The Nakeds (33 page)

Her mom and Azeem were standing at her side, one on the right and one on the left. Her dad, who’d met the three of them there, was sitting in a chair he’d pulled up to the examination table and was touching her shoulder.

Her mom and Azeem had barely talked to each other in the car and Hannah had felt pressure to make conversation. She asked each of them questions and they gave her short, clipped answers until she gave up, sat back, and watched the other cars on the freeway. Two little girls waved at her from a back window. She looked at the center divider or she looked at the trees.

Now her mom reached out for Hannah, but she pulled her hand away, not to be mean but needing to hold the sides of the table for balance. She understood that they were eager and excited and nervous, just as she was.

In her underwear and a T-shirt with both of her legs stretched out in front of her, she was noticing again how dirty the cast was, exceptionally so, with big gray smudges like rain clouds and fraying edges at her thigh and toes. Having been dragged on the floor, the cotton at her toes was nearly black and she wished she’d had her mom cut the edges before they’d left the house. Hannah looked down at Pablo’s drawing and thought about him, remembered the last time they were together in Rebecca’s den and how far they went. She wished she hadn’t complained about his driving.

Dr. Russo’s office was so familiar to her, the life-size illustration of a body on the wall, the red and yellow and blue that represented the body’s insides. A picture of a night sky was taped to the ceiling. She was supposed to look at the fake stars while he did what he did. There was a long cupboard against another wall, inside of which a skeleton hung from a hook. During Hannah’s last visit, at her request, Dr. Russo had opened the cupboard and introduced the skeleton as Max. She thought about Max’s many bones inside the cupboard. She wondered when he’d lived and how he died. She wondered how she’d die herself. She hoped she’d grow up and grow old first. She wondered what made Max decide to give his bones to science.

The doctors who preceded him were sometimes optimistic, but Dr. Russo had given his word, made a promise, and now as the whirring blades made their way toward the uppermost part of her cast, very near Hannah’s crotch, he was either going to fail or deliver.

After he cut the first long line, he turned off the saw and looked at Hannah. With his chin he gestured to her crutches that were propped against Max’s cupboard. “You’ll need those things at first, but week by week you’ll need them less.”

“Hear that, Hannah?” her dad said.

“It’s exciting,” Azeem said.

After Dr. Russo cut the second line down the outside of her leg, he pulled out the scissors and cut through the gauze and cotton. The smell of her leg embarrassed her. It was a skinny, smelly thing. A thick purple scar wrapped around her ankle and Dr. Russo admired it. “Beautiful, just beautiful,” he said.

Her leg was even thinner than she’d remembered it, uglier, it seemed, pale and scaly, and her toes, although freed from the cast, were still scrunched up together and curled.

The doctor and Azeem helped her off the examination table. Her dad stood up from the chair. She felt embarrassed in just her underwear, embarrassed by her skinny leg. After that afternoon with Pablo, after what she’d done with him, it didn’t seem right that the four of them were looking at her now. She felt exposed and wished she’d had a robe.

Nina stood expectantly while the doctor and Azeem reached under Hannah’s arms and stood her up. Hannah’s dad had his hands on his hips, waiting. Everyone was nervous. Even the doctor didn’t seem like his confident self.

Hannah’s instinct was to hop. She didn’t want to put weight on her left foot, expecting it to be sore and sensitive.

“Come on,” Dr. Russo said.

“Come on, Hannah,” her mother said.

“You can do it, sweet girl,” Azeem said, and she could see that he’d already started to cry.

“It’ll feel strange at first, maybe uncomfortable, but you’ll get stronger every day,” Dr. Russo assured her.

“Just a little bit of weight,” her dad said, pleading.

There was a knock at the door and the receptionist stepped inside the room. “I’m sorry, Dr. Russo, your wife is on line four.”

“Not now.” He held up his hand. “We’re busy here, Grace,” he said.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, closing the door and rushing away.

Hannah gently placed her left foot on the tile.

She was surprised by how cold the tile felt, more intensely cold than it felt to her right foot.

“It’s like ice,” she told them.

“You’ll feel temperature more acutely with that foot,” the doctor said. “Hot will be hotter and cold will be colder. We expect that with nerve damage.” He looked at Nina, who was nodding and holding back tears.

Hannah put a little more weight down.

She had to admit that her foot looked straighter than it had since before the accident.

Still, there was pain and pressure and all that cold. But she wanted so badly to walk, for them, and for herself.

She tried, one foot in front of the other, a few meek steps, but it hurt badly and she gave in to the limp.

“There,” she said.

“Just a few more steps,” Dr. Russo said.

“That’s all I’ve got,” she told him.

“It’s great, Hannah. You did fine,” Azeem said, picking her up and spinning her around in a circle. She was aware again of being in only her underwear and T-shirt. “Put me down,” she said, but she was smiling at him and wiping his wet face with her hand.

THE NOSY
assholes had become Martin’s confidants. He’d been going to meetings with Tony on Monday afternoons and Thursday evenings. At the third meeting he’d stood up and introduced himself as an alcoholic and told an edited version of his story. He said he’d had a car accident and that he’d left the scene. This was years and years ago—nearly a decade, he told them.

“I hit a parked car and left without taking responsibility.” He could feel Tony’s eyes on him, see him shaking his head.

His sponsor, Jack, sat in the front row, nodding encouragingly. Jack was next to Tony, who was obviously waiting for more from Martin, his impatient expression saying,
Go ahead, tell us the truth.

At the fourth meeting Martin admitted to the group that all of his sexual encounters occurred when he was drunk, that it was difficult for him to make it work without a drink or two, and that the girls in Las Vegas were usually tourists or married and unavailable here.

On the way home in the car, Tony smoked a cigarette and was obviously unhappy with Martin. “You didn’t come clean,” he said. “Maybe about fucking, but not about the girl you hit.”

“I thought you quit smoking,” Martin said.

“Don’t you worry about me,” he said.

Earlier, Martin had seen Tony bum a few cigarettes from an AA girl. Now he took a deep drag and the front seat filled with smoke. Martin coughed and rolled down the window, cold air rushing in.

“You know it’s not right—that story you told in there. It’s a lie, Marty. The program won’t work if you’re bullshitting everyone, if you’re bullshitting yourself.”

“I have to work at my own pace, man.”

“You’ve got to at least tell Jack. Have you told Jack? He’s your fucking sponsor.”

Martin shook his head.

“If you’re going to lie, don’t tell the story at all. Talk about how you can’t get it up without booze.”

“Hey, wait a fucking minute. I
can
get it up. No one said anything about not getting it up.”

“You told us you couldn’t get a boner without a drink.”

“That’s not what I said. I hope no one thought I said that.” He ran a hand through his hair.

“That’s what I heard. Your dick doesn’t work unless you’re wasted. And the way you told the story made it sound like you’d had a fender bender and didn’t want to have to call your fucking insurance agent.”

“That’s as far as I’m going to go.”

“It’s not far enough.”

“Do you want me to go to meetings or not?”

“You have to do this right.” Tony opened his window an inch and flicked the cigarette butt to the street.

“Fuck you,” Martin said.

“Fuck you too.”

“Go to hell.”

“
You
go to hell, Marty.”

They were quiet at a red light.

Tony turned on the radio. He pushed the buttons hard, moving from static to news to more static to Elvis Costello crooning “Alison.” He angrily clicked the radio off.

“Hey,” Martin protested. “I like that song.”

“I like the truth,” Tony said. The light turned green and he put his foot heavy on the gas, the two of them lurching forward.

“Easy,” Martin said. “Jesus.”

When they pulled up to the curb in front of Martin’s apartment, Tony stopped short and Martin smelled rubber. He turned to Tony without taking off his seat belt. He didn’t want to fight. Tony was his only friend in town and dickhead or not, he meant well. “You and Annabelle coming in on Saturday?” he asked, feeling like a pussy for not staying mad.

Tony pulled another cigarette from his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. “I don’t know,” he said. He pushed in the car’s lighter and stared straight out the windshield.

“My mom will be there—she’d like to see you again.”

“Maybe,” Tony said, softening.

Martin unbuckled the seat belt. He opened the door and stepped out, his boot in the gutter. He stood on the grass and put his hands on the top of the car. He leaned over and stared at Tony through the open window. “Thanks for taking me tonight, man.”

Tony nodded.

“I mean it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Martin tapped the hood a couple times, saying good-bye, and Tony waved at him without looking his way.

•  •  •

In bed, he smelled the ocean he couldn’t see and pet Sadie, who was curled up and purring on his chest. He thought about Jack and Tony and the others, how during breaks they stood outside clutching coffee cups and smoking cigarette after cigarette.

The meetings were held in the back of a flower shop in a mini-mall in Torrance. Martin liked to sit by the door so he could smell the gardenias and roses while people told their stories—this man beat his wife and now she had only one eye, this teenager snorted so much coke that she had a hole in her nose that wasn’t a nostril, this woman fucked her husband’s brother. Martin preferred looking at the flowers to seeing the alcoholics’ sorry faces.

He didn’t believe in a higher power and he wasn’t sure if he was technically an alcoholic. In Las Vegas, when Ilene had suggested he cut down on his drinking, he’d done so without having to confess a bunch of shit to a room of strangers. When he’d told himself to stop going out with Elmer and to stop fucking girls he hardly knew, he stopped easily. He beat off every night and didn’t give a shit if he was alone.

He wasn’t so sure that labeling oneself was a good thing.

God, Higher Power, and his least favorite, the Lord—you could call Him what you wanted to call Him, but He was always the same unbelievable dream to Martin.

•  •  •

In the morning he met his sister for breakfast at a pancake house on Fourth Street and told her about the meetings. Sandy confessed over a big stack of banana waffles that she’d starved herself all through high school. She said group therapy was what saved her. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t eat at all back then. I lived off pretzels and Coke Slurpees and sugar-free soda.”

“I did notice,” he said, feeling guilty.

“Yeah, well,” she said, cutting into the waffles with her fork.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It was me who wouldn’t eat.”

“I should have been a better brother.”

“Are you making amends?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Good for you,” she said.

Sandy told him that she’d joined an eating-disorder group right after he’d left for Las Vegas and that several of the girls from her group were now dead. Only she and one other girl from that group had made it through. “In a way, it’s worse than alcohol,” she said. “You need to eat to live, but you don’t need to drink.”

She admitted that sometimes she looked at her baby daughter’s fat little legs and soft arms and feared the girl would grow up with the same problems. And another part of her, the part she rarely acknowledged and didn’t, until now, speak of, feared her daughter would always look like that—fat and pink and soft.

When she thought of withholding milk from her hungry girl, she started going back to group.

“Give it a chance,” she told him.

The waitress came up to the table then, asking if everything was OK.

“Can we get some more coffee here?” Martin said, lifting his empty cup in the air.

“Right away,” she said.

When the waitress was out of earshot, Martin leaned forward. His hands were clammy and his stomach ached. He could feel the sweat on his forehead and picked up the napkin to dab at it.

“What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t look so well.”

He put the napkin down and leaned forward, elbows on the table.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“I want to tell you something,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

“What? You’re scaring me,” she said.

“Remember that girl who was hit by a car?” he said.

“What girl? When?”

“Years ago, right before I left.”

She put down her fork and looked at him.

“I hit her,” he said.

“What are you talking about, Marty?”

“I’m telling you,” he said. “I hit her and then I left her there.”

THE NIGHT
before Mustafa went home and two days before Azeem was to move out of the house, Hannah couldn’t sleep. Mustafa had promised to write and keep in touch, and Azeem had promised that the separation from her mom was temporary, that he’d do his best to win her back. He’d live at his cousin’s apartment in Los Angeles for a month, two at the most. They’d see a marriage counselor and patch things up. He loved her mom and he loved Hannah like a daughter. He’d be back, he promised, as soon as he could win back Nina’s trust.