And Again (8 page)

“You contracted an aggressive strain of HIV,” Dr. Bernard says.

“Lucky, right? Though,” she motions to the rest of us, “I guess I’m in good company when it comes to the luck department, aren’t I? We’re all either very lucky or very unlucky, hell if I know which.”

“And how does it feel, now that you have a second chance at the career you thought you lost?”

Connie sits back in her chair, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle, her feet almost reaching Dr. Bernard’s.

“Peachy,” she replies.

Dr. Bernard adjusts his tie, pulling it away from the skin of his neck. “Linda. Could you tell us a little about your situation before the transfer?”

Linda is still wide-eyed and twitchy, but some of last week’s terror seems to have left her. She swallows.

“I was in a car accident. Eight years ago.”

“And what happened as a result of that accident?” Dr. Bernard prods.

“I couldn’t move. I could blink, but that was all.” She blinks now, as if to demonstrate.

“I read about a guy who had that same thing,” David says, nodding, his face a phony attempt at gravity. “He wrote a book by blinking the letters of the alphabet. Or something like that.”

“I guess I didn’t make good use of my time then,” Linda replies, looking at her feet. I can’t tell if she’s trying to be funny.

“Linda, last week you asked us a question that we couldn’t answer, about your family, about whether they still love you. What made you ask that?” Dr. Bernard leans forward in his seat, his hands steepled in front of his mouth, his eyes intent on her.

“I don’t know,” Linda replies, simply, her voice devoid of emotion. “I guess I wouldn’t love someone who left me like that.”

Her words hit me in the stomach. Not because her situation is awful, though it is, terribly. But because in that moment I think of Sam. Like a reflex. I think of waking alone in that hospital room, of Lucy’s explanations. As if part of me knows a secret that the rest of me is trying, desperately, to unlearn.

I follow Hannah up to the roof after the support group disbands. It’s curiosity more than anything. She sat there like a stone for the last twenty minutes of the session, unmoving, her eyes fixed in middle space. It was something in Linda’s story, I think, that sunk her so far into her head that she only resurfaced when Dr. Bernard repeated her name, twice, before we finished.

Hannah has fascinated me ever since our little tête-à-tête near the coffee cart. Some part of me must have feared that I’d been lost in the transfer, too changed to return to my old life, until this girl turned all of her wrath in my direction. It’s amazing, how familiar it is to be hated, almost like coming home.

I follow her up five flights of stairs, pausing at each landing to regain the strength in my lungs and my legs, listening as she does the same a flight or two above me. She must hear me panting below her, but she doesn’t wait, and I wonder if the mood she’s in has divorced her from any hint of the world outside her own mind. She reaches a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only” and walks through with such unflinching confidence I wonder if she’s ever gotten in trouble for breaking a rule in her life.

Following her out onto the roof feels like summiting a mountain, all fresh air and endorphin-filled exhaustion. I’m sweaty and drained, and when I find her collapsed against a brick wall with her legs stretched in front of her, I drop like dead weight next to her. Street noise—the honking of horns, the squeaky breaks of city buses, and the rumble and jostle of traffic—wafts up around us, like music being played in a faraway room. It’s sunny, but gusts of
late-summer wind drive heavy, fast-moving clouds above us. Their shadows crawl their way across the concrete of the roof.

“I did Google you, actually,” she says, as if continuing a conversation we’ve already been having.

“I knew it,” I reply, feeling a small swell of triumph beneath my sternum.

“You were one of seventeen congressmen congratulated by a group called American Evangelicals for Life. For your opposition to, among other things, abortion and stem cell research.”

“I’ve been congratulated by a lot of people for my opposition to those things,” I reply.

“I wonder what American Evangelicals for Life would think of you taking part in a medical study involving human cloning.” She kicks off her sandals, flexing her feet. They are the color of frozen milk, so white they are almost blue. “Think they’d be cool with it?”

“Stem cell research takes a life in the name of medicine. I’ve done no such thing.”

“So you believe in God?” she asks. I venture a glance at her. She’s looking at me with such earnestness that I wonder if she’s fucking with me.

“Of course I believe in God. Don’t you?”

She shrugs. “I did when I was a kid. I guess I sort of grew out of it.”

I bristle a little at this, the way I do when faced with any sort of atheism, the people who believe they are superior and enlightened for believing in nothing. As if closing your eyes to the light is somehow the braver decision. “Believing in God isn’t like believing in Santa.”

“How does someone like you take part in this study? If there is a God, I think SUBlife is tantamount to laughing in his face. How do you believe in God and also choose to defy everything you’ve been taught to believe?”

“I’ll tell you and anyone else the same thing. That God put a gun to my head and asked me what I was willing to do to save
myself, to save this life that he gave me. And I answered that I would do anything. Because life is that precious to me.”

“I guess I can understand that,” she says, nodding. “But I’d bet you that congressman’s salary of yours that the AEL won’t.”

“Maybe not,” I reply. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and they’ll never find out.”

“And what if they do? Have you thought about what you’d do if you can’t go back to who you were before?” she asks. Her arm is brushing against mine. I wait a moment to see if she’ll move it, and when she doesn’t I press a bit more toward her.

“I haven’t thought about it much. There’s a lot about me that my constituents haven’t ever found out.” I want to shock this girl, because I think maybe she’s the type who is impressed by things that shock her. “You know, I used to steal cars as a kid.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” I reply, “there was this dealership in our town with a real shitty security system. We’d break in at night and get the keys, joyride around. I think to this day Mr. Beecham is wondering why the cars on his lot were always low on gas.” My body is suddenly drunk on the recklessness of being seventeen, punching through the darkness of rural routes without streetlights, hollering into air that was empty for miles. The thrill is so sharp, even in memory, that gooseflesh erupts on my skin. “And you? What will you do if you can’t go back?”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shifts, and I feel her arm pull away from mine. Her mouth tastes like heat when she kisses me, like the muggy, asphalt-baked air of summertime. It’s an appalling taste, and wholly intoxicating, like so many things I’ve experienced, a muddling confusion of attraction and revulsion. Coupled with my lingering memories, it’s overpowering. But she pulls away before I can give myself over to it. I move a hand to my mouth, wiping away the sheen of wetness there.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d do. Reckless things, probably.”

“I can’t afford to be reckless anymore,” I reply, trying to temper
everything that is rioting inside me. There are a lot of thrills to be had down that rabbit hole. I’ve been so marooned in this new body, so diminished and altered, that to be recognized by this girl feels like a small bit of salvation. But I cannot be that boy again. I cannot be this man. “I’m married.”

She nods, eyes downcast. But she doesn’t apologize. “You know, you look married.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, endlessly curious about how others perceive me, especially now. Especially her.

She shrugs, settling back against the wall. “Comfortable, I guess. Like you’re interested in the world, but not too interested, because you’ve not supposed to be looking for anything anymore.”

I’m not sure what to say to this. I’m not sure, not exactly, what it is I’ve found in Beth. A woman of great beauty, certainly. A political wife of the highest order. A competent, if not always exuberant mother to my son. I try and remember what it was I wanted on those nights, flying through the darkness, just careless enough to be free. I don’t remember wanting any of those things. And the thought scares me a little, scares me in a way driving ninety on a marginally paved road in a stolen car never did.

Hannah motions to my hand. “No ring?”

“Too big.” My fingers are tapered, almost feminine, when I’m used to seeing hands that belonged to a laborer, rough and calloused. Knuckles that had been cut and bruised in fistfights. Palms that never grew clammy, no matter how nervous I was. The broken thumb that gave a baseball the perfect bit of spin when I threw it. Hands that had shaken those of presidents and union leaders and billionaires, and demonstrated that I was just as formidable as any one of them. These hands are not mine. They are not the sum of my experiences. These hands belong to someone much weaker. “What about you?” I ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be engaged?”

“Sort of,” she says, playing with the hem of her scrub shirt. “We agreed that we’d get married after the transfer. If everything went the way it was supposed to.”

“So why are you up here being reckless with me?”

“Because you followed me up here at the wrong moment. Because nothing feels the way it’s supposed to,” she says, turning toward me, fixing me with those huge eyes of hers. “Can’t you tell? Nothing tastes the way I remember, everything is so bright it hurts, everything feels so . . .” She stops, and I understand it now, why the doctors brought the four of us together. It’s because I understand what she means, exactly what she means, and no one else in the world will. “How can I be the same person,” she asks, “when nothing feels the same?”

“Maybe we’re not the same people. Maybe we’re better than we were,” I reply, though I know it’s not the answer she wants.

“I guess we’ll see,” she says and rises, steadying herself on the brick wall, stepping over my outstretched legs to get to the door. I have to tamp down the sudden impulse to follow her, again, to make her stop, to keep her here. I think of Beth, flawless Beth, who never really tastes like anything I can discern, who is so familiar to me that the smell of her hair is as inconsequential as my own. Hannah opens the door and then pauses, turning back to face me.

“We’re not really off to a great start, are we?”

The world outside of my hospital window feels so huge I expect the air to be too thin to breathe. One morning last week a flock of birds blew around the sky like a swarm of bees. I watched for an hour as they gusted around, breaking and reforming like sea foam riding a wave. I sat there wondering at how full the world was, how huge, to include flocks of birds that do nothing but spend an afternoon riding the air. It reminded me of looking out my window at home, with Cora dozing in the chair next to me.

Connie visits one afternoon, a few days after our support group meeting. It’s just as jarring this time as it was the first time, to see Mary Jane Livingston step out of
Stratford Pines
and into my hospital room. It’s as if a wall between my two worlds has been breached, and one is leaking into the other. I want to ask her everything, ask what her secrets are, she who has seen so much more of life than I have. But it’s difficult to say anything, because what is the right thing to ask a person like her? I’m afraid of saying something silly, of scaring her away like a skittish bird landing on my windowsill. So I stay quiet because this is the best way to deal with people, from what I can tell.

“I hope you don’t mind me showing up again,” Connie says, taking a few steps in. She’s wearing scrubs too now, and I wonder what the trick to that is. I asked Tom to get me some earlier in the week, and he told me that only doctors and nurses wore them. I didn’t want to tell him that it wasn’t true, that I knew for a fact he was wrong. But now I feel dowdy and a bit infantile in my hospital gown and bathrobe. She crosses the room and takes a seat in the
chair next to my bed, Tom’s chair. But he’s not coming by until after work. And Connie is here now, looking as if she’s been gilded by sunlight against the gray sterility of the room.

“
Stratford Pines
starts in five minutes,” Connie continues. “I didn’t want to miss it. I’m so behind already. Do you mind?”

I shake my head. This is not the time to say anything, because what do you say if Paul McCartney stops by with a copy of
Sgt. Pepper’s
and wants to play it for you? Nothing, that’s right. You’d shut up and listen.

We watch the show together, like Cora and I used to do, with me lying in bed and her sitting on the chair next to me, her feet propped up on the edge of the mattress. It feels like sitting in a pool of sunlight, being next to her. She asks questions as we watch, about why Star and John are together, and why Kyle is suddenly named Tony, and why Krystal is living with her most hated rival, Sarah. And I tell her, as best I can, about evil twins and stolen babies and old enemies falling in love with each other. Things that I have lived, and get to live again now, in the telling.

Connie’s reactions to each of my revelations thrill me like gusts of soft heat pouring through my limbs, as if the show were something I myself created. As if it is my life that I’m recounting. How I have lived, I think. How many lives I have lived, from my hospital bed, and how wondrous it has been.

“What was it like?” I ask. “Being on the show, was it amazing?”

“It was a lot of long hours,” Connie says, and then she must see the slight fall in my expression, because she quickly adds, “But I made some great friends there. Good people. It was kind of like a halfway house for actors, you know?”

I nod, though I have no idea what she means. On screen, Chrissy throws a drink in Damien’s face. I grin, because boy does he deserve it, but Connie doesn’t seem to notice.