“I want him to come on a trip.”
“A trip? What kind of trip?”
“It wouldn’t be for too long, a week, or maybe two, at most.” She added, if more to remind herself: “It can’t be longer than that.”
“But for what reason?”
“I’m looking for my son.”
“Your son?” Dora said, with alarm. “What does Hector have to do with him?”
June tried to calculate whether it would be advantageous to tell her. But she was tired and muddled and she said, “Nothing. Nothing.”
“Then why do you need him to go with you?”
“I just do.”
“I don’t think that’s a very good reason.”
“Maybe it’s not,” June said, her weariness now spilling over into irritation, anger. The little shatters of pain were expanding, the small world of her was fracturing, and she wished she had shot herself with the kit in the car, the arms of her thoughts now stretching there, desperate for the clear vials. But then she realized-or was it fantasy?-that she had a vial of morphine and a syringe in her handbag.
“Well, I don’t believe you!” Dora gasped. “I don’t believe you at all. There’s something else. Isn’t there?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You must have something on him. He must owe you. Otherwise I can’t see why he would ever agree. Not the man I know.”
“Maybe you don’t know anything about him,” June said harshly, hearing herself utter it as would the woman she once was, who could easily wield a cold, sharp steel. “Not one true thing.”
“I want you to leave now,” Dora said, rising. “Right now. I mean it.”
But June replied, “I’ll wait here.”
“No, you won’t!”
“I will.”
Dora took her by the arm and though she didn’t grab her very roughly June gasped with the pain, this hot charge clawing and scrabbling beneath her skin, her flesh. She tried to resist, but her strength was a mere child’s to this woman’s and it seemed that if Dora wanted to she could crush her bones with a hard squeeze of her hand. Instead Dora tugged and June pitched forward onto the floor. Dora shouted at her to get up but June could not rise. She was kneeling, and although the floor was carpeted, her kneecaps felt like cracked glass, strums of icy pain conducting instantly up her legs, through her spine, fanning out to every last cell of her, whether good or renegade. Dora was still pulling on her and her arm felt as if it would come off easily, like a leg twisted from a roast chicken, and she cried out so loudly that Dora released her, the woman actually stepping back and covering her mouth. June was groaning, and coughing, and now retching again, spitting up the water she’d just drunk, her tears marking the worn-flat pile of the carpet, wetting her hands, her only thought being that she had better get up on her feet, that if she stayed down she might remain down forever.
“Please help me,” she whispered.
“Oh, God,” Dora said, mortified. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I’ll go. Just help me, please. I’ll go. My car should be back by now.” Dora first tried to lift her from beneath her arms but it hurt too much and she had to crouch and kneel herself in front of June and hoist her almost onto her back to get her up on her feet. June grabbed her handbag. They trudged this way for a few feet, until June got her legs working again, and then Dora tucked her shoulder beneath hers and it was all June could do to keep up as they walked out of the apartment. It had rained, the air moist and heavy. Dora kept asking where her car was but June couldn’t answer. She was the simplest creature now, a beast trotting dumbly forth. Paradoxically, it was the pain that was now holding her up, this most rigid of infrastructures, as if she only existed through its searing lines. But she wanted to recline, if just for a moment, to feel the cool damp grass of the apartment lawn that now wove through her sandaled feet. Or was that elsewhere? Was it the pain, secretly, that she lingered upon?
So let me lie down.
Have the briefest rest.
Here…
Dora barely caught her, struggling to keep her upright. June was on her knees, being held up by the woman’s warm, soft arms. She had to lie down. “My bag,” she murmured to Dora. “I need my bag.”
Dora took it quickly and splayed it out for her and June found the vial and little syringe. Her hands suddenly grew calm. She plucked off the protective cover and drew some liquid from the vial. It was too dark to try to read the lines.
“Should you do this right here?” Dora asked, standing what seemed many miles above her. “Should I help you?”
June didn’t answer. She was on her side in the weedy grass, trying to open the alcohol pad. She fumbled it and Dora retrieved it for her but June couldn’t wait and hitched up her skirt and blindly stuck herself, the tiny bee sting blooming into a wide, clean coolness that reached all the way up to her throat, her mouth, a temperature that she could almost taste.
And then washing back down over her was the flooding warmth, this lush, weightless blanket.
The world shifted, clicked back. Dora asked her if she wanted to get up and she said yes and without any pain-or perhaps there was pain, if unrequited-she was able to stand up. There was no sign of Clines or their car but June didn’t mind, for at the moment she had misplaced her purpose for being here. All she knew was that this woman holding her was Dora, and that Dora was goodly, was basically kind, and that she would very much like to remain in her arms. The streetlamp above them went on and June had to cover her suddenly sensitive eyes from its bright, tinny light by tucking her face in Dora’s neck and hair as the two of them trudged past the sidewalk and stepped off the curb into the street. The three dogs from earlier were scampering about them now, sniffing and baying playfully at their heels, each vying for their attention. Dora shooed them away. Several blocks down the wide, two-way street, headlights appeared in the distance. “Maybe it’s yours,” Dora said, and waved at it, and the car replied with a flash of its lights. It sped up.
“I don’t want to go yet,” June said, but the sounds she made surprised her, by how weak and deformed they were. She was near mute. She felt herself slipping from Dora’s hold and so Dora leaned them up against the trunk of a parked sedan. Dora was turned to the approaching car, so she could not see what June saw, that behind them and across the street, beyond the cast of the streetlamp, a man with two white plastic shopping bags in his hands was strolling in his own penumbra, contented in his posture and step, maybe once and for all. Was it he? June murmured, “Hector,” and Dora simply answered that she would have to leave now. The car was fast approaching and this was the end. She could see the driver behind the wheel, glasses on. But the dogs, like June, had noticed the man, too, perhaps picking up the good scent in his bags, and the three bolted across the road, directly in front of the car. The car swerved and just missed the trailing dog, but then lost control and shot wildly forward on the slick pavement, striking Dora where she stood at the back of the parked car.
Had there even been a sound? A crashing of metal? To June a new opacity reigned, as if she, or else the world, had been dipped once in candle wax. The layer was fast hardening. The car had careened diagonally across the street and bounded straight into a telephone pole. The corner of the parked sedan, just where she and Dora had been standing, was pushed in, smashed. June herself was untouched. But Dora was lying still on the pavement. The man knelt beside her, his back to June, his white bags discarded in the middle of the street. One of Dora’s legs was all bloody, a mangle of flesh, though June couldn’t exactly tell. Dora was crying, very softly. Then she stopped crying and was quiet and then cried a little again and then she no longer made any sounds at all. He tried to resuscitate her. After a moment the man kissed her, on the forehead, and then let go of her hand. The dogs had come back around and were rooting in the bags. The man rose and without acknowledging June’s presence went past the dogs to the ticking car, where it was hitched up onto the curb. She walked into the street. Clines had slumped sideways into the door, the windshield in front of him cracked. His face was bloodied. His hand jittered up by his throat and he was lamely pulling at his own collar, as though he couldn’t quite breathe, and when the man got to him it was with the feral hunch of menace. He was going to clench Clines’s neck and snuff him. But before he could touch him, Clines bucked once on his own and lay back, still. The man stepped away then and faced June, and it was at last in the pale lamplight that she could be sure it was he.