Jessica Chiarella - And Again

I’m not in the attic for long. And I have plenty of time, because Tom likes to linger over his paper, slurping the excess milk from his bowl in slow, dripping spoonfuls. I saw the suitcase when I was up here before, and it takes only a few minutes before I find it again, wedged between an old lamp and the box to an inflatable kiddie pool. It’s dusty, but I recognize it immediately, the suitcase I dragged with me on our disastrous honeymoon to Hawaii, where it did nothing but rain and I was laid-up with Braxton Hicks for three days straight.

I carry it down the attic stairs and stash it in my closet for later, when Tom picks the kids up from school. Until then I consider what I will take, what I even have to take. I think of my artifacts, my stash of pilfered items, which have so wholly lost their magic that I don’t even feel the need to look at them anymore. None of them will do me any good out in the world. None of them has any real value. They’re like Tom’s box of keepsakes in the attic now, the shawl and a piece of glass.

I fold my clothes, the pairs of jeans and T-shirts and cardigan sweaters and socks I bought to replace the things Tom threw out. I stack them up, ready to be dropped into the hollow stomach of the suitcase. I go into Tom’s sock drawer and find his roll of emergency cash, and I take all of it. I collect a hair brush, a toothbrush, a photo of the kids from before the accident. It’s a paltry little life I have here, ready to be packed away. It feels fitting, because my life has been small, so small, for so long. The difference now is that the world is big. It’s huge, and frightening, and all I want is to see as much of it as I can.

The difficulty of this life, I have found, is how little magic there is in it. How little possibility. Here, imagination is foolish. Impractical. Stratford Pines is treacle and melodramatic, unrealistic dreck. It is hard to resolve the realization that I dreamed more — in waking and in sleep — lying in that hospital bed than I have since my own personal miracle occurred. It seems like the greatest crime of luck or fate that I have left a hopeless situation only to find myself unable, now, to even dream of hope. There will be no baby. There will be no other men. There will be no blind corners to turn, no unexpected delights or rushes of excitement. There will be no other path for me but as a mother, as a wife, if I do not leave this place. And there is nothing like eight years of solitude to teach you selfishness.

I thought about leaving Tom a note. Telling him about the affair, about the years he wasted waiting for a wife who was already gone, even before she was still and silent and confined to her bed. But it seems doubly cruel now, to tell him all of that, and to leave as well. It was so much easier when all of our conversations were distilled down to two words. One for no. Two for yes.

I think about leaving something for the kids, for Jack and Katie. There’s a gnawing ache within my chest when I think of them, like hunger, as if my heart is starving at the thought of them. But I still think of them as babies, as the children I had before the accident. I feel like a wicked stepmother now, the usurper of their idea of a mother, of the perfect image they’d grown up envisioning when they looked at old photographs of me. I am a woman who does not know them now.

I will leave tomorrow. I will leave this house in the morning and board the Purple Line and head into the city. I will have my suitcase. I’ll buy a ticket for the bus. And I will be gone. No fingerprints. No ID. No pictures of me; no way to track me down. The possibility of it is so massive I feel as if I could drown in it like an avalanche of cold snow.

Maybe I’ll get off the bus in a small town somewhere. Maybe there will be a diner, somewhere I can ask if they’re looking for help waiting tables. And maybe it will be the sort of place where people fall in love easily. Maybe it will be the sort of place where long-lost people congregate, where twins impersonate each other and babies are born to the wrong people and families are built and shatter and reform again and again. Maybe they’ll be waiting for a woman who spent eight years paralyzed before getting a new body, a woman with a world full of secrets inside her. Maybe that’ll be the sort of place I’ll go.

Dr. Grath’s door is closed when I get back from L.A. I’m a bit disappointed, but not altogether surprised. I wonder if he assumed I wouldn’t be coming back this time. It’s not exactly out of the realm of possibility; after all, it was only yesterday that I learned Harry was not prepared to pay for my flight back to Chicago. I had to pawn one of the necklaces he bought me, all while he left pleading voicemails on my phone, imploring me to reconsider Jay Cunningham’s offer of the lead in Almost Ruins in the strongest terms imaginable. But I don’t want it. I don’t want to be paid for.

I knock on Dr. Grath’s door, already smelling the skunky whisper of smoke drifting out into the hallway. I hear him mumble something from inside, so I let myself in. His eyes are half-lidded and bloodshot, and he sits slouched in his chair.

“Who is it?” he asks.

“It’s me,” I reply, sitting on the couch next to him. The TV is off, and something in that bothers me. I wonder when he’s eaten last, or last ventured out of his apartment. “It looks like you started without me, old man.”

He chuckles a bit, raising the joint in his right hand. “Well, you’ve been a bit tricky to track down lately. Not like the alley cat you once were, always showing up for supper. One can’t wait forever, can one?”

“I guess not,” I reply, taking the joint from him and inhaling.

“I thought you’d be off somewhere warm, making love to the camera by now,” he says. “Every time you leave, it gets harder and harder to imagine you coming back.”

I hold the smoke in, letting its itch turn into a burn within my lungs before I let it out in a long stream. I contemplate my options.

“What if I lied to you?” I ask, passing him the joint.

“Lied? About what?” Dr. Grath’s blind eyes widen just a bit.

“About what I look like now. You know, Grace Kelly. All that.”

“About the cloning?” He’s confused. His wiry eyebrows try to touch like trapeze artists attempting a midair catch.

“No, that was the truth. I just… exaggerated the rest a bit. A lot, maybe.”

“Oh,” Dr. Grath says, and I can’t tell if he’s at all surprised. Maybe he’s disappointed.

“I went to L.A. To see my agent. Hoping that he could get me an acting gig, maybe some modeling.” I sigh, trying to sound dejected. “He said he didn’t have anything for me. He said he couldn’t market a look like mine anymore. Too classic.”

“I like classic,” he says. I laugh a little.

“I know you do, old man. You don’t have a choice.”

“So what are you going to do?” he asks. I shrug, though I know he can’t see it. It’s habit. A habit that was born long before I entered this body; impossible to break.

“I guess I just stay here. My agent said he might be able to get me some more work here in Chicago.”

“Surely you can do better than that,” he says, and I shrug again. “I know what’s going on here. You’re waiting for me to qualify for this SUBlife thing, so I can look like Monty Clift again, and we can run off together, is that it?” I smile and there are tears in my eyes, though he can see neither. I suspect he knows what I do, that Dr. Grath is one generation too old for immortality, that he will grow old and die the way people were always intended to, a death that is the sort the rest of us have always hoped for.

And if he did get his sight back, everything would be ruined. He would see my lie, see that I am every inch what I described myself to be after the transfer, and that I gave up all the possibilities that my beauty afforded me and stayed with him, in this dingy apartment building. Because I don’t want to be bought by men like Jack Cunningham. And because even now I’m afraid of what might happen to Dr. Grath in my absence, that without me he’d drift into some final oblivion, stop eating or watching his Turner Classic Movies or going through his photo albums. That he would grow lost in this little apartment. I want to be here to keep him from drifting away. And he would never forgive me for that.