“Define pain,” she said, and laughed. But he remained serious, and she shook her head. “I told you, it sounds like fun.”
He said the pills would cost her. After a couple of offers, he finally accepted a bra, barely worn when they had moved here and almost forgotten. Frida knew Cal would never notice its absence.
“I’ll throw in the garlic for free,” August said, reaching into the carriage to stuff the bra into a duffel bag. “The bulbs I’ve got are a little shriveled, don’t know if they’ll take anyway.”
“A steal!” Frida cried. She wouldn’t have to tell Cal a thing.
From his pocket, August pulled an amber-colored plastic vial, the prescription information torn off. “Put out your hand,” he said. He shook out two white pills onto her palm.
“Two seems a bit much,” she said.
He handed her a canteen. “It’s water,” he said, and Frida threw one of the pills back before she could change her mind. She bit the second pill in two and downed half of it. The other half she handed back to August.
“Gee, thanks,” he said, but slipped it back into the vial.
Frida was ready for the high to slink upon her. It reminded of her being a teenager, when she’d nurse joints until the world felt different. Once she was rightly stoned, she’d go and make dessert. By high school, baking had become a kind of obsession. She’d plunge her hand into a bowl of silky, sifted flour, so high she thought she was communing with the stuff, and she couldn’t wait to taste the cake at the end. She liked to bake all night, and at some point her mother would walk in and tell her to finish up, it was time to sleep. She often missed her morning classes, and her mother was too crazed to even notice.
“Do you always have drugs to trade?” Frida asked. Already, she felt the world going loose and dreamy.
August shook his head. “Rarely, and if I do, it’s this playground stuff.”
“I do feel like a kid again, even if this isn’t weed.”
She closed her eyes, opened them.
“Don’t tell Cal, okay?” she said.
“Tell him what?” he asked, and she caught her reflection in his glasses. She looked drawn and tired. Jesus, what was she doing? Endangering the life of her child? Oh, Frida, she told herself. Relax.
They were standing on the other side of the carriage now. She put her palm on the mare. She felt a peace emanating from the center of her body. A mellow.
“I was much less tired looking when Cal and I met.”
She wanted to complain about their stupid fight, tell someone, but from August’s pause she could tell he wouldn’t care to hear any of that. She’d wait him out.
“How did you two meet?” he finally asked.
His question was innocuous—maybe he wasn’t really interested in the answer—but now she would have to talk about Micah.
“Through my brother,” she said. “They were roommates in college.” But Plank wasn’t just any college, and that would need explaining, too.
“Your brother. Huh.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Older or younger?”
“He’s dead.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, and that was probably obvious to August, who, for a moment, remained silent.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She didn’t want to answer, but she knew she would, and that she’d tell him everything.
“He was a suicide bomber,” she said.
“Shit.”
She could tell he was truly surprised. Perhaps August had been a vagabond at the edge of civilization for so long that, for him, history was news.
It was true: Micah had strapped dynamite to his chest and blown himself up. He had killed thirty-one people and injured many others. Everything else about him was merely postscript, and the same probably went for Frida. She was the sister of a suicide bomber, the guy who blew himself up at the Hollywood and Highland mall, the man who had yelled, “Listen!” before pushing the button that set off the timer, which set off the explosion.
“He was the first to do it in L.A.,” she said, “which made him…notable.”
After Micah, she explained, people were killed at the supermarket, at all the other malls, at gas stations. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, Memphis. The good cities, all of them rendered violent and terrifying by men and women who martyred themselves in the name of—what?
“I thought I got over it,” she said.
“But you didn’t,”
“Right, I didn’t. Not really. I put on a brave face, you know? For my parents.”
“Understandable,” he said.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him.” She paused. “Cal brought him up this morning. That’s why he’s on my mind, I guess.”
Maybe now she’d tell August about her possible pregnancy. He’d be especially nice, maybe offer her some free stuff. Or he might be mad she’d taken the Vicodin. Cal certainly would be.