The Parallel Apartments (33 page)

She grabbed a handful of dirt and grass and tossed it at the glass.

“Troy?” she said again, louder. “Troy!”

She ran around to the front of the house, not bothering to hide. Mr. Bugler's Toyota was still in the driveway. But visible at the corner of the block was Troy's Aspen, just where they'd left it.

“Troy!” She banged on the front door. “I need you. Come on.”

No answer. No movement at all from inside. A bluejay sallied down from a magnolia tree and plucked a hair out of Justine's head.

“Ah!” cried Justine, this time rattling the doorknob and trying to twist it with both hands. “Oh, Troy, Dot's dead. And my mom… oh, Troy. Oh god. Come out here. Please!”

The bluejay swept down again and plucked another few strands.

She ran to the backyard again, picked up more dirt—this time a larger and rockier handful—and threw it hard at his window. A single vertical, almost perfectly straight crack appeared.

“I'm all alone now, and I need you,” Justine said, when nobody responded.

She tried the back door. “Just let me use your phone, then,” she said to the door, which was scalloped with old gray paint.

She sat down in the grass for a moment. Fire ants found a bare, dirty ankle, and lit it up.

“Ah!” Justine jumped up and frantically brushed herself off. “Help me, Troy.”

She ran around to the front of the house again. Mr. Bugler's Toyota was gone.

Down the street she saw Troy open the back door to his Aspen and put Mactard, in his cage, inside. He threw a rolled-up sleeping bag in the front. Justine ran toward him.

“Troy, Dot's dead, and I…”

Troy turned to look at Justine. His hair was wet and combed to the side. He wore a blue suit, wrinkled, dusty on the shoulders. His Stan Smiths were gone, replaced with stiff brown wingtips that looked four sizes too large. In one hand he had a box of Triscuits; in the other, his keys.

“Stop.”

“Troy?”

“I have to go to my great uncle's in Deep Ellum.”

“Let me come. I can't live without you.”

“I can't.”

“When are you coming back?”

Troy shrugged, then looked inside his car.

“What about your stamps?”

He shrugged again, then got into the car. Justine ran around to the passenger door, but Troy reached over and locked it. Then he twisted around and locked both back doors.

“Troy. Everything's falling apart. I need you.”

He started the engine. Justine stood in front of his car.

“It was only
one hour
ago when everything was okay.”

Troy rolled down his window a crack.

“I have to go. I'm sorry. It's all my fault.”

“I don't have anywhere to go. Let me come with you. I'll stay in the way back. We won't tell anybody.”

Troy smiled, a horizontal pink slash in his face. Then the smile vanished, and Troy put the car in gear.

Justine darted around to the back and opened the station wagon's rear door. She almost got inside, but there was nothing to hold on to. Troy stepped on the accelerator, and Justine fell back into the street.

Twenty-six blocks; twenty-six alleys.

Justine went into the drugstore through the service entrance.

“Good news, child,” said Fanny, who was bent over her pill-counting tray, counting Tagamets. “Archibold Bamberger come by yesterday and buried some stuff in the yard, ChapSticks and dice and what-have-yous, and I'll be damned if I didn't dream sweet dreams all night. No Doc, no Johnny, no Sebastian Cabot, no Charlie Rich. Just clouds and King Ranch chicken and something about college football… sugar, you look awful.”

“I have to call Charlotte.”

“Sorry, no phone calls at work. What have you done to yourself?”

“It's no big deal.”

“You tell me what happened. Wait. Vic, get your nose out the insulin refrigerator. No snacks in there, never have been, never will be. Get Justine some Neosporin and gauze.”

Vic, Fanny's most senior employee, and the one in charge of payroll, instead brought Justine an envelope.

“Eighty-four fifty-five cash,” he said, then returned to the insulin refrigerator.

Justine picked up the phone and dialed the bank, but the receptionist said Charlotte had gone home early. Justine hung up.

“Did you just disobey me?” said Fanny.

Justine ignored her. She went into her backpack, which had smears of garbage all over it from the alley behind Troy's, and found a business card. She dialed the number.

“Is Ms. Yin there?”

“Who's calling?” said a deep, male voice.

“You hang up that telephone receiver,” said Fanny.

“Justine Moppett, one of Gracie's, ah, Ms. Yin's guidance, uh, subjects. At school.”

“You can't call her at home.”

“It's that Troy, I know,” said Fanny. “Nasty influence. He wouldn't buy one candy bar, so you tell him…”

“I know, but she gave me her card…”

“Out of Neosporin,” said Vic. “Out of gauze.”

“Troy, right, sugar?” said Fanny. “I'm just trying to help here. Quit that fussing and hang up and tell me what's the story.”

“She said I could call if I needed her, I'm a special case…”

“Bactine?” said Vic.

“You forgot that sign about Doc yesterday,” said Fanny. “I had a lot of damage control to do this morning because of that, and I wasn't gonna say anything, but now you're being insubordinate, so you are removed from my grace, Justine Moppett.”

“Please, can she call me? I'm at 453-1254.”

“No.”

“Antiseptic cotton disks?”

Fanny placed a finger on the telephone hook.

“I'm… in trouble, Mr. Yin, she said I could call her…”

“You are not welcome to call me Mr. Yin.”

“I…”

“You're the cutter, right?”

“Hang up,” said Fanny. “Now.”

“Yes. I am.”

“Sit down so I can squirt this at your knees,” said Vic.

“Believe you me, Gracie does not want to talk to you.” “I need her,” said Justine, exhausted.

Fanny leaned over and glared hard at Justine. Justine slapped Fanny's hand away from the telephone hook.

“Whoa,” said Vic. “Damnation,” said Fanny. “Right,” said the deep male voice. “I'll die,” she whispered.

“I doubt it,” said Vic, Fanny, and the deep male voice.

“I love Gracie.” “I love restraining orders.” “She loves me.” “She loves
me.
”

Fanny pulled on the phone cord.

“I need my Humulin!” shouted Mr. Krupp.

“Isopropyl alc, three cases,” said the deliveryman. “Nutrament, four.”

“Fire-ant bites, too, down here,” said Vic, glancing up Justine's skirt.

With a great tug on the cord, Fanny pulled the receiver out of Justine's hand.

“You are fired. Go away.”

Two hours and five miles later Justine stopped at one of the two entrances to the multi-acre parking lot of the Santa Ana Apartments. She jogged up and down the rows of parked cars, pausing at one entrance or the other to watch the cars come and go. No 1970s yellow Subaru.

It was nearly 6:30. Maybe her car had broken down. Maybe she had already come and gone, and was on her way to Enchanted Rock or someplace with her mean boyfriend/husband. Maybe she had bought a new car or gotten a ride. Maybe she'd stopped at Jim's with another student she liked better. Maybe Dick the dick. Maybe she was having sex with him in her office at this very minute.

But probably she just wasn't home yet.

Justine couldn't watch both entrances at once.

Or could she? Next to a dirty perimeter fence stood an ash tree. She left her backpack at the foot of it and began to climb. At twenty feet, she
found a large, semi-comfortable branch with a barely sufficient view of both entrances, and settled along it on her stomach, like a three-toed sloth.

Calm—the sort that makes sails droop sleepily and the ships below them drift in helpless circles—found its way through Justine. She allowed ants and caterpillars and spiders to cross her as if she were just another branch. Sunlight baked her in random patches. Mockingbirds ignored her; squirrels scolded; paper wasps evaluated her dirty elbows; ash borers went about their destructive business. She was safe here, safe from the terrible history of the day that eddied beneath her like a heavy, lethal, invisible gas. She was not known here.

“Justine?”

She contracted like a spring broken, nearly falling from her perch.

“My god, Justine. What are you doing?”

The bustling crowd of insects, alarmed, bit, stung, scattered. Justine shimmied down, nearly suffocating with relief, panic, and the loitering heat of the April evening.

Gracie helped her down the last few feet. Justine's blue skirt hiked up, exposing her body. The unforgiving bark met with her queasy shame.

“It's all right, kiddo, it's okay. Come, let's sit in my car.”

Gracie had parked just under her tree.

“Sorry about the mess,” Gracie added, clearing the passenger seat and floor of McDonald's bags and homemade Led Zeppelin tapes and stocking wads and sticky-looking travel mugs and
U.S. News and World Reports
and blackening banana skins, tossing them all like wedding bouquets into the backseat. Last, she flung her thin black attaché case into the back. A few manila folders peeked out of the mouth. “Sit.”

She turned the car on. Frigid air conditioning and J. Geils exploded all over both of them.

“I saw the backpack,” said Gracie, turning J. Geils down. “I didn't think anything of it at first, but something made me look up. I knew it was you right away. I remembered your skirt from today.”

“Today,” said Justine. “That was today?”

“What happened to you? You're an absolute mess.”

Justine counted the blanching Chiquita banana stickers on the glove-compartment door.

“You were all right earlier,” said Gracie. “Tell me what happened. Maybe I can help.”

Gracie's inspection sticker had expired four years ago.

“Want me to run you home? I'd have to run inside and tell my husband a little white lie first, though.”

They both smiled; Justine because of this free fall of absurdity she was in; Gracie, perhaps, to hide her desire to be rid of her troublesome counselee.

“I don't know.”

“Troy's?”

Justine smiled again.

“No.”

“Want me to call your psychiatrist?”

Justine shrank down in the seat, put the bony sockets of her eyes on her kneecaps, and shook her head.

“I'm just glad to be here right now.”

“You really, really don't look well, Justine.”

“It's all right.”

They sat and listened to something rattle around inside an air-conditioner vent. The melody of “Centerfold” was still barely audible.

“I called you before I came, but your husband said you weren't home yet.”

“A cleaning,” said Gracie. She bared her teeth. The falling sun highlighted her incisors' tiny serrations, and made her canines appear yellower than they had that morning. Harder. More…
canine.
“I had a poppy seed between two molars. The tech said it'd probably been there for weeks.”

Justine witnessed against a scrim of her imagination a sudden, unbidden film of herself kissing Gracie so deeply that their jaws, at right angles to each other, unlocked and stretched open like boas swallowing rabbits, each tongue now seated deeply enough to experience the warmth of the other's throat.

“I don't think he appreciated me calling.”

Gracie leaned back and sighed.

“He doesn't like for me to bring my work home,” she said, glancing back at her attaché case. “If I have work, I either have to stay late at school or go sit at Denny's. You want to go sit at Denny's and drink coffee?”

Justine shivered. She pulled her knees up to her chin and pulled the hem of her skirt tightly across her thighs. Gracie immediately turned off the air conditioning.

“It's about the only thing that works in this shitbox.”

“I don't know what to do.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“I don't know.”

Already the heat was gathering again.

“How can I help you?” Gracie said, with what Justine thought was more than a trace of impatience. “How about that doctor you mentioned to me today. Sherpa? Can he help you?”