Just One Year (Just One Day 2)

I run my finger along the cracked crystal.

“Are you going to keep it?” she asks, her tone gone sour.

I nod. Céline starts to protest, but I hold up my hand to stop her. I barely have the energy to stand. But I am keeping this watch.

Céline rolls her eyes, but she also shuts down her computer and helps me up the stairs. She calls out to Modou, who is now digging around behind the bar, that she is taking me home for the night.

“What happened to your friend?” Modou asks, popping back up.

I turn back toward him. The lights are dim and Céline’s arm is around me for support. I can hardly see him. “Tell her I’m sorry. Her suitcase is in the closet. If she comes back. Tell her that.” I want to tell him to make sure she looks at the postcards, but Céline is yanking me out the door. Outside, I was expecting darkness, but, no, it’s still daytime. Days like these go on for years. It’s the ones you want to last that slip away—one, two, three—in seconds.

The watermark from where the vase smashed into the wall is still there. So are the piles of books, magazines, CDs, and precarious towers of vinyl records. The picture windows, which she never bothers to cover, even at night, are wide open, letting in the endless, endless daytime.

Céline gives me a glass of water, and at last I take the painkillers Dr. Robinet gave me before I left the hospital. He advised me to take them before the pain came on, and to keep taking them until it subsided. But I was afraid taking them earlier would dull whatever wits I had left about me.

The instructions on the bottle say one pill every six hours. I take three.

“Lift up your hands,” Céline instructs. And it’s like yesterday, when she was making me change my clothes and Lulu walked in on us, and I’d thought it cute that she tried to hide her jealousy. And then Modou had kissed her and I’d had to hide mine.

I can’t lift my arms over my head, so Céline helps me off with the hospital scrubs. She stares at my chest a long time. She shakes her head.

“What?”

She clucks her tongue. “She should not have left you like this.”

I start to explain that she didn’t leave me like this, not knowingly. Céline dismisses me with a wave of her hands. “No matter. You are here now. Go into the bathroom and clean yourself up. I will cook something.”

“You?”

“Do not laugh. I can make eggs. Or soup.”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I have no appetite.”

“Then I will make you a bath.”

She draws me a bath. I hear it running and think of rain, which has stopped. I feel the drugs starting to work, the soft tentacles of sleep slowly tugging me under. Céline’s bed is like a throne and I collapse onto it, thinking of my airplane dream earlier today and how it felt slightly different from the usual nightmare. Right before I fall asleep, one of my lines—Sebastian’s lines—from Twelfth Night pops into my head: “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!”

At first, I think I’m dreaming again. Not the airplane dream, a different one, a good one. A hand trailing up and down my back, slipping lower, lower. She kept her hand on my heart. All morning as we slept on that hard floor. This hand tickles toward my waist and then goes lower. Bruised, not broken, the doctor said. In my sleep, I feel my strength returning.

My own hand finds her warm body, so soft, so inviting. I slip my hand between her legs. She groans.

“Je savais que tu reviendrais.”

And then it’s the nightmare all over again. Wrong place. Wrong person. Wrong plane. I jolt up in bed, push her away so hard she tumbles to the floor.

“What are you doing?” I shout at Céline.

She stands up, unapologetically naked in glow of the streetlight. “You are in my bed,” she points out.

“You’re supposed to be taking care of me,” I say. This sounds all the more pathetic because we both know I don’t want her to.

“I thought I was,” she says, attempting a smile. She sits down on the edge of the bed, pats the sheet next to her. “You don’t have to do anything but lie back and relax.”

I am wearing nothing but my boxers. When did I take off my jeans? I see them folded neatly on the floor, along with the shirt from the hospital. I reach for the shirt. My muscles protest. I stand up. They howl.

“What are you doing?” Céline asks.