No One Knows Us Here(33)

We drove in silence through the streets. I grew angrier and angrier with each passing mile.

Most of all, I was angry at myself. Why didn’t I just leave? No one tied me down to that exam table. I should have laughed in their faces. I should have walked away. Then I thought of my sister, my promise to her. It had been easier back when I believed I was the wicked fairy. When I believed everyone was better off without me. I couldn’t fly away anymore.

“Did you ever have to dissect a frog in school?” I asked Alejandro, breaking the silence.

I wasn’t looking at him, but I could sense his head moving toward me, then back to the road ahead. “Sure,” Alejandro said.

“They pass out these frogs, lay them out on a piece of butcher paper, and they’re just lying there, flat on their backs, their frog legs flopped wide open. And then—you remember what we had to do? We had to take a scalpel and cut out a little window. And then you could peel the skin back and look inside at all the organs. Those giant flaps of lungs and the tiny little heart. We pinned the skin down, pinned it to the table, to get a better look. We looked inside and we made drawings.” I looked over at Alejandro then. He was still staring straight ahead, a parody of the perfect driver, both hands on the wheel. “That’s what it was like in there. Like a frog pinned to the table. But at least the frogs were dead before we sliced them open.”

Alejandro’s head whipped around to face me then. I’d shocked him. “It’s an analogy,” I said, waving my hand at his face.

We were silent again for a minute before I started up again. “I have to ask,” I said. “Is this a big part of your job—accompanying ladies to the wellness clinic?”

Alejandro narrowed his eyes at the road. After a moment he let out an indulgent little laugh. “Oh, Rosemary,” he said.

“You’ve got to find this unusual.”

“It’s not my job to ask questions,” he said.

“Blood sample, urine sample. Cervical cells scraped out. I can’t wait to see what’s next.”

He dropped me off in front of my apartment, even offered to escort me up.

“No!” I slammed the door and walked away.

The car remained idling in the street. The engine hummed, and I could sense it, its presence. Drive away, I willed it. Just go. I heard the mechanical whir of the window lowering.

“Rosemary!”

I considered pretending I hadn’t heard Alejandro calling after me. He called again, tapped on the horn.

I whirled around. “What? What now?”

Alejandro crooked his finger, beckoning me back to the car.

I leaned in, resting my arms on the open window. “What?”

Alejandro lowered his voice, forcing me to stick my head back inside the car. “Just be careful, Rosemary. Okay?”

Before I could respond or even register what, exactly, Alejandro was trying to tell me, he stepped on the gas, causing me to stumble back onto the sidewalk.

As soon as I got inside, I undressed and stepped into the shower. I wanted to scrub my skin raw, sterilize myself with chemicals, but I was too tired to do anything but stand under the water.

Be careful, he’d said. Be careful.

I tapped the handle to make the water hotter. Be careful of what? Did Alejandro know something? Was he trying to tell me he knew, that he had been hiding out in the shrubbery outside my building, training Glasseyes in Fred Meyer on me and Sam as we walked around the store filling up my new stockpot with garlic and cheese?

He couldn’t know. If he did, why be cryptic about it? Just tell me it was over. Tell Leo, have him fire me for breach of contract.

I turned the water hotter, as hot as it would go. The drops pelted my skin. I closed my eyes and turned around slowly, like a pig on a rotisserie.

Be careful, he’d said. Or maybe it was “take care,” just something you say when you’re saying goodbye. Take care. That wasn’t such an odd thing to say at all.

Suddenly my vision went dark, and my foot slipped on the floor of the enameled bathtub. My hands reached for the shower curtain to catch my fall, and then I was steady again, breathing quickly, my eyes screwed shut. I’d almost fainted. As fast as I could, I turned the handles until the water stopped.

Dripping onto the tile floor, I held my arms out in front of me. They were red and puffy. All the blood had rushed to the surface. I could see it pulsing, right below the skin.





CHAPTER 12


I went through several versions of the breakup text before settling on something simple, something that left no room for a false interpretation: Sam, I’m sorry. I have to end this thing between us. I held my breath and pressed send before I could change my mind.

And that was it. I’d done it.

I stared at the screen for just a second. Then I blocked Sam’s number.

Tight white dress. Red lipstick. Oversize sunglasses. Hair loose, straight down my back. I looked like a different person. Exactly the kind of person I needed to be.

Downstairs I waited for my car to arrive. I had him drive me all over town, like I was Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman shopping up and down Rodeo Drive and telling those snobby saleswomen they’d made a big mistake. Huge.

I bought a painting at Anthropologie for $598. It was called Three Lines and looked like a kid had scribbled all over a blank canvas with a thick black Sharpie, but it was huge and framed in gold and I needed it to hang over my charcoal-gray couch.