The Best American Short Stories 2013 (34 page)

Yvonne Borneo perked up so markedly her neck seemed to lengthen an inch. “Do you need to see to that?” she said.

Cora excused herself and went to the back gate. It was DJ, a regular client who had come to the door and screamed for her plenty of times before, but never when anyone important was present. Cora had once lanced a six-inch-long abscess on DJ’s arm—she’d measured it—and when the clinic doctor pared away the necrotized tissue, bone showed through. DJ had started coming to the women’s center at nineteen, freshly emancipated from foster care, clearly bipolar, and Cora had been trying to get her to see Sonia for seven years. She was twenty-six now and looked at least forty.

Today she looked worse than usual, in army pants held together with safety pins and a filthy tank top that revealed the caverns of scar tissue on her arms, the bulging sternum that seemed to twang fiercely under her skin like outraged tuning forks. When she saw Cora, DJ thrust both arms through the bars of the gate, like a prisoner in stocks, and wept.

“You came to see me when no one else did,” she sobbed.

“Okay, DJ,” Cora said. “Okay.”

DJ did this a lot: went back and forth in time. She was talking about when she’d been stabbed by a john two years before and Cora had been the only one to stay with her at SF General, eventually securing her a semiprivate room and making the nurse give her painkillers. “Yeah, she’s an addict,” she had snapped at the young woman on duty. “It still hurts when she gets stabbed.”

Sometimes DJ would recount an unknown past assault, or several, quietly sitting in the corner of the needle exchange and saying, “He raped me, Cora,” while peering through the twisted vines of her hair. “I know, hon,” Cora would say. “I’d cut his balls off if I could.” This always seemed to calm DJ down.

After Cora’s sister had a baby and the baby got older and began to speak in lucid sentences, its vocal patterns and flattened sense of chronology reminded Cora of DJ: that tendency to recount, repetitively, in the balanced and slightly bemused tones of a person under hypnosis, past events as though they had just happened. No “I remember this,” just “Mama dropped a plate and it broke,” meditatively, with an air of troubled, grieving reflection. It seemed to her that DJ, like the baby, was stuck in some cognitive cul-de-sac and, unlike the baby, would never develop a perspective layered and three-dimensional enough to find her way out.

Now Cora looked into her wet face and said, “DJ, I’ve got someone in there. Someone I’m having a meeting with. If you come back in an hour, when I open the exchange, we’ll talk. Okay?”

DJ gazed at her. “An hour?” she said hollowly.

“Yeah.”

The girl’s face began to twist and shift like there was something behind it, trying to get out. She slumped forward, forearms still resting on the bars of the gate, and moaned. Cora smelled alcohol and urine.

“DJ, please. One hour. I’ve got someone who might give us money in there, and I can’t just leave her sitting in my office.”

DJ slumped on the concrete, fingers still poking through the grates, and muttered, “Okay, okay, okay.”

When Cora returned and apologized to Yvonne, the novelist said, “Everything all right?” Before Cora could answer, the screaming started again. DJ was now banging her head against the metal bars of the gate and howling, “I’m sorry, I know there’s a rich lady in there, but I need to come in!”

Cora grabbed her ring of keys and hurried down the hall. It was starting to get dark outside, but she could see a wet patch of blood on DJ’s lip from the banging. When she unlocked the gate, DJ fell against her, almost gracefully. Cora staggered under the weight and struggled to dig her hands into the girl’s armpits, hoisting her up to standing. She lost her grip, and they collapsed together on the concrete floor. The crotch of DJ’s pants was soaked through. “It’s just so cold,” the girl slurred. “It’s just so cold out there. I keep peeing myself, Cora.”

Cora took DJ’s chin in her hands and looked into her eyes. They were unfocused and dilated, but not fixed. She was just very drunk.

“I can’t be out there right now.”

She pressed against Cora. They were entangled now on the floor of the hall, and Cora felt a hot dribble of urine slowly trickle across the floor underneath their bodies. “It hurts,” DJ said.

“I think you might have a UTI again, hon,” Cora said. “Remember when we talked about pissing right after you fuck?”

“She’s fancy,” DJ said.

At first Cora thought DJ was going back in time again, but then realized she was referring to Yvonne Borneo, who stood in the middle of the hallway in her gray suit, arms at her sides, projecting the deliberate, neutral composure of a wartime nurse—one of her own heroines, perhaps, kindly but remote and weighted with an incurable private grief.

“Is there anything I can do?” she said.

And so Yvonne Borneo helped Cora haul DJ into the bathroom. It was Yvonne who picked through the clothes bin and found clean pants and a sweatshirt, who went and bought three black coffees at the diner down the block while Cora helped DJ shower. And later, it was Yvonne who sat in the needle exchange with Lew, the volunteer, while the on-site nurse gave DJ a dose of antibiotics and Cora spent an hour trying to find her a shelter bed for the night. It was fruitless. There was nothing.

“What if we book a decent hotel room for her and you take her there in a cab, make sure she checks in?” Yvonne suggested.

Cora shook her head. “If she’s going overnight somewhere, it needs to be a place where people know what they’re doing.” She looked down at her lap. “The only option is to 5150 her.”

Yvonne didn’t ask what a 5150 was. She said, “Well, if the alternative is to be on the streets . . .” Her words trailed off. From the exam room came the sound of DJ alternately screaming and sobbing. The sounds were a kind of last gasp, witless and terrifying as the
crunch
before a piece of machinery breaks down for good. Cora stood up and shut the door to her office.

She made the call. Half an hour later, when the paramedics burst in the front door of the drop-in, four big burly men, louder and stompier than necessary in the way paramedics always are—the way anyone is, for that matter, who comes in the guise of eleventh-hour rescuer—and strapped DJ to a gurney, Cora ran alongside the stretcher and told the girl that things would be okay. But she knew this was unlikely, just as she knew her chances with Yvonne Borneo were blown, because the woman had borne witness to Cora’s greatest failure, a failure multiplied by the scores of clients just like DJ: girls who could not change. The part of them that knew how to accept help, whatever that part was called—hope? imagination? foresight?—had been destroyed. And what Cora and her staff did for such girls, day after day, felt more and more like hospice care: an attempt to minimize the worst of their pain until death.

Cora stood in the alley after the ambulance took off. It was Friday night and all the barkeeps along Mission and Valencia were dumping empty bottles into recycling bins. The sound of breaking glass seemed gratuitously destructive, nihilistic. She watched a woman walking down Capp Street in a short swingy coat and heels. A car pulled up alongside her and idled. Some idiot from Marin, thought Cora. The woman and the man in the car conferred for a moment, and the woman drew herself up and hurried down the sidewalk, shaking her head, outraged, as the vehicle pulled away.

When Cora came back into the exchange, Lew was alone.

“Where’s Yvonne Borneo?” she said.

“You mean that lady? That narc-looking lady?”

“Yes,” Cora sighed. “She left, didn’t she?”

Lew shrugged. “She left when the paramedics got here. She looked freaked.”

‘Did she say anything?’

“Nope. Maybe
toodaloo
or something.” He flapped his wrist.

Cora sat down. “She did not fucking say
toodaloo
.”

“No,” Lew admitted. “She did not.”

The first time Cora saw Yvonne’s daughter was in Ravenswood’s recreation room. They were both fifteen. She remembered Angelica as tall and big-framed and slumped, with choppy bangs and sidelong, slippery eyes, seemingly beyond nervousness and fear, reduced to the passive, grim spectatorship of an inured captive. There was sympathy in the look she gave Cora, but it was neutered, the retroactive ghost of sympathy you have for your own past, stupid self.

One of the other girls asked how long Cora would be staying.

“Not long,” Cora said, scared. Straining for flippancy. “Two weeks probably.”

Angelica laughed.

“That’s what we all thought,” she said. She spoke in Cora’s direction but didn’t look at her. Cora tried to snag her gaze but it kept floating away, elusive and directionless. Then Angelica turned to leave the room and that’s when she said the chilling thing, head down, so quiet and unassuming she could have been saying it to herself. “Honey,” she said, “you are
never
getting out of here.”

That night, her first at Ravenswood, Cora cried and sweated in her bed. Every fifteen minutes an aide came in and shone a flashlight on her. She wasn’t allowed to talk to her dad on the phone. “Can’t be a daddy’s girl forever,” one of the staff told her cheerfully. A dry-skinned, freckled woman wearing a sweatshirt with a grainy Georgia O’Keeffe flower scanned on the front. “You have a vagina on your shirt,” Cora told her. The woman’s mouth twisted into a tight, hurt smirk. “You need to grow up,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone what you said this time, but you need to start growing up.”

At night, Cora would watch the snow from the tiny window in the Chill Out Room. She’d discovered that if she said things like
vagina
and
penis
and
fuck
enough, she’d get sent to the Chill Out Room and could be alone and not have to talk to anyone or pretend to be listening. There was no toilet in there, so she tried to limit her beverage intake. The hours stretched on. Cora would sit on the floor, scowling at the aide who came by every half-hour to ensure that she hadn’t found an inventive way to hang herself. All the staff on the girls’ ward were women, soft and easily hurt but inflexible, vicious in a hand-wringing, motherly way. Turned-down mouths and sad, round faces. If you called one of these women a fucking twat, her eyes would fill up and her voice quaver with genuine injured dignity. Then she would tell you she was very sorry, but you couldn’t shower or change your underwear or socks until you apologized and admitted you were wrong. And the terrible thing was, she’d actually
seem
sorry. They were all perpetually cowed by their own brutality, quivering and defeated by the measures they were forced to enact. If Cora was nice to them, they were worse: unpardonably brisk and springy and relieved, presumptuous in their patting and hugging, insufferable in their tentative optimism. Their nonviolent and vaguely cutesy demands—that she sing show tunes in the bathroom to prove she wasn’t shooting up or purging, that she do three jumping jacks for every swear word uttered, that she participate in a sock-puppet revue dramatizing what she wanted her life to be like in five years—made her want to kill, and she envied the boys, who, it was rumored, merely got hog-tied and placed in restrictive holds.

When Cora got home after her meeting with Yvonne, she sat on the floor of her living room and did sudoku puzzles for two hours. Then she tried to sleep but couldn’t. The apartment was too quiet and she missed her cat, Melly, who had been dead for two weeks. Melly was a soothing, watchful, totemic presence, like a Buddha statue. She had a charming trait of standing on her two back feet for hours at a time, as if this was a restful position, her front legs hanging straight down from her chest, exposing the fur on her stomach, which was wavier and coarser than the rest. Cora and her friends had gathered round and laughed and marveled and taken pictures on their cell phones and praised Melly for being so cute and novel, until the day the vet informed Cora that Melly had advanced bone cancer and the reason she stood on her back feet was that it was the only position that alleviated her excruciating pain. Melly was put to sleep while Cora held her, whispering apologies, and she wanted to get another cat but was afraid of misinterpreting another signal, unwittingly laughing at another decline.

Melly’s food and water bowls were still in the kitchen, half full, the water filmed over with bits of fur on the rim, the corners of each room still hoarding tumbleweeds of cat hair. Cora wiped the rim of the water bowl with her thumb. She kept remembering Yvonne Borneo in the bathroom of the drop-in, kneeling on the floor in her taupe skirt, pulling off DJ’s army pants with grim, sharpened concentration. In those moments she seemed to have stepped into a transparent sleeve like the plastic sheaths on her novels, an invisible barrier that kept her from getting dirty. Not shying away from the wetness on DJ’s pants. Not wincing at the smell. But not registering it, either. At one point, she leaned over DJ, blotting at the girl’s bloody lip, and her Scottie-dog pin dinged against DJ’s nose. DJ blinked, started, stared at Yvonne as if she hadn’t seen her before.

“You’re taking my clothes off,” she murmured.

“Yes,” Yvonne said. “So you can clean up.”

“Oh, God,” DJ moaned. “Oh, God.” Then she squirmed to one side and planted her hands flat on the floor and vomited, not all at once but like a cat with a hairball, a series of back-arching, rippling convulsions.

“Get it all out,” Yvonne had said.

The phone rang. A man’s voice, clipped and high-pitched.

“Is this Cora Hennessey? Of Capp Street Women’s Services?”

“Yes,” Cora said.

Someone’s dead
, she thought.
DJ’s dead
.

“My name is Josiah Lambeaux. I’m the personal assistant to Yvonne Borneo.”

“Okay,” Cora said.

It was raining. The ride to Yvonne Borneo’s house felt needlessly meandering, up and down hills and around curves in the dense foggy dark, the car’s lights occasionally isolating a frozen, fleeting image—a hooded man in a crosswalk, head bowed; a shivering sheaf of bougainvillea clinging to a stone wall; peeling layers of movie posters and
LOST CAT
signs and sublet notices trailing wet numbered tabs, plastered across the windows of vacant storefronts. Josiah drove his dove-gray sedan with the decorous effacement of a dad trying not to embarrass his teenage daughter, and she sat in the back and watched his thin neck tensing, his hands modestly manipulating the wheel with a pointed lack of gestural flair as they entered Seacliff, a hazy Land of the Lotus Eaters perched on the edge of the Presidio’s red-roofed orderliness: a mirage of wide, silent streets and giant lawns and strangely permeable-looking mansions, many of them white and turreted and vaporous in the dark, whose banks of windows turned a blind slate toward the bay and its light-spangled bridge. As they turned onto the mile-long, cypress-lined lane leading to Yvonne Borneo’s estate, Cora stuck her face an inch from the backseat window and imagined how hard it would be to run away from this place. Did Angelica break out under cover of night and run the entire mile from the front door to the road? What intricate alarm systems did she have to disassemble before she even crossed the threshold? And once she was free, adrift in this silent, echoing no-man’s-land of ghost-houses and yawning boulevards, how did she keep going? Having known nothing but this eerie greensward with its self-contradictory air of utter desertion and hyper-preservation, how did she know where to go, or even how to leave? Cora’s own leave-taking, at fourteen, was comparatively easy. She waited until the house was silent and sneaked out her bedroom window and climbed the backyard chain-link fence, to the road where her twenty-year-old boyfriend, Sammy, waited in his car. Her father barreled out the back door after her, chased her across the yard, grabbed the belt loop of her jeans, and pulled as she threw herself against the springy fence. She’d been shocked by how easily the fence swayed and shuddered as she clung to it. The change she’d filled her pockets with—pennies mostly—poured out, spattering on the ground and hitting her father in the face and arms. As he clutched her ankle, his eyes were screwed shut against the shower of coins and so he didn’t see the foot of her free leg swinging toward him with all the lethal agility of the gymnast she’d once aspired to be, and he could only reel back, shocked, as the heel of her boot stomped down on his face.