Last Last Chance Read online

  Her skin was immaculate. I noticed she had calf muscles. When I smoked, she stayed upwind.

  The rehab was fancy and a little dumb, and had supplied every bathroom with Listerine. The day after Kam left, a staffer found me drinking from the bottle, hiding in a shower stall and sniffing the replacement grout for fumes of advisable use. They ditched the Listerine. I got sent home.

  In the tunnel to Manhattan, I whacked Stanley awake. I hate tunnels for the same reason everyone who hates tunnels does. If the thing collapsed, I wanted him there to scream with me. He looked ready to scream anyway. The tunnel did not help. I said something about the wedding being at four the next day, and how we had plenty of time to get attired and sober. He said he was game for whatever. We reviewed my story: I worked for the USDA; I was a mole recording violations in one of the country’s biggest kosher chicken plants. And Stanley, he was my boy Friday.

  I got us to the hotel and parked in a garage. The guy at the desk was looking all around and behind us, like where was the Mr. and Mrs. I had promised?

  The bed was a queen. It was late and I thought it best to crash and get up early the next day to prepare. I told Stanley to shower. He said: Come with. I said he was obviously going through a tough time. He said today was the anniversary of his wife’s death. I said: Oh, fuck.

  He left the shower on for me once he was done and came out with a towel wrapped around his midriff. There were black and silver curls patterned across his chest.

  We fit together nicely, and after, he was sweet about it.

  Next day, I took him downtown to a used-clothing store that was still fairly chichi. I made him try on suits. We settled on a double-breasted pinstripe. The saleslady kept asking what’s that smell, like she was having déjà vu. We got that a lot. The odor of raw chicken is a bit like resentment: try as you will, it never goes away.

  I bought a black dress, spaghetti strapped, with eyelet-sized polka dots. Heels and shawl, but only because Stanley insisted. I was worried about looking just right and got to thinking about Mother’s pearl bracelet and how to make my story stick. If I had to go to rehab, maybe I could pretend it was a work-related sojourn. Maybe there were cracker cattle to neutralize down South. Maybe there was mad cow to deal with. So my job, it could seem important. And I could seem needed. If I could just belie the impression I knew people who’d be at the wedding had of me, this venture into the world would be worth it.

  I was chewing a fingernail and thinking how to acquire the bracelet and make Stanley’s collar sit flat when he took me by the wrist and said, “What’s the big deal? We’ll go over to her place and get it.”

  I tried explaining about doormen, which turned into a story about one of the doormen I’d grown up with, this guy Joe, who taught me how to ride a bike in the courtyard, and how he helped me get my dad unhitched from the ceiling fan and later how he went nuts and beat the desk guy, José, over the head with a pipe.

  Stanley was dragging me along and noting how fancy this part of town was. When we reached Mother’s apartment, I hid because a lot of the door guys had been there for years and some of them would recognize me and it wasn’t that I was afraid of getting busted but that I was embarrassed that so much time had passed and I rarely came by to say hello even though these guys, a lot of them, they were like family. Also, my mother. Coming back after a leave was always precarious because I never knew just how bad off she’d be, or how low I’d feel about it.

  Stanley left me at the corner and marched into the building. Words were exchanged. The desk guy—someone new—was on the in-house phone and next thing, Stanley was being directed to the elevator. I waited and waited, then tired of waiting and went to a bar down the street where me and Dirty Ben used to hang out and deal. Or he dealt and I bought. I was already dressed for the wedding. I was intending to order a soda, kick up some nostalgia, and split. The bar was one of those city relics around which progress has to arrange itself. Boutiques and bistros cramming the purlieus and at the heart, this dump that hasn’t been mopped in sixty years. I felt good in there. I stood out against decrepitude, which was novel. If there was a contrast to be had, it rarely favored me. I checked my teeth in a mirror. No lipstick stains or anything.

  I took a stool and waited for someone to show up behind the bar. Instead, I got hands covering my eyes and Dirty Ben saying guess who. So now he was the bartender, which probably made dealing that much easier.

  “Well, well,” he said, onceing me over. “Drinks on the house! How are you?”

  I smiled. It was good to be around people who knew you for what you were. I said I wanted a soda, that was all. I asked how’s tricks, which was enough to stifle other thoughts like: My, he looks healthy.

  “I’m doing all right,” he said. “I make some money here. I’m back in school, trying to get my GED. I got loans and stuff, but on the whole, things are really good. And you? Obviously, I heard about your dad, I’m sorry.”

  I said thanks, and marveled. He was so happy for a drug addict. I was tempted to join in, like: I’m good, too! I work on Wall Street!

  “And the rest of it?” I asked, because how long were we going to play this game?

  He laughed and said, “Oh, come on. Ancient history. I got divorced, but I’m engaged now. She’s in law school. We want children in the next few years. I work at this place, which isn’t so great for staying sober, but I manage.”

  I think I reared. He squeezed my forearm and said, “You look really good, Lucy. I’m glad we all got out of that phase alive. Because I was worried about you at Kam’s wedding. We all were.”

  Horror cannot describe it, but if I flushed my head down the toilet and drank, it’d be an improvement on the condition of my inner life as it now struck me in that miserable little bar. I’d been told deadly plague was on the loose and that my dead father was to blame. I had groped my way to consciousness in front of several people seeking the halcyon magic of acupuncture. I’d even accompliced a chicken massacre for two months, but this—this was, no. Just no.

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “You’re still out there. Oh, honey,” and he lifted my face from the bartop.

  The automaton in me had words to share: “The wedding is today, August thirtieth.”

  Ben shook his head. “The third, sweetheart. August third. A Saturday night. There was a sit-down dinner and yours was the only empty seat. We thought maybe it was too depressing for you.”

  “August thirtieth. At the Plaza. I am dressed appropriately. I have a date. This is an opportunity for me to do well. I’m not going to ruin it.”

  “Lucy, wait. I can take you someplace.”

  I must have walked home like a zombie. Waved at the doormen and gone upstairs. One of them might have said something friendly, but I was so zeroed in on Mother, I heard nothing. I had missed my oldest friend’s wedding, and it was her fault. On some other planet for the love of drug? She gave this illness to me.

  There was only one apartment per floor, so the elevator opened into our vestibule. The front door was ajar.

  Mother was laughing it up. Her nose was red and laced with powder. Her eyes were bloodshot. It did not take a genius to figure out what she’d been doing.

  As for Stanley, he looked relaxed, sitting on a couch opposite her with a bottle of rye between his legs. I saw the pearl bracelet in his chest pocket, which could only mean Mother had not noticed the theft. But no. It was not like that at all.

  He motioned for me to lean in close, then whispered: “I called the police already. Your mother was on the floor, crushing pills and snorting them with a straw. And the way things are in my head, I’d rather be back in a real jail than this.”

  So he was waiting and Mother was laughing and I was standing there, angry. And anger was good. Anger always seems like a filigree atop whatever else you’re feeling, viz., I am so fucking mortified I want to put my head in a blender, so that the whole shebang starts to feel outlandish and silly. In short, I deflate on a dime.

  Stanley looked me up
and down. My dress really was pretty. “Lucy,” he said, and his face bloomed with ardor. “This is for you.”

  He retrieved the pearls and held them aloft.

  Mother stopped laughing. “A stranger with pearls,” she said. In some other movie, she’d have meant me. “I have earrings to go with them. Stanley, right? They’re in the safe, help yourself.” But then she sniffed the air and cocked her head as if registering a smell, like maybe she’d left the oven on. She lurched for the back room.

  I put on the bracelet and bunned my hair. The house phone rang from downstairs. Stanley said, “You know, I still think of my wife every day.”

  I told the doormen to send the police away. Then I went to see about Mother, who was in the laundry room under the ceiling fixture Dad called relief. This was where she’d always smoked, before his suicide and after. She was crawling around the floor, looking for anything white and crumbly. I noticed a pipe jutting from her back pocket. She’d smoke talcum powder if it was there. I called Kam’s house. I watched my mother harvest the tile and nose the corners like a truffle hound. On the machine, the groom’s voice, which having to hear was three times more painful than I had expected.

  “Found some!” Mother said. “Come join me?”

  She beckoned me to the floor. I got on my knees to help.

  Two

  The way the apartment worked, you could cohabit for days and still feel alone. Seven thousand square feet can do that. So even though it was me and Stanley, Agneth, Mother, and Hannah, the place was desolate.

  Hannah is my half-sister, seventeen years between us. She probably thinks I’m unhip to the major consensus narrative of adolescent girls today, and if that’s what she thinks, she’s right. Hannah was born in the nineties. The nineties. I find this hard to accept no matter how long I’ve known about it. As a result, we have a routine, and in this routine we do not understand each other. And this is fine. On days I see it her way, it’s only because she’s tapped into something primal whose occasion cannot be good.

  Returning home in the shape I was in, it wasn’t like the second shift come to reprieve the first. My homecomings never were. Only this time, opportunities to fail everyone were in more abundance than ever. There’d been a development on the plague front, two developments, in fact. The first: a letter addressed to a senator from Minnesota suggesting that whoever had absconded with the bacterium knew how to release it. The second—well, it was more revelation than development. What everyone knows: it’s been 237 days since vials of plague were stolen from my dad’s lab, and 180 days since he took his life. What everyone just found out: The bacteria he cultured are sprightly. They do not degrade in the open air and no antibiotic can kill them. They are, in a word, immortal.

  The story broke around dinnertime, which meant someone sworn to secrecy had cracked over the pot roast. We’d been congregated in front of the TV, watching the preview channel. Stanley had been saying, “So this isn’t a pit stop? This is our actual viewing for the night?” when came the news crawl at the bottom of the screen and Hannah flipping to CNN, where the anchorman was delivering the latest with elan. What a time to depart from tradition. The anchorman is indurate, he is glacial, the provenance of feeling has never included him, so who the hell was this guy?

  I made for the remote, which Hannah shoved down her pants. CNN was her bag. I asked her to turn down the volume. She pointed at Agneth and shook her head. Agneth is eighty-four and under the impression that at the advanced age of eighty-four, one’s cochleae frustrate the progress of sound to the relevant hearing organ. Her hearing is fine, but no one likes to argue.

  As soon as the anchorman finished the lead, Hannah had an opinion. “This is bad,” she said, shouted really. “Bad, bad, bad.”

  I understood her completely. There was even some nodding between us.

  On-screen was a picture of our dad, the same picture that accompanied every story about plague, which kind of story tended to inveigh against the scientist on whose watch the disease had toodle-oo’d out of a lab in D.C. We were all agreed that the photo had been doctored to assert in his demeanor something unpleasant. My poor dad. As a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control, he’d been an eraser. When a disease got too virulent or contagious, he’d be called in to wipe it out. But he was also a forward-looking man. Why wait for death when you can preempt? He did some work on the side.

  Regular pneumonic plague, if untreated, already has a near– 100 percent fatality rate. It’s easier to get than a cold. And because there was some bioterror precedent here—e.g., the Japanese bombed China with infected fleas during WWII—Dad figured it’d be good to assess the danger. And so did the government. Never mind that his work violated the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention—like anyone paid attention to that anymore—he was headed for the Nobel. And we were proud, in a Heisenberg’s mom sort of way. His questions were simple: Could plague be stabilized? Made to survive in the air for as long as it took to saturate a major city? Could he devise a strain that resisted antibiotics, even if treated immediately? If he could do it, could anyone? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

  “Absolutely,” Hannah said. “This is just what we need. First on my list.”

  We fell into that group silence there’d been so much of in the last eight months. The anchorman passed the story to a woman standing outside CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Her hair smacked the mike in the wind. She said the FBI was downplaying the danger, but that sources inside the White House were confirming a high degree of apeshit among senior staff.

  The reporter looked weepy. She upheld the cover of tomorrow’s New York Post. The headline? SUPERPLAGUE. She was reading out 800 numbers to call for more information.

  The anchorman asked about the threatening letter. Was it credible? Were there any leads about the author? After all, there’d been several such letters since the theft, just enough to keep the concept of holocaust fresh in your mind, but not enough to spike life insurance. Still, this new letter. seemed more ominous than the others, in part because our friends at Dad’s lab had been saying the strain would probably hit any day. Someplace up North. Canada, if we were lucky.

  Hannah was on her feet. I tried to grab her arm, but she parried. I asked where she was going.

  “Her room,” Mother said, which made me think there was some tension there.

  “Jesus,” Agneth said. More nodding. “The nightmare continues.”

  I went after Hannah, whose door was closed. Her room, I gathered, was more fort than sleeper. I knocked. The password was streptococcus. I had to say it twice before she answered. She was in the bathroom, private facilities, which was just as well. She likes her hands to be clean. Teeth brushed and flossed. Agneth, who is both spiritualist and diagnostician, says Hannah has acute juvenile mysophobia. That it runs in our family and, for emphasis, she’ll snap the bands of her surgeon’s mask, which she buys in bulk.

  Hannah’s room was unchanged since Dad died. He’d been helping her plot incidents of West Nile on a map using colored pushpins. Avian flu wasn’t much in the news yet; back then, West Nile was the thing. The map took up half her wall. In a corner were toys and a stuffed apple-green platypus.

  “Watch the puzzle,” Hannah said, and just in time, since I was about to step on what looked like an ulcerated vesicle on some guy’s neck. It was a cutaneous anthrax infection depicted in stages. A three-thousand-piece puzzle she’d bought online.

  “Hannah, this is gross. Not at all normal. When I was twelve I had a poster of boys who waxed their chest hair.”

  She stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped about her head. She is fair-skinned with freckles that saddle her nose. Braces are imminent. Breasts are not.

  “See my map?” she said.

  I nodded. It had come a long way. This time last year, five cases of West Nile had been reported in New York State. Now we were looking at close to thirty, and those only in the boroughs.

  “Very professional,” I said. “You’ve got a future here.”r />
  “Shut up. I was getting weekly calls from Wanda Deckman until now. You always mess up everything.”

  She was on her bed. Her hair had begun to leave a wet spot on the pillow. I haven’t been around much to see her grow, but I swear her feet didn’t hang off the mattress like that a couple months ago.

  I said I was sorry. She said, “I’ve heard that before.” I leaned against the wall.

  Wanda was one of the last to see Dad before he died. He’d gone up to the plant to check on the CDC’s first-line-of-defense chicken initiative, which was meant to trial-run a belvedere for plague. The way it works, domestic fowl are host to viruses that scare the crap out of everyone. Avian influenza and exotic Newcastle disease. St. Louis encephalitis, Eastern equine encephalitis, and the notorious West Nile encephalitis, to name a few. But here’s the thing about chickens, they don’t get sick from West Nile. They produce a strong antibody response and do just fine. So there you have it, a virus-patrol chicken. Choose six that test negative for West Nile antibodies and use them as bait. Bleed them every two weeks. Euthanize the ones that test positive, necropsy the carcasses, and monitor the results. If a lot of birds are getting hit, trouble’s on deck.

  The program backed the virtues of the nonhuman sentinel and endorsed spin-off plans for hundreds of other vector-borne diseases. But nothing came of it. The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals got in the way. The bleeding is painful, they said. And the birds don’t get to run around. Also, what good is knowing a pandemic is upon us? All we can do is run, and we can’t run forever. Seemed like a reasonable gripe until the stolen vials of plague. Since the vials, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals are America’s most wanted.

  I straightened up, like I’d just had a great idea. “I’ll be going back, anyway,” I said. “I’ll smooth things over.”