Jessica Chiarella - And Again

But no, I’m not just like my mother. I have more resilience than she did. She was so easily bruised, so easily discouraged, the sort of woman who would dump a half-cooked omelette into the trash if it began sticking to the pan, or burn the drapes in the fireplace when she noticed her hems weren’t straight.

It was not such a great shock to me that my accident was a tragedy she could not handle. It was not so great a shock when Tom came to me in the hospital and told me that she’d taken pills and walked off the end of the dock near our family’s house on Lake Michigan, her pockets filled with stones. I’d hated him for telling me. He could have lied, could have made up an entire life for my mother and I would have never known. He could have created a different death for her even, cancer or blood clots or pneumonia after a fall. His honesty felt cruel, more for him than for me. That was when I began to be born yesterday. To have no history at all.

“I guess she did, in a way,” I reply. My nose is running a little. I go to the sink and dab at it with a paper towel. “I guess she did get sick.”

“Too bad she couldn’t get a SUB like you,” Katie says. “If she was still alive maybe you could have gone to live with her.”

I turn back toward her then. “Why would I go live with her?” I ask. “You and Daddy and Jack are here.”

“I just mean, maybe you’d be happier with someone you know, that’s all.”

“What makes you think I’m not happy?”

She avoids my eyes. “But you’re not, are you?” she says. At first, I don’t know what to say. I can’t answer her, and she nods, as if I’ve only confirmed her suspicions. As if she’s somehow let me down, as if my sadness is her doing.

“Katie, don’t you want me to be here?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, the pitch of her voice rising, as if I’m accusing her of something. She gets up fast from her stool. “What if I don’t?”

“That’s all right,” I say, but it doesn’t stop her. She’s off, running up the back stairs to her room. I hear her door slam. I want to tell her that she’s not required to be happy that I’ve come back, and come back altered. I can’t begrudge her hating me a little, just like I always hated my mother a little, no matter how much I loved her. But I can’t tell her that, because of the little bit of something, the little pea of tissue that’s combusting with life in my stomach. It scares me too much to think that I’m the same as my mother. To think that I could hurt these kids the way she hurt me, through her own weakness. And still, still, I find myself dumping the cookie dough out in the trash instead of baking it because it has been ruined, this afternoon, and more, perhaps much more along with it.

Hannah shows up at the worst possible moment. I’m on the phone with Beth because David Jr. broke his arm jumping the fence into the neighbor’s yard this afternoon, and she seems to think that the bone will heal faster if I hop in my Audi and drive up there immediately. Ignoring the fact that the kid will have been asleep for hours before I’ve even crossed the state line. Ignoring the fact that I technically shouldn’t be driving. And I’m right at the point of really needing a drink, at the point where Beth’s words bounce off me like hot little pellets of asphalt, where everything in me is dying to call her a spoiled cunt and throw the phone across our well-furnished living room — that’s the moment Hannah arrives.

She shows up this time with a bottle, something with pink frosted glass. Fuck.

“Hey,” she says, before I can cover the mic on my phone, and then Beth is in my ear asking who the hell is coming over at this time of night. Hannah takes a sip as she slips off her coat, leaving it in a soft puddle on the entryway floor, her mouth on the neck of the bottle doing something vaguely pleasant to my spine, setting off a little thrill there.

“Beth, I’ve gotta go,” I say, and I don’t even wait for an answer before I end the call, dropping the phone into my pocket. My anger evaporates at the sight of Hannah. She doesn’t have much on under her coat, it looks like silk in the darkness, a little pearlescent slip that shows off her breasts wonderfully, insubstantial as they are. The lace at the hem of it slides up and down her thighs like a tide as she leans back to sip from the bottle. This was the sort of girl I’ve always known would be my undoing. Not as elegant as Beth, or as staggeringly, pristinely beautiful as Connie. A girl who didn’t instill the kind of hesitance that those other women would, the subtle, almost unintelligible fear of marring them in some way, as if the blunt instrument of my body could strip them of some of their perfection. As if I could be made to want them less, by having them.

My sexual fascination with Hannah runs no such risks. This is a girl with sharp teeth, hard as bone, standing there with my other favorite devil clutched in her hand, wafting off her breath.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

“You brought your own refreshments.”

She giggles a little. “It felt like that sort of night. Maybe it’s a full moon. Who knows?”

“Wine coolers were never my favorite,” I say, stepping toward her. She steps back a little, teasing in the dark, silhouetted by the orange glow of the streetlights on the window shade.

“What was?”

“Scotch, mainly.”

“And you haven’t had a drink since the transfer?” she asks. I shake my head. “Well, then I’m not sharing with you.” She takes another sip. She’s unsteady on her legs, I can tell, because she stumbles a little, raising that scrap of silk even farther. My self-control is in tatters.

“Yes you are.” I take a few steps toward her, and she retreats again.

“Nope.”

I chase her around the room, taking advantage of the moment when she bangs her shin on the glass coffee table to divest her of the bottle. She doesn’t seem pleased as she reaches down to rub her leg, which is already starting to bruise. “Asshole,” she says, in a voice that tells me she’s not even close to kidding, but I’m not listening. I’m holding the bottle, looking down its neck as if it were a wading pool positioned beneath the towering ladder of a high-dive. I take a sip and it’s sugary and sort of floral-tasting, with a harsh bite underneath. Not what I remember, not even close. I wait for that report of pleasure within my body, that familiar click of a switch flipping, opening all of my channels at once. But still, there’s nothing.

“Well?” Hannah asks, straightening up, her hands on her hips. I shrug.

“It’s not very good.”

“It cost seven dollars. It’s not exactly Chateau Margaux.”

I take another swig. The burn of it is sort of pleasant, like easing into a hot tub. “Why do you keep coming back here?”

“Do you not want me to keep coming back?”

“My chief of staff certainly wouldn’t.”

“And what’s his name?” she asks, closing the distance between us and popping the buttons on my shirt, one by one.

“Jackson.”

“Jackson.”

“Is it because you can’t paint?”

Her hands drop, finding their way back to her hips.

“Chatty tonight, aren’t we?”

“Explain it to me. There are a million ways to make it rich in this country, take it from me. You don’t have to be able to paint.”

“Getting rich wasn’t the point,” she says, dropping back onto the couch and crossing her legs in front of her. “It was about being extraordinary at something.”

“And being ordinary…”

“Is just about the worst thing I can imagine,” she replies, making slow circles with her ankle. She’s wearing heels. It seems absurd to me now, because I’m pretty sure it’s pouring outside tonight. Everything about her is suddenly a mix of sadness and absurdity. “But you can understand that, can’t you?”