Joan stops but does not turn.
“I have a bad feeling,” says Penny. “Feeling in a bad way when I look at you, buttoned up to your neck, in that shirt.”
Joan waits.
“Plus I saw a weird car. You seen it? Over there?”
Joan follows Penny’s finger. Parked near the Rabbit Hutch is a shiny white vehicle with a rental tag on the visor. “What about it?” asks Joan.
“He’s been parked there for hours.”
“How do you know it’s a him?”
“It’s always a him, even when it’s not.”
“What’s weird about it? It’s a car.”
“You don’t see a car like that around here often, do you?”
“I’m sure it’s just a visitor.”
“A visitor.”
“Why not? People have family.”
“I saw a guy in there earlier. Just sitting there, looking up at your building.”
“What kind of guy?”
“Fifties. Chubby. Blank.”
“Blank?”
“You know. No screams on his face, no birthdays, no goldfish, no jokes, no flights. Hard to picture a man like that enjoying the simple things, like a rocking chair. Or a volcano. This was a man who was—I don’t know. He was glacial.”
“Glacial?”
“Cold, cold, far. Doomed.”
“And you gathered that from . . .?”
“Just looked.” Penny shrugs. “You can see a hell of a lot when you look.”
“So you think this man is some kind of—what?”
“All I know is that you can’t trust a man with an empty face. I should know.”
Joan’s bangs collect sweat as she stands on the pavement, anxiety pounding on the door to her evening, begging her to let it inside. Not tonight, she decides. Summer storms are her favorite. Maraschino cherries are her favorite. She might even trim her bangs tonight.
“Just stay safe out there,” says Penny. “Keep an eye out. I’m very intuitive.”
“Thanks.” Joan smiles. “It’s nice to be thought of. I hope you like the stuff.”
She walks across the street to her bronze station wagon, which she inherited from her parents—a rusty malfunctioning machine whose windshield wipers activate every time you turn left. Last year, the door fell off when she tried to open it, and she had to take out a loan to repair it. Her parents neglected the vehicle, and she followed suit; in their household, car maintenance was viewed as a profligate waste of money, exclusively for people with disposable income. The manifestations of this intergenerational neglect are always unpredictable, often funny, never affordable.
Not until Joan unlocks her station wagon’s front door does she remember that she has burned all its fuel. She has two hundred dollars in her bank account and rent due at the end of the month. Debt payments after that. Her savings diminished alongside her parents; an only child, Joan paid for the walkers, buttoning-aid hooks, bed handles, shower grips, hearing aids, urgent-response devices, motion lights, copayments, emergency room fees, pills, surgeries, and hospice nurses. Any product or service that might ease the transition from this realm to the next. After Joan’s parents died, Aunt Tammy often called her to tell her how good she was. How lucky her parents were to have such a loving daughter. “I wish I had a daughter like you,” Aunt Tammy would say. Instead, she had an adult son who often stole from her purse to feed his gambling addiction.
Despite Aunt Tammy’s encouragement, Joan doesn’t feel virtuous about her caretaking; virtue entails choice. Joan helped her parents die for the same reason that she sets humane mouse traps in her kitchen and drops the victims off in the Valley: she’s the only one around to do it, and she finds the alternatives intolerable.
So she can’t drive. So what? She accepts this with flared nostrils and pep in her step and a decision to walk to the grocery store. Never mind the four-lane traffic and absence of sidewalks. Never mind the shin pain and the shootings in the neighborhood—ten per year, on average. Never mind the impending storm and the absence of rain gear. Never mind the glacial man in the white car.
Her limbs function, and she finds this miraculous when she dwells on it. In fact, she finds plenty of things miraculous. Forcefully, she summons her best memories. That time on a red-eye bus when the driver used the intercom to contemplate, in campfire baritone, the wonder of his grandchildren, the way they validated his life as time well spent. As he lulled the passengers with stories, someone began to pass around a Tupperware of sliced watermelon, and a drunk man offered to share the miniature bottles of whiskey from his bag, and Joan felt such overwhelming affection for her species, she feared she would sacrifice herself to save it.
A bad summer storm. Green sky, tornado warning, violent winds. Joan was downtown, leaving work early, briskly walking toward the parking garage where her station wagon waited. On the opposite end of the sidewalk, a large woman in her sixties collapsed. Immediately, two people rushed to the woman’s side, gingerly tending to her, touching her shoulders and face, speaking to her as though she were their mother—a cherished one—and Joan understood that human tenderness was not to be mocked. It was the last real thing.
Dining alone on a blustery Easter night at the only Chinese restaurant in town. When she asked for the check, the waiter said, “It just started to rain. You’re welcome to stay a little longer, if you want.” Miraculous. Joan recalls the existence of dogs, craft stores, painkillers, the public library. Cream ribboning through coffee. The scent of the lilacs near her childhood home. Brown sugar on a summer strawberry. Her father’s recovery from the tyranny of multigenerational alcoholism. The imperfect but true repossession of his life. The euphoria of the first warmth after winter, the first easy breath after a cold, the return of one’s appetite after an anxiety attack. Joan has much to be happy about. She thinks: I am happy, you are happy, we are happy. These thoughts—how she can force herself to have them. Miraculous.
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” Joan asks Penny as she passes her again.
“Obviously,” replies Penny.
Joan twitches. “I believe in it, too.”
“But I’ll tell you one thing for sure: if there are good levels and bad levels, everybody gets sorted randomly. The same way we get sorted in real life.”
“What makes you so confident?”
Penny shrugs. “I’m very intuitive. Like I said.”
“Well. I’ve decided to walk to the store, not drive. It’s such a nice evening for a walk, isn’t it? Hope you stay out of the storm.”
“Good luck, Mama Bangs.”
Penny salutes, and Joan turns toward the grocery store. Because she is happy and would like to substantiate her happiness, Joan hums a popular song, wondering how it got deposited in her head.
Human Being!
At 6:57 p.m. on Wednesday, July seventeenth—166 minutes before she exits her body—Blandine Watkins leaves the Rabbit Hutch and heads to the Valley, wearing a light, boxy dress. The evening is still hot and humid, zipping her into summer. It’s the kind of weather that precedes a storm. The Valley is nearly a mile from the Rabbit Hutch; it takes Blandine about twenty minutes to walk there. For the past couple years, she’d been using a Frankenstein bike she assembled from disparate parts, but someone stole it from the Valley bike rack in March. She spent an unjustifiable amount of time watching those bicycle-building video tutorials, a genre dominated by pale, enthusiastic men. She developed a tender attachment to one of the instructors: benevolent eyes, shaved head, rope necklace, rubber watch, Eastern European accent. A tendency to speak in the first-person plural. Encouraging as a kindergarten teacher. “We CAN do it, even if we are a beginner! I believe we should all of us build a bike in our life!” Remembering the loss of the bike, Blandine comforts herself by recalling the abundant ASMR she enjoyed while watching his tutorials.