. How could I break her big thick neck? With what could I put her out of her misery? I had only an iPod and a house key. I had nothing. What was worse was how afraid I was to touch her, as though her body were dirty. I kept trying to make myself rest my palms on her body, to let her know I was there, that I loved her, but she was as foul to me as if she had been any anonymous roadkill, some infested carcass. She was still warm! And yet no matter how hard I tried, I could not keep my hands on her body, but kept pulling them back up and bunching them in fists under my face.

  “My friend’s dog just had puppies!” the woman with the curly hair said.

  “I don’t want puppies,” I said. “What do I do? She’s too big to carry!”

  “I don’t know. Can you call someone?” the woman asked.

  But I had no one to call. Eventually, a kind woman in an SUV stopped and offered to give me and Space a ride somewhere. The woman had one of those windshield sun protectors that are shiny metallic paper-fabric and look like they should line the inside of a rotisserie oven. I tugged Space’s body onto it and then loaded her into this woman’s SUV. We were on our way to the vet when Space finally stopped shaking and her body became still.
Instantly, the smell in the car changed. After a brief consultation, the woman reversed her direction and instead took me and the corpse of my dog to my apartment.

  I had never before this understood the horror of death. I found poets and writers who wrote on themes of death to be slightly melodramatic. For myself, I looked forward to death. I was curious if there would be anything. If there would be a bright light or heaven or hell or nothingness. I thought it was going to be kind of cool to find out, and I had no worries that I would die whenever I was supposed to and that it would be fine. Before Space, I did not understand zombie movies either, or what makes vampires frightening. I didn’t understand how very dead dead things were.

  The night of Space’s death, I called the only person I knew to call.

  She picked up on the third ring.

  “Hey, Mia, what’s up?”

  Quavering, I told her the story. “And now I can’t stop seeing it happen in my mind, just over and over again. I’m not being melodramatic. I just keep almost seeing it. Do you know what I mean?” I could hear screaming in the background, child screaming.

  “No,” Lorrie Ann said, in a way that I could tell was not meant for me, but for Zach. “Listen,” she said, “Jim gets home tomorrow in the morning and the house is a fucking wreck. It’s insane. The sergeant on Rear D only called me like half an hour ago.”

  “Rear D” was the rear detachment, or the group of soldiers who were left behind on a deployment. Jim had joined the army during my last year at Yale, so by now I knew all the lingo. They were living on base at Fort Irwin in San Bernardino, one of the most remote and desolate of all army bases, surrounded on all sides by the Mojave Desert. Lorrie Ann spoke of this isolation often in tones that implied quiet persecution, by which I was completely baffled. Jim had not been drafted; he had enlisted. I didn’t have a terrible amount of sympathy for the Jim-Army decision.