Althea and Oliver (20 page)

Althea tries to parse the ruckus for Oliver's voice, but she can't make it out. Still, her breath quickens at the very thought of his nearness, that she might get to bury her face in his neck and smell that familiar Oliver scent. Fabric softener and honey pomade, and apples, faintly, always. Here, will he still smell the same? Her body aches, not just from the long drive and sleeping in her car, but from the memory of Oliver wrapped around her, or idly holding the loop on her carpenter's pants, Oliver's lips pressed against her throat, Oliver smoothing out all her nerves and tics.

But that is not all she misses. The Oliver-faced imposter who fisted his hands in her snarled hair and yanked—she wonders if she'll ever see him again and is saddened by the thought that she might not. If they fix Oliver here, like he wants, that other Oliver will be gone, the Id will have a lid, and everyone will celebrate the death of the fat mouse; Althea will be the only one to mourn the insatiable boy who had been famished for her.

Edging forward, she pauses with one hand on the curved reception desk. Emboldened, she keeps going, hugging the wall until she can finally peek around the corner and see the cluster of boys in a common room at the end of the hall, sprawled on broken-down couches and institutional chairs, watching football and doing push-ups. She recognizes one of the boys who was skidding around in his socks; he's limping back to his seat. Two other boys are having a hushed conversation on a sticky-looking sofa.

There's still no sign of Oliver. She thought being here would galvanize her, but instead she's unexpectedly, unrelentingly weary. The environment is so alien, enough to make her realize how small their home galaxy of Wilmington is. There, they orbited the same swimming hole, the same coffee shop, the same houses of their three same friends. Here, in this hospital, is one infinitesimal chunk of the rest of the universe—these boys, whose own dramas have led them to the study; the dizzying city baying against the windows; the pink girl from downstairs and her more polished friend. Althea is reeling suddenly from the scope of it all, as if an invisible thread tethering her all the way back to Magnolia Street has suddenly snapped, leaving her adrift and violently conscious of the distance between herself and all that she's known.

The two boys on the couch fall silent. One remains clearly preoccupied, fastening and unfastening the wristband of his watch. The kid next to him reaches over and slaps his back heartily in an awkward, earnest gesture of comfort. Recognizing Oliver's pain on another boy's face makes the desperation in the room suddenly palpable, despite the air of faux indifference—she can recognize it anywhere, feigned apathy, having honed her own brand for years. The thing for which they all came here, this endlessly evasive cure, they all want it so, so badly.

A door down the hallway opens and Althea leaps back, startled, pressing herself closer to the wall. In the lounge a boy in camouflage pajama pants looks up from his magazine, staring at her from underneath the brim of his baseball cap as a blonde nurse emerges from the room, quickly closing the door and sliding a medical chart into the mounted plastic box. Before Althea even sees the name on the binder she knows that it's Oliver's, that he's behind that door.

“Who are you?” the nurse asks sharply. She has long fingers and narrow green eyes, and Althea is speechless with jealousy. “What are you doing back here?”

“I was looking for someone.”

“Who?”

Althea struggles to form the one word she's spoken more than any other. “Oliver,” she whispers.

The anger evaporates from the nurse's face. “You're here to see Oliver?” she says softly.

Biting down hard on her lip, Althea gnaws away chapped, dry skin that stings when she tears it with her teeth, so as her eyes fill she can tell herself that's why she's crying. “I'm too late, aren't I?”

“For now. I'm sorry. It can wait, right? For a little while?” says the nurse. “It's not forever, just a couple of weeks. Whatever it is, it'll keep for that long, won't it?”

Althea wipes her face with the cuffs of her sweatshirt and heads for the door. “Yeah. It'll keep.”

ALTHEA BUYS A FORTY
of King Cobra.

She takes the bottle of malt liquor, neatly tucked inside a paper bag, and walks down to the pier. Staring out at the river, she drinks her King Cobra and smokes. A party boat drives by, blasting dance music over the shrill laughter of its passengers. After it passes, the only sound is water, lapping noisily against the gravel.

Instinct brought her to the water. Unable to complete her mission, but unwilling to turn around and drive home, she left Manhattan for Brooklyn, keeping Oliver close but putting a river between them. She found a place Nicky never mentioned, a tiny crook on the map called Red Hook, a postindustrial maritime neighborhood full of unobtrusive places where she could sleep in her car, where it smelled like the water and she could see the Statue of Liberty from a small gravel beach near the pier.

New York is fucking cold. The sun has long since set. Althea's empty belly piggishly soaks up the contents of the bottle. The pier, the park, the surrounding docks and warehouses are deserted. In Wilmington she's used to trespassing in the dark, stealing around the riverbanks at night or taking an unlit shortcut home on foot. But the woods are never quiet; there are crickets and foxes, skunks, of course, and the perpetual rustling of the creatures that go unseen. Here there's nothing, not a car passing with a gentle swish nor a mistaken songbird trilling invisibly from the highest branches of its tree. Just the rhythm of the water, so hypnotic it might carry Althea off to sleep on her bench, if the wind weren't so damn cold. She feels numb yet oddly sated; for so long Oliver had been her sole preoccupation, and without the prospect of touching him or talking to him, she's rendered inert, wiped clean of all will and desire. Shivering violently in her vest, she fills herself up with booze and waits for King Cobra to tell her what to do; he doesn't seem to have a lot to say.

When she's finally drunk enough for the shivering to subside, she gathers her cigarettes and car keys and stands, swaying a little. She chugs the last three inches of flat malt liquor and drops the empty bottle into a trash can, woozily saluting Lady Liberty before she turns to go. But those last three inches are three inches too many, and suddenly all forty ounces are backing up on her, and she's clutching the mouth of the garbage can on either side, doubled over and retching. Her nose fills with the smell of industrial plastic trash bag and rotten banana and acrid bile as sour liquid spills out of her, unprompted, and her gagging drowns out the sound of the river. When it's finished she stays there, catching her breath; her eyes have filled and her nose is leaking. She spits a few times and stands up, shaking it off, wiping at her face with the cuff of her sweatshirt.
Okay, that wasn't so bad,
she thinks. But then she realizes her hands—previously holding her car keys and Marlboros—are empty, and there's only one place these items could be.

“Motherfucker,” she whispers, and rolls up her sleeves.

It's too dark to actually see into the trash, so she keeps her eyes on the Statue of Liberty while she gingerly delves into the slick refuse and feels around. Her fingers graze the banana peel she smelled, the cold glass of her empty bottle, the soggy pages of a magazine. The smell is ungodly, vomit and vinegar and sour milk, and everything she touches is soaked with her puke. It's the cigarettes she finds first, that unmistakable flip-top box; removing the cellophane wrapper, she tucks the pack safely into her pocket. Holding her breath, she makes another foray, digging deeper until she's up to her shoulder and gagging from the stench, dry-heaving, eyes burning as her fingertips troll the bottom of the plastic bag through the forty ounces of regurgitated malt liquor that's collected there. Out on the river, a lone duck paddles toward the rocky beach.

Finally, almost accidentally, the metal loop of her key ring slips around the tip of her index finger. Securing the keys in her fist, she jerks her arm out of the trash so quickly, she barely notices her forearm catch on something sharp and jagged. It only feels like a pinch at first, then a hot sting, then warm and wet.

Drops of blood form a neat line in a slit up the side of her wrist, slowly at first, then gathering momentum as they run down her arm, sticky and warm. Clamping down on the wound with her other hand, she staggers backward and drops to her knees on the pier. The sting spreads, becoming deeper, searing through the rest of her that is still so cold. She wipes ineffectually at the blood pooling in the crook of her arm, whimpering, face pressed to her knees, the overripe denim rough against her cheek as she smells the iron of her blood, the stale smoke in her hair, and her beery puke.

Rising unsteadily to her feet, she stumbles off the pier and finds her car. Tearing a T-shirt into small strips, she douses one with water from her bottle and dabs at the wound, then uses another as a makeshift bandage. She digs the beach blankets out of the trunk. Hunkered down on the floor of the backseat, holding her arm above her head, swaddled in her quilt and the sandy relics that still smell like Wilmington, she tries to think of this as camping, imagines herself in a tent with her father, listening to one of his ancient mythological stories, trying to remember a single one that had a happy ending.

• • •

That night Althea dreams of dinosaurs. The theme is familiar; for years she's dreamed dozens of variations. Sometimes she's alone in a prehistoric forest watching a herd of triceratops from behind a cluster of iridescent jade ferns, or being chased through the streets of downtown Wilmington by a clumsy T. rex she can easily outrun, or she's crouched on the sawdust-covered floor of a warehouse the size of a football field, hiding, stifling the sneeze that will inevitably give her away to the trio of feathered velociraptors seeking her out. These dreams have never frightened her. She was always at least vaguely aware she was asleep, but at the same time they seemed real enough to be exciting. They were certainly more interesting than Oliver's pre-KLS dreams, thinly veiled anxiety metaphors about history exams or being left behind in the woods after a camping trip. When she pointed that out, he had groaned and asked her if she had to be competitive about even their REM cycles.

Tonight the dream is different. In it, she sleeps in her car underneath her blankets. Her icy hands are clutched between her thighs. Two deinonychus watch her through the window, smoking cigarettes and speaking in low voices. One taps on the glass with a curved onyx talon, chuckling. Gone is the fantastic element of wonder as well as the certainty that she isn't actually in danger. She may be able to take Coby or Oliver easily in a fight, but she'll be no match against two theropods with crested heads and spiny fishbone teeth. She can't hear what they're saying, but she feels them watching her, discussing. Beer bottles clink together. Her car keys are in her vest pocket, digging into her side. Is there any chance she could lunge into the driver's seat, start the ignition, and drive away before they could smash her windshield and devour her? Probably not.
Garth is going to be so pissed,
she thinks.

The clouds are still pink when she wakes, agitated by her first nightmare in years, uncertain what brought it on. Rifling through the glove compartment, she hopes for a rogue granola bar or stale bag of candy, but there's nothing to eat, only a broken pair of sunglasses, Minty Fresh's pamphlets, and a stack of old lottery tickets that have been there since she inherited the car from her grandmother. It's been too long since she showered; the car smells like vomit and garbage, but it's too cold to roll down the windows and air it out. She ties up her greasy hair and wipes at a stain on her pants with a spit-dampened thumb. Her arm still aches.

Last night she parallel-parked on a residential side street, hoping the apartment buildings would serve as a windbreak. It took her twenty minutes to maneuver into the minuscule spot, and she had felt a tiny rush of excitement at doing it without Oliver guiding her in with a series of hand gestures from the sidewalk. She gets out of the car to stretch and cases the block to determine if it's still early enough for her to squat down and relieve herself by her bumper; she decides it is. Hunkering down between the Camry and the adjacent SUV, she makes a noise of satisfaction. Some small pleasures are the same anywhere. Eye-level with her fender, she watches the sidewalk to make sure no one's coming and sees something so chilling that if she weren't in the process of emptying her bladder, she might have lost control of it altogether.

There's a pile of cigarette butts, half a dozen, not two feet from where she's crouched. White-filtered. Not her brand. And two sea-green Rolling Rock bottles lolling on the ground beside them.

She's barely finished but she stands anyway, hastily pulling up her pants and fastening her zipper with shaky hands, piss soaking warmly through the crotch of her jeans. The side-street hush that seemed so peaceful minutes before is malevolent now, a trap she didn't spot soon enough. Flinging herself into the car, whispering
“Go, go, go!”
under her breath, terrified and rib-crackingly lonely, she peels out of the parking spot she'd been so proud to find last night.

One of Minty's pamphlets lists the locations of all the East Coast chapters of Bread and Roses, where they cook and where they serve. She still has some money left, but she doesn't know how long she'll need to make it last. The addresses for the Brooklyn chapter don't mean anything to her; she locates them on her map, tracing her finger from Red Hook along the Belt Parkway and Leif Ericson Drive to the tiny park in Coney Island where this afternoon the Minty Freshes and Valeries of Brooklyn will be giving away free food.

Winding through increasingly narrow and deserted streets, she emerges on Surf Avenue, low and empty, a shabby discount furniture store facing the shuttered arcades and beach shops on the opposite side of the wide thoroughfare. Only Nathan's looks as she had imagined it, the restaurant itself dwarfed under the signs that proclaim it as
THE ORIGINAL, WORLD FAMOUS FRANKFURTER
S SINCE 1916
. Beneath the bombast of the newer billboards, the humbler yellow signs remain, advertising the clam bar and the seafood as well as the hot dogs, referring to Nathan's as a delicatessen.

She parks by Nathan's, home of the annual hot dog eating contest. Every Fourth of July Nicky comes over to watch it on ESPN, reciting the stats of each competitor before game time and then screaming ferociously at the television until it's over, Garth blanching slightly and a mortified Oliver shrinking into his side of the couch. Afterward, they barbecue in the backyard and Althea and Oliver stage their own competition, eating until they're sick, lying in the gazebo to recover while Nicky and Garth drink mint juleps and eat Althea's apple pie directly from the pan. But Oliver slept through this July, so Althea had spent Independence Day with Coby, setting off bottle rockets and drinking Southern Comfort.

The smell of the ocean is wildly comforting, and she follows it to the shore across a splintered boardwalk that rattles under her feet. It isn't like her beach at home. The gray sand is punctuated with broken Corona bottles and cigarette butts, and there's a deserted amusement park to her back, but that's the same ocean rolling in against the shore. Closing her eyes, she lets the salty wind whip her hair around her face and she listens to the seagulls screeching at one another and the waves crashing over and over, an endless feedback loop of God's own soothing white noise. She might fall asleep standing up right here if it weren't time to go collect a free meal.

It's easy to spot the small group in the park, huddled around a folding table draped with a banner that reads
FREE FOOD
. Behind the table are a guy and a girl a few years older than Althea, doling out hot food from large aluminum containers on stands warmed from underneath by little burners that remind her of chemistry class. About half a dozen people wait in line. Dead, frosty grass crunches under Althea's tennis shoes as she crosses the park, hood up, sunglasses on, to join them. It could almost be a backyard barbecue except all the guests are homeless, mostly older men with patchy beards wearing torn cargo pants and coats over jackets over sweatshirts. She tightens her grip on her bag.

It's the food that has her real attention—spinach and mashed potatoes and something that looks like meatloaf but is probably made from lentils, if this chapter is as fervent as Minty Fresh about sticking to its vegan credo. He pestered her and Oliver mercilessly about going vegan, snorting with derision every time they said they wouldn't give up cheese. “If I put cheese on shit, you two would eat it,” Nicky used to complain, but she would have done anything to make her cooking edible. As Althea takes her plate from the petite blonde girl, whose hair spills from under her black knit cap and pools in the hood of her jacket, she averts her eyes—from the girl, from the boy with her, from the cluster of people eating on the benches. Originally she intended to go back to the beach and eat there, but now that she's holding the plate she can see the diced garlic in the spinach and the traces of red skins in the potatoes and it's all she can do to wait until she's sitting on a bench to dig in. Some of the others go back for seconds or even thirds, but she can barely finish the helping she's been given. Satisfied, she lights a cigarette—the best kind of cigarette there is, the kind you smoke after a good meal.

She's barely closed the pack before she's approached by a man with lentils worked into his beard. “Excuse me, miss,” he says. “Do you have another one of those?” She ends up passing around her pack and lighter to everyone in the park.

As the sun begins to dip in the sky, the occupants of the other benches drift away to their unknown destinations. The blonde girl and her partner, a thin boy with glasses and red hair, speak quietly behind the table. They're not what Althea was expecting, but she's not sure what she was expecting—more Minty Freshes, she supposes, severe hairstyles and militant zipper pants. She thought, if anything, the Brooklyn versions would be more extreme.