In the vast valley north of Los Angeles, on a street of abandoned warehouses, behind a wall of corrugated metal topped with barbed wire, beyond an unused machine shop, in an unmarked prefab office building, inside a tiny bathroom with a hollow-core door, our first hero begins to tremble as she steps into a strange pair of pants.
These pants are enormous—inches thick, visibly stiff, made of a fabric coarse and gray—and when she grips the sink for balance, letting them fall, they relax only slightly, a pair of heavy phantom legs leaning against her own. A matching jacket lies felled on the floor like some hunted thing, arms pinned beneath its own weight. On the seat of the closed toilet, an open equipment bag bears a padded red helmet, its dark metal face cage regarding the water-stained ceiling. And on the floor beside it, a clipboard:
McClelland Security Services
Contingency Stress Inoculation Training
Dana Bowman, Years 1–6
with colored graph lines for Heart Rate and Test Duration descending.
This woman keeps her head bowed, focusing resolutely on the shining silver drain stop at the bottom of the sink. She is able to still herself this way, but over the course of a long minute, the short hair at the back of her neck begins to darken, the skin to shine, and at last a bead forms and slides down to disappear into the rolled cotton edge of her tank. She cranks the sink water on. She flips a wall switch, setting an old ceiling fan rattling. Finally she straightens and pulls the pants up tall, fitting her arms through the ragged straps of the suspenders in front of the mirror. Tall and lean. Short, dark hair. Eyes a clear green. Thin white line of a scar above her upper lip.
This is Dana.
She stops the stream of water with a still-shaking hand and cups some, sips at it, the bulk of it dribbling from her chin into the sink. She reaches behind her into the equipment bag to grab a long black strip of nylon webbing with a plastic clip. She passes it under the running tap and hikes her tank up to fit it on around her rib cage under her bra, weaving it through the suspender straps and snapping it in front over her sternum. Beyond the red helmet, in the deep of the bag, is a little black wristband with a digital display. She takes a deep breath through her nose—nothing you can hear, but you can see her chest rise and keep silently rising, followed by a long, slow fall. Then she fishes out the wristband: forty-four beats per minute.
She shuts the water off now and takes two neoprene sleeves from the bag and pulls them on over her forearms. She hefts the coat from the floor like you would a heavy backpack, slinging it on, tiny inside it, and makes short work of the clips in front. Then she picks up the clipboard, tucks the helmet under one arm, and opens the bathroom door.
On to a large break room. At the counter is a big young man in a T-shirt and camouflage cargo pants, his brown head shaved shiny bald. He is leaning against a humming microwave, tapping a spoon in his open palm. “Shit,” he says. “The corsage I got isn’t going to match.”
Dana lumbers past him, setting her things on the table, and twists the dial on a padlock. Inside her locker is an oversized backpack—black ballistic nylon girded with a dozen zippered pockets. He watches as she yanks one open and withdraws a box of Pepto-Bismol tablets and fiddles with a crinkling cellophane sheet.
“Cujo-itis?” he says.
She pops a pair of pink tablets into her mouth and shuts her locker door. She twists the dial on the padlock again, and grabs the helmet and clipboard. The color is back in her face now, not so quickly from the pills, of course, but from some internal effort of her own. She manages to smile at him, even. “Smell of your mom’s leftovers,” she says, and she pushes the bar release on a fire door and steps, squinting, out into the bright courtyard.
Or not a courtyard, really. A half acre of sparkling mica-flecked blacktop hemmed in by those barb-topped walls and bulwarked by the unused warehouses beyond. To one side a line of six black SUVs with dark windows, windshields flashing white in the sun. At the far end a few long runs of chain-link fence leading to a low concrete outbuilding. And at the center a man in a tie and shirtsleeves next to a plain white service van. When the door crashes shut, the little building in the far corner of the yard explodes with muffled barking.
Dana lifts the helmet and swings open the face guard as she crosses the blacktop. She parts the flaps of thick foam at the neck and lowers it over her head, shutting the cage over her pale green eyes and the little white scar. It muffles her hearing, but right away (she will never understand this about herself, but she will continue to crave it) her heart rate slows and her focus sharpens. A paper clip on the blacktop. A helicopter banking south so far off in the turquoise sky she cannot hear it. And just before she reaches him, a flash of something at her examiner’s neck as he reaches out for the clipboard. Someone (a barber? his wife?) has nicked him with the clippers just above his collar, a nearly invisible line of fine red marks just below the short hairs, like perforations. Corey Sifter is his name. A former Marine Aircraft Wing Commander and Combat Tactics Instructor from Alabama. Who likes the chair nearest the door in the break room and eats sunflower seeds in his office.
Dana hands him the clipboard and the wristband to her heart-rate monitor, and in turn he hands her a different wristband—no display, just a white plastic box with a single red button. She slips it on and pushes it up a bit, hiding it inside the sleeve of the big coat.
He says, “Now, you know that’s not just a token of our affection. You can press that thing if you need us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were in there so long last year, we thought maybe you forgot. Decided you had no choice but to make a roommate out of him and live out your days in the back of that van.”
“I like living alone, sir,” she says.
He laughs. “Fair enough.” He riffles the pages on the clipboard and then raps it with his knuckle. “I’m just hoping you don’t fall asleep this time. Your peak heart rate has dropped by at least seven points every year.”
Dana blinks inside her helmet, waiting. She knows such exchanges can go on a long time if she participates in them, and she is itching to get inside the van. She is still hot inside her suit; she is still nauseous. He still has the trace of a smile on his face people wear when they expect that their banter will be returned, but finally it falls away. He coughs and raps his knuckles again on his clipboard.
“All right then,” he says.
And Dana opens the barn doors at the rear of the van and climbs in, pulling them shut behind her.
The space is dark after the bright outside, but it is also familiar. The pair of bucket seats scabbed with duct tape and the empty rear compartment stripped down to the white sheet-metal skin. An anarchy of scratch marks on the floor as her eyes adjust. The space does for her what the helmet did, and she kneels in the center of the van and feels carefully along the underside of the seats. She leans forward to click the glove box gently open and shut. She does not watch through the windshield as a door in the far building swings open. There is just the soft sifting of her hands along the floor beneath the dashboard, searching, and the rattle of her sneakers as she turns and steps back behind the bucket seats, while outside, silent beyond the van windows, a big German shepherd barrels out, dragging a handler by a leash. It scrabbles toward the van, and Dana crouches on one knee, extending her left arm just as the barn doors swing open, flooding the van with light, and the dog flies at her, teeth bared.
It is as she expects it to be. The van doors slam shut, plunging them into darkness, and the dog’s jaws clamp down on the arm Dana feeds him. He has her just below the elbow, snarling and tugging, his claws scrabbling and slipping on the bare metal floor, and she pumps it in his mouth to keep him engaged as she waits for her eyes to adjust again and then scans: ceiling, spare tire well, door handles, window frames, tool kit. When she is sure she has covered it—the whole back half—she relaxes her arm knowing he will release it for a grip on something new, bored, and he does. As she turns to face forward, he lunges for her shoulder, his teeth knocking hard against the bone and throwing her into the back of the passenger seat, and as they fall together to the floor, Dana thinks her shoulder does hurt, she can feel that muffled somewhere deep below the surface of her attention, but it is precisely then that she detects what she has been searching for—the barest hint of it on the sunlit armrest of the front passenger door. The pivot lid on the ashtray is ajar. Its silver edge glints.
As she struggles to right herself, the dog grabs her by the back of her coat, trying to shake her whole body now, but Dana can just reach it, stretching her fingers out of the end of the tapered sleeve and flicking open the tiny metal lid. And this, right now, this moment is what Dana loves. She feels almost serene, seeing the key there in the ashtray and knowing just how she will grab it, just how she will pull it back into her fist and then into the sleeve of her armor, just how she will crouch before she explodes upward to throw the dog back into the closed barn doors. He doesn’t let go of her jacket when she does it, but it doesn’t matter. When she ends up on her back on the van floor, for the tenth of a second it takes him to right himself and land with his front paws on her chest, Dana does absolutely nothing. She waits for him to come, his teeth clattering against her face guard, wild, glistening, enormous, a child’s nightmare. It should be terrifying, but she has the key tight in her right hand and she is working a boot up under his belly, and Dana shoves, catapulting him against the spare tire. It gives her all the time she needs to roll onto one knee and dive for the steering column. As he lands on her back and bites down on the fabric at her neck, he crushes her against the parking brake, and her helmet bounces on the bucket seat, but she can just reach now, and on her second fumble she slides the key into the ignition. She turns it and the engine rumbles on, and at the sound of it, like magic—like something from a cartoon, really—the dog lets go of her jacket and lies down on the floor of the van, as if ready for a nap, or a pat.
As soon as Dana’s examiner opens the doors, the nausea returns. She hops out and takes off past him at a trot. She types a code into a keypad next to the building door and pulls it open, rushing past the big young man eating soup from a bowl at the table and into the tiny bathroom, shutting the door on our view of her.
We are out in the break room, where the big young man has paused over his bowl of soup and the examiner is just stepping in through the fire door, clipboard in hand. Velasquez is another of the firm’s agents—he has worked protective shifts with Dana a hundred times—and Corey Sifter coached her through a high-speed-emergency driving course and an evacuation simulation in a smoke- and flame-filled room, but neither man has ever been shown a photo on her BlackBerry or heard her describe a movie she saw over a weekend or watched her drink a beer. Through the hollow-core door to the bathroom now comes the clear sound of retching and coughing. Velasquez looks down at his food, and Corey Sifter at the statistics before him. They steal glances at the door as the sounds from within change. A toilet flushing. The rattle of a paper-towel dispenser. Running water. And finally the door clicks open and Dana emerges, her face dry and pale and her hair glistening with sweat or sink water, in her damp tank top and running shorts, the heavy bite suit draped over one arm and the helmet under the other.
She heaps them onto the break table next to the empty equipment bag and peers down at Corey Sifter’s clipboard.
“How’d I do?” she says to him.
He coughs. He looks at her wristband and then back at the clipboard. “Five beats down on pulse and about a minute faster than your best speed.”
Even as he speaks she is stepping around him to her locker, and he turns, watching her. He runs a hand through his buzz cut.
She unzips the top of her backpack and takes out a hooded sweatshirt and pulls it on over the tank she fought in.
“Where you headed?” he says.
“Home.”
“What’s your hurry? How about you stop by Shannon’s office before you go? Let her check your vitals.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Just heart rate and blood pressure. She’ll have you out in five.”
“I appreciate your concern, sir—”
“Corey, Dana. We’ve been working together for seven years.”
“I appreciate it, I do. But I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“Sometimes the heat gets to people in there—”
“It wasn’t that, sir—Corey.”
“Or the adrenaline buildup.” He picks up the receiver on the break-room phone. “She’ll check you out real fast.”
Dana shoulders her backpack and shuts her locker, leaving it empty. “I was queasy before I tested. Velasquez saw me take something for it before I came out.”
Corey Sifter looks at Velasquez in his place at the table.
The big young man nods, gesturing with his spoon, his mouth full. He swallows. “True story.”
“Something I ate, maybe,” Dana says.
He sets down the phone. “I’ll have to note it in your file.”
“Of course.”
He shakes his head. “And you’ll have to be sure to report it in the Protective Asset Inventory on your next duty check-in.”
“Certainly,” Dana says, turning.
“And, Dana?”
She turns back to him.
“We like a pilot who can fly without a wingman. We do. But not if she won’t keep her radio on.”
Outside she steps through a small corrugated metal door in a corrugated metal wall into a street of locked-up warehouses and garbage-choked gutters. Down at the corner a few men sit on the curb outside a taqueria, but other than that the street is empty. Just a lunch bag blowing, and a few parked cars, including Dana’s white Jetta, and a big black crow sitting on her roof. He could almost be looking at her, she thinks, and in fact, as she gets closer, she sees that he is. He cocks his head, his black eyes staring, and only when she takes out her key to open the door does he fly away, wheeling up and off over another razor-wire fence to a place she can’t see and never will. She gets in her car, locks her door, and sets her big backpack on the seat beside her. Behind her, hanging down from the hook and bending at the waist against the seat like a passenger, is a white cotton dress with peach-colored flowers still in the clear bag from a department store.
The drive out of that valley into Los Angeles is long. And silent for Dana. She does not turn the radio on. She watches the road. And at stoplights her eyes catch on the out-of-place and the furtive: a woman sitting on a suitcase; a boy opening a bag in a dark doorway; a man in a parked car outside the high-fenced play yard of a school. She passes from the narrow streets of those closed-up blocks, to the stoplighted boulevard of the flat valley, up onto a highway that bears her between brown hills until she can see the beach and ocean, and then off and down to more stoplighted streets that draw her into her own neighborhood, Culver City, with its streets of single-story houses just big enough for an arched front door and two flanking windows, well kept every one. Neat streets. With clean gutters and sidewalks and tiny squares of clipped lawn, and then a tidy little alley alongside her own street’s one apartment building, white and U-shaped around a courtyard of vinyl-strap lawn furniture, with windows overlooking, all of them closed, save for three at the top with scraps of curtain each cut from a different patterned bedsheet, billowing out in the breeze like flags. Dana pulls into the little alley and through a garage door and down into the low-ceilinged parking area underneath.
Dark and cool and low, the garage is mostly full at this hour, but she finds a slim space. Her shoes make a gritty sound in the echoey dim as she crosses, beetle-backed in her big backpack and carrying the dress high to keep it from dragging. It trails behind her a bit at the hem, like a ghost. They ride up in the elevator together and emerge into the third-floor hallway, brown doors receding into the distance like beads on a string, and she stops in front of number three-twenty-four.
It is dim inside, all the louvered blinds drawn flush to the windowsills against the late afternoon sun, and Dana flicks on the lights to reveal an expanse of white wall-to-wall carpeting broken only by a white couch, a glass-topped coffee table, and a computer desk with a closed laptop. On the wall to the left of the couch, a bicycle hangs from a pair of hooks. Above the desk is an Escher print of infinite stairs. The silence inside this room is thick, almost cottony.
She shuts the door.
On the clean floor of the hall closet, beside two pairs of neatly aligned running shoes, there is a space for her backpack. Above it she hangs the peach-flowered dress. The bedroom beyond has a light blue blanket and a smooth fold of white topsheet beneath another Escher print—this one of triangle tiles that row by row part and change just slightly, until at the top they fly away as birds. She showers in a small clean bathroom where all the personal items hide secreted behind a mirror, and dresses in jeans and a white T-shirt and afterward steps to her living room window, where, with a slow pull of a cord, she draws the blinds half open, filling the white room with light. She cracks the window, and flamenco music drifts to her from across the way.
Then her phone rings.
Dana looks through the half-lowered eyelid of her metal blinds at the curtains luffing out across the way. On the windowsill, a green plant growing from the skull of a cow. She picks up the phone.
That same music and a man’s voice: “You’re home! I’m on the other line with my mom! Save me!”
Then a click and a dial tone.
Dana smiles. Although this trip is just down the hall, she puts on her sneakers. She slings her backpack over her shoulder. She locks her door behind her. She walks down the long gray carpet. Beige walls with brown doors. A welcome mat. A wreath of hay and dried flowers. A right-angle turn to the right, and more doors, and another right turn, and then the sound of Latin music draws her to a door where a pair of muddy sneakers lies untied and discarded, toes pointing in opposite directions on the threshold of a door that is half open.
When she pushes it wide, she is face-to-face with a red macaw on an open perch plucking a grape from a bowl of sliced bananas and oranges. Birdseed is scattered everywhere on the little square of white linoleum that marks the vestibule, and in the tangle of sneakers and boots and sandals below, cracked peanut shells and little pellets of millet line the insoles and fill the crossed laces.
The room beyond is similar in shape to her own, but larger. The white rug is covered with a big raggedly cut rectangle of bright green Astroturf, and the couch, on which a second parrot (blue and gold) sits preening, is draped with a Spider-Man bedsheet. In the corner a huge wooden Buddha sits cross-legged and delighted next to a terrarium crisscrossed with branches and bejeweled with tiny frogs. A sudden breeze pushes the curtains into the room like streamers and knocks the cow skull full of soil and green tendrils onto the floor. Standing in the kitchen in swim trunks and a yellow T-shirt, holding a cordless phone to his ear, the man who summoned her here does not notice this, though. He only notices her. His eyes widen at the sight of her standing behind his parrot. This is Ian.
“Mom, I have to go! I’ll see you tomorrow, Dana’s here!”
He turns on the water and tries to rinse his hand. “Yes, I’m bringing her with me this time so you can finally meet her.” He wipes his dripping hand on the seat of his shorts, leaving a trace of green. “She’s a volunteer EMT, I said, remember? I saw her in her uniform, and I asked her to teach me to do my Sylatron injections.…” He is rolling his eyes now and grinning. “Her regular job is in security services, yes.… Yes, it’s crazy and appalling that you have to ask after we’ve been dating almost a year.…” He raises his eyebrows and runs a hand through his messy blond hair. “Yes, we plan to continue living in sin for a while.… No, actually that’s a common misconception, sin only gets better with age.…” He winks at Dana. “Tomorrow, yes, and I have a perfectly good suit, yes. I know that weddings start at a specific time, yes. And in this case it’s seven o’clock in San Marino, yes. I love you, yes. Okay, gotta go.”
When he hangs up, his hands shoot into the air. He takes two big strides, cradles her head between his hands, stamps a kiss on her mouth, and pulls back grinning. Then he fingers her backpack straps and pulls them off—one, two—eyeing her slyly, as if they were straps on lingerie.
“Hi,” she says, and her eyes flit (she can’t help it) to the ridge of scar tissue in a patch of reddened skin just below his left ear.
“Any oozing?” he says.
“No.” She shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut a second. “Sorry.” She opens her eyes. “What are you making over there?”
“I was at the Venice Market, and there was this beautiful Puerto Rican woman with ice blue eyes and six little kids running around and two Colt 45 cartons, one full of Rottweiler puppies and the other full of ripe avocados marked ‘Whole box, fifteen dollars.’ I figured you’d be happy I came home with the avocados.”
“Instead of the Puerto Rican woman?”
He laughs (gigantic; explosive; a joyous gunshot) and says, “Instead of one of the puppies, I meant.”
“A puppy I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Aha! ‘Minded,’ though! That’s the key word. I don’t want anything to jeopardize my slow and steady, make-moving-in-with-Ian-easy-and-attractive plan.”
She eyes the birds and the frogs. “I don’t think a puppy would have tipped the scales much.”
“Is that a yes?” He grins, and before she can answer he grabs her by the back of the neck and plants another kiss on her forehead. “So I tweeted about the avocados, and now I might have as many as four hundred and eighty-nine people showing up in an hour for guacamole and this drink I found on the Internet that’s blue, and I need you to taste everything because I still can’t taste.”
“What’s in the drink?”
“Rum and blue Kool-Aid mostly, with green sugar on the rim. I just wanted it to be blue and green, like the Sylatron box. Here, taste the guacamole, would you?”
He has mashed it in a large frying pan with a scuffed black plastic handle. He dips a finger in and offers it to her and she takes a tentative lick. She squeezes her eyes shut again, smiling and wincing at the same time. “So salty!”
“See! That’s what I need you for! Or one thing, anyway. I was seasoning it while I was talking to my mom and I got distracted. Help me add more avocados.”
Dana washes her hands at the sink, soaping them so thoroughly it makes him grin. She holds her dripping hands upturned like a surgeon, looking around his counter at the crumpled hand towels, the box of hypodermic needles, and the pile of mail, and finally takes a paper napkin from a plastic bag lolling in the mash of green.
He says, “Hey, how’s your nausea?”
“Thriving.”
“Have you thought about seeing a doctor? Maybe it’s not the triathlon training. Maybe you’ve got some kind of bug. Swine flu. West Nile. Encephalitis.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the training.”
“Maybe it’s sympathy nausea! ‘Radiation Side Effects Particularly Strong in Devoted Lovers of Melanoma Patients, New Study Reveals.’ ”
“It’s worse after exertion, mostly after the longer runs.”
“Or hey! When was the last time you got your period?”
“A girl like me does not get inadvertently pregnant, Ian.”
“Accidents happen—”
“Only to disorganized people.”
“There’s always room for serendipity.”
“I take the pill, and I make you use a condom.”
“Okay, fair point. I have some ginger ale in the fridge if you want some.”
“That sounds pretty good, actually.”
She opens the refrigerator. Inside is a loaf of white bread, a six-pack of ginger ale, and one can of Boost nutritional supplement drink. She pulls out a ginger ale and cracks it open and takes a sip.
Then she goes to her backpack and brushes aside the millet and bits of peanut shell and opens a zippered compartment to withdraw a little plastic tube of multivitamin tablets—the kind you drop into water and make fizz. Ian is watching her. She takes a glass from his cupboard and drops an orange disk in the bottom with a tinkling sound. She fills it up with water and slides it toward him among the dark skins.
He watches it dissolve, hissing. An ugly lacing of yellow foam rims the top of the glass.
“It’s good for you,” she says.
“Maybe.”
“It can’t hurt.”
“We’ll see.”
“Humor me?”
He smiles at her. “As long as we both shall live,” and he gulps it down, tipping his head back, the ridge of scar exposed. Dana looks away, her eyes settling on his messy counter: the plastic bag of paper napkins, his keys and wallet, the sea of skins and streaks of avocado and a box of needles not quite closed and that pile of mail, slipping among the pits and peels. A postcard. A utility bill. An ad for a wireless plan. An open envelope from Aetna insurance, the top of it sticking out with a phone number handwritten in purple crayon across the top:
Dear Mr. Freeman:
We regret to inform you …
“What’s that from Aetna?” she says.
“Just a letter.”
“What do they regret to inform you?”
“They denied one of my claims.” He takes another avocado and slices it open with a heedless little zip of his paring knife.
“For how much?”
“Thirty thousand-ish.”
“That’s terrible!”
“We’ll see.”
“How can you say that?”
He squeezes the yellow-green into the pan. “I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”
“How?”
“One thing will happen. And then another and another. And so on.”
She grabs the letter. At the top is an incongruous blue-and-yellow logo—a stick figure with arms upraised to catch rays of light. Dana goes to her backpack and takes out a pen and a tiny notebook. “Do you mind if I write some of this down?”
“Not if you don’t mind my finding your relentless notetaking mysteriously arousing.”
She crouches among the seeds and writes, “Sylatron.… 888 micro-grams.… Aetna Claims Division.”
Ian is wiping his hands on his shorts as he moves to crouch next to her. He has to stand under the bird perch to do it, and he settles in beside her, the millet and hulls cracking beneath his bare feet. He kisses her on the shoulder.
“Hold on a sec,” she says, and keeps scribbling.
He kisses her again. “I can appeal it, Dana. It happens all the time with cancer treatments.”
“Can I borrow this for a night? There’s so much here.”
“You can borrow anything,” he says.
She makes another note. Then closes her notebook and slips it in a little pocket with the letter, folding it small.
He says, “What else have you got in there?”
She smiles and zips the pocket shut.
He says, “Please? Just a few things?”
She rolls her eyes, but she unzips the top compartment and reaches inside. She draws out a roll of duct tape. A ziplock bag of zip ties. A ziplock bag of ziplock bags.
“Temptress,” he says.
She pulls out a set of tiny screwdrivers. A box of matches. A pair of black sandals. A small white-noise machine and a little box of earplugs.
“Vixen.”
She laughs then and turns awkwardly to kiss him, a long kiss, both of them squatting over her backpack under the bird stand among his dirty shoes.
He says, “Will you stay for the party?”
She winces.
“Is that a yes?”
She puts the duct tape back in the bag. “I have twenty-three steps in my latest sleep-improvement regime.” She puts away the matches and the zip ties.
He says, “Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
“What is?”
“All the steps. A regime.”
She gathers the remaining things and arranges and rearranges them inside. He himself falls asleep so easily. She has seen it many times before she steals back to her snow white room, his arms and legs splayed wide in the center of his churned sheets, his lips parted. Sometimes tiny tears form at the outer corners of his closed blue eyes.
He says, “Maybe what you need is a super late night of blue drinks and the comfort of sleeping in an unfamiliar bed with a charming snorer who adores you.”
She is still shifting things around in her bag. “It’s just the way I’m built, Ian. That should comfort me—I’m with you on that—but it doesn’t. You know what comforts me?” She takes her hand out of her backpack and looks at him squarely.
“Tell me.”
“Being alone. Being in my own room alone. Or even—it’s crazy, get this—wearing a costume. Helmets too. Helmets comfort me. And sinking to the bottom of a public pool. Or here’s another weird one—being in a motel room. An empty, sterile, anonymous motel room.”
“You sleep well in motel rooms?”
“Well, no. But I feel comfortable in them. They soothe me.”
She takes the duct tape out one last time and moves it to the other side. The two of them are crouched so close together their faces are almost touching. Her elbow grazes him as she jockeys things around.
He says, “I love this backpack, Dana. This backpack has appeared in all five of my favorite dreams. But I’m telling you, whatever finally helps you sleep peacefully, it isn’t going to be in this backpack.”
“Why?” she says with mock surprise. “What’s missing?”
“They don’t make ziplocks for everything.”
“You do know they come in gallon and snack size now, right?”
“Some things can’t be bagged.”
“Like what?”
“Luck.”
“You’re so superstitious.”
“It’s not superstition. It’s respect for the inexplicable, and actually you’ve got plenty.”
“All those things you try to help you sleep. What is that if not voodoo?”
Everything is back in her backpack now, and she zips the top shut.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She looks tired, but Ian is smiling, and his eyes are soft on her.
She says, “You’re probably right. But for tonight at least, I better stick with my twenty-three steps. I want to be well rested for work and your sister’s wedding tomorrow. I know how important it is to you.”
He shrugs, still smiling. “We’ll see.”
“Besides”—she stands up, hefting the pack—“you’ve given me a project. You know how I like a project.”
The intercom rings then, and she turns and puts her hand on the doorknob, but he rises quickly and lays a hand against the door to stop her opening it. He presses the button on the intercom. “Avocasa!” he says. “Enter to be delighted!” Then he releases the button and lays his hand on Dana’s shoulder. Pieces of birdseed drop from their clothes to the floor, a soft ticking like the end of a rain.
“Dana,” he says. “I know it’s not the birds. Or the frogs. Or your insomnia.”
She keeps her chin level, but she cuts her eyes away to a point just beyond his face. She says, “I just think we should wait a while.”
“I know uncertainty is not your best thing, but the truth is, anything can happen. The treatment could work and I could live to be a hundred, still teaching surfing and annoying my neighbors with flamenco music. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow on my way to Rite Aid to buy more Boost.”
“Not if I buy you more Boost.”
He closes his eyes and presses a last kiss on her forehead. They can hear footsteps approaching in the hall. He takes his hand off the door.
“Have fun tonight,” she says, and then she steps out into the long beige hallway and turns left, away from his guests, and walks away without looking back. The sound of his Spanish music shimmies and pumps behind her and fades a bit each time she turns the corner, turns the corner, past the dark brown doors and the one little welcome mat, one little wreath, past her own door to the elevator to the garage.
The Boost, it turns out, is at the end of an aisle stocked disconcertingly with bedpans and adult diapers, and it takes her a second, standing there in the fluorescent light, to make herself move to take some from the shelf. The Muzak from above is something familiar but slowed down, and played with a tinny-sounding piano that makes her sad. The cans are grouped in packs of twelve, slipcovered in a cardboard case with a handle at the top, and when she places her hands on a pair at eye level on the top shelf and slides them back and off, taking their weight like a village girl with two buckets of water, she sees that there, pressed against the white perforated metal back wall of the shelving where the two cases of Boost used to be, is a single boxed pregnancy test.
Dana looks up and down the aisle for other boxes like it, but of course there are none. It is an aisle for the sick and dying. The box is pink, with a picture of a delighted woman holding the white plastic test stick, and a band of blue reads, “Second Test Free Inside.” On the shelf on either side of it is a thin furry strip of dust, where the cases of Boost never reach.
Back in the garage she finds the door to Ian’s green Volkswagen unlocked, as she knew she would, and she places the cases of Boost on his seat. Her apartment is dark now, but her window is still cracked and through it she can hear the flamenco music and the laughter from his party. She passes through her dark living room and flicks on the lights in her bathroom, and from her backpack she withdraws the boxed test. The instruction sheet crackles as she takes it out. She examines the pictograms. She reads the tiny print. She pulls down her pants and holds the stick between her legs, staring at her socks on the floor on the blue circle of rug. A faint chorus of cheers floats in from Ian’s party, and she recaps the stick and sets it facedown on the counter and fastens her pants and then flushes and washes her hands, soaping thoroughly. When she has dried them, she flips it over and sees that she is in fact pregnant.
Over the next hour, even with the blinds drawn and the window closed fully, she can hear the backbeat from Ian’s music. The Planned Parenthood website shows eight clinics offering abortion services within a ten-mile radius of her apartment. The American Cancer Society recommends a fifteen-step process for handling a denial of claim for prescribed treatments. The Patient Advocate Foundation has several sample letters of appeal. She owes him the news, she knows this, but it is ten o’clock, and his apartment is full of people, and the news is not only private, but also (she is certain) to him it will be heartbreakingly sad. Dana’s printer whirs and clicks, and she collates and staples as the papers roll out into the tray. She labels folders. She separates her printouts inside them with little colored tabs. Last, from under her keyboard she takes a cream-colored envelope addressed to Ms. Dana Bowman. There is an invitation inside it to the wedding, and a little card with printed directions to the chapel in San Marino where she will meet Ian after work. She will tell him in the parking lot in case he does not want her to stay. She adds this to the stack, and fits all of it neatly into a large flat pocket at the back of her backpack.
Then Dana irons her dress, setting up the board and iron in the center of her living room and doing a good job, taking care at the seams not to make the cloth pucker, and she zips it back into the clear bag and hangs it again in her closet.
When she slips into bed she is wearing just plain cotton underpants and a long white T-shirt. A black sleep mask and a pair of earplugs lie on the nightstand at the base of the lamp. She twists a switch to lower the light to a cavelike dimness, and she presses a button on her iPod, and the man’s voice is so soft and gentle it is almost shaky. There are long pauses, a minute or more, between the things he says.
“First, lie on your back with your arms and legs at a distance from each other that allows you to relax them completely.…”
“Notice if you are holding any tension anywhere else in your body.…”
“Notice your jaw.…”
During the pauses there is only her breathing, and the distracting bass thumping from Ian’s party, but lying there in the orderly dim, centered on the big bed beneath the print of triangle tiles that waver and change into birds, Dana ignores the backbeat and follows her plan.