If I Told You Once: A Novel (38 page)

Dawn was just breaking when we left, a baby-pink light in the sky. We drove through parts of the city I had never seen before, that I had not known existed. Buildings rose up with points and curved spires, and gargoyles leaned from the eaves sticking out their tongues. The streets were deserted, metal grills covered the storefronts. The sun rose bright orange, a ball of fire.

I should have been excited to be leaving the city for the first time. I was setting out just as Ilana had at my age. I would get to see the world firsthand, instead of hearing about it filtered through the stories of other people.

But I did not care, I was cold, I sat with my knees pulled to my chest and stared at the little snow globe stuck to the dashboard of the car, watched the little white bits swirl around in the water. It hovered straight in front of me, as if it were a mirage we were driving toward.

Oh man, I don’t believe it, it’s snowing, Vito said.

I did not bother to look up.

I can’t believe it. In the middle of summer.

I kept my eyes on the snow inside the globe.

Hey, it’ll cover our tracks, he said and forced out a laugh.

He was enjoying himself, his eyes still crusted with sleep and a big bottle of soda nestled up against his crotch. I did not ask him how he learned to drive, when he learned to steal cars. I did not care.

We drove over bridges and along dull gray highways. My body felt numb and heavy, a sackful of ball bearings. I watched the snow swirling around in the oval of glass. Inside was a forest, and a tiny Santa, and a little house all cozy and safe.

Are you sure you want to do this? Vito said. Are you sure you want to kill it?

I’m trying to save it, I said.

Save
it? he said.

I said nothing.

How could I explain?

I looked at the people in the other cars around us. People sealed in behind glass, like tropical fish in aquariums. As if they would die if the outside air touched them. People seemed so fragile to me suddenly, so easily broken. Not just those people in the cars. All people. Vito, me, the child inside me. Any of us could be snuffed out in an instant. Arbitrarily. Or on a whim. A sudden tug on the steering wheel to send the car flying. A decision made on the spur of the moment.

I wanted to crawl inside that tiny house within the globe and hide, and listen to the waves and white snow beat against the windows.

*   *   *

The town was on the coast; there were neon-lit bars and long low strips of motels. It was like an enchanted city, so quiet, utterly asleep. It was a summer place, and when the sudden snow had come down it had muffled everything.

We walked along the empty beach. Snow covered the sand and the waves were slate-colored and rough. There was an amusement park, deserted, spread out along the boardwalk. We passed by the stalls and shooting galleries, all shuttered. Dingy tents sagged beneath loads of snow. The wooden horses on the calliope wore mantles of white. The rickety framework of a roller coaster loomed above us like a dinosaur skeleton. I was wearing Vito’s jacket over my own and still I was cold.

There were faded posters of freaks: Siamese twins joined at the head, a man in a tiger skin and a necklace of skulls, a woman with gills, a man with a long furry tail. An enormous painted clown leered at us from a billboard. Red hair, enormous teeth. I thought of Anya.

We got back in the car and drove to the bar where Vito was supposed to meet his friend. Wait here, he said as he got out of the car.

But I’m coming in, I said.

I’ll just be a minute, he said. You can’t come, you look too young. You’ll get kicked out.

No, I said.

I just have to talk about something with him, real quick. Here, keep the heat on, I’ll be right back, I promise, he said and tossed me the keys.

I waited ten minutes for him, then twenty, and then I went in.

It was dark inside, lit by orange-and-blue beer signs and the glow of cigarettes. I could feel the noise from the jukebox pulsing through the floor. Heavyset men sat hunched over tables and the bar, their heads hanging low as if they were too heavy to hold up. I did not see Vito. I sat on a stool and waited.

What you doing here, anyway? the man sitting next to me said as if he were continuing an old conversation. He had a bleary face, three empty glasses before him, a big red porous nose.

Nothing, I said.

You must be doing something, he said.

I can’t stand this, I said. People keep telling me things, making up stories and lying, and I don’t know what to believe anymore.

Oh yeah? he said, interested, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. I think I can help you.

Really? I said.

He said: You say you’re looking for the truth? I’ll tell you where to find it.

The music was giving me a headache. Where was Vito?

He said: You’re looking for the truth? The truth is in my pants.

He laughed loudly then, and the man beside him laughed, and the laughter was wet and sloppy, it spilled all over the counter and onto the floor.

The friend leaned over toward me, his eyes were little five-pointed stars, spinning, and he said: Maybe it’s something you can’t quite
put your finger on.
Right?

The first man said: The answer’s right there, just reach in and grab it.

They laughed and laughed and though I didn’t want to, my eyes kept falling on their pants, coarse ill-fitting pants that were tight in the thighs and lumpy over their crotches.

I heard catcalls, wolf whistles—a whole menagerie.

Then Vito came up out of the dark and I turned to him in relief but he was glaring, his teeth clenched, and he spat out:
I thought I told you to wait in the car.

*   *   *

We spent the night curled up on the peeling vinyl of the backseat.

I could hear the waves pounding.

Do you want to do it? Vito said, his hands on my shoulder blades. We might as well, he said, you won’t have to worry about getting pregnant this time, right?

His breath was sour as old cheese.

Get away from me, I said.

I fell asleep shivering and woke up sweating.

Most of the snow had melted in the night.

He drove me to the clinic. It was a small square white building with shrubs along the front and a crowd of people by the door.

I’ll come pick you up in a few hours, he said.

You’re not coming with me?

I’ve got to talk to Russell some more. Just business. He wants me to bring some stuff back to the city for him. Just go in there, ask for Stephanie, she’ll help you out.

What? You want me to go in there alone?

The people by the door screamed at us. They held up enormous bloody photographs and spat at the car.

Why are they screaming at me? They don’t even know me, I said.

Their faces pressed up close to the window. It was the same face, over and over, men and women, old and young, but the same chanting mouths, same frenzied eyes.

I can’t do this, I said.

They’re just protesters, he said. Just a bunch of stupid people. Don’t listen to them.

I know, I said and looked at them and they were just a mass of movement, an ignorant mob, hardly human at all. I could ignore that.

But then I saw that one of them held a baby and everything stopped. She balanced the baby on one hip, carelessly. She was swept up in the chanting like the rest and bouncing up and down, her fist in the air. But the baby looked at me, he met my eyes with a wide curious gaze. He rode calmly up and down on his mother’s hip as if she were a horse on a merry-go-round, his hair ruffled up all over his head. Those eyes held me. He was beautiful. He was shaking his head.

How could I do this?

I can’t, I said.

You can, Vito said. It’s for the best. And we came all this way.

No, I said. But in one quick motion he reached past me, opened the door, and pushed me out of the car.

They were all around me, shouting in my face. They pressed up against me and held their horrible pictures in front of my eyes, pictures of tiny hands and feet and eyes sealed closed and mouths open in terror. And as the shouting went on and on and hands tugged at my clothes everything blended together til I could not tell the difference between the red sweating faces of the protesters and the hideously enlarged bloody faces in their obscene photographs.

I closed my eyes and someone took my arm and led me firmly and insistently through the red sea. I opened my eyes when it was quiet again and I took a deep breath thinking I was far away from it all but then I realized I was inside the building.

I did not see who had brought me in. I could hear the chanting, very faintly, outside the doors. I could not go back out there just yet.

I would wait a little while. And then go.

In here everything was clean and brisk and efficient. Green tile covered the floors.

I sat in an orange plastic chair with uneven legs.

Who are you here to see? a nurse asked me.

Stephanie, I said automatically.

She’s busy right now, the nurse told me.

I sat and waited. And waited. Women came and sat in the other chairs. Some came with men, some came with their mothers. Some looked frightened, but most looked as if they were shut completely within themselves, struggling with a private puzzle that no one could help them with. None of them looked pregnant, I thought.

Most of them were holding their bellies.

I realized I was holding mine and quickly sat on my hands.

I was not like them, I thought. I was different.

The women came and went, but there was one man who sat and waited as long as I did. He had long legs stretched out before him, a windbreaker with the hood pulled up over his head. I could see the cross hanging around his neck, but I could not see his face.

I wondered how he felt, sitting here waiting for his wife or girlfriend or sister or mother.

I wished Ilana were with me. If Sashie were here she would pretend it was not happening, that was her way of coping with things. She would talk brightly about the decor, the artificial plants. The weather. And Mara, Mara would see it all as a plot, a conspiracy directed at her. I think she has always had secret plans of her own, and that is what makes her so suspicious of everyone else. Her paranoia taints her view of everything. One day she will grow suspicious of herself, and she will drive herself mad chasing herself in circles.

Only Ilana saw things clearly. I realized this now. She did not even know my name, but she was the only person who knew me as I really was.

Here’s Stephanie, someone said and I looked up to see a woman in white walking down the hallway at the side of a gray-haired man in a white coat with a folder in his hand. I stood up and the man in the windbreaker rose too and his hand came up.

I turned and looked at him, thinking: what is he doing? Who is he greeting? What kind of handshake is that? And everyone else in the room was looking at him too but for a different reason.

There was a sort of spark in the vicinity of his hand, and I did not hear the noise, only the echo which went on and on as the gray-haired man fell toward me, the folder falling from his hands. For a long moment I looked at the ugly red splotches blooming on his coat, like beet soup on a white tablecloth when you spill it by mistake, and I saw the look in his eyes which was not frightened or pained but only surprised.

Then he was collapsed on the floor with blood pooling around him, it pulsed out of him rhythmically, like the rhythm of waves, it bubbled out of his mouth, and I was thinking idiotically: get this man to a hospital! And then: he’s in one already, how lucky! There were screams, a flurry of motion as nurses ran to him and the gunman had already disappeared somehow, like a magic trick and I did not know what to do so I ran. Not the way I had come, but down a hallway and through door after door until I found one marked
emergency exit,
and I burst through it to the screaming of sirens thinking: yes, that’s exactly what this is.

*   *   *

The sand was wet and the waves rolled in.

The amusement park had shed its coat of snow and now looked more ramshackle than before. You could see the nails and paste and strings that held it all together. Families in small clusters drifted here and there. No one seemed to be controlling the rides, they ran by themselves, their old clockwork grinding away.

The scaffolding shuddered ominously every time the roller coaster made its rounds. The passengers screamed as they flew downhill—not because they were frightened, but because they thought they were supposed to be.

You could see now how chipped and faded the calliope horses were. The music that poured out was painfully off-key. But the children who rode them did not care. They rode shouting, rearing, bucking, rocking back and forth, stroking the wooden manes. In their eyes it all was beautiful.

And so it
was
beautiful.

I walked by the ocean and watched the waves rise up closer and closer. I looked at that dark line where the ocean met the sky, and Ilana was right, it was like nothing I had ever seen before in my life. The meeting of water and air. Like a long thread drawn tight.

It divided but it also joined.

I thought of the man’s blood pushing out of him and spreading on the floor. Drops of it had dried on my hands, on my shirt. Dark little dots, almost black. And as I thought of him I began bleeding, as if the sight of him made my own blood want to jump out of my body and join his. I bled and bled, soaking my underpants, first a trickle and then a stream, as if my insides were weeping.

It’s my period, I said to a seagull. My period is just late, that’s all.

That’s all it is.

All this fuss and worry just because my period was a little late, I chided myself.

This blood, it couldn’t be anything else but that. Could it?

It could not be the other thing. It couldn’t be.

I did not even want to think the word.

Somehow I would not be able to bear it if it was.

*   *   *

Later I saw Vito and some newfound friends traipsing along the beach.