Two Months after the Accident
MAY 1983
Today marks a week that I’ve been home, and also Jude’s first day at work; she’ll be cleaning rich people’s houses along the Main Line, in neighborhoods far in both distance and temperament from our own. She arranged this job with urgency and some secrecy. The head of the agency is a savior of sorts, Jude says, prioritizing hard-luck cases—domestic violence victims, the formerly homeless. The rich people like knowing that having their toilets scrubbed also amounts to charity. Jude told the boss that our parents died and we’d lost our way, drifting about and aimless, with no clear path forward. Not as grim as some of the other cases, but good enough to get us on the roster. But after my accident, we rose to the top of the list. “Now we’re the most pathetic case of all,” she jokes. “The marquee unfortunates. The headliners, if you will.”
My doctor hasn’t yet cleared me to work, and Jude won’t let me tag along even to keep her company. My body and brain need rest, she tells me, and I’ll be able to join her soon enough. I insist that my body is fine and my brain needs anything but rest—it needs to wake up and stretch and explore—but she won’t hear of it. “Do this for me,” she says. “We have the rest of our lives to work.” I watch her pack her tools: bucket, sponges, extra pairs of gloves. She gives me the addresses and phone numbers of the day’s destinations, in case of an emergency. She warns me not to venture past our little gray block. A careful stroll is fine; a neighborhood expedition is not.
I scramble an egg and grow restless. I look again at the artifacts from our past, still arranged on the coffee table in a tidy row. I pull on the opera gloves past my elbows and make the dancer spin in my hand. I study the pictures more closely, searching for clues. Why is the carousel picture, with those menacing horses leering in the background, the only one we like of ourselves? The black-and-white shot of Harmony’s Main Street looks decades old; did our mother take it before we were born? In the picture of the lake, I see a head peeking from the surface of the water, just two eyes and a nose—is that me or Jude? In the final photo, which shows our family on a sandy beach, the setting sun throws us all into silhouette, transforming our faces and bodies into sharp, elongated shadows. A mother, a father, and two little girls of matching size, maybe eight years old, one with a shovel and the other with a pail. I remove it from the frame to read the block lettering on the back: BIRD FAMILY VACATION, WILDWOOD, 1969, and I wonder who wrote the words.
I wish I could gather all of my pieces and solve myself, everything snapping into its familiar place, the whole picture unambiguously revealed.
I long for a television to watch the soaps and page through the old magazines Jude took from the hospital waiting room, with headlines about the chilling lure of cocaine and a mysterious and deadly disease called AIDS. I look out our window and spy a golden dog, an old man pushing a wobbly cart, a blue Tastykake truck, and a girl in a sun hat darting down the street, glancing left and right, looking for something or someone, a limp rendering her left leg half a beat behind. I watch her walk back and forth, setting her gait to a beat: Ba-dah. Ba-dah.
After a few minutes, I search for something myself: my hospital bills. I’ve asked numerous times, but Jude won’t divulge what we owe for my lengthy stay. Wild guesses pile up in my mind: Three thousand? Five? Ten? Jude tells me that she’s always been the responsible, organized twin, tamping down my reckless urges, and I imagine that the bills are hidden neatly somewhere, organized by date and labeled something like “Kat’s Scrambled Brain.” I find nothing in the kitchen drawers besides a sparse collection of utensils and some dull pencils, and figure they must be in the bedroom.
Jude has divvied up our dresser fairly; I have the top drawer, she has the bottom, and the middle one is evenly split, containing every set of underwear we own. In her drawer I rummage through crisply folded shirts, taking care not to disturb them, and at the bottom of the pile my hand collides with something hard. I pull it out and hold it up for examination: a white stick, long and thick as my forearm, with a top shaped like a tennis ball. I flip its switch and it begins a low hum, tickling my palm and raising the hair on my neck. I know exactly what it is but not if I’ve ever used one.
Lying in my bed, I run it over my face and neck, tickling myself. I hover it over my shirt, letting it graze my nipples, and then I pause long enough to take the shirt off and let it dance over my bare skin, up and down, buzz and release. I feel a slight sting of guilt—Jude would never use something so personal of mine—but am distracted by its ripple across my thighs. I tell myself not to push it any lower, that doing so would be invasive and weird and possibly unsanitary (although my brain retorts: Come on, you know Jude bathes this thing in bleach), but those thoughts, too, recede, as the humming finds the point between my legs. My brain resurrects our private word for it, a lovely word, ginva, and I move the wand in circles. I feel a budding heat, a mounting pressure, a storm cloud thick with rain. Sparks flicker at the edge of my mind—and then Jude steps in. An image of her on her hands and knees, scrubbing and sweating. I try to close the void and push her aside. I increase pressure and speed. Jude’s body disappears, but I hear her voice: Be careful, don’t venture very far, I can’t almost lose you again. I try to purge all evidence of her. I press, I make smaller circles, I imagine it as a game that must be won. I do win but it seems like a consolation prize, a quick and mild flutter, a purr instead of a roar.
It exhausts me, regardless. For a half hour I scarcely move. So that’s what it feels like, I think, and realize I’ve lost the precise word. It seemed more exciting when they acted it out on the soaps. I add to the mental tally of who I am: I am a person who throws parties, likes beer, and appreciates certain private devices. Just as quickly my mind counters: Yes, but millions of people do and like these things, and they are useless clues. Find some that actually tell you something, important parts of your whole.
I spring up from bed with a start, charged with purpose. I have work to do. I take the device to the kitchen sink and scrub it with every product I find, wipe it dry, and return it to Jude’s drawer. Before I let her warning—stay within our little gray block—dissuade me, I shower, dress in jeans and a tank, and slick my lips with red gloss. Checking the mirror, an impish, glamourized version of Jude stares back at me. I speak aloud, as much as to Jude as to myself: “I am a person who won’t be told what to do.”
The sun is just beginning to whip up its heat and layer it across the neighborhood. Our apartment complex occupies the entire block, but beyond that the streets give way to twin homes—connected structures that are themselves built like mirror twins, with doors and windows lined up on opposing sides; if folded together, they would match faultlessly, melding into one. The wires overhead are draped with pairs of sneakers, lined up like a murder of crows. Jude has explained the neighborhood’s personality, with its odd and stringent territorial distinctions; allies and enemies are made according to the locations of intersections and playgrounds. I think she appreciates the private, insular nature of this place, the way questions aren’t expected and answers are ignored.
I pass a Catholic church, a playground, a check-cashing place, a McDonald’s, a theater showing Cheech and Chong’s Still Smokin, a shop called Corropolese Tomato Pie. The smells drifting from the open door compel me to pause, and I sit on a bench outside. Closing my eyes, I make a mental list of questions to ask Jude (Where did we go after our parents died? What did we do? What were we doing on the night of the accident?) and am disrupted by the sudden appearance of a body next to me.
Shifting my eyes, I assess him: about my age, slim but cut, tanned skin and dark hair, a tuft of curls gathered into a point at the nape of his neck. The sleeves of his T-shirt are rolled up to reveal, on his wiry bicep, a tattoo of a woman’s face. He unwraps a hoagie and shoves a third of it into his mouth, and I am transfixed by the finely drawn eyes, dark and slitty, and how the right one seems to wink with each flex of his arm.
“Mmmm, mmmm,” he says, chewing.
I nod and slide away; I don’t need his appraisal of lunch. He swallows and then speaks again, using words this time: “I meant to say ‘my mom,’ but I don’t think that’s how it came out.”
“I thought you said something else. I didn’t mean to stare.”
He waves his hand, and the eye winks again.
“What about your mom?” I ask.
“That’s her, on my arm.”
I scooch an inch closer and lower my head.
“It’s okay, have a look.” He holds out his arm, meeting me halfway. “It was my favorite picture of her. My brother’s an artist—he did this after she died.”
I look directly into his face for the first time and am struck by the incongruity, the hard against the soft: long lashes and plush lips anchor a scaffolding of sharp bones, the skin stretched tight as a sheet. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “Mine did, too.” I’m surprised by my revelation, the sharing of private information only recently acquired, still rough and raw.
“I’m sorry. How?”
I hear myself speak Jude’s memory, making it my own. “Car accident.”
“Bummer,” he says. “Drunk driver?”
“Some kid. Swerved right into her, head-on.” I sound so poised and assured, so certain of my words. I have a piece of my past, a real and true thing I can now summon at will.
“I can’t imagine,” he says, and takes another bite. “The sudden shock of it.”
I am tempted to let myself cry and practice my grief, my mourning of not knowing how to mourn, a mourning once removed. “How about your mom?” I ask.
“Leukemia. That was its own kind of nightmare.”
I point at his tattoo. “You must have been really close.”
“We were. You too, with yours?”
I am about to answer “I think so” and stop myself. “We were, very,” I say. “My mom was my best friend.” With those words I feel a slight twinge of disloyalty, but I want to claim this moment for myself, separate from Jude. “Sometimes I wonder if I was meant to be in the car, too, because the pain of losing her nearly killed me.”
“Damn,” he says, and takes another huge bite of hoagie. As he chews, I raise my face to the sky. A bead of sweat slithers down my back.
“What’s your name?” he says, finally.
“Kat.”
“Sab.”
We shake hands. I like the way his hand feels wrapped around mine, warm and firm, a pressure that stops just short of intimidating.
“I have to ask—what kind of a name is Sab?”
“Short for Sabatino. My dad’s Italian, my mom was Puerto Rican. So it’s Sabatino Ramos. I went by Ramos for a while, but it didn’t stick like Sab.”
“What’s your first name?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Try me.”
“Blaise.”
“Blaze? Like you’re on fire?”
“Well, I like to think I’m hot, but it’s B-L-A-I-S-E. He was a saint, the patron saint of many things.” He holds out his hand, ticking his fingers: “Sore throats, wool combers, choking, infants, and attacks from wild animals.”
“Impressive! I’ll try to avoid conjuring any of those.”
“At least not all in one encounter. I like to take it slow.”
He smiles, a kind of smile that is new to me, tinged with heat and wanting.
“How did you end up on this bench?” he asks. “Is this your lunch break?”
My mind whips up a lie. I don’t want to admit the broken parts of myself before I’ve devised a way to fix them. I hear myself say, “I have the day off.”
“What do you do?”
The lie expands itself and I settle in, waiting to see where it will take me. “I care for a very old, very wealthy man. Buy him groceries, clean him up, keep him company. His daughter came today for her yearly visit, so here I am.”
“He sounds lonely.”
“Not when I’m with him,” I say. “He loves me like I’m his own. What about you?”
“I’m in construction, so this is actually my proper uniform.” He lifts a leg, showing off a steel-toed boot. “But I’ve been working since five this morning and I’m off the clock now, so let’s talk about something more interesting.” He moves an inch closer. “I mean, if you want to.”
I think of Jude: I am well beyond the boundaries of our little gray block. I thrill at the danger of it, the chance to dip into a stranger’s world before I return to my own.
“Why not?”
“I thought you’d say that.” He stands and offers me a hand. “Come with me.”
I imagine another piece fitting into place: I am a person who takes risks.