Uncanny Magazine Issue 32

by Lynne M. Thomas

  Julia found her quarter-page ads in Business and Travel. Orange silk and opalized ammonites. Blissful extinction. The amber bottle gleaming like sunken treasure in the middle of it all. But the colors that were arresting on the office computers were watery in newsprint, diluted by the fluorescent lights of the clinic.

  “How’d they turn out?” Vivian asked. The soft leatherette armchair seemed to swallow both her and the taxane drip feeding into her left arm.

  Julia shook her head.

  “Okay, how was your date with whatshername, Ellen?”

  Julia sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it. But look at this. They’re still writing about the horse.”

  “For Chrissake, Julia.”

  “Soup. It looks like they’re selling fancy soup. Beef, butter, onions. I told them to use less color. Save it for the slicks. Client’s going to yell at me tomorrow.”

  “You should quit.”

  “I wish.”

  With an immaculate thumbnail, Julia peeled open the ziplock bag in her lap. The coil of hair inside, wide as her thumb and nine feet long, was woven throughout with black and gold strands in equal proportion. When Vivian began chemo last May, her hair had skimmed the lower edge of her scapulae. Three weeks later, her purple stripes had rinsed to blonde, and she had not dyed them again. Vivian had smiled at Julia in the bathroom mirror, eyebrows high and brave, but after the first handful slithered to the floor, she handed the humming razor to Julia and covered her eyes.

  “You do it,” she said.

  The braid was almost finished. Julia had added some of her own hair as needed, taking surreptitious snips behind her ears and bleaching her brown waves in a bowl. Vivian’s false gold was easier to match than her black. The braid felt both coarse and silky, crackling softly when she ran her fingers along it. Only a few loose locks remained at the bottom of the bag.

  Vivian kept glancing at the braid, then away, shivering.

  “The hell are you doing with my hair?”

  “The Victorians made jewelry out of their relatives’ hair,” Julia said.

  “Sure, but in front of them?” Vivian screwed up her mouth. “I’m not dead yet.”

  “It’s not a mourning piece.”

  “So what is it?”

  “A gift.”

  “For who?”

  Julia hesitated. “Maybe you?”

  “Nope. No way.” Vivian scratched the down on her skull. She couldn’t stand wigs and wore brilliant silk scarves printed with birds and stars instead. “Weird, isn’t it? Doesn’t bother me when it’s growing on my head, but I can’t stand it when it’s cut. Slopped around the salon floor—ugh. Like seeing a severed hand.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, I won’t look.”

  Vivian opened Applied and Environmental Biology and held it up to her face while Julia overlapped yellow strand and black, tugging, straightening, smoothing. When, after half an hour, she noticed Vivian hadn’t turned the page, she pinned the end of the braid and dropped everything into her purse.

  Eventually a nurse in pink scrubs sailed over and slid the cannula out of Vivian’s arm. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  Vivian pushed herself upright without speaking, her face pale, and lurched toward the bathroom. Julia followed. Over the retching and splashing, she made soothing noises and rubbed circles in Vivian’s back.

  “Pharmacy stop?”

  “Thanks.”

  Julia had bought her indestructible orange Beetle as a ticket out of rusting Paterson with three summers waitressing in an Italian restaurant and five illustrations for two evanescent magazines. She called it the Lady. When the art school letter came, Julia had fought all day with her parents and cried all night for a month before stuffing the Lady to the roof and driving to Providence. She had not looked back.

  Although parking took a large bite out of her budget, the odometer clocked 170,000, and the odors of frying oil, mint gum, nail polish, and drive-through coffee had painted a thin and indelible layer over the interior, Julia kept the Lady when she moved to Queens. Even thinking about selling the Lady struck her as disloyal. Vivian’s sudden need was in many ways welcome, and Julia told herself that she had kept the car for times like these.

  She left Vivian hunched in the car and ducked into the hard bright aisles of the corner drugstore. At the counter she collected a battery of pharmaceuticals in orange canisters: yolk-yellow Zofran, pentagons of Ativan, dented white Percocet, and smooth white Lomotil. The paper bags crinkled as she thrust them into Vivian’s hands.

  “You doing okay?”

  Vivian was breathing through her teeth, and a bitter, stinging smell drifted from her skin. She wouldn’t meet Julia’s eyes. “Swell.”

  Julia double-parked on 119th and watched Vivian until she vanished into her walkup.

  Although Central Park at night featured often in her mother’s monthly litany of New York horrors, and Julia could not walk there after dark without twitching and jumping at shadows, in all the newspaper accounts she had read, the horse had never been observed before twilight. She went at dusk on a Friday with the braid snaking through the belt loops of her jeans and a jackknife jammed into a pocket to compensate for the judo classes she had never taken. Hawkers of ice cream and soda were shuttering their silver carts. Couples pushed strollers through the orange puddles of park lights, leaning into each other. The air began blue and dimmed and filled with bats.

  “Come out,” she whispered. “I’m here.”

  The fine gray gravel of the Bridle Path crunched under her canvas shoes. She walked to Riftstone Bridge, now a pool of darkness, and peered underneath. The smell of urine scraped her nose but bothered her less than it once had. There was a faint, bubbling snore.

  “Hello?”

  Plastic rustled. Something moved.

  “What do you want?” The voice was whiskey and dry leaves.

  Squinting into the gloom, Julia distinguished two dim eyes and a glint of teeth. “I’m looking for a white horse.”

  “Fresh out of horses, sorry. All I got is UFOs and Elvis.” The chuckle was low but female, and Julia unlocked her shoulders. “Why?”

  “For a friend. She’s sick.” She tried a smile. “My name’s Julia.”

  The woman who shuffled out was tall and swaddled in stained clothes. “Lorrie.”

  “So have you seen a horse? No halter, no bridle. Just running loose.”

  “How’s a pony ride help?”

  “It might be a unicorn.” She bit the inside of her cheek, anticipating laughter. None was forthcoming. Lorrie only folded her arms and tilted her head. “Saint Hildegard wrote that unicorn liver healed leprosy. That unicorn leather cured fevers. The horn was good against poison. No one says anything about cancer, but I figure—”

  “Why you askin me?”

  “You live here. You might have seen it.”

  “I don’t live here.” She coughed thickly. “I been crashin with my uncle when I can, but his house is fulla kids. New wife can’t stand me. Sometimes I hit the drop-in center, but those are bad nights.”

  “Oh.”

  “March is too cold to sleep outside. You hafta be desperate.”

  Julia pulled a rumpled bill from her back pocket and held it out, but her hand was swatted aside.

  “My problems they bigger than a dollar, unicorn girl.”

  Julia said, “You must think I’m nuts.”

  “Of course you is. You carryin a fruit knife shorter than my pinky. You think that’s gonna keep you safe from folks like me.” She wheezed with laughter as Julia’s hand went to her hip. “Your fingers smell like metal. You keep dippin in that pocket. You leanin backwards like you wanna run.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her face went hot.

  “It’s A-okay. You crazy. And whiter than Wonder Bread. Lots of you come joggin scared around here at night, like you think we bite.”

  “You didn’t laugh when I started talking about unicorns.”

  “Don’t nobody in t
his city think I exist either. Used to work at the Aqueduct before I hurt my back. Thought I was invisible then. Now? Bam! Gone. What’ve I got against unicorns?”

  “Have you seen one?”

  Lorrie shook her head. “Go home.”

  “Please. Tell me.”

  “You got ten dollars? I’d use it better than you.”

  When the money was safely concealed in her clothes, Lorrie straightened and stared. “Think, babygirl. If there a unicorn here? All of us be sleepin sweeter. With no pain. We be smellin honey, fresh bread, lilacs, good days. The wild ones they settle. The angry ones they calm down. If we got a unicorn, why would I tell you? With that knife in your pocket? Leather? Livers? A sick friend? What’s that knife for?”

  Julia heard bodies stirring sleepily under the bridge.

  “Nowhere in this city is safe for me,” Lorrie said. “I do what I can to get by. You smell safe and selfish. Hunger and pain and need, you don’t know. Go home.”

  Julia took two steps backward, then turned and hurried up the path. She could feel Lorrie’s eyes on her. Not until she emerged from the chained green tangle of the park into the traffic of Central Park West did she exhale her double lungful of fear.

  “I have to talk to you—”

  “If there’s a unicorn,” Julia said, “I’ll bring you its horn. I promise. Abracadabra, Australopithecus, poof, tumors gone. Like that.”

  “No. Listen to me.” Vivian shut the cabinet and set two mugs on the scarred table. A chocolate cake slumped half-eaten on scalloped gold paper. WE’LL MISS YOU VIV in green jelly icing. A cardboard box of her notebooks and rubberbanded pens had been shoved under a chair, and Julia kept kicking it by accident.

  Her last day at the lab, Vivian said. Everyone had pretended the departure was happy.

  “But that’s not what you want to tell me.”

  “Ginger? Chamomile? Black?” Vivian fanned out the teabags. “We’re stopping chemo. I’m done.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Three fresh lesions on my liver. You want to argue? It’s right here, you can talk to it if you want.” She tipped a kettle, and hot water chortled into the mugs. “Be real persuasive, cuz they say two months, best case.”

  Julia raised a cup, the steam blurring her vision. The right words were somewhere, buried under jingles, loud typefaces, the shotgun poetry of advertising. Never again would she smell bergamot without the sting of tears.

  “Give me some time. Let me try.”

  “Spend my last days vomiting, you mean?”

  “There’s a unicorn, Vivian.”

  Vivian’s laugh was hard and tired. “People stopped believing in unicorns in middle school.”

  “So I have a rich imaginative life. Sue me.”

  “You couldn’t imagine your way out of a cubicle.” Vivian rubbed her eyes. “I remember when you talked grants, galleries, art shows, MoMA. Where are you now? Selling watches and vacations to people who don’t want them. Cold calling. Retouching portraits of steak.”

  Julia pushed away from the table. “I have to live, Viv.”

  “And I have to die. Well, we all do. But I’m going to do it the way I want. With friends. With dignity. More water?”

  “No.”

  Vivian refilled both mugs. “Anyway, Asian girls never get unicorns.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Beagle. L’Engle. Lewis. Coville and Gaiman, even though I was too old. I looked anyway, just in case. When I was a kid it was Laurence Yep, take it or leave it. Lots of dragons, no unicorns. None for you either, right? Aren’t you more likely to find a domovoi or a leshy? When did Russia get unicorns?”

  “Late fifteenth century.”

  “You checked.”

  “Of course I checked.”

  Vivian grabbed Julia’s hand across the table. “It’s sweet of you, but you’ve got better things to do.”

  “Fine. No unicorns for you.” Julia picked up a pen and one of the insurance forms on the table. “Say you’re giving up. What’s next?”

  “Hospice. Starting next week.”

  Hospice meant nurses, Julia discovered, and the sweetish smell of Roxanol. Clutching a sheaf of filled-out forms, she let herself in with the spare key, then stood in the hallway, bewildered, as brisk strangers squeezed past her. A silver IV tree had sprouted in the kitchen. Vivian’s aunt, who drove up from Queens on the weekends with cooked food in foil pans, fussed at Julia, plucking off her coat and bag.

  “Nothing serious,” she said to the expression on Julia’s face. “It’s the rules. Someone has to be here every day. One of her cousins, or me.”

  Vivian was lying in bed, her eyes closed, a transparent loop of oxygen around her head. The tall windows she loved were ajar and clattered softly as the warm, astringent air inside mixed with the damp breath of March.

  Loneliness gusted through Julia, sudden as rain.

  “What am I going to do without you?” she asked, hating herself for the question.

  Vivian opened one eye. “Watch it. I’m not dead yet.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I can still beat your ass. Tremble in fear.”

  Julia sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, careful not to bounce. Nine years ago they had washed up in New York together, both of them certain that success lay around the corner, or behind the next door, even as the gum-glazed sidewalk ate blisters into their heels and the rent came due again and again and again. The thought of living without Vivian’s rude jokes and good taste, her crayon annotations of newspapers and leaflets, her abrupt phone calls—“You free at eight? Nice dress? Good!”—hollowed her chest. “What will I do?”

  “Cry. Breathe. Live. Fall in love. You’ll be better at that when I’m gone, really you will. Skydive. Have children, if you want them. Play tennis. Snorkel. Visit Morocco. All the things I can’t do anymore. Next question.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Fair?” Vivian smacked the mattress. “I wanted kids. I got Gregory and cancer. I wanted a career in microbiology. I got two postdocs and Gregory and a layoff and cancer.”

  “And six second-author papers in first-tier journals.”

  “I’m thirty-three, Julia. Thirty-three! I’ll never ride a horse or learn how to snowboard, I’ll never drive to the Grand Canyon and order coffee in every diner on the way, I’ll never see Moscow, I’ll never have a houseboat, I won’t win any Nobels, I won’t see any more meteor showers, I won’t pick any more apples, and I’ll never, ever have a daughter. Don’t talk to me about fair. Don’t even think about fair when you’re in the same room as me. I’ll rip it out of your head and crush it into a ball and eat it.”

  Vivian’s aunt stuck her head into the room. “Everything all right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Doing great.”

  The aunt retreated. Vivian bit her lip and crushed the edge of the quilt in her hands. In a quiet voice, she said, “He’ll be here Saturday. Can you pick him up from JFK?”

  “Who?”

  “Gregory.”

  Julia blinked. “He’s coming?”

  “He heard I was going off chemo.”

  “How thoughtful. I’m shocked.”

  “I may have called him.” Vivian put her hands over her face. “I may have asked him to come.”

  “So I meet him at the airport and make him disappear? I don’t do murder, normally, but for you—”

  “Just bring him here.”

  “Vivian—”

  “Loose ends,” she said, not meeting her eyes.

  The marriage had not been a long one. Vivian had disappeared for a year, a deeper and more profound absence than when she was dating Gregory, while she tried on wife as if it were a winter coat, turning and stretching and looking at herself in it, testing its warmth. She smiled less and less, the few times Julia caught her, and a little gutter of worry dug itself into her brow.

  One month after the separation, Vivian had called and let the room around her fill with silence.
r />   “I’m coming over,” Julia said, after waiting in vain for a word.

  In a voice small and sticky with grief, Vivian said: “Okay.”

  Julia had barged into the apartment with two bottles of cheap chardonnay and a handful of black-and-white movies. Vivian scrubbed her eyes with the back of one hand.

  “I’m such a mess—”

  “It’s fine.”

  Vivian’s third glass was almost empty when she snatched the remote and jabbed down the sound.

  “He said he never wanted children. Three years into our marriage! He only told me he did because he thought I might change his mind. Or that he might change mine. ‘I wanted to give us a chance,’ ” she said, imitating his sweeping gestures, and laughed with a catch in her throat. “ ‘Too many cultural differences,’ he said. ‘I don’t want my kids speaking a language I don’t know. How would that look to everyone?’ He said it was hard enough listening to me jabbering with my relatives, not knowing when we were laughing at him. He said the kids wouldn’t resemble either of us—how was he supposed to handle that—”

  Julia splashed out another half-glass for her. “He loved you, though.”

  “Never. Never ever.” Vivian shuddered.

  “I was at your wedding. I saw how he stared at you.” Vivian had glowed and glimmered, her dress a waterfall, her hair black wings. “No one could see you and not love you.”

  “Except him.”

  “All right. He’s a jackass. Why am I defending him?” Julia slung an arm around Vivian’s shoulders. “I barely saw you while you were together. He’s a jerk of the first water, just for that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re back now, so honestly, I owe him.”

  After a long silence, Julia glanced sideways. Vivian had fallen asleep, legs drawn up to her chest, beginning to snore. Julia tossed a blanket over her before turning off the TV and the lights.

  It was rare for Vivian to ask for anything, and although Julia disapproved so strongly her stomach hurt, she could not say no. On Saturday, she drove into the arteriosclerotic snarl of the airport to retrieve Gregory. She found him, punctual as a banker, planted at the prearranged section of curbside pickup: his hair as curly as ever, houndstooth jacket and trousers slightly mellowed from the straight line, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses weighing down his face. One suitcase, sized for the overhead bin, sat at his feet. He blinked rapidly at the Lady as Julia pulled alongside and beeped.