Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

And so it's never been strange to me that I've gravitated toward women like Kelly Stearns, and then my Rita, who hardly said a word until the end and then coolly informed me, sotto voce, as we were driving home from the multiplex after having watched Jurassic Park II, that she had rented back her old studio apartment in Hauppauge and would be gone by the end of the week. I didn't say anything, because it was no great surprise; I didn't protest, because I had no arguments for her, the previous long years providing evidence enough of what we might expect (past performance, in the recent stock-crazed parlance, being in this case a bankable guarantee of future results), and I drove home feeling as if I'd been bitten clean through right at the sternum, my heart pumping fast but pumping nothing, my lower half already marinating in the gullet of a beast named Rue. Rita was by then more sorrowful than angry, though still plenty bitter, as the next morning she gave me back the diamond-and-ruby ring I'd given her to celebrate twenty-one years of living together, but then carefully packed for removal every last one of the expensive stockpots and saute and cake pans I'd bought her over the years (despite the fact that she never cooked for just herself), understanding before I did the full measure of how this would pain me.

As I step inside the kitchen, the wall clock (shaped like the nose of a Sopwith Camel) mumbles "Contact" and fires up, the hands whizzing around until they stop back at the present hour, midnight. Still no word from Kelly, so I call her again, at her apartment and cell phone, but to no avail. My next move, I think now, is to call the police, to check if there has been any accident or report involving her, but then the phone in my hand rings and I know this is she, and something aberrant in me lets it go a few more bleats before I click it on.

I say, "Kelly. ."

"Jerry?"

"Kelly, is that you?"

"No, Jerry. It's me. It's Rita."

I can't say anything, because of course I knew it was Rita, almost before she even spoke, which makes no sense at all. And I have no sense now, the only feeling the clammy empty bottle in my other hand.

"Listen. I'm at work. I just got on shift and I really can't talk.

Kelly is here. She came in about an hour ago. Actually she sort of crashed her car by the emergency entrance."

"Is she hurt?"

"Not from that," Rita says, and not casually. "She must have known she was in trouble and driven here, but couldn't quite make it. She took a lot of pills."

"Oxy-somethings," I say.

"That's right. How did you know?"

"She told me she was taking them," I say, realizing how not good this sounds, vis4-vis me. "She's okay, though, right?"

"She'll be okay," Rita says grimly. "She didn't have enough to kill herself, but she could have really hurt herself. She's in a daze right now She did ask me to call you. That's why I'm calling."

"I know."

"She said you might be looking for her."

"I was. I am."

There's an unsettling, sneaky long pause, the kind we got used to over the years, and then finally became sick of, though now I don't know that I'd refuse a great deal more of it, if this is all I'll ever have.

Rita says, nurselike, "She'll be okay, but she has to rest. She'll have been transferred to the main ward. You should go by there in the late morning."

"I'll come first thing," I say, knowing the night shift ends at 7 A.M., with a thirty-minute changeover, after which Rita will go back to Richie the Rabbit, snug in his baronial bedchamber.

"Let her sleep," Rita says, her tone riding somewhere be-tween command and wish. "Listen, I've gotta go. Be kind to her."

"I'm always kind."

"Okay, Jerry. Okay. I'm hanging up now Bye."

"Rita. "

But before I can say anything else she's clicked off. I punch

*69 but it's the hospital operator, and by the time she connects me to the emergency room nursing station Rita's already un-available, according to another nurse, as the paramedics are wheeling in a minivan's worth of teenagers from a nasty wreck on the Meadowbrook Parkway.

After this surprise brush with Rita, and then settling in with the increasingly sobering notion that Kelly may have really tried to hurt herself, I can't really sleep at all. I get up every other hour to satisfy my quick-trigger bladder and then poke around in the refrigerator and surf the late-night cable for anything remotely engaging (for me it's an infomercial for a rotisserie cooker, the chicken done to a perfect shade of polished cherry wood) and then sit in my old convertible out on the driveway, squinting in the scant moonlight at the just-getting-old guy in the parking mirrors. Not to worry, as this won't be that moment for a midstream self-appraisal heavy on deprecation and knowing charm, or a dark night of the soul's junket through the murk of a checkered, much remorsed-upon past. I won't suffer anyone bizarre fantasies or nightmares, as often happens in movies and books, because I'm not really capable of that sort of thing, being neither so weird nor smart enough. I'll simply relay what I can see, which is a man sitting alone at night in an open-air car, hands restless on the wheel, humming silently to himself, waiting for the sun to rise up so he can just get moving again.

Come morning, I'm already here, in the parking garage of the mid-county hospital. It's amazing how many cars are around at this hour, like it's the long-term lot at La Guardia during Thanksgiving week. You'd think that people (despite what they profess) in fact love hospitals, as they do everything they can (smoking, drug-taking, road-raging) to hurry themselves inside. Sometimes I used to pick Rita up from her shift (then the day shift) and they'd be practically lined up in the emergency waiting room in all manner of wreck and ruin, accidently poisoned, nearly drowned, stabbed and shot and burned, so that it seemed we were living nearer to Beirut than to Baby-lon, Long Island.

It's only just 7 A.M. and I'm determining exactly how I'm going to go about talking to Rita, or more to the point, have her talk to me. I've already visited Kelly Stearns in the adult ward, having told the nurses that I was her half-brother and had driven all night from Roanoke when I heard the news, leaving a couple of carnation-heavy bouquets of supermarket flowers (nothing else was open) and a surprisingly long and wholly loving note on her dresser, generally saying that I was sorry if I let her down and that I would never do so again. I was glad to leave the note, especially as she was asleep, and, strange to see but understandably, strapped down in restraints, and my one alarming thought was that she was going to wake up like that and might very well flip the hell out. So when the nurse left us alone I un-fastened one of Kelly's hands, so that she could move a little bit, at least scratch an itch somewhere, if she needed to.

Concerning Rita, I know she'll exit the hospital from the ER entrance and come this way, past where I'm just idling, as her banana-yellow 1982 Mustang with the black racing stripes and fake chrome wheels is parked behind me, against the far wall.

She bought the car used, already in a dinged-up, rusty condition, and oddly enough it looks no worse than it ever was. She liked to say it was her PR Mobile (as in Puerto Rican), which I'm surprised Richie Coniglio allows her to drive into his estate area in Muttontown. Maybe he likes it, or maybe he has no choice. When she began living at the house with me I offered to buy her a new car, really anything she wanted, my heart breaking open with an uncharacteristic (back then) generosity, with only the smallest cell of me doing it for unsavory reasons. I never gave a damn what the neighbors thought, never really knowing them anyway, but I must admit, during those first few months of domiciling, to a certain twinge in my gut whenever she'd jounce up the driveway. These past six months I have been waiting for Rita to return just like that, with me staring out the kitchen window in the afternoons, waiting for her to step out in her white shoes and pad up the walk. For her to use her key.