Shapeshifted

I closed my laptop’s lid and curled into a ball on my couch, and when Minnie came over to snuggle me, I didn’t push her away. I must have fallen asleep there, because the next thing I knew my phone was ringing in my hand.

“Hello?” I mumbled. I hadn’t looked at the incoming call on purpose. Then I could pretend it was someone who could help me, calling me back.

Instead I got the peeved voice of the receptionist at the sleep clinic that I’d left hanging for my night shift. “I don’t suppose you’re coming in to work tonight?”

“No,” I told her, and hung up.

* * *

There was no way to get back to sleep after that. I couldn’t believe that my mother had cancer. A couple of months. Less than a year. By this time next year, I’d be … without a mom.

It was too horrible to grasp. I tried to do things to distract myself, seeing as feeling bad for myself or her wasn’t going to help. I read books without reading them, flipping pages at random. I tried to watch a comedy, but the whimsical acting felt like an insult to my current life.

As I wandered around my place, I wished I had someone to talk to about things. I didn’t mean to be a loner, but that’s just how it was. My zombie boyfriend had left town months ago, and I couldn’t see the werewolf I’d briefly dated—one-night-standed—again, after the shun. Same thing for Asher. I was tempted to call him up again regardless, but leaving repeated messages on his voice mail would be too pathetic for words.

I just wasn’t good at keeping track of people. The fact that no one ever seemed to keep track of me either was not lost on me. I’d never known how to relate to the real world, or myself; I’d just run from crisis to crisis trying to even things out. Fix my parents’ divorce, fix my addict brother, fix my patients at work—with all the placating and atoning I was doing, in a previous life I must have been an asshole. I’d managed to maintain a vague sense of self via helping people, and in return it gave me a feeling that I had a semblance of control.

But losing my mom would send me reeling. I could feel it. Everything beginning to spin away.

I went back to my room and poured the Ambien out of my pill bottle. I popped two of them, drank a full glass of water, and surprise! It was eight A.M.

I woke up normal, only remembering that I’d been upset about something and what was it, when memories hit me in the stomach like a physical blow. I reached for the Ambien again and spilled them out to count them.

I could just stay in bed. They said that Elvis had a diet where he took sleeping pills so he wouldn’t get up and eat. I wondered how long that’d work for me. Just because I’d lost fifteen pounds didn’t mean I was thin—as long as I drank some water with my pills, I could probably keep going on stored fat for an easy week. I’d be like Sleeping Beauty, up until I got evicted.

If I remembered right, I’d sort of quit my job yesterday. It wasn’t too late to call in and play the I-just-found-out-my-mom-got-cancer excuse. They were nice to me there, even if the work was slow.

I tried to imagine myself going in tonight, though. Sitting in the small video booth, listening to people snore, thinking about my mom, all alone.

That wasn’t going to be healthy for me. Worse even than double-Ambiening it for a few day-nights.

I shoved myself to sitting and reached for my computer.

There were tons of nursing jobs on Craigslist, mostly wanting experience that I didn’t have. I sent my résumé out anyway, scattershot, just to give me something to do. And then I cleaned my place—it was bigger than the old one, but funkier too, so my rent had stayed pretty much the same after I’d moved. The hardwood floors meant that Minnie’s hair had collected in tufts in the corners of the living room. Suddenly hunting all of these down seemed monumentally important, and I set myself on the task industriously.

Anything to do something. Just not to think.

I was chasing down the last of these when my phone rang. I picked it up, dust covering my face. “Hello?”

It was one of the places I’d sent a résumé to earlier. The person on the far end of the line had a slight accent, and wondered if they could ask me some preliminary questions.

“Sure.” I opened up my laptop and brought it back to life so that I could use it to cheat if need be. “Where are you guys located?” I asked, to buy myself some time.

She gave me an address, and I plunked it into my browser first off.

“Yes—two years of prior hospital experience. No, I don’t speak Spanish.” Some things weren’t worth lying about when they could be easily disproved. My browser hopped into map mode and pulled up the street view of the Divisadero clinic. I saw it had a huge Santa Muerte mural painted in front of three elaborate crosses on its wall and a dramatically shadowed numeral seventeen. The woman on the phone began making polite excuses to get off the line with me.

“No, wait, please. I’m very interested in working there. Public health has always been a passion of mine.” Completely not borne out by my résumé or working experience, but hey. I shrank the map program and saw just how much farther south Divisadero was, and made an assumption about how much of a pay cut it would be. There couldn’t be that many other qualified nurses applying. I zoomed back in quickly. The mural on its side was huge, and her outstretched skeleton hand seemed to be beckoning me. “I can even interview today.” I crossed fingers on both my hands. Please, this time, just let me get what I want.

She inhaled and exhaled loudly, and gave me a time two hours from now.

“Thank you—public transportation? I have a car—if you say so. Okay. See you then.”

I hung up the phone with her and paused to really think. Despite the fact that I’d slept normal hours last night, I wasn’t used to being up during the day. I was covered in dust and cat hair—and I’d just volunteered to be at an interview in two hours. But it was an idea. The mural seemed more stagnant than it had barely a minute ago; now that I wasn’t deluding myself, her outstretched hand was more pointing up the street than calling out to me. But still. Nothing said I actually had to take the job. I might as well see, right? And two hours was long enough for a shower and coffee.

* * *

After my shower I blow-dried my hair and got dressed in a just-past-the-knee skirt and a blousy summer-weather-appropriate top, hoping it would say interview but not mug me, and walked to the train station in the pre-noon sun. Today would be as hot and humid as every other day this summer had been, the sun breathing over Port Cavell’s shoulder like a stalker.

While I felt confident that no one actually wanted to steal a Chevy from last century, the Divisadero clinic was more than a little into what I’d been trained to think of as the bad side of town. No wonder she’d suggested I take public transportation.

* * *

The fourth leg of the train ride was the longest. As the train snaked aboveground to where the fifth and sixth stations were, the entire population of the train rotated through the car, everyone but me. When we reached the sixth station, I got out alone.

This was an open station, and just below it in the shelter the train platform provided was an open-air market of sorts. There were stands with fruit piled up, and ropes strung from side to side of the bottom of the pavilion, knotted off and lined with shirts. There was a cart with a grill and something good-smelling cooking on it. I took the next few steps down.

The platform above provided some shade, and maybe the trains created a passing breeze. There were women pulling small children behind them. Smoke from the grill caught a crosswind and made me cough nervously. Everyone around me was speaking Spanish.

People were looking at me, registering that I was there, that they didn’t know me, and then looking away. I didn’t feel I was in danger, but I did feel like an outsider. I got my bearings while trying not to turn my back completely on anyone. I’d been too paranoid for too long to let my guard down now. According to the map in my head, the clinic was two blocks up. I set off down the sidewalk while listening for footsteps behind me.

The road was lined by the walls of run-down businesses, a few painted fresh white over graffiti. Others were turquoise and pale pink. There were some cars parked outside, though none that would have shamed my Chevy. The road itself could only questionably be called such, full of potholes and patches of gravel. The sidewalk wasn’t much better.

I looked back where I’d come from. Who knew there was this whole other world that I’d never been to before, or even seen? I thought back to the train. Had I taken that line before? Yes. It’d been a while, but I had—I’d just never gotten off at this one stop. It was like Europe—you were sure it was there, but you mostly only saw it on TV.

Kind of like cancer too.

A car pulled up beside me, and the music playing inside it turned off. I elbowed my purse a little closer to my chest.

“Need a ride, lady?” asked the man inside the car. I thought about ignoring him. I didn’t want to be the type of person who thought poorly of anyone, but I also didn’t want to wind up a sad morality tale that women told to other women on dark nights. Still, it was one P.M., and there wasn’t anything in my purse worth stealing.

I leaned over. “I’m just walking to the clinic. It’s up that way, right?”

“Yeah. Just up the street. Tell Hector I say hi.” He nodded and turned his music back on, veering back into the center of the street and heading up to proposition another pedestrian.

Just a gypsy cab—a cabbie without a license. I relaxed a little but kept walking quickly. There were men standing on a corner, outside what looked like a liquor store, but that was farther down. I saw the clinic itself, its name at the top of one wall, the letters painted on where the original ones had fallen off. I realized I was facing the wall that had been on the street view—but that the mural was gone, replaced with off-white paint that hadn’t been weather-beaten by an entire summer’s sun. Santa Muerte was gone.

I wondered what that meant for me.

I stood for a moment, trying to compose myself. Just how much of a fool’s errand this would be. An early-teens kid standing outside the clinic door walked over to me. He looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, judging me, and then he clucked, shaking his head. “You’ve got susto bad, lady. You won’t find help for that in there. You need to come with me and see my grandfather.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">