Free Within Arm's Reach by Ann Napolitano Page B

courses because my sister, the good lay, the pregnant, unmarried twenty-nine-year-old, thought it sounded like the best solution.
    “It’s the letters from the young girls that get to me,” Gracie says. “I have seven letters this week alone from girls whose boyfriends are pressuring them to have sex. They don’t know what to do because they don’t feel ready, but they also don’t want to lose their boyfriends. There are also three letters from girls who want help because they’re depressed.”
    Gracie spreads her hands over the rows of letters. Like mine, her hands are pale, without creases, but her fingers are slender where mine are stubby. She looks as exhausted as I feel. “Who am I to give them advice?”
    I can’t argue with this, so I concentrate on my apple, which is a little mealy. A picture of Gram in the hospital flashes through my mind: old, bandaged, shaken. I wish suddenly that my sister had been there with me to see Gram. I don’t want to be the only grandchild with that image in my head. I wish that my memory was able to let go every once in a while. It has been too noisy in my head lately, too raucous. I miss the silence I used to be able to create locked in my dorm room or in my favorite study carrel at the library.
    If I were at the library now, I would reread a chapter in my medicine textbook. Maybe the one on epidemiology, which was always a favorite. I’d review the causes and symptoms for Lyme disease, Chronic Fatigue, Epstein-Barr. I’d read about the suppressed immune system that lets in all germs, infections, and viruses and makes a bad situation worse. I am a fan of these kinds of diseases, which are vague in their symptoms, heavy in fatigue, capable of blurring the edges of the people they strike. These illnesses dull everything—personality, skills, drive, memory. I like to imagine, when I am tired and burnt out, that I have contracted Epstein-Barr, and that I now have the chance to step away from my life, and lose myself.
    “Are you going out tonight?” I ask.
    Gracie gives a rueful smile. “No. I’m off men for a while.”
    “Literally and figuratively?”
    “Funny.”
    “Well, I’m going for a walk.” I’m surprised to hear this come out of my mouth. I rarely go for walks. I am more a lie-in-front-of-the-television-until-I-fall-asleep kind of girl.
    But once I’m outside in the cool night air, I know it was the right decision. I had to get out of that stuffy kitchen, away from my sister, away from the letters full of unanswerable questions and inconsolable grief.
    I round the block and approach the Green Trolley with its painted sign of a green train car. I consider going inside. Maybe I need to raise some hell. I haven’t been drunk since college. I haven’t had sex in, well, a long time.
    But my legs take me past the front door of the bar. After all, it is Gracie’s place. I stare straight ahead so I won’t have to make eye contact with half of my high-school class. But out of the corner of my eye I see Joel and his buddy Weber standing beside some overgrown adolescent who is throwing up in the parking lot. Joel freezes at the sight of me, his hand on the vomiting guy’s back. But Weber has no problem talking.
    “Hey, Doc,” he yells, “we need some medical attention. Hellooo, I’m right over here. . . . Oh shit, are you ignoring me, Leary? Joel, she’s ignoring me.”
    Joel stays frozen. Weber takes two skips in my direction. “I knew your sister had a secret,” he says. “Did she tell you that I knew?”
    I have heard about Weber’s so-called psychic gifts. He can’t keep his mouth shut about them. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just a fat fireman, and not much of a friend to Joel either, yelling about his business in the parking lot of the town bar.
    “I can tell you’ve got a secret, too,” Weber is saying. “That’s why you’re so goddamned uptight. You need to loosen up! I could help with that—come inside and have a beer with me.”
    I