Commuters (6 page)

He held up the stick end of a broom, mock-heroically. “Gutter time.”

“Oh, my. What have I done to deserve
this
?” Unclogging the mess of leaves and twigs gumming up one corner of the back drainpipe had been something he’d been talking about, off and on, for weeks.

“You haven’t asked how much I charge.”

“I see.”

“I’m wildly expensive. My tools are known as the industry standard.” Bob hooked a thumb through a belt loop and gave his pants a tug.

Rachel reached out to gently brush a fluff of dust from his eyebrow. “Is that so.”

“Booked solid through the spring. You’re lucky I could even find time for you. Ma’am.”

“Find time for me, huh?” Rachel moved closer, pushing one of her thighs between Bob’s legs.

“Unhand me, Mrs. B! That kind of thing won’t get your drains clear!” When she lingered, Bob swept her out of the way with the broom, pushing harder against her ass—swatting, even—as she resisted, laughing. As she left, she could hear him singing some James Taylor handyman song, the one he warbled during all home repair projects.

How many minutes elapsed? That’s the way they always asked, the medical team. “Elapsed.” As a consequence, Rachel’s visual memory of the day always stamps a timer on the bottom of the
frame, one that immediately runs up the seconds, the milliseconds, as she watches herself putter around the house, after leaving Bob. There was a phone call, though she can’t remember who. She knows she poured a second cup of coffee, for she found it, rimmed with white mold, three days later, sitting on her dresser. Down in the basement, she had folded the girls’ clothing into two teetering piles, and she had put in a load of towels, snatching one back out for her own use. Ticking, ticking, upward. Back upstairs, would she have heard the ladder bumping and scraping against the back wall? Only if she’d stopped in Melissa’s room, whose window overlooked that side of the yard. And had she? Had she? If Rachel wasn’t able to remember, that same afternoon, in the trauma unit of the hospital, weeks and months later she certainly wouldn’t be any closer to knowing.

Nor how long she had been in the shower. Several people seemed very intent on this point—the woman driving the ambulance, and that first surgeon. So, how long did a shower take? She definitely hadn’t shaved her legs, so there was that. But she did own, that winter, a certain hot-oil type of hair conditioner that needed to be applied for ten minutes before rinsing. Occasionally, Rachel liked to use that time to zone out in the shower, an objective justification—see the instructions, right on the tube!—for a lengthy, luxurious water waste. So, had she used it, March 20? In any reconstruction of her hurry that afternoon, their perpetual fear of missing Lila’s first dive, Rachel can’t imagine that she did. But it was impossible to know for sure. By now, she was familiar with the way memory worked, its own sly insertions into a long lost sequence of events. Ticking, ticking. In any case, she had blown her hair dry and put on her clothes.

A gust of cold air, the first sign. Confused, she had stopped on the stairs. Why was the front door open? Swinging, banging, wide open. A creeping unease. She shut it and went back down the front hallway when something caught her eye. Bob, in the living room. Flung back on the couch, way back. The clock, still ticking at the bottom of the screen, in those last moments before her awareness. When she had wondered, for a flash, if he was pulling a prank. Before she saw his head, how it was tilted to the side and how it was bulging, along the temple and behind his ear. His eyes, open only to their whites.

Doctors who specialized in head injuries, Rachel was to learn, occasionally spoke about the “first injury”—to them, this meant whatever initial impact, that first blow, the one that set off a chain of dire problems inside the skull. They also spoke about a “second injury,” but while Rachel had originally thought this referred to another impact in the accident—another fall, collision, blow—what the doctors meant was the trauma that occurred inside the patient’s head, a buildup and overflow of blood, a rapid swelling that broke apart those neatly coiled tubes of brain. She got it, sort of, but the terminology continued to bother her because in Bob’s case, they still—years later—didn’t know how the two were related. Bob had been in a coma for eight days, and his amnesia, later, blacked out everything after that morning’s breakfast. He could remember Melissa dropping an open box of cereal, for example, the corn puffs skidding across linoleum, but he didn’t remember the broom, the ladder, or the James Taylor song. Everything about his first injury remained a frustrating mystery. There were a couple of leading theories.

The gutter had been cleaned out. So had he fallen off the lad
der, as was first assumed? There was no sign of it—no blood, no dent or disturbance in the grassy dirt along the back corner of the house. Plus, the ladder was neatly replaced in the garage, hanging on its metal hook as usual. Was it possible that he fell, recovered, and then went inside—disoriented, unaware of the damage done—to collapse on the couch? Possible, the neuromedical people conceded. They said that it was more often the second injury that incapacitated people, not the original impact, whose damage many victims underestimated, and hence delayed treatment. But Rachel couldn’t believe that Bob would fall off a ladder and then take the time to fold it up and carry it all the way back into the garage, before coming inside. Winnie had to agree.

The doctors ruled out a stroke or a heart attack. They traced the initial impact to a blunt blow along the left side of his face. That first night they spent at the hospital, after Bob’s first surgery had begun, Winnie took the girls back to her apartment. She phoned Rachel and Bob’s neighbor, Bruce Everwine, to ask him to check that the house was closed and locked. When Bruce arrived, he noticed that their car was backed partially out of the open garage, left at an odd angle, keys in the ignition. No one knew what to make of this. Had Bob driven anywhere, in those minutes Rachel couldn’t account for? Had he been in some kind of car accident? No sign of it on the car itself, Bruce reported. One nurse in the trauma unit wondered aloud if the car had rolled backward, had hit Bob in the head, in the garage. Rachel tried to picture this. Had he, for some reason, turned on the motor and then bent down behind the car? Had she, somehow, left it in drive after returning from dropping off Melissa? None of it seemed likely.

“You might just have to live with never knowing,” Dr. Rich
ards, who led Bob’s team, had said to both of them several months later, once Bob had survived both the major surgeries.

And because they were instantly plunged into the world of rehab and recovery, those endless months of scans and programs and treatments, for a long while there was no time to consider any alternative. Then, as time went on, Bob didn’t seem to want to know. Even after he was moved back home, he showed such little interest in parsing out either of their movements on that day that Rachel finally stopped asking or hoping for something to trigger a flood of actual recollection. She burned for answers, still, but because no one else seemed to understand that urgency—everyone talked about “moving on,” and “moving forward”—she learned to hide what she really felt.

And then, she simply split into two. Little by little, Rachel realized that in this new world, new life, she would have to be two people, one overt and the other private. There was the concerned and mobilized Rachel, the one who was caught up in all the immediate, mutable crises and daily triumphs of a husband’s recovery. The one who sometimes wept fiercely to have him back, alive, and then who was tear-free in the next instant, nailing down every detail of his eight medicines and the rotating shifts of three home-care nurses. This Rachel kept all of them
going
, the four of them, propelled by everything she had to do, buoyed by Winnie, by friends and neighbors, all of Hartfield, who celebrated Bob Brigham’s miracle and never let her forget how grateful she should be. But sometimes, deep inside, Rachel heard and saw another version of herself, one who shook off what she knew was
the right way to be
, a Rachel who flew at poor, slow Bob—forgetting what the frightened girls might witness—and gripped his upper arm, and marched him
around the living room and garage, forcing him to look, to remember, to explain, shouting at him, shouting for someone, anyone, to tell her exactly
what the fuck had happened to her life?

As she reached Hand Me Down, Rachel walked slow and slower. She passed Rudy’s shoe store, where a sign announced, fall arrivals soon: get ready for school. In July! Rachel shook her head. She could remember taking the girls on the first warm day of spring to Rudy’s to buy each a pair of sandals. And how they would wear the new shoes deliriously home, a balloon string tied securely to each girl’s wrist, winter shoes—all of a sudden so heavy and worn—packed away in the sandals’ pastel-colored boxes.
Old Hartfield,
she thought of this—a private designation to mark what Rachel remembered about the town, which had changed somehow when she wasn’t looking. It couldn’t be true, but it felt to Rachel that she had gone underground for those months while Bob was in the hospital, while he was in bed at home, and then when she finally came up for air, everything about where she lived was utterly different. More expensive, more typically suburban.

Rudy’s didn’t give out balloons anymore. And the staff would smile sadly if you stopped in anytime past February to buy spring shoes, because you’d missed the fashion season when those were in stock.
New Hartfield.

She passed the bank and crossed the street. Outside Hand Me Down’s front window, Rachel came to a stop and stood there, staring blankly through the glass at the racks of outfits as if she were a potential customer. She took out her cell phone and held it tightly, dread rising like nausea. She tapped it against her thigh and strolled next door to look in the Christian Science Reading Room window. Rachel, used to crisp actions, wondered at the roil
ing fear and doubt inside her. Was this what a panic attack felt like? Ridiculous, after all that she had been through, to fall apart now. Rachel reached out to the window to steady herself. People did this all the time.

While she was dialing, a woman walked up to Hand Me Down, tried the door, and frowned at its closed sign. Rachel smiled at her, mimed a shrug, and listened to the ring on the other end of the line. The woman looked at her watch, shook her head, and walked past.

Winnie answered, cautiously. They spoke a little about the weather and the girls. Winnie was saying something about a pool—or a tree?—but Rachel couldn’t follow it.

She leaned her forehead against the Reading Room’s glass, next to her forearm. As usual, metal clamps were placed neatly on a page of the open Bible, bracketing off the week’s chosen passage. In the contrast of sun glare and the dim gloom of the display, all the words were hard to make out. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing…” Rachel could delay no further.

“Mommy,” she blurted. And stopped, horrified at what had come out of her mouth. The words
Mom
and
money
must have collided, with the result being every bit as humiliating as Rachel had imagined this moment to be. A short, giddy laugh escaped her.

There was a pause, on Winnie’s end. “Is everything all right?”

“I was hoping to ask you for a loan. Or Jerry. Not—you know what I mean. I’m not asking
for
Jerry. Ha. Just to borrow some money. From him, from both of you. Whatever.” Rachel shut her eyes and held very still, overcome by painful self-consciousness.

“Well…of course. Don’t be silly. Of course we can do that. As
long as you’re all right.” Winnie’s voice was warm but retained an uncertain note. Rachel could feel the sun on the back of her neck. “You are, aren’t you? Rachel?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she whispered. Meaning,
I didn’t want you to know.

“I can hardly hear you. Why don’t you come over after closing up. That’s at five, right? We’ll have a glass of wine, and Jerry will be here, and you and he can talk about the…about all of it. It’s going to be
fine
, sweetheart.”

Rachel could hear her mother relieved to be back on firmer terrain: making plans, solving problems. And it felt good to her, too, simply to be on the phone again; these past few weeks of tension between them had unsettled Rachel. Would it really be having to ask for a loan—she shivered with embarrassment, again, at the thought—that would bring things back to normal between her and Winnie?

“I didn’t want to bring this up, but as long as I’ve got you”—now Winnie was fully back in the swing of it—“remember we wondered why we hadn’t seen the Donaldsons in ages? How they weren’t at the church barbeque, or the other thing? Well, turns out they were out of town, for almost two weeks. At a place called Casa Naturale. I think it’s in Mexico.”

“So?” Rachel walked over to unlock Hand Me Down. She was smiling, despite herself. They were back, she and her mother. “They went on vacation, so what?”

“Don’t you get it? Casa
Naturale
.” Winnie was brimming, triumphant. “It’s a nudist colony! I thought it sounded funny, so I Googled it. Ian and Sherry Donaldson, naked on a beach. Now tell me
that
didn’t just make your day.”

He stared at the silver tube of lipstick in the toilet water. God
damn
it. It had happened in slow motion, the merest bump of his towel-wrapped hip against the sink, itself an overflowing steamed-up mess of jars, bottles, and strange metal wands. All he’d done was reach for the faucet and there it went, right off the edge and
plunk
into the toilet before he could even stretch out a hand. Now it was lodged in the stained porcelain hollow at the very bottom of the bowl. Of course it was. Avery looked around the tiny bathroom in dismay. What was all this makeup, anyway? It was like a fucking pharmacy in here. Well, there was only one thing to do, and it wasn’t going to help to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

He plunged his hand in, almost to the elbow, fishing and fumbling, and then he had it. Now what? His first instinct was to wrap it in a wad of toilet paper and bury it in the trash. How could she miss it, really, with all these other lookalike lipsticks? He’d get her another one! Replace it, later tonight, and she’d never know. The dime-size label on the bottom read only garbo. What did that mean? And what if it was a favorite? She was so particular about
her outfits, not just for performances but planning costumes for herself every day, a shifting thrift-store parade, calibrated to minute changes in mood or plan or the music playing on the stereo. What if, stumbling into the bathroom after him, Nona started to brush her teeth and then thought,
You know what would be perfect for today? Some Garbo lipstick.

At the thought of her, naked and warm in bed right now, on the other side of the wall, buried under a tangle of pillows and blankets, that soft rumble of her breathing—Avery slowly closed his eyes, still holding the tube in his dripping hand. He was so close to climbing back in there with her, fuck it all, to sleep and fuck and sleep again, until it turned dark outside and then they could go out to that all-night Vietnamese place, for a burning shared bowl of pho, and sticky rice balls wrapped in lettuce, and mango pudding. Except that’s pretty much what he had done yesterday. And most of the week before, stints at work the only exception.

“This is
it
, Avery,” his mother had said yesterday, when she finally reached him. He had managed to buy himself a few weeks, citing minutiae of job and apartment searches, but the excuses were running out. “I’m not kidding. If I don’t hear that you’ve been out there by—”

“What kind of evidence do you want? Photographs? Sworn statements?”

There was a slight pause, and for a moment Avery wondered if he’d gone too far. “Just go see him, all right?” As usual, as soon as his mom’s voice took on that tired, overwhelmed tinge, Avery conceded. He could barely hear her as she went on: “There’s a lot going on that I can’t even…Just go see him.”

With the happy thought that the sooner he left Nona, the
sooner he could return, Avery rinsed and soaped the lipstick, drying it on a corner of his towel. Uneasily, he dropped it back into the mess of cosmetics, but not before giving it a quick sniff. Nope. No toilet smell whatsoever.

Nona’s bedroom was three unevenly cut pieces of Sheetrock banged together against the apartment’s main wall, not much bigger than her double bed. To open the bottom drawer of her overflowing dresser, you had to tug the bed out of the way first, the foot of which served as desk chair, coffee table, and laundry hamper all at once. And then there were the teetering stacks of CDs and records on every surface, everything from 1950s opera to hip-hop demos made in garages. Nona’s stereo, wedged underneath a rickety night table on the floor beside her bed, was a shockingly expensive brand from Germany, probably worth more than the entire contents of the rest of the apartment. Her thick-cushioned headphones were invisible, buried under the pillows somewhere, but the sight of the cord trailing down from the bed sent a flash-shiver through him—last night, toward the end, he’d put them on Nona just to watch her face, eyes shut and mouth open. (Avery had to believe it wasn’t
just
the music that had made her writhe like that.)

He dropped his towel and climbed on top of her.

“Oof. Already?”

“Don’t go anywhere,” he whispered. “Don’t even get dressed.”

Nona raised her head an inch, sniffing dramatically, and then dropped it back down. “My God, you read my mind.”

“No. No way.”

“It smells divine. I can’t wait.”

Avery pulled on the same jeans he’d been wearing for a week. “You’re dreaming.”

“Avery’s famous popovers. With some of the clover honey. You’re a prince among men.”

“Nona, these trains only run on the hour! And getting from here to Grand Central…Tomorrow, I promise I’ll make them. Every day next week!” But even as he scanned the torn-apart room for his wallet, his shirt, he was whipping through ingredients in his head. What a sucker. “Eggs?” Eggs were fast. “Pepper and onion omelet?”

But Nona just shook her head, burrowing deeper. “I love that popover smell,” she said sleepily.

Christ! There was barely enough flour, but only one egg, and the muffin tin was still caked with blackened crust edges. Avery dumped the tray in a sinkful of hot soapy water, pulled on his shoes, and fished around in Nona’s bag for the keys. Outside it was oddly cool for late August, and, grateful, he ran two blocks over to the bodega, where he bought mildly suspect eggs and butter and, last minute, a bunch of pale-pink tulips. Into the corner garbage can went the cellophane wrapper and five of the six flowers, and then he took the stairs three at a time back up to Nona’s apartment.

Seeing Thomas, Nona’s sometime roommate, in the kitchen slowed him, though. They’d met once, but Thomas pointed a finger at him and put on a puzzled face anyway.

“Mm…Avery, right? Good. Sorry to…interrupt.” He smiled, eyebrows raised, at the dishes and the flower. “I’m just dropping my things. Off to Seattle later today.”

“No, that’s cool. I have to run in a second, anyway.” He tried not to be self-conscious, cracking the eggs, whisking in flour, setting the empty buttered pan to smoke away into the blackened, tiny oven. Thomas was sorting through mail, leaning against the
counter. He taught cultural studies at NYU, Nona said. They’d been friends forever. Gay, obviously, so that was all good. But why the whole roommate setup, when the two of them were—well, old? Thirty-whatever, at least. They’d lived together for years in a series of apartments across Brooklyn, and once in Queens—
eesh,
Nona had shuddered about this—to end up here, in this reconfigured industrial space in Williamsburg. Thomas traveled, Nona explained. She hardly ever saw him.

Avery wished that was the case this morning.

“Is it part of a tour? For your book, I mean?”

Thomas looked up, polite and perplexed. “Hmm?”

“Going to Seattle…to sign books, and all that?” Avery had seen Thomas’s book—had flipped through it while on the can, actually. The cover image was a curvy nude dancer, posing while a black bar covered her eyes; the title was
Queering the Show: Gender, Economics, and Burlesque in Turn-of-the-Century New York
. For a book about strippers, though, it was pretty boring.

“What? Oh, right. Yes, wouldn’t that be something.” Thomas chuckled, although Avery wasn’t aware of making a joke. He poured the oily batter into the hot pan in precise dollops. With a pen, he wrote, “STOP! DO NOT OPEN OVEN! TURN DOWN TO 350 DEGREES. TAKE PAN OUT AFTER 22 MINUTES,” on the back of one of Nona’s flyers, and taped it to the oven’s grimy handle. Thomas disappeared into a back room. Working quickly, Avery fiddled with his watch alarm—avoiding the time—washed the bowl and whisk, and wiped out the sink. He set out a plate, the sticky honey container, and the tulip in a jelly jar.

Nona’s wrist was tiny and brushed with fine dark hair; he
kissed its inside and buckled his watch on her arm as tight as it would go.

“Listen,” he said, waggling her arm back and forth. “Six minutes. When it beeps, get up and go into the kitchen. No kidding. Unless you want the fire department.”

Nona pulled her arm away and rolled over. But first, she blew him a kiss, eyes still closed.

He had it so bad. Hard to believe how bad it was, how deep he was in, after—what?—three weeks.

On the train, Avery pushed his knees against the seat back in front of him, feet dangling. He’d been carrying Cormac McCarthy’s new paperback around forever, but couldn’t seem to get past the first dozen pages. Outside the nicked and clouded plastic of the window, metal bridges rumbled by, and the upper parts of Manhattan, and then the Bronx. They crossed highway after highway and then rolled steadily past high-rise buildings, thick forests of dark brick interspersed with paved plazas, empty green benches, neon-lit liquor stores and dry cleaners. Avery rubbed his thumb across his abraded lips, felt the ache in his groin. He was miserable; he was elated.

He hadn’t come to that first show, but he’d tracked her band down the next week. And though he would definitely have said that their first few times together were good—great, even—it took a little while for him to realize what was happening. Standing in the back of the crowd, Avery had fought some initial disappointment while Nona howled and swore and stomped through a set or two of standard-issue indie-grunge rock. Yes, she was hot, even in that crazy 1940s-style getup, a boxy gray suit and pompadour hair—a wig, he found out later—and yes, he liked how she met his
eyes from the stage. But the overall scene was blah, and those guys in her band were poseurs. Afterward, he’d milled around during load-out and then he and Nona had ended up at his place, and the next night too: standard, right? Nothing special.

Idiot,
Avery on the train mouthed to himself, that old version of himself already gone and unrecognizable.

There were moments, though, where he guessed something was up: her dreadlocks splayed across his naked stomach (
like a tarantula
—a thought that coincided with a sudden, baffling orgasm); the way she set down her glass on the bar and left it there for the rest of the night, having noticed that Avery was drinking only water; the long, patient 2 am conversation she’d had with this guy on the street, some cracked-out bum, about her own shaky finances and why she had a policy against giving out change on the street, and detailed directions to this one shelter she knew wasn’t too insane. She listened seriously to this person. She nodded and asked questions as he went on and on with his crazy spiel, all these Swiss bank-aliens out to get him—she held a hand up to Avery when he tried to interrupt—Avery who’d wanted nothing more than to hand this guy a five and tug Nona away, back to himself.

So, there were moments. Hints. Still, he was caught off guard when it came together, all at once—he was blindsided when the fuse lit and hissed inside him, unmistakable.

Their fourth night together, they were sitting up in her bed, naked, facing each other, eating sliced plaintains he’d sautéed with brown sugar, and chocolate truffles from the bodega, each one wrapped in crinkly blue-and-silver plastic.

“Your mom taught you to cook?” Nona asked, sugar grains dripping down her wide, soft belly.

“No. I mean, she loves food and we always had good stuff around, growing up, but…no.”

“Who, then? Your grandma?”

“Actually, it was this guy Luther.” Nona raised her eyebrows, waited for more. All of a sudden, though, Avery was stuck. He couldn’t figure out what it would mean to her, or what it would sound like, out loud—all the drug stuff, and the tired, bad way everything had gone down—here in this naked woman’s bed in this strange new city. Was this really the first time he’d told someone who didn’t already know? Maybe not, but it felt like that. He waded in carefully. “He was head of the kitchen at this place I was at for a year—”

“This place…?”

“Yeah.” Avery smiled helplessly, still stuck.

“This place being—rehab?” Her face was calm, watching him. Avery nodded, and then she did, too.

Nona considered the two chocolates left. She weighed them carefully, one in each hand, and then made her decision. “What kind of food did he cook?”

Avery started to speak, and then stopped. There it was, full and clear, what she’d done for him just now: accepted his story, accepted
him
. “Well, everything. He was in charge of meals for fifty, sixty people at a time, so a lot of it was just volume and turnaround. And timing.”

“No individual lemon soufflés. No rack of lamb.”

“Right. More like shepherd’s pie or spaghetti casserole. And it was in Virginia, this place, so we did all the usual Southern food, everything with ham hocks. But he’d been through a lot, this guy—” Avery remembered the two scars along Luther’s thick
black neck, the time some whiny backwoods addict snarled some racist shit and the way Luther had so calmly, almost gently, set down a stock pot and pinned the kid against the wall with one huge forearm.

“This was like his kingdom, you know? Being responsible for everything we all ate. He took pride in it. And when it was a good dinner, when all the serving plates would come back empty, Luther would be so pumped. Like, here was this hard-core black guy, usually all impassive and intimidating. But then he’d go around chest-bumping us all when the chili came out perfectly. I don’t know. Nobody wanted to be assigned to the kitchen, because it was fucking hot in there, and there was no way to get out of all this shit that had to be done, every day…but I really got into it, after a while.”

“Chili. Is it wrong to want chili in August?”

“I’ll make you the best black-bean chili you’ve ever had.” He reached over to put both hands around one of her thighs. “It’s so hot you’ll sweat.”

“But that’s not the kind of the thing you usually make. Right?”

“I don’t mind a good bowl of chili.”

“No, I mean, where’d you learn all the glammed-up stuff? You know, the wrapped-up figs and all that.”

Avery blushed. Yes, that antipasti plate he’d made for her had been overkill, six different fussy preparations, including a half ounce of
culattello
from Mott Street he’d stood in line forty-five minutes to buy.