And Again (30 page)

They have signs. Some of them hold the newspaper in front of them, David’s campaign-smile showing in the muddy black and white of its photo. Others have hurriedly painted posters in the same shade of bright red. Abomination. Sin. Satan. I can only see single words, something in my brain has clicked off, something that has made it difficult to comprehend anything beyond single words and the mass of angry voices being hurled at anyone who dares enter the hospital. Adrenaline, I think, feeling my heart still pounding as I get through the doors and escape into an elevator. Fight or flight. It’s not important to be able to read when you’re running for your life.

I’m the last to arrive, in fact. Even Dr. Bernard sits with his hands cupping his jaw, waiting for me to appear. I feel like I might be late, forgetting for a moment that none of us are supposed to be here yet, not for hours, but I am too cracked open to think clearly. David is on his feet, though, and my vision tunnels around him. I fish the paper out of my purse.

“What have you been doing?” I ask, my voice so much calmer than I would have expected.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he replies, not calm, not even a little. Almost shouting, stepping toward me. I throw the paper at him, halting him as he bats it away.

“Okay,” Dr. Bernard says, on his feet as well now, stepping between us. “I think we all need to take a minute here.”

“Yeah, sure, doc,” Connie says. She’s sitting with her arms folded, unreadable. I’d think she was bored, if I didn’t know her so well. Linda’s face is half covered, her nose and mouth eclipsed by both of her hands.

“You think I don’t know who Sam Foster is?” David yells, flushed down to his collar, the veins standing cable-rigid in his arms as he gestures at me. I realize, for the first time despite the nights that we’ve spent unclothed together, that David has become physically formidable in these months since the transfer. “Your self-righteous journalist boyfriend? You think I don’t know where he got his information? Where he got my name?”

This is not my fault. He cannot possibly make this my fault. I’m worried, suddenly, that I might cry. It was a lifelong annoyance, the tendency of my old body to dissolve into stupid, useless tears when I was angry. That particular weakness seems to have trailed me into this new form, and it makes me doubly furious, as I swallow against the raw ache in my throat, that this body has retained all of the wrong things.

“Well I certainly didn’t tell him that you’ve been trying to keep SUBlife from getting FDA approval.” Good, my voice has some volume now. I think Linda may be crying, but I can’t stop. “What is it, David? Is it okay with God that you saved yourself as long as you make sure no one else can?”

“You rotten bitch.”

I can’t recognize any of the man I’ve known in David. I have known his wants, the way every bit of him feels. But I’ve never before known his anger, the venomous rage in him. He’s probably more alive than I’ve ever seen him.

“All right, that’s enough,” Dr. Bernard snaps. Then one quiet voice comes through, clearer than all of the rest.

“What are we going to do?” Linda asks, raising her face from her hands. She’s not crying, after all. I wonder what it would take to
make this woman cry, this woman who has withstood more horror than the rest of us can imagine. “Did you see the people outside? How are we going to be able to meet here, with them out there?”

David laughs, a bitter sound. He reaches down and picks up the newspaper at his feet. “This? This means that everyone knows what’s happening here. You honestly think we’re going to be able to keep meeting after this? Come on, Linda. That’s naive even for you.”

“Get out, David.” It’s Connie who speaks. She’s calm. Her face is a study in well-controlled wrath, and it’s a fearsome thing to behold. “Get out of here. This is over for you now.” We are all still, waiting to see what comes next.

“Fine. Fuck it,” David says, pulling a cigarette out of the pack in his jacket pocket and lighting it up right there, his pose careless, flouting the rules. There he is, the boy who would joyride in stolen cars as a teenager. No wonder I was drawn to him. “It’s not like this was doing any goddamn good anyway,” he says. Then he drops the barely smoked cigarette on the floor, stomps it out with the toe of his shoe, and heads for the door. Dr. Bernard sits back down, smoothing out the fabric of his dress pants as if he’s been in a scuffle. I, too, drop into one of the open seats.

“What do we do now?” Linda repeats, looking from Dr. Bernard to Connie to me.

“I’ll confer with the other doctors involved in the study,” Dr. Bernard says. “This is a serious breach of confidentiality. And if the lottery was compromised, it might put the whole study at risk. The FDA votes in only a few months . . .” He chews on the inside of his cheek as his eyes land in middle space, vacant with the furious calculations that must be going on in his head.

“No one else recognized him?” I ask, but no one answers. I am left to wonder what it means, that I’m the only one who knew exactly who he was, all along.

I run into Linda at Trader Joe’s. At first, I can’t place her. She’s out of context, away from the hospital and the rest of the group, dressed in ill-fitting jeans and a baggy T-shirt. She has her kids with her, a skinny, sullen-looking girl in a Chicago Sky T-shirt and a boy whose smile reveals half-grown-in front teeth. We spot each other at the same time, at opposite ends of the aisle. At first we both hesitate, unsure of the rules, if we’re allowed to acknowledge each other after everything that has happened. But then Linda starts toward me and so I maneuver around other families with carts until we meet in front of the shelves of dried fruit.

“You look tired,” she says by way of greeting. It’s forever our function, it seems, to evaluate and comment on each other’s physical appearances. She glances down at her kids. “This is Katie and Jack. Kids, this is Hannah. She’s a friend of mine. From the hospital.”

I give them a little wave, trying my best to portray normality as best as I can, as if I’m the person who must confirm for them that their mother wasn’t abducted by aliens or grown out of a pod. It makes me wish I’d showered today, rinsed some of the thick grease out of my hair. They look at me blankly, unimpressed in the way only children can be.

“Why don’t you two go get those ice cream bars that you like, hmm?” Linda says, shooing them toward the freezer cases. She sighs when they’re out of earshot. “I hope it’s ice cream bars they like. It’s so hard to keep up with all of it. Jack’s cutting me slack, but it’s still eight years’ worth of stuff I don’t know.”

“It’ll get easier,” I reply.

“Sometimes I get the distinct sense that Katie is angry with me. And I can’t tell if it’s because I was paralyzed in a bed all their lives, or if it’s because I decided to wake up and change everything without asking them first.”

“They probably just need more time to adjust,” I say, because I have little else but platitudes to offer Linda. I am as lost as she is, knocking around my empty apartment, watching daytime TV in my pajamas, sleeping in taxing, fitful shifts. This is the first time I’ve ventured outside in days, and it’s only to replenish my stores of peanut butter and potato chips. I have yet to find this body’s upper limits when it comes to the consumption of junk food, but I’m not one to back down from a challenge. “I’ve been watching
Stratford Pines
,” I say, offering a consolation for my lackluster advice.

“Oh, isn’t it great?”

“It is,” I say, because while it is indeed a terrible show, there’s something satisfying in its simplistic melodrama. It’s easier to think of the world as a place where love and hate and betrayal are threads that do not cross, instead of existing in a constant jumble, a knot I cannot even touch, much less try to untangle. “I’m trying to figure out who the stalker is.”

“If you’ve been watching as long as I have, it gets pretty easy to figure out,” Linda replies. “But I won’t spoil it for you.” I’m struck by how different she is now, how present and capable compared to the woman who would barely speak after the transfer.

“Have you heard from any of the others?” I ask. I imagine Linda and Connie meeting in a coffee shop, or in the bright sunlight of a park somewhere. They’re not at the hospital, at least, not on Thursday afternoons. I know because I’ve been going there, staking it out, just in case I spot one of them. But no one comes. Week after week, I stand there alone.

Linda shakes her head, looking pensive, wistful even. “No. I haven’t heard from either of them. Not since the last time. You?”

I shake my head. “Though, I keep waiting for a call from David’s lawyer, for violating the confidentiality agreement. Ruining his career.”

Linda smiles a little. “I think you underestimate his feelings for you,” she replies, and I wonder how much she knows, how much she has suspected.

“It’s harder, isn’t it? Doing this on our own? I never would have expected it could get harder.”

“It won’t always be like this,” she says. “Give it time.”

I’m not sure if she’s even aware that she’s handing my same useless platitude back to me. But I can see something in her now, a patience, something that makes her seem older than I remember. It’s motherly, that way about her.

There’s not much else to say, but we both linger a little longer. It feels good, running into Linda in the long drudgery of my daily life, like finding money in the street. Something unexpected and a little bit thrilling, a change of luck. Linda must feel the same way because neither of us seems to want to leave.

“Maybe you and I can meet and talk, once in a while,” I say, desperate to keep some connection to the three people who know me better than anyone, even when they don’t particularly know much about me at all. “Watch some
Stratford Pines
?”

“I don’t know, Hannah,” Linda says, drawing a hand across her stomach. “I’ve haven’t had as much time to keep up with it as before. You know, with the kids.”

“Of course,” I say. “Of course, I understand.” She gives me a squeeze on my arm and wheels her cart away from me. I blink hard, waving again at her kids as I pass them. They eye me with unguarded suspicion.

I glance back at Linda just in time to see her slip a package of trail mix into her purse. She tucks it under her arm and goes back to consulting her shopping list like any other mother on a grocery run. But she’s not. She’s not like everyone else. She’s a woman who lived in a white-walled room, unmoving, for eight years. I think that Sam was right, that it has to have an impact, everything the members of our groups have had to endure. So, while I myself don’t steal anything from the store, I can understand the impulse.

I work my way back up to Scotch. It takes time and a lot of dedication because my taste buds have reverted back to the days when I’d drink sugary sodas and dump a long succession of creamers into my coffee. But as the months pass I move from faux wine to Jack-and-gingers to Old Fashioneds and then there I am, finally, sipping Scotch and hating it in some hipster bar on Lincoln Avenue. The lady bartender has an intricate tattoo of a mermaid running from her shoulder to her elbow. It makes me think of that painting of Hannah and, though the bartender is nowhere near as pretty as Hannah, I find myself chatting with her for a little too long. She has a silver ring in her nose and bleached-blonde hair, and she laughs heartily at my jokes, which are subpar at best. I wonder if she’ll go home with me if I ask. And then I do ask, more to quell my own curiosity than anything else. She smiles.

I buy another drink, running down the clock until this tattooed little college dropout is off work, and I catch my reflection in the mirror above the bar. I’ve been avoiding mirrors since the transfer, since the self that I imagine when I close my eyes and the self I see in the mornings are two very different men. But now it looks like all the working out has paid off, because I can see muscle definition through the sleeves of my shirt. I’ve let my beard grow back. It’s easier, now that my new face has been splashed all over blogs and newspapers and magazines, because people don’t recognize me as easily with facial hair. It’s too unexpected. They don’t make the connection; politicians never have facial hair. I don’t look like me, not really, but I don’t look that bad either. It’s no wonder this little bartender is interested.

There are three missed calls from Jackson on my phone. He is in such a constant, furious state of damage control that I’ve begun ignoring him so I can get drunk in peace. The people of my district are furious with me for taking part in a treatment that involves human cloning. The rest of the country is furious that I bought my way into a clinical trial from which I should have been disqualified. The guys in my caucus and the Republican leadership are incensed that I’d get caught trying to tamper with an FDA study. People are talking about recall elections. People are talking about hearings in front of the disciplinary committee. I’ve been accused of everything from corruption to blasphemy to murder, ostensibly of the person whose life should have been saved in place of mine during the pilot program. I’ve done my best to ignore most of it. Beth is holding up like any good political wife would, keeping a stiff upper lip and shaking off the media attention with her trademark WASP-y coolness. It’s Jackson who can’t seem to let our presidential dreams go.