I got a partial answer at least a few days later when I took my trash out to the dumpster in the alley I share with my neighbors. There, propped against the side, were New Girl’s wooden crutches, yellow ducks still attached. Next to those was a large canvas with a life-size portrait of New Girl—as nude as I had seen her and leaning on those very same crutches. The painting was surprisingly sophisticated and beautiful. The colors were bold and bright—blues, reds, and pinks—and contained a great deal of life and light. I was unprepared for how emotional it made me feel. I hadn’t liked New Girl at all, it was true, but it made me sad to see her abandoned this way.
Without even thinking about it, I picked up the painting and carried it home. I left it near the front door at first, as if I was going to take it out again, but then after a few hours I brought it into the living room. The next day I hung it up next to the TV so that I could see it all the time, even when I was watching a show. I’m not sure and I’ll never know because there were no witnesses, but I think I may have, from time to time, conversed with it—with her—when I was feeling particularly lonely.
Vida came back alone right after Labor Day, and for a few weeks that was how she stayed. But just last week she brought another girl home. This one looks like a thicker, coarser version of New Girl, but she’s also blond. And she’s also missing the bottom half of her left leg. I saw them getting out of the car—Vida in jeans and a sweatshirt proclaiming Hecho en Mexico (the summer of muumuus is over, I guess) and the new New Girl draped in one of those woven blankets you can get for ten bucks in Tijuana. I saw the crutches—the beaten-up ones—and the bandages and the awkward journey up the driveway. The girl said something to Vida as they got close to the door but her words were drowned in the howl of a passing airplane.
Yes, I suppose all of us have trouble with our neighbors from time to time. And, yes, there is something very strange going on next door. But I am now convinced that New Girl was right—I should mind my own business.
After all, the dogs are gone and Sheila is never coming back.
INSTANT KARMA
BY TAFFY CANNON
Rancho Santa Fe
So okay, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. We’re all clear on that one. But what about a vulture?
Laverne Patterson probably doesn’t consider herself a bird of prey whose specialty is hanging around waiting for something to die before ripping into the carcass. And in fact the analogy is imperfect; there’s no creature in nature quite like this woman. At least I hope there isn’t.
But it’s close enough. And time is short.
A lot’s been written and sung about what it’s like to have nothing to lose, much of it poignant and evocative. Most of those authors and songwriters still had plenty to lose, however, hadn’t even come close to hitting that sweet spot yet.
I have.
Bull’s-eye.
My name is Tina and I am going to die very shortly. I know, that’s a little too Twelve-Step cute for the announcement, but it happens to be true and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. As these things go, I’m fortunate that I’m not going the way some other people I knew already have. I’m still pretty lucid, retain control of my bodily functions, and have the bittersweet satisfaction of knowing that I did everything right and so did my medical team.
It just happens that mine is one of those rare and relentless orphan diseases for which there isn’t yet the whisper of a cure.
I am single, childless, and without siblings. My parents were killed in a plane crash while I was in college, leaving me a settlement that seemed sufficient to last a lifetime if I were careful, to allow me choices I might not otherwise have had. No need to conserve now, and not too many choices, either. I’m just glad I took some really cool trips in my early twenties, because I don’t have the energy for that kind of bucket list now, though I did buy a hot black Porsche after the diagnosis.
I hated the endless unctuous sympathy when my parents died so I made an early decision not to share my diagnosis with coworkers, or with folks I thought of as friends who were actually acquaintances. My symptoms were never obvious and I telecommuted a lot anyway, so it was easy to hide all the medical appointments. I’ve gradually circled the wagons till there’s nobody inside but me and my cat, and I have arranged for her perpetual care when I go. Some charities will also be very happily surprised.
Nobody’s going to miss me all that much, however, which is sad if you think about it, so I choose not to.
Once you make the acknowledgment that you’re about to die, a form of letting go occurs that is far more grand and terrifying than skydiving or bull riding or walking a tightrope over burning coals. After that, an equally grand and terrifying window opens that most folks don’t ever have the blessing or misfortune to see.
Final possibilities.
You might call it justice. Or liberty. Or merely opportunity.
Whatever it is, it’s how I happened to be planning to murder a woman I have never met.
I certainly didn’t think this would be my life when I was twenty-nine. As a teen and college student, I anticipated an interesting career, maybe a husband, possibly a child, certainly a bright and burning future. I got the first one, and for a while I also had the last, and maybe it’s just as well that the two in the middle never came to pass.
Because not long ago, I sat across the desk in a generic doctor’s office in an anonymous three-story medical building across from Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, getting a death sentence.
It wasn’t put in those terms, of course, and I was given to believe initially that there was a great deal more hope than actually turned out to be the case, once I pulled myself back together after a few days of hysteria and started doing my own research. I’m a researcher by trade, a writer and editor of web content, and it didn’t take long to discover exactly what the doctor had failed to mention.
It was very, very bad. As in invariably fatal. Palliative measures could extend my life a bit, of course. There was even an upcoming protocol for an experimental drug that I could and did apply for, but that was on the East Coast and only accepting a handful of patients. Also, I’d probably be dead before it began.
The diagnostic process had been going on for so long by then that I was ready for a definitive prognosis, even a bad one. Or so I thought until it happened.
I’d endured what felt like hundreds of needle pricks and biopsies and humiliating procedures. I’d been poked, X-rayed, lasered, MRI’d, biopsied, ultrasounded—everything but dunked in a vat of water to see if I swam or drowned, the way they used to test witches in the Massachusetts Colony.
Sometimes I think it would have been easier if we’d just started with dunking, except that as a native San Diegan, I’ve been in the water all my life and could certainly swim, which would have declared me guilty. Or, in this case, afflicted. Whereas a decision by drowning would have meant that my body actually wasn’t in its final hours, not even close, and that I didn’t need to die at all.
This is way beyond catch-22.
Instant Karma came about because of a dreadful illness contracted by my high school friend Molly Donovan, a young woman whose talents and gifts would have been really depressing and intimidating if she hadn’t been such a genuinely nice person.
Molly died two years ago of a brain tumor. A glioblastoma multiforme, the baddest of the bad in a family of outlaw cells I have always found particularly horrifying. Brain tumors are terrorists who attack your centers of insight and reason, who fly straight into the control tower supporting your motor skills, who reprogram the axis of your body’s global communication systems. And glioblastomas do it really, really fast.