And Again (29 page)

David calls me on a Tuesday morning. Early. I ignore the call at first, afraid that it’s Sam, again, leaving a voicemail that I will again delete, unheard. I try to get back to sleep. But when I realize the effort is completely futile, I check my phone and realize it’s David who called. He picks up on the second ring.

“What if I’d been on a ledge when I called you?” he says, without even a greeting. “What if I was calling so you’d talk me down? You really think you could live with yourself if you left me hanging?”

“Are you on a ledge?” I ask, yawning.

“No, I’m in the middle of a conference call with the CEO of a fertilizer company. If that isn’t enough to make you want to off yourself, I don’t know what is.”

“I don’t know, isn’t dealing with excrement something that you’re used to as a member of the Republican Party?”

David laughs on the other end of the line. “Ouch, Reed. You really know how to hurt a guy.”

“How exactly are you talking to me if you’re on a conference call?”

“I have the linkup muted. You’d be surprised how much this guy has to say about fertilizer.”

“I’m sure I would,” I say, turning back over.

“Are you in bed?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I reply. “It’s a little early here in the world of the unemployed.”

“Can I come over?”

“No.”

“Come on,” he chides. “I want to see your place.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I want to see what you’re really like. See what books you have. Go snooping through your medicine cabinet. That sort of thing.” I think of bringing Sam to my old apartment, the one that held so much of me. David would learn nothing from this moneyed, sanitized version of my life.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not going to find out much about me here,” I reply. Then a thought occurs to me. “Hey, you want to see what I’m really like?”

The painting hangs in the Museum of Contemporary Art, where it has ever since Trevor won a commission for the lobby of the Wrigley Building two years ago and became the most in-demand young artist in Chicago. Penny was apoplectic about the whole thing, of course. It was all I could do to keep her from crashing her car when I told her.

“That pretentious weasel doesn’t have half of your talent,” she’d yelled, her voice careening around the interior of the little vehicle. “Why aren’t you more pissed about this?”

I hadn’t been, not at the time. Perhaps because I knew, in the back of my mind, that it was only a matter of time before it would be my work hanging in the galleries and the historic lobbies. Perhaps because I knew that Penny was right, that his talent couldn’t touch mine. That my time would come.

I’d come to visit the painting every once in a while before the transfer, as if it were an abandoned child, left in the city its maker had outgrown. Trevor was in New York, last I heard, dating a chef from the Food Network and failing to follow up on his early success. Now, standing in front of the painting again sends a low thrill through me, like running into an ex-lover on the street and smiling at each other a little too long. But there’s pain there, too. Because I can understand what Trevor must be feeling now, to have all the potential in the world and worry it will never be realized.

I’m quiet as David’s eyes move over it, taking in the lines, the warm color of my skin in the lamplight, the lavender tendrils of my hair, the tattoos on my arm and wrists and hip. I have an odd sense of déjà vu, of standing in front of this painting with a man and testing his reaction.

“This is you?” he asks.

“About five years ago, yeah.”

“You were a bit of a punk, huh?”

“Yes, grandpa. A bit.”

He adjusts the Cubs cap he’s wearing, no doubt an attempt to disguise himself out in the world. I wonder what he thinks of me now, now that he’s seen who I am, who I was. I wonder if he knows what he’s gotten himself into.

“It’s not how I imagined you,” he says.

“How exactly did you imagine me?” I’m a little afraid of the answer. He shifts again, and it’s then that I realize he’s uncomfortable. The great David Jenkins is uncomfortable here, standing in front of a nude painting with the girl it portrays standing next to him. Except this time, unlike last time with Sam, I doubt anyone would make the connection between me and her. How I miss her, I think, looking up at those dark lines.

“I don’t know. Not so rough, I guess.”

“Rough?” I can see his expression hardening in front of me, like he’s making the conscious decision to be a bastard. I’ve seen this look before.

“I never understood why perfectly attractive young women would want to mark themselves up like that.”

“You know, you have a real gift for paying someone a compliment while you insult them. Is that something that comes with the office?”

“All I’m saying is, it’s not my cup of tea. I’ve never been a fan of that sort of thing.”

“Well,” I say, injecting as much acid into my voice as I can muster, “Lucky I didn’t do it for men like you.”

“Did Sam like it? The tattoos and the piercings, and having a girlfriend who doesn’t mind stripping down for some schmuck with a paintbrush who couldn’t get into a decent college?” he asks. His expression is so smug, so painfully superior, that the desire to spit in his face is barely within my control.

“Even if he didn’t, he liked everything else.” It’s absurd, to be defending Sam, after everything. To be defending our relationship to the man I’ve used to break it apart.

“Not anymore, apparently.”

I walk away from him then, because staying for even one moment more would break the last thread of my control. It’s not that I’m afraid of the ferocity of my anger, or the ramifications of screaming at him in public. It’s that I’m afraid I might cry, the pressure of my anger is so intense it closes my throat, and crying is the last thing I want to do in front of David. It would ruin it, to cry in front of him, to put him in the position of having to apologize or, god forbid, comfort me. This, this interaction I have with him, it only works if I can hate him. Hating him makes it better. And even as I leave him there, winding my way through the exhibits until I reach the lobby, banging through the doors into the bracing air of the street outside, even then, even though he’s a bastard, and I certainly know better, I’m already anticipating the next time we’ll meet.

I go to see Dr. Shah. I’ve always liked Dr. Shah the best of all my doctors. I was surprised by her age when I first encountered her in the hospital, when she leaned over my still, supine anchor of a body. She comes into the examination room smelling like bubblegum, her hair held up haphazardly in a tortoise clip, her white coat loose over a precariously short pink dress. She is a half-decade younger than I am, though she possesses a list of accomplishments that would have been impressive for a doctor twice her age. Now she’s as fresh and enthusiastic as ever, almost comically so considering the program she’s charged with overseeing.

“So how’s it going, Linda?” she asks, perching on the stool across from where I sit, her eyes wide under thick, long eyelashes.

“Well, I’m still on my feet,” I say with a meager smile.

“Phenomenal, isn’t it?”

“Most days,” I reply.

She nods, sagely. There’s a small imprint on her nose that I’m sure once held a piercing.

“Having a hard time? Let me say first, it’s very normal for survivors to have a difficult time reentering their lives in the beginning. You’ve been through a very intense physical and psychological trauma, even if it wasn’t in this particular body.” She speaks in the way I imagine a sorority girl might when explaining the house rules to new pledges. But I listen with rapt attention because I know her manner belies an almost savant-like understanding of medicine.

“I’m pregnant,” I say, all at once, the way I couldn’t with Connie on the street. And then I think I’ve said absolutely the wrong thing,
because Dr. Shah’s brow creases so severely I wonder if it makes her forehead ache.

“Pregnant,” she says, and then everything in her forehead smoothes out and she smiles, a little less exuberantly than before, but no less genuinely. “That’s wonderful Linda. Congratulations.”

“The problem is, I think,” I say, stumbling a bit in the middle. “I think maybe I don’t want to go through with it.”

“With the pregnancy?” she asks, as if I could be talking about anything else.

“I think it’s too soon after the transfer,” I say, trying to remember all the things that Connie said that made her argument seem so bulletproof. “I’ve only just gotten my life back. I don’t think I can handle any more complications.”

Dr. Shah taps her forefinger to her lips. I look down at her from my perch and wonder if I’ve ever seen the bubbly light in her so dimmed.

“The thing is, Linda,” she says, looking up at me with her huge, earnest eyes. “I don’t have authorization to allow you to terminate a pregnancy.”

“What?” The examination room seems to be growing colder by the minute, the harsh bite of alcohol in the air chilling the insides of my lungs.

“I would have to get authorization from the SUBlife committee to even prescribe the most basic of medications to you. I don’t have authorization to perform a surgical procedure, much less terminate a pregnancy.” It’s as if she’s explaining the rules of bridge. It’s all I can do not to pull on my clothes and run from the room.

“Can you get authorization?” I ask, my voice a little more pinched than a moment ago.

“Linda, the sort of data this pregnancy provides the study is literally unprecedented. I can’t see them approving anything that would limit the sort of knowledge they could gain from this.”

“It’s my body,” I whisper. She nods, looking a little sick.

“Of course it is, of course it is. But in the paperwork you signed
before the transfer, you specifically consented to allow the SUBlife committee discretion in your medical treatment for the next five years.”

“My husband.”

“What?” she asks.

“My husband signed that paperwork. Not me.” I must be pale. I must be shaking. Something. Because she rises quickly from her seat, placing a steadying hand on each of my shoulders.

“Think of this as an opportunity, Linda. To begin again with your family. This could be the beginning of something . . .” she searches for the word, and breaks into her cheerleader grin again. “Something great.”

I consider how wonderful it must be, to be a brilliant young doctor, now that we live in the time of a miracle cure. When there are fewer lost causes, when nothing is incurable. I think of the future, a future in which people will only fear the most acute sort of deaths. Car accidents. Gunshot wounds. Unexpected, irreversible conditions. How lucky she is to be able to administer the cure without needing it herself.

I nod, giving her my well-practiced smile. Make her think it will be all right, that it could even be great, though none of it is true. It’s the story I’ve told myself every day since the transfer, but none of it is true.

The story breaks on a Thursday morning and it takes me a moment to realize it’s Sam’s name in the byline. I’m too caught up in the fact that it’s happened, so soon, and so completely. The
Chicago Tribune
has published a piece about the Northwestern SUBlife trials. And worse, it names Congressman David Jenkins as one of the study’s participants.

I’m actually a few paragraphs into the article, skimming through a brief description of the transfer procedure and details about David’s illness, before I recognize the writing. I’ve read so much of Sam’s work—everything, really, that he’s published since we’ve been together—that the voice is immediately familiar. I barely have to glance at the byline to know that it’s him.

And, of course, it’s all there. Everything I’ve mentioned to Sam in the months since the transfer, all of those little details I’d foolishly assumed I could trust him to keep secret or, at the very least, not write about for the papers. Mercifully, the rest of us are only mentioned in passing, as the “three other members of Jenkins’s support group, each with their own terminal or degenerative condition.” But David is drawn in pitiless detail, everything from the number of times he’s voted to cut Medicaid, to allegations that he used his political influence to buy his way into the pilot program.

And there’s more. Things I didn’t know, paragraphs I have to re-read standing up at my table after I’ve kicked over the nearest chair. Confirmed phone calls from David to an official at the FDA. Threatening calls. Mounting evidence that David has been trying to keep SUBlife from being approved.

I stuff the paper into my purse and bang my way out of the apartment. There is only one place in the world I can be right now. And even though group doesn’t begin for another three hours, I have the sneaking suspicion that I won’t be the only one arriving early today.

There are already protesters outside the hospital. It’s almost impressive that they can congregate so quickly, considering the story just broke this morning. As if they’re all part of some sort of Evangelical call-tree, like mothers who phone each other when school is cancelled because of snow. Maybe all it takes is a phone call to mobilize twenty people who don’t mind screaming at strangers in the name of Jesus.