Fishbowl (20 page)

She can’t wait to forget the strange phone call and the PartyBox and just read until she drifts off to sleep.

Tomorrow is for starting the job search, she thinks. Tomorrow is for replying to the email and getting the number for the placement company Gabby offered.

Tomorrow is for worry, but tonight, she resolves, is for tonight.

She turns on the oven light and checks on her creation again. Seventeen minutes left according to the stove timer, counting the time backward even though time has continued its unidirectional march forward. Claire guesses it’s a matter of perspective. The top of the quiche is starting to brown, and tiny bubbles rise through the mixture slowly, getting caught in the newly gelatinous texture. She nods, dons a pair of yellow rubber gloves from a package, and does the dishes. Then she puts the mixing bowl and cutlery in the dishwasher, adds the detergent, dumps in a cup of white vinegar, and turns it on. She sprays down the counters again with a mild bleach solution followed by a disinfectant wipe pulled from a single sheet package. Then, another. Then a final wipe with the paper towel and it’s good until the following morning.

Claire pulls one glove off, turning it inside out as it slides from her hand. She revels in the smooth feeling from the delicate frosting of powder that lines the inside. To her it’s like the finest silk against her skin. Then she bundles the glove, the disinfectant wipes, and their packages in the other hand and pulls that glove off, inside out, making a satisfying, tidy, and entirely sanitary bundle of refuse. She drops the bolus into the garbage can and rubs her hands together.

Tomorrow is for worry, but tonight, she thinks, is for tonight.

She stands, the apartment quiet save for the occasional arrhythmic tick from the oven.

It’s too quiet for a Friday afternoon, she thinks.

If she strains, she can hear the neighbor in the next apartment over. She thinks she recognizes the song playing but then becomes unsure when the beat takes an unexpected turn. The occasional horn bleats from outside, down on Roxy, but it only sounds once in a while.

She glances at the countertop radio and flicks it on. “Help Me, Rhonda” pours out of the speakers. Claire feels warmth start to spread through her again. She can’t tell whether it’s the wine—how much did I have anyway?—or the routine of a wonderful Friday night, the quiche and the music and the aromas filling her apartment.

She looks around, considers closing the blinds early, then decides against it. The sunlight is lovely. She dances. Her hips sway and her steps twirl her through the kitchen and into the living room. She raises her arms above her head and sways her body and spins it around, her legs and hips corkscrewing elegantly. She smiles and she sings, dancing her way through the warm smells of the quiche baking, and forgets all the day. She feels safe and at peace.

Tonight is for tonight.

There’s an urgent pounding on the apartment door. Claire jumps at the noise and then freezes in midtwirl. She waits, staring at the door, her heart thrumming and her mind trying to convince her, logically, that she hadn’t heard a thing.

The pounding sounds again.

What is it? Claire’s heart skips into a panicked rhythm to match it. Is it the man from the front door coming to get me? Her body tenses. Her pulse rushes in her ears. Did he manage to get into the building?

“I need help.” A woman’s voice on the other side of the door. It’s hoarse and strained and all too close. “Please, I need help. I’m having a baby and there’s this kid who collapsed and he needs help too. Please open the door. Please.”

Perhaps if I stay still and quiet they will go away, Claire thinks. She slowly lowers her arms and takes a creeping step in the direction of the door.

Cheerily, “Help me, Rhonda. Help, help me, Rhonda.”

“I know someone is in there,” the voice comes. There is a single bang from the door. It jumps against the frame. “I can hear your music and I can smell your fucking baking now help me.”

Claire crosses her apartment on tiptoes, her arms held out defensively in front of her. Even the sound of her clothes moving seems too loud. Her hands are the first things to reach the door, her fingertips touching the cool paint. Claire leans in and sees a fish-eye forehead through the peephole. Claire jumps back a step. Another thump on the door unleashes a shock wave through the wood and into her palms.

“I can’t,” she says, wanting her voice to be strong, but it’s weak and trembling. She steps up to the door again and peers through the peephole. A woman looks directly at her. They stare each other in the eye. Claire wants to shy away but doesn’t. The woman looks a mess: shambolic hair, glistening forehead, and a bright-red shiny face. The woman also looks honest and kind, a face that would be transparent, unable to be devious in any way even if she was to try.

“What?” she says. Claire watches her lips move in keeping with her voice but more entrancing. Her face falls and her shoulders slump. “Could you please open the door? I need help. My name’s Petunia Delilah and I’m having a baby and there’s this passed-out kid I found down the hall.”

“I can’t,” Claire says again. This time her voice finds a bit more strength. “I want to help you, but I really can’t. I can’t open the door. It’s this … thing I have. It’s hard to explain.”

“You can’t open the door? Lady—”

“My name is Claire.” Claire watches the woman through the peephole. She stands for a moment and then places a hand against the door, right about where Claire holds her palm against the surface.

“Claire.” Petunia Delilah’s voice sounds weary and resigned. “Claire, can you please open the door? I don’t know how much longer I can stay on my feet and I need to call for help. My baby’s coming now and it’s in trouble. My phone’s dead—I can’t get ahold of my boyfriend or my midwife or anyone. I’m all alone here.”

“What about the kid? I can’t see him,” Claire says, then bites her bottom lip.

Through the keyhole, Claire sees that Petunia Delilah clearly knows she’s being watched. She looks directly at the fish eye.

“He’s here, just lying here on the carpet. Not doing much more than that and breathing.” She looks down at her feet. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he just passed out. Please, Claire,” Petunia Delilah says, “help.”

“Okay, stay right there,” Claire says as she pats the door with the palm of her hand. “I’ll get my phone and call an ambulance. Don’t move.”

One step from the door, Claire freezes. Through the inch of wood she hears the most pained and animal noise she has ever heard. The woman on the other side, Petunia Delilah, groans and starts sobbing. It’s a pitiable noise of pain and frustration. Claire responds on the same base level. Before rational thought can stop her, she unbolts the dead bolt, removes the chain from its track, and opens the door.

35

In Which Homeschooled Herman Suffers a Horrific Accident

And as the car drifted across the lane into oncoming traffic, the opening piano strain and Bonnie Tyler’s smoky voice drifted through the speakers. From the back seat, Herman watched his mom shaking his dad’s shoulder. Dad didn’t respond. His head drooped forward, exposing the massif of vertebrae under the skin on the back of his neck. Herman could see Mom’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear the sounds coming out. She was screaming in Dad’s ear. The veins in her neck and on her forehead stood out. Her face turned rosy; her cheeks flushed pink.

Dad didn’t move.

Mom looked out the windshield. Their car had crossed fully into the oncoming lane. She grabbed the wheel and pulled it to the right. The car jerked back toward the centerline, toward the safe side of the road. It was a ridiculous line on the pavement, a ludicrous protection, those three inches of yellow paint demarcating the difference between safety and this.

And the chorus began to swell through the speakers.

As the front of the car crumpled with the impact, as the screeching of metal being folded and torn asunder battered Herman’s eardrums, and even as the diamonds of safety glass sprayed across his body like hail, the radio played on. As Mom and Dad were thrown forward in their seats, only to come to an aorta-tearing jolt against the seat belt restraints, as his sister was tossed sideways into him, her head colliding with his in a shock of sepia sparks behind his eyelids, even through a second concussive whump and another shuddering jolt, through it all, Bonnie Tyler sang on.

The car whined and screamed in protest as it was bent and shattered. When the car spun sideways across the highway and the tires wailed against the speed and flinty asphalt, when gravity took a spin around the roof, leaving the debris of the crash suspended in opposition to its forces, and even when everything went silent except for a lone voice screaming somewhere outside, the song played on.

The car had come to rest on its side, and Herman hung sideways by his seat belt, suspended over his sister. The weight of his head bent his neck. His ear rested on his shoulder. He couldn’t muster the energy to right himself. His arms dangled, one across his chest and the other splayed out in the space below him. The back of his hand rested against his sister’s cheek, her hair tangled through his fingers, soft as feathers to the touch. Herman did not feel it though; his body was limp and he was gone. He had been for a while.

The radio played all seven minutes of the power ballad, and it took seven more for help to arrive.

But that length of time was nothing to Herman. He wouldn’t come back for three more weeks. He didn’t want to. When he did wake, he was in a hospital, and he was alone in a dark room. Every bit of him hurt as he tenderly moved his hands over his body. There were wires and tubes attached to him. There was beeping coming from somewhere in the dark. Through the window, he could see it was dark outside. There was a city of lights out there, just on the other side of the glass.

Later, the doctors said the reason he survived was because he seemed to be unconscious at the time of impact. His body was completely limp and was able to absorb the thrashing as the vehicle spun to its side and rolled over twice. They also told him he was a kid and his body would heal quickly. A few more weeks passed, and they released him into Grandpa’s care, as per the directions in his parents’ will. There was no other family on the continent.

Even later, Herman would revisit the scene. Going back to that moment was how he remembered what his mom, dad, and sister looked like. He reached across the invisible centerline of the seat, the one they had fought over for years, from his side to hers. He felt his sister’s hair, her soft tangles woven between his fingers. When he looked down from where he was suspended by the seat belt, asphalt outside her window, she appeared to be sleeping. Occasionally, he would pop in to see it play out again, but he would always leave before the song ended. There was nothing to understand after that point in time. By then he would be gone, knowing where and when he could return should his parents’ faces fade from memory or should his fingers forget the softness of his sister’s hair.

He never told Grandpa he went back to the car crash, not even after he had settled into his room in the Seville on Roxy to work on his history lessons and language studies and trigonometry problems.

*   *   *

Herman stared at the page, his eyes dancing between the two dots that Grandpa had penciled in opposite corners. They were 13.9 inches apart, and no matter which way his eyes traced lines across the blank white page, they always wound up the same distance apart.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Grandpa said as he left Herman’s room. “The distance between the two is variable. Those two dots can be the same dot, or they can be anywhere up to fourteen inches apart, like you think. Now tell me how that could be.”

Herman chewed on his pencil eraser as he contemplated the puzzle. The kettle whistled from the kitchen, and then the newspaper rustled in the living room. The button of eraser came off in his mouth.

How can those two dots on the page actually be one dot? he pondered.

Or, alternately, he thought, how can one thing exist twice at the same time?

“Got it yet?” Grandpa called out from the living room.

“No,” Herman mumbled loud enough for Grandpa. “It’s impossible. You can’t make the hypotenuse shorter,” he said to himself. “It’s an absolute.”

“Herman,” Grandpa’s voice came, “the world being round was an impossibility. Now we live on a new continent. Human flight was impossible. Now we go into space. This is easy compared with those things. Think of that space between the dots as time, not distance. Time is a drug we’re all addicted to. Sooner or later we have to kick the habit.”

The newspaper rustled, and Grandpa went quiet.

Herman put his hands to opposite edges of the paper, pinning it flat to his desk. His brow furrowed in concentration. He scrawled out a few more calculations, his frustration mounting. They didn’t work out, so he crossed them out. He circled the 13.9 at the end of his original calculation.

What did Grandpa mean? If distance is time, the only way to shorten it is to travel faster. But distance didn’t travel at a speed, the combination of the two did, velocity did. They were tied together, but not the same, as Grandpa said.

With each passing minute, Herman felt his flustered brain become more agitated until he could no longer think. Had anger been in his nature, he would have crumpled the paper and thrown it in the trash. Instead, he swept his hand across the desk. The paper fell off the side and landed against the wall in a curl, and momentarily, the curve of the paper let the two dots touch before it straightened itself again.

“The two dots are the same,” Herman said to himself. “They are no distance apart even though they’re on opposite corners of the page.”

He picked the page up and slowly curled the corners toward each other. All the while, the distance between the dots grew shorter and shorter until they touched. They were the same even though they were far apart. He let the page lie flat on the desk, excited to share his discovery with Grandpa.

He called out, “Grandpa, I know it. I know that they’re the same dot.”