"What's the difference?" he'd asked. "I get sick just thinking about it."
He'd been living with me because his wife had kicked him out. He later wound up in jail for hitting her, although I should point out that she had driven their car into him first. He told the judge at the trial that he just wanted a happy marriage, like on television. He got six months.
We found my car around the corner and drove along the wet streets, accompanied only by the sounds of the engine and the squeal of the brakes whenever we took a corner. I tried the radio after a few minutes, but it was still broken.
"How long does this sort of thing usually take?" I asked after a while.
Rachel looked out the side window and didn't answer me right away, and for a moment I thought maybe she was crying. I looked closely at her, afraid I'd see tears on her cheeks, but there was nothing on her face at all.
"I don't know," she finally said. "I don't do this all that often."
THE LAST TIME I'd been in a clinic had been months before I'd met Rachel. I'd gone because I'd woken up that morning with an itching I was convinced was gonorrhea or syphilis or something like that.
The doctor was less convinced, though. He didn't bother to sit down when he came into the examination room, just leaned against the desk and stared over my head, at a poster of internal organs taped to the wall. He didn't look me in the eye the whole time I was there.
"You been having sex recently?" he asked.
"No, I've given up on all that," I said.
"What about coffee or alcohol? You been drinking a lot lately?"
"I guess. No more than usual, though."
"It's probably just an infection then, but we'll do some blood tests anyway," he said. He had me lower my pants and lie down on the examination table. I thought very hard about not getting an erection as he touched me, but it was already too late.
"Well, at least everything's working fine," he commented.
"This doesn't usually happen," I said.
"That's all right. Lets me see things easier."
I thought about killing him then, about knocking him to the floor and searching through his drawers until I found a hypodermic or scalpel I could stab him with. Or maybe I could strangle him with the cord of that thing they use to look in your ears.
Thinking about all that just made me harder, though, and I swore then that I was never going to set foot in such a place again.
RACHEL AND I FOUND a walk-in clinic by the twenty-four-hour A&P. Inside the clinic, the walls were covered in half-finished murals of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger. No signs of the others, though, no Piglet or Christopher Robin. On the television in the corner, Oprah was talking to the empty waiting room.
The nurse at the reception desk was reading a Cosmopolitan magazine and didn't look away from it when we walked up. "Reason for visit?" she asked, circling the answers to a quiz.
"I need a morning-after pill," Rachel told her.
Now the nurse looked at me, and I felt I had to say something. "The condom broke," I explained. "But I didn't notice until afterwards."
"You should always buy the extra-strong ones," the nurse said. "Just in case." She gave Rachel some paperwork to fill out and then went back to her quiz.
We sat in the waiting room and watched Oprah. It was a rerun about parents reuniting with the children they'd given up for adoption. Everybody was crying, but I couldn't concentrate. I didn't understand why we had to wait when we were the only people in the place.
"Christ," Rachel said, shaking her head at the television. "Isn't there anything else on?"
I looked around for the remote but didn't see it anywhere. I went up to the counter and asked the nurse if she had it.
"We lost it," she told me, not looking up from the magazine again. "We think maybe one of the patients stole it."
"Why don't you just get a new one?" I asked her.
"That was the new one," she said.
I went over to the television to try and turn the channel, but it was too high on the wall for me. I even tried jumping, which made Rachel laugh.
"I can't watch any more of this," she said. "I'm going outside for some air."
When she didn't come back, I began to wonder if she'd left, so I followed her. She was lying on the trunk of my car, smoking a cigarette. It was starting to rain again, but she didn't seem to care. She just kept lying there, staring up at the sky.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Nothing," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me."
LATER, IN THE EXAMINATION ROOM down the hall, I found a stack of brochures about pregnancy.
"It says here that all the cells are identical in the first two weeks," I told Rachel, showing her the pictures. "It's only later that they start changing into different parts of the body."
"I really don't want to hear this right now," she said.
"But they start growing right away. It could be growing inside you right now."
"I'm never having sex with you again," she told me.
Just then the doctor came in. She looked like somebody's mother, with her gray hair and floral blouse. She sat down at the desk and took a package of pills from her pocket.
"You'll need to take two right away," she told Rachel, "and you can't eat anything for twenty-four hours."
"Right, right," Rachel said.
"Are you sure about this?" I asked her, and now the doctor looked at me for the first time.
"Sure about what?" Rachel asked.
"Maybe we should just wait and see what happens," I said.
"Out of all our choices," she said, "I think that's about last on the list."
"Will it at least kill the baby fast then?" I asked the doctor. "Before it starts growing a brain or anything?"
"I think we're about done here," she said.
Rachel dry-swallowed two of the pills. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and smiled at me. "I can feel them working already," she said.
I WAITED IN THE CAR while Rachel finished talking to the doctor. I was spending the whole night waiting. After a while, I started thumping the steering wheel with my fists. I couldn't stop until Rachel finally came out.
She stood in the doorway for a moment and lit another cigarette before coming over to the car. She opened the door but didn't get in, just stood there, smoking and looking around the empty lot.
"Everything okay?" I asked.
"Everything's fine now," she said. She laughed. "That was a close one."
I sat there a moment longer and then said, "What do we do now?"
"We need groceries," she said, looking at the A&P.
"All right." I started to get out of the car.
"I'd like to do it on my own," she said. She flicked the cigarette away without extinguishing it.
"I'll wait here," I said.
ONCE RACHEL WAS INSIDE THE A&P, I started the car and drove a few streets over, to an all-night gas station I knew about. The attendant, a young man named Phil, topped up the gas tank and then leaned into my window.
"You sure picked the right night," he said, rubbing his nose with an oil-stained finger. "A friend of mine who works at the hospital just dropped off some meds."
"What do they do?" I asked.
"I'm not really sure," he admitted. "But he told me they use them to calm down the crazies."
"That sounds just fine," I said.
He slapped the car's roof and went back inside. I sat there and watched the traffic pass. A cop cruised past once but he never looked my way. Still, I was sweating by the time Phil finally came back.
He counted my money twice and then handed over a baggie holding a half-dozen yellow-and-black capsules. I dry-swallowed one right away and threw the rest in the glove compartment. The one I'd swallowed scratched my throat all the way down.
"You want anything else?" Phil asked. "Oil checked or anything like that?"
"No, that's all I need."
"We've got windshield washer fluid on sale."
I STARTED TO GET HUNGRY on the way back to the A&P. I took a few more of the pills, but they didn't help. I drove around the area for a while, looking for a coffee shop that was still open, but there was nothing, just lit-up, empty office buildings. I couldn't even find a 7-Eleven.
I stopped at a red light, and that's when the drugs hit me. I felt like I was slowly collapsing inward. When the light turned green again, I couldn't bring myself to touch the gas pedal. I couldn't even take my foot off the brake. I just sat there, staring at the light as it changed colours what seemed once every hour or so.
After a while, I noticed more lights flashing on and off behind me, but I didn't see the cop until he rapped on my door with his flashlight. Then I saw the cruiser in the rear-view. I somehow managed to roll down the window.
"What are you doing?" the cop asked me. He was an older man, tall and heavy and with a white mustache. The hand not holding the flashlight was on his gun.
I stared at him. "What do you mean?" I finally managed.
"What do you think I mean?" he asked me.
I thought that over for a moment and then said, "I was just on my way to pick up my wife. She's doing a little shopping."
"Did you know your lights are off?" he asked me.
"No, I didn't," I said. I looked around the deserted street. I couldn't see what difference it made whether my lights were on or not. There were streetlights everywhere, after all.
"Did you also know that you haven't moved in the last five minutes?" he went on. His voice was quiet and conversational.
"I'd like to," I said, "but I really can't."
"What do you mean, you can't?"
"I don't know. I just can't."
He looked at me for a moment longer, then said, "Wait here."
"All right," I said. Where did he think I would go?
He walked back to his car and spoke into his radio for a while. When he came back, he opened my door and reached in to turn off the ignition. "Seeing as you can't drive," he said in that same tone of voice, "I'm going to do it for you." I let him walk me back to his cruiser. Once he had me on my feet and was guiding me, I could move just fine. But what I really wanted to do was sit down and not move at all.
We waited for a tow truck to come for my car, and then he took me to a hospital I'd never been to before. I couldn't take my eyes off the doctor who examined me. He was young and clean-shaven, with hair that shone under the fluorescent lights. Behind him, the walls burned with more light, like it was seeping through from the other side. I understood then what the cop had meant about my lights being out. He'd brought me here so I could shine like this young doctor.
"I found these in the car," the cop told the doctor, showing him the bag of pills. I hadn't seen him take them, hadn't even noticed him searching the car, but that was okay. I didn't want any more of those pills.
"How many of these did you take?" the doctor asked me, holding up the bag and frowning at its contents.
"I don't know," I said. "Three or four."
"Jesus," the doctor said.
"Is he going to be all right?" the cop asked.
"Probably. Physically, anyway."
They put me into a room with an old woman in the bed opposite mine. There were tubes sticking out of her nose and arms, and she only breathed every few seconds or so. There seemed to be a longer gap between each breath. It occurred to me that she was probably dying.
I looked out the window. Somehow the sky had already lightened into grey. I couldn't see the street outside, but I could hear the cars driving by. All those people, going on with their lives, and there I was, lying in a room with a dying woman.
I don't know how long I lay there before the nurse came in. She looked at the old woman and shook her head, then came over to me. "And how are you doing?" she asked.
"What have you done with my car?" I asked her. It sounded like somebody else's voice.
"Don't you worry about that," she said. She put her hand on my forehead. "We'll have you out of here in no time."
"I want my car," I said. I tried to sit up but she held me down. She was stronger than me.
"We just have to make sure you're back to normal," she said.
"I want my car!"
STILL By Peter Darbyshire
"CNN," THE VOICE on the phone said. "Quick."
"Who is this?" I asked.
"It's your mother."
CNN was broadcasting a live car chase. Helicopter shot from above. A cluster of black-and-white cruisers slowly following a blue pickup through freeway traffic. The sound was off on my set, but I could hear the commentator's distant voice coming from my parents' television. There was a bit of an echo.
"Hello?" my mother asked. "Still there?"
"Where else would I be?"
"It's California," my father said on another extension. "We were there just last year."
"He hijacked the truck," my mother said, "and went on a rampage. He was shooting at people and running stop signs and everything."
"I didn't see any of that," my father said.
"It happened earlier," she said. "The announcer told me while you were in the bathroom." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, I figure he's one of those typical California types. You know the kind I mean."
"A vegetarian?" I asked. "An actor?"
"A druggie," she said, lowering her voice. "And after he hijacked the truck -"
"Wait," I said. "Did he hijack the truck or steal it?"
"What's the difference?" she asked.
"Is there someone in it with him?"
"No. He forced them out at gunpoint."
"That's theft then," I said. "Not hijacking. Hijacking would be if he'd taken them along, if he had hostages."
"Really?"
"I'm pretty sure."
"I had no idea," my mother said.
"Where was I for all this?" my father muttered.
The pickup tried to pass on the shoulder and hit the guardrail, bouncing off and into a white van. Both vehicles stopped for a moment, and the police cruisers slowed. Then the pickup rolled forward again. It drove past one off-ramp after another, hesitating slightly at each one, as if looking for something.
"What I want to know," my mother said, "is where he's going."