San Diego Noir

Maybe I’ll be able to someday, she’d think, but she didn’t like to think too much about that. Sometimes, if she tried too hard to grab onto such thoughts, she’d get so frustrated, the anger bubbling up in her like a teapot boiling on the stove. She’d break things, sometimes, when she felt like that.

But that didn’t happen much. It hadn’t happened in a while.

She always set a timer when she boiled water too. So she wouldn’t forget.

That was the key to managing her After life. They’d taught her all these things in rehab. Make lists. Check off your to-do’s. Stick to a routine.

“So you want to go, you know?” Sam asked. He stretched out his arm and settled his hand on hers, his thumb gently rubbing the muscle between her thumb and forefinger. Kari liked it when he did that. Her right hand cramped sometimes, at odd moments, since the accident.

She got out her notebook. Looked at her list for the day. “I can’t,” she said. “David’s home tonight.”

Sam tilted back his head and sighed. “Okay.”

Sam didn’t like David. Which made sense, she guessed. They were about as different as two people could be. Sam was relaxed. Shaggy. That was the word that she used for him. He smoked a lot of pot and liked to surf. He made money doing carpentry and odd jobs, and he wrote things, stories and poems. She didn’t know if what he wrote was any good or not. That was one of the problems she had After. Reading, keeping the words in order, was hard for her; they were like unruly kids who wouldn’t stay in line.

But she didn’t really care if Sam was a good writer. She liked him. He was nice, she thought, and she liked the way he smelled, and she liked how he fucked her.

Made love, she corrected herself. That was how you were supposed to think of it.

She liked how David made love too, but he was really different. He was bright. Sharp. Those were her words for him. She liked to look at him, just to take in his glow. He probably wouldn’t like Sam, if he ever met him. David didn’t have a lot of patience. He lost patience with her sometimes, though he tried hard not to.

But David was from Before. She’d had to tell Sam about David, but she couldn’t see any reason to tell David about Sam.

David was from Before, so he came first. She could keep that much in order.

She knew that sleeping with two different men at the same time wasn’t something she was supposed to be doing. Helen, her therapist, talked to her a lot about that. “You have some problems with impulse control,” Helen said. Kari remembered this because Helen had said it many times, and she’d written it down.

“When you want to sleep with somebody, you really need to stop and ask yourself why. And if this is something you’ll be happy about the next day.”

Kari had actually thought this was pretty stupid advice, but she’d kept that to herself. “Why” was because it could be fun and it might feel good. How she’d feel about it the next day was impossible to predict—it hadn’t happened yet.

Still, she remembered that she had to be careful about things, about getting pregnant, about getting diseases. They’d wanted to give her some kind of shot or some other thing, some device, for birth control, so she wouldn’t have to remember to do anything, but she convinced them that she could remember to take the pill, and she could remember to use condoms, and she did.

Write it down. Stick to a routine.

And she didn’t think that she was being that impulsive. She wasn’t picking up strangers in Newport Avenue bars.

Two men didn’t seem like too many.

It was just better if David didn’t know about Sam.

The check came. They’d each had two fish tacos and a beer. As usual, they split the bill. Sam liked coming here on Tuesdays because it was so inexpensive, and he didn’t have a lot of money.

It didn’t bother her that Sam couldn’t pay for things. She guessed it would have bothered her Before, but not now. She had plenty of money now, and she didn’t care if men could take her out or not, even though she was supposed to. Actually, she wished she could just buy Sam lunch all the time. But that might raise too many questions.

Sam didn’t know that she had money, and she wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to tell him.

That was another thing she and Helen talked about. How she needed to be careful, or people could take advantage of her.

After lunch, she stuck to her Tuesday routine.

First, she went down to the beach, then south, past the faded stucco apartment with the tattered peace flag hung in one window and the yard of sand that had once been a saltwater pool, onto the tide-pool flats where generations had carved things into the soft rock; their names, mostly. Why did people do that? Kari wondered. They wanted to be remembered, maybe, but she read their names now, and she had no idea who they were. She watched crabs scuttle in and out of the crevices, listened to a man sitting on a rock play his guitar, his feet dangling over the ocean, catching spray.