Within Arm's Reach (23 page)

The woman rises up slowly between us. Her long hair pulls back off her face, and when I catch sight of her profile, I grow dizzy. She looks at Weber.

She says, “My life is not turning out the way it’s supposed to.”

He shrugs, as if that isn’t an odd and presumptuous thing for one stranger to say to another. “How do you know how your life was supposed to turn out? Would you like an ice cream?” He holds out the vanilla cone.

This brings the tears on again, but more quietly this time. She cannot wipe them away fast enough. “I already had three banana splits,” she says. “I can feel my hips growing wider.”

“I ate six cones once on a dare,” Weber says. He takes a lick of the vanilla ice cream, and I focus on hating the sight of his big fat pink tongue. He is the one who continually gets me into these situations. First I am faced with the fact that he’s been having conversations about God knows what with my family, and now this. Now her.

“I failed an exam,” she says, “and this important man at work doesn’t like me. I don’t know why, I’ve tried everything—asking questions, being helpful, staying late and coming in early—but he just doesn’t like me. It’s so big there, and I get lost, and it’s too hard to focus on what’s supposed to be . . . oh, I don’t know. For hours this morning I hated myself. And I’m so tired.” She cries into balled-up fists.

“You just need some sleep,” Weber says, in his calm voice. “You hit the nail on the head right there. Look, I’m a fireman, and I know that adrenaline can only take you so far. The mind needs rest. Go home and chill out. I promise that you’ll have better perspective tomorrow.”

“A fireman,” she says. “That sounds nice. So simple.” She peers up and seems to take in the sight of Weber for the first time. “You look like a fireman,” she says, as if that’s a compliment.

Weber puffs up at this. He gives a big grin.

You idiot, I think. You haven’t put out anything bigger than an oven fire in three years.

I study the girl’s face, wrinkled and wet. I know Weber’s lame advice to rest won’t work. I feel sick deep inside. I hear myself say, “Don’t listen to him.”

They both turn to me. I watch Belinda’s expression freeze and then harden. “Lila,” she says.

“Maybe it’s supposed to be really hard,” I say. “Maybe it’s not supposed to be fun or fulfilling. Maybe it’s called work because it is.”

I am standing now, a few steps from the picnic bench. “Lila,” Weber says. “What are you doing?”

What I’m doing is remembering standing with my grandmother in the hospital after her car accident. She held my hand, and her skin was fine, and papery-soft. I can feel this, her hand pressed to mine.

“Do you even go to school anymore?” Belinda asks. “Someone said you were sick. Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

“You two know each other?” Weber asks.

My grandmother leaned toward me at the hospital and said, “Who said becoming a doctor was going to be easy?” She had known. She had been telling me not that I was a quitter, but that I needed to do what was hard. That I needed to push forward.

I am careful not to look at Weber. I focus on Belinda. I focus on staying frozen inside. I say, “You should get ahold of yourself. You’re a mess.”

Belinda seems to make an effort. Her shoulders tighten. She stops crying. Her face is shiny with moisture. “You were sitting there this whole time?” she asks. There is a choking noise in her throat. “You were sitting there laughing at me?”

I can feel a hard smile form on my face. I know that my expression is just going to fuel her suspicion, but I can’t help it.

“You’re hateful,” she says. “Really hateful.”

“I’ll be back at the hospital tomorrow,” I say.

I am smiling because I’ve finally figured it out. This moment has been a gift. Belinda, my enemy, has given me a gift. I have been expecting too much from my work. It is supposed to be hard and challenging and exhausting. I can’t expect it to be more, to mean more.

“Lila,” Weber says. He is looking at me with his mouth slightly open. He has never seen the real me before. And it is just as well, because I am back on track now. I am returning to my old life, a life Weber James doesn’t fit into. I know, with total certainty, that my time of weakness is over.

“We go to school together,” I say, in the same cold voice. “Belinda and I are classmates.”

“Classmates,” Belinda says, “but not equals. I’m sure Lila has told you that she’s number one?” She is in her purse now, punching her hand around the inside. She pulls out a compact mirror and opens it. She pats the skin under her eyes and then clicks the mirror shut. “Not that I care. I have to stop competing. My therapist told me that I need to stop competing. I’m destroying myself.”

Belinda stands up. She loops her purse over her shoulder. She addresses Weber. “Thank you for your concern. I’m going to use the restroom now.”

She walks away, her posture straight beneath her wrinkled, tucked-in T-shirt and shorts. Her sandals bang small clouds of dust around her ankles. I look down, and see that the chocolate ice cream cone has melted, running in brown stripes across my hand, down my arm, and splattering across my shorts.

I pick my letter up from the picnic table and use it to wipe the ice cream off my skin. The brown liquid covers the writing completely and my arm is left sticky but dry. I ball up the useless sheet of paper and throw it into the garbage.

“What the hell was that?” Weber says.

“I’m sorry, Weber, but we’re over. I mean it this time.”

He stares at me as if I’ve spoken in a foreign language he doesn’t recognize.

“I’m sorry I’ve been indecisive with you in the past. It was unfair of me to say I didn’t want to be with you and then show up at your door two hours later.”

“I understood that,” Weber says. “You were fighting yourself, Doc. You really wanted to be with me—”

I interrupt him. “I’m done fighting myself. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want you.”

The words sound cruel under the hot summer sun, but I tell myself that it is the sound of honesty. It is the sound of freedom.

“I don’t recognize you right now,” Weber says. “Your face is cold and scrunched up.”

“This is what I really look like.”

“I see,” Weber says. And I can see from his expression that he does. He sees me, and he turns away.

AFTER WEBER drops me off at the library, I get in my car and drive home. I make a beeline from the car to the shower. I feel exhausted and gritty with dirt. Gracie is waiting in my room when I come out of the bathroom dripping wet in a towel.

“For Christ’s sake,” I say. “Will you get out of here?”

She is sitting on my bed Indian style. She is wearing Papa’s cardigan for what must be the tenth day in a row. She is not handling Gram’s hospitalization well. She says, “I have to ask you for a favor.”

I am not comfortable. Gracie and I are not the kind of sisters who walk around in our underwear and borrow each other’s clothes. We grew up in a house where everyone got dressed behind his or her closed bedroom door, and we live in that kind of house now. “Can we do this later?” I say. “I have to call the hospital, so I need to get dressed. I’ve made my decision. I’m going back to school. I’m going to be a doctor.”

Gracie just stares at me, caught up in her own dreamy world. There’s no way she could understand needing to be somewhere, or job responsibilities, since she has stopped going to her job and is not expected to show up at any particular place.

“Lila, will you please be my Lamaze coach?”

I grip the towel around me and study her face. “Are you joking?”

Her pale face has no humor in it. “Please? There’s no one else I can ask. Really. There’s no one else I’d feel comfortable letting . . . They said that I had to choose someone by this week in case I went into early labor. I know you don’t want to and you don’t approve and all of that, but . . .”

I suddenly remember driving my sister, then painfully thin and sallow-cheeked, to the clinic for her abortion. I remember sitting in the waiting room and flipping through
Seventeen
magazine. I remember thinking that it was odd that I was there since I was still a virgin. It was a freezing-cold January morning, and I had to half-carry Gracie down the icy walkway when it was over. When we got to the car her shoulders shook for a moment, but no tears followed. She gazed straight ahead through the windshield on the way home, not bothering to take off her mittens or unzip her coat in the heated car.

“I need someone in there with me,” Gracie says. “I can’t do this alone.”

I try to think of other possible coaches, and come up with nothing. Mom is unthinkable in a delivery room. Joel is not an option, as Margaret would show up with a shotgun. Gram is too sick to be of any help. But Gram would be there in some capacity, if she could. She would do anything possible to ensure that Gracie and the baby were all right.

I feel strong under the weight of my decision to return to school. I will make Gram happy and proud. I will be number one in my class again, no matter how many annoying patients I have to deal with. I will simply do what is hard from now on, whenever there is a choice.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

“Really? Oh, thank you so much. I’ll owe you for the rest of my life.” Gracie is up off the bed and coming toward me as if for a hug. But she veers away at the last minute and heads for the door. “I know you have to get dressed. The next class is on Wednesday evening, but I’ll remind you later. I can meet you at the hospital.” She stops in the doorway. “You’re my favorite sister,” she says, and is gone.

I smile at that, a saying from our childhood. You’re my favorite sister, she would say. I’m your only sister, I would say in return.

I stay seated on the bed for a minute, wrapped in my towel. I stare down at my hands, at my thick fingers. They look powerful. I am still looking at my hands when the strange noise starts on the other side of the room. It is garbled and staticky, and sounds like a radio. I cross the room toward the noise. It’s coming from my purse. I unzip the zipper and the noise grows louder, more urgent. It’s Weber’s radio. I remember now that he put it in my purse at Dairy Queen so he wouldn’t have to carry it.

“Full alert, big one, 1244 Finch Way. Electrical, apartment complex, 1244 Finch Way.” The radio spits out the information, gives a long static-filled gasp, and then repeats.

I listen for a minute, running the numbers through my head, and then throw the radio on my bed. “Gracie,” I yell. “Ryan’s building is on fire!”

A few minutes later we are in the car, headed across town. When we are a mile or two from the building, we begin to hear the sirens. Wailing and keening to one another. I pull over to the curb to let one fire truck pass, then continue driving.

“Should we call Mom?” Gracie asks. She is in the passenger seat, the seat belt stretched across her big belly. Her hair looks dirty.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what the etiquette is in this kind of situation.”

“Don’t joke, Lila.” Gracie is holding on to her seat belt with both hands. “Uncle Ryan could be dead.”

I don’t like that she’s said that out loud, but I can’t argue the point.

We make it onto the block and park seconds before long blue police barriers cut off access. The street and the lawn in front of Uncle Ryan’s building are a mess. There are three police cars, two with sirens going, and one mammoth fire truck parked at an odd angle against the curb. Firemen are running a giant hose across the lawn, yelling in some unidentifiable code. The air smells like smoke, and Gracie starts coughing as soon as we are out of the car. The lawn is crowded with the tenants of the building who have made it out. A cluster of elderly men and women stare at the fire, looking dazed. Some are wearing bathrobes and slippers. One old woman with curlers in her hair is yelling at a policeman, shaking what looks like a bar of soap.

The fire has consumed the center of the white brick building and is moving slowly outward. We are twenty-five yards away from the building, but I can feel the ovenlike heat against my skin. The fire has a deep hum to it, punctuated by crackles that sound like the breaking of bones.

Gracie hurries ahead. She grabs the arm of a police officer. “Have you seen a man in a wheelchair?” she asks. He shakes his head.

“Do you see Weber?” I ask her.

“Oh God. Look.” She points upward.

At first I don’t see what she is pointing at, and then I do. It is the window to Uncle Ryan’s living room. The window is half open, and three huge yellow birds are sitting on the sill. Their beaks open and close, but we can’t hear their squawks above the fire and the sirens and the people shouting around us.

I take Gracie’s arm, or maybe she takes mine. I’m not sure. We stand still in the middle of the lawn. We keep our eyes on the fat, panicked birds.

“Why don’t they fly away?” I ask. “How can they just sit there? They’re going to be cooked.”

Gracie is gripping my arm so tightly, I have pins and needles in my shoulder. “They don’t want to leave Uncle Ryan,” she says. “They love him. I can’t watch this.”

“They’ll be fine,” I say.

“Stop saying that.” She lets go of my arm and turns away, her attention caught by something else. “Joel!”

I turn, too, and see Joel a few feet behind us. He is wearing his uniform, the huge flame-retardant jacket and hat, but he is the only fireman on the scene who’s not in motion. He is leaning against a parked car. “Have you seen our uncle Ryan?” Gracie asks. “Why are you just standing there? Are you hurt?”

“He’s drunk.” I suddenly want to cry. “Look at him, Gracie. He’s shit-faced.”

“Oh,” Gracie says. She sees it now, too. Joel’s face is red, his eyes bleary. “Oh!” Gracie says again, loudly, as if she is angry. “You should stop this, Joel—it’s ridiculous. Please tell us about Ryan. Do you know anything?”

Joel’s cheeks grow even redder. His pupils swim in bloodshot sockets. He looks as close to falling apart as I feel.

“Oh jeez,” Gracie says.

“You’re so huge,” Joel says. “The baby is in there . . . Jesus.” He shakes his head, which seems to sober him enough to speak semi-coherently. “I saw your dad by the trees.” He points to the side of the lawn that is lined with apple trees.