Break in Case of Emergency (15 page)

“I just don't know that I'm up for this,” Jen said. It was her monthly check-in at Dr. Lee's private office, which was tucked away in a quieter back corridor of the henhouse, perhaps forty paces away from the Garden of Earthly Delights. “Physically or emotionally or financially.”

“Financially is the easiest part,” Dr. Lee said.

“Oh, really?” Jen said with ironic glee.

Dr. Lee squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Forgive me, you must understand, our clientele is—”

“It's okay,” Jen said. “Even with WellnessSolutions not covering the—the procedure, there are still payment plans, installment plans, income-based sliding scales, all that. It's not as formidable as it is at other clinics. I did the research, and—”

Jen exhaled and looked out the window. Dr. Lee's office overlooked a Grecian-phallus monument perched in the center of a tiny patch of walled grass in a busy intersection. Jen had been jaywalking past the phallus for more than a year on her trips to the henhouse, and she had never once stopped to read the plaque. She had no idea what the phallus commemorated. For all she knew it honored not past mayors or congressmen or land-grabbers but served instead as a totem of power and fecundity meant to embolden all visitors to the Garden of Earthly Delights.

“Well,” Dr. Lee said, placing her palms on her desk in a pose of adjournment. “Let me know what you decide.”

They stood and shook hands. “I have some work travel coming up, and it's the holidays soon—I'll come to a decision after that,” Jen said. “In the New Year.”

She went to open the door, hesitated, and turned back. “I don't know why I keep saying
I.
I'm not the only one doing this. It's Jim and me. It's you. Your colleagues.”

“It's still isolating,” Dr. Lee said. “Patients talk about that. You know, the clinic offers a support group—”

“I went to one; I got up and left after ten minutes like a jerk,” Jen said. “It reinforced the feeling that I'm getting at—it's almost like the more people get involved with this, the more isolated I feel. Whereas if we could have done this alone in a bedroom or a broom closet or the backseat of a car like normal people, I never would have felt isolated at all.”

“Well,” Dr. Lee said again.

That night, Jen dreamed that she received a certified letter from a collection agency, and Jim explained, remorsefully, that he had been using their shared WellnessSolutions health-insurance card as a credit card for the past year under the mistaken impression that their household expenses would be covered by their premium and copay.

“I'm so sorry,” Jim kept saying in the dream. “I tried to guess how it worked, and I guessed wrong.”

MARGARETHE!: Sorry I'm not calling you back; Millie is sick and gross and I just got her down and if she wakes up again I know we'll be up all night.

jenski1848: Aw, poor little lady.

MARGARETHE!: Oh, man, I just found more barf in my hair, hang on

MARGARETHE!: Back! You're leaving first thing in the morning, right?

jenski1848: Theoretically, although I can't find my passport.

MARGARETHE!: I want to hear about the trip, but first—and I wanted to ask you about this in person, but—what happened? With you and Pam?

MARGARETHE!: And full disclosure, I asked Pam this question already, and I didn't really get anything out of her.

jenski1848: It was my fault.

MARGARETHE!: OK…

MARGARETHE!: I'm not interested in taking sides, I just wish one of you could tell me what happened.

jenski1848: I asked her to do something—pressured her to do something, really—and I shouldn't have, and she's angry.

MARGARETHE!: Pam said it was an interview? That's basically all I got out of her.

MARGARETHE!: Sorry if I'm being pushy! It's just so sad that you guys aren't talking.

jenski1848: An interview, yes.

MARGARETHE!: OK, well, so what? It couldn't have been that bad, and she could have said no.

jenski1848: And what do you say to her about it when I'm not around?

MARGARETHE!: I say, “It couldn't have been that bad, and you could have said no.” Jesus. I said that to her yesterday, in fact. You can ask her.

jenski1848: No, I can't, “in fact.”

MARGARETHE!: Don't be awful. I know I'm pushing too hard on this, and I apologize, and I'll stop, but don't be awful.

jenski1848: I'm sorry, too, Meg. I'm really sorry. It will all be OK. We just need to give her some space. I think sometimes I lose sight of all she's been through. She deserves some slack.

jenski1848: I hope that doesn't sound like I'm condescending to her.

MARGARETHE!: Ooh, now I get to ask a Jen question: Are you saying all that for my benefit or are you saying that because you think it's true?

jenski1848:

When Jen finally came to bed, bags packed and passport located, Jim was lying still, but she couldn't hear him breathing, and because she couldn't yet make out his familiar rhythm of inhale and exhale, she knew he wasn't asleep but only lingering on the threshold of sleep, ready to turn back, and insofar as there was space for thought, she thought about why she would ever think about anything else but this, to want such relief so badly and to be filled with it more or less whenever she chose, and afterward as she thought she was fading into sleep, she couldn't remember the last time they had convened an all-hands meeting without it having been in some sense scheduled in advance or at least without her knowing where it landed in the calendar, and therefore whether or not it might theoretically serve a larger purpose, and above them what sounded like an armoire crashed to the floor, and he gasped and turned again to wrap his arms around his wife, and his wife realized that her husband still wasn't asleep, and as he pressed against her again his wife pushed her fists hard against her husband's shoulder blades, hoping to release the ecstatic pressure of desperately wanting what she already had.

Jen watched Karina waiting just outside the gate at the Belize City airport, clasping and rubbing her hands together. It was bizarre, Jen thought, to glimpse Karina—however briefly—in a public place as if she were alone, unguarded, amid her excitement and her private thoughts. Virtually everything Jen knew of Karina amounted to an interpretation of a performance, consciously acted out in front of an audience. Jen thought of the tactic that Pam said she sometimes used on her more ill-at-ease photographic subjects, when, after twenty or so minutes of holding themselves stiffly before her camera, they would hear Pam call out, “That's it, we've got the shot,” and the subject would either crack a grin of merry reprieve or sink and sigh into pensive relief—and
that
would be the moment when Pam squeezed off a few more frames, when she
really
got the shot. It was a trick, yes, but one that the subject almost always instinctively understood. The trick, of course, was to forget yourself for just a few seconds, to allow yourself to be safely alone before a documenting eye.

“He's just in the gents',” Karina informed Jen by way of greeting. “Usually Travis would charter his own flight, obviously,” she added, “but this time around, you know, he's gotta run with the plebes.”

Jen wondered if running with the plebes meant that LIFt was footing the bill for Travis Paddock's trip as well as hers and Karina's. Jen had wondered about the financial arrangements behind their itinerary as she and her fellow coach passengers had inched past the first-class cabin, one of its rows occupied by Karina and an unidentified man, presumably Travis Paddock, their faces obscured by copies of
Grazia
and
Men's Health,
respectively, elbows pressed together across armrests.

Now a bronzed figure emerged from the men's room closest to their exit gate, his wide-legged carriage seesawing like a cowboy's. In person, Travis Paddock was smaller and wirier than the image of him that Jen had extrapolated from the homunculus staring out from the box-top of his smoothie starter kit. His stride accelerated as he grew closer to Karina, who called out, “Mr. Paddock, I presume!” in a preemptive tone as she glanced anxiously in Jen's direction. He stopped a few feet short of Karina, pivoted 30 degrees toward Jen, and reached out to grip her hand with all the power invested in him by BodMod Nutritionals
™
.

“Travis Paddock, BodMod Nutritionals,” Travis Paddock intoned, pumping Jen's arm like a cable pulley in a weight room.

“So Travis has an SUV waiting for us,” Karina said. A custardy singsong lapped around her voice. “Out here, most people would hire a driver, but not Travis,” Karina added. “He is pure-cut DIY.”

Jen realized that her mouth was hanging open. “Yeah,” she said. “I bet you
built
that SUV, Travis.”

Outside, the air hung like damp wool, a chilly undertow kicking at a steady breeze. A sooty cloud cover was dissolving the pale blue sky, as if the day were aging in time-lapse, its pigments drained by pollutants, tomorrow's colors already muted by today's subtle epigenetic changes. The city's specific sleepiness felt almost suburban to Jen, as if the rows of nineteenth-century colonial structures, tin-roofed and weatherproofed and raised on stilts, hosted an absent bedroom community of daily travelers to some mysterious island location, accessible only via passport and password.

“Look at the huge line outside that—is that a shopping mall?” Jen said inanely from the backseat. Travis and Karina had kept an eerie silence since pickup.

Travis, behind the wheel, glanced out the window. “That's a sort of security checkpoint for the cruise ships that dock here,” he said. “Way to keep out the riffraff.”

“Capitalism, huh?” Karina said from the front passenger seat.

They headed southeast along the coast, the gray haze obscuring the shoreline, then cut straight west toward their hotel in Cayo District, near the Guatemalan border. As they passed through the outskirts of Belize City, the landscape turned both greener and more desolate. The houses on their rickety stilts became fewer and farther between. Discarded auto parts languished in the yards. Chickens rooted in piles of garbage. A rooster and a pelican happened past. Dogs and coconut palms everywhere. They passed a graveyard of golf carts (“Did you see that graveyard of golf carts?” Jen asked, to no reply), an abandoned school bus, and three little girls stacked on one purple bicycle: one whose legs dangled from the front basket, one perched precariously on the edge of the seat, and the biggest girl in the center, pedaling steadily. Jen leaned out her window to snap a photograph of the girls—two of whom looked up in stoic accusation—and she immediately regretted it. She turned her camera's attentions instead to the region's residential aesthetics: The houses were bubblegum pink or spearmint or baby's-room blue, salmon and racing green and magenta.

“They paint them that color so they can watch them fade,” Travis said.

“I can see what attracted you to this place, Travis,” Karina said. “It's a paradise, and yet there is so much
good
to be done.”

“Paradise in progress,” Travis said.

“Very well put,” Karina said.

“So, uh, you've got your work cut out for you the next day or so, huh, Jen,” Travis said over his shoulder.

“Oh, ha, yeah, tell me about it,” Jen said. “Hiking through paradise-in-progress, in search of nature's next great elixir. Under these conditions, we should unionize.” She caught herself. “Not that what you do isn't really hard work, Travis. I'd love to hear
more
about what you do—everything about what you do, actually!” She giggled without knowing why.

Travis caught Jen's eye in the rearview mirror and peered at her curiously, nose tilted upward, as if he'd caught the elusive scent of a precious particularizable herb at the exact second that a breeze across the highland scrambled the direction from which it came.

“You're not—coming with us?” Travis asked.

“Oh! Sorry,” Jen said. “I didn't mean to make any assumptions.”

Jen felt oddly allied with Travis as they both glanced over at Karina. Karina looked out the window serenely, even though the route was growing bumpier all the time, the road at turns rutted and beach-soft. Then she stirred in her seat in an overdetermined way, as if she were robotically playing out the eightieth take of a movie scene for a demanding director. “Oh, goodness,” Karina said, making a diphthong out of
good,
“I was lost in a world of my own.” They had just passed a mile of marshland, and now they were coming up on a soccer field, empty save for plastic bottles, its midfield buckled under several inches of stagnant, milky water.

Karina turned her head halfway toward Jen with some effort, as if she were wearing a neck brace. Her movement expressed not physical discomfort but the psychic pain of relocating from the flow state.

“So, Jen, I've been thinking,” Karina said. “If you do the cost-benefit analysis of our little adventure, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the two of us to double up with Travis—I mean, one of us can take notes and observe the action just as well as the other can. But it just so happens that, in this tiny little country, there's another amazing opportunity for LIFt just waiting to be fulfilled, if one of us will be so bold as to accept the mission.”

“What are the odds,” Jen said.

“I
know,
right?” Karina said. “So, remember when we were talking about integrating our board, being more inclusive of everyone in our mission to empower women?”

“Mm-hm,” Jen said.

“Have you heard of a friend of Leora's named Baz Angler?”

“Let me think,” Jen said. “Software fortune? Video games?”

“See, Jen,” Karina said, “you're always one step ahead of me.”