Woke Up Lonely (5 page)

She put her files away. Tried to relax. The years without Thurlow were cairned in her heart for the life they never had, but just because she’d grown used to the weight did not mean that it wasn’t heavy or that sometimes she could not bear it.

And to think it was her job that had brought them together. They’d known each other since they were kids, but their first real encounter came after she’d been assigned to him. And he never knew. He still didn’t. And now, a decade later, she was still following him around. Five minutes at a Laundromat. A few hours in North Korea.

Under her bed was a queen-size strongbox instead of a box spring. It was designed to conceal thirty-five rifles and seventy handguns, though she used it for DVDs and letters. Four hundred eighty-two letters from Thurlow. A thousand DVDs. She grabbed one from last year, marked
11/04,
right after the election. She had filmed that night herself; the weather had been awful—a storm, a flood—but everyone still came.

She popped the DVD into her computer and closed her eyes. Thurlow’s voice was enough for her; she knew the rest by heart. He’d been wearing jeans and a long-sleeved polyester crew that hung off his shoulders. His hair was mopped across his face because he’d just showered and that was what conditioner did to it. His skin was pale and freckled, which gave him an injured, boyish look that made the traumas issuing from his lips seem all the more unjust. He had put his hands on the lectern, and she could make out the swollen knuckle that had never healed from when he fell off his bike at age twelve. He thanked everyone for coming. Three hundred in the audience? Four? A drop in the bucket.

“Now, listen,” he said. “A lot of people think solitude comes from a deep need attached in our social history to the dread of convention. Or even just the dread of belonging. How can I belong? I live in darker registers of inquiry and feeling than anyone else on earth. Does that sound familiar?”

Esme was mouthing the speech with him. She’d heard it and the others a thousand times. She remembered that this one went on for hours. And that somewhere in the middle, the rain stopped, and the wind died. And that by the time Thurlow was done, the sky was fledgling blue.

She turned off her computer. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with Thurlow. Loneliness
was
a pandemic, and she had only to look at herself to see the proof. She had spent more time alone than anyone she knew, despite her daughter, whom she loved but whose presence was not companionship. Ida was just a child. Sometimes she was even an affront. So, the premise—Thurlow had that right. It was the rest Esme couldn’t get behind. Fellowship among strangers as antidote to a life’s worth of estrangement? As if when the romantic or familial valence of your secret self falls short, you can just entrust that secret self to the Helix and feel better?

She grabbed tweezers from her bedside table and stripped her cuticles. Examined her fingers, as she did almost every night. So strange not to have fingerprints. Growing up, she had let the condition ask of her questions most people spend their lives trying never to ask, among them: What the fuck is wrong with me? And: Do the affectations of my body—and doesn’t everyone have something? that dreadful mole? a sunspot?—proceed from a darker and more dire malady clutched to my heart? Phrenology and palm reading may have been fatuous, but they still derived from a basic impulse to solipsism and self-hatred: everything in the world is but evidence of my failure.

Esme had her problems: an ex-husband she still loved and a child who might not love her. She popped a finger in her mouth. The blood about her nail had gathered like pectin.

There was nothing to do but what she could. Assemble a team: Ned, Anne-Janet, Olgo, Bruce. Execute reconnaissance on Thurlow and the Helix House. Listen up, look hard, and if, in the crosshairs between hurt and sorrow, she felt the tremor of longing—Where are you? and, I miss you—then, yes, some part of her continued to do the right thing, despite all.

II. In which the Lynne Five-0 creeps her team out. In which stories begin to assert themselves like pebbles thrown up from the sea. Cloud seeding, speed dating, clogs. The language of back then. A joust.

II. In which the Lynne Five-0 creeps her team out. In which stories begin to assert themselves like pebbles thrown up from the sea. Cloud seeding, speed dating, clogs. The language of back then. A joust.

Alone with her problems: Anne-Janet Tabetha Riggs.
DOB 3.4.75 SS# 145-08-633

Anne-Janet tarried. Outside her mother’s hospital room, gelling her hands clean. Next up, the mantras: Forty-five minutes are all I need to stay. Forty-five minutes look like love. Multiple attempts to visit the patient look like love. I will be kind. If not for her, then for the propitiation of God, in whose caprice illness comes and goes.

So far the news was bad. Her mother had a stent and a clogged lumen in her calf. Immobility can do that, they said, can increase the threat of embolism. So they’d plunged a tube in Marie’s leg. Her charge? Stay put or bleed out. For Anne-Janet, the sight had been dreadful, her mother’s lips collapsed for lack of teeth, the skin of her face pleated and wan. It was one thing to regard her own face and note the loss of its selling points—when was the last her eyes had spangled with the greens of mint and holly for which she was known?—but quite another to confront decay in her mother, who was timeless.

“You’re up,” Anne-Janet said. “How are you feeling?”

“You don’t want to be here,” Marie said. “Hospitals are where people come to get even sicker than they were before. You have a depressed immune system. I can tell you want to go home.”

“You’re up!” Anne-Janet said, and she sat in a chair next to the bed. “Sleep well?”

“Ech. I am on so many drugs. And I’m thirsty. You wouldn’t want to go get me some juice, would you?”

“I’ll have to ask the nurse. Be right back.”

She stood and made for the station. It was awful having to bother a nurse about kid stuff like juice. But then what if Marie was on blood thinners that turned evil with sugar? What if her liquids were being restricted for a reason? Anne-Janet would corner a nurse, who would refer her to another nurse, who would not be pleased—not at all—to answer Anne-Janet’s questions. Next would come anxiety about having pissed off the nurse, in whose disposition hung the balance of a good or bad stay at the hospital. Ring the bell at 3 a.m. and get help, or just lie there in your own vomit. Sometimes you had to enlist a roommate to get attention because the roommate was still on good terms with the staff, in which case the roommate did not always want to imperil those terms by helping you. Every patient in a hospital needed an advocate to raise hell on her behalf. Anne-Janet beelined for a woman pushing a cart of towels down the hall.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but my mom, in room thirty-four—”

“Marie, sure. And you must be Anne-Janet. She talks about you all the time.”

“She does? Well. We’re wondering if she can have some juice. Also, while I have you, do you know when the doctors are coming by? Or when they’re going to remove the stent? Is the stent permanent? Why haven’t they scheduled her surgery yet? She’s just getting the plate, right? Not a whole new hip or anything?”

The nurse said, “I’m Lynne. I don’t really know the answer to any of your questions, but you’re free to walk with me while I distribute these towels. I’ve sat with your mother a fair amount today. She’s a great lady.”

Anne-Janet stopped walking. People didn’t say these things about her mom. She looked the nurse over. Maybe if Lynne just stood up straight—but then maybe she couldn’t. Maybe that hunch was permanent. Or maybe it was just her uniform, which was oversized, even for her. Could be, though, it was just her face that gave Anne-Janet the heebie-jeebies. Imagine high school with a nose like that.

“Thanks,” Anne-Janet said. “But I’d better go.”

“Okeysmokey.”

The hallway spooled around reception, as it did on every floor. If Anne-Janet closed her eyes, she could be in oncology, awaiting results from one scan or another. After five years with metastasized colon cancer, you stopped caring about the names of the tests or what they were for. Your tumors have grown, they have shrunk—these were the words that mattered. For now, they were shrunk. All but gone. Anne-Janet was on a cancer furlough and wanted to make the best of it. She wanted, even, to date. To date with minimal exposure to men, which explained her plans for the night. A Helix event. Speed dating. Since she was twenty-five, cancer had given her ample excuses not to date, among them feeling too ill, too ugly, too pointless. But finally, this was not the inhibition that needed surmounting. She was, simply, afraid to be touched. Her memories of touch were steeped in terror. It was the thing she talked about most, not in its fraught detail but in general. She would not hide it; it was always there. And seemed to come up whenever she made a new acquaintance, people being unable to call her by her full name and wanting, immediately, to call her AJ instead. Could they call her AJ? Well, her father used to call her AJ and her father had touched her inappropriately. So no, they could not. Not unless they wanted to rouse in her memories so vile, she had not had intercourse since age eight.

She looked at her mom. Probably it had been worse for her. Not to know what evils were transacted in her own home.

“No juice?” Marie said. “Did you check every floor?”

“I’ll get it in a bit. Have some ice chips.”

“So how was work yesterday? Like the new job?”

“It’s where God has landed me, I guess.” She said this wistfully because she did, in fact, marvel at change. Yes, she was surprised to have landed anywhere—to be alive, really—but mostly she was surprised to have landed at the Department of the Interior when two weeks ago she was still hawking celebrity mouth guards on eBay.

“But what’s your title?” Marie said. “What do you do?”

“Are you asking so you can tell your girlfriends? Because if so, you can tell them I am head of Research and Development.”

“But is that true?”

“No. Hey, I met a strange-looking nurse just now. Says she’s been hanging out with you. I think her name is Lynne.”

“There are so many, I can’t keep track.”

“She’s got weird posture.”

“The one with the nose?”

“You got it.”

“She’s new. She showed up out of nowhere. Listen, my angel, you wouldn’t want to get me that apple juice now, would you?”

“I think you’re on a restricted diet. Because of the surgery.”

Marie sat up. “I’m having surgery? No one said I was having surgery. What? Oh my God.”

And with that, she tried to swing her legs over the edge of the bed, never mind the stent or that her hip was fractured in two places.

Anne-Janet dove at her mother. Yelled at her. “
Get back in bed.
You want to die? You could die. Just get back in bed.”

She rang for the nurse while struggling with Marie, afraid the struggle would make things worse and eyeing the heart monitor as if she knew what all the numbers meant but certain a spike in any direction was bad.

“Let go of me!” Marie yelled. “I can’t stay here. You can’t put me under!”

“Mom, don’t be like this.” But her mother pushed her away with a strength she’d obviously had on reserve. “Mom, you are scaring me. I can’t help you if you are doing this.”

“Get off me, AJ!”

“Don’t call me that!”

And they struggled still. Anne-Janet depressed the emergency button. She could hear it ringing down the hall. But no one came. She looked to the roommate, who’d been shot in the gut by a bullet strayed from gang violence, but she just shook her head. No one had come to visit her, she had no advocates on the outside, she had to protect her standing in this hospital no matter what. Would she ring for the nurse? No.

Finally, Lynne of the jumbo duds stormed in with a syringe poised above her head. It was one of the scariest things Anne-Janet had ever seen, this stout little woman who wore her hair like a baseball mitt, coming at her mother like a slasher—practiced but lusty. She stabbed Marie in the thigh.

Marie went slack with the sense of being outnumbered. “You are psychotic,” she mumbled, and she let herself be helped back into bed.

Anne-Janet glanced at the heart monitor. The numbers were blinking. She looked at Lynne.

“Don’t ask her,” said Marie. “She is the stupidest nurse ever.” And then, turning to Lynne, “It is strange, the way you know nothing.”

She settled into the mattress. The numbers stopped blinking. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said. “You look like you want to go home anyway.”

Lynne said she had other places to be but that she’d come back later. Anne-Janet wet a towel in the bathroom. Wet and wrung and tried to return her thoughts to something safe, though instead they alighted on the whys of her being here in the hospital alone, the whys of having to shoulder her mother alone, the mistakes she’d made, the chances she’d never even had.

She passed the towel across her mother’s face and hands. “There,” she said. “Good as new. You’re going to feel much better in a second.” She swiped the cloth behind her ears and along the folds of her neck, and the room said: Washing your mother when she is incapacitated looks like love.

As soon as Marie fell asleep, Anne-Janet slunk out. The sedative would probably give her a few hours’ reprieve. Time enough to go speed dating without thought of her mother calling out her name in vain.

She headed for the bar, just a couple of Metro stops away. Options to drink in this neighborhood were limited to the New Wave—an all-night karaoke bar for British punk—or Nixon’s, whose three rooms could accommodate multiple events at the same time. A favorite among government staff, who came for the beer as much as the decor: renderings of the presidents no one cared about or even recalled. Zachary Taylor, who died of fruit and never brushed his teeth. Chester Arthur, of the morbid kidneys and rowdy facial hair. Warren Harding, whose reputation would have fared better if his wife really had poisoned him, and, next to him, a vacancy where once was the sober likeness of Rutherford Hayes, whose contentious election was, these days, just too much grist for argument. In point: good-bye, Hayes; hello, Reagan of the unifying landslide, whose triptych depicted the president with dog, horse, and gun, respectively.