Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(19)

   I had a room now, but I missed those perfect houses where the privileged blew money on things like retro iron doorknobs. Church Street was too quiet at night. So I’d swing up to T Street before I cut down to Logan. The pink house with the forest green door where they always seemed to be throwing a party. The brown house with the black door with the old dog watching the street. He never did bark at me. Sometimes I’d watch to make sure he was still breathing. The Caribbean-blue house with the white door and the couple who sat at a table and never looked at one another. They looked like that Hopper painting. But the man in this window read his laptop screen instead of a newspaper. The woman wrote in a notebook. In the painting, she’s hitting a key on the piano. Not playing it. Just hitting a key as if to annoy him, to get his attention. The painting captures the instant before he explodes. The next time I’d walk by, they’d be watching TV.

I’d walk past these houses and watch through the windows. Not long. I told myself it wasn’t creepy as fuck because I didn’t stop walking to look. But I looked. And I wondered what their lives were like. The parts I didn’t see. I wondered what they were writing on those laptops. I wondered what they were fighting about. I wondered what they were talking about at the dinner table that had them so excited they were all talking at once. I wondered what they were reading, if it took them someplace else. I wondered if they were lonely like me. In the wee hours, walking home from work, I didn’t see them so often. I didn’t miss all of them. The guy on R Street who jerked his little terrier’s collar so hard I thought for sure he’d snap the dog’s neck, I stole his paper for weeks. The asshole on Swann Street who called me a loser for the sin of being poor. Sometimes I’d watch a parent sleepwalking a crying infant. An insomniac like me curled up with a pillow on the couch, a movie lighting their face.

   There never was much to see through our living room windows. But if the lights were off, Carl had gone to bed, and I could usually make it to our room without questions about rent, or horoscopes.

I dreaded taking those stairs in the dark. Every floor of that fucking house tilted another direction. The stairs, each step was a crapshoot—left, right, back, forward. Never occurred to me to throw myself down a flight and hire a lawyer. But the streetlights helped. And the streetlights in the window once I made it up the stairs lit Jay’s face just enough to see that something was wrong. He was wet like he’d stepped right out of the shower into bed. He whispered “strep” like everyone does when they have a sore throat. I used the little penlight on my key chain to prove him wrong. But his throat looked like hamburger with acne. He’d been to the VA, showed me a bottle of meds.

This is how I found out I could use VA hospitals. You miss all those briefings when they kick you out. Jay found out about the VA when he asked Carl for a ride to a clinic. (He’d brought his yellow truck back to his mom’s in Carolina so the bank could repossess it and taken the bus back to D.C. His poor Pentecostal mother—he’d left a porn tape behind the seat, Balls to the Wall 4.) Carl told him the VA hospital was a couple blocks up. “A couple” meant about thirty. But I could yell at Carl later. Jay said Carl put oil on his forehead. I swear to Christ. Oil. I muttered something under my breath, a joke I’d been workshopping since I was ten about olive oil for colds, motor oil for flu. (I’m still working on it.)

   I asked Jay if he’d eaten anything. He said fruit salad. “Fruit salad” is what you call garnish and people who work in bars who can’t afford or don’t have time for a meal call dinner. He’d been living off olives. So had I, but I wasn’t sick. I thought about checking the cabinets for a can of soup and hoping no one missed it. But it’s hard to steal from people you know. Even if they’re assholes, it can get awkward fast.

I lit a cigarette. I already knew what I was going to do. I just wanted to sit for a minute in the half-light and think. I figured I owed it to myself to play out the possible outcomes, something I’d been trying recently. Think like a chess player. Stop making every decision based on what I needed to survive right at that moment. But my brain wouldn’t play along.

Our situation was so tenuous that a couple days out of work, an infected throat, one misstep, and we’d slide, no bumpers to stop us this time. I didn’t know how long he’d been sick. Jobs like we had, you don’t call in sick. You work. You may infect everyone else, but you fucking work. A doctor’s note won’t save you. Not that anyone has insurance. They’ll hire your replacement before you realize you’ve been shitcanned.

Carl was already hounding us. We were late on rent, and he’d been demanding extra money for Jay living with me. He’d never get it. But he didn’t need much of an excuse to throw us out. This time, we wouldn’t have cars to sleep in. But then, every time I stole—tampons, socks, Advil, those little processed lunch-meat packets that are easy to hide—I was risking jail. Same outcome. Same free fall, bonus criminal record and chance of jail. But none of that mattered because Jay was sick and getting worse.

   Jay patted my hand and said he wasn’t bored, like that was why I was worried. He said he’d been watching Jerry Springer. Skinny guys who date fat girls. I stared at him a moment, but he kept his eyes closed. We didn’t have a television.

I told him I’d be back in a minute. He asked if I could pick up juice, and I knew he was fucking delirious.