scratching with her brush and now rubbed her arms and legs with her open hands. Then, without warning, she came up and sat next to me in the passenger seat.
“How much farther?” she said, her eyes desperate.
“At least half an hour,” I said. She began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It just hurts. It won’t stop itching. It’s like the itch is too deep to get to.”
“What can I do to help?” I said, trying not to sound too eager. The windshield wipers creaked as they swatted at the gathering snow.
“Can you pull over for a minute?” she said.
I pulled over to the side of the road and put the hazards on.
“Here,” she said, and gave me the brush. “It helps if someone else uses this while I concentrate on blocking the itch out. My dad usually does it for me. Do you mind?”
I told her I didn’t mind.
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the seat.
I started stroking her arms with the brush, and tiny flakes of skin, like dandruff, fell to the floor. The hazard lights ticked on and off.
“That feels good,” she said, her voice shaky from crying. Her face appeared puffy from the betamethasone, but with the soft winter light falling on her skin, she looked eerily beautiful, like a statue from atop a gravestone.
After a while I laid the brush in her lap and used my hand. I rubbed hard on her jeaned knees, her shoulders. Soon she was able to breathe through her nose and then her breathing evened out, calmed. She kept her eyes closed; her expression was one of resolve. I told her I wouldn’t let anything happen to her. I rubbed her neck and told her it would be all right.
When we finally reached the hospital, she asked me to come in with her. A male nurse led us to the fourth floor, where he eventually hooked Lex up to a device that resembled a large beige sewing machine. Two thick tubes ran into her arm. Dirty blood ran out of her through one tube and into the humming chamber of the machine and then out of the machine through the other tube and finally back into her arm. The dirty blood looked no different from the clean; both were a dark, syrupy red. I couldn’t tell one from the other.
We didn’t say much during that first time. Pop music crackled in from a radio shaped like a cartoon cat perched on the sill. Snow fell past the window, then turned to rain. At one point Lex said, “I heard you practicing your trumpet the other day. You played ‘Embraceable You.’ That was my grandparents’ song.”
“That’s one of my favorite songs. I love that song,” I said. “I learned it the first year I started playing, back when I was thirteen. I was in this YMCA program where coaches taught you a skill or a hobby—you know, to socialize easier? They even had a woman there who could teach you how to ride a unicycle—which still seems ridiculous to me. What popular kid did you know who ever rode around school on a unicycle? Am I talking too much?”
Lex laughed. “A little.”
I nodded and was silent for a while. The dialysis machine whirred. I watched her blood slide through the tubes.
“My father told me what you did, you know, to wind up working at the camp.”
I felt my face grow flushed. What I’d done to wind up at About Face was try to help someone. I’d been driving along one night, just coasting through the streets, when I spied a man stabbing an old woman in the ear right on her own porch. I watched him take a knife from his pocket and start digging its point into her eardrum. So I did what anyone else would have done. I got out of my car and yanked him off. Then I knocked him to the sidewalk. As the man hit the curb, his arm made a sound like dry pasta breaking over a pot of boiling water. But he hadn’t been robbing the old woman. In fact, she was his mother and he’d been testing her hearing aid with a sonic wand.
“It was dark,” I said.
“No, I think it’s funny. It’s romantic, kind of. Chivalrous,” she said. “I see you lingering by groups of cadets sometimes. Standing on the sidelines. You really want to help out.”
“Yes,” I said.
She peeked beneath her bandage. “Sometimes I wonder how well the camp works,” she said. “We get letters pretty often from kids who’ve made something of their lives after being sent to us. Dad puts them up in the barracks. But we also get kids who come back again and again.” She nodded at the arm with the tubes in it. “They’re like me. You can clean them up, but it’s only a matter of time before they go sour again.”
“That’s not how I see you,” I said.
She smiled. Ringlets of dark brown hair hung around her face. “Good. That’s not how I see you either,” she said.
She slept on the way back. I drove a full ten miles per hour below the limit, my eyes on the road. I felt like everything important was in my hands, which I kept planted at ten and two the entire way.
After that things were different during our trips. We still didn’t talk much—on the way to Albany Lex was uncomfortable, on the way back, drained—but the feeling inside the van, the feeling between us, changed. She always sat up next to me, and I often massaged her limbs with her brush. She was like every girlfriend I’d never had when I was younger: fun, playful, patient. I wanted her, and wanted to protect her at the same time. We started listening to country music on the radio together and soon enough we both learned all the popular songs and artists. There was one song we both enjoyed about a man and a woman who were kept apart by their trucking jobs but who talked on the CB all the time. The song was called “It’s Not Over Till It’s Over, Over,” and there was a part in it when the man’s truck and the woman’s truck pass going opposite directions in the night and they honk their horns at each other. At that part I’d lay on the horn, or Lex would take my trumpet and blow into it, making a terrible squawk. We found other songs to like, too, but that one was my favorite. I bet they still play it on the radio. I bet if you get up and turn the dial to country right now, you might hear it this very moment. It’s that good.
I always stayed with Lex while her blood was being cleaned. I would read her magazines, or if the TV was free in the next room, I’d roll it in and we’d watch a movie on the VCR. They only had a few movies that weren’t for children, but I didn’t mind. One day, I rolled in the TV and pressed play and a dirty movie came on. Lex laughed and clapped her hands over her mouth, but when I turned it off, which I did right away, she asked me through her hands if I could put it back on, so I did. In the movie a naked man was running back and forth between two women lying on their stomachs. One wore sunglasses and high boots and was demanding, a boss; the other was just a girl, coy and playful, biting her lip and smiling at him over her shoulder. They were both beautiful, though, with their bottoms raised on pillows and rocking back and forth for him. The man’s body was shiny with sweat and he kept wiping his brow and sitting down on the floor and panting in an exaggerated, comical way. But then one of the women would beckon to him and he’d struggle to his feet and climb on top of her.
“Oh my God. He only has one thingy. One ball,” Lex said, giggling.
“It happens,” I said.
We watched for a while, me hesitantly, embarrassed, with a painful erection, and Lex with her eyes glued to the screen. She looked more interested than aroused, though, fascinated in a clinical way. I wondered if she’d ever slept with a man before. Eventually the movie flickered to static.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Lex asked quite suddenly, just as I was turning off the TV.
I felt my throat tighten. “No,” I said, sitting down next to her.
She began to say something, then stopped. She smiled and scrunched up her nose. “There’s a guy I like. I have a crush on someone,” she said. “Nobody thinks much of him, but I don’t know, he makes me laugh. This is between you and me, promise?” She put her hand on top of mine. Her fingers were hot and clammy.
“I promise,” I said, and squeezed her hand.
“It’s a guy I’ve been hanging out with pretty regularly. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said. Patches of my skin kept giving off shocks of excitement, now at the base of my back, now along my scalp.
Suddenly Lex put her other hand to her head. Her cheeks were red. “God, I’m terrible at this stuff. Let’s just forget about it.”
