Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“So they’re just— actually stressful?” He hated the way she kept saying “we.”

“Yes, but not stressful to the extent that she experiences them. For instance, going into a deep depressive funk for weeks because — I don’t know, a houseplant dies. Or she saw a Christian Children’s Fund commercial on TV. Those ones with Sally Struthers?”

“Finding Sally Struthers depressing is cause for rehabilitation?”

Sissy eyed him warily. “Well, yes. If you can’t get out of bed for three days afterward. You or me, we’d feel bad for a minute, maybe two, and we’d move on. With Ella? Well, you know what brought her back here this time, after doing terrifically for six months without trouble? She saw one of those St. Jude’s posters on a bus. You know, with the little bald chemo children? Apparently she just lost it. Began weeping and didn’t stop for two days, even after her boyfriend drove her back up here.”

Jacob hoped his eyes hadn’t widened too much on the word boyfriend .

“So how long before she goes home?”

Sissy set her egg roll down and pulled out a white carton full of lo mein. Then she snapped apart a pair of chopsticks, and then to get the stray splinters of wood off, she rubbed them against each other like a Cub Scout trying to start a fire.

“You know how it works. She can stay here until someone stops paying for it. Or until she’s ready for the world, I guess.”

“Who’s ever ready for it?”

Sissy looked exasperated, its own reward. “Why are you so interested?”

“I’m not really. Just, she talked to me the other day, and she seemed — I don’t know — she seemed fine. Made me wonder what she’s doing here is all. Hey, where’d you order from?”

“Pardon?”

“Is that from Szechuan Garden, in Stamford?”

She looked down at her half-chewed roll. Jacob glanced at the colorful assortment of cabbage and carrot inside, and the smooth brown spiraling of the wrapper.

“Stamford? No. Of course not. I live in Katonah,” she said. “I don’t know. I just order off the menu on my fridge. Hunan Palace? Dynasty Pagoda? I can’t remember.”

MAY

Then one day Ella was gone. Not in Feingold’s group and not in art therapy. Not lining up for decaf coffee at seven on the dot. Jacob overheard a despondent Maura mumbling to another girl that Ella’s parents had come over the weekend to pick her up and take her on a Wonderland Cruise for two weeks before going back to start the summer session at Columbia. Her mug was gone from the rack, though “Self-Portrait in Gray” still hung on the wall in the common room — left behind, perhaps overlooked in her rush to get back to her real life. He liked to think she’d left it there for him. A way of saying thank you. Goodbye.

“There, there,” Paul said, when he saw Jacob moping over his roast beef sandwich, “plenty of other crazy fish in the sea.”

Jacob wanted to lay into him — tell him that for one thing he was gay, and for another not everything always had to be about sex, despite what The Real World: San Diego and the CW’s Vampire Hookups might suggest. Not everyone was so lonely and desperate that they leaped into bed with the first willing partner. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, and sometimes a skyscraper was just an efficient way of arranging offices given limited surface area. But Jacob barely mustered a good eye roll before heading off to eat his lunch in the bathroom again.

He hadn’t meant to look Ella up on Facebook. He didn’t even have a Facebook account . He felt this was important to stress. When he had to — when he really had to — he used Irene’s account, which she had hardly used herself, never even bothering to upload a profile picture, so that now it displayed just a ghostly outline of a woman’s head. She had given him her password, and he used it only in cases of emergency. As he looked at messages for her, he wondered who else might have been there. Then he thought of Ella and couldn’t remember — was it York or Yorke? So he’d tried typing it out, there in the little search bar— Ella York … no, no… Ella Yorke . Yes. That was it. And without thinking, he emphatically hit the enter key.

And there she was. Smiling like a girl in a toothpaste commercial, in a blue high school graduation gown. Eating tacos in a college cafeteria with a couple other girls. Unwrapping a present in front of a fake Christmas tree. Eating mozzarella sticks in Washington Square Park with a girlfriend, wearing churchgoing hats at a Salvation Army. He realized what a difference just a few years made. Facebook, the Internet, all this had been a part of her youth, while for him, now, it hardly existed. He paused on a picture of her wearing a cranberry prom dress and pinning a corsage onto the tuxedo lapel of an earnest-looking young man — when he hovered the pointer over the boy’s face, his name popped up, unrequested. Francis U. Williams. Francis and Ella. Then Jacob signed off, almost immediately. It had been only a tiny, accidental lapse in professionalism.

This was how Jacob planned on explaining it all to Oliver, as he walked quickly through the halls of Anchorage House to Oliver’s office, where he had been abruptly summoned over the PA system, midway through his shift in Dr. Feingold’s group. He knew he was in deep shit even before he saw that the door to Oliver’s office was, unusually, closed.

“Dr. Boujedra?” he said, knocking quickly on his way in. “You wanted me to come—”

Inside the office, Jacob saw Oliver’s elbows on his desk, his hands gripping the sides of his balding head. A police officer stood a few feet behind the door, fiddling with the dispatch radio on his belt. Jacob froze. Surely not because of him?

“Thanks for coming in. Unfortunately, my father just had a stroke behind the wheel of a car. He’s been killed. This officer needs me to go and identify his body.”

Jacob didn’t understand. “What? All the way to India ?”

The police officer looked confused.

“Jake — you know—” Oliver paused to collect himself. “My father has been in a senior citizens’ community in Mount Kisco for a few months. Before that he lived in New Jersey.”

Jacob had known this. It was just the way Oliver spoke about his father — always reminiscing, always in the past tense, made it seem like Dr. Boujedra, Sr., still lived far away. But yes, now that he thought about it, he remembered that the man had been widowed six years ago and had then retired to the United States.

He began remembering snippets of conversations with Oliver — anecdotes of how Dr. B. Sr. had been behaving erratically. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s, and Oliver had gone down to Jersey to bring him up to the Glendale Retirement Center.

Jacob thought of something. “Where’d he get a car ?”

Oliver looked embarrassed.

The officer spoke up. “He pocketed a set of keys belonging to the assistant director of the facility. Nice little blue Porsche. Cayenne model?”

“Yes,” Oliver said bitterly. “Which he totaled. Drove it into a water hazard at the Sunningdale Country Club.”

Jacob tried to cover his snort of amusement with a fake sneeze.

Oliver didn’t seem overly convinced. He sighed. “I suppose I should be happy he didn’t kill anybody. Anybody else.”

All Jacob wanted to do was throw his arms around Oliver, but he kept pretending that he was just a dutiful employee. “How can I help?”

Dr. Boujedra cleared his throat. “Officer Himmel is giving me a ride to the morgue. I was hoping you could drop my truck off by my flat later this evening on your way home from work. If it isn’t too far out of your way. I don’t think I’m in any condition to drive, and I’d — I’d leave it here but the Glendale people have asked me to come by in the morning to pick up his things.”