Get in Trouble: Stories (37 page)

But he came back in a minute. He turned on the lights and stood there.

“Like what you see?” she said.

His arms were shiny and wet. There was blood on his arms. “I need a tourniquet,” he said. “Some kind of tourniquet.”

“What did you do?” she said. Almost sober. Putting her robe on. “Is it Alan?”

But it was Jason. Blood all over the bathtub and the half-tiled wall. He’d slashed both his wrists open with a potato peeler. The potato peeler was still there in his hand.

“Is he okay?” she said. “Alan! Where the fuck are you?”

Alberto wrapped one of her good hand towels around one of
Jason’s wrists. “Hold this.” He stuck another towel around the other wrist and then wrapped duct tape around that. “I called 911,” he said. “He’s breathing. Couldn’t or didn’t want to do the job properly. Bad choice of equipment either way. Who is this guy? Your brother?”

“My employee,” she said. “I don’t believe this. What’s with the duct tape?”

“Carry it with me,” he said. “You never know when you’re going to need some duct tape. Get me a blanket. We need to keep him warm. My ex-wife did this once.”

She skidded down the hall. Slammed open the door to Elliot’s room. Turned on the lights and grabbed the comforter off the bed.

“
Vas poh!
Your new boyfriend’s in the bathroom,” she said. “Cut his wrists with my potato peeler. Wake up, Lan-Lan! This is
your
mess.”

“
Fisfis wah
, Lin-Lin,” Alan said, so she pushed him off the bed.

“What did you do, Alan?” she said. “Did you do something to him?”

He was wearing a pair of Elliot’s pajama bottoms. “You’re not being funny,” he said.

“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I’m drunk. There’s a man named Alberto in the bathroom. Jason tried to kill himself. Or something.”

“Oh, fuck,” he said. Tried to sit up. “I was nice to him, Lindsey! Okay? It was real nice. We fucked and then we smoked some stuff and then we were kissing and I fell asleep.”

She held out her hand, pulled him up off the floor. “What kind of stuff? Come on.”

“Something I picked up somewhere,” he said. She wasn’t really listening. “Good stuff. Organic. Blessed by monks. They give it to the gods. I took some off a shrine. Everybody does it. You just leave a bowl of milk or something instead. There’s no fucking way it made him crazy.”

The bathroom was crowded with everyone inside it. No way to avoid standing in Jason’s blood. “Oh, fuck,” Alan said.

“My brother, Alan,” she said. “Here’s his comforter. For Jason. Alan, this is Alberto. Jason, can you hear me?” His eyes were open now.

Alberto said to Alan, “It’s better than it looks. He didn’t really slice up his wrists. More like he peeled them. Dug into one vein pretty good, but I think I’ve slowed down the bleeding.”

Alan shoved Lindsey out of the way and threw up in the sink.

“Alan?” Jason said. There were sirens.

“No,” Lindsey said. “It’s me. Lindsey. Your boss. My bathtub, Jason. Your blood all over my bathtub. My potato peeler! Mine! What were you thinking?”

“There was an iguana in your freezer,” Jason said.

Alberto said, “Why the potato peeler?”

“I was just so happy,” Jason said. He was covered in blood. “I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I didn’t want to stop feeling that way. You know?”

“No,” Lindsey said.

“Are you going to fire me?” Jason said.

“What do you think?” Lindsey said.

“I’ll sue for sexual harassment if you try,” Jason said. “I’ll say you fired me because I’m gay. Because I slept with your brother.”

Alan threw up in the sink again.

“How do you feel now?” Alberto said. “You feel okay?”

“I just feel so happy,” Jason said. He began to cry.

one boy, raised from the dead

During the summer between third and fourth grade, Lindsey had witnessed the mother of a girl named Amelia Somersmith call a boy back to life when he fell off the roof during a game of hide-and-seek. He fell off when a kid named Martin saw him hiding up there, and yelled his name. David Filgish stood up and just to show he didn’t care that he’d been seen, he turned a cartwheel along the garage roof, only he misjudged where the edge was. He had definitely been dead. Everybody was sure about that. Amelia’s mother came running out of the house while everyone was standing there, wondering what to do, looking down at David, and she’d said, “Oh, God, David, you idiot! Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead. Get up right now or I’m calling your mother!”

There had been a piece of grass lying right on David’s eye. Amelia’s mother’s shirt hadn’t been buttoned right, so you could see a satiny brown triangle of stomach, and she had sounded so angry that David Filgish sat up and started to cry.

Lindsey Driver had thrown up in the grass, but no one else noticed, not even her twin, Alan, who was only just becoming real enough to play with other children.

They were all too busy asking David if he was all right. Did he know what day it was. How many fingers. What was it like being dead.

not much of a bedside manner

Alan went with Jason in the ambulance. The EMTs were both quite good-looking. The wind was stronger, pushing the trees around like a bully. Lindsey would have to put the storm shutters up.

For some reason Alberto was still there. He said, “I’d really like a beer. What’ve you got?”

Lindsey could have gone for something a little stronger. She could smell nothing but blood. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

“Not all that recovered,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Lindsey said. “You’re a really nice guy. But I wish you would go away. I’d like to be alone.”

He held out his bloody arms. “Could I take a shower first?”

“Could you just go?” Lindsey said.

“I understand,” he said. “It’s been a rough night. A terrible thing has happened. Let me help. I could stay and help you clean up.”

Lindsey said nothing.

“I see,” he said. There was blood on his mouth, too. Like he’d been drinking blood. He had good shoulders. Nice eyes. She kept looking at his mouth. The duct tape was back in a pocket of his cargo pants again. He seemed to have a lot of stuff in his pockets. “You don’t like me, after all?”

“I don’t like nice guys,” Lindsey said.

There were support groups for people whose shadow grew into a twin. There were support groups for women whose husbands left them. There were support groups for alcoholics. Probably there were support groups for people who hated support groups, but Lindsey didn’t believe in support groups.

The warehouse had been built to take a pretty heavy hit. Nevertheless, there were certain precautions: the checklist ran to thirty-five pages. Without Jason they were short-handed, and she had a bad hangover that had lasted all through the weekend, all the way into Monday. The worst in a while. By the time Alan got back from the hospital on Saturday night, she’d finished the gin and started in on the tequila. She was almost wishing that Alberto had stayed. She thought about asking how Jason was, but it seemed pointless. Either he was okay or he wasn’t. She wasn’t okay. Alan got her down the hall and onto her bed and then climbed into bed, too. Pulled the blanket over both of them.

“Go away,” she said.

“I’m freezing,” he said. “That fucking hospital. That air-conditioning. No wonder people are sick in hospitals. Just let me lie here.”

“Go away,” she said again.
“Fisfis wah.”

When she woke up, she was still saying it. “Go away, go away, go away.” He wasn’t in her bed. Instead there was a dead iguana, the little one from the freezer. Alan had arranged it—if a dead frozen iguana can be said to be arranged—on the pillow beside her face.

Alan was gone. The bathtub stank of old blood, and the rain slammed down on the roof like nails on glass. Little pellets of ice
on the grass outside. Now the radio said the hurricane was on course to make landfall somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and St. Augustine sometime Wednesday afternoon. There were no plans to evacuate the Keys. Plenty of wind and rain and nastiness due for the Miami area, but no real damage. She couldn’t think why she’d asked Alberto to leave. The storm shutters still needed to go up. He had seemed like a guy who would do that.

She threw away the thawed iguana. Threw away the potato peeler all rusted with blood. Ran hot water in the bath until the bottom of the tub was a faint, blistered pink. Then she crawled back into bed.

If Alan had been there, he could have opened a can and made her soup. Brought her ginger ale in a glass. Finally she turned on the television in the living room, loud enough that she could hear it from her bedroom. That way she wouldn’t be listening for Alan. She could pretend that he was home, sitting out in the living room, watching some old monster movie and painting his fingernails black, the way he had done in high school. Kids with conjoined shadows were supposed to be into all that goth makeup, all that music. When Alan had found out twins were supposed to have secret twin languages, he’d done that, too, invented a language, Lin-Lan, and made her memorize it. Made her talk it at the dinner table, too.
Ifzon meh nadora plezbig
meant:
Guess what I did?
Bandy Tim Wong legkwa fisfis, meh
meant:
Went all the way with Tim Wong.
(Tim Wong fucked me, in the vernacular.)

People with two shadows were
supposed
to get in trouble. Supposed to
be
trouble. They were supposed to lead friends and lovers astray, bring confusion to their enemies, bring down disaster wherever they went. (She never went anywhere.) Alan had
always been a conformist at heart. Whereas she had a house and a job and once she’d even been married. If anyone was keeping track, Lindsey thought it ought to be clear who was ahead.

Mr. Charles still hadn’t managed to get rid of the six supernumerary sleepers from Pittsburgh. Jack Harris could shuffle paper like nobody’s business.

“I’ll call him,” Lindsey offered. “You know I love a good fight.”

“Good luck,” Mr. Charles said. “He says he won’t take them back until after the hurricane goes through. But rules say they have to be out of here twenty-four hours before the hurricane hits. We’re caught between a rock—”

“—and an asshole,” she said. “Let me take care of it.”

She was in the warehouse, on hold with someone who worked for Harris, when Jason showed up.

“What’s up with that?” Valentina was saying. “Your arms.”

“Fell through a sliding door,” Jason said. “Plate glass.”

“That’s not good,” Valentina said.

“Lost almost three pints of blood. Just think about that. Three pints. Hey, Lindsey. Doctors just let me out of the hospital. Said I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy.”

“Valentina,” Lindsey said. “Take the phone for a moment. Don’t worry. It’s on hold. Just yell if anyone picks up. Jason, can I talk to you over there for a moment?”

“Sure thing,” Jason said.

He winced when she grabbed him above the elbow. She didn’t loosen her grip until she had him a couple of aisles away. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t fire you. Besides the
sexual harassment thing. Because I would enjoy that. Hearing you try to make that case in court.”

Jason said, “Alan’s moving in with me. Said you threw him out.”

Was any of this a surprise? Yes, and no. She said, “So if I fire you, he’ll have to get a job.”

“That depends,” Jason said. “Are you firing me or not?”

“
Fisfis buh.
Go ask Alan what that means.”

“Hey, Lindsey. Lindsey, hey. Someone named Jack Harris is on the phone.” Valentina. Getting too close for this conversation to go any further.

“I don’t know why you want this job,” Lindsey said.

“The benefits,” Jason said. “You should see the bill from the emergency room.”

“Or why you want my brother.”

“Ms. Driver? He says it’s urgent.”

“Tell him just a second,” Lindsey said. To Jason: “All right. You can keep the job on one condition.”

“Which is?” He didn’t sound nearly as suspicious as he ought to have sounded. Still early days with Alan.

“You get the man on the phone to take back those six sleepers. Today.”

“How the fuck do I do that?” Jason said.

“I don’t care. But they had better not be here when I show up tomorrow morning. If they’re here, you had better not be. Okay?” She poked him in the arm above the bandage. “Next time borrow something sharper than a potato peeler. I’ve got a whole block full of good German knives.”

“Lindsey,” Valentina said, “this Harris guy says he can call you back tomorrow if now isn’t a good time.”

“Jason will take the call,” Lindsey said.

everything must go

Her favorite liquor store put everything on sale whenever a hurricane was due. Just their way of making a bad day a little more bearable. She stocked up on everything but only had a glass of wine with dinner. Made a salad and ate it out on the sun dock. The air had that electric green shimmy to it she associated with hurricanes. The water was still as milk, but deflating the dock was a bitch nevertheless. She stowed it in the garage. When she came out, a pod of saltwater mermaids was going out to sea. Who could have ever confused a manatee with a mermaid? They turned and looked at her. Dove down, although she could still see them ribboning there, down along the frondy bottom.

The last time a hurricane had come through, her sun dock had sailed out of the garage and ended up two canals over.

She threw the leftover salad on the grass for the iguanas. The sun went down without a fuss.

Alan didn’t come by, so she packed up his clothes for him. Washed the dirty clothes first. Listened to the rain start. She put his backpack out on the dining room table with a note.
Good luck with the suicide kid.

In the morning she went out in the rain, which was light but steady, and put up the storm shutters. Her neighbors were doing the same. Cut herself on the back of the hand while she was working on the next-to-last one. Bled everywhere. Alan pulled up in Jason’s car while she was still cursing. He went into the
house and got her a Band-Aid. They put up the last two shutters without talking.