She, Myself, and I Page 10

  I shake my head. “Of course I don’t mind.”

  “The burger joint rated by Bostonstream as selling the best burger under ten bucks is practically next door to the office. It’d be a crime for us to be so close and not to get some . . .”

  I glance at him. “I couldn’t let you add another crime to your tally for the day.”

  He shakes his head, pretending—I think—to be offended.

  Then I realize a problem. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. “I—I don’t actually have any money. Or a card. Everything at the hospital goes on my account—”

  “I have money.”

  “I don’t want to use your money.”

  “I guess you don’t have any choice.”

  “I’m really sorry—”

  “Rosa, seriously, it’s totally fine.”

  “As soon as we’re back, I can get money—”

  “I told you,” he interrupts, looking at me so long I start to worry about the road. “It’s fine.”

  We turn a corner. A group of men and women in suits tumble out of a bar. Joe slows the car at a crosswalk.

  I look up. Suddenly, we’re hemmed in by tall buildings. I peer out at a grand old hotel, its windows of yellow light like pores in the brickwork, emitting human happiness, human warmth. The people in those rooms are hugging, celebrating, bathing, having sex. Not enduring physical therapy, not sweating in an Exoskeleton, not dreading test results.

  We pass a sign for a college. And a theater. Blue-and-yellow banners run down a classical facade. They’re rippling in the breeze, or maybe it’s just the motion of the city—all the cars and the people, thronging the pavement, talking, eating out of paper bags, laughing, shrieking into phones.

  Sylvia’s father came after me. I have left the hospital. I’m out.

  From the safety of Joe’s car, I stare out at this world, unremarkable to anyone within a hundred-mile radius but me.

  As we drive on, I notice parkland to the other side of the road. I can’t avoid being drawn to the shadows. Tree after raggedy tree after tree and gravestones? Are those gravestones? Then this must be Boston Common.

  The traffic slows again. Brake lights from the truck in front of us almost hurt my eyes. Joe says, “You still okay about all this?”

  “This?” I repeat the word, because I’m not sure exactly what he’s asking. This—us in a car. This—being alone together. This—with night coming.

  “Leaving the hospital,” he says.

  “Oh. Making my escape in a strange car.”

  “With a strange guy you hardly know.”

  I look at him and let my eyes trace his profile, his shoulder, his arm, bent to hold the wheel. “Who, without me asking, followed this woman who’s been watching me, pretended to be a mugger, and found out that a man who thinks he’s my father is following me.”

  “Yeah, that guy sounds pretty strange.”

  He glances at me and smiles. Almost as quickly, his face falls.

  I tense. “What’s wrong?”

  He’s peering over at a narrow open doorway with a red awning above it and a line of people snaking from it, onto the pavement. The awning reads BART’S BURGERS.

  “Nothing,” he says. “Except that line.”

  We park on the street.

  I grab my jacket, get out of the car, and as I feel the thud of my feet on free ground . . . Yeah, maybe this is my Neil Armstrong moment.

  But I don’t want to think too much about the momentousness of leaving the hospital, and I can’t, because I’m being bombarded. Voices. Voices. Horns. Engines. A radio voice yelling from a cab window about someone being disgraced. A muffled loudspeaker somewhere blaring hip-hop. A dog yelping. I’m hit by sweet perfume from a woman untying a silk scarf from her neck, and then by the smell of fat from a Styrofoam box of french fries as a dreadlocked girl on a skateboard whizzes past.

  Joe’s at my side. He touches my arm. Points to the doorway. “I’ll drop off the wallet and be right back. See if you can find somewhere to sit. I’ll order. Burger and fries?”

  I nod. “Thanks.”

  I have a mission now. I can focus.

  I slip inside the burger joint, pressing myself to the door-frame to try to avoid knocking into anyone.

  Perhaps my luck really is changing, because as I reach a window booth, the couple sitting there gets up. The guy is very tall and very blond. The girl’s hair is cobalt blue. I know I’m staring. But I can’t help it. And they don’t look at me. As soon as they’re gone, I sit down on the bench facing the window. The red leatherette’s warm where the girl was sitting.

  In here, it’s still noisy. Louder, maybe. A couple of girls—maybe eleven or twelve years old—are giggling in the booth behind me. Customers are calling their orders at the register. I hear the rattle of ice cubes in glasses. Smell the hot dog on a plate carried by a woman with long scarlet nails. The red of those nails and her lips are visual sirens, screaming: Remember, remember! I lived in London. It wasn’t that different. Almost every Thursday night, I used to go with Mum and Dad and Elliot to the restaurant maze of Brixton Market. But I’ve been cloistered in the hospital for so long. Being here—it’s like that feeling you get when you’ve been sitting for ages, then you move, and blood gushes through your numbed limbs.

  Movement outside catches my eye. A man striding past, yelling into his phone.

  Beyond him, across the street, the trees are almost bare. Fragile brown oak leaves are still clinging to their branches, seemingly the last leaves left, the most reluctant to admit death and drop.

  By natural law, I should be dead. But I’m in a burger restaurant in Boston. In Sylvia Johnson’s body. In her country. Out in her world.

  Did her dad see me leave? Has he followed us? I was careful on my way to the parking lot. I didn’t see him. But perhaps he had somebody else watching out for me.

  From a zip pocket of my jacket, I pull out my phone. I try to focus on what to text Mum. Forcing myself to block out my surroundings, including those giggling girls, I write, delete, write, delete, write.

  However I phrase the text, it sounds just too bald or selfish or weird.

  Then I think, If I text, will she worry I’ve been abducted and it’s not from me?

  I contemplate adding a line that’ll confirm my identity. Something only I’d know. The name of my first hamster: Cheeseball.

  But that might come across as odd, too. So I delete my mess of a draft text and call Elliot instead. Then I end the call before he has a chance to pick up.

  How long was Sylvia’s father waiting to glimpse me? Who was that woman? Did I really see her with Jane?

  I try writing another text to Mum.

  In the end, I settle for:

  I am totally fine so please don’t worry. Just need a little time away. Am safe. Have drugs. Really, don’t worry. I won’t be gone long. Love you.

  And I send another:

  Tell Elliot there’s no need for any dark house.

  And a final one:

  I’m going to turn my phone off for a few days. So don’t worry if I don’t reply.

  And I am going to turn it off, because I’ve seen The Wire and CSI and even, once, when I just didn’t have the energy to change the channel, Hawaii Five-O. I left my bangle back in my room, just in case it can function as a tracker, but I know the police can home in on mobile phone signals. And I wouldn’t put it past Mum to call the police. But before I power off my cell, I half stand to search for Joe in the line that’s still stretching out of the door. I make out what I think is his head. Before he comes over, I want to find the newspaper story he had up on his phone in Les Baguettes.

  Now that I know what to look for, it doesn’t take long.

  I find five paragraphs. The photograph. And beneath the photograph, more detail.

  Friends report attending a house party on Marrett Road on the night of the accident. Around midnight, a group that included Johnson left the party for the Old Reservoir. One teen, who was said to
be upset over the breakup of a relationship, walked onto the ice. Johnson followed in an attempt to encourage her back. When the ice cracked, Johnson went under. The other girl made it to safety.

  Emergency services were called, but by the time fire department officials located Johnson, she had been submerged for 42 minutes.

  The cold temperatures had slowed her physiological processes almost to a state of hibernation, the article said. Her brain was dying. But her body was—just—still alive.

  She went out on the ice to try to help a friend . . .

  “Your order, ma’am.” It’s Joe; his voice breaks me from my reverie.

  Quickly, I slip my phone back into my jacket pocket.

  Joe puts a plate and a bottle of Diet Coke in front of me. Pale cheese oozes out from the burger. Salt glistens on the fries. He removes his jacket and sits down, back to the window, with another Coke, burger, and fries.

  I take in, as though for the first time, the way his black hair falls over one eye. The tension of the muscle in his neck. The curve of his chest, down to his waist.

  Medically speaking—yeah, maybe, possibly, I shouldn’t be here. But all kinds of natural drugs are coursing through me right now, and I feel like they’re awakening parts of me that were still anesthetized after the surgery. Parts that maybe never really woke up.

  I let thoughts of what happened to Sylvia settle in my mind. I’m out, and I’m going to find her, and she and Joe—this is what I need.

  “Brioche bun,” he says. “Eighty-twenty beef and pork. Twice-cooked fries. Bostonstream gives your dining experience tonight a perfect ten.”

  My eyes reach for his. “Thank you.”

  He nods. Grabs a few napkins from a metal dispenser.

  Deep breath. “I mean for the hoodie. And Daniel Johnson’s driver’s license. And for taking me away from the hospital . . . and the burger.”

  Now his level gaze meets mine. There’s a soft smile on his lips when he says: “You’re welcome.”

  It ejects me right out of the last of my worries.

  I hit the ground in a very different place.

  If I were another girl—if I were Sylvia Johnson, before she half died in freezing water—maybe I might lean over this table and kiss him.

  Would she want me to? Would he?

  I pick up my burger and take a bite.

  For so long, all I’ve eaten is hospital food, supplemented with the occasional pilfered treat. No wonder, then, that the burger tastes incredible. I take a fry next. It’s crispy and golden on the outside, fluffy-soft on the inside. I remember reading in one of the online history tutorials that Americans renamed french fries “freedom fries” after France refused to join the war in Iraq.

  “My freedom fries,” I say.

  Joe knocks the neck of his Diet Coke bottle against mine. “To your freedom.”

  “My first meal.”

  I take a napkin and wipe a little ketchup from my lips. “If you’d just got off death row and out of prison and you could have whatever you wanted, what would it be?”

  He thinks for a moment, then he says, “When I was a little kid, my mom used to make me the solar system out of pancakes. Maple syrup for the sun. Strawberry jelly for Mercury. Honey for Venus. Raspberry jelly for Mars. Blueberry jelly and apple slices for Earth.”

  “That was dedicated,” I say. “She went to a lot of effort.”

  “She had a thing about space,” he says at last.

  I glance at his tattoo. At the words Ad Astra—to the stars. “She isn’t here in Boston? Your mum?”

  He shakes his head.

  I want to ask more about the tattoo, but I don’t. “Do you miss San Francisco?”

  “. . . Some things.”

  Could he be more vague?

  I search my memory for what I’ve read or heard about the city. “Like the people all being so relaxed and having shaman pool parties and drinking ayahuasca?”

  He looks at me doubtfully. “Ayahuasca?”

  “It’s a hallucinogen.”

  “I know what it is. Where’ve you heard about it?”

  “I don’t know.” But I do. “Probably the New Yorker.”

  “Really?” He nods, and I think it’s a nod of approval.

  He puts his burger down and wipes his fingers on a napkin.

  “The people in the suburb where I’m from all work for Google and Facebook or venture capital groups or wish they did, or for one of the pharmas,” he says. “The people all work at breakfast, work on their commute, work at the dinner table, want their kids to do the same. Except for when they’re let out to do something recreational. Like going to a tutor to learn Mandarin.”

  “That’s what your parents are like?”

  He hesitates, and I can’t help wondering why. “A little. So, Sylvia Johnson. What exactly do you want to know?”

  I think about this.

  “I want to see where she lived. I want to see the reservoir . . . I want to find a friend who really knew her. I want to know her heartfelt truths. What she loved. What she hated. Her dreams.”

  He says, “If you did tell me why, maybe I could help you more.”

  The lightness that has been spreading inside me since he sat down fades a little.

  “Rosa, there’s nothing you could tell me that would shock me.”

  I can’t meet his gaze, so I look away, at an overweight woman in the line, cooling her face by fanning it with a folded Boston Globe. At a cashier, red-cheeked, counting out bills. I don’t know them. They don’t know me. Instability starts to rock me.

  “Everyone has to talk to someone,” Joe says.

  I find my tongue. “Says the journalist.”

  “I’m not talking as a reporter. I’m not even a real reporter. I’m an intern for a mediocre—actually, a pretty shitty—website, and—” He stops. “Who is she to you? Who are yow?”

  I focus on my half-eaten burger. A skin has formed on the cheese. The droplets of fat on the plate have congealed.

  “If I told you,” I say quietly, “you’d get in your car and drive as far away from me as you could.”

  He leans over the table toward me. “I doubt it.”

  “You’d realize I’m the most horrific thing you’ve ever seen.”

  Everything around us goes still.

  “Did you kill someone?” he asks.

  I took Sylvia’s living, breathing body. It’s still breathing. Eyes on my hands, which are clasped in my lap, I shake my head.

  “Have you ruined someone’s life?”

  “. . . I don’t think so.”

  “Have you committed a crime?”

  “Not according to the laws of the United States of America.”

  “Then how can you be horrific?”

  I can’t possibly answer. And I’m so stiff now that if I don’t do something, I swear I will fracture.

  Grabbing my jacket, I get up from the table. I push my way to the door, making the woman with the Globe exclaim, “Excuse me!” and I head out, with no plan of where I’m going. I just need to move.

  Now I’m out among a crowd of strangers. Their features disassociate and don’t quite combine. I walk fast, glimpsing parts, but not wholes: a flash of gold hoop earrings, a piercing in a cheek, a waft of body odor, a pair of shiny black shoes.

  “Rosa! Rosa!”

  I stop.

  Awkwardly, because I feel so rigid, I turn.

  I realize I’ve gone quite a way down the street. Joe jogs to catch up. He’s close now. I’m so intensely aware of how near he is, and how far away I know I should keep him.

  “I just can’t tell you,” I say. “I signed something that’s legally binding. I can’t . . .”

  Gently, he says, “Okay.”

  I guess the world keeps turning, but I’m not aware of it.

  Then a siren whoops, and I realize we’re outside a tobacconist’s shop. An ornate board in the window advertises a Thanksgiving Day blend. As I spin away, I notice something else entirely: a statue on the p
avement behind me.

  It’s bronze, of a man, shorter than me, striding along with old-fashioned coattails flying. He’s gripping a case from which a giant bird springs. I take in the sweep of his coat, the gaping beak of the raven—

  I jump. A hand is on the back of my upper right arm. Joe’s. My arm burns where he’s touching it. It feels like life—or the reverse.

  Perhaps now that I’ve left the hospital, the mesmeric spell has been broken, and I’m decaying. I’m rotting from his touch, outside in. If I don’t do something, I’ll become a pool of detestable putridity, right here, on the street, in front of Edgar Allan Poe. I knew there was a statue of him near Boston Common. Well, here it is.

  “Rosa?” Joe says. “I’ll help you find people who knew her. We’ll find out everything we can.”

  I stare at him.

  I’m not decaying.

  “Why are you doing all this?” I ask.

  “I told you . . . to help.”

  “But why—”

  He takes another step closer. “Because I’d like to help you. Because I hear all these stories and I can’t ever do anything. Maybe this time I can do something.”

  I guess my emotions are running nuclear hot. My chest goes hard. I feel like I’m about to cry, and I do not want to. But even if he does help me, eventually—soon—he’ll realize the truth. I’m not this pretty girl. Not Sylvia Johnson. My body was a ruin. Everything he sees is a lie. A route to salvation? Who was I kidding?

  “I don’t think you can give my story a happy ending,” I tell him.

  He fixes his unrealistically determined eyes on mine. “I can try.”

  20.

  We drive through the darkness on I-95, four lanes in both directions, trees to either side. The radio’s on. It’s playing country. I peer through my window, trying to see beyond my reflection. Jagged shadows are all I make out, and advertisements on the sides of trucks. One screams at me to call 1-800-BAD-DRUG, another 888-HURT. Pain and near-death. They seem to follow me wherever I go.

  Not just pain and near-death . . .

  Joe’s elbow is propped on the ledge of his window. He’s driving with one hand. It’s a casual approach to a journey that’s so loaded for me.