“Yes. Thursday anytime after one o’clock. Okay?”
“Sounds good.”
The woman runs her hands over the fabric, counting up all the little cuts and tears from the dogs as well as the abdomen slice and then writes up a little slip and gives me the pink copy. I smile again and thank her for her time.
I’ll get the suit back on Thursday, and Friday I’ll see Liz for the last time.
°
I run all night. All over the city. It pours rain on me everywhere I go, and it feels right. Which is to say it feels sufficiently depressing and epic. I can’t decide if the universe is judging (and punishing) me, or trying to cleanse me for rebirth. Somehow both seem right. As the sun starts to come up I realize that no matter what I decide to do, I have to at least say goodbye, I can’t leave it the way it was on the train. So I head back Clark’s apartment in the rain, my hands stuffed in my jacket pockets. The rain has washed away the blood from my face and my clothes, but I can’t get my hands clean for some reason. By the time I get downtown and near his apartment, I’ve discarded my shoes. The rain has soaked them so thoroughly that they had started to fall apart somewhere in Central Park.
I put the key in the lock and instantly know he’s sleeping in his favorite chair with the lights on. I can hear his low rhythmic breathing much closer than if he’d been in the bedroom, and the apartment door is warmer to the touch of my hand than it would be if all the lights had been turned off at a reasonable hour. I open the door slowly as Joan mews quietly at the crack. She skitters back away from me when my clothing starts sprinkling water on her. I just look at Clark for a while and can’t move. His face, is both calm and somehow also furrowed as if he’s concerned for me even in sleep. The cordless phone and his mobile are clenched in his hands, his laptop open at his feet on the floor. When I finally move again, quietly, to get a towel from the closet to clean up the puddle I’ve left on the hardwood floor, a board creaks and he jumps sky high. Disoriented, he looks at me; I’m sure I’m quite a sight, but as soon as the veil of sleep leaves him he rushes toward me and embraces me, harder than he ever has before. It lasts a long time and when he releases me it’s only to touch my face.
“Are you okay?” he searches my eyes for some explanation.
“I am,” is all I can say. He lowers his hands to mine and holds them. This makes me nervous. He looks down at them and steps back, they’re still stained with blood. This seems to make him think twice about everything he’s been thinking over the past hours. In the deluge of questions that I can see forming behind his eyes, my wellbeing is slipping into the background.
“Bonnie. What’s going on?” he asks loudly. I glance toward Jake’s and Ryan’s rooms at the other end of the apartment. He shakes his head lightly. “They’re not here. They’re away,” he says, clearly wanting to move on with his inquiry. I remove my hands from his and walk to the hall closet to get the towel. He follows me. Joan tails behind us both, concerned. I try to dry off my hair a little bit and take another towel into the hall for the puddle. “Stop, Bonnie. Don’t worry about that now…please…you’re freezing and soaking. Let’s get you out of those clothes.” I stand up from the puddle and take off my jeans. “Where are your shoes?!” He cries out, pointing at my bare feet. I shrug my shoulders, like a kid.
“I don’t know.”
He purses his lips together, trying not to comment, and takes the wet jeans from me. We walk into the kitchen and he puts my jeans in the sink. I take off my jacket and hand it to him as well. When I do he grabs my arm.
“Bonnie!” he cries out, incredulous. I look at him and he searches my face. “What the hell is happening?! I saw you take that knife out of your arm. This cannot be all there is! There’s…there’s no wound…what…what is going on?!” he turns my arm over and back again obsessing over the flawless skin. I look at him, very sad, seeing how this is all going to go, wishing that it could be different.
“It wasn’t so bad as it looked,” I say lamely. He hardens.
“I saw it, Bonnie. I saw it all. That knife was coming out the other side of your arm. How is it possible that there’s nothing? I’ve been imagining you all this time at some hospital getting yourself stitched up, even though I’ve called every hospital in New York and found nothing. Now I see…not only do you look like you’ve been swimming in the East River for the last twelve hours, but you barely have a scratch on you. You have to tell me what the fuck is happening, and you have to do it now!” Clark forces me into facing him, and his eyes are such a strange look of anger and fear and love and revulsion that I can’t bear to say anything. I wrench my arm away from him and take off my shirt, tossing it into the sink with the rest of my clothes. I walk to his bedroom in my wet bra and underwear, Clark and Joan on my heels. I strip off my underwear and pull new, dry clothes from my drawer. “I deserve an answer, Bonnie,” he says between clenched teeth, full of so much emotion, so many different ones he doesn’t seem to know which one to settle on. We’ve come so far in the five minutes since I walked through the door, back when there was only concern for me. I go into the bathroom and lock the door behind me. I can tell from Clark’s breathing that he’s leaning on the door. Joan has managed to slip in with me and is trying to jump up onto the lip of the tub and is falling repeatedly onto her kitten butt, destroying in a series of little experiments, the theory that cats land on their feet. I turn on the water as hot as I can get it, and start scrubbing my hands with the bar of soap. I scrub until they are as clean and sterile as a surgeon’s hands, until there’s just a little nub of soap left, and then I scrub until that nub is gone too.