I put the letter from the lawyer aside and lay down on the sofa. I should have felt something—a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that—if I were in a movie—would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life’s most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video footage of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn’t hit. These weren’t my memories. I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don’t. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose. So I called the estate lawyer.
“What would make more money?” I asked him. “Selling the house, or burning it down?” There was a breathless pause on the phone. “Hello?”
“Selling it, definitely,” the lawyer said.
“There are some things in the attic and the basement,” I began to say. “Do I have to—”
“You can pick that up when we pass the papers. In due time. The professor moves out mid-February, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know what transpires.”
I hung up and put my coat on and went down to Rite Aid.
It was cold and windy out, snow brushing up off parked cars like rainbow glitter in the noon light. I could smell the coffee burning as I passed the bodega and was tempted to get some for the walk to the pharmacy, but I knew better. Caffeine wouldn’t help me now. I was already shaky and nervous. I had high hopes for the Ambien. Four Ambien with a Dimetapp chaser could put me out for at least four hours, I thought. “Think positive,” Reva liked to tell me.
At Rite Aid, I browsed the videos: The Bodyguard, The Mighty Ducks, The Karate Kid Part III, Bullets over Broadway, and Emma, then remembered, heartbreakingly, again—the truth was cruel—that my VCR was still broken.
The woman working the pharmacy counter was old and birdlike. I’d never seen her before. Her name tag said her name was Tammy. The worst name on Earth. She spoke to me with a clinical professionalism that made me hate her.
“Date of birth? Have you been here before?”
“Do you guys sell VCRs?”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.”
I could have made the trek to Best Buy on Eighty-sixth Street. I could have taken a cab there and back. I was just too lazy, I told myself. But really, by this point, I think I had resigned myself to fate. No stupid movie would save me. I could already hear the jet planes thunder overhead, a rumble in the atmosphere of my mind that would rend things open, then obscure the damage with smoke and tears. I didn’t know what it would look like. That was fine. I paid for some Dimetapp, the Ambien, a tiny tin of Altoids, and strutted home through the cold—vibrating but relieved, the pills and mints now rattling like snakes, I thought, with each step I took. Soon I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep.
A dog walker passed by with a team of yipping teacups and lapdogs on whiplike leashes. The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazed me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter, but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good.
“Some flowers just came for you,” the doorman said as I walked back into my building. He pointed at a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the mantel over the nonworking fireplace in the lobby.
“For me?”
Were the roses from Trevor? Had he changed his mind about his fat old girlfriend? Was this good? Was this the beginning of the new life? Renewed romance? Did I want that? My heart reared up like a frightened horse, an idiot. I went over to look at the flowers. The mirror hanging on the wall above the mantel showed a frozen corpse, still pretty.