Helping Others is the Best Way to Help Yourself

Emily Ling

The whole neighborhood stayed in the Crown Royal Hotel for about three days. This was back in the armpit of summer when a bad storm came in and threw down a few tornadoes over the northern half of the Carolinas. The hotel was all our city could offer since the storm knocked down one too many power lines and slashed through trees which tore off roofs and left our neighborhood dark and cold for a good week. My mom and I stayed in room 322 right across from the Dallesandro’s, who we rarely saw because they lived on the other side of the neighborhood. Their daughter, Abby, and I were both about to be freshman in high school, and with nothing else to do, we walked up and down every hall, slipped random love notes under doors, and shared a pack of cigarettes under the stairwell of the basement. I bought us peanuts from the snack bar by the front desk and Abby stole pillow chocolates to sneak into my backpack with a sticky note that read for Reuben in a not-quite-cursive style.

At the end of the day, Abby and I would end up in my room to eat takeout and watch prepaid movies. Mom liked to keep the T.V. on even when no one was in the room, so some Lifetime movie was playing when Abby and I walked in. I could hear the shower running. I turned off the T.V. and Abby opened up the fridge to let the cool air hit her face. The hotel had small refrigerators and tiny kitchens.

“Reuben?” my mom called from the bathroom.

“It’s me,” I said.

“You’re father called.”

“And?”

“I didn’t ask. I told him I’d have you call back,” she said. My parents liked to put up a front that they were communicating when they weren’t.

“I have my own phone you know.” She didn’t say anything after that. They were always trying to prove something to me.

I looked over to find Abby pulling out one of the refrigerator shelves.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I think if I took out the two shelves, I could fit my whole body in and close the door,” she said. “Like some kind of igloo.”

“You’ll break it.”

She said, “So what if I do? This isn’t our home. We can do whatever we want here. The state’s paying for it.”

“Let’s go,” I told her, though I couldn’t deny that she was right. We were free to do whatever we wanted in this place.

*

That night, Abby and I created one of those “helping hands” you see on infomercials that allow you to reach things high up. We untwisted the wire hangers found in the closet. Abby bent the end into a hook and brought me across the hall to the vending machines where we fished out Chips Ahoy and Honeybuns. All of the good stuff was at the top, so Abby had to put her arm in the slot.

“That all?” she asked.

“Moon pies.”

“We got those.”

“I know, get more.”

We could hear someone make their way out of the elevator and move toward us. Abby tried to pull the hanger out of the machine, but it was hooked on one of the coils. A woman rounded the corner and stopped in front of our stash of snacks. Her hair was cut to the scalp. It must’ve been seventy degrees outside, but she wore a thick NASCAR jacket over blue shorts and a tube top. She looked to be in her forties, but her face was painted with wrinkles so it was hard to tell. She stood still and raised her right hand slowly to push her mirrored sunglasses up her nose with her thumb. Between her index and middle finger was a lipstick stained cigarette. Abby let out a small laugh and I froze. The woman glanced at the machine and then at us.

“I’m going to take a wild guess and say this isn’t allowed,” the woman said.

“Neither is smoking,” I said.

She brought the cigarette to her lips and let out a small cloud of smoke.

“I’ll have the Chex Mix,” she said.

Abby wiggled the hanger up to row C and pulled the Chex Mix bag down. I handed it to her with a sort of smile and she walked off. We watched her as she unlocked the door to room 328. Outside the room, pizza boxes and old magazines piled up by the door. She had to kick a few of them out of the way to get through.

I’d never seen the woman before, which was strange because everyone kind of knew everyone in the neighborhood. At first, I thought she might have been a real visitor from some place like Atlanta or Savannah, but then I remembered the city had allotted the first three floors to people from our tornado-ravaged neighborhood and town.

“She must be new,” Abby said stuffing the snacks into my bag.

“Maybe we just never noticed her,” I said.

“Nobody could look like that and live in this part of town without being noticed.”

*

It was a warm night. We ate our snacks by the pool while Mr. King swam laps. He said he was training for the Special Olympics because that was the only kind of Olympic title he could win. Haley Wooten and her boyfriend were crying and making out in the hot tub, and Mr. Blaine, currently in room 114, was on the phone with his sister because he wanted a different place to stay.

“Rumor is,” Abby started, “housekeeping found a wok perched on top of a melted toilet in his room. All the water inside was replaced with charcoal.”

I watched Mr. Blaine remove the phone from his ear and press it to his lips whenever his sister would yell at him. A lonely street lamp dripped sterile light onto his drooping skin. I hate to say it, but it felt good. The fact that someone was sad and I was witnessing this intimate moment. My parents hid so much, about the divorce, about their lives, that it felt good to see something real.

“Are you even listening?” Abby asked. I felt like I had been caught. I said nothing and stared at my phone.

“What’s the matter with you? Is this about your dad?”

The truth is I only thought about him as much as I did anything else, but I wanted to act like I was hurt.

“My uncle,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve already heard.”

“I haven’t,” she said. “Is it cancer?”

“AIDS.”

“Shit.”

I tried to think of some way I could morph the story into some form of truth, but I couldn’t. All of my family members were healthy. The only death I’d experienced was my great aunt, who died surrounded by people who love her.

I got so bogged down that I forgot it was summer. Forgot what nights normally meant. I must’ve fallen asleep on the lounge chair because I was alone at a metal table, watching a rabbit meander through dying ironweed across the street. It was one of those solitary moments when everyone was either going to bed or not up yet. The woman we saw at the vending machine made her way out of the the hotel and onto one of the lounge chairs. She wore a purple bathrobe and bearclaw bedroom slippers. Next to her was a Pomeranian that rubbed its butt on the cement.

“Can’t sleep?” Her dog chewed on the chair leg under her.

“Something like that.”

My phone rang. It was a text from my mother wondering where I was.

“What was that?”

“My phone. My mom’s been down my throat about where I am ever since the divorce.”

“Jesus, everything in this goddamn world beeps.” She pulled off a pager that was clipped onto her pocket. “They said they’d call me as soon as there was a kidney available.”

She came over and sat next to me. “You would think there would be kidneys to spare since everyone has two, but it has been five months and no word from my doctor.”

I told her I was sorry.

“Why?” she asked.

“That’s kinda sad,” I said. I’d never known anyone with a serious illness, but the movies always made it look devastating.

“I don’t get sad.”

“But you’re going to die.” She said nothing, pulled out a pack of gum and popped a piece in her mouth.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Reuben.”

“Pauline,” she said.

She didn’t ask why I’d been crying, but I made up a story in my head in case she did. I wanted to match her kind of pain. I thought I would tell her my girlfriend just moved four states away or that my dad drank too much.

I noticed one of her arms was missing. How had I not seen this before? The fuzzy fabric of her sleeve clung to the side of her robe. She removed the robe to reveal her arm cradling a bottle of wine. It was startling. My reality had been rearranged twice in less than a minute. She went from missing an arm, to having one. It made me wonder what my parents were doing, if the world was just as strange for them.

“I just grabbed the most expensive one I saw,” she said. “This hotel really needs to learn how to lock up better.”

“You can’t do that.”

She took a sip and handed the bottle to me. “The last thing we need is one of those firemen getting ahold of this. They’d be drunk on the job and hurt themselves, or others. I’m just trying to do my part. We all have to do our part to help the world.”

*

The next morning, I told Abby about Pauline. I had never met anyone like her. All of the adults I knew went through life with such grace, or at least tried to. Pauline was like a shithouse mouse that always outsmarted the homeowner. She regarded everything with such distance, like nothing in the world could touch her. I wanted to feel what life was like for her, so the next day I dragged Abby to room 328 with a bag of pork rinds. Pauline’s room smelled like vinegar and mothballs. While Pauline ate, Abby flipped through episodes of Planet Earth and I discarded all of the pizza boxes.

“Helping others is the best way to help yourself,” I said. It was something I heard on T.V.

She told me she wasn’t some kind of charity case and that if we were only there to pity her then we should get the fuck out, so I sat down on her bed and said I had a story for her. I told her that last summer I was in the car with my best friend and his girl. I was in the backseat and his girlfriend in the passenger seat. We were on our way to Camden to watch a football game and were running a little late. My best friend’s truck was tearing through the morning while I slept horizontal in the backseat. “Kiss From a Rose” by Seal was cranked out of the radio. It looked like it was going to be the perfect day, only we had been following a lumber truck a little too closely. One of the long pieces of wood was bumped loose and shot out of the pile, through our windshield, and into my best friend’s chest. The car spun out of control until we slammed into a road barrier. Just like that. Everything was over.

I saw this on T.V. a few years prior. It was a situation that I convinced myself had happened to me just so I could feel something deeply, feel alive through some great suffering.

“I’m not looking for sympathy,” I said. “I just want you to know that I know what it feels like to be alone. This kind of stuff changes you. Not like being alone is a bad thing.” I told her loneliness was just her spending more personal time with the world.

She said, “You don’t have many friends, do you?” and got up to use the bathroom.

She was in there for a little while, too long it seemed. “You think she’s crying?” I asked Abby.

“She probably just fell asleep on the toilet or something,” she said. “Can we go do something? I’m bored.”

Pauline came out and wiped her hands on one of the towels in the kitchen.

“You got a car?” Abby said.

“Come on,” Pauline said. “I’ve got something to pick up.”

*

We piled into Pauline’s SUV. The needle was on E, but Pauline said E would last her a few days, easy. There was nowhere to go except the gas station, which was exactly where Pauline drove, and also where Pauline bought some mushrooms from the cashier. She said studies showed that these things had the power to lift fear and anxiety from a seriously ill person. That they made the seriously ill person feel connected to everything and feel safe. Also, they gave you cool visuals. Abby waited outside while I bought us cherry slushies. The cashier moved slowly and wouldn’t look me in the eye, like he was going through the motions. His hair wasn’t combed and his shirt wasn’t tucked in. He clocked out after ringing us up and joined us in the SUV.

“You like horses?” I said, pointing to his belt buckle that was the shape of a horseshoe.

“No,” he said. He blinked rapidly a couple times and stared out the window. Pauline pulled out of the gas station and drove toward the hotel.

“Well, there’s this barn that I work at, and, you know, with a horse you gotta be ready for anything that could be thrown your way. Now, I wasn’t working this day, thankfully, but my friend Melanie was. One of our best horses got stuck in one of those feeders, the huge ones that hold a bale of hay. You know what I’m talking about?”

The cashier said nothing.

“Well, he got stuck in one, and I’m not talking his hair got stuck or his leg, his entire body was laying inside of it. His legs were all tangled up and he was completely inside there like a hay bale.” It was kind of a funny image when I thought about it, but it was actually really scary.

The cashier scratched his head and leaned in a little.

“Well, what’d they do?” he asked.

“I don’t remember exactly, but I think they had to saw off the metal feeder and get a crane and all that crazy stuff. Poor guy’s legs were so swollen, he couldn’t walk and was lame for three months healing.”

Abby stuck her head out the window and mooed at a pasture of cows. This story wasn’t all true. It was one my dad told me and my sister when we were younger. He was the one to find the swollen horse. He had to listen to the horse’s pain every night when he locked up. The cashier slumped into his seat and rubbed his forehead. I wanted to tell him that I knew how he was feeling, but this time it felt strange, like the cashier had taken the horse story more personally than I’d expected. I figured horses were emblematic of his childhood or something, so I just said sorry and left it at that.

We drove back to the hotel where the four of us ate the shrooms in Pauline’s room. It took about half an hour for Pauline and Abby to start giggling and dancing. Abby rolled around in the bed and rubbed her head on the pillows while Pauline played in the curtains, her lipstick smudged across her face. The cashier jumped on the couch and talked about how chewy the air felt. Everything inside felt cold and rigid, so I decided to go for a walk. I wanted to feel the tenderness of grass or bushes or the sky. I found a spot near a side door of the hotel where the softness of things –the hazy streetlights, the swift moving clouds– felt just right. I took out my phone to see if my mother called, but I got distracted by my reflection on the black screen. For the first time, I thought I saw myself the way others saw me. I had caught myself the way you catch a glimpse of an old friend at the supermarket, barely recognizing them. Then I had a vision: in front of me was no longer the hotel parking lot, but a road at night, where a car had crashed into a barrier and the glitter of sandstone in the cap light illuminated my body on the asphalt. I looked dead. A good bit of blood was around me and I could feel the coldness of it. There was no need to cry because I felt nothing. I guess I could blame the drugs, but I felt true loneliness. I knew it was all an illusion, but it seemed so real. Up ahead, I spotted a group of people moving so far away that they just looked like shadows.

“Can anyone help me?” I asked.

Nobody answered.

When I looked back down at my dead body, the face was so blurred that I realized it could have been anyone. I didn’t feel anything. As the figures drew closer, I realized that they were all engaged in their own world. Some were laughing, others were crying, one came up to me and began speaking another language. I thought of my father. We used to go down to Edisto and swim deep to fish out sand dollars with our toes. He used to carry me around on the beach at night when I couldn’t sleep. I remembered how beaten his face looked after a day of fighting with my mother, but he still managed to take me out on the beach at night, and that’s more than most could say.

When I got back to the hotel room, Pauline, Abby, and the cashier were all taking a shower. They had their clothes on, laughing and playing in the water, saying they were getting clean. And I thought about how, at some point, if she didn’t get a new kidney Pauline would never take a shower again. She’d be gone. Her body would be gone. Would anyone remember her? We didn’t even know she existed before the tornadoes put us here. I felt warm and cloudy as I pictured myself telling the story of Pauline — this person I once knew. It wasn’t to impress people, or to make myself feel something. I was telling it for Pauline, to remember her.

She looked at me, stepped out of the shower and said, “Thank you for seeing me. It helped.”

I asked her what she meant, seeing her?

“Just that. Just seeing me,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, not even knowing I’d done anything at all. Pauline grabbed my arm and pulled me into the shower–each of us wet and lazy with the golden hour light coming through the hotel windows–and all of us moved as one.

Spring 2018 Issue

Fiction