Sliding Past Vertical (4 page)

“In your
car
?”

Dee Dee’s parakeet squealed. Sarah
lowered her voice, as if it cared what she said. “The way you drive? You could
get pulled over and…”

“It’s safer than my apartment. I’ve
been robbed twice.”

She stared at him. Potstickers
congealed into a nasty lump in her stomach.

“What I was trying to say was that
it’s locked in my glove compartment and I have to give it to the guy tomorrow.
Maybe I could bring it up and you could, you know, keep it safe for me until
then?”

Her eyebrows flew up. At least he
had the sense to look embarrassed about the request. “No. No way. You’re not
bringing that stuff in here.”

“But if it’s out of my hands I
won’t be tempted.”

“You should have thought of that
when you decided to get it.”

He pulled in a long breath and let
it out slowly, looking a lot less cavalier than he’d been a few minutes ago. “It’s
too late for that. The guy already paid me and I already got the stuff.” He
picked at a thumbnail, his hands between his knees. He looked up at her, not
with the fake sad eyes but with genuine fear and humility. “I thought…” He
swallowed and when he spoke again, his voice cracked a little. “I thought it
would be okay. I don’t know. Maybe…maybe I wanted to test myself. See if I
could still deal and not do any of it while I’m holding. It’s like, my first
step toward getting better in the real world.”

Sarah sighed, gazing down at him.
She stroked a lock of his unruly hair back into place. At least she should be
thankful to be having this conversation with him before he’d done it, rather
than after. Still holding her brush, she flopped down next to him and said
softly, “If you don’t want to do the stuff, don’t you think it would make it a
lot easier if you didn’t have it around?”

“You’re right.” He turned toward her
with a small, charming smile. “It is a lot of money though.”

She shrugged. “You could give it
back.”

He snorted a laugh. “You don’t give
it back, Sarah.”

“Why? Is that considered poor drug
dealer etiquette?”

She’d meant it as a joke, but he
was serious and had a bit of a panicked look in his eyes. “You don’t give it
back. You get the goods and you deliver. And if you don’t deliver…” He made an
ominous slash across his throat. “You saw my windshield after I pissed the last
guy off. Maybe next time it could be me.”

“All right.” Sarah squeezed her
eyes shut, instantly regretting the decision. “You can keep it here.”

Jay opened his mouth to speak but
she stopped him, waving the hairbrush. “But only until tomorrow and only this
once, okay?” He nodded. “And you’re going to Dee Dee’s program.”

“Okay,” he said, eyes melting at
her. “Thanks. Really. I mean it.”

She grunted a response as he ran
out with his car keys.
Three crimes in
two weeks
, she thought.
Collusion in
a possible insurance scheme and now, aiding and abetting a drug dealer, and
possession
.
Plus someone should give
me the Codependent Girlfriend of the Year award
. In her head she heard
Emerson scolding her, saying that it’s possible sometimes to be too damned
nice.

And he should know.

Chapter 7

Running out of luck and money,
Sarah took a freelance job near Bunker Hill in Charlestown. The pay for three
days’ work, laying out and pasting up a monthly real estate magazine, was
insulting, but it would be enough to get Dee Dee off her back. Combined with
what she had left from her final paycheck, she wouldn’t have to borrow from
Emerson or her parents for the month’s expenses.

The third and final day was turning
into a late one. At nine, the cute little Macintosh that the publisher had
purchased to run out makeshift camera-ready art crashed. Three people frowned
over the brand-new toy, a variety of manuals spread over the desk. Since Sarah
hadn’t had dinner break yet, she took advantage of the downtime to get
something to eat. It was a dodgy neighborhood, and she’d already been to the
pizza place downstairs twice, so she was glad to find a nearby deli still open.
She paced the two Lilliputian aisles of overpriced grocery and pharmaceutical
items while waiting for her pastrami on rye with coleslaw. Partly from boredom,
partly to exercise her eyes after so many hours of close work, she scanned from
the front of the store to the back, checking out all the labels, boxes, and
bottles. They had cookies she’d never heard of. Weird things like pipe cleaners
and poker chips. And never in her life had she learned so much about the proper
dosages of Alka-Seltzer.

“You want mustard?” the kid at the
counter said. His pale chicken arms stuck out of baggy T-shirt sleeves. He
didn’t look old enough to be up this late, let alone staring at the magazine
Sarah caught him looking at when she came in.

“Um, yeah, I guess.”

He’d left the magazine face down on
the back counter, but there were more in the display stand near the cash
register, where Sarah waited with a crumpled bill. She recognized most of the magazines’
names. Emerson had mentioned them, summarizing and sanitizing their various
editorial contents. The one in front, the one Em’s stories were published in
most frequently, had had its paper wrapping torn away. The girl on the cover
was draped over a motorcycle. She wore sunglasses, a pair of black chaps, and a
smile.

Sarah felt bad that the girl was
made to pose that way. It looked unnatural and silly at best, painful at worst:
all that cold, hard steel and impossible angles. But then, like Em always said,
the model was over eighteen, nobody put a gun to her head, and she probably got
paid a lot of money. Sarah pitied the men who bought the magazines.
Settling for a two-dimensional stranger in
the middle of the night must be awfully lonely.
She felt sorry for Emerson,
too, feeding into the big, sad machine where women were only valued for their
bodies and men’s insecurities were exploited.

“It’s just another form of
literature,” Em once told her. “Like
Ivanhoe
or Tom Sawyer. The reader lives vicariously through a character’s adventures.
How is this really different?”

“Tom Sawyer didn’t get it on with
Becky Thatcher while Injun Joe watched.”

Sarah knew he’d been rationalizing
for her. She didn’t really mind his avocation that much, as long as she never
showed up as any of the anonymous, big-breasted bimbos Emerson said his
protagonist, Dirk Blade, used and tossed aside like fast food wrappers.

The kid was busy at the slicer, his
bony back to Sarah, knobby elbow flexing. She slid the magazine out of the rack
and, heart racing, flipped to the table of contents. There he was. She read:
When I went to the 7-Eleven last night, I
never thought I’d get—

“You want a pickle with that?” the
kid asked.

Sarah jumped, giving herself a
paper cut as she whipped the magazine closed. “Ow. What?”

“Pickle. You want a pickle with the
pastrami?”

“Uh. No.” She pressed a tissue from
her pocket to the bleeding cut on her palm. “No thanks.”

“Anything else?”

Unable to meet the kid’s eyes, she
bought the magazine, too.

* * * * *

She tossed the magazine into her purse
and didn’t remember it until the subway ride home. It was the twelve thirty
train, last run of the night. Among her fellow travelers were a smattering of
late-shifters, college kids, and yuppies who hadn’t wanted to give up a good
parking space when they went out partying after work. Sarah sat alone on a
two-person bench, her back to the window, legs across the seat. Her curiosity
won out and she fiddled with the magazine inside her bag, like a photographer
changing film, opening to his page to continue where she’d left off.

As she read about the potential
conquest Dirk eyed—some mini-skirted cashier coyly offering flashes of
her red panties—revulsion welled up inside her. It was crass, cruel,
and…horribly written. This couldn’t be from Emerson’s typewriter. She took
another gander at the byline. Dirk Blade.
Yep,
that’s him, all right.

She read on, although she really
didn’t want to. After coercing the cashier in the empty 7-Eleven to lock the
door, there was more buildup, and then it dissolved into a parade of body parts,
with lots of violent verbs and imagery. Soon Dirk was zipping up and out the
door with a free burrito, leaving the girl an undone, quivering, and (most
likely) unsatisfied heap on the Slurpee machine.
The son of a bitch.
The cashier would probably get fired.

“Whatcha got there, girlie?” a
voice said.

She looked up. A toothless man a
few seats behind her leered at her bag. Part of the magazine hung out—a
full-page picture of the woman from the cover, just as scantily dressed, bent
over a car engine, touching herself. Sarah wanted to smash her bag over his
head. He was behind this: him, and all the other men who liked this stuff. If
not for them, publishers wouldn’t print it. If not for them, Emerson wouldn’t
have to write it. Not just for the lonely men in the middle of the night but
for the sick ones, too.

“Leave me alone.” Sarah stuffed the
magazine back into her bag.

“Just wanted a little peek, goddamnit.”
He reeked of alcohol. A brown stain trailed from the corner of his mouth and
disappeared into a ragged white beard.

Just then the T pulled up to her
stop. “Leave me alone!” She bolted for the door.

He grunted and gave her an obscene
gesture but didn’t follow. Still, she looked for him over her shoulder. Every
noise, every twig broken underfoot, every stone kicked along the sidewalk was
some man stalking her.

She heard his voice:
Whatcha got, girlie?

She saw the toothless leer and her
mind spun up memories of men who’d yelled rude things at her on the street, of
drunken college boys who tried touching her at parties. And, most recently, of
Dirk Blade, with his European briefs and lava lamp and polyester sneer. He was
to blame.

* * * * *

“I don’t like you very much right
now,” Sarah said to Emerson. He’d made the mistake of calling her shortly after
she arrived home, only wanting to know how the job had gone. The magazine was
still in her bag. She’d almost tossed it into the first trashcan she saw but
hadn’t wanted any man to find it.

“Did I do something wrong? I know
it’s late, but you said your roommate worked second shift on—”

“I just met Dirk.”

Silence.

“He should die,” Sarah added.

“Which…” Emerson cleared his
throat. “Which one did you read?”

“The Slurpee machine.”

He sounded relieved.

Sarah wasn’t. “There are worse
ones?”

“Sarah…” He began the literature
spiel, which she immediately interrupted.

“Don’t you dare try to rationalize
your way out of this, Emerson McCann. This has nothing to do with literature.
It doesn’t even belong on the same planet as literature. It’s crude, it’s
tacky, and it’s misogynistic…not to mention the writing…”

“What’s wrong with the writing?”

Of course that would get his
attention. “You disappointed me, Em. Yeah, the sex thing…well, I can live with
that, I guess, but I thought you—especially you—would do it with a
little flair.”

“You didn’t appreciate the subtlety
of the metaphors?”

She fought back a smile. “That’s
what you were going for? Subtle?”

“Please. My editors wouldn’t know
subtle if it ran up to them screaming and beat them with a very large stick.”

She tried but couldn’t stifle a
giggle. This was the Emerson she knew. The one who sent roses and mushy cards
and made her laugh. The other one…scared her.

Apparently she was thinking about
this other Emerson for too long because he filled the silence. “You know it’s
not really me,” he said softly. “He’s…just a character. My editor and the
readers like him, so I write to suit and get paid for it. I never have, never
would treat a woman that way. You know that. You
have
to know that.”

She let out a long breath. She knew
that. Emerson was sweet and romantic, and he’d never leave a girl stranded atop
a Slurpee machine. He’d help her down, clean her up, and probably marry her.
And he’d never write about Sarah. He’d said it a million times. “I know,” she
said. “It just…hit me the wrong way, I guess.”

Maybe because the girl in the story
looked a little like her.

Chapter
8

Emerson prided himself on his
honesty but allowed what he considered…certain lies of kindness. That a patient,
ill in winter, would live long enough to feed the ducks in the spring. That his
mother wasn’t to blame for what happened to Thomas. And that he never wrote
about Sarah.

He puzzled over that last lie the
next afternoon while he mopped the sunroom in the infirmary. There had been
other women. He’d had adventures. He’d even fallen in love again since Sarah,
at eighteen, had changed her mind about him and moved on to other, less
complicated men. Yet when he sat behind his typewriter and mentally slipped
into Dirk’s leather jacket, it was Sarah behind the checkout counter and later,
her body beneath his sweaty palms.

Since in his opinion, honesty was
the core of good writing, even when it was by the word, barely edited, and not
what he wanted to be doing for the rest of his life, Emerson put his heart and
soul and lust into it. He put Sarah into it. His heart. His soul. His lust. But
because for the past eleven years she had offered him nothing more than
friendship, a state he’d become attached to and did not want to lose, he had
learned to balance honesty with sensitivity. So he could, with a semi-clear
conscience, say it was not Sarah in those stories. He normally pored over his
first drafts and changed certain key details. Made her blonde. Made her twins.
Made her a biker chick with tattoos and a nipple ring. Whatever he hadn’t used
in a while. With the Slurpee machine story he’d been careless. Or reckless. He
wasn’t sure.

He squeezed the mop through the wringer
and tackled another section of the sunroom.
A
good time to do it,
he thought, with most of the ambulatory patients
downtown for a matinee revival of
Guys
and Dolls
at the Landmark Theater. Emerson was grateful for the relative
calm. He could finish a task without interruption, catch up on his paperwork, and
give some attention to those who had been left behind. He paused for a moment
to admire the wet gleam of the checkered linoleum floor. He’d get to the rest
of it later. In the far corner by the windows, a new arrival named Charlie
Fitzpatrick had been dozing on and off for the better part of an hour on an
inclined gurney, hooked up to various pieces of mobile equipment, and Emerson
didn’t want to disturb him.

The sun peeked out from behind a
cloud and showed Emerson a spot he’d missed near a potted palm, a few feet from
Charlie. He dabbed the mop into the bucket, pulled it through the wringer, and quietly
trailed the rolling contraption along the dry walkway he’d left, having learned
years ago never to mop himself, or anyone else, into a corner.

“You need to get over here?”
Charlie croaked out, waking from another catnap. He batted at his various tubes
with withered hands as if he’d just woken up from surgery for the first time.
The IV stand began to list.

“No…no.” Emerson caught the stand
before it fell. “I’ll get to it later. You just relax.”

“Good.” Charlie gazed out the
window, a corner of his mouth turning up. “’Cause I kinda like it over here.”

Emerson followed Charlie’s line of
vision to the duck pond outside the window. One of the interns, a curvaceous
redhead, was bent over Mrs. Nickerson in her wheelchair, helping her feed the
ducks.

Emerson mentally rolled his eyes.
“Okay,” he said. “Just this once, I’ll let you stay.”

“Good man.” Charlie coughed,
wheezed a little, and settled down. “You got a name?”

“Emerson.”

Charlie cocked his head.

He was accustomed to explaining.
“Like Ralph Waldo. My mother had great aspirations for us, I guess. She named
my brother after Dylan Thomas.”

“Who the hell’s that?”

The irony cut at him, that Dylan
Thomas had been his brother’s namesake.

“A famous drunk.”

No response.

“The poet. You know. ‘Do not go
gentle into that good night,’
A Child’s
Christmas in Wales
…”

“Huh. Yeah. I know the guy.” Charlie
turned back to his view of the intern. “Will you look at that ass?”

She
has a name,
Emerson wanted to say but just sighed.

“Tell you what, Ralph Waldo
Emerson.” Charlie’s gaze was still riveted out the window. “When I get all this
crap off me, you gotta take me out there to feed them ducks.”