Liminal Spacey

It’s dark and cold and raining. I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. 

My head hurts.

I roll my eyes​​, heavy in their sockets, up to look at the lightning rods emitting a faint buzz and pulsing like the butts of dying fireflies where the glass walls meet the ceiling; a poor attempt to beat back the night. When I place my palms on the aluminum bench and lean forward to peer outside, I can see nothing but rain refracting the light. The bench is cold on my hands, not on my butt; I’ve been here awhile. 

Ah. 

A memory of standing outside the box that is a bus shelter on a winding stretch of black road with pale hills stretching into the distance growing increasingly darker as the storm clouds rolled in.

Water has darkened the concrete floor. Made wet my canvas slip-on shoes. I pull my wool-clad legs closer to my body, and only then do I notice the bloody tear of my tights. My kneecaps are crusted red. With the return of another memory comes a prick of pain. 

Ah. 

An expanse of blue sky. Cloudless. The sun on my face and wind in my hair. Legs pumping, I flew down the mountainside, taking wide turns around the bends of the sinuous road until my foot slipped on the pedal. The bicycle wobbled. The tire hit the gravely shoulder and we tumbled, the bicycle and me, end over end, sky and ground swirling like the flush of a toilet bowl, me the waste matter discharged from the bowels of God. 

A wink of violence, then darkness. 

A bus pulls up to the shelter. The brakes squeal in the way they always seem to do, and the chug of the engine quits. A single passenger descends the steps. The bus driver’s stolid face peers over the passenger’s head and our eyes briefly meet before he pulls the lever and the doors close. 

Here. 

My eyes flick back to the passenger, and the cardboard coffee cup he’s holding out to me. 

My fingers twitch, a polite and primeval response to accept what’s offered. To not refuse a stranger. A male stranger with whom I am alone at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. 

No, thank you. 

C’mon. He tilts it closer. It’s not poison, promise. It’s freezing out here. Just something to keep you warm. 

When I don’t move to take it, he holds it up to his mouth and takes a sip. A beat, and then: See? No frothing at the mouth. 

I take the coffee cup if only to hold it to warm my cold hands. 

His mouth curves at the edges in a subdued smile. It’s a nice mouth with a small scar that cuts across his cupid’s bow. He sits down on the bench, leaving a respectable distance between us. I watch him and wait in anticipation of an explanation or for my mind to catch up, but there is no ah moment. 

I do not know this man who catches me watching and raises a brow. 

Have you remembered? he asks. 

Hm? 

Why you’re here.

Oh. The storm. I mean, my bicycle. I try again: I was in an accident. Suddenly, it occurs to me the bicycle is not here with us in the shelter. I twist this way and that, looking,  but it isn’t propped anywhere against the walls, inside or out. 

Right. You told me that already. 

Oh. A beat. Told you?

He’s been here before, I realize. We’ve been here before. I can’t remember, but why else would he be here? Why else would he have brought me coffee?

Are you sure you don’t want me to call 911? I think you have a concussion. 

No, I blurt out. My middle cinches. Don’t. 

Somewhere I’m not supposed to be. I can’t remember. The sun. The bicycle, not mine. I’m not supposed to be here. My dad’s a cop, I tell the stranger. 

He blinks at me. I know. You told me that, too. 

He thinks I’m in San Francisco. 

The man sighs and leans back against the shelter wall. He seems to know this, too. 

My head really hurts. 

I grip the coffee cup tighter until its sides crumple, until the knobs of my fingers whiten with the strain of altering a thing enough to damage but not destroy it. 

What’s so bad about San Francisco, anyway? So what if he finds out and sends you back? 

A mother I loathe. A pretentious school with pretentious classmates and pretentious teachers with pretentious rules. 

I don’t tell the man this. Instead, I watch him. In his mid-30s, I’d guess. A rumpled navy suit, the first two buttons on his white shirt undone, the necktie loosened. His black hair looks soft and curls around his ears, bangs loose on his olive-forehead, nearly in his eyes the color of wet river stones. 

Why’d you come back? I ask. 

Because I told you I would. Because I’m afraid you’ll sit here forever. 

What’s it to you? I don’t ask. 

Instead we sit in silence, listening to the rain, the buzz of the overhead lights.

I remember a party. Stacey Liu’s party. Her voice static on the phone a week ago: Come to L.A., you won’t. What she didn’t know is I was already there. Crouched at the train terminal next to the outlet outside the bathrooms that smelled like moldering bodily discharge, in fact. The day of, I took a stripper bath in the sink, shaved with one heel at a time propped up on the stainless steel counter, and dried my hair under the handdryer—all under the glares of strangers with better places to be. One of which was trusting enough to leave her tote bag of groceries on the sink before disappearing into a bathroom stall. I dug past the bag of apples and box of tampons to the crinkly plastic assortment of macarons. Call me poor, but I always thought macarons where a sweet treat for the wealthy who swore off sugar when they hit puberty because no one who appreciated the real thing would opt for styrofoam wafers with the stingiest smear of buttercream in the center and the bathroom stall was opening, so I grabbed the little meringue cakes and ran. 

Hey!

Pulsing EDM. Plush couches with kissing couples. Bodies on the dance floor flailing about like some sort of large-scale mating ritual and Danby Carter’s hands on my hips. The smell of his aftershave. The rough sandpapery scratch of his near-beard on my thighs. The weight of his body. His breath sour with IPA hot on my face. The tangle of sheets. Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. 

I thought you moved to San Francisco. 

I did, I didn't. I’m still there now, I thought under the haze of alcohol. Don’t tell my parents. I smashed a finger to my lips. Don’t tell. 

A hand on my shoulder, I startle awake to find a strange man standing over me and cringe away, scooching further down the bench. 

You’re passing out. You really shouldn’t fall asleep. 

His eyes search my face and he says angrily for some indiscernible-to-me reason, You forgot again didn’t you? Seriously, you need help. 

I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. A pinprick of panic threads my chest. 

Here comes the next bus, the man says, looking out to the headlights that manifest in the darkness through a light sheen of falling rain. If you won’t let me call 911, at least let me take you to a hospital. 

The panic swells. No. 

Clear blue sky. A quick and violent descent down an embankment studded with pointy rocks eager to crack my head open like an egg. My head. 

I think I’m pregnant. 

What?

My entire body was one big achy bruise as I untangled it from the mangled bicycle I’d stolen from Stacey’s front yard first thing this morning. 

No. No. I’m getting them mixed up. Fuck, my head hurts. 

I could tell by the look on the doctor’s face that it wasn’t good news. She couldn’t even look directly at me as she moved into the room and shut the door quietly behind her and a part of me hated her for that. 

Well? Mrs. Cherry. My mother. Ice Queen, her subordinates call her behind her back and she lets them, wears it as a kind of badge of honor. Always prim and proper and poised, uncharacteristically wrung her hands. Tell us. 

I’m afraid it’s not good news. 

In the car on the ride home, I couldn’t breathe. I told her to pull over but it wasn't until my head was out the window expelling the contents of an Eggo breakfast onto the shiny hide of her Lexus that she swerved to the shoulder with a curse. 

My mother who always has all the answers. You’re going to terminate the baby, she said before I’d so much as stood up, my hands on my knees, a wiggly piece of waffle wet in the corner of my lips.  

No. I ran the back of my wrist over my sour mouth. I’m not. 

Goddamnit. You’re not keeping it and that’s final! It’s you or that baby and I am not going to let you throw your life away. 

It’s the first time Veronica Cherry has put me first. Ha. She hadn’t wanted me to have the baby in the first place, but now she had the perfect scapegoat: a terminal illness, me or this cluster of eight-week-old cells? You need your strength, the doc said. The baby is unlikely to survive the chemo. The radiation. 

And isn’t it my luck that the abortion pill didn’t take?

A smattering of days later, and we returned to the hospital. Me, the sickly. She, Mother Teresa (Kids aren’t supposed to go before their parents, Aunt Gayle says over speaker phone in the waiting room). When the anesthesiologist puts the mask over my face and I’m supposed to be counting backward from 100, I repeat like a mantra what I never had the courage to say to the Ice Queen’s face: I hate you. 

I put a hand over my stomach where there is no longer a cluster of cells that might have grown into a baby had I not already had a rapidly growing something else inside me.

No, I whisper to the rain. Remembering. I have a brain tumor. Stage 4. And I ran away because I won’t give Mrs. Cherry the satisfaction of having me stay. Of saving me. Not when she’s been killing me slowly all this time. Any terminal suffering will be done on my terms. 

The bus pulls up to the shelter. The brakes squeal in the way they always seem to do, and the chug of the engine quits. The door folds open and the man grabs me by the arm. Let’s go. 

No. I try to wriggle out of his grip but he won’t let go. 

C’mon, you’re gonna die here. 

Stop. I said let go of me, I scream, dropping the coffee cup that splits open and spills its tepid contents all over my already wet shoes. I rip out of his grip as the bus driver yells: Hey. 

The faces of the passengers are pressed up against the bus windows. 

The strange man is furious. Fine, he grits through clenched teeth. Have it your way. He gets on the bus, fishing his phone from his pocket. The bus driver hesitates and I wonder if he’ll ask if I’m OK. Instead, his mouth flattens to a line and his eyes return to the road. He pulls the lever and the doors close. 

San Francisco is for socialites to whisk their pregnant daughters away to in the hopes they will be able to better convince them in a strange land to not repeat the mistakes that they made when they were our age. 

L.A. is for beginnings. And ends. 

I step out into the rain, head tilted back to catch the sky on my face. There is no stopping it, the rain, it comes and goes as it pleases. I smile at that. A sprinkle of ether. A kiss from the heavens. 

I am dying, but when are we not? I tell the rain. It doesn’t stop to listen. 

I walk across the road and look back at the bus shelter little more than a blip on the mountainside. A liminal light against the dark. 

Sirens sound in the distance. I guess the man made that 911 call. 

Headlights come around the mountainside. Not an emergency vehicle, not this one. The bus shelter suddenly seeming impossibly far away, I step back until my butt bumps the guardrail and wait. I think the driver will see me. I think the car will slow. I wait until my shadow is thrown flat against the asphalt, stretching in its hurry to get away, and I step out into the light.