Easy Street, page 18
Jimmy is still uncertain, but he dutifully scrolls through the shows we have recorded. “We’ve got a new Dateline: True Crime.”
“Perfect, nothing calms my spirit like murder.”
I climb onto the bed and get under the covers as Lester Holt begins the narration. “She had a smile that lit up a room.”
“Dead!” Jimmy and I call out in unison, knowing from watching hundreds of these shows that nobody with a smile that lights up a room makes it through the first commercial break.
“Can I ask you a big favor?” he asks.
“Sure.”
“Hug?”
I cuddle up to Jimmy, squeezing myself into his torso, my legs squashed up toward my belly, my head burrowed into his chest.
“Did you ever think you’d get a girl so tall she had to curl up to fit around you?”
This is another of my little jokes: asking Jim if he ever thought he would get a girl with characteristics I possess that would not generally be sought after in a mate. Often this little joke references my height. “Did you ever think you’d get a girl who could comfortably put her arms over your shoulders without shoes on? Did you ever think you’d get a girl who’ll never ask for help getting the peanut butter down from the top shelf?”
“No, I didn’t,” Jim says, kissing the top of my head.
As the light-up-the-room-with-her-smile Dateline ingénue goes missing, I monitor my senses and flow of thought, waiting for the Valium to kick in.
“How’s it going?” Jim asks with a squeeze.
My pulse is still racing, and it’s still hard to take deep breaths, but it’s been only ten minutes since I took the pill.
“Let’s not pay attention,” I say.
“You’re going to be okay,” he says, rubbing my back. His voice is soothing.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yes, okay,” Jim says, bracing for a tough one.
“Ever think you’d get a girl who’d give you such a first-class education in the effects of psychotropic medications?”
Jim does not laugh, but I’ve drawn a smile from his eyes.
“What a jackpot of mental health discovery you’ve landed in!”
We chuckle for a moment. Then, after a silence, I add a simple “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
After the third commercial break, as the once-smiling girl’s body is being dredged from the lake, I still feel no effect from the Valium. No problem, I think. I’ve got until act three of the show. Forty-five minutes is still fifteen minutes away. Everything is going to be fine. Fine, fine, I play a little singsong in my head. Fine, fine; everything is fine. Fine, fine; everything is fine.
As the episode’s initial suspect confesses to the crime, however, I note with alarm that nothing seems to be changing. It’s not working! I think, and a burning sensation blazes from my stomach up to my scalp and back down to my stomach. “I have to throw up,” I tell Jimmy.
Bethanie, my psychiatrist at Grace Point, diagnosed me as bulimic, but she wasn’t right. I was never trying to lose weight. But one thing about the process of heaving the contents of your stomach out of your mouth is that you are guaranteed to feel different afterward than you did before—not necessarily better, but definitely different. If an emotional state is intolerable, throwing up can move you to a different intolerable emotional state. It’s something, at least. A small mercy.
I pull the door to the bathroom closed behind me and cave to the floor, banging my knees on the cold marble and grasping the sides of the frigid porcelain. I want the relief of a big expulsion, but nothing more than red wine mixed with bile comes up. I heave again, but when I’m really anxious, I can barely eat, and there’s just nothing there. And so, no small mercy.
I rinse my mouth at the sink, dry my watering eyes, and walk unsteadily back to the bedroom, wiping my cheek with one hand.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say, my heartbeat accelerating.
Jimmy’s eyes are steady, comforting.
I want to be fine, but, “No,” I say. “I’m not.”
Jimmy takes a step toward me, but I shake my head.
“The Valium isn’t working. It isn’t working. It’s not going to work. Nothing’s going to work.” Sweat gathers on my forearms and shoulders, and I can feel it dripping toward my hands. “I’m burning, Jimmy. I’m burning up.”
“Lie down, Mags. Lie down,” Jimmy tells me with an assurance he can’t possibly feel.
I nod and lay myself down flat on top of the covers, arms tucked to my sides, as stiff as a corpse in a coffin. I look up at the ceiling and wait, but my heart continues banging in my ears so strongly I can feel the beats in my eyes, so I shoot back up and begin pacing in front of the television. “I feel like it’s getting hotter,” I say, stroking my face and then looking at my hands wet with sweat. “I feel like it’s hot. It’s so hot. I feel like it’s getting so hot!”
Jim watches me, covering what I recognize as his own rising panic.
“Do you want to go for a walk?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want, Mags? What can I do? I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything!” I snap. “This isn’t about you!”
Jim freezes.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Turn off the TV? Maybe you could turn off the TV.”
Jimmy springs to the remote and hits a button. There is silence.
“I think—I think—I don’t know. I don’t know.” The house is an oven. “Okay, then. Okay. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s get out of the house.”
“Yes, let’s go,” Jim says, grabbing a coat from the closet and me around the waist.
“I’m burning up. Fuck. I’m burning up, Jim.”
There are always a few genuinely cold days to a Los Angeles winter, and on this moonless January night, I brace against what feels like Chicago wind whipping off the icy lake. As I welcome the frigid air into my lungs, walking past one dark house, then another, and then another, the pounding of my heart softens into something more like a tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
After several more blocks, I lean my weight into Jim’s and ask, “Did you ever think you’d get a girl with such a complicated inner life?
“No,” he says, giving me a kiss on the forehead. “No, I did not.”
10
Road to Nowhere
I don’t have it, Maggie, I don’t have it. I’m in dire straits!”
“Hello, Joanna,” I grumble into the phone, the right side of my face still pressed into the pillow. “You don’t . . . you don’t have what now?” Without lifting my head, my eyes search out the clock: 5:07 p.m. Three weeks have passed since I resumed taking medication, and now apparently I’ve taken another mid-afternoon Valium-and-merlot-induced nap. The Paxil should have kicked in by now, but it hasn’t.
“Six hundred and twenty-five dollars! I don’t have it.”
I spot a small purple drool splotch on the white fabric in front of me. And another, slightly larger, a couple inches over, from the day before. And another. The wine. And maybe that should worry me, but instead, I think that if I can just manage to lift my head and turn the pillow over, the spots will be gone. Problem solved.
I must deal with problems in the order and extent to which I can handle them. I have started back to work in the writers’ room after a hiatus and have been able to function adequately. I can do the tasks that need to be done despite the disruption of my mind, despite my body’s all-day alert to my grave and immediate danger, despite the disconcerting side effects of my medications. I can do it. And no one, for the most part, can tell anything is amiss. I do not appear haunted or tortured or rattled or afflicted.
“What do you need six hundred and twenty-five dollars for?”
“My mother. I need six hundred and twenty-five dollars for my mother, Maggie.”
Oh shit. I sit up. Is Joanna hallucinating? I’ve been scared of this exact thing ever since the Social Security clerk told me about Joanna’s disability qualification.
“Paranoid schizophrenia?”
“Yup,” the clerk had said.
“But I’ve never seen Joanna see or hear things that weren’t there,” I objected, as if the sweet, acne-scarred twenty-year-old before me had anything to do with diagnosing Joanna when she was eighteen, two decades before he was born. And as if I knew anything about schizophrenia.
I had gone back to Social Security to get Joanna’s disability qualification for a group home application form after several more landlords told us, like Nazrini, “It’s just not going to work out.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Jimmy had offered, taking the bright side. “She’ll have someone to be accountable to, someone to make sure she bathes and eats more than Oreos and hot sauce.”
“Maggie!” Joanna’s scream into the phone pulls me back to the moment. “Are you there?”
“Yes,” I say, drawing the receiver back from my shocked eardrum and standing up.
“Oh, I thought you weren’t there anymore.”
“No, no,” I say, “I’m here.”
I examine myself in the full-length mirror across from my bed and take in the slackness around my eyes and the purple stains on my lips. “So,” I cautiously probe, flinching from my reflected image, “you’ve seen your mother, or, um, you’ve been talking to your mother recently, and she needs six hundred and twenty-five dollars?”
“What?”
“Your mother asked you for money?”
“My mother’s dead, Maggie,” Joanna states matter-of-factly.
“Oh, good—I mean not good, I was just—”
“How could you forget a thing like that? How could you forget my mother—?”
“I didn’t forget. I was just making sure that you weren’t having . . . never mind. What do you need the money for?”
“To dispose of it.”
“Dispose of what? What is ‘it’?”
“My mother’s body.”
“Joanna,” I say with complete focus. “What do you mean by dispose of your mother’s body?”
“They sent me the certificate. The death certificate. ‘Sunny Hergert,’ it says, ‘deceased.’ It says I have to claim the remains of Sunny Hergert, deceased, and pay six hundred and twenty-five dollars to ‘dispose’ of them. ‘Remains’ means her body, Maggie. It’s her body, Maggie.”
I had just assumed that Sunny’s body had been taken care of by, well, somebody associated with the state. I haven’t really thought about it beyond this very general idea. She died two months ago. Where has her body been this whole time? You can’t just keep a body lying around, so it must be refrigerated, or is it frozen? Are there freezers of bodies somewhere waiting to be disposed of, tossed out like a couple of poached eggs? I think of all the morgue scenes in Dateline episodes, with that same stainless-steel drawer sliding out a body with a tag on its big toe. I picture Sunny sliding out on that drawer and a tag on a bunioned toe.
But why wouldn’t the coroner’s office contact Joanna before now? Two months seems like a long time for a body to sit on ice.
“It came in the mail?” I ask, walking to the bathroom, picking the sleep crust from the corner of my eyes.
“Yes. In an envelope.”
“When did it come?”
“Today. I just got it today.”
I tick through the facts in my head as I wet a washcloth in the sink and rub it over my dehydrated lips. The state—or is it the county?—having identified Joanna as the deceased next of kin, is asking her to pay for a cremation, or burial, or something. If Joanna claims the body, will she have to see the body?
I’ve always been uncomfortable seeing a dead body, scared I would begin contemplating its former soul, its eternal soul, its perhaps lukewarm soul, perhaps in jeopardy, perhaps condemned to hell. I did not go to my grandmother’s funeral when I was twenty-one, which my mother and father kindly told me they thought wise. It wasn’t worth the risk, they assured their strange, troubled daughter.
I don’t think a coroner would be showing Joanna Sunny’s body, though. They already know it’s Sunny. They’re probably just trying to extract a fee for something they’re going to do anyway. I mean, they can’t just leave unclaimed bodies stacked up in the morgue forever. They’ll have to dispose of Sunny’s remains in any case. Joanna doesn’t know that, I figure, and maybe she imagines $625 will buy Sunny dignified treatment.
“I can pay the money, Joanna. She can get a proper—” I falter, unsteady talking about something so primal and tender and tragic. “A proper . . . burial.”
“Proper?” Joanna interjects, incredulous. “She’s already dead, Maggie! What does she need to be proper for?”
An excellent question, of course, but one I’m surprised to hear Joanna ask.
“Oh, no,” I say. “Of course. Of course it doesn’t need to be proper. I just was trying . . . I just wanted . . . I just didn’t want you to have a picture in your mind of . . .”
“Of what?”
It’s hard for me to say anything directly on this subject, it seems.
“Of your mom, or . . . of your mom’s body being treated—”
“My mother’s not in her body, Maggie. I’m never going to see my mother again,” Joanna says with biting lucidity. “She’s not going to come back. She’s not going to ride a bus anywhere she wants in the whole city.”
“Yes,” I reply, thinking how sturdy Joanna sounds, sturdy enough to attend a grandmother’s funeral at age twenty-one, anyway. “You’re right. So then we can ignore the notice; the state will just take care of it.”
“But they’ll send me to jail. They’ll send me to jail for not claiming the body. This is dire straits, Maggie. I’m in di—”
“They can’t send you to jail, Joanna. Is that what you’re worried about?”
“But I have to pay, Maggie. I have to pay six hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“No, you don’t. I don’t know what that letter is, but it’s not a tax bill or a citation or a summons or anything like that. You can just leave it alone. You can just not respond if that’s what you want to do.”
“They won’t send me to jail?”
“Definitely not.”
“With no hope of parole? They won’t send me go to jail with no hope of parole?”
“No,” I say. “No jail. No need for parole.”
“What a relief!” Joanna says with a profound sigh. “That’s a very big relief, Maggie, a very big relief. I thought for sure I was in dire straits.”
“Nope,” I say, feeling like a divine magician. “You’re doing just fine.”
In the empty moment following her call, I realize I have not been monitoring my anxiety, or my anxiety about anxiety, for the length of the conversation, which I realize has lasted almost an hour, a relief from what feels like my own dire straits.
“The diagnosis is out of date.”
I squeeze the phone against my left ear with my shoulder and empty the last of a bottle of merlot into a glass from the sink.
“We would need a current diagnosis for Ms. Hergert,” the group home worker goes on. “The one on record is from 1983. You’ll need to make an appointment to have her evaluated.”
I hang up, wondering how in the world I am going to get Joanna, who is terrified of all doctors and has refused to see one the entire time I’ve known her, to agree to see a psychiatrist. I decide to address the issue head-on by taking an especially long, slow sip of merlot and making plans to definitely call Joanna first thing in the morning, when my phone buzzes on the counter.
Zzzzzt, Zzzzzt.
JOANNA, the call screen tells me. “Hey, Joanna,” I say into the receiver, “I’m glad you called.”
“Forgery!” Joanna shouts in lieu of hello.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a forgery! Forgery, Maggie! He didn’t sign it!”
“Who didn’t?”
“The doctor.”
I sit at the kitchen table, take another sip of wine, and remind myself to be a good listener.
“What doctor, Joanna? Tell me the whole thing.”
“Dr. Reed. My mother’s doctor. He didn’t sign my mother’s death certificate. Dr. Reed never went to Pure Hearts Home Care. He never went there, so how could he know her cause of death? It says ‘cause of death: cardiac arrest,’ but how could he know about cardiac arrest if he wasn’t there? Dr. Reed never even went to Pure Hearts Care Home. He never went there once.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“Because he didn’t even know she was dead. That’s what I’m saying!”
“He didn’t know she was dead?”
“Dr. Reed, my mother’s doctor, he’s been her doctor for years, he called this morning to say my mother missed her scheduled exam. What does that say, Maggie? What does that say?”
“I don’t—”
“It says he thought she missed her scheduled appointment because he didn’t even know she was dead.”
I lift my forehead from the table, thinking that does sound somewhat suspicious.
“It’s proof! It’s proof my mother was murdered,” Joanna says with the flourish of a triumphant lawyer wrapping up a slam-dunk argument. “It was murder, murder in the first degree!”
“Oh, Joanna,” I say, “I really don’t think it’s likely your mother was murdered.”
“YES, SHE WAS!” Joanna shouts. “You have to call Dr. Reed and tell him.”
“I really don’t feel comfortable accusing—”
“I would do anything to see Reyna go to jail, Maggie, go to jail without parole. Anything.”
And there, right there, I see my opportunity.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “I’ll call Dr. Reed. But I need you to do something for me. I need you to talk to a psychiatrist.”
“But I’ve always had my—”
“You just said you would do anything.”
“But I have my mind, Maggie.”
“Joanna, I’m trying to get you into this nice place that I think you will like, but have to talk to a psychiatrist first.”
“But I have my mind, Maggie. I’ve always had my mind just like my mother.”
