Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  The outside of the shelter was squat and tan, not how she’d imagined. Angie walked in and asked the man behind the counter, “Are you Staff?”

  “I’m a Resident Advocate.”

  “Does that mean you’re a resident?”

  “No, it means I’m Staff. Could you hold on one moment?”

  He turned his attention back to a woman Angie’d barely registered. She was well dressed, holding two shopping bags. “You’re homeless?” Angie blurted. Or thought she’d blurted. Both the others ignored her.

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. A thousand dollars?” said the woman with bags.

  Angie’s head was chattering. You look great the coffee’s good what’s wrong with that girl get off, Angie, get off get Angie we’re here we’re who am I teaching up here I love him but I can’t live yeast infection swimmers take your marks not here not here.

  “Now. Can I help you?”

  “What happened to that woman?” Every word was hard to push out past you’re dwelling, dwelling in a dwelling smelling of yeast beasts.

  Staff was looking at her expectantly. I love you please look at me you fucking rapist oh no not Angie Voorster. Had he already responded to her question? “Did you say something?” she asked.

  “I said, ‘How can I help you?’”

  Angie laughed. He wanted to fuck her but she wouldn’t let him. She was going to get her room. “You know.”

  Staff sighed. “We don’t take walk-ins here.”

  “She left her bags! That lady left her things!” She dropped to her knees. “She’s going to need these things! Her winter coat’s here.”

  “Those are donations, ma’am. I’m going to give you a shelter list—”

  “These are old. She needs these, she’s going to freeze—”

  “Ma’am. Ma’am. Please get up.”

  He glanced behind her, and she turned to see that a small group of residents were watching her. How had she gotten onto the floor, surrounded by a nest of old clothes? She couldn’t make out what he was saying—something loan phone moan—from the jabbering in her head. She pulled an old white turtleneck sweater onto her lap, twisting it. Those are your CDs do you want room for cream ma’am please put the donations down down downed plane off the coast of Sri Lanka a thousand I can give you family neighborhood she’s cranked up I can give you a shelter list and ten minutes on the phone these aren’t even written on Angie she saw herself asleep on a bench and a man came toward her, he was going to rape her and then slit her throat and she screamed, hands over her ears, someone trying to pull her to her feet, the voices still there but drowned under her own voice and she screamed again and screamed and screamed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Those are your things,” said the discharge nurse. “Sign here.”

  Angie’s motions were slowed, like water ballet. She watched her hand float toward the pen, and then the pen was gone and the nurse was gone, no, the nurse had bent down and was straightening up, the pen in her hand. Angie’s legs buckled and she caught herself on the edge of the counter.

  “Hold on tight,” said the nurse, closing Angie’s hand around the barrel of the pen.

  “This isn’t my stuff,” Angie said. The nurse had piled on the counter an old white turtleneck sweater, some rocks, Great Expectations and Cold Feet, a doll-sized white apron, a crumpled typewritten list. “The books are mine. The rest—”

  “This is what you came in with, Jessie.”

  Angie smiled. She’d given Jess’s name and her own Social Security number, but with two digits reversed.

  Like Jess would have, she said, “It’s not Jessie, it’s Jess.” Miss Salter if you’re nasty.

  Sigh. “Jess. The shelter has a bed for you. You need to come in with a week’s supply of meds. Do you have a way to get there? Are you sure there’s no one I can call for you?”

  “What did you guys give me? I feel—God, I feel drunk.”

  “Let me look on your chart.”

  Angie picked up her books and turned away, trying not to stagger. “Throw that shit out. I don’t want any of it.”

  She walked. Her shoes kept her from feeling the road so she took them off, lining them together neatly, like her father kept his wingtips and dress shoes and his single sad pair of old red tennis shoes. She felt better after she left her shoes behind. The sun rose in the east. Carrying her books against her chest, stones pressing warm into her soles, she walked east toward the sea.

  In the morning a man found her asleep on the church steps and took her to another shelter. When was the last time she’d used heroin? asked Staff, reading from a list of smudgy questions. Cocaine, crack, crank? Then, “Do you need to get your things?”

  “I don’t have things.”

  She slept and woke to darkness. The dorm had filled with women and children. A little boy screamed as his mother—You’re going to get it—wrestled clothes onto him. The dorm had bunk beds and cribs set up between the beds. Over the windows, whimsical curtains with seals balancing red balls on their noses.

  “What time is it?” Angie asked.

  “Six.”

  A.M. or P.M.? She didn’t want to sound crazy, so she didn’t ask. Her head pounded. She started out of the room, but when she opened the door, the way had been blocked with a wall of paper towels and toilet paper, gleaming white.

  An older Asian woman with dyed-red hair touched her arm. “It’s that way.” She pointed in the opposite direction.

  Angie leaned close and tried to whisper, through the static, “Is it day or night?”

  She must really have managed to get it out, because the woman patted her shoulder. “Suppertime, honey.”

  The front room was bright, the last light of the day shining through the front window. Outside, the maples burned red. Someone said, “You need your shoes.”

  Angie shook her head. Her feet glowed with heat.

  “Come into the office,” said Staff. She held open the half door. “Sit there. Now, let me see your feet. … Oh, my God.”

  “You see why they can’t be covered? They spun the room around but I got out. … Has anyone told you about that woman? She’s been following me all week—”

  “Slow down, Jess. Slow down.” Staff sat on a stool. “Okay. I want to take your temperature, and then I want you to wash your feet so I can bandage them.”

  “No. If you do that I won’t be able to see. This way I have three-hundred-and-sixty-five-degree vision.”

  Staff looked up crookedly at her. Angie could hear the woman’s thoughts singing like crickets, in sweet shrill arcs. She pulled on gloves and, with surprising gentleness, picked up Angie’s glowing feet.

  “Isn’t that amazing?” Angie asked.

  “I always get the crazy ones on my shift,” the woman muttered. She reached for a bottle, poured something onto a cotton ball. “This is going to hurt like hell, Jess. Hold on tight.”

  Twenty-two

  Home from work, Jordana stripped off her itchy wool pants and stood in her underwear and sweater, going through the mail. Outside, a cold, sulky rain. She read a Christmas letter, then another. Normally, she would have ignored them—their bragging and false cheer—but she didn’t know what to do with herself. Her concentration was so bad these days; if she tried to read a novel, she lost track of events from one paragraph to the next. The Radners had a new grandson. The Hoffheimers enclosed a picture of the whole family in snorkel masks in Belize; the Hardings had moved again. Water drops crept down the glass window, their shadows dappling the hall wall.

  Jordana kept trying to remind herself that Angie had taken off before, but it only temporarily pushed fear back to the edge of her brain. They knew Angie hadn’t had her wallet with her when she left the halfway house. But she could have hitchhiked, and if she could have hitchhiked, she could have been raped or killed.

  She hadn’t hitchhiked. She was more likely to be scared, hiding someplace near Manchester. Jordana and Pieter had met with police in three counties, had made flyers.
The flyers showed Angie above the words MISSING—ILL—MAY BE DISORIENTED, and then their phone number. Jordana thought the posters might help, and at the same time they shamed her; the words felt like a betrayal, exposing their daughter at her weakest.

  Luke’s Datsun turned into the driveway. After a moment, she heard his footsteps on the porch, his key in the lock. He tossed his keys, then his scarf, onto the stairs. Shutting the door, he leaned back against it.

  “Anything?”

  He shook his head, then grimaced. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorting the mail.”

  “In that?”

  She glanced down at herself, then laughed. “Oh! Shit. Sorry. I guess I’m just used to you and Angie being gone.” Looking around for her wool pants, she saw the letter she’d opened earlier. She held it up. “Can you believe some people are already getting their Christmas letters out? Lisa is finishing her senior year and applying to law school. … Chuck and I continue to work on the summer house. …”

  “Aren’t you going to put something on?”

  “I guess. These must be people your father knows.”

  “So I went out to that farm Angie used to be at, since you asked. I thought Angie might have gone back there.”

  “You drove out there? It’s three hours each way.”

  “Jesus, Ma, I can’t talk to you dressed like that.” He went past, into the kitchen.

  She pulled on jeans upstairs, then went down to join him.

  “There’s nothing to eat,” Luke said. He shoved a bag of popcorn into the microwave and turned it on. The microwave’s hiss reminded her of when Ben used to call from the static-ridden car phone The White Mountain Times had given him; she waved her hand in the air, pushing away the thought.

  Pieter’s coping strategy was to throw himself into rehearsals: his string quartet was meeting nearly every night this week. Left to themselves, she and Luke cobbled together dinners—as though, she thought, they were snowbound. Box of frozen string beans, a hunk of yellow cheese and slightly stale Lay’s potato chips. Rolling Rock beer and pancakes made from a mix.

  She didn’t think they were going to find Angie just by driving around southern New Hampshire, but all three of them did it. Yesterday—a drizzly Sunday morning—she’d tried to occupy herself cutting back the forsythia. She’d abandoned the project halfway through, when she realized she was breathing so shallowly she felt dizzy. Yanking off her gloves, she left them with the clippers on top of a damp heap of branches. She snatched up her wallet and keys from the house, flinging herself into the car and driving south, still in her mud-splattered clothes. She knew that the police had a better chance of finding Angie than she did, but just doing something lessened the constriction in her chest. She drove all day, staple-gunning telephone poles with flyers: Angie’s face among all the lost cats. The gas gauge trembled onto empty and she’d forced herself to stop at a Mobil station. When the attendant, on his way to the office with her credit card, had paused to talk with a customer, she’d wanted to scream What are you doing?

  The buttery smell of popcorn rose, its rat-a-tat coming in short bursts. The other week she’d noticed that if she held her hand near the microwave, it gave off warmth. Did they all do that, or was it leaking in some way, one more thing to deal with? She meant to check the one at work but kept forgetting.

  Luke leaned on the counter, staring into the microwave as though it were a television screen or an oracle. She opened her mouth to say something about radiation, then decided not to. Exhausted, face drawn, he looked like a grown man.

  Luke blamed them for Angie’s disappearance. If she and Pieter had done enough, he seemed always to imply, then Angie would have been found. His disapproval pissed her off, but that always collapsed into just feeling tired and sad. She couldn’t sustain resentment: Luke’s love for his sister was so protective, so fiercely loyal. And tinged with guilt, Jordana suspected, for being hard on Angie after her first break.

  She found a carton of orange juice in the fridge and drank from it.

  “Popcorn?” he asked.

  “Sure. OJ?”

  These meals were the closest time between them, leaning against the counter, trading containers. As soon as she felt coziness, though, it turned lonely. The most companionable moment of her day was with her barely-speaking-to-her son.

  After dinner, Luke went upstairs to make his long nightly phone call to the girlfriend in Wisconsin. He didn’t talk about her, and questions made him even more bristly than he already was. From Angie, Jordana knew that Wendy came from one of the midwestern vowel states and had red hair to the middle of her back. “Pretty boring,” was what Angie had said of her. “Like she’s so scared of saying something dumb that she only states the completely obvious.”

  Jordana turned out the light in the kitchen. One of Pieter’s cardigans hung over the back of a chair; she sat, wrapping it around herself, smelling his familiar blend of wool and Dial soap. She was so wiped out. She’d never felt quite this way before, this tangle of alarm. Instead of galvanizing her, it made her feel slow and stupid. She kept thinking of Angie, scared and lost. She thought of someone from one of the handful of family support meetings she’d attended, a woman whose daughter had hanged herself in the mother’s closet. With the mother’s favorite belt. Stop it, she told herself.

  Hugging her knees to her chest, she rested her head on them. She imagined Ben there, the weight of his cheek against her back. She’d been sleeping only a few hours a night since Angie disappeared; the chair felt like it was on the deck of a gently pitching ship. Recently, she’d begun talking to Ben in her head a lot, telling him about her days, saying I’m so scared for her. Strange to miss him now, and with such longing, after years when thinking of him filled her with panicky aversion.

  She stood. What could she do? Not read. She turned in place; there was no direction that held out promise. TV would only depress her more. Rain outside. She could sort through old magazines, but the idea overwhelmed her.

  Going to the base of the stairs, she called up, “Luke?” She waited. “Luke? Want to play cards? Scrabble?”

  No response. His music was on. She climbed the stairs until she stood outside his door. She knocked. “Luke?”

  He yanked the door open. “I heard you the first time.” He had the phone receiver pressed against his shoulder, and she thought, strangely, of holding him against her when he was a baby. He hissed, “No, I don’t want to play Scrabble. Jesus.”

  Twenty-three

  Luke woke earlier than he ever had without an alarm, getting breakfast at fast-food drive-throughs. All the women in his life hated McDonald’s—his mother and Angie for various political reasons, Wendy because of working there in high school—but the Egg McMuffin trumped any argument. He had no idea why it was so delicious.

  Because it has, like, five thousand grams of fat, he imagined Angie saying.

  He drove, and when he could no longer stand driving, he parked and walked. He’d already been home ten days, the longest he’d thought he’d stay. He could still be back for midterms—and maybe salvage his grades—if he started back to Wisconsin in six days. Seven at the most.

  He had a stack of his parents’ flyers. He didn’t have a lot of faith in them; people called, but never with anything that panned out. He also carried pictures of his sister to show around anyplace she might have visited. She loved coffee shops, where a dollar could buy a whole afternoon at a table. (“Tourist of the normal,” she called herself.) Fast-food restaurants and pet stores she hated enough that she might go in and lecture the workers. He was trying to pretend his search had an essential order, but he knew that if he finished visiting every coffee shop and pet shop in one town today, Angie might arrive there tomorrow.

  Angie had left the halfway house in a mixed state. He’d just found out his mother called Angie’s manias light or dark, which was kind of funny because he also had his own names for them. To him, mixed states were dirty manias—unlike the pure mania Angie had been ri
ding when she’d showed up in Madison—and they scared the hell out of him. Not because she was incoherent or violent, though she could be both. Dirty mania meant he barely recognized his sister. Even very depressed or manic, Angie was basically kind; she had moments of dark humor and self-awareness. When people used the term “he isn’t himself today,” it had always seemed ridiculous to him. But in mixed states Angie could become truly not herself.

  He showed Angie’s photo to a kid sitting in Memorial Park, sixteen or seventeen, shivering in his T-shirt and windbreaker. There was a scab—nearly black—on his upper lip. He took Angie’s picture to study it. With one finger of the other hand, he worried the edge of the scab. “She’s pretty.”

  In the picture, Angie sat on a picnic blanket, looking over her shoulder, smiling, hair caught back in a messy ponytail so that strands framed her face. Luke had chosen this picture because Angie looked so normal in it, which might make people sympathetic. But also part of him was embarrassed by the thought of showing another photo—Angie glowering and sullen in a dirty sweatshirt, or Angie in a low-cut shirt and heels, smiling with her mouth wide open, as though she were about to swallow the camera.

  The kid hadn’t seen her. Neither had the woman with swooping eyeglass stems who worked at the St. Anthony’s thrift shop. “I’m sorry, hon. Maybe try back through that door. That’s the soup kitchen.”

  The kitchen he entered had stainless steel appliances and butcher-block counters, much more sleek and industrial than he’d expected. An older black man in a baseball hat measured dried basil and oregano out of plastic containers the size of milk jugs; a youngish woman opened enormous cans of stewed tomatoes. She wore a knee-length navy blue jumper and a small gold cross.

  “We’re making spaghetti,” she said.

  “Smells great.” Luke was just being polite, but as he spoke saliva rushed into his mouth. He took out the photo.