Life Blood --X---Page 32



I headed on back downtown, planning to take a bath, change clothes, and then recalibrate my game plan. Maybe, I thought, I ought to just go up to the editing room at Applecore, try some rote work to help tranquilize my thoughts.
But first things first. About halfway there, at Thirty-eighth
Street, I pulled over and double-parked by a Korean deli, and
surveyed the flowers they had out front, an array of multicolored
blooms that virtually blocked entry to the doorway of the tiny
grocery. Azaleas, chrysanthemums, birds-of-paradise, but I
wanted the pink roses. At ten dollars a bunch, they seemed the
right touch. I dug out a twenty and picked two.
Still standing on the street, I pulled them to me and inhaled
deeply. As far back as I could remember, I'd always loved the
scent of roses. I'd never really thought myself pretty, the natural-
blond often-dyed-brown hair notwithstanding, but just having
roses around somehow made me feel that way. I wanted to be
engulfed in them, especially any time confusion threatened to get
the upper hand.
Five minutes later and I was at Twenty-first Street. I'd arrived.
My refuge, my one-bedroom cocoon. Time to collapse into a hot
bath, wonder why Alex Goddard had given me illegal drugs, and
contemplate roses.  I was looking for a parking space when my
cell phone rang. No, don't bother, I told myself. Enough intrusion
for one day. Then I remembered I'd sprung for the caller-ID
feature, and I glanced down at the little liquid crystal slot. It was a number I happened to know, Lou's place downtown. One eye still on the street, I reached over and picked it up.
"Finally got you," he boomed. "Where the heck are you?" "I just got home from—"
"Yeah, I know where you been. Dave told me." He paused, as
though he was holding off on some important announcement.
"Hang on a sec. There's somebody here might like to speak to
you."
I thought about Lou's makeshift digs, lots of "heirloom"—worn-
out—family furniture he'd lugged along with him. Sarah and I used
to play on the couch, and it still had a dim mauve stain where I'd





once dumped a glass of "grape" Kool-Aid on her head when she was six. Whatever else, definitely not a Soho look.
        Then I heard a whispery voice.
"Hi, Morgy."
It was a tentative utterance I'd heard only once before, when she was waking up after falling off a playground swing. She'd been knocked out cold for a moment and I'd been frantic, wetting a handkerchief in the nearby fountain and desperately rubbing it over her face. When she came to, she'd gazed up into my eyes and greeted me as though we'd just met.
My God!
Before I could recover and say anything, Lou came back on. "We're practicing eating chicken-noodle soup. And we're trying to do a little talking. Why don't you come on down? She asked about you earlier this morning, said, 'Where's Morgy?' "
"Lou! This is incredible!"
"You gotta believe in miracles, right? Just come on down."
        "Is she . . . God, you've got it." My hopes went into orbit as I
 clicked off the phone and revved my engine.
I could have swamped him with a lot of questions then and
there, but I immediately decided I wanted to see her first, with my own eyes. I still couldn't quite believe it was true. On the other
hand, a weekend partial recovery was not totally beyond the
realm of medical possibility. With a coma, so little is understood that anything's possible. Lou was right. This was definitely a
weekend of the unexpected.
I'd been close to the deaths of people near to me, both my
parents for starters, but I'd never been close to the restoration of
life. It's hard to explain the rush of joy when you think somebody is
gone for good and then they pop up again, like they'd never been
lost. And with Sarah that feeling was especially jarring. It was
almost as though some part of me had come back alive.
        The fact is, since Sarah and I were both only children, we'd
identified a lot with each other. True, we'd traveled our separate
paths, each looking, perhaps, for something to fill the lonely void
in our lives that a sibling might have taken. As a child of the dusty,
empty plains of West Texas, I didn't see other kids very much
during the summer, and I made up reasons why she and I should
visit each other as often as possible.
Once, when I was plowing, turning over oat stubble—yes, my
dad warily let me do that if I asked—I unearthed a rabbit nest full of
little baby cottontails. Sarah was coming to visit the next day, and





I rescued the infants so we could play nursery. We fed them milk with little eyedroppers, and before long Sarah decided she was actually a reincarnated mother rabbit. That was when she became a vegetarian, and she remained so—by her account—till she
finished college. It was just another of those magic moments of childhood I ended up sharing with her.
I also sometimes wondered, as you might have guessed,
what it would've been like to be born a boy. I was definitely a
tomboy, had a real collie (my own version of Lassie), liked to
climb trees and dig holes in the hardscrabble West Texas earth.
Maybe that was why I felt so at home—free associating now—when
I filmed my documentary of the Maya village in Mexico's Yucatan.
It was hot and dry and lay under a pitiless sun, a blazing white
bone in the sky that seared the spare landscape. None of my
crew could understand how anybody could bear to live in such a
place, but to me it seemed perfectly natural, almost like home.
        Thoughts of which now made me sad. I only wish my parents
had lived long enough to see that documentary. Maybe then
they'd have understood how terribly lonely I'd been as a child, a
loneliness I shared so deeply with Sarah. Would we ever be
together again?
On my hurried trip downtown, I kept wondering what I was
about to encounter. Was it going to be the fantasy-bound Sarah of her girlhood, perhaps the same Sarah who'd spun out some
stuttering vision of a jade mask? Or would all that be past and would she again be the ambitious, sparkling pre- med student she'd become when she was in college?
Getting to Soho took only about ten minutes, scant time to
think. Lou's place was in what had once been a garment factory
sweatshop. He'd rented it from another agent at the bureau, who
had inherited it from a cousin, a well-known downtown artist,
lately dead of AIDS. Lou paid virtually no rent, was there mainly to
keep out squatters, and couldn't care less that he was living in
one of New York's trendier sections. All he knew was that there
was plenty of room, and free parking on the street for his old
Buick.
I'd been down many times before. Inside, the space was still inhabited spiritually by the dead artist, with acrylic paint spattered on walls and graffiti I didn't fully understand in the bathroom. The place seemed to be a broom-free area, with layers of the past littered on the floor like an archaeological excavation. And the old Kool-Aid-stained furniture, fitting right in.

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