Losing Clementine (35 page)

“How did this happen?”

I sounded like my mother. What difference did it make how? It only mattered that it had.

Jenny choked on her own spit and coughed, which set off another sob. “I don't know what to do.”

I leaned over the kitchen sink, suddenly sick to my stomach. I had to stand over Carla's casket in an hour. I wanted to. I wanted to see how she did it. To watch how it all played out, a sort of fire drill for my own passing. Afterward we would all gather at our designated meeting spot outside the building, and our emergency response leader would take a head count and discuss how well we did. I didn't have room for anything else. I didn't have time. I had almost no time left at all.

“Stay there,” I said.

I hung up the phone and opened the freezer just to feel the cold on my face for a moment. Then I marched out of the studio, slamming the door behind me. I was angry at Jenny for calling me, angry at her for needing me, and not at all in any sort of state of grace or forgiveness or any other bullshit that's supposed to happen as you walk into the light.

I knocked on Brandon's door, and he opened it. He wasn't wearing a shirt. I saw that with detachment. Beauty like that is the reason museums have to put
DO NOT TOUCH
signs next to statues, but I had nothing left with which to appreciate it.

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but I need your car.”

“You don't look so good.”

“Bad day,” I said.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Last spring, you took those medications for a month. They worked, right?”

“The PEP? Oh God, honey, this on top of everything else?” He looked down at me as if I were a hopeless case good for nothing but pity.

“I'm asking for a friend.”

“Sure you are.”

“They worked?”

“I stayed negative,” he said. “That's good enough for me.” He handed me his car keys. “Drive fast. You only have seventy-two hours, and the longer you wait, the worse your chances.”

I took the keys and started to turn away.

“Clementine?”

I looked back.

“They're going to make you feel like shit.”

“I figured.”

“I mean really, really bad,” he said.

“Medications are like that.”

“When you start them, come over. You're going to need someone to take care of you.”

“I'll be okay,” I assured him.

“No,” he said, “you won't.”

I turned up the air conditioner all the way and pointed the vents at my face and chest. My bangs fluttered in the artificial breeze, and goose bumps rose up on my arms. It still wasn't enough. My cheeks felt hot, and my nerves crackled. My brain pinged from emotion to emotion, unable to alight on any one and setting them all off at once.

“Damn it.” I hit the steering wheel with the palm of my hand and pressed harder on the accelerator until Jenny's exit came into view. When I hit the off-ramp, I was going too fast and had to grind the sole of my shoe into the brake to keep from flying off past the guardrail and into the treetops. My heart fluttered. With the drop in speed, the engine switched to battery power and went silent. I hated that. I was used to the growl of internal combustion. It's how I knew something was happening.

I took my eyes off the road and scrolled through my phone to Jeremy's number.
Pick up, pick up, pick up,
I willed.

“Th-th-this is Jeremy.”

I explained my situation, and he listened without interruption. And then he said, “What can I d-d-do?”

I asked for the name of a clinic, somewhere I could take her right then. He put the phone down, and by the time I reached my turn and had put my blinker on, he was back. I watched the traffic coming toward me, waiting for a hole big enough to make a left, while he read off the name and the intersection in the San Fernando Valley where I could find it. I concentrated on the information, carefully committing it to memory rather than to the scrap of paper I didn't have.

“M-M-Mark says it's a good place. Th-th-they keep a doctor on call.”

I told myself not to judge Mark for having the information I, after all, had asked for.

“Thank you,” I said to Jeremy. “You're a lifesaver.”

He didn't make the obvious joke.

“Anything for you,” he said instead, and then he hung up.

This was my second time in two days driving to Jenny's neighborhood. I turned off the engine—not that anyone could tell the difference—and sat. A red sedan drove past me, parked two buildings down, and discharged a woman in a peach blouse with a gray work skirt down to her knees. The front was wrinkled as if she'd been sitting a lot that day. She parked in a red zone and ran inside on high heels that made her take too-small steps. She was back out quicker than even parking enforcement could move, holding on her hip a child too big to be carried that way. The girl's brown hair was curly and hanging in her face, and she clung to a construction paper art project her mother deposited in the backseat with her, then trotted back around to the driver's seat on her work pumps without knowing I was there.

I watched them without thinking, and when they were gone, I was alone with a steady stream of late afternoon traffic. I stared out the windshield at the space where the family had been. My stomach was clenching itself into too small a space. Jenny was inside waiting for me to come in and be something to her, and I wasn't even sure exactly what. Was I the big sister? The employer? The friend? I didn't know her well enough to be her friend, and I didn't know how to be an older sister anymore. I was the most useless person she could've called, and I couldn't think of another person on the whole planet, let alone within driving distance, to whom I could pass the buck.

Jenny answered the door so fast she must've been standing there watching through the peephole. Her cardigan, two sizes too big, was wrapped tightly around her with her arms following suit. It looked for all the world like she was trying to hold her organs inside her body. She stepped back to allow me room to come in, and when I did, she went limp against me. I thought she'd fallen and clutched at her too hard. She let go of her sweater and her insides and wrapped her arms around my waist, returning the too-tight hug I didn't mean to give. In my arms she felt insubstantial and hollow. It was like holding a wren and knowing one squeeze could crush it.

I didn't know how long to stand there. The door behind us was still open, and it made her dingy apartment feel vulnerable and exposed. Her head was pressed under my chin and her cheek against my sternum. Her hair smelled like lemon shampoo. Sounds from the street were blowing in. Somewhere close by a car door shut and then opened and shut again. One of the large black crows that plague the city, the ones as big as cats, cawed and flew toward us.

Jenny let go then, and so did I. She shut the door against the bird, and the room dimmed so much I had to wait for my pupils to adjust. She hadn't bothered to open the blinds, and the bright L.A. sunshine couldn't manage to do anything but shimmer feebly around the edges of the shades, which only made the room seem darker by comparison.

“Do you want something?”

It might have been funny, pleasantries under the circumstances. Her mother, the woman who had fed me brisket under equally trying circumstances, would've been proud.

“No,” I said.

Jenny's arms went back around herself, and she held her intestines in place all the way to the couch. Wadded tissues were piled on the floor next to an empty bottle of Coke. She sat and pulled her feet up into the seat, forcing her body to occupy as little of the physical world as possible. I could've told her that didn't work. Mental anguish was not proportional to your footprint.

With the door closed, the apartment smelled of leftover takeout.

Her face was pink and blotchy, and the soft, puffy skin under her eyes looked bruised. “What'll happen if I have it?” she asked.

I took the spot next to her. It was a small couch, more of a loveseat. Sitting side by side our thighs were less than six inches apart. I didn't say anything. Whatever she was thinking, what I was thinking was worse. New York in the eighties was like living through an outbreak of the plague.

“You're thinking I could die,” she said.

“No.” Yes.

“I am.”

“There are things you can do,” I said.

She picked at her toenail. The black paint was still there and still chipping. “Maybe Ray's girlfriend was lying. She lies.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know she lies?” I knew the answer was that Ray said so. It seemed Ray said a lot of things, and if I had known where this was all going to lead, I certainly wouldn't have let him walk out of my studio with that smug look still plastered on his face.

“Did it sound like she was lying?” I asked, glancing at the clock. We both needed to hurry.

Jenny shrugged inside her sweater cocoon. “She just asked if Ray had told me he was positive. I asked her ‘Positive for what?'” She smiled with her mouth while the rest of her face stayed where it was. She wiped at her cheeks. “I'm so stupid.”

She reached down for her soda, picked it up a few inches, realized it was empty, and set it back down.

“You called Ray,” I said.

“Four times. I left messages and sent a text each time.”

“Since yesterday?”

“Yes.”

I was guessing Ray didn't want to talk about it.

“He doesn't get good cell reception at his studio,” Jenny said.

Or in his car or his apartment or the grocery store or the back of the ex-girlfriend's Toyota, it would seem.

“The day before yesterday was the time without a condom?”

She nodded.

“The only time?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to tell me the truth,” I said. “The timing matters.”

“I said it was.”

I shifted my weight toward the edge of the couch. It was time to go, time for movement and progress. Everything over the past month was rolling downhill, gathering speed. I also didn't want to keep sitting there in the dark smelling the congealed fat from leftover Chinese food that was wafting out of the kitchen trash.

“We should go to the clinic,” I said. I looked at my watch as though I knew what time it closed.

“I haven't had a shower.”

“That's really not important right now.”

“I'm waiting for Ray to call me back.”

“Why?”

She looked at me for the first time since opening the front door. “What do you mean why?”

“Does it matter what he says? Are you going to take his word for it if he says no?”

“Why should I take her word for it? She hates me. She wants Ray back.”

“I can't imagine why.”

I could feel the shift and the weight of her angry fear as it settled on me and her relief in having found a target.

“You just don't like Ray.”

“No, I don't.”

She scrunched up her face. “I'm waiting until he calls.”

“You don't have that kind of time,” I said.

“He's going to call back.”

“No,” I said with absolute certainty. “He's not.”

“You don't know that.”

I stood up. I stood up and pulled myself to every millimeter of my six feet—more in shoes—and towered over her.

“Get up,” I said.

“No.” Her voice had the small quality of a child testing out her independence, unsure if it would work and unprepared for what would happen if it did.

I reached down and snatched her by the bicep, which was hardly bigger than her forearm. My hand was like the claw of the crow outside, and my fingers were no doubt making white marks that would turn pink when I let go. But I didn't let go. I picked her up—dragged her, really, to her feet—by her arm.

“Ow, you're hurting me,” she said.

I wasn't. Not really.

Once on her feet, she stood on her own. I kept hold of her but not as hard.

“I won't go,” she said. “I won't go to any clinic. Not without talking to Ray first.”

“Where's your bag?” I asked.

“What?”

I scanned the floor looking for it.

“I said I'm not going.” She tried to pull her arm from my grasp, but I held it so the ball of her shoulder was hitched up high and the angle was too awkward for her to get any leverage. “I don't want to. You can't make me!”

“Where's your bag?” I repeated.

I spotted it on the floor near the door and walked her toward it, my long legs making easier work of the distance than hers. She trotted the short distance to keep up, pulled along by the arm I still controlled. I scooped up her bag with my free hand.