Viral (11 page)

She saw the woman standing over to one side of the concourse. She was leaning on the wall and had one leg crossed over the other. She was peering into the stream of arriving passengers, but she had not yet seen Cynthia, so Cynthia had a moment to observe her unobserved herself. The woman had high cheekbones and a kindly mouth and fair skin a little burned from working outdoors. Her sandy hair was tied in a long braid down her back and she looked nervous. Cynthia stopped and stared at her and then the woman caught sight of her and stood up straight, her face lit up with hope. Cynthia found herself walking toward her, leaving her suitcase where it stood and holding out both hands to her. The woman reached out her hands, too, and Cynthia saw that they were fine, long-fingered hands, a violinist's hands, strong, freckled and marked by other kinds of work. She recognized them. They were the same hands from her dream. She reached out and took them in her own.

She stood in the fluorescent lighting of the airport concourse holding hands with this stranger while people passed them on either side.

“It's you,” she said, and then again: “It's you.”

A Boy My Sister

Dated in High School

A
boy
my sister dated in high school slapped her across the face during an argument. They were sitting in the front seat of his car, parked by the basketball court behind our house, and she made a sarcastic reply to something he had said and before she knew what was happening, he'd raised his hand and swung it, open palmed, against her cheek.

She didn't tell me about this until years later after we had both left home. When she told me, I felt at once angry and strangely guilty because the boy in question was extraordinarily good looking and I remembered having been impressed in a shallow way that I never spoke about that my sister was dating someone so handsome. I was jealous of a lot of things about my sister in those days: her beauty and her ease with people, how spontaneously funny she could be, how well she was liked. She fitin at our school and in our town, in her own body, in a way that I could not seem to manage, quiet and bookish and peculiar as I was then and remain. Still, there was never a time when I didn't love her very much and when I wouldn't have done whatever I could to support and defend her.

Why didn't you tell me sooner? I asked, when she finally told me.

When the boy she was dating hit my sister, it made a sharp cracking sound, just like it does in the movies. She raised her hand and touched the side of her own face. The expanse of skin where he'd struck her buzzed and tingled, felt weirdly alive. It didn't hurt and even the actual slap itself hadn't really hurt. Instead, she was shocked, surprised because she had not expected this, and then confused about what she should do next.

She looked over at the boy she was dating, who had just hit her. He was leaning way back away from her against the car door as if he was afraid, either of her or of what he had just done. In his eyes was an expression of shock and remorse much more intense than anything she herself seemed to be feeling. He too had been surprised, and he looked like he might be about to cry. At that moment it came into her mind that maybe, in punishment for what he had done, the gods had magically frozen him in his current physical position: curled up like a frightened fetus with his eyes bugged out and his mouth hanging slightly open. Perhaps he would be stuck like that forever. In her mind she envisioned having to explain to the boy's mother how her son came to be paralyzed in this posture:
He hit me,
she would say
, and then, well, now he doesn't seem able to move or speak. I'm sorry
. She thought of him in various scenes over the course of his life to come—in school, at home, in church—still fixed in that attitude, and the absurdity of these images together with the amazement she still felt at what had just occurred made her suddenly snort with laughter.

Her laughter seemed to free the boy from his paralysis.

“Oh, god,” he said. “I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I didn't mean . . .” He reached out toward her as though he wanted to take back what he'd done, but then he withdrew his hand. “I'm sorry,” he said again. He hung his head.

“I guess you should take me home,” my sister said. Suddenly she felt like crying. He nodded and started the car. When they pulled up in front of my parents' house, he turned off the engine. He looked over at her mournfully. She suddenly thought he was making a huge, self-centered melodrama out of something that wasn't really so important. He wanted to be a terrible, unforgivable villain. She did not want to give him that satisfaction.

“Look,” she said. “I'm okay. It doesn't hurt. I'm not, like, scarred for life or anything.”

“Really?” he asked.

“Really,” she said. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He clasped her hands gratefully. They smiled at each other because that was what they were used to doing. When they smiled, it felt as if a moment before they had been drowning in some cold, unpleasant sea, but now they were back on solid ground, back in the world they knew. A wave of relief swept over them.

“You were being kind of a bitch,” he said.

“I was,” she conceded. “And you were being a class-one a-hole.” She opened the door and got out.

“Can I call you tomorrow?” he called after her.

“Yes,” she said and went inside. She could hardly even feel where he had hit her at all anymore.

Because they had made up and because she wasn't hurt, she didn't feel like she needed to mention to anyone what had happened. If she said anything to our mother, she thought, Mom would only overreact. She would call the school, maybe the boy's parents. She would say things about violence against women and the patriarchy, the kind of embarrassing things that my sister had to do her best to ignore so that she would not be a total outcast in the conservative suburb where we lived. If she told our mother and she started making a fuss, it would definitely mean that she and the boy would break up and stop dating. They were both part of a big group of friends, and she didn't want to cause problems in that group over something that was really, truly no big deal but that might become a big deal if the parents were involved. It wasn't like she was some battered and abused woman, like you saw on television talk shows or heard about on local news. Probably, in a few months, she wouldn't even remember that it had happened.

So she said nothing and the boy never did it again and after a while they broke up for unrelated reasons and started dating other people without much drama or distress to either of them. They finished high school, went on to different colleges. They didn't keep in touch.

But during that time, unlike what she had expected, the memory of being hit by the boy didn't just fade away and vanish. It wasn't that she thought about it all the time or it ruined her life or she could never trust a man again or anything like that. From time to time it would come into her mind, that day, the moment of surprised confusion afterward. And she came to feel, especially as she got a little older, that she had let herself down by the way she had reacted. This was the feeling that grew incrementally inside her. She should not have tried to make him feel better by telling him it was no big deal. She should not have kept it from their friends just so they could all continue to get along. From the beginning she had failed to stand up for herself, and now she knew, or felt like she knew, about herself that she would let someone do that to her and do nothing about it. She would be obliging. She would comply.

This guilt about how she hadn't stood up for herself was like a small stone that she had to carry around. That was how she pictured it. Small and round, but heavy. And she came to believe—she said, when she finally told me about it all those years later—that maybe if she told people about it, as she was doing now, it would get smaller and lighter; that sharing would diminish it, make it smaller, maybe even make it vanish.

And I thought, but did not say: maybe, or maybe it will make it multiply.

My Daughter

and Her Spider

A
fter
her father moved away, my daughter Lisa had a difficult few months. She slept badly. She had terrible nightmares from which she'd wake up shouting words I couldn't understand or crying tears of fright. She threw tantrums that would come over her like fits and then she'd cry until she was exhausted, hoarse and dizzy. I worried constantly about her. I wasn't in particularly great shape myself after the ending of my marriage. I was working longer hours so that I could pay our bills. I was tired all the time, struggling to keep from slipping down into my own sadness and drowning there.

I wanted to be strong and do the right thing for my daughter. But I really didn't know how to help her cope.

Dr. Clemens, the psychologist I took her to, suggested that we get her a Companion. She gave me the name and address of a facility where we could go to pick one out. She said they'd have a full range of choices, each one carefully engineered to meet the needs of children who had recently been through a traumatic loss.

I was skeptical at first.

“What about a real pet?” I remember asking.

Dr. Clemens sighed. She'd obviously had this question from parents many times before. “Well,” she said, “we generally recommend artificial over natural. The children bond with them just as well and there's no mess, no allergies, a lot less noise. The schools prefer it; some will even let the children bring Companions into class with them.”

She handed me a brochure. On the cover were pictures of the company's designs: a sleek, elegant, azure-colored cat; a dog with shaggy, silver hair. Their faces looked alert and curious. You could hardly tell that they were just machines.

“All right,” I said. “If it will really help her . . .”

“I promise,” Dr. Clemens, the psychologist, intoned. “She'll be like a different child soon. You'll see.”

Lisa is little
for her age. She's eight years old. She has a head of boisterous, dark curls and big black eyes that she got from her father. She is simultaneously willful and fragile. In this, she is not like me, not like I was: a healthy, heavy, dumpling of a child, blonde and freckled. Even when her dad was here she cried easily, held on to hurt in a way that made me worried for her future happiness.

At the facility, which was a big, corrugated-metal building in a business park out in the suburbs, she was nervous, fidgeting and chewing on her hair. She held on to my pant leg as I signed us in at the front desk. She had been excited when I told her we were going to get her a Companion, but now she seemed so timid I began to wonder if this was a good idea.

“Don't worry, sweetheart,” I told her as we sat in the waiting room, listening for our names to be called. “There's nothing to be scared of here.”

“But what if I can't choose?” she said. “What if I don't know which one I'm meant to choose?”

“You'll know it when you see it,” I said. “And if you really can't decide, we'll come back another time.”

After a few minutes, a woman employee in nurse's scrubs called our names and introduced herself as Gretchen. She led us down a carpeted corridor into the windowless interior of the building. She spoke to Lisa in that cloying voice some adults use with children and that Lisa doesn't like. She explained that we were going to a room where there were “a whole bunch of special friends, who are all very excited to meet you and play with you.” There would be other children there, too, but no grown-ups were allowed. She said this like it would be a special treat, but I felt Lisa grip my hand tighter when she heard it.

“I won't be far away,” I said to reassure her.

No, Gretchen agreed, Lisa's mommy would be just outside, waiting for her while she decided which Companion she liked most of all and wanted to take home with her. Wasn't it great that she could take one of them home? Wasn't that the best?

“We think it's better for them to make the selection by themselves,” she said to me. “That way she doesn't need to worry about pleasing you.” I told her I understood.

I was relieved when Lisa let go of my hand, reluctantly but without tears, and went with Gretchen to the playroom. I went to the viewing room next door. It was small, low-lit, with a long, glass panel on one wall and a few chairs set up in front of it as if it were a movie screen. When I entered, there were several other parents there already. There was coffee on a counter, so I poured myself a cup, then joined the others peering through the glass..

The room beyond was cavernous, fluorescent-lit and over bright. Its walls were painted with flowers, trees and animals in garish colors. There were a few child-sized chairs, no other furniture, carpet wall-to-wall. Five or six children aged variously between four and ten stood or sat in different parts of it and around them flocked and flew, loped and crawled, an incredible variety of artificial animals. There were the ones that you'd expect: cats and dogs, hamsters, mice and guinea pigs, some birds with ice-cream-colored plumage, orange and magenta, pale pink and lime green. Then there were others, more surprising: a pig, a couple of iguanas lounging in a corner. There were some that had no analog in life but combined characteristics from different species: fat, waddling, fluffy things that looked half-toad, half-teddy bear; winged lizards with the hairy faces of friendly dogs.

I watched Lisa go among them. She stopped to pet a purple-and-white splotched rabbit with lopsided ears. Then she got distracted by the movement of an enormous butterfly that was the size of one of those old paperback books they used to publish when I was a child. She followed its meanderings across the room, reaching up toward it until, to her delight, it landed on her outstretched hand. It was ice blue with pink stars at the center of each wing. I watched her with it and thought how marvelous it would be to have something like that around the house, to come into a room and find it lighted on the wall, to see it perched on Lisa's hand or shoulder, a wonderful, flying jewel.