Jessica Chiarella - And Again

I spend my days scouring the city for photos, walking through its streets with my camera, snapping shots of children playing at a park with their grandmother, or an overgrown aloe plant pressing its waxy leaves against a shop window, or a group of tight-jeaned teenagers standing under the Melrose Diner’s blaring neon sign at three in the morning. I forget to eat, some days, hunting around with film cassettes rattling in my pockets. I bring my spoils back to my darkroom and follow my days of excursions with more days spent in darkness. It’s a strange pattern into which I’ve fallen. I am both explorer and hermit. I study the faces of people and speak to no one. I am invisible, behind that camera. I have become something new.

I sit down with a pencil and paper, trying to sketch out what I have in my head. The thin, spindly feathers, the swirling lines. The feeling of movement. But it doesn’t work, everything looks thick and flat and lifeless when I put the graphite to paper. I crumple it up, toss it into the wastebasket, and get my phone. Penny picks up on the third ring.

“Hey.” Her voice sounds tight. These last few months are the longest we’ve ever gone without speaking. I wonder if she’s angry at me.

“Hey,” I say to her now. “I need you to draw me something.”

She pauses, and I can almost feel her bite back a reproach. “Okay,” she says, finally. “Okay, I guess.”

An hour later we sit, huddled in my spare bedroom until the floor around us is littered with sheets of discarded paper and Penny’s drunk the last of my emergency coffee stash. Late afternoon sunlight cuts swirling, dusty paths through the air around us.

“How about this?” Penny says, holding up the drawing she’s been working on.

“I think that’s probably about as close as we’re going to get.”

We’ve both relaxed a bit from when she arrived, when we greeted each other with forced smiles and anxious glances, testing each other out before we dove back into the deep waters of our friendship. But now, even before she speaks, I know what’s coming.

“So let me get this straight,” she says. “You left Sam for the Antichrist?”

“He’s not the Antichrist,” I reply, though my attempt to defend David is admittedly feeble. “And I didn’t leave Sam for him. I left Sam, and David happened to be around.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to fuck a Republican.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway. Sam’s article put a stop to it pretty quickly. Which, I assume, was his intention.”

“Please,” Penny said, flicking her hand dismissively. “You think Sam published that article to punish David because you were sleeping with him?”

“Why else would he single him out? Go after him like he did?”

“Listen, I don’t know where he found out about David trying to kill the FDA vote. But can you imagine Sam, the white knight of truth and virtue, sitting on that story for any reason? Come on, Hannah, he wouldn’t be the guy you loved if he did.”

“Even if you’re right, none of it matters, anyway,” I reply. “The article has nothing to do with why Sam left. Neither does David, not really.”

Penny’s head drops back against the wall. “He told me what happened, Hannah. He was wrecked,” she replies.

“Yeah, so was I.” I think back on that night and imagine how different things could have been if I’d gone to Penny in my grief instead of David. “I can’t forgive him, Pen.”

“I know. I understand,” she says. “That’s what we’ve always loved about each other, isn’t it? That we’re both merciless, in one way or another. Kindred spirits.” She glances at me and I nod, a confirmation. “But then I think about Connor. And if it came down to watching him go through something like that and closing my eyes, I don’t think I would have an ounce of strength to keep them open. I don’t know if I could have stood it for as long as Sam did.”

“Jesus,” I say, “would you really want to be with someone who would leave you to die alone?”

She starts to cry then, and it’s an appalling thing to watch. Penny, fearless Penny, the one who has always been the fiercer of us, crying there on the floor of my little spare room. She claps her hands over her face. I don’t know what to do. I’m helpless before this wash of emotion from someone who is always so controlled. She wipes at her eyes.

“You wouldn’t have been alone,” she says, her voice so tight it’s almost a whisper. “I would have made sure of it. I would have been there.”

I take her hands and kiss her knuckles. They’re rough. Artist’s hands, made for utility, for transmission. Mine are like a child’s hands, wrapped around her dark fingers, useless and unformed.

“I love you, you know I love you,” I say, and she sniffs, nodding, shaking off the lingering emotion the way someone else might flick away an insect. “But you’re not the one I would have needed to be there.”

We take the drawing to the little tattoo shop on Irving Park that Trevor used to swear by when he lived in Chicago. I’d never gone there before, since I always went to a shop in the Ukrainian Village for all of my other work. But there’s no way to explain to Garry, my former tattoo artist, why all of his previous work has suddenly disappeared from my body, so I had to find an alternative. Inside this shop is a woman with long auburn hair, and she looks at the drawing, then from Penny to me.

“You’re really jumping into the deep end for your first tattoo. You sure about this?”

“This isn’t my first tattoo,” I say, grinning at my own private joke, and she shrugs and leads me to her chair. Two and a half hours later, I walk out of the shop with the beginnings of an ornate phoenix spanning the space from my left shoulder to my elbow, its lines like lacework in Penny’s delicate, perfect detail. It’s hot and aching when the cool evening air hits it, but it’s that good ache, like sore muscles, the kind of pain that’s born of living.

It feels good to watch it heal during the next days and weeks. It crusts over, grows dry, as my body tries to rid itself of the ink deposited in the low wound. But the marks remain, too deep for this body to be rid of, and that feels like a triumph. Like I’m reclaiming myself, an inch of skin at a time.

I’m spending too much time alone. There is nowhere for me to go without our weekly group meetings, waiting for Harry to summon me back to Los Angeles. He got me a modeling job in Chicago to hold me over, a few days of photo shoots for some Midwestern makeup company, which felt briefly exhilarating until they handed me a check and sent me on my way. Now I spend hours holed up in my little apartment, the way I used to when I was sick. I keep thinking about my mother. I think about the way she was when I was a child, her ferocity and strength of will, her unyielding authority. And I think of her now, imagine her in that trailer, a dried-up shade of what she was, because of me. I want to talk to Linda, to ask her what she thinks of my depression and its source. But there’s no way for me to find her. I don’t know how to even begin trying to track her down.

I consider confiding in Dr. Grath, but things have grown a bit frosty between the two of us since my trip to L.A. I returned so certain of my future, so sure of my impending departure from this broken-down apartment building. It’s probably only natural for us to begin to drift apart, since a more permanent separation is probably imminent. But without the group, without Linda, and now without Dr. Grath, I find myself with nowhere to turn when the familiar depression begins to plague me. All of the things I press back seem to seep forward when I’m alone for too long.