felt terrible. The alcohol was wearing off.
‘I feel pretty good,’ she said, trying to smile.
‘Did you go to the hospital?’
Kristina remembered clambering up the hard ground, just to avoid going to the hospital. ‘No, I felt okay, so I came home.’
Jim became agitated. ‘You felt okay so you came home?’
Kissing Jim on the cheek, Kristina said in her nicest voice, ‘I’m okay, Jimbo.’ But her arm, swollen by her side, betrayed her. She tried to move it to show him, and failed. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’
Albert got up. ‘I’d better go and see how Conni’s doing.’
‘She’s okay,’ Jim said, not looking at Albert. ‘She’s waiting for us. Maybe we should all go down.’
Kristina managed a pasty smile. ‘Why don’t you two go on ahead? I’ll be right down.’
Albert didn’t say anything, nor look her way; he just walked out of the room, taking Aristotle with him. Jim looked at her accusingly for a second and said, ‘Yeah, fine,’ and then left, too.
Kristina waited a few seconds to make sure they were way down the hall and couldn’t hear her before she locked the door and collapsed on the bed.
She lay there for what seemed like hours. Her eyes were opening and closing and she was looking at the lightbulb burning in the middle of her ceiling and wishing it would shut itself off, so the room could be dark, dark like it was in the car, in the middle of nowhere, when she thought she was dead. Now as she lay on her bed, she wondered why God had spared her, why he had spared her certain death in a collision of such suddenness.
It was the closest she had come to death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had come to her, looked into her face, and galloped away. It wasn’t the first time she had seen them. When she was twelve, she had fallen off a wall into cold water. She was a good swimmer, but fear paralyzed her. She couldn’t move her arms or legs, couldn’t even scream for help. She just went down without a fight, gulping for air and feeling her lungs fill with water.
And last year she had seen them again on her bridge, when she tumbled down to what she was sure was certain death. She had survived that too, but lived her life prepared at any moment to meet God, adding up the tally of her life every time it snowed, and she, drunk beyond reason, praying under her breath, walked the ledge on the bridge, her hands outstretched.
She didn’t want to die. However, most of all, she was scared that it wouldn’t be God’s face she would see upon meeting her master. ‘I have only one master on earth,’ she whispered, ‘and I’m trying to exorcise him from my life because he’s no good for me, but he won’t let me, he’s stronger than me, and he won’t let me leave him.’
She opened her eyes and touched the temple that had had the piece of tempered glass wedged in it. I feel pain, she thought. Do dead people feel pain? Do they feel tenderness, anger, regret? Profound regret?
Do they feel love? A love more overwhelming than summer air?
I’m alive, Kristina thought, because I still feel pain. ‘I’m not ready to die,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not done living, I don’t want to die…’
I need a drink. I need another, and another and another. I need to pour it all over my wounds to numb them, to forget them, to not feel pain.
Leaning over she reached for Southern Comfort and then fell back on the bed. With her good hand, Kristina unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle Comfort over her head. Closing her eyes, she poured the liquor over her face. Some of it got into her mouth, and some of it got into her nose. But some of it got on her cut, too. It stung then numbed her bruise, and that’s what she wanted. She poured the rest on her shoulder.
Kristina dragged her aching body from the bed and put on a track suit. The track suit’s biggest advantage was that it wasn’t the same jeans and sweatshirt in which she had faced the darkest unknown. Kristina had always believed one should be well rested and nude - as newborns - to face one’s darkest unknown, and she had been neither.
Her friends were waiting for her downstairs in the Hinman lounge. Albert was reading a textbook and taking notes. Jim was writing. Conni was biting her nails.
‘Hey,’ Kristina said weakly.
They looked up at her.
‘Krissy, what happened to you?’ Conni got up immediately and went to Kristina, peering up into her face. ‘Jim told me you were in an accident. I was so worried.’ But those were only words. Conni didn’t look worried. She looked bitter. She looked as if she was trying to contain anger with a fixed smile.
‘I’m all right,’ Kristina said. ‘Really. I’m fine now.’
‘Accident?’
‘Yeah,’ Kristina said. ‘I crashed the car.’ Kristina figured if she said that often enough, she soon wouldn’t want to cry.
She tried not to show she was unsteady on her feet. She felt herself moving with deliberate slowness toward the cake, as if in a fast-forward search on a cheap VCR, with all the horizontal lines on the screen. And soon maybe someone would say, ‘Geez, this is awful; I want a four-head model.’ And turn her in.
They all stood up, Aristotle barked, somebody lit the candles. Kristina didn’t count them, but it looked like a lot of candles. About twenty-two, she guessed. She noted that no one had baked her a cake. This cake had been bought at the Grand Union on Main Street. Pepperidge Farm German Chocolate Cake. So what if it was her favorite and everyone knew it. Nobody had baked her a cake.
Last September when it was Jim’s birthday, Kristina had knocked herself out to make his favorite lemon meringue pie. The egg whites took an hour and three attempts because she wanted to show Jim she cared.
Kristina stood in front of the lit candles, in front of the kind of cake she bought often for herself, and dimly heard someone say, ‘Make a wish, Kristina.’
She thought of her Mustang, and of Albert pressuring her to go to Canada and about to be three hundred miles away from her for Thanksgiving - about to be three hundred miles from her forever, really - and of Jim, wanting her all to himself and not wanting her at all, and of Howard in New York, and of her mother, lost, a million miles away, and of her dead father, and of herself nearly dead too, without a decent coat.
She thought of the pipe music from Edinburgh, and she closed her eyes, bent over the cake, and blew, thinking, I hope Donald and Patricia Moss let Evelyn keep her babies…
Then she sat down.
Aristotle nudged her in the calf. Kristina sluggishly cut the cake. She gave the first piece to Jim with a labor-camp forced smile. She gave the second piece to Conni without a smile. The third piece she gave to Albert without even looking at him.
Aristotle nudged her in the calf again. She smiled down at him under the table, cleaned the knife off with her thumb and index finger, and put the fingers under Aristotle’s nose to lick.
‘Krissy, aren’t you having any cake?’ Conni asked her.
The alcohol’s magic was wearing off. She
