I remember being confused. If Alice didn’t know about my visits to Shannon’s house, why was she always mad at me? I remember thinking it wasn’t fair, even though I was the one who was lying.
Then there was the night of the party at our A-frame when Alice told my buddy Gunther how long it would take the dashboard of a new car to off-gas, explaining why she was getting the engine replaced in her 1992 Subaru rather than buying something newer. I’d heard this rant about off-gassing before. The gist: how the smell of new plastic could weaken the integrity of her eggs. Gunther was listening — he’s a good sport — and he glanced over at me to see what I thought of my girlfriend’s logic, and when he saw my blank expression, he turned politely back to Alice, and I laughed. Just a little chirp of nervous laughter. And Alice said, “You know what, Steven?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I’m sick of being laughed at.”
“You’ve misunderstood.”
And she’d had a few glasses of beer so she took a step closer and yelled, “No, Steven. That’s wrong! I haven’t misunderstood.”
“What did I do?” I whispered. No drinks for me because I ate two of Alice’s muscle relaxants earlier in the evening for a toothache which had been bothering me for the last few days. I glanced at Gunther. He was looking at Alice, concerned.
“You have some serious problems,” she said.
“Maybe I don’t fully understand the whole off-gassing concept.”
“Don’t condescend to me. You know what?” and while she searched for the right words, her neck and cheeks flushed, and I was shocked by how self-possessed and serious she was (I probably didn’t notice this enough) standing in front of our friends in her clogs, her collar bones jutting out in that thin blue cotton dress over pants, with a few strands of sweaty hair skittering across her forehead. She’d told me once what it was like to be in the field-hockey huddle — she’d been co-captain at Williams — barking at her teammates to play smarter. My mind was floating a bit. I blinked and she was still standing before me with watery light-blue eyes. The silence didn’t last long, but everyone in the room had quieted to hear her next words: “…. you’re … the fucking … joke!”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed then, too. So Alice tossed her drink at me (mostly ice cubes) and instead of responding directly to her I said, “Does anyone have a napkin?” I was trying to gauge our friends’ reaction to the scene.
Gunther went to the kitchen. Others averted their eyes. No one cracked a smile. After Gunther returned and handed me the paper towels, I said to Alice, “I’ll be right back” and walked toward the bathroom. But I passed right by the bathroom and went to the mudroom, put on my boots and walked out the front door.
I could have taken the Corolla but I didn’t want to leave Alice without a car — hers was still at the dealership — and we didn’t live far from Rutland, so I started walking. The air was summery for May and town was downhill, so the idea of walking didn’t seem daunting. I’d never walked to town before. I thought it would give me time to think.
There weren’t many cars on the road — it was already midnight. Down near the intersection with Sawyer Road I noticed my boots felt a little snug. Each step had my toes ramming into the rubber at the front. When I got to the next streetlight I looked down and saw I was wearing black boots, not my own brown ones, but I’d already walked almost a mile and I didn’t see going back uphill to exchange boots.
Here was the thing with Alice. She was basically a very good person. A little intense, but kind-hearted, smart, blessed by her Hungarian mother’s rakish charm, quick-witted, fiery. She ran the Choral and Harpist Arts Society, established in Vermont in 1952. They had 80 singers and three harpists and they gave concerts throughout the year. Alice was an alto of above-average talent and she was a fantastic fundraiser, dedicated to building CHASe’s reputation and getting them more recognition outside the state. I’d seen her for the first time at one of their concerts, several years earlier at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Rutland. I was raised Catholic but I don’t attend Mass anymore, though every December I try to attend some kind of Christmas event. The harpists were plucking their colossal golden harps on stage, the singers were gliding up and down the aisles humming and holding candles. Then one lone choral member — Alice — piped up from the back of the church, the first soloist in their humorless version of “Silent Night.” She was wearing a shapeless robe, all of them were, but I felt as though I gained some insight by listening to her silvery voice. Her name was in the program. I waited a few hours before calling her.
I told her I wanted to get her over to the McLeod School, where I teach history, for a concert and perhaps some singing or harp workshops with the kids. I really thought this was a good idea, though I knew the music teacher would have been annoyed that I’d extended this invitation without consulting him. Luckily Alice didn’t take the offer too seriously. We met for coffee. She had a boyfriend at the time. I told her a bit about the school, and she asked me about my classes, why I had chosen to pursue a career in education. I told her I loved kids, which was true, though when I said the words they sounded fraudulent, even though Alice seemed to believe me, sipping her coffee with round open eyes. It took a while, several meetings with her at the Jamboree Cafe, to start feeling more like myself. After the first date, we stopped talking about getting the Choral and Harpist Arts Society over to the school, but we made plans to see each other again. Alice told me about her family, her brother the architect, her sister the sculptor, her parents who started a small outdoor equipment company in southern Vermont when she was a young girl. For conversation’s sake I asked her if she’d had a favorite family hike, and she told me about their regular trips to the swimming hole at Ferry Falls, a place where skinny dipping was encouraged. I tried to imagine the leader of the Choral and Harpist Arts Society swimming naked with her parents. We didn’t talk much about it — I feigned nonchalance — but it opened a door for me. I told her I was just beginning to become a better teacher. For years I’d been expending far too much energy thinking about how the kids regarded me — whether or not they considered me smart, entertaining, or nice. I was making a shift toward believing the only worthwhile professional goal should be to give the kids what they needed, to teach them the material. Alice seemed to understand the breakthrough I described. We slept together for the first time the following week. She ditched the other guy.
Part Two
When I left our A-frame and started walking downhill, I was surprisingly even-keeled. All I could think about was wanting to get a burger at the new place on Drawer Street. At first, imagining Alice’s anger about my departure from the party was thrilling. In the light of the street lamps — there weren’t many up on the hill, but there were some — I could see the little lime-green leaf buds on the trees. I was still several miles from Drawer Street, and the floating feeling from the muscle relaxants was beginning to fade. That’s when my toes became more bothered by the small boots and the throbbing pain in my teeth radiated throughout my entire mouth. Halfway to town and I was starting to think the pain was stemming from my decision to leave Alice at the party. If I’d stayed, my feet wouldn’t be hurting, and Alice’s muscle relaxants would have kept my mouth untroubled.
And this worthless way of thinking led me to realize — suddenly, mid-stride — I wasn’t walking to Drawer Street for a burger; I was making yet another visit to Shannon’s house. Three miles into the walk I discerned this, and for a few paces I didn’t dwell on the pain. Shannon had been Alice’s best friend, they’d grown up together and they both sang in the Choral and Harpist Arts Society, though it had been six months since they’d spoken. Neither would tell me exactly why they were fighting, but I remembered a comment Alice had made in February when she was last at our house for dinner. It started when Shannon said she didn’t like one of the new harpists, Greta Pitman. Nothing personal, she said, but as a musician Shannon found Greta Pitman too somber and restrained. It’s rare for Alice to hear any criticism about the CHASe, even from her closest friends, and Alice defended Greta Pitman’s by saying her stern plucking was the consequence of a monastic lifestyle, and I think Shannon assumed Alice was teasing her for being stubbornly isolated — she hadn’t had a boyfriend in a while. I’m fairly sure this was the basis of the fight.
For the record I have never slept with Shannon and I have no plans to sleep with her. She’s a teacher at the McLeod School, like me, and she’s artsy with long legs and seems not as neurotic as Alice. She’s simply never had much interest in romantic relationships with men. In January, though, she decided to have a child. On her own. This issue came up around the same time that Alice and I were talking about getting married and having a kid. We decided we weren’t ready. Probably someday but not now.
But Shannon was convinced that she wanted to have a child as soon as possible, and she didn’t want to adopt — she wanted to find a sperm donor. She and I talked about this at great length in her classroom at school; she taught English, and airy Sanderson Hall was usually empty after classes, when the kids were playing sports and the faculty were coaching. Shannon and I didn’t coach in the winter so we often had the building to ourselves. In leather armchairs beside an oval oak table we talked about her specific plans to have a baby — she had already received hand-me-downs from her sister, she knew her mother would be able to babysit in the mornings during the week, and the school had a generous maternity leave — and then I’d go home where Alice and I would have an irritatingly abstract discussion about the “definition” of our relationship.
It was about six weeks after the feud with Alice began that Shannon revealed a few more particulars about her actual plans. She wanted to have a sperm donor whom she knew, someone who might be available to answer questions the child would eventually have about family history, etc, but someone who wouldn’t hover inappropriately. Someone who would understand his role as a provider of an X or a Y chromosome and who would stand by as a resource but who wouldn’t get too carried away. She knew it would be awkward if the donor were to want to come to all of the birthday parties and graduations. So Shannon asked me to be this donor. In Sanderson Hall, room 214, with the hum of the janitor’s vacuum cleaner downstairs, she sprung it on me. Initially I worried that she’d chosen me because she was fighting with Alice. But it didn’t take long to brush this aside. Deep resolve welled up in me. As a man, regardless of my situation, I couldn’t refuse Shannon’s request. Though I knew I couldn’t tell Alice, I said yes, Shannon, I’ll be the father of your child.
Sperm donor, she said.
Yes.
Part Three
Passing the Sunoco station on the outskirts of Rutland the toothache blurred my vision with tears. The nauseating pain seemed to have dark origins. I could still see the leaf buds in the trees but not distinctly, only as shadowy masses. But I kept a decent pace. In comparison to my mouth, my feet were hurting less — I was on the flats now and my toes weren’t crammed as tightly against the front of the boots. As I walked past the Motel 6 at the corner of Hazelton, I thought about getting a room, because it was now 1:30 a.m. and I’d walked five miles and my body was dog-tired, though even a worse thought than walking back uphill to the house was cooping myself up in a musty motel room all alone with the mouth pain. Also, I suspected Shannon was wondering why I hadn’t stopped by her house earlier in the day, as scheduled; I’d needed to go shopping for the party with Alice. Shannon had told me that for the next three days, she wanted me to come over as often as possible. She’d been paying close attention to her temperature. For superstitious reasons she didn’t say it out loud — ovulation — but I knew that’s what was happening.
I stopped at the 7-11 and bought a packet of Advil and as I left the store I wondered if my stride, the pounding of my undersized boots against the asphalt, was bringing more pulsing pain up into my jaw. The last few blocks — she lived just northwest of the town green — I was in some kind of non-thinking meditative zone, the various pains in my body, high and low, balanced out, and I hummed quietly to myself, Bum, Bum, Bum, Bumpity-Bum.
All of the lights in Shannon’s house were out. I hesitated before pressing my finger to the bell.
Through the gauzy curtains in her front windows I could see a light blink on in the back of the apartment. A few minutes later, Shannon came to the door in an unflattering green robe. Her hair was flat against her head and her eyes were barely open. “Does Alice know you’re here?” she asked.
“No.”
“The party’s over?”
“How’d you know about the party?”
“Gunther told me,” she said.
I stepped into her dark living room and banged my foot on one of her filing cabinets.
She said, “Should we do it now?” I could smell the cat box and maybe some tea — peppermint? — she’d brewed earlier in the evening.
“Shouldn’t we? I haven’t been here since … ”
“So we definitely should. Give me a minute. I was sound asleep.”
“I’ll make it quick,” I said.
“Aren’t you teaching tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t thought much about it. I could always set them up in small groups and have them discuss the war. They were good kids, easily excitable.
“I hope you can get some sleep tonight,” she said.
“I’m sorry to wake you up,” I said.
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “I gave you an open invitation. I’ll get the stuff.”
She pulled the shades, which is what she always did when I came by, and she walked into the kitchen. When she returned she yawned but her eyes were brighter — she’d pulled her hair back with a red bandana. Shannon was a real hippie, a maker of pottery, and though she was smart and beloved as a teacher, she had a gangly, unpredictable quality — spacey and loose-limbed. She smiled and handed me the magazine and the cup. It was the customary smile she gave me–a mischievous smile, with a quick eyebrow raise — when she handed me the magazine and the cup, because it was an awkward moment, and it would have seemed strange had she not smiled, but strange also if she had just given me a standard, straightforward smile, so she was forced to turn the smile into a little joke.
I had mixed feelings about the magazine. Not that I have any moral issue with pornography, exactly, but it just seemed odd to me to seal the deal — to help in the conception of Shannon’s child — while looking at smut. It’s not the kind of story you want to tell future generations. Not that I would necessarily be telling future generations anything. So the middle ground I took was to stand in the bathroom with the door closed and the magazine propped up unopened in the sink. I looked at the cover: a girl wearing a captain’s hat and an Air Force jumpsuit, with the zipper pulled down to her bellybutton. She looked a little like Diane Keaton. It was helpful to have this image of the girl in the captain’s hat to propel me toward thoughts of Diane Keaton. Closing my eyes while thinking about Diane Keaton felt slightly more wholesome as a conception story. Diane Keaton with large breasts unzipping herself from a jumpsuit. The pain in my jaw faded for a few seconds and I had to open my eyes toward the end so I’d get everything into the cup — Shannon said the optimal amount was over 3cc.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, the air felt hot on my face, and I handed Shannon the warm cup with the same kind of playful smile and quick eyebrow raise she’d used. She said, “Awesome, Steven. I think we’re really hitting it straight on. I’ll know soon if it took.” She had the plastic syringe in her other hand.
“Should I come by tomorrow after school?”
“I’m at a yoga retreat for the weekend,” she said. “How about lunchtime? I’ve got a key to the girls’ locker room.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Are you okay to drive?”
“Totally,” I said. I didn’t want to alarm her by telling her I’d walked. “It’s just my mouth is kind of fucked up. Something’s wrong with my teeth.”
“If you need a dentist, I know I good one. Dr. Keith,” she said. “You should see if you can get in with him after school. He’s cheap.”
I hadn’t heard of him. “Teeth by Keith,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Part Four
When I left Shannon’s apartment I felt really depressed. I know that happens sometimes after jerking off, but this felt especially difficult. I couldn’t find it in myself to head back up the hill, so I walked the two blocks to Route 7 and stopped at the Little Robin Diner, where I often picked up coffee in the morning on my way to school. I rested my legs sitting in the corner booth, staring at the round silver lid of the sugar dispenser, the salt and pepper shakers, the square, perfectly-designed jelly packets. For a few loops of consciousness before the pain howled back, I had the chance to think about how far away I was from the A-frame and what it meant to be keeping a secret from Alice. She could be a handful but she was generous and caring and in her heart-of-hearts, forgiving. I was also trying to reenact in my mind the brief conversation I’d just had with Shannon, because it left me feeling empty. I know I’d woken her up, but even so.
I wondered if Alice was sleeping. I turned on my phone. There were several voice messages from her.
First, Where did you go? … people are still here … Mike Dimpfl was just saying he wanted to talk to you … I told him I had no idea where you were … did you leave the house? … I’m sorry I yelled at you. Then, Okay, people are leaving and I don’t know where you put their coats … call me. And in the third message: I don’t know why your car is here … please turn your phone on. And in the fourth message, I’m going to bed … I’ve been looking for you in the woods for like an hour … this is stupid … you know what? … damn it … I’m turning my phone off and going to bed … damn … will you call me? … seriously.
The clock on my phone read 2:39 a.m. I called her.
“Where are you?” she said. She sounded wide awake.
“I’m at the diner,” I said.
“I’m coming down there,” she said, and she hung up.
I tend to focus on the negatives. Alice was sometimes irrational. She made a weird face when she washed the dishes. She didn’t like comedies. She’d leave a post-it note for me on the trashcan when it was full instead of just saying, the trashcan is full. But as I sat there in the booth I felt relieved to know she was on her way, and I felt deep gratitude that she hadn’t yet given up on me. She was absolutely right, I was a fucking joke. Somehow I’d forgotten this. She had plenty of reasons to be mad at me — even if they couldn’t always be pinpointed — and I had almost no reasons to be mad at her. She’d given me a leather belt for my birthday even though she was a vegan, and yet still I was deceitful and unappreciative. We had good sex together — sometimes a little repetitive but who can really complain about that? She liked being on top, grinding her pubic bone into mine, which may not sound great but for some reason it worked well for both of us. What a fool I was for walking out of the party and not telling her where I’d gone.
I sat there staring at the metal door of the diner, imagining the moment when she’d walk in — I’d jump up and embrace her and tell her everything: I loved her, I wanted to get married, I loved her, I wanted to have children, I loved her, I’d made the mistake of helping Shannon get pregnant, I loved her.
The diner was empty and an hour passed and Alice didn’t show. I called her back and her phone was off. Even though Alice knew what I meant by “the diner,” I called information to get the number of the only other diner I knew about, in Castleton, but they weren’t open. I called school and left a message for the headmaster’s secretary, telling her I had a dental emergency and I couldn’t work.
Emanuel, a cook at the diner I’d played basketball with, woke me up in the booth and offered me a place to lie down out back. There was a little dirty breezeway behind the kitchen where the propane tanks were kept beside a stack of wooden pallets. He set one of the pallets on the concrete and covered it with a layer of dish rags. He brought me a stack of white aprons to use as a pillow. Back there it smelled like fake maple syrup. I spread my jacket over me like a blanket.
I lay with my eyes open, my head pounding, staring at the miniature tin roof above the back door.
Soon the dusty blue dawn arrived. I could hear cars pulling up out front and more and more voices inside. The smell of fake syrup intensified and made me hungry and sad.
Then Alice was standing over me in her full-length orange parka — I couldn’t believe I’d been able to fall asleep on the pallet — looking at me as though she couldn’t make sense of my face, her brown hair wet from the shower. She looked radiant, but angry.
“There you are,” she said.
“I thought you were coming down to pick me up,” I said.
“I wanted to make you wait.”
“I’m sorry I left the party.”
“That was horrible, Steven.”
I sat up. “I want to marry you,” I said.
She stared at me, shaking her head. “Aren’t you going to school today?” she asked, looking like she was going to cry.
“I called in sick. My teeth — there’s something wrong with my teeth.”
There were a few different ways of phrasing it, and they ran through my mind then: The reason I’ve been distracted is I’ve been helping Shannon … get pregnant and I’ve been donating sperm to someone you know but I plan on stopping immediately. But then I feared it was not the time or the place to say these things, so I figured I’d tell her in the afternoon, or at some point over the weekend, after the pain in my teeth had been addressed.
Part Five
Alice had an early morning rehearsal with CHASe so she drove me to Dr. Keith’s office, a small ranch house in the middle of a half acre of new blacktop. “I left the dishes for you to clean up,” she said, and she kissed me at the corner of my mouth.
There was a tiny plot of dense dark green grass in front, like a mini-golf course. The sun had come up, faint orange, and I sat on the stairs of the porch in the beautiful light. Then I got sleepy again and moved to the grass, lying once more on my back and closing my eyes. The patch of grass was just big enough for me to recline with my arms outstretched which is how I prefer to sleep.
When Dr. Keith finally fit me into his schedule — about four hours later — he brought me back to a mint-green chair, and with his fat striped tie tucked between buttons of his shirt, he clicked his pen light and peered into my mouth.After his assessment he strapped my forearms to the chair. I turned away as he slipped a needle into a vein on the top of my hand. He pulled the needle out, planting the IV tube, which he taped in place.
“You need to pull them all at once?” I asked.
“The third set of molars are vestigial,” he said. “They helped us when we were in the caves, chewing meat. When was the last time you saw a wooly mammoth?” and he wheezed out a perfunctory little laugh. I felt like a hideous cretin in front of this perfectly groomed man with his soft-looking hair, his sharp shirt collar, his close shave, his well-muscled body. I imagined him standing beside his weightlifting friends at the Y, tightening his belt and jotting notes in his training log. He reclined my chair. “What I’m saying, is: you’ll be better off when you wake up. And after that, who cares? Very little swelling. This set of teeth, you don’t need. Okay?”
“Do you have yours?”
“Mine came in straight,” he said, and opened his lantern jaw, pulling his fat tongue back to unveil two impressive horseshoe-rows of obedient choppers. His breath was papery, archival. He slipped the needle into my IV line. “Remember when you used to sleep until 2 p.m. as a teenager? This is the good stuff.”
I was worried it wasn’t going to be strong enough; I’d watched a show once about a patient who’d heard the crackle of his own bones during a hip operation. I missed Alice, her lovely wet brown hair. The room was bright and the colors of Dr. Keith’s shirt and tie matched the colors of the room, and then I heard something that sounded like a faucet opening wide, and there was a deep puddle of thick rainwater, an elm tree, bobcats, diving lake birds, and then total darkness.
“Welcome back,” said Dr. Keith, bending down in front of me so that we were eye level. His face was tan. “Stubborn fellas, your 17 and 16. But you’re aces, now.”
I glanced around the office. There was no evidence that anything at all had happened since I’d last had my eyes open, though the veins in Dr. Keith’s arms were bulging. I looked for the big tools he’d used, but all of the counters were clean.
I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t.
“You can just sit there for a minute. Then I’ll bring you to the little room.”
The little room was the size of a phone booth, with a small puffy chair in the middle. It wasn’t really a room, exactly, but a cordoned-off part of the hallway, thick maroon curtains hanging from the ceiling. My legs were half asleep, and my belly was warm. “We’ll let you just sit there for a while to enjoy the landing, Steven. Don’t put your tongue in the holes. Matty will come get you.”
In the little room, I felt for my face and it was there, intact, a little puffy, but not too misshapen. I owed a number of people a huge debt of gratitude. First of all, Dr. Keith. His work as an emergency dentist was noble and indespensible. I stumbled out to the hallway, where Matty, his assistant, spotted me. He corralled me back into the little room. “I need to speak with Dr. Keith,” I said.
Matty said, “You’re just high.” Matty was skinny, Italian, and looked like a sophomore in high school, though he was probably much older.
“Fine,” I said. I felt full of laser-sure determination. “Can I speak to him?”
“He’s gone for the day,” he said.
“Can I write him a note? I just want to thank him for the work he did. I don’t feel any pain at all.”
He gave me a phone-message pad, and I composed my letter on the back of seven or eight of the little sheets, so that each sheet contained five or six words. But after I assembled them in my lap they didn’t make much sense. Matty came by and said, “I’ll tell him you were glad he fit you into his schedule. How’s that?”
“Okay,” I said.
“You left part of your consent form blank, dude,” he said. “You didn’t tell us who’s coming to get you. You need to have someone come pick you up.”
“I’m on foot,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter, bro. You need someone to pick you up. At least, you know, tell me you do — for insurance purposes.”
“Can I use your phone?” I asked.
Matty told me he’d bring me the cordless, but he wanted to let me chill out for a few minutes, first.
I reclined in the chair, its leather cool on my neck. I closed my eyes and remembered camping with Alice the previous fall. Her uncle was rich and they ran a dairy farm for fun just outside Waitsfield. We camped in a hayfield near the farm, and the next day we bushwacked through brambles and saplings to the top of Durham Mountain. It had been raining for a week, but we saw small bits of clear sky through the canopy of overlapping tree branches. I stepped on a hornets’ nest and got stung eight times on one leg, thinking I’d snagged my ankle in a barbed-wire fence. Along the way we would sometimes rest against a smooth gray beech tree trunk. Later, when we got to the bottom, Alice had this nostalgic memory of catching frogs in the pond beside her uncle’s house, so we stalked them quietly in the grass at the edge of the reeds, and I pointed out the frogs to her and she tried to catch them before they jumped. She caught one, let it go, and then we went inside her uncle’s house and made huge sandwiches.
The tense frogs, floating weightless on their lilipads, the little patches of sun and blue sky between the tree branches, the swollen red marks left on my leg by the hornets, reaching the top of Durham Hill, the sturdy beech trees.
Matty brought me the phone. I needed to call Shannon first, because I hadn’t shown up at school and I hadn’t been able to meet her in the girls’ lockerroom, and she was leaving on her yoga retreat. I just wanted to tell her — something. That I hoped she’d have a baby soon. That I needed to talk to Alice about it. That the chances that Alice and I would stay together were slim, but that I still needed to talk to her about how thoughtless I’d been. I called the teachers’ lounge in Sanderson Hall but when the janitor answered the phone, I told him I was calling about the sneakers I’d left beside the long radiator by the windows. He said the sneakers weren’t there, and he asked if he could check the lost and found for me. I told him no, I’d check it myself on Monday.
In the warmth of the little room I realized I was still lying. I wasn’t too hard on myself, I just closed my eyes and called Alice. I thought to myself, she’s my first great love. It would be years later when I’d finally learn how to adore her — but that wasn’t until long after we’d parted ways. Alice, the pitch-perfect, careful, above-average alto, left her job at the Choral and Harpist Arts Society after we broke up and moved to Manhattan where she married Gunther’s brother, a hedge-fund manager. They have two little toe-headed girls.
Her phone rang and rang, and when it stopped, I left a message: I’m down here at Dr. Keith’s office. Feeling much better. Had all my wisdom teeth removed. Isn’t it weird — I didn’t know that’s what it was? Anyway … could you come and pick me up?
I was ready to leave the little room, but I waited for Matty to retrieve me. When he did, he pulled the curtain aside, and in the dimmed lights of the office hallway, he looked like an amateur magician unveiling his final trick. He held the curtain in one hand and his windbreaker and the ring of keys in the other. “Here we go, dude,” he said.
“Thanks for your help, Matty.”
“You might want to rinse your mouth out one more time. Your teeth have a ton of blood on them.”
I felt fantastic, but when I got into the bathroom I saw my dark eyes, sallow cheeks, and ghoulishly red teeth. I sloshed some water around in my mouth, felt an ache toward the back teeth but heeded Dr. Keith’s advice and kept my tongue out of the holes. After spitting into the sink, I flashed my teeth again in the mirror. Better. I slapped my cheeks with my wet hands and didn’t look much more alive, but there wasn’t anything else I could do. I stepped back into the hallway and followed Matty out of the building. I stood beside the steps of the office as he locked the door. “You find a ride?” he asked.
“She’s on her way,” I said.
“Take care, bro,” he said, flashing me a peace sign.
In the west, storm clouds skirted the sky. The first raindrops were beginning to fall, fat dollops dotting the parking lot, accompanied by that famous metallic smell.
