Читать книгу: «Under My Skin», страница 4
4
The Lincoln Town Car waits for me in the motor court. When he spies me, Layla’s towering, refrigerator-sized driver, Carmelo, climbs out quickly and rushes to reach the door before I do, smiles victoriously as he swings it open. He has long blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, faded denim eyes and a jaw like the side of a mountain.
“I got there first, Miss Poppy,” he says.
“This time,” I concede, slipping into the buttery leather interior, and he closes the door.
It’s a thing we have; how I find it ridiculous to wait by the door while he comes around to open it. And he considers door-opening a critical feature of his job, and a terrible dereliction of duty if I open it and get in before he sees me. He’s the rare person who cares about the minute details of his profession. I shouldn’t mess with him. But he’s sweet and funny and we enjoy our little game.
“Home?” he asks.
“Home,” I say, even though I don’t have a home. I have a place where I live, but not a home.
The city rushes past—lights and people, limos, beaters, taxis, bicyclists. I am light, the wine, the pills—I let my head rest against the seat, which seems to embrace me. The hooded man is a distant memory. The car is quiet, except for low jazz coming from the radio; I let my eyes close. Sometimes Carmelo and I chat about his aging mother, his young son, Leo. But he rarely speaks unless I talk to him first, unless he has a question. It’s another standard of his job, to disappear, to be only what you need him to be. When I open my eyes, I catch his in the rearview mirror, watching.
“Long day?” he asks.
“Yes,” I admit. “You?”
“The usual,” he says with a shrug. He takes the kids to school, Mac to work, shuttles Layla through her busy day, waits for Mac in the evenings, takes clients (and friends) around; his day ends when Mac’s does, often not until after midnight or later. Carmelo was always the driver for boys’ night out, when Jack, Alvaro and Mac got together. Shuttling them from bar to bar, maybe to some private card game at Mac’s club, who knows where else.
What could Carmelo tell us about our husbands? Layla mused.
Are you kidding? I’d quip. He’d never tell us anything.
“The city, though, lately. What a mess.”
“Ever think about getting out?”
“Nah,” he says. “Born and raised, you know.”
He pulls to the curb and I just stare for a second, my heart pulsing.
“Carmelo.”
He turns to look at me questioningly, then out at the street. His eyes widen as it dawns.
“Oh, no,” he says, then covers his mouth in a girlish gesture of embarrassment. “Miss Poppy. I’m so sorry.”
He’s taken me to my old apartment building, the one on the Upper West Side where I lived with Jack, not far from Layla’s. A couple I don’t recognize climbs the stairs, laughing, carrying sacks of groceries. She’s petite and wearing jeans, a light black jacket. He’s taller, broad, with an inky mop of hair—young, stylish. It could be us. It was us.
“It’s okay,” I say, biting back a brutal rush of grief, of anger—not at him, at everything.
He pulls away from the curb quickly, cutting off another car and earning the angry bleat of a horn.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says, voice heavy with apology. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say again, trying to keep my voice steady. “Easy mistake.”
I look back at my old street, but then he turns the corner and heads downtown. It’s gone. I want to go back; I want to get as far away as possible. I wish that he would drive and drive and that we’d never reach our destination; that I’d just drift in the space between Layla’s life and what’s left of mine forever.
* * *
Back at my place, I open another bottle of wine, pour myself a glass and look around the space. The pain from the sucker punch of seeing my old block has subsided some. And I experience a brief flicker where I feel distantly inspired to decorate, to settle in, as Dr. Nash keeps encouraging. At least unpack the boxes that are still stacked everywhere.
But that moment of inspiration passes as quickly as it came and I find myself reclining instead on the couch. I turn on the television, close my eyes and listen to the local news—an armed robbery in the Bronx, the Second Avenue subway near completion, a missing child found. The measured, practiced voice of the newscaster soothes; my awareness drifts.
* * *
“Jack?”
The bed beside me is cold, the covers tossed back. The clock on the dresser reads 3:32 a.m. I push myself up, sleep clinging, lulling me back.
“Jack.”
I pad across the hardwood floor. I find him in the living room, laptop open.
“What are you doing?” I ask, sitting beside him on the couch.
He drops an arm around me, pulls me in. I love the smell of him, the mingle of soap and—what? Just him, just his skin. No cologne. He’d wear the same three shirts and pairs of jeans all week if I didn’t buy his clothes. He doesn’t always shave, wears his hear longish, a sandy-blond tangle of curls. Has a pair of black-framed glasses instead of bothering with contact lenses.
“Just catching up on email.”
His email is open, but so is the web browser, the window hidden.
“What is it?” I tease. “Porn?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m out here watching porn while my beautiful wife sleeps in the next room.”
I nudge in closer, wrap my arms around him.
“Porn’s easier, though, right?” I offer reasonably. “Isn’t that what they say? Porn’s never tired, doesn’t say no. You don’t have to satisfy porn.”
“Stop,” he says. I reach for the computer and open the web browser before he can stop me. The face of a beautiful dark-eyed woman stares back at me. But it isn’t porn; just a news article he’s been reading. A photojournalist was beaten to death in her East Village apartment, a suspected robbery gone wrong, all her equipment stolen.
“Who is she?” I ask.
He shakes his head, a beat passing before he answers. “Just someone I used to know.”
I scan the article. “She was murdered?”
He stays silent.
I feel a rush of urgency. “Jack, tell me who this is and why you’re reading about it in the middle of the night.”
He doesn’t answer, just stares straight ahead.
“Jack,” I say again. “Who is she?”
* * *
I wake up with a jolt on the stiff fabric of my couch, disoriented, reaching for him. The dream lingers, clings to my cells. Who is she? My own voice sounds back to me. I’m tangled in that strange weaving of the real, the remembered and the imagined. Jack’s scent, the feel of his arm, stays even as the shapes and shadows of the apartment he’s never seen assert themselves into my consciousness.
I reach for the dream—the woman’s face on the screen, the news article. Someone I used to know. But it’s jumbled, makes no sense. A dream? A memory? Some weird hybrid?
The couch beneath me is hard, not soft and saggy like the one in our old place. This one I bought online because I thought it looked sleek and stylish; when it arrived, it was as stiff and gray as a concrete slab. I didn’t have the energy to return it.
The television is on, the sound down so low it’s barely audible. Radar images of tomorrow’s weather swirl red and orange, a storm brewing, unseasonable heat.
Slowly, Jack, the dream begin to fade. I reach for him, but he’s sand through my fingers.
This is not new. Since his death, I vividly, urgently dream of my husband—embraces, lovemaking, his return from this place or that, maybe the store, or a business trip. The joy of his homecoming lifts my heart. These moments—though they are twisted and strange, places altered, patchworks of things that happened and didn’t—are so desperately real that I often awake thinking that my real life, the one in which Jack has been taken from me, is the nightmare.
And then, when I wake, there’s the hard, cold slap of reality: he’s gone. And that loss sinks in anew. Every single time. How I dread that crush when he’s taken from me again, when the heaviness of grief and loss settles on me once more, fresh and raw, its terrible weight pushing all the air from my chest.
I wipe away tears I didn’t even know I was crying. And I reach for the remote and let our stored pictures come up on the screen. Photos from our travels scroll—a canopy walk in Costa Rica, lava tubing in Iceland, a selfie that we took while kissing on the Cliffs of Moher. The images transfix, the girl I was, the man he was. Both of us gone. Many nights after work, this is what I do. Lie here and watch our hundreds of photos scroll silent across the screen.
It’s going to get better, Dr. Nash has told me. With time, the weight of this will lessen.
It isn’t, I want to say but don’t. How can it?
Outside my towering windows, the city glimmers.
I pull myself up, dig the new lower dosage prescription out of my bag, pour a big glass of water. Just about to drink the medication down, I pause. It sits in the palm of my hand, blue and seductive.
What if I just stopped taking them? What would happen? I should do some research. Jack wouldn’t approve of the amount of medication I’ve been taking, I know that. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol for a headache.
Or...
I remember the higher dosage Layla handed me; I grab them from the pocket of my coat, hearing her voice, always so certain: take what you need to sleep. I think about the other pills I took today. How many? What were they? How much wine did I drink?
To be truthful here, there’s not much of an internal battle. I need the utter blankness of dreamless sleep, the dream life Dr. Nash so values be damned. I need a break from grief, from my thoughts—from myself. I shake out one of the higher dosage pills. Then another. I drink them down. Just for tonight.
With images twirling around my sleepy brain, I enter the bedroom. On the bedside, the black dream journal rests by my bed. I haven’t written in it in a while, but Dr. Nash’s advice from today is still fresh in my mind. We can learn a lot about ourselves there. I flip it open, and scrawl down what I remember, but it’s faded to nearly nothing. I scribble: a dark-eyed girl on the screen. Who is she?
The pen feels so heavy in my hand.
There is no furniture in the bedroom except a low white platform bed, covered by the cloud of a down comforter, big soft pillows. I close my eyes, let the journal and pen drop to my side—pushing away thoughts of Jack, and the stranger shadowing my life, Layla, Dr. Nash. I wait for that blissful chemical slumber.
5
The surface beneath me is cold and hard, my head a siren of pain. Nausea claws at my stomach and the back of my throat. My shoulder aches, twisted under me. A sharply unpleasant odor invades. I don’t want to open my eyes; I squeeze them shut instead.
Where am I? I should know this.
I open them just a sliver, peering through the fog of my lashes. Silver and white, a filthy tile floor, feet walking by, high heels, sneakers, flats. Scuffling, voices. Music throbbing outside, someone laughing too loud—drunk or high.
You must be kidding me! a voice shrieks.
I push myself up. I’m in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl. That odor—it’s urine. I’m on the floor in a bathroom, in a nightclub by the sound of it. My heart starts to race, my breath ragged. I look down at myself. I am wearing a dress I don’t recognize; tight and red, strappy high heels.
Okay, okay, okay, I tell myself. Just think. Just think. What’s the last thing you remember?
Jack’s funeral beneath a cruelly pretty sky, leaning heavily on Mac, his strong arm around my waist practically the only thing holding me up. Layla holding my other hand. Mac’s whisper in my ear: It’s okay, Poppy. We’re going to get through this. All of us together. Hold on. Be strong. He’d want that. Our old apartment filled with friends, damp eyes, whispering voices; Jack’s mother, her face ashen with a tray of sandwiches wobbling in her hand; Layla taking it from her, laying it down on the table. My mother chatting with Alvaro, flirting as if this wasn’t her son-in-law’s funeral. I can hear her throaty laugh, inappropriate enough to draw eyes. Me wishing for the millionth time that my father was still alive. Daddy, please. I need you. How silly. A grown woman still calling for her father. Those are the last things I can remember. Where am I now? How did I get here?
I pull myself unsteadily to standing, the walls spinning. Someone pounds on the stall door.
“One minute,” I say, voice croaky and strange. I don’t even sound like myself.
Whoever it is finds another stall, slams the door. The door outside swings open, voices and music pour in, filling the whole room. Then it goes quiet again.
There’s a bag lying beside me, a glittery black evening purse. Even though I don’t recognize it, I grab for it and open it. My cell phone, dead. Five hundred dollars in cash. A thick compact, which I pry open with shaking hands.
The woman in the mirror is a mess, long black hair wild, mascara running down her face in sad clown tears, pale, blue eyes wide with fright. I sit on the seat and use some toilet paper and my own spit to clean my face. I do a passable job, running my fingers through my hair, using the makeup in my bag to fix myself up. In the small shaking mirror, I’m almost normal again. Except for the fact that I have no idea where I am, or how I got here.
Okay. Deal with that later. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I just need to get myself home. I can figure everything out once I’m safe. I’ll call Layla then. We’ll figure it out. She’ll know what to do.
I wobble through the stall door, tilting in heels too high. Two women—one black, one white—applying makeup at the mirror glance at me, then at each other. They both start to laugh.
“You okay, honey?” one of them asks, not really caring. She smears a garish red to her lips.
“You need to Uber your ass home, girl,” says the other, frowning in disapproval. Her hair is dyed platinum blond, her lips dazzling berry. I feel a lash of anger, but a wash of shame keeps me from answering back.
Their laughter follows me out the door, until it’s drowned out by the heavy techno beat. Bodies throb on the dance floor as I push my way through the crowd, wondering where the exit is. Instead, I find myself at the bar, taking a seat. I’ll rest here a minute, my legs so unsteady, head spinning.
The bartender comes over and leans in to me. She brings me a glass of ice water. Embossed in ornate script on the glass, a word in red: Morpheus.
“Your boyfriend’s been waiting for you all this time,” she says as I take a long swallow. “If you thought you lost him, you didn’t.”
I glance in the direction that her eyes drift—they are violet, eerie and strange. Color contacts. On her arms, tattoos—a dragon, a tower, a woman dancing. I stare, fixated by the lines and colors. I can’t focus on anything for very long.
“He sees you.”
Who is he? Long sandy hair, pulled back, a thick jaw and strange eyes that seem to defy colors—amber, green or steely blue. He gets up and comes over, leans in behind me.
“I thought you left.” His voice in my ear sends a shiver down my spine.
He spins me around, tugs me into him. The heat between us; it’s electric. He snakes one arm around my back, the other around my neck and leans in, as if we are not in a crowded club, but alone. His draw is magnetic, irresistible. And then we are alone, the world dropping away, music fading, as he kisses me long and deep. I am on fire with desire, a deep ache inside me. It’s embarrassing how badly I want him.
Jack. Jack.
But it’s not Jack.
“Who is Jack?” he wants to know. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be Jack, whoever he is. I’ll be anyone you want me to be.”
Then, as if by magic, we are in his car—or at least he’s driving. I have no idea whose car it is. But it’s a nice one, leather, glowing blue lights, soft music playing on Bose speakers. Everything smells clean, new. The city skyline is in the rearview mirror, streamers of white and red lights around us.
“Where are we going?” I ask, barely even recognizing my own voice.
“Don’t you remember?” he asks gently.
“No,” I say with a rising panic. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.”
He looks at me with a strange smile and just keeps driving.
6
I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.
The words burrow into my sleep, taking on urgency, growing louder, until the sound of my own frightened shout wakes me.
I bolt upright, breath labored, T-shirt soaked through with sweat. I’m in my own bed, the covers tossed to the floor. A weak Tuesday morning sun bleeds in through the blinds, shining on my clothes from last night in a messy tumble on the floor.
The details of the dream are already slippery. What kind of car? What club? It’s important to remember; I must dig into that place.
Coffee brews in the timed pot that’s set for six, its aroma wafting through the apartment. The city is awake with horns and distant sirens and the hum of traffic. Slowly, breath easing, these mundane details of wakefulness start to wipe away my urgency. The dream, the panic to remember, recede, slinking away with each passing second like a serpent into the tall grass of my wakefulness.
Sleep is the place where your mind organizes, where your subconscious resolves and expresses itself. In times of great stress, dreams can become like a whole other life, Dr. Nash said. A terrifying, disjointed life that I can’t understand.
I reach for my dream journal and start writing, trying to capture what I remember:
Morpheus, a nightclub?
Black-and-white-tile floors, kissing a faceless man?
He takes me somewhere in his car, a BMW maybe. Afraid. But relieved, too? Who was he? Where was he taking me? Why did I go with him?
Red dress?
Powerful desire. Jack. I thought he was Jack, but he wasn’t.
The impressions are disjointed, nonsense really in daylight. As I scribble, the sunlight brightens and begins to fill the room through the tall windows. Too bright. I must be late for work.
Finished writing, I flip back through to the earlier pages, looking to see if there’s any other dream like this one. Reading what I wrote late last night, before I took the pills, it’s the scrawl of a crazy person, loopy, jagged:
Jack, computer, looking at porn? Who is she?
Another sentence that I don’t even remember writing: Was he hiding something from me?
I stare at the black ink bleeding into the eggshell page. There’s a little stutter of fear, as if I discovered a stranger had been writing in my dream journal. But no, the handwriting is unmistakably mine.
I start flipping back through earlier entries. One page is filled with a twisting black spiral. It begins at a single point in the middle of the paper, spins wider and wider until it fills the whole sheet. It’s inked in manically, scribbled at so hard that it leaks through to the page beneath. There’s a tiny black figure that seems to be falling and falling deep into the abyss.
No one tells you about the rage, I’d written. I could fall into my anger and disappear forever. How could he do this to me? How could he leave me like this? Who did this to him? To us? Why can’t they find my husband’s killer?
Again, that feeling—a stranger writing in my dream journal.
But no.
That rage, what a sucking black hole it is, devouring the universe. I remember that there was a terrible, brilliantly real dream about finding the man who took Jack from me. I chased him through the streets, finally gaining on him and taking him down in a lunge. I beat him endlessly, violently, with all my strength. It was so vivid I felt his bones crush beneath my knuckles, tasted his splattering blood on my mouth. It went on and on, my satisfaction only deepening. I confessed this tearfully to Dr. Nash.
Anger, in doses, can be healthy, Poppy, she said. It’s healthy to direct your rage toward your husband’s murderer, to not hold it in. Rage suppressed becomes despair, depression.
How can it be healthy to dream of killing someone, to imagine it so clearly? To—enjoy it?
There’s darkness in all of us, she said serenely. It’s part of life.
I shut the dream journal hard; I don’t want to go back to that place. That rage inside me; it’s frightening. I don’t want to know who I dreamed about last night, where I was. Maybe it’s better to let these things fade. After all, if you’re supposed to remember your dreams, if they mean something—why do they race away? Why do they never make any real sense?
The hot shower washes what’s left of it all away. I can barely cling to even one detail. But there’s a song moving through my head, something twangy and hypnotic.
I’ve seen that face before.
* * *
Images resurface unbidden as I head to the office—I flash on the man at the bar, the blue lights of the car interior. It’s an annoying, unsettling intrusion, these dreams so vivid, so disturbing. And I’m not rested at all; I’m as jumpy and nauseated as if I’d pulled an all-nighter.
I ask myself a question I might be asking too often: How many pills did I take last night? And: How much wine did I have?
Not enough, apparently. Not enough to achieve blankness.
Nervously aware of my surroundings, I scan my environment for the hooded man. Though the day is bright, I see shadows all around me, keep glancing around like a paranoiac. There’s a group of construction workers, all denim-clad, with hoodies pulled over their hard hats. One of them stares, makes a vulgar kissing noise with his mouth. I stride past him, don’t look back.
Finally, in the office, at my desk, I feel the wash of relief. It’s early still, at least an hour before anyone else comes in. I pick up the phone.
“Hey, there,” answers Layla. “You didn’t call me back last night.”
Her voice. It’s a lifeline. She’s so solid. So real.
“Did you call?” I ask, confused.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just wanted to check on you. I didn’t like how you looked when you left.”
Scrolling through the messages on my phone, I see her call and a text, left after eleven.
“Oh—sorry.” How did I miss that?
“Seriously. What’s going on?”
Layla is the first one to start worrying about me. She was the first to think that maybe something wasn’t right a day or two before my “nervous breakdown” or “psychotic break” or whatever we’re calling it these days. Dr. Nash just refers to it as my “break.” Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It’s like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event. And Layla was the one to bring me home.
I tell her about the dream, anyway the snippets I can almost remember.
She’s quiet for a moment too long. I think I’ve lost her.
“Layla?”
“Poppy,” she says. “Maybe you should call Detective Grayson.”
I’m surprised that she would bring up the detective who has been in charge of Jack’s murder investigation. A murder investigation that has petered to almost nothing. It’s been almost a year since Jack was killed and every lead has gone cold. There are no suspects. No new information. But Grayson is still on the job, checking in regularly, always returning my calls to query about progress. I used to crave justice for Jack, for everything we lost. It used to gnaw at me, keep me up nights. But, with Dr. Nash’s help, I’ve let that idea go somewhat. What justice is there for this? No matter what price paid, the clock will not turn back. So this question sits like an undigested stone in my gut. Who killed Jack?
“Why? What does Grayson have to do with this?”
Another moment where she draws in and releases a sharp breath. I can hear the street noise so she’s probably leaning out the bathroom window with her cigarette so that the kids don’t smell it when they get home from school. She’s supposed to have quit; obviously, the nicotine gum isn’t cutting it. I’m not going to hassle her about it. Who am I to get on her case, pill popper that I’ve become?
“I was just thinking,” she says finally, carefully. “The days you can’t remember. Maybe what you dreamed last night. I mean, maybe that wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was a memory.”
Her words strike an odd chord, cause an unpleasant tingle on my skin. “Why would you say that?”
“Honey,” she says. A sharp exhale. “When I found you, you were wearing a red dress.”
Ben comes in singing. He has his headphones on, clearly doesn’t see me. He’s belting out Katy Perry, singing about how this is the part of him you’ll never ever take away from him. He reaches into my office to flip on the lights I’ve neglected to turn on and his eyes fall on me. He blushes and gives me a wide smile, takes a bow. I’d laugh if my body didn’t feel like one big nerve ending, sizzling with tension.
“Maybe—you’re remembering things,” says Layla when I stay silent.
“Dr. Nash said I probably wouldn’t, that likely those days are gone forever.”
It was two days after the funeral that I disappeared. Four days after that I woke up in a hospital, remembering nothing. Even the days before Jack’s murder and through the funeral are foggy and disjointed. Part of me thinks that it might be a blessing to forget the worst days of your life; I’m not sure I want them back. Dr. Nash has suggested as much, that my memories haven’t come back because I don’t want them.
I remember the day he was killed in ugly, jagged fragments, sitting in the police station, reeling at Detective Grayson’s million, gently asked questions. Was he having trouble at work? Did he have any enemies? Were there money troubles? Affairs? Were either of you unfaithful? Hours and hours of questions that I struggled to answer, grief-stricken and stunned, trapped in a tilting unreality. There were these long stretchy moments where I pleaded with the Universe to just let me wake up. This had to be a nightmare. Grayson’s grim face, the gray walls, the flickering fluorescent lights, all the stuff of horror movies and crime shows. This wasn’t my life. It couldn’t be. Where was Jack? Why couldn’t he make it all go away?
Finally, my mother showed up with our family attorney and they took me home. I remember stumbling into my apartment—our apartment, falling into the bed we shared. I could still smell him on the sheets. I remember wailing with grief, facedown in my mattress.
Take this, honey. My mom forced me to sitting, handed me one of her Valium tablets and a glass of water. I didn’t even hesitate before drinking it down. After a while, the blissful black curtain of sleep fell.
For a while, I know Detective Grayson suspected me. After all, I would inherit everything—the life insurance payout, the business, all our assets—when Jack died. But I think at some point he realized that for me it was all ash without my husband. Then he became my ally. If you remember anything, no matter how small, call me.
The case, it bothered him. Always. Still. Stranger crime is an anomaly. A beating death of a jogger—it grabbed headlines. The city parks are Manhattan’s backyard; people wanted answers and so did he. Jack was a big, strong guy, fast and street-smart. He’d traveled the world as a photojournalist, dived the Great Barrier Reef to find great whites, trekked the Inca Trail, embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan, attempted to summit Everest. It never, ever felt right that he’d die, a random victim, during his morning run. He had a phone and five dollars on him. A year later, his case is still unsolved.
“But maybe Dr. Nash is wrong?” suggests Layla. “Maybe it means something.”
Now it’s my turn to go silent.
“Let’s do it tonight,” Layla continues. “Work out, eat, talk it all through. In the meantime, call Dr. Nash and Detective Grayson.”
Layla, queen of plans, of to-do lists, of “pro” and “con” columns, of ideas to turn wrong things right. She corrals chaos into order, and heaven help the person who tries to stop her.
“Okay.” I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “That’s a plan.”
I flash on that moment at the bar, that man, again. Who was he? Someone real? Someone I know?
“You’re okay, right?” asks Layla. “You’re like—solid?”
“Yeah,” I lie (again). “I’m okay.”
* * *
Detective Grayson agrees to meet me in Washington Square Park for lunch. So around noon I head out. The coolish autumn morning has burned off into a balmy afternoon as I grab a cab to avoid even worrying about the hooded man.
The normalcy of the morning—emails and the ringing phone, conversations about understandable things like contracts and wire transfers—has washed over the chaos of yesterday and last night, my dreams where they belong, the grainy, disjointed images faded into the forgotten fog of sleep. I don’t have the urge to look over my shoulder every moment as I make my way under the triumphal Washington Square Arch and into the park. My chest loosens and breath comes easier. Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope. My new mantra: I’m okay. I’m okay.
Grayson sits on a shady bench near a hot dog vendor, by the old men playing chess. He already has a foot-long drowning in relish, onions, mustard, ketchup and who knows what else. It seems to defy gravity as he lifts it to his mouth. A can of Pepsi sits unapologetically beside him. No one else I know would even dream of drinking a soda, in public no less. It’s one of the things I like about him, his eating habits. It reminds me of Jack. Jack and I would be walking home from a client dinner that had consisted of tiny salads and ahi poke with some slim, fit photographer who turned in early so he could make a 6:00 a.m. yoga class, and Jack would make us stop at Two Guys Pizza, where he’d scarf down two slices.
