And Again (26 page)

“You know,” I say, everything in me hardening with resolve. “You know. Don’t make me ask.”

He shakes his head, unfastening his tie and throwing it on the table. Doing anything he can to keep from answering. Finally he looks up at me.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

A laugh tears its way out of me. It’s all become so absurd, absurd to the point of comedy, that we could keep this farce going even a minute longer. I want to tell him that this body isn’t his. My old body might have belonged to him, but not this one, not anymore.

“Do you really think saying it out loud will make any difference?” I ask. “How about this? I’ll go first,” I say, because I’ve forgotten not to hurt him. I can feel all of the sadness and regret wash out of me, my anger like a purifying fire. “I slept with David Jenkins. Your turn.”

Both his hands come down on the table, fast, and I jump at the noise. It silences me, both of us. We stand there. He doesn’t look at me. And his expression changes then because he finally understands what this is. He knows that this is how it ends.

“Goddamn you,” he says, his hands tightening into fists as he straightens to face me. “Fine. I didn’t have the flu. All right? Is that what you want to hear?”

“Maybe,” I reply. I think of Lucy crying into his shirt, the way he held her, the intimacy there. Yes, I want to hear all of it, every detail. If for no other reason but that it will wipe away my guilt over David. “Tell me about what happened with Lucy.”

“She covered for me. She lied, even though she didn’t want to. She did it because I begged her to.”

“What happened, Sam?”

“I couldn’t stay,” he says. “The doctors, they told me that you wouldn’t survive the week, your numbers were too low, you weren’t going to make it to the transfer. And I couldn’t stay there and watch.”

“What?” I have never heard this. No doctor has ever told me this. But the pain of that week was so intense, so wrenching, I know it must be true. I know that I was dying.

“I couldn’t watch that, not with you. So I got in my car and . . . drove. For days. Just drove, to Montana, Wyoming, I think. Waiting for Lucy to call and tell me . . .” He’s crying. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him cry, in all the years I’ve known him.

“Oh god.” I grip the back of a chair. My palms are wet. There’s a taste of metal on my tongue. I sit down carefully, my mouth pressed into my hand.

“I was out of my mind. I can’t even . . .”

“You need to go,” I say, but there’s no air behind it, it’s the barest of whispers. This is too much, too much for this new body, maybe. I’m cold, a deep cold. As if this truth, the one I had not prepared for, has set off some terrible chain reaction within me. I’m worried it’s more than this body can take. “Please. I don’t want you to come back here.”

“Hannah.” He drops to his knees in front of me, clasping my hands in his. He is so warm that I want to curl into him, let him gather me up. But I can’t. I can’t stop remembering what it was like to wake up day after day and ask for Sam, because Sam was who I asked for when I was scared. And he was gone.

“Please. You have to go.” I can ask this of him, and I know he will give it to me. His body shudders a bit, and then he straightens.

“I’m sorry. Please, know that,” he says. I can only shake my head. He should have chosen someone good, someone like him. He knows that I am not one for forgiveness. So he takes his keys out of his pocket and works the silver one off the ring, setting it on the table between us. Then he picks up his suitcase and leaves.

Hannah calls me in the middle of the night, but I’m awake. I haven’t been sleeping well since Beth left to go back to Wisconsin to be with David Jr.; since the call with Burt Leeland. The apartment feels foreign, cold, and hard around me like everything in it has been carved from stone.

“I need to talk,” she says, a strange crackle in her voice that I mistake for the static of her cell phone.

“It’s a little late,” I say, and then wait for a response. “Hannah?” Nothing comes. I let out a long breath. “All right, come over. You remember the address?”

“Yeah,” she says.

She shows up at my door and she looks bad, like she has an awful head cold. But when she steps closer, steps inside, I can see that I’m wrong. She’s not sick. She’s upset. She glances around the darkness in my apartment, the flicker of the television strobing against the living room wall, the college basketball game I’ve been dozing in and out of for the past hour or so. Her eyes look hollow in the dark, her hair lank around her shoulders.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, but she shakes her head. It’s a cold feeling, when she kisses me, so different from the scorch of that kiss on the rooftop, or Beth’s tepid embraces. Even her skin under my hands feels chilled by the winter air, and she tastes of salt, and I think of water, huge expanses of dark water. And I know that I’ve been lying this whole time, when I’ve been shouting to myself and anyone else who will listen that I’m a different person. A better man. That I’ve changed, that last time was a one-off, a misstep that
can be corrected. Because this girl, this damn girl, knows me too well already. She knows that I can’t say no. Not here, alone in the middle of the night in the darkness of my apartment, with this cold girl in my arms, where the possibility of daylight feels very remote. Here there is only going under. Here, there is only giving in.

It strikes me anew, when we’re upstairs in the muddy streetlight flooding my bedroom, how different her body is from the other women I’ve known. She feels like bone beneath my hands, and her skin is distractingly flawless, so different from Beth’s marks and moles and the dark seam of the C-section scar that traverses her belly. Hannah is thin and supple and pliant beneath me, and I want her with such force I’m afraid of hurting her. There is something so tender and vulnerable about her, like the skin of a nectarine, as if I could bruise her with simply the press of a fingertip. And it’s all a little sickening, the strength of my desire and the ferocity with which she answers it. This is how people are ruined, I think. This is how kingdoms are toppled. Wanting, like this.

It’s only after, when she’s lying facing away from me on the bed with the sheet curled around the jab of her hipbone, that I think of Beth and the second chance I’ve already begun to squander. The thought makes me angry.

“Where’s Sam tonight?” I ask, because I want to be a little mean to this girl, as she has been to me by showing up at my door tonight.

“Gone,” she says, her voice flat. She doesn’t cry, or even breathe any differently after she says it. It’s as if all the emotion has been drained from her, left her still and empty, and I think that I’ve been the tool of this transformation.

“His choice or yours?”

“His,” she says, but I think she’s lying. My lower lip is bleeding from her teeth. Tonight was a palate-cleansing sort of fuck, like she’s trying to blot out the memory of someone else. And she doesn’t seem like the sort of woman that men leave.

“Too bad.”

“Where’s your wife?” she asks, and there’s more than a little cruelty in her voice.

“Wisconsin. With my son.”

“Must get lonely for you here.”

“Sometimes.”

She turns to face me then. “Does she know?”

“Does she . . .”

“About your extracurricular activities.” The way she says it makes me want to kiss her, or throttle her, to wipe the smugness out of her expression.

“What makes you think I’ve done this before?” I ask.

“I would think you’d look a whole lot guiltier now if you’ve never done this before.”

I sit up, finding my boxers in the mess of blankets and pulling them on. I don’t want to look at her because she’s right, I should feel guiltier. But she’s wrong, too, in a way. This body that was supposed to be my clean slate. This body that was supposed to make me better.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asks, and the easiness in her voice is sort of astonishing, considering the state she was in when she arrived. It strikes me for the first time that she might be dangerous, this girl. She might be made of tougher mettle than I ever imagined. But now it’s me who doesn’t want to be alone.

“You can stay if you want,” I reply, getting up and walking to the bathroom, taking a piss with the door open.

“I realized something the other day,” she says, her voice floating in from the bedroom. I splash some water on my face and chest from the sink.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t think I’ve dreamed at all since the transfer.”

“Dreamed?” I reenter the bedroom, and she’s lying half covered with the sheet. She doesn’t look real, lying there in the streetlight. I want to sink my teeth into her, like stepping into new snow. I want the satisfaction of it, to mar something that is too, too perfect.

“At night. I used to dream a lot. I used to wake up tired in the mornings from it, these really long, realistic dreams. But now I wake up and I can’t remember a single thing. I can’t remember if I’ve been dreaming at all.”

It’s a bit unsettling, because when I think about it there hasn’t been a single night since the transfer that I haven’t slept in complete oblivion. “I don’t think I have either.”

“Doesn’t that make you sad?” she asks, as I settle back on the bed beside her. “The idea that maybe we can’t? It’s like being told that you’ll never see the stars again. You don’t think much about them until they’re not there anymore.”

It’s too much to think about all we’ve lost. To tally all the bits of ourselves we’ve had to shed to stay alive.

“Sometimes I think I could spend the rest of my life waiting for the things I’ve lost since the transfer to come back,” she says, and I know we’re thinking the same thing. “But then what good would the rest of my life be?”

I don’t answer her. I don’t have an answer. Instead I pin her wrists at her sides and go to work on the skin at the inside of her right hip bone until an angry wheel of color shows under my mouth.

Jackson arrives early the next morning, before I’m even out of bed. It used to be disconcerting when I was first running for Congress, the sort of access that my staff required, how people seemed to be constantly letting themselves in and out of our hotel suites or our home in Wisconsin. Now it just feels typical, as Jackson raps twice on my bedroom door and pauses for permission to be admitted. I sit up in bed, rubbing a crust of dried saliva from the corner of my mouth.

Hannah is already gone. I never expected her to stay the night, but still it feels a little unfinished with her absent. There are probably still things for us to say to each other. But it’s better this way, now that Jackson’s here.

“Yeah,” I call toward the door. Jackson enters in one brisk, economical movement, though his eyes are on his cell phone.

“Good morning, sir.”

“What’s the word, Jackson?”

“I’ve got your call sheet for the morning,” he says, dropping a folder stuffed with papers on the bed in front of me.

“And let me guess, is Rick Preston’s name on it?”

“For the fifth week in a row, yes,” he replies. “And I’m not sure the best course of action is waiting for another call from Leeland before you get this done.”

I open the file. Rick Preston’s name is indeed at the top of the list.

“The FDA vote isn’t until August. And I don’t intend to jump the minute Burt Leeland snaps his fingers. If he’s going to have a Labrador in Congress, he’s going to understand that it’s a reluctant one.”

“I understand, sir. But, while Leeland might seem like a sweet old man, he has an itchy trigger finger when he feels like he’s being tested.”

I shut the file and toss it toward my feet. “So, theoretically speaking—”

“Because you know how much I love it when we get theoretical.” Jackson’s tone has an insolence in it that he tempered better before I got sick. And I’m in no mood this morning.

“Jackson, I know I’m sitting here in my boxers, but let’s not forget that I’m a U.S. Congressman, all right?”

He blanches, straightening his glasses. “Of course, sir.”

“To absolutely flog a metaphor here, what happens if we take the ammo out of Leeland’s gun?”

“If we?” Jackson makes a motion like he’s about to sit on the corner of the bed, then immediately thinks better of it and pulls up a chair.

“We make a statement about my involvement in SUBlife. ‘It’s a lifesaving procedure with far-reaching benefits to humanity,’ that sort of thing.”

Jackson looks like he’s bracing to be slapped. “Theoretically speaking?”

“Humor me.”

“Well, you can kiss S&J’s campaign contribution good-bye, for starters,” he says. “Though, that point would probably be moot.” He stops then.

“Why?” I ask.

“With seventy-eight percent of your district identifying as Christian, devoutly Christian, all the money in the world couldn’t buy back the votes you’d lose right there. And that gets even worse if Leeland leaks how you got your way into that study in the first place. Then you’re a man who took a seat in a lifeboat from someone else. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone would attempt to bring criminal charges against you.”

“Jesus.” For the first time, I can feel how little sleep I’ve had. My eyes feel raw. My limbs ache.