Run You Down (2 page)

“You should come to El Cinco tonight,” said Chris. “It’s two-for-one margaritas.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what a margarita was.

“Bring your boyfriend,” he said, standing up, grinning. Grinning the whole time. “Or maybe don’t.”

I told your father I met someone near the tennis courts who said there was a good time at El Cinco tonight.

“See? You’re already making friends,” he said. “I knew people would love you as soon as they got to know you.”

He told some of his friends to meet us at the restaurant, and we all sat around a table with margaritas coming and going and chips and salsa for free. The music was loud and everyone had to scream over it. People were dancing by the bar and after two margaritas—they tasted like Slurpees from the 7-Eleven—I got up and said I wanted to dance. Your father held my waist as we walked through the crowd. We danced and I drank another margarita. I waved my arms in the air and felt my shirt lift up, exposing the skin of my belly. I twisted my hips and kissed your father, right there in front of everyone. He pulled me close and whispered in my ear that he loved me. I love you,
Aviva, he said. I love you, too, I said.

I had to go to the bathroom, but there was a line. I stood for a minute and as soon as I stopped moving, I knew I’d had too much to drink. I closed my eyes and felt sick to my stomach, so I slid down the wall and sat on the floor. The girls around me didn’t say a word. I put my head between my legs. Everything was spinning and lopsided. And then a hand grabbed mine.

“Aviva!” It was Chris. He pulled me up. “Uh-oh, too many margaritas! Where’s your boyfriend? Come on, come here, you just need some water.” He pulled me into the men’s bathroom, which had no line. I went straight to the toilet, and up came the lime-flavored drinks and salsa chunks. I threw up twice. Chris held my hair. When I was done he gave me a wet paper towel to wipe my mouth.

“Feel better?” he asked. I nodded, but I didn’t really feel better. Where was Brian? Chris reached for my hands and pulled me up and close to him, locking an arm around my waist. He kissed my neck, and in one motion slid the strap of my bra and tank top down my shoulder, letting my left breast fall out. He grabbed it and squeezed my nipple. I tried to squirm out of his arm but he held me tight.

“No,” I said.

“No?” he said, grinning, his cold hand kneading my breast like dough, pulling at it. He pushed me against the wall and put his mouth on mine, shoving his tongue between my lips. I twisted my head sideways and he moved his lips to my neck. “What’s the matter?” he said. And then he grabbed my hair and turned me around so my face was pressed against the greasy tile wall. I teetered on my high-heeled shoes and he righted me. He pressed one hand against the back of my head, and with the other he pulled my waist toward him and put his hand under my skirt, his clumsy fingers pushed aside my underwear, which, like everything else I was wearing that night, was new, still a kind of costume. Six months before I wore underwear my mother bought me. Big, thick “full-coverage” cotton underwear with tight elastic hugging the tops of my thighs and a waist at my belly button. I thought: If I was wearing my old underwear it would be harder for him to get in. I thought: I’ve brought this on myself. He shoved his hand up. I felt his fingernails scratch me and that’s when I thought of you. It was the moment I admitted you were inside me. I had allowed myself to ignore the fact that I hadn’t had my period in two months, but I could not let this boy hurt you. He took his hand off my head to open his pants and I struck him in the face with my elbow. He stopped smiling and stumbled backward and I ran to the door. It was a little latch lock, a flimsy nothing. Why didn’t Brian break in? I got it open with shaking fingers and burst into the hallway. One of the girls was still in line for the bathroom. We looked at each other and she pointed to my chest.

“Pull your shirt up,” she said.

I ran through the loud music to the front door and out of the bar. People were drinking beer from cans and smoking cigarettes on the patio. A different song was playing over speakers hidden in palm trees above our heads. I found a chair and sat down but stood back up immediately because it hurt to sit. I wondered if I was bleeding. I didn’t know how to get back to Brian’s room, but I couldn’t go back inside to bring him out to me. I was scared Chris would see me, and I was scared to try to walk home alone, and I was scared that if I told Brian what happened he would blame me. I stood on the patio shivering in the heat for a long time. People just moved around me. Finally, your father came outside.

“Aviva, are you okay? What happened?” He reached up to smooth my hair and I flinched.

“I got sick,” I said. “I fell. Can we go home now?”

“Of course,” he said.

When we got back to his room I climbed into bed in my clothes. I slept until noon the next day and woke to find Brian studying at his desk. He asked how I was feeling and I told him I was going to have a baby. When he asked me to marry him an hour later, I said yes.

CHAPTER TWO

REBEKAH

Every night I go to bed telling myself that I will call her tomorrow. And every morning I wake up knowing that I won’t. It’s been almost two months and I can still hear the gunshot in my ear. The doctor said the ringing would go away, but apparently not yet. I went back to the
Trib
two weeks after I came home from the hospital. My job is different, though, at least for now; instead of rushing from scene to scene, I’m in the office for the late rewrite shift. It’s supposed to be a step up because it means the editors think that in addition to being able to gather information, I can figure out what information is important enough to include in the article, and actually write the article myself. I come in at 2:00
P.M.
and stay until 10:00
P.M.
I sit at an old computer in one of several semicircles of old computers that make up the newsroom. Stringers, my former compatriots, call in their notes about dead bicyclists and celebrity nightclub shenanigans and corrupt hospital CEOs and police shootings, and I turn them into column inches. I also “rewrite” stories from other, often dubious, news sources. The British tabloids are the worst. They’re almost never right in the end, but we always print their stuff anyway—with “allegedly” and “reportedly” sprinkled throughout.

When I’m not at work, I sleep. Tony, the guy I was dating for a couple months, is out of the picture. I didn’t exactly mean to stop returning his texts, but I never really want to go out—or have anyone come visit—so it felt pointless to keep things going. He came over one last time at the end of February and said he really liked me but that it was clear I wasn’t ready to be involved in something. He was right.

In early March, my roommate Iris starts bugging me to go to the psychiatrists-in-training at Columbia.

“They charge on a sliding scale,” she tells me, looking all interested. We’re sitting on the couch—which is basically the only place I see her anymore. It’s Saturday evening and we’ve been arguing because she’s meeting some people we know for margaritas and Mexican food, but I’m not going.

“It’ll be like fifty bucks,” she says. “I’ll pay half.”

“You’re not paying for my shrink,” I say.

“I’ll pay for your margaritas if you come tonight.”

“I don’t feel like it, okay?”

Iris closes her laptop and gets up.

“You know you’re not acting right,” she says.

She says that a lot these days.

The next week, Iris makes me an appointment and I agree by not canceling it. She takes a morning off work and we ride the A train to 168th Street together. The magazines in the waiting room are several weeks old, which, for some reason, pisses me off.

“I can’t believe I let you drag me here,” I say.

Iris rolls her eyes. “Don’t be a bitch about this, please? Living with you has gotten
hard
. It’s obvious you’re depressed. Just face it, please, and let’s move on.”

“I don’t have depression, Iris, I have anxiety.”

“Well, I’ve done the online tests and you are
definitely
depressed. I checked every box. Lack of energy, lack of interest in things that you once enjoyed, excessive sleeping, irritability. Come on. You weren’t like this last year. You gotta get your shit together.”

A woman calls my name before I can retort. Not that I had a retort. Even sighing seems like a lot of effort. I stand up and approach the woman, who looks just a few years older than me.

“I’m Anna,” she says. I shake her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Follow me?”

We walk down a wide hallway and into a tiny room with two chairs and a small table with a lamp, a clock, and a box of Kleenex on it. There’s a framed poster of a field of flowers on the wall. She sits and I sit across from her.

“What can I help you with?” she asks.

I run my hand over my head. It’s become a tic. Touching the soft, sharp fuzz where my long hair used to be grounds me in what happened, reminds me it was real. “My roommate thinks I’m depressed.”

“What do you think?”

I shrug. “She sort of dragged me here.”

“Why do you think she did that?”

“Because she’s worried about me.”

Anna remains unfazed. She is schooled, I suppose, in humoring people.

“What do you think makes her worried?”

“I’ve been sleeping a lot.”

“What is a lot?”

“Basically, if I’m not at work, I’m asleep.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a reporter,” I say, and somewhere, below all the heavy blackness inside me, a tiny light flicks on when I do. I love saying I’m a reporter. It makes me feel strong. “I work for the
Trib
.”

“Difficult work, I imagine,” she says.

I almost laugh. “Sometimes, yeah. Mostly I’m in the office right now, though.”

“Is the amount of sleep you’re getting now unusual for you?”

“I guess.”

“Why do you think you’re sleeping so much?”

“I guess because I’m depressed.”

She nods. “Is depression something you’ve dealt with before?”

“Not really. It’s always been anxiety with me.”

“Have you ever been treated for anxiety?”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “I was in therapy most of college. And I still take medication.”

She asks me for names and dosages. I give them.

“And are you seeing anyone for therapy now?”

I shake my head.

“So how are you getting these medications prescribed to you?”

“My regular doctor, at home,” I say.

“Where is home?”

“Orlando.”

“And when was the last time you saw this doctor?”

“Um, last year. Like, May, maybe.”

“And this has worked for you until recently.”

“Pretty much.”

“Has something happened, some life event, a stressor in the past few months that might have triggered something?”

Again, I almost laugh.

“Yeah,” I say. “Definitely some stressors.” I tell her about Rivka Mendelssohn’s naked body, and Saul, and my mother suddenly surfacing after twenty-two years. Moving my mouth is hard. I haven’t spoken this many words in a row in weeks.

“It’s not unusual for a symptom like anxiety to morph into or remanifest as depression. Or vice versa. I’d like to prescribe you a medication that is specifically indicated for people experiencing both depression and anxiety.” She explains the dose and the side effects (sleep disturbance, loss of libido, headaches—basically what I’m already experiencing) and walks me out to the waiting room to make me an appointment to come back in a month.

“Call me if you have any questions,” she says, handing me a card. “It was very nice to meet you, Rebekah.”

I let Iris fill the prescription that night, because, why not? The shrinks and their prescriptions were the net that caught me in college when the lies and contradictions and despairs of my motherless childhood nearly felled me. Two weeks later, Saul calls and I pick up the phone. He asks to take me to lunch and I agree to meet him.

The Kosher Kitchen is a narrow storefront on Atlantic Avenue between a halal meat market and an old botanica selling dusty Blessed Virgin candles. The proximity of this threesome makes me smile, genuinely, for the first time in weeks. The Jewish restaurant next to the Muslim butcher next to the Christian reliquary. I love New York.

Saul is at the counter when I get there. A couple is sitting at one of the tables: he with a beard and the black coat-and-pants uniform, she in a glossy auburn wig. Another young man is working on a laptop. Every male in the restaurant, including the black barista, is wearing a yarmulke. I hop onto the stool next to Saul.

“It’s still so cold,” I say, unzipping my winter coat.

“The people on the television say it’s going to get warm soon,” Saul says.

“Not soon enough,” I say. “It’s almost April, for Christ’s sake.” Twenty-two years in Florida and it never occurred to me until recently how much sunshine was a part of my life. The cold makes me feel smaller and less consequential. My reactions are slower. Even if I weren’t depressed I’d hate going outside.

“It must be difficult adjusting to the weather,” says Saul.

“It is,” I say. “I guess eventually I’ll get used to it.”

“Do you think you’ll stay here, long term?”

“That’s the plan,” I say. “There’s nothing in Florida. I mean, even where there’s something there’s nothing. Not compared to New York.”

The menu is written on the wall in chalk. We both order tea and decide to split a smoked fish platter with bagel chips.

“I’ve never been to a kosher restaurant before,” I say.

“This one is new.”

“How have you been?” I haven’t seen Saul since right after I got out of the hospital. Since he told me my mother wanted to get in touch.

“Not bad,” he says. “What about you?”

I shrug. “Just work, mostly. I’m feeling a little better, I guess. My ear still rings.”

“It’ll go away eventually,” he says.

“That’s what I hear,” I say. And then: “Oh, ha. I didn’t mean…”

Saul smiles.

“I haven’t called Aviva,” I say. “But maybe you already know that.”