Before and After

warning: violence, depression, drug abuse

Do you ever feel that the world is unfolding without you? That you’re on the detective side of the glass, but what you’re peering into is not a drab interrogation room filled with brown tile and a single scorching bulb, but rather the rhythms of the people you know and the goings on of existence that used to give you meaning? On that side of the glass there is color and warmth and belonging. On this side, in your heart and tattooed across your face, there is endless night, numbing cold, and an otherness that can only be described as an unwanted stranger.

              Condensation on the train window and raindrops that dither away in complex deltas. Foggy clouds drawn from my breath. Hazy, through the mist, is the frolicking outline of a little girl. She’s got on a rain jacket, pink, and cute rubber boots, yellow. Her hair, remarkably full for a girl so young, is an auburn waterfall that cascades from beneath her hood. In her hand and over her head, she twirls an object of delight. It’s an origami crane.

              I made a flock of them this morning with hundred-dollar bills.

              I wipe the fog from the glass and smile; she’s flying it like it’s an airplane, like there’s a fighter pilot in the cockpit. Furrowed brow and duck lips narrating turret guns.

              Dooge-dooge-dooge-dooge-blow! Nyeeeahhhh-prghhhhhhh!

              Must have brothers. She topples the crane wing-over-wing and drops it recklessly into a puddle. Her arms shoot out and she puffs out her cheeks, mimicking an explosion. A fit of giggles engulf her and she scoops the crane from the muck to continue the imagined combat closer to her parents. They’re beckoning her away from the tracks.

              There was a time when I wanted nothing more than a little girl of my own.

              I glance down into my lap. Age comes for the hands first, doesn’t it? Gone are the smooth palms and delicate fingers; they’ve been replaced by bony digits and the tensed chords of previously unknown tendons. All the weight we’ve carried written on our skin. So many things that bite, burn and scar.

              There’s a tingle in the back of my ear and a memory that floods in like a vision. Warmth spreads in my chest, rolls from the shoulder blades down to the tips of my toes. Lightness. Oxygen. In bed with him. Saturday morning and nothing to do. Goodbye rage; you don’t exist here. Blue-gray eyes and a tussle of black hair. A gaze full of gravity that simultaneously anchors and takes flight.

              Lucas. My husband.

              We did everything together. Fun things like travel and concerts, but the mundane too, grocery shopping and car maintenance appointments. Even the things we did alone we did together. Reading foot-to-foot on the sofa, thrillers for me, nonfiction snoozefests for him. I would paint at the kitchen table while he played guitar on the porch, chord strokes and brush strokes combining in our little make-believe world of culture, a place we carved out on our own, one we scrapped and worked so hard for. A home with a gravel driveway and a winding crack in the bathroom wall that we covered with a floating shelf and three janky vases I sculpted in a pottery class at the community center. For a time we rotated fresh flowers continuously. But Lucas grew tired of dead, drooping stems so we replaced them with dried arrangements made by a lady up the road.

              We’d listen to the rain and make love. Tilt on the porch rocking chairs and drink wine when we were bored, an album mumbling on the record player through the window. When Lucas worked around the house, I made it a point to wear jean overalls and nothing else. There’s nothing so satisfying as feeling desired. Going from a crossword at the dining room table to heaving passionately on top of it. Spread wide and him plunged to the depths of me. Intensity that goes on forever.

              The doors whoosh open and more passengers board. Two twenty-somethings, brothers probably, the way they jostle. An old man struggling with an unwieldy suitcase that one of them notices and helps stow in the metal storage overhead. The old man thanks him and sinks into his seat. Heavy breaths and flushed cheeks.

              And then a woman, years younger than myself. Beautiful, soft skin that’s radiant. High rosy-glow cheekbones and a black long coat cinched at the waist. She’s a serious person but an optimistic one too, a woman that men chase. I glance at the brothers. Both of their antennas are up. They’ve puffed their chests and straightened their shoulders but she pays them no mind. Ego wounds.

              She sits in the seat across the aisle and settles her things. She fetches a laptop from her bag and removes the air pods from her ears. The volume is loud and I recognize the song. It’s one of my favorites actually.

Sometimes I can’t believe it

I’m moving past the feeling.

Sometimes I can’t believe it

I’m moving past the feeling and into the night.

So can you understand

That I want a daughter while I’m still young?

I want to hold her hand

And show her some beauty before this damage is done.

But if it’s too much to ask, if it’s too much to ask

Then send me a son.

              It was my fault we couldn’t conceive naturally. Women blame themselves. Don’t blame yourself! An abnormality in my uterus that would never allow for it. Perfectly functional ovaries though, so the doctor steered us to IVF. Egg and sperm capture and then fertilization into embryos. Then a search for a surrogate mother to carry and deliver.

              “How much will it cost?” I asked. Cold table nipping my ass through the medical gown.

              She paused before answering. “Most surrogacies taken to birth will run at least a hundred thousand.”

              One hundred thousand. We had jobs. We made money. But we certainly weren’t wealthy and our insurance was in-case-you-get-sick-and-miss-a-month-of-work coverage. They weren’t benefits that provided for fertility. Also, the state we lived in didn’t foster a culture of alternative routes to parenthood, so employers mostly got away with it. Jesus and guns and football on megaphones but ho-hum silence for women with defective reproductive organs.

              That’s how I felt. Defective.

              But Lucas reassured me. He calmed me down like always. It wasn’t going to be as easy for us as it was for other people (our friends, on their second and third, making announcements and posting pictures like procreation is a cinematic event), but we would get there. God, all the same photos too – ultrasounds and sunsets and white dresses and unbuttoned jeans and round bellies, then hospital beds and tiny blankets and blocks with month intervals of life. We’re so glad you’re finally here! Tory finally has her little brother! Coming soon: big boy number three. And outside of public consumption always complaining. It’s so hard. It’s so thankless. I’m always so exhausted. Like they’re not the entirety of your joy and purpose. Like there aren’t people tearing themselves apart for the same opportunity.

              A horn blast from the train, departure imminent in the next few minutes. If you’re on the platform and intend to board, move your ass.

              The woman opposite me opens her laptop and syncs it with the free Wi-Fi. Surely she works for a big, important corporation (important in revenue, nothing else) and has a virtual private network to connect to. Or maybe she’s more righteous and is hammering hours away in service of a nonprofit with an admirable mission but for a paltry salary, the expensive coat and shoes a ruse, a disguise to deceive the world into seeing what she wishes to be. Does she know who she wants to be, someone that young? Can she feel the closing of possibilities? The cementing of her current situation as something long-lasting, something she never intended? Does she have someone waiting for her at home? Is that something you can still learn through conversation or does that belong solely to the internet where we curate identities for total strangers and people we like far less than we admit? And what’s more important: who we are or who we say we are? Does anybody care anymore?

              Oof. That’s a tangent.

              So we started making plans and saving. And then Lucas lost his job.

              He was a software engineer at a startup specializing in the design of innovative medical devices, mostly next generation prosthetics. He liked the founders, it was good money and he could work remote. But tariffs went up and all of their partners production was based in China. Then AI happened, whatever the fuck that means, and the company downsized considerably. Lucas was let go on a Friday. We spent the weekend getting high and straddling each other.

              I don’t code. I’m a people person, a nurse for joint-replacement surgeries with a side gig doing bedside care every other weekend at an elderly community of condominiums down the road from the hospital.

              Money got tight. Real tight. Still I demanded we push forward with the surrogacy. He was reasonable. I wasn’t.

              “Let’s just catch our breath.” Him, exasperated. “I’ll focus on interviewing and every second I’m not I’ll drive ride share so we can at least tread water for a bit.”

              I agreed.

And then I had the procedure done to capture my eggs anyway. Six grand for the medication and another five for the procedure. A fat bill out of left field that slammed our joint statement and sparked two days of ragged fighting. I didn’t care. I wasn’t listening.

              “It’s already done Lucas and we can’t waste it. So get your ass down to that office on Monday and jerk off into the cup. Unless you’re okay paying for it a second time when you finally have a job again.”

              I’ve never seen him that angry. But in an instant it all bled away from his face and sadness was all that remained. He grabbed his car keys from the table. “Fine.”

              “Where are you going?” I shouted after him. Really, I wanted to apologize. I was scared and angry and hurt. I should never have said that to him.

              “I don’t know”, he replied, tiredness in his eyes. “Maybe a movie. Clear my head.” He shut the door and I slumped to the hardwood floor, sobbing into my knees.

              That was the last time I would ever see him.

              The little girl is back with her crane. She glides it more delicately through the air and simulates the flapping of wings. I think she’s realized it’s a bird.

              Lucas walked into the theatre for a 7:15 showing of Oppenheimer. At 7:42, a deranged man wielding an automatic rifle equipped with a high-capacity magazine entered the auditorium and began firing indiscriminately into the seats. I won’t say his name out loud. Never. Four prior hospitalizations related to psychotic episodes, two at least stemming from drug use and resulting violent confrontations. He was diagnosed manic bipolar and at the time of the murders had enough methamphetamine in his system to kill three non-regular users. No motive was ever determined.

              I don’t remember the phone call. I never saw his body; they gave me the option but strongly advised that it would be too traumatic. I don’t remember the funeral. Or the weeks and months after. I drowned my sorrow in vodka and battled insomnia with dangerous amount of Ambien.

              There’s no adequate way to describe the darkness. I think a way to put it, to help people understand, is that one moment you believe in order in the universe. Morality and fairness. And there exists joy and reverence. The next moment, none of it. It evaporates instantly. Gone is anything that resembles life. The truth, you realize, is that we are all simply random collections of atoms, crashing and churning against the brick wall of existence. Life itself leads nowhere, and those atoms will run out. Some people are blessed with their lives and memories. Others are obliterated by freak chance and large-caliber bullets.

              Going nowhere. My mind stalking me like a ghost. It’s hard to know what a caged, crazed animal will do when finally the hatch is released. I remember hearing whispers and voices, but nothing getting in, not really. Not my friends. My family. His parents. The revolving door of grief counselors.

              I went to disgusting bars and left with strange men, to feel anything at all. Then that got tiresome and I’d let them do me right there in the bathroom. I’d tighten my skirt, do my hair in the mirror, and take off to the next bar.

              I tired of men and went to strip clubs instead. I paid the dancers for sex in the back room, glistening gold flakes and soft breasts and body glitter. I stopped going to work. The allowed me to resign with dignity due to my circumstances.

              The voices of people that loved me grew louder. I pushed them all away.

              Then one night I was attacked. Same story – wasted from an encounter at the bar, stumbling into a moldy hotel room for a fleeting thrill. He was nice at first. Handsome, considerate. We rolled into bed and started fooling around, everything watery from the liquor.

              Then he wrapped his hands around my throat. I told him no and hit him in the chest. He clamped down and suddenly I could no longer breathe. The world started to fade.

              I grabbed the liquor bottle from the night stand and crashed it into his temple. His eyes rolled back and his body went limp. I heaved him off of me with my last ounce of strength and collapsed on the floor, struggling to breathe. I crawled to the bathroom, panicked, and locked the door. I was sure he’d get up. Sure he’d kick the door in and kill me. My keys lay on the sink counter. I made weapons between my fingers and inched open the door.

              Motionless. Nothing at all.

              I tiptoed forward and that’s when I saw the blood. It was cherry red and there was tons of it. I felt for a pulse – none. I listened for breathing – silence. I sat on the carpet and cried.

              Down the hall was an ATM. I withdrew the max and bought a train ticket. I ditched my phone and credit cards. Cut my hair. Dyed it. I put three states behind me before exiting.

              They always ask: “what’s the catch?” They try to appear coy. Men will do anything for a pretty face and tight body.

              The catch is that I’m ruined forever. There’s no soul left and I don’t feel bad for what I’m about to do to you. You’re not like Lucas. Kind, loving, gentle, compassionate. Plying a girl with alcohol to get laid – that’s despicable, not courteous. Don’t worry; I won’t drug or hurt you. Being a woman doesn’t give me permission to be a predator. But go ahead, you have as many tequilas and whiskeys as you want; mine are going in the well when you’re not looking. Sure, we can go back to your place. I’ve only had a little, of course I can drive.

              What’s the catch? It’s that I’ll replace the Rolex on your wrist with the zip ties in my purse after we’ve rolled around and turn down the lights (and maybe one sleeping pill, just to help. It’s over the counter, don’t you dare lump me with the roofies creeps). Then I’ll clean out your wallet, make a max withdrawal from the lobby ATM with your debit card (a labeled note in your phone? What are you six years old? And who leaves their phone on the restaurant table when they use the bathroom anyway?), and rifle through the center console of your Tesla to find the spare cash and Ray Bans that reside there too. Your clothes and phone I’ll take with me and pile in the dumpster out back. I’ll top the pile with my dress and heels and toss a sparked lighter over my shoulder. The catch is that tomorrow my hair will be red (not jet black), my accent will be less drawl (and more Brooklyn), and I’ll be sipping wine on the Maryland shore or dozing off in a Catskills cabin while you contemplate filing a police report, which, ultimately, you’ll decide against. Because how could you possibly explain it to your wife?

              “What’s that?” The little girl on the platform, fifteen minutes prior. The prick had a roll of hundreds in his glovebox. I spent the blue part of the morning folding cranes and ditching them in puddles as I plodded to the train. You never know what a damaged animal will do.

              “Oh, nothing,” I reply. “Just making silly little things.”

              Her parents are busy buying tickets at the machine. She’s studying the crane in my hands.

              “Last one,” I tell her. “You want it?”

              She smiles and nods. I put it in her hand and head for the train door.

              “I like your pink coat.”

              Another horn cuts through the air and the wheels start to chug. I take one last look at the little girl through the dark lenses of the sunglasses, through the window of the train. She waves goodbye and I do the same. I hope she gets to decide the woman she becomes.