And Again (37 page)

“We made such a mess of it, didn’t we?” I say, thinking of cities razed to rubble. High towers fallen. A perfect love story, gone to ruin.

Sam nods sagely. “We should keep that in mind for next time.”

I glance up at him. “Next time?”

“I got it from my source in the FDA,” he says, stepping forward and drawing his thumb over my cheek. “Looks like SUBlife’s going to be approved at the vote tomorrow. And I figure, if we’re all going to live past a hundred, you and I have time to make a mess of things at least once or twice more.”

I can’t tell if he’s kidding as he kisses me, a patient kiss, one that calls back all of the memories I’ve tried to hide away, and walks off into the crowd.

Tom is eating cereal in the kitchen when I return to the attic. I know he is, because that’s what he does every morning. He sits at the kitchen table with his
New York Times
and he eats a bowl of Cheerios. Even before my accident. I remember hating the exactness of his routines even then.

I’m not in the attic for long. And I have plenty of time, because Tom likes to linger over his paper, slurping the excess milk from his bowl in slow, dripping spoonfuls. I saw the suitcase when I was up here before, and it takes only a few minutes before I find it again, wedged between an old lamp and the box to an inflatable kiddie pool. It’s dusty, but I recognize it immediately, the suitcase I dragged with me on our disastrous honeymoon to Hawaii, where it did nothing but rain and I was laid-up with Braxton Hicks for three days straight.

I carry it down the attic stairs and stash it in my closet for later, when Tom picks the kids up from school. Until then I consider what I will take, what I even have to take. I think of my artifacts, my stash of pilfered items, which have so wholly lost their magic that I don’t even feel the need to look at them anymore. None of them will do me any good out in the world. None of them has any real value. They’re like Tom’s box of keepsakes in the attic now, the shawl and a piece of glass.

I fold my clothes, the pairs of jeans and T-shirts and cardigan sweaters and socks I bought to replace the things Tom threw out. I stack them up, ready to be dropped into the hollow stomach of the suitcase. I go into Tom’s sock drawer and find his roll of
emergency cash, and I take all of it. I collect a hair brush, a toothbrush, a photo of the kids from before the accident. It’s a paltry little life I have here, ready to be packed away. It feels fitting, because my life has been small, so small, for so long. The difference now is that the world is big. It’s huge, and frightening, and all I want is to see as much of it as I can.

The difficulty of this life, I have found, is how little magic there is in it. How little possibility. Here, imagination is foolish. Impractical.
Stratford Pines
is treacle and melodramatic, unrealistic dreck. It is hard to resolve the realization that I dreamed more—in waking and in sleep—lying in that hospital bed than I have since my own personal miracle occurred. It seems like the greatest crime of luck or fate that I have left a hopeless situation only to find myself unable, now, to even dream of hope. There will be no baby. There will be no other men. There will be no blind corners to turn, no unexpected delights or rushes of excitement. There will be no other path for me but as a mother, as a wife, if I do not leave this place. And there is nothing like eight years of solitude to teach you selfishness.

I thought about leaving Tom a note. Telling him about the affair, about the years he wasted waiting for a wife who was already gone, even before she was still and silent and confined to her bed. But it seems doubly cruel now, to tell him all of that, and to leave as well. It was so much easier when all of our conversations were distilled down to two words. One for no. Two for yes.

I think about leaving something for the kids, for Jack and Katie. There’s a gnawing ache within my chest when I think of them, like hunger, as if my heart is starving at the thought of them. But I still think of them as babies, as the children I had before the accident. I feel like a wicked stepmother now, the usurper of their idea of a mother, of the perfect image they’d grown up envisioning when they looked at old photographs of me. I am a woman who does not know them now.

I will leave tomorrow. I will leave this house in the morning and board the Purple Line and head into the city. I will have my suitcase.
I’ll buy a ticket for the bus. And I will be gone. No fingerprints. No ID. No pictures of me; no way to track me down. The possibility of it is so massive I feel as if I could drown in it like an avalanche of cold snow.

Maybe I’ll get off the bus in a small town somewhere. Maybe there will be a diner, somewhere I can ask if they’re looking for help waiting tables. And maybe it will be the sort of place where people fall in love easily. Maybe it will be the sort of place where long-lost people congregate, where twins impersonate each other and babies are born to the wrong people and families are built and shatter and reform again and again. Maybe they’ll be waiting for a woman who spent eight years paralyzed before getting a new body, a woman with a world full of secrets inside her. Maybe that’ll be the sort of place I’ll go.

Dr. Grath’s door is closed when I get back from L.A. I’m a bit disappointed, but not altogether surprised. I wonder if he assumed I wouldn’t be coming back this time. It’s not exactly out of the realm of possibility; after all, it was only yesterday that I learned Harry was not prepared to pay for my flight back to Chicago. I had to pawn one of the necklaces he bought me, all while he left pleading voicemails on my phone, imploring me to reconsider Jay Cunningham’s offer of the lead in
Almost Ruins
in the strongest terms imaginable. But I don’t want it. I don’t want to be paid for.

I knock on Dr. Grath’s door, already smelling the skunky whisper of smoke drifting out into the hallway. I hear him mumble something from inside, so I let myself in. His eyes are half-lidded and bloodshot, and he sits slouched in his chair.

“Who is it?” he asks.

“It’s me,” I reply, sitting on the couch next to him. The TV is off, and something in that bothers me. I wonder when he’s eaten last, or last ventured out of his apartment. “It looks like you started without me, old man.”

He chuckles a bit, raising the joint in his right hand. “Well, you’ve been a bit tricky to track down lately. Not like the alley cat you once were, always showing up for supper. One can’t wait forever, can one?”

“I guess not,” I reply, taking the joint from him and inhaling.

“I thought you’d be off somewhere warm, making love to the camera by now,” he says. “Every time you leave, it gets harder and harder to imagine you coming back.”

I hold the smoke in, letting its itch turn into a burn within my lungs before I let it out in a long stream. I contemplate my options.

“What if I lied to you?” I ask, passing him the joint.

“Lied? About what?” Dr. Grath’s blind eyes widen just a bit.

“About what I look like now. You know, Grace Kelly. All that.”

“About the cloning?” He’s confused. His wiry eyebrows try to touch like trapeze artists attempting a midair catch.

“No, that was the truth. I just . . . exaggerated the rest a bit. A lot, maybe.”

“Oh,” Dr. Grath says, and I can’t tell if he’s at all surprised. Maybe he’s disappointed.

“I went to L.A. To see my agent. Hoping that he could get me an acting gig, maybe some modeling.” I sigh, trying to sound dejected. “He said he didn’t have anything for me. He said he couldn’t market a look like mine anymore. Too classic.”

“I like classic,” he says. I laugh a little.

“I know you do, old man. You don’t have a choice.”

“So what are you going to do?” he asks. I shrug, though I know he can’t see it. It’s habit. A habit that was born long before I entered this body; impossible to break.

“I guess I just stay here. My agent said he might be able to get me some more work here in Chicago.”

“Surely you can do better than that,” he says, and I shrug again. “I know what’s going on here. You’re waiting for me to qualify for this SUBlife thing, so I can look like Monty Clift again, and we can run off together, is that it?” I smile and there are tears in my eyes, though he can see neither. I suspect he knows what I do, that Dr. Grath is one generation too old for immortality, that he will grow old and die the way people were always intended to, a death that is the sort the rest of us have always hoped for.

And if he did get his sight back, everything would be ruined. He would see my lie, see that I am every inch what I described myself to be after the transfer, and that I gave up all the possibilities that my beauty afforded me and stayed with him, in this dingy apartment
building. Because I don’t want to be bought by men like Jack Cunningham. And because even now I’m afraid of what might happen to Dr. Grath in my absence, that without me he’d drift into some final oblivion, stop eating or watching his Turner Classic Movies or going through his photo albums. That he would grow lost in this little apartment. I want to be here to keep him from drifting away. And he would never forgive me for that.

“Exactly,” I say, turning my hand over so I hold the roughness of his palm in mine. “Exactly.”

He doesn’t think he will ever be selected for SUBlife. He’s lying, and I know it, and I let him. I wonder if he knows I’m lying too, and is letting me just the same. Either of our truths would mean I have to leave here, to leave him behind, to go out into the world and live through all the danger and possibility afforded to a woman born with my face. I don’t want to leave. He doesn’t want me to go. So there is nothing left for us but to love each other, and lie.

I wake early on the morning I’m going to leave. Tom is still asleep next to me, breathing in heavy, open-mouthed snores. One of the kids is up, I’m not sure which one, but I hear the TV on downstairs. I try not to think about them. They will be better without me, without a mother like mine, silent and remote, a mother who will leave them eventually anyway, and will make the leaving their fault. I lay in a bed for years pretending I had no history, that I was no one, because my mother chose to see my tragedy and raise it with her own.

Still, memories wash up. I indulge today, only today, because what I am about to do is such a high crime that any little indulgences along the way will be surely, fully eclipsed later. I play the game, the one I never allowed myself to play in the hospital, tracing my way back, trying to pinpoint the moment that would have prevented my accident and spared me all of this. Don’t change lanes. Don’t get in the car. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t sleep with Scott, again and again, no matter how much you want to. Don’t wish you hadn’t married Tom. Don’t marry Tom. Don’t get pregnant three months before graduation.

That is where I must stop. Because I cannot, no matter what I do, wish away my daughter. I can remember, so clearly, that morning. Fainting after speed work at cross-country practice, how panicked Tom looked when he met me at the health center, wrapping me up with both of his arms and taking a deep breath of my hair. Anemia, they said. Could I be pregnant?

I told them I wasn’t. There was no way, we were always so careful. But as Tom drove me home we talked about the nights when we
weren’t so careful. Admitting to each other the things we couldn’t admit to anyone else, as we always did. We stopped at Walgreens on the way home, and I waited in the car while Tom bought me a pregnancy test and the biggest bottle of water they had. I chugged while he drove.

I made him wait outside the bathroom of our little apartment, because no matter how long we’d been dating, I still couldn’t pee when he was in the same room. Then I made him plug his ears and sing Tom Petty outside the door so he couldn’t hear, and he did so with such gusto that I was laughing so hard I nearly missed the stick.

“I’ll buy you dinner if it’s positive,” Tom said when I finally let him back in the bathroom, as we sat on the counter and waited for the timer to run down.

“And if it’s negative?” I asked.

“No way.”

“Cheapskate,” I said, just as the pink lines appeared in the window of the test. It was a feeling of my entire world clicking out of joint, a train derailing at high speed, running along without tracks for a few perilous moments while everyone inside held their breath, waiting for its inevitable tumble. Tom’s face fell in a small way, and I saw my first glimpse of the look I would come to know so well, the
couldn’t you have done better
look in his eyes that seemed to make all of it my fault. But then he took a breath and smiled, and there was resignation in his expression.

“Well,” Tom said, “where do you want to go to dinner? And will you marry me?”

I check again to make sure I have everything I need, ruffling gently through my stacks of clothes, the money I’ve pilfered from Tom, the hair brush and toothbrush and box of tampons. These are the things a person needs for life, I think. Not a trunk of keepsakes or a collection of stolen artifacts. These things, the practical things, should belong to a person without history.