Althea and Oliver (19 page)

“You lost your—”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

Oliver bites the insides of his cheeks. “I have this friend back home. My best friend, since we were kids. She grew up down the block.” He hesitates. “I don't really know how it happened.”

“You didn't—” Kentucky can't even finish the thought. “Did you?”

Oliver shakes his head. “No, no, it was nothing like that. She wanted to, she'd been wanting to forever. But I told her I didn't want to, that I wasn't ready, and she did it anyway. And when I woke up, she didn't tell me. Not for months. So isn't that kind of like the same thing?”

“So you're saying she— Is that what you're saying?”

Oliver winces. “I don't even know what I'm saying.” He remembers Althea screaming at him in the driveway:
Christ, I'm not a fucking rapist.
He didn't argue with her, not on that point. Something about that word doesn't feel right. It's too broad, not specific enough to describe what Althea did to him. Kentucky can't even say it out loud. “No, that's not what I'm saying. Not exactly.”

Kentucky looks baffled. “I don't get it.”

“What don't you get?”

“Is she ugly or something?”

“Fuck you, she's beautiful.”

“Listen, I pulled out my dick in front of my mother. AK-47's little sister is going to need years of psychotherapy. New Jersey got dumped for some infraction he'll never even know about. That shit is all irreparable. You just told me you got laid.”

“But it's like I wasn't even there.”

Irate, Kentucky leaps to his feet and points to the door. “New Jersey tried to fuck a window treatment! You fucked your beautiful best friend! What the hell are you doing here, man? Go find this girl and screw her brains out! And this time you will remember!” He shakes his head. “Christ on a cross, NC, you should have told that story the first day you got here. You would have been holding the remote this whole time.”

“I don't want to have stories to tell!” Oliver shouts. “I want my fucking life back! I got laid, sure, and I have no idea what it was like. I have no idea what
I
was like.”

“What, you're worried you weren't any good?”

“That's not what I mean. I mean— Why is this so hard to grasp? When it happens, it's supposed to change your life, divide everything into ‘before' and ‘after.' And instead I'm in some weird limbo. It used to be I was a step behind all my friends. I get sick, time stops for me, they keep going. Now I've even fallen behind
myself
. And how can I ever catch up? It'll never be my first time again. Not with anyone. Not with her.” Even as the story has galvanized Kentucky, Oliver is wiped out by the telling. Lying back on the hospital bed, he throws a forearm over his face. “We get to stop recording, but we don't get to hit pause, and we don't get to rewind.”

Kentucky launches his frog across the desk again. “What does your girl say about all this?”

“She's not my girl. I was so pissed when I found out, I stopped speaking to her.” Exhaustion falls over Oliver like a billowy sheet; it lands on his face and knees first, and then settles over the rest of his body.

“Look, I hear you. It would bother the hell out of me if I couldn't remember my first time. Not that I've
had
a first time. You know what I mean. But listen, you've heard everyone else's stories. Doesn't it seem possible that you were the aggressor? If she'd been wanting to for ages, and you finally made a move, maybe she just, I don't know, couldn't help herself.”

“I can blame KLS for my bad decisions. She's got no excuse for her lack of impulse control.”

“What's her name?”

“Althea.”

Kentucky shakes his head. “You got some beautiful girl named Althea in love with you, and you're stuck here talking to me. I'd be pissed, too.”

Stella walks in, brandishing her thermometer. When she leans over to check Oliver's glands, he can smell the nicotine on her lips and in her hair.

“How are you feeling?”

“I think it's time.”

“Let's get you set up.” She turns to Kentucky. “Would you mind excusing us?”

“Can I ask you something first?”

“Sure.”

Kentucky looks solemnly at the nurse, and as she looks back, Oliver is aware of the gulf in years between them. This woman weathered her own uncertain adolescence and made it out on the other side. Oliver realizes if he could fast-forward ten years, he'd see that he, too, had done the same, that the unknown territory between now and then would be navigated much as the past had been—inelegantly, and with great confusion, in a clumsy but dogged fashion. KLS might force him to skip ahead here and there, but he's going to have to do all the hard parts himself. The thought exhausts him further.

“Do they assign you what color scrubs you have to wear?” asks Kentucky. “Or do you get to choose?”

• • •

Althea stands outside the hospital, smoking and planning what she'll say. Her neck aches from sleeping in her car overnight; she craves a cigarette even though she's in the middle of one, and she knows she could stand out here all day and never be ready to go in. He's up there, an elevator ride away. All she has to do is push through the revolving doors and traverse that marble lobby, find his room in this enormous building, and open with some whimsical remark about the weather in New York. That should do it. Some whimsy, the weather, a big smile. Right. Or maybe he'll just be so impressed by her devotion, that she's driven all this way to offer one of her rare apologies, that he'll forgive her on the spot.

Two women spill out of the revolving doors, giggling and looking over their shoulders, one of them wheeling an IV stand behind her, a hospital bracelet around her wrist. Her friend places a hand on her elbow, steering her away from the entrance. The patient looks a few years older than her friend, the friend a few years older than Althea. The two are full of mischief, mirth, giddy over their brief escape. The friend has pink hair and a nose ring; the patient sports the kind of slick bob that can only be achieved with various efforts and appliances.

Pink pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers one to her friend.

“You light it,” the patient says. “They always taste better when you light them.”

Pink obliges, and soon the two are enveloped in their cloud, taking intensely grateful drags.

“We need to ditch my mother,” the patient says, gesturing with her free hand. “She's got to be shined on.”

“She's scaring the bejesus out of all the doctors,” says Pink. “Yet I find her presence oddly soothing.”

“Soothing like a car alarm. You've got to do something. She's got to go.”

“She needs an activity. A way to be useful. Useful somewhere else.”

“Should we tell her the dogs need to be walked? Give her the keys to my apartment?”

Pink shivers. “Your mother is wearing a Donna Karan suit and I'm standing here dressed like a street urchin. Which of us is the more likely candidate to pick up dog shit in the East Village?”

The patient's eyes widen. “That's it! We'll send her back to my apartment to pick up clothes. Get her to go pack a bag for me.”

Pink nods enthusiastically, pointing at her friend with the lit end of her cigarette. “Yes. But. You need to fixate on an item that she won't be able to find. To make sure she's there for a while. Something you absolutely need. Something that's in
my
apartment.”

Althea listens, envious, as the two work out their scheme. They seem unlikely cohorts. She wonders how two such women found each other in this city. Nicky only told the story of meeting Oliver's dad once—a party, a friend of a friend, it had not been interesting—but Althea loves the tale of her friendship with Sarah, how they lived on the same floor of their apartment building and eyed each other for weeks, first smiling, then saying hello, daily pleasantries at the mailboxes extending into longer conversations, Nicky gathering the nerve to invite Sarah over for dinner. “A shot in the dark,” she called it. They spent a long night on the fire escape with a bottle of wine, listening to cats howl in the courtyard below and their upstairs neighbors singing a pornographic duet of sighs and moans. By the time the sun rose, Nicky said, she knew that was it. She knew she was in it with Sarah for life.

“Are you sure?” asks Pink. “You're sure you don't want your mother here? She really, really wants to be here.”

Her friend holds up the hand with the IV. “This right here? This trumps your conscience. As long as I'm schlepping one of these things around, you have to do what I want.”

“And what you want is to trick your mother into going back to your apartment?”

“For hours. Yes. That is what I want.”

“Your wish is my etcetera,” Pink says.

Their strategy fully formed, she wheels her friend's IV back toward the entrance, the two women firmly leashed together. Althea watches them go.

“That girl looked so sad, don't you think?” A gust of wind carries Pink's whisper back to its subject.

Her friend shrugs, the plastic bracelet slipping down her wrist. “It's a hospital. What do you expect?”

They forge a path through the revolving doors and the lobby Althea has been trying to cross for two hours. Imagining herself drawn along in their wake, she pushes through the doors before they can stop spinning, letting the duo's momentum tug her forward.

• • •

If Oliver had ever fantasized about going to bed with Stella, this would not quite be what he'd imagined. She waits outside while he changes into his pajamas—an old pair of sweats that he's cut into shorts and his favorite Johnny Cash T-shirt. Everything aches now, his ankles and wrists and even the base of his neck, and his head is warm and heavy. As he gets into bed, he expects to feel grateful, but his exhaustion is unexpectedly mingled with anxiety. For the first time since he arrived, he realizes that the outside world has not ground to a halt simply because he's quarantined here. Nicky joked that she could have a boyfriend by the time Oliver wakes, but it's actually possible, isn't it? And what else could be going on out there?

Stella knocks on the door. “You ready?”

“I guess.”

She enters, standing over his bed. “Don't look so worried.”

“I hope this wasn't a terrible idea.”

“Shush.”

“Don't shush me,” he says automatically, but she doesn't know the rest of her lines. He tries to cue her. “You're supposed to say . . .” But the rest comes out an incoherent, sleepy mumble. In his head he can hear it perfectly.
You love it when I shush you.
“Fuck.”

“I'm supposed to say ‘fuck'?” asks Stella.

Abruptly, Oliver sits up, panicked. “This was a bad idea. Why did I come here?”

“So we could help you. Relax, okay? I'm here to help you.”

“I don't know why I'm so nervous.” His voice trembles.

“Here.” Reaching behind him, Stella fluffs his pillows, then punches them to make an indentation for his head. “Lie down.”

If he says one more word, he's going to cry. He obeys.

As his reward, Stella starts to sing. Her voice is cracked and raspy but warm, filled with honey, and it fits the slow, mournful song she's chosen. He closes his eyes and listens as she presses the sticky electrodes to his temples again and hooks him up to all the equipment, sadness filling his chest until it's tight against the rubber strap.

Even half-asleep, Oliver can sense Stella's graceful movements around the room. But it's Althea's image that swims onto the stage of his eyelids, blissed out and covered in cherry Jell-O, then driving her car down the highway, one elbow resting on the open window, the other hand masterfully piloting the wheel. He remembers when that was enough for her, just a ride in the car or a day at the beach, and he wishes he could have given her another ten years of days like that, when all it took to make her happy was him in the shotgun seat and twelve hours when they had nowhere to be.

Suddenly the idea that Stella might see him in the midst of this coming episode, that he might unwittingly grope her or say something profane or relieve himself on the floor while she watches, seems inexpressibly horrible. He would rather go back to Wilmington right now than risk sacrificing her kindness and ruining one more person's good opinion of him. When she's finished her song, he opens his eyes with tremendous effort.

“Will you look after Kentucky while I'm out?” he says. “Make sure the gorillas aren't giving him a hard time.”

“They're not gorillas,” she says. “They're just a bunch of boys, all as scared as you.”

“Still.”

“Okay.”

“You won't be here, right?”

“Here where?”

It's getting harder to string words together in a coherent fashion. “You won't see . . . me,” he manages.

She smiles, understanding. “Whatever happens, I won't see any of it.” Leaning over, she tucks the blanket under his chin and he can smell cigarettes and lip balm and the sharp scent of her scrubs, and his stupid, stupid heart rends one more time with the memory of Althea, and if he weren't losing consciousness he would burst into an apocalyptic fit of tears, but instead his eyes close and the last thing Stella says finds his brain by way of some small miracle, right before his mind flickers like a candle and is snuffed out.

“But I will be here when you wake up.”

• • •

Althea steps out of the elevator, fists thrust into the pockets of her jeans, shoulders hunched in her down vest, hood hanging over her face. A long, shiny hallway stretches out before her, then makes a sharp right turn. Somewhere a television is broadcasting sports; an announcer's voice drones faintly over the cheer of a stadium crowd. Two boys come careening into sight, sliding down the slick floor in socked feet, almost crashing into the wall at the end of the hallway. They run back in the other direction, vanishing behind the corner again. There is an audible thud and the squeak of skin against linoleum as one of them wipes out, then braying laughter.