“Second, a prescription for antibiotics shouldn’t raise a red flag for the pharmacist. Antibiotics aren’t commonly sought in prescription fraud.”
“You’re saying there’s a chance that, if I go fill this, I could get busted?”
“A very small chance. Usually people who try to fake prescriptions get caught because they don’t know how to write scrips. Doctors and pharmacists communicate with each other in a language all their own. It’s not easy to fake. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with the way this one is written, except that the license number I wrote is completely invalid,” he said. “If they do bust you, they’ll probably go in the back, call the police, and then stall you until the cops arrive.”
What a sordid little story it would make: Hennepin County detective caught scamming prescription drugs.
“So if it takes more than ten minutes for them to find your prescription, if they say they can’t track it down, just leave,” Cicero told me. “But this is the second condition: if you do get caught, this doesn’t come back on me.” He held out the prescription, but just a little, bargaining. “I have enough problems. I do not need to get arrested. If you give me your word you won’t give me up, that’s good enough for me.”
“I give you my word,” I said.
He gave me the slip of paper.
“Why, though?” I asked him. “Why do you trust me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just do.”
A silence settled between us. The candlelight flickering on the family photos made the table look like an altar to the spirits of Cicero ’s ancestors, although at least one of the prints was recent: it was Cicero at what must have been his med-school graduation. His smile looked genuine, not the tense rictus some people produce when faced with a camera and a demand to smile. He was easily half a head taller than the people surrounding him.
Half a head taller. He was standing. He was able-bodied.
“How tall were you?” I asked without thinking.
“Were?” he repeated.
Heat immediately rose to my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant-”
“Six feet,” Cicero said. “The tallest man in my family, ever.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“It’s all right,” he said.
My embarrassment began to recede slightly, but still I looked down at my bare feet. “I should go.”
“Sarah,” he said, “are you afraid to touch me?”
It was true, we were sitting close together, and I had been careful not to let our limbs touch.
“Of course not,” I said. “You examined me, for God’s sake.”
“That was me touching you,” he said. “That’s not the same thing. Does it disturb you that I’m paralyzed?”
“I’m married,” I said.
“I see,” Cicero said quietly. “You wear no wedding ring and are free to stay out until two in the morning, but when I make an overture to you, suddenly you’re married.”
“My husband is in prison,” I said.
He didn’t believe me; I could see that.
“He got sent up for auto theft,” I said. “He’s in prison in Wisconsin.”
Cicero ’s expression didn’t change, but at last he said, “Then I suppose you should go.”
“It’s not because you’re paralyzed,” I said. I don’t know why it was important to me to establish that. I leaned forward and laid a hand on his thigh. It was stupid, a chickenshit half measure.
“I can’t feel that, Sarah,” Cicero said. “You don’t have to do anything to prove to me that you’re open-minded. But if you’re going to touch me, do it somewhere I can feel it.” He reached over and took my hand. “Let me show you something,” he said.
With his other hand, he pulled up his shirt. “A lot of people think a paraplegic’s body has one sharp line between sensation and no sensation, like the line that divides light and dark on the moon,” he said. “But it’s more like the way twilight falls on the earth.”
He placed my hand high on his rib cage. “Here, I can feel everything.” He slid his hand and mine, underneath it, a little lower. “Down here, only temperature, but not pressure. Down here,” a little lower still, “full dark.”
Keeping eye contact, I laid my left hand on the other side of his rib cage, and Cicero put his hands on my hips, pulling me toward him. There was nowhere to go but onto the wheelchair, and cautiously I put my knees on each side of his thighs, on the edges of the seat, so I was kneeling in front of him.
He had no insecurity about having to tip his face upward to kiss a woman, and when he did it, he went deep almost immediately, probing with his tongue. It shocked me; that kind of deep, invasive kiss from a virtual stranger was disturbing and exciting and I felt something roll over deep in my stomach, like nerves, except warmer.
Our dim reflection in the mirrored closet doors showed man, woman, and chair; a sexual tableau I’d never expected to be a part of. Men had taken me into their homes before, and into their beds. But in climbing onto Cicero ’s wheelchair, I was being taken into the very center of his life, almost his body. It made me wonder if Cicero Ruiz had a special insight into how it felt to be penetrated.
The third time I woke up, the flames of the candles were almost completely recessed in deep pits of wax. It no longer mattered; the sky was lightening to predawn blue beyond the window, just starting to illuminate the bedroom. Cicero slept so close to me that I could feel the warmth of his skin. It was reassuring until I saw Shiloh’s old shirt hanging off the back of Cicero ’s wheelchair, and I felt something cold in my stomach, like I was looking at a map and nothing was familiar.
I slipped out of bed and put my clothes on as quietly as possible, picked up the prescription, and turned the knob of the bedroom door in that time-honored, half-speed way people do when they are sneaking into, or out of, bedrooms.
Cicero didn’t even open his eyes when he spoke, and his voice was rusty with sleep.
“It’s just a little sympathy between humans, Sarah,” he said. “Don’t let it ruin your week.”
9
After eight uninterrupted hours of sleep at home, I woke up in my warm, stifling bedroom wanting several things all at once: ice water; a hot, hot shower; and some kind of food I couldn’t quite identify. I satisfied the first two needs first, lingering in the shower. It was amazing how much better my ear felt already. It wasn’t even sore. It just had that pleasant, empty heaviness that sometimes replaces pain, the way your head feels after a particularly nasty headache rolls out, letting you free of its grip at last.
Dressed in a pair of cutoffs and a tank shirt against the hot weather, I went into the kitchen and looked over the lightly stocked refrigerator and cupboards. Nothing appealed to me. Whatever this odd craving was, it wasn’t the usual impulse-eating suspects: caffeine, sugar, salt, or red meat. I went out the back entryway, into the yard.
Last night’s storm had left the skies clean, with just a few white clouds left over in the west. The sun was high in the sky, but the overhanging elms filtered out all but a few of its rays. My neighbor’s underfed Siamese cat prowled through the overgrown grass of our narrow, untended backyard, stopped, assessed me as no threat, and went on. I, also, went on, to the basement door and down into the cobwebbed dimness.
Down here was what Shiloh called the “Armageddon food,” canned things only to be eaten in case of natural disaster, riot, martial law, or nuclear attack. I’d always thought the kind of food that kept well in emergencies- ready-to-eat, low-sodium soups and powdered milk and fruit in syrup- was too depressing to be eaten as the world fell apart. “We need liquor down here,” I’d said. “A few bottles of whiskey and some jars of chocolate sauce.”
Shiloh, sitting on his heels in the dimness, surveying the shelves, had dryly agreed. Oh, sure, he’d said. Maybe we should put a bed down here, too. As the world goes up in flames outside, we can give ourselves over to every kind of perversion. And then he’d given me that look, the one that reminded me that few people have as deep a pleasure in wickedness as the once devout, like Shiloh, a preacher’s son.