The Parallel Apartments (71 page)

At the corner of South First and Oltorf was another orange light. Rose snuck through it. So did a city cop, who pulled her over with all the fanfare and fireworks a cop car could produce.

“Sir!” said Rose, as the pigeon-footed cop walked slowly up to the window.

“Licenseregistrationproofofinsurance.”

“Sir,” said Rose, emptying into the passenger seat the bowling bag she used for glove-compartment overflow. “I have to be somewhere, it's extremely important, can we postpone this? What if I just drive over to the station later and we can finish there? Just an hour or two, promise.”

“Lcnsregstrnprfinsrnce.”

“Please? I'd be so grateful, sir!”

The cop spoke into his radio. “Requesting backup.”

Rose handed all her car-related documents over. Her registration had expired, her car needed inspecting, and she'd been meaning,
so meaning,
to get with Geico. At least a three-hundred dollar ticket. But of course that wasn't what worried her.

The cop went back to his cruiser and sat on the edge of the driver's seat, legs stretched out, his boot heels scraping the asphalt. Backup arrived. Both cops came up to the car, one on either side.

“You shoulda called your PO when you moved, uh, Miss Balaguer.”

“I did, sir!” But she hadn't. She'd been planning to call the same day she was going to bring all her tardy automotive paperwork up-to-date.

“Sure you did.”

“Sir, it's a matter of life and death! I'll turn myself in once I'm all finished! Pleeeeeeze?”

“You better call the richest person you know, because your bail's gonna be sky-high. Why don't you step out of the car.”

Instead, Rose deftly slipped the Jeep into gear and drove away. In her rearview the two cops were still standing there. Then they jumped into their cars and came after her.

Rose flew. She darted around Sunday drivers, she swerved down side streets, she sped down one-ways, she bullied her way through intersections, she nearly clipped a man on a ten-speed, she did clip a vast Ford F-350, she entered and exited the freeway, she drove through alleys, she nosed pedestrians out of the way. There were so many of them, pedestrians, too many, a parade's worth, yes, that's a
parade,
jammed with limping clods, so many that she could not elbow her way through them. She was forced to stop completely, surrounded by shin-splint sufferers. Before she could even climb out of her Jeep, two pistols were pointed right at her head.

The back of the cruiser seemed not to have a heating vent. The cold of the black vinyl seat ate right through her corduroys and nipped at her thighs. Would her tears freeze on her cheeks?

Rose leaned her forehead against the Plexiglas dividing the front seat from the back. The last time she was arrested, she'd been able to work her handcuffs so that they slid under her bottom and wound up in front, but these were too tight. What could she do if she escaped, anyway? Jog to the hospital? She was too far away.

She was going to miss everything.

Late in the evening Rose paid her cellie, DeeDee MacHugh, five bucks cash to borrow her smuggled-in Blackberry.

“Three minutes,” said DeeDee, handing Rose the phone. “Ready? Go!”

Rose dialed Livia.

Livia told her everything.

Rose spent the following month in a cell with DeeDee, unable to rise from her bunk, until Livia bailed her out on the last day of a violent storm.

XXXV

February 2005

From the northwest a cold front arrived, bearing temperatures too frigid and ice too sharp for central Texas—for its people, its mood, its traffic, its spirit—and from the south another front arrived, a hot, rolling auster of smoke and ash from burning Mexican forestland.

The two vast weathers collided at noon in an eight-hundred-mile, east–west line at whose midpoint lay the unprepared city of Austin, where the climatic meeting at first produced violent gusts of wind, then brief, gray tornadoes, then single-digit temperatures, then, for two full days, an ice storm that left an inch-thick membrane of opaque, ash-invested ice on trees and buildings and cars and streets and the homeless. The city's residents woke the first morning to discover that a feathery layer of fine, grayish soot had covered every surface inside their homes except for the clean white areas on the pillows where they'd laid their heads. Shuddering coughs, exploded pipes, downed power lines, breathing through T-shirts, emergency-vehicle sirens caroling all day and night, stalled and wrecked cars and killed trees blocking the treacherous roads, whole families sleeping on mattresses in
kitchens where their ovens, doors wide open, efficiently warmed them all, but sometimes also, through faults in the appliances' air-fuel mixtures, imperfectly combusted the natural gas, asphyxiating them. Dozens died this way, and many others died in wrecks and collapses, from exposure, falls, plummeting icicles, and the failure of machines. But most were going to survive the frigid black interruption and return to their lives, running pharmacies, collecting debts, delivering deliveries, cashiering at bookstores, doing time, avoiding punishment, burbling like babies do, idling in wealth, chroming tricycles, outrunning loneliness, reporting weekly to parole officers, moving from one home to another, conspiring with police to lie to the world to save the soul, and possibly the life, of one woman who against the longest odds in medicine had persisted in living, under powerful sedation, in a hospital whose generator had not choked and died on the nearly unbreathable air of a smoke-and-ice storm stalled over her city.

When Justine finally awoke, on the last morning of the unique storm, after a month's profound, drug-induced unconsciousness, she screamed for Rose, for her mother, for Dot, for Charlotte, for her baby, but only a nurse came, who adjusted her a bit, spun dials and punched buttons on the many devices and consoles and portable computers that filled the hospital room at St. David's, and who ignored Justine's questions, instead calling for a doctor, a thin woman wearing rubber gloves and an ID badge—Dr. Leona Kraus—whose clothes hung from her like wash on a line.

“Well, hello, Justine. You gave us quite a fright for a while.”

“What…?” she said, eyes barely open, mouth dry as the Sonoran.

“You're extremely lucky. There are only a few documented cases of…”

Dr. Kraus had been instructed by the FBI not to inform Justine of anything that had happened since her assault, though she could talk about its medical consequences. The doctor had readily agreed with the FBI, because she thought the shock of so much bad news might actually kill her patient. Dr. Kraus had seen such things before. It was why she'd decided to go along with Justine's mother's plan.

“What do you remember?”

“I'm thirsty.”

Dr. Kraus left the room and came back with a bottle of warm Poland Spring. She opened it for her. The doctor, who had once been attacked herself, empathized with Justine, and the anxiety of the memory of her experience
caused her hand to shake as she gave her patient the bottle. Justine took it with both hands, which were also trembling. Dr. Kraus, when under stress, would often conjure sudden morbid scenarios in which she was forced by an unknown god to choose from two sufferances. Today she found herself struggling with whether she would rather be raped again by a man they'd never catch or endure what Justine had.

“You were attacked. Do you remember that?”

The doctor could not decide. Her rape, a violent assault inside a walled cemetery in New Orleans by a man she never saw who smelled of roasted meat and rubber and whose footsteps when running away reminded her of centaurs, had been thirty years before, and was still the standard to which she compared all suffering.

“Somebody cut you very badly.”

Dr. Kraus clenched her thighs and drove her legs as close to each other as she could.

Justine, with no little effort, lifted her arms and touched her belly. Under the blankets and sheet and thin hospital gown Justine could feel a long… what? A discontinuity. With the little strength that remained in her atrophying muscles, she threw back the covers and hiked up her gown. Two crowded lines of small white comma-like scars ran on either side of a raised, foot-long scar across her sunken abdomen. The configuration reminded Justine of a zipper. She touched it.

“Where's my baby?”

The bathroom door was open. Dr. Kraus caught a reflection of herself in the mirror. Oh, that's what she looked like when at the mercy of her PTSD's cunning trials: a smiling crone. She wondered what Justine would see when she looked into the mirrors of her post-trauma life.

“I'm going to raise your backrest.”

When her upper half had been raised high enough to see under the closed door the shadows of people walking by, Justine said, “I think I remember… I was waiting to see my grandmother.”

“I see.”

“And mother and my, uh, Rose. But my neighbor came over first and cut my stomach.”

Sweat leached through Dr. Kraus's bra and was now appearing in patches on her blue blouse. She would have to decide soon.

“It felt like she was drawing a line on there but the point accidentally slipped in. Oh, I remember, it was my box cutter. Did she hurt my baby?”

“I don't know.”

Justine began to cry, but, dehydrated as she was, she produced no tears, only sobs, violent ones, like temblors sine-waving her body.

This alarmed Dr. Kraus—Justine was hardly out of the woods, and any trauma, physical or mental, was liable to be dangerous. The doctor immediately produced a sedative and injected it into Justine's PICC line. Dr. Kraus decided at that moment that she would rather endure the rape again than be eviscerated and rendered childless. The god in her head who'd forced her to choose withdrew. The doctor relaxed. When she got home, she would begin taking a higher dose of ziprasidone.

“I'm afraid,” said the doctor, when Justine had worn herself out, “that I don't know much except that I performed three surgeries on you, and you came close to death more than once. But you're going to be fine. We're in the middle of a storm right now, and travel is precarious, but your family will be here as soon as they can. They'll answer your questions.”

Justine could not bring herself to form the words
what family.
The doctor dabbed at the sweat on Justine's face and arms. She sat with her for a while. Justine fell asleep, dreaming of Halloween pumpkins and yawning animals.

Justine did not notice that Livia had come in till she was sitting next to her bed, holding her daughter's hand. Livia wore a parka and hiking boots. Clots of ice hung in her black hair. She wore her makeup just as she had when Justine was young. The shades of muted color seemed no longer to accent her features but to smother the evidence of their decline. Particularly her shadow and mascara. Looking into her eyes way back when was… well, had Justine ever really looked into her mother's eyes? And now, was she really, genuinely looking? If so, what for? Her baby? Did Livia know what had happened? Instead of asking, Justine blurred her vision so her mother looked as she always did in Justine's memory, a nulliform wash of grays, moving like a cloud of swifts.

“It's me,” said her mother. “Just me.”

Livia had spent three weeks in this same hospital, after the final pop of the guilt of a lifetime of lies. She was no longer afraid of the truths emergent, no longer afraid of her daughter and what she knew. In that vast bed, among
its attendance of monitors and pumps and tubes, her daughter looked like a broken doll.
This is my fault.

“Tell me,” said Justine, already certain that her child was dead, “what happened to my baby.”

With her fingers Livia combed melting ice out of her hair. She fought an urge to eat it, the slick, grayish lumps, how good it would feel on her throat, so dry now from the zero-humidity hospital atmosphere.

“I've got something to tell you first.”

Justine looked around the room. The doctor was gone. The TV was on, a dance contest of some sort.

“It's Charlotte,” said Livia.

Whenever she spoke that name aloud Livia would gradually notice in a corner of her field of vision a figure: her mother, a mere punch of black, a featureless silhouette, a smear of oblivion, standing open-armed, as if waiting for an explanation of her death and why it occurred at a moment when living was worth the fighting for. “She passed away, during childbirth. Her baby didn't make it either.”

“Edith?”

“Edith. They died on January 17. A month ago. The same day you were…”

Justine turned away. She did not wish to look at her mother's age-hatched face, her graying hair, her dispersing sexiness; she did not want to watch as she shook beneath the weight of her duty to her daughter, or redden at the guilt of her relief that the bearing was now done. Justine was ashamed to feel a tiny bit of relief that there would be no Edith for her to covet, and a grander relief that she would not have to confront Charlotte at all.

“Justine?”

Charlotte had not survived, this was true.

But Livia had lied about Edith. Edith was alive and healthy. Upon Charlotte's death, Livia became guardian.