In Case of Emergency (17 page)

“Well, at least you’re feeling better,” I say sulkily. All the skin covering my body is suspicious of being crawled upon.

“They’re not dangerous, you know. Very gentle creatures.”

I wrap my arm around her waist, and she leans against me for support. In its own strange way, it’s beautiful. The tarantulas are at once bestial and delicate, and the sheer number of them makes it look like an optical illusion, like the road is rippling away from us.

“See that?”

She points behind us, back toward the car, and at first I’m scared to turn my head for fear my little Corolla will be covered in a hairy suit of
tarantulas. But she’s pointing at a lone spider, still crouched in the turnout. He’s smaller; instead of the lifted body and multi-limbed gait of the others, he’s in the locked and low position of would-be camouflage, eight legs planted obstinately in the dirt.

“He’s got two shadows,” Ayla says. “The angle of the sun is giving him that long shadow, like the ones we have, and your headlights are giving him a second one. You see it? It’s kind of a haze, right underneath him.”

We both watch as the shadows of the trees dance around him while his two shadows stay fixed in place.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing that took me forever to figure out,” she says. “I’d see something like that, something that seemed off, and it’s not like I could tell someone—I couldn’t ask why a spider would have two shadows—because I couldn’t even find the language to explain why something looked off. I just knew that it did.

“You asked if anything good came out of this injury. I hate that question more than anything. People want a bright side, a success story; they want to believe things happen for a reason, and meanwhile
they
have a brain they trust. You look out at the world, Piper, you take it at face value. Because you can. My whole life I wanted something extraordinary to happen to me, and what happened instead was I had to learn everything twice, even down to the simplest things. And the worst part is, that is extraordinary. I got what I asked for.”

We watch our lone tarantula for a while but he doesn’t move; he continues to pretend he doesn’t exist. The sun is slipping away from us. Soon he’ll be left with just a yellow-gray glow, at least until we drive away. I wonder when he’ll decide it’s safe enough to start walking. The others are already leaving him behind.

22

We arrive in Monterey a little after nightfall. After checking into our room, we wander around for an hour, taking in the shops, restaurants, fish markets, and Cannery Row, avoiding the overcrowded wharf. I like the old-fashioned streets and quaint buildings, the smell of fish, the low-hanging burgundy archway that reads
MONTEREY CANNING CO
. But most of all, I love and fear this coastline, so different from our own. Rocks, boulders, cliffs. A chorus of seals not the least bit intimidated by the dramatic waves crashing over and around them. There isn’t a sand beach in sight.

Choosing a small Italian restaurant for dinner, we sink into a dimly lit booth and look at the menus with glazed-over eyes. Ayla has been sober for three years because she says alcohol turns her into a crazy person. I haven’t drunk around her because of this, but tonight I have a glass of wine with my spaghetti, feeling a little guilty as I do. She doesn’t seem to mind. The fatigue from driving heightens the effects of the alcohol; I grow self-conscious, aware of my steps and speech patterns as we walk back to the inn in the darkness. I can’t remember the last time I got tipsy on one glass.

I am in over my head. I know that.

Things Ayla and I will never be able to do together: (1) go on a road trip where we take turns driving, (2) get drunk, (3) go on roller coasters.

Once in our room, we undress down to our underwear and T-shirts and collapse onto the king-size bed.

“Babe, can you do me a favor?”

“What is it?”

“I need to do something called the Epley maneuver. Helps recalibrate my inner ear. Should clear up the last of my vertigo.”

“Okay.” With great effort, I sit up and try to ignore my own swimming equilibrium.

We turn down the comforter and toss the small, frilly pillows off to the side. Ayla sits in the center of the bed, facing the scalloped headboard, checking to make sure that when she lies down, her head will completely hang off the edge of the bed.

“Where do you need me?”

Sitting up, she points to the right side of the bed. “Just support my head while I lie back. I have to hold four positions for thirty seconds each.”

Standing over her, I cup her temples with both palms and wrap my fingers around the back of her skull, careful not to cover her ears. Then I lower my lips to her forehead and kiss her. Together, we turn her head so that she’s looking directly toward her right diagonal. “Lean me back, quick,” she says. “Let my head hang off the bed, but not all the way.”

As I help her hold the awkward position, Ayla shuts her eyes tight. Her eyelids bounce with a spastic fury. After half a minute of this, she says, “Help me turn the other way but keep the same angle.” We move her slowly. “Oh, that’s better.” I watch as her eyelids smooth over. “That’s so much better.”

We finish with her sitting up stiffly, staring at the headboard again. After she’s held that final position for thirty seconds, she relaxes and begins to move like her normal self. The change is striking. Since our first date, I’ve tried to picture Ayla in uniform, standing at attention or marching. It’s almost impossible. At some point her shoulders started rolling forward, her eyes drifting down. Did she stand and sit and walk that way before going into the army? Or did she begin folding into herself because of her three years in it?

“Where’d you go?” she asks.

My vulnerability feels stretched taut; I shift from one foot to the other, watching her. Ayla reaches up, circles an arm around my waist. We lie back, legs entwined.

“One of these days you’re going to let me in there,” she says, her eyes on my forehead. “It’ll be your turn to go to confession.” I feel myself blush.
She rubs her thumb across my forehead, down the sides of my cheek and jaw. She kisses my temple, my ear, the side of my neck. Maybe I should say something but then I realize she’s not expecting me to. She reaches to the nightstand and turns out the light.

Ayla lies on her side, back toward me, and I spoon her from behind, my arm wrapped tightly around her waist. The darkness of this room is more than what I’m used to, the mattress softer, and there’s no noise other than the occasional conversation of people walking on the street below us. She makes it look so easy. Earlier she said I was steady, but what if she knew the truth?

My arm, wrapped around her waist, starts to tremble.

“I’ve always been kind of quiet,” I say, the words rushing out. “When I was a kid, the only person I ever really talked to was my mom. At night, when she tucked me in, she always asked what I was thinking about. Or at least that’s how I remember it. And I’d go on and on.”

Silence. Ayla’s breathing is too deep, too even. I prop myself up to get a look at her and, sure enough, she’s asleep, a wistful, almost childlike expression on her face.

Peering around the room, I can just make out the shapes of the Dutch furniture, where one thing stops and another begins, the ball-and-claw feet intersecting with rose-colored carpet, the shadows blending in with the wallpaper. I remember Ayla’s ex-girlfriend, who used to yell her name in the middle of the night, how Ayla would only sometimes wake up, and I continue, my voice barely audible. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out how not to think about her. Trying to will her out of existence. And when something does remind me of her, it’s like everything shuts down.”

I look at the bare shoulder next to me, rising and falling with each breath. “I’m scared to tell you that I’m bi. Not that being bi is bad, but you’d be surprised. The last woman I dated, Diane, was so horrified. Like
I was
ruined
because I’d been with men, like my skin had been tainted with something foul. Why are people so weird? When Diane found out, she broke it off but pretended that wasn’t why. I’m bad at math. I’m jealous of everyone you’ve ever been with, especially your first. I don’t mean crazy jealous, I just mean—some people really enjoy this part but I find it so hard. Walking around with my insides quaking all the time, wondering if you feel the same way.”

What else?
, my mother used to ask me every night at bedtime.
What else?
And I would answer.

I close my eyes. Picture the road as a river of tarantulas. Think about the guy I worked a day car with the other day, whose name was Mike or Steve or Tim, how every time he laughed he said, “Ha ha ha,” which made it sound like he wasn’t actually laughing. And eventually I fall asleep.

23

The trailhead for the hike looks treacherous even to me. “What’s the name of it again?”

She looks at the map the inn gave us. “Soberanes Point. The trail should take us right down to the ocean after we go through some kind of canyon.”

We set off, Ayla leading. I’m cranky. I didn’t get enough sleep; I’m hungry and we didn’t bring any food with us. Now Ayla is insisting we go on a hike. But the sight of her legs is distracting—I’ve never seen her in shorts—and as I watch her shapely calves flex in front of me I think maybe it’s not a bad idea.

It’s beautiful already. Two shades of blue hang in front of us, where the sky meets the ocean. The first drop into the tree-filled canyon is almost vertical, and when I slip a little, a cascade of small rocks tumbles past Ayla. She pauses, re-centers herself, and keeps moving.

“Why’d you pick Monterey?” Ayla asks. “Have you been here before?”

“Once.” She’s clearly waiting for me to say more so I add, “When I was little.”

“With your whole family?”

“Yes.” I don’t feel like talking about myself. I woke up in a panic that Ayla had heard everything. If she did, she’s really good at pretending otherwise. “We stayed at some hotel that had a pier. You could walk right out to the ocean. And I saw a family of otters, and all of them had wrapped themselves up in the kelp forest.”

“They’d done what now?”

“It’s so they don’t float away while they’re sleeping.”

The trail levels off somewhat, and we pause to admire the view before taking the next descent into the canyon. The rolling, wildflower-covered hills look as soft as plush toys against the severe coastline.

It was the last family trip we ever took. Dad drove up the 1 freeway in our old Volvo, loaded with games and books and clothes, and when Mom wasn’t breaking up fights between Ryan and me, she was pointing out the hawks overhead, or telling us about the aquarium, leaning her head out the window, her hair so long it lifted in the wind and brushed against the back window.

In the canyon, light pokes through the evergreen and redwood trees and lands in a pied pattern on the trail. I find myself thinking about depth perception and balance, the difference between Ayla’s brain before she got hurt and Ayla’s brain after, all the while admiring the muscle definition in her arms as they swing in front of me and the obvious strength in her back. Her head tips forward as she makes her way down the side of the canyon, looking up now and then to be sure of where she’s going, her bangs uncharacteristically swept out of her face.

“Ayla, when you drink, what is it you end up thinking about?”

She points out a tall pine that was struck by lightning, one blackened
half falling away, the other half alive. “Well, I had a bit of an adrenaline problem when I came home. It was hard to settle. Alcohol made it worse, but it’s also—do you remember what I told you about intrusive images?” In her tone there’s a touch of pride. Somewhere in Ayla’s planner are notes on what we talked about that day at Venice Beach. “I had those real bad for a while. Not that I ever did anything too drastic—a buddy of mine had it much worse. When he first got back, he drank too much one night and pulled a gun on his girlfriend. Thought he was in a firefight back in Taji.”

In front of us the trail forks, the left path taking the higher road and the right one dropping at a more severe angle. Ayla hooks left without pausing.

“Shouldn’t we look at the map?”

“Nah, we want this one. It’ll curve around and then drop down to the beach.”

I look behind us, trying to memorize where we’ve come from, and see a smaller trail up the hill to my far right. Five hikers lean their weight into the incline; all of them have walking sticks that look like ski poles. When I turn my head, Ayla has almost disappeared. When I catch up to her, she continues.

“The way it worked, for me at least, was that some memories would sort of layer themselves over reality. So I never thought I was back there or anything—I never got confused about what was real—but I couldn’t stop the images from coming.”

We talk about my becoming an EMT and I struggle a little bit from trying to keep up with her and talk at the same time; meanwhile, she’s charging ahead, both hands hooked lightly on the straps of her backpack. I tell her I might go into nursing, that I’ve always found medicine interesting. Probably because she can hear the breathlessness in my voice, Ayla stops walking and retrieves the water bottle from her backpack. Passing it to me, she asks, “What’s the real reason?”

“How do you mean?”

“Saying you might want to go into nursing is not a reason to become an EMT.”