In Case of Emergency (32 page)

“Who am I?” he says, his face darkening. “Who am I? I’m the one who holds everything together! If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even make time to
see
Dad.” Ryan never gets mad but he’s really shouting now. “I’m the one who’s always making sure everyone is okay, I’m the one who—”

“You and Malcolm broke up.”

I should’ve realized right away. It’s not like him to behave like this, to bellow and criticize, even in a well-intentioned way.

Ryan doesn’t say anything, he just kind of crumples. I catch his sagging shoulders and hug him tight. We stand in the street for a long time, my brother’s body shaking against mine, my arms awkwardly wrapped around him, trying to hold him up.

There was a game Ryan started when we were younger, after Mom left. He would leave me notes with secret missions or assignments scribbled on them. I’d find them folded up inside my shoes, or taped to the back of the cereal box. The notes usually referred to small objects found hidden in my
room. First there was a small glass jar and then later a note taped to my bedroom lamp: “Find something to put inside.” I chose the intact body of a large beetle. The green sheen of its hard shell faded quickly, but I lost the jar before I ever got to see it decompose. A week after finding a cloth purse with gold coins in my closet, I found a note tied to my toothbrush that said, “Figure out which coins are fake.” But my favorite was a foil-covered owl pellet I was instructed to dissect, because inside the mixture of bones and hair and feathers, nestled in with the rodent’s tiny skull, was a flat red button Ryan had taken the time to place, as if to suggest that the mouse had been wearing it when the owl ate him. Nothing says love like a small red button in your owl pellet.

But the fact that Ryan deserves a better sister has never been more obvious than right now. I hold his shaking body even while I resent his presence—I try to comfort him because I know I’m supposed to—and meanwhile I can’t feel my arms at all, or the weight of his body leaning into mine. It’s as if I’m watching the girl who looks like me hug the boy who looks like Ryan.

52

“Can I help you?” the woman with the hairnet asks.

She sounds as exhausted as I feel. I admire her gold front tooth, how there’s just one, how this bull’s eye of a first impression is the only decoration she wears. I scan the objects under the heat lamp, of which there are many. This place serves fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and fish tacos. Somewhere behind that dirty counter there is even ice cream, as advertised on the overburdened sign outside.

I stare at the personal cheese pizza. Its grizzled face and mozzarella cheeks take up a circle no bigger than my palm, flaring out concentrically: the puffy dough rim with its burnt-orange shrapnel of Parmesan.

“How much?”

“Three dollars.”

I don’t cook anymore. I used to bring meals for each shift, fresh fruit and vegetables, or Ayla would pack me leftovers using her complicated Tupperware system that I found so baffling and endearing. For the last three weeks, everything I put into my body is white or orange or an overly processed shade somewhere in between. I will drive all night, all over Los Angeles, and at 2 a.m. decide that I need an Oreo milkshake from Jack-in-the-Box, and at 4 a.m. decide it is a good idea to fall asleep in my car, still holding the cup with its coagulated remains.

“Ain’t got all day,” the woman says. “What’s it going to be?”

Death is a grizzled personal cheese pizza. It’s being revived under an unsentimental heat lamp.

“I’ll take it.”

I drive to Manchester Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue and park in front of the auto repair shop. Sitting cross-legged on the roof of my car, I look out over the intersection.

It is, of course, like nothing ever happened. Four lanes wide open for traffic. The steady rhythm of cars coming and going, going and coming, the swollen pause of a red light followed by the sound of bass-heavy beats streaming by and fading away. The yells and waves to people ambling on the sidewalk, or waiting at the bus stop, and no one is any wiser, least of all me.

Tonight Ayla is coming over. I have the vague feeling I need to make a decision of some kind. Maybe I should even try to tell her what happened. But I don’t know how to do that. I can’t remember the events of that night very well, or the order in which they occurred. Did I look? Did I ever really look at her face, or did I just lose it? I can’t remember.

I scan the tarmac, looking for tire track marks or stains, looking for evidence of any kind. Nothing. And yet this is the only thing that’s real. When I am really honest with myself, I can admit that I haven’t felt the same since that day because it
wasn’t
her, and maybe some sick, twisted part of me was kind of relieved when I thought it
was
, because then I could just stop worrying about what I know is inevitable.

From the newspapers I found out that her name was Debbie Heinemann, thirty-three years old, from Hancock Park. The argument between her and the man seated next to her escalated until the man pulled out a knife and began to stab her. Other passengers panicked and the bus driver pulled over and attempted to investigate, at which point he was also stabbed. The prime suspect is Willie Thomas, the woman’s boyfriend, who is believed to have escaped the scene on foot. The bus driver remains in critical condition at Crossroads Hospital in South Los Angeles.

If I hold the newspaper about a foot away from my face, close my right eye, and squint my left, the grainy black-and-white picture looks exactly like Ayla.

Hopping down and climbing into my car, I take another look at the seemingly benign intersection before driving away. This is where I lost my mind.

53

Ayla comes over. We don’t talk much. It’s as if we’re both worn out by a conversation that has yet to take place. We sit on the couch watching television, sharing a blanket, our bodies almost touching. Eventually we go to bed.

As we climb under the covers she burrows into me, wrapping my arms tightly around her, but once she’s asleep I withdraw, the arm trapped beneath her more difficult to remove, the crook of my elbow a perfect
cradle for the side of her neck. Sitting up and looking at her, I take in the glowing, perfect skin, the way her lips shove against the pillow as if kissing it. For the first time in weeks I see Ayla and not the phantom, and with this clarity comes my first selfless thought in a long time: I don’t deserve it anymore. I don’t deserve to be so close to a person whose skin looks like that; she will be better off without me.

When she comes downstairs in the morning she finds me sitting at the kitchen table, staring out of the small window above the kitchen sink at the thin gray light of dawn. I’ve been here for hours.

Most of Marla’s stuff is already gone. The three-story wooden spice rack, the wide-lipped blue margarita glasses, all the refrigerator magnets. Perhaps the most glaring void is the space over the stove, where the rooster oven mitt had hung like some kind of kitchen mascot.

Ayla sits down across from me. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Not really. It’s okay, though.”

“Is it?” Her voice has gone flat. She looks briefly at me before dropping her gaze. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her face sunken. “It doesn’t feel okay,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on but I think you do.”

I think of the bus driver in critical condition, two puncture wounds in his ribs. Tyson raising his arm, driving the needle in, getting it wrong. Because of me. Because there is never just one consequence.

She leans toward me. “Whatever it is, Piper, you can tell me. Did something happen at work?”

There’s no way to shield myself from the images. “Nothing happened at work.”

An explosion doesn’t just blast an object into the air. Shock waves also travel through the object, causing blunt trauma, imploding trapped pockets of air.

“You haven’t been acting right—at all—you haven’t been sleeping, or eating—”

And then there’s the force of the object hitting the ground afterward.

“Whatever it is you don’t want to talk about, you can tell me.”

All of this happens in seconds.

“Even if—” Her breath catches and then she goes on. “If there’s someone else, you have to tell me. Whatever it is, I need to know.”

It doesn’t ever stop.

“That’s not it,” I tell her.

“Then
what
?” When her voice cracks my eyes lock on her face. Ayla never cries. Not when she told me about the IED, or her buddy’s head exploding when he got shot in front of her, or how none of her friends knew how to talk to her after she came home with a brain injury. But she’s crying now.

“Stop.” I push the chair back using the table’s edge. “Just stop.”

“No. I won’t
stop
. Whatever you’re going through, you have to tell me. I’m not going anywhere until you do.”

Ayla and I could be like that couple on the pamphlet cover, but the queer and fucked-up version—her with her headaches and memory problems, me with my mood swings and visions.
Learn to celebrate life in every moment.
But who would be giving whom a piggyback ride?

I tell her she needs to leave. The words are hard to say but I feel a weight lift off me, just a little, once I’ve said them. “I’m sorry,” I say. “But I can’t—”

“Tell me you don’t love me anymore.”

“What?”

She leans across the table, eyes narrow and lit up. “Piper, I know you love me.”

I’m flooded with a sense of wonder. She doesn’t want to let me go.

I raise both of my fists above my head and bring them down onto the table as hard as I can, with the single-minded conviction that if I strike hard enough, I will cleave the table in two. It doesn’t work. After the cracking sound dies out, the thick wooden surface still stands, barely shaken. Meanwhile my hands reverberate in the air, distress signals blinking
crimson, enough pain shooting through my palms and fingertips to offer each digit its own throbbing pulse. She jumps up and takes a step back, her arms thrown up in a defensive gesture.

“Get.
Out
.” The voice is not my own. “Get the fuck out, Ayla.”

Her arms float down and hang at her sides; her breathing is heavy and even. I can feel her staring at me and I don’t look up. The earthquakes in my fingers travel all the way to my teeth.

She grabs her overnight bag from the bottom of the stairs, hoists it onto her shoulder, and leaves.

54

You’re pretty sure the Egyptians had it right. When deciding what to keep and what to throw away, pull the brain out of the nose with a long hook, separate and preserve the digestive system into canopic jars, and let a son of Horus watch over the removed lungs. But leave the heart right where it is.

Modern science tells you the heart isn’t responsible for feelings or decisions any more than your intuition resides in your gut. It tells you that despite Hindu gurus naming the heart a primary chakra, and the Roman physician Galen calling it the seat of emotions, and the ancient North African city of Cyrene using its shape as the symbol for romance—despite these things, colloquial terms like open-hearted and brokenhearted, wearing your heart on your sleeve and letting your heart guide you, are wrongly named. Falsely inspired.

No, the real wonder of the heart lies in its physiological properties. Each and every cardiac cell a living and microscopic battery, the SA node acting as a conductor for rapid-fire electrical signals, the valves and chambers opening and closing, emptying and filling, and the left ventricle pushing out blood from its trenches with enough force to fight gravity, with enough
power to send that crucial fluid to the farthest reaches of the body and back.

But even so. None of this explains what you know to be true. You house trillions of exquisite living sculptures daily, blooming neurons extending spindly arms, the curve of your ear and the spiral hiding inside it, your lungs like bellowed instruments, swaying in the tides of your breath, the visceral triggers and rhythm-keepers, the molecular messengers and music-makers, and none of these structures can tell you what you most want to know, any more than the grandparents of origin themselves, those mirror-twin circular staircases spiraling up and around each other, could predict not just who you are but all you would become.

Feel the tug of vulnerability—that pure agony of fear and passion—and you will touch your chest in wonder as it swells, glows, expands, consumes. And when people from around the globe and for thousands of years have felt the pain of loss, it is to that hollow, undulating organ beating within the rib cage that they point. “Here,” they say. “Fix it. Fix it, please. This is where it hurts.”

55

“A & O Ambulance, Jonathon speaking.”

“Hi, Jonathon, it’s Piper.”

“Piper Gallagher. How are you?”

“Good, sir. Thank you.”

“Excellent. What can I do for you?”

“I’m ready to come back to work.”

“Hey, that’s great news! We could really use you. Let’s see, I’ve got a double opening at Station 710. On the A shift, with J-Rock and Pep. How about I put you with a rookie from our last training group? That sound all right?”

“Sounds perfect.”

“Excellent, excellent. And Piper?”

“Yes, sir.”