by Adam Klein
‘My father used to write and ask me to visit her, but I never did. He got out of jail a few years after her first operation and took care of her before he screwed up again. Now he’s back in prison, and he wants me to go to scatter her ashes. For years at a time he’d leave her alone while he was serving his sentences. Then he’d come out of prison stronger and she’d be whittled down from the drugs and what it took to get them. And then they’d start using together, like he had to catch up with her. I always knew she’d die first. I stopped charting her progress once I left home.’
She lifts her beer, and I take a sip of my soda. ‘Who could blame you for distancing yourself? You saw what was happening and you knew you couldn’t change the outcome.’
We sit quietly looking at each other. Now make me disappear.
‘Did you get home OK?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I really had to concentrate on my driving. I was higher than I thought.’ My stomach turns a little – I really did that, swallowed the blotter, took those risks. I’m drawing my nail over the frost on the glass when I tell her, ‘Don’t let me do it again. You know, acid. I’ve never made good decisions, so I need you to help me. I need you to look out for me.’
‘OK,’ she answers, and I think she is a little ashamed; her concern is immediate and grim.
‘I’m sure I felt my mother while I was waiting in front of your door. I just felt this coldness around my heart. And then today, the letter came. All day I felt very slow and methodical, as though I’d prepared for it.’
I don’t tell her I deserve this. When I get high, people die.
‘That’s like my experience with the photograph.’ She leans against the dark wood, names scratched in with keys and knives. She puts her feet up on the seat. ‘That’s the thing about acid. Things become very coincidental on it.
‘You know, I came in here and I saw Ellen and Stefan drinking one night. This was a little while after she took his car. And Ellen called me over, but the two of them had been drinking, and it wasn’t good when he drank. Anyway, I remember Stefan asked me to sit down, which I did, and he kept staring at me. I felt really nervous about it, but Ellen didn’t seem to notice. I forget what she was talking about, but all along I felt his foot – he’d slipped it out of his loafer – traveling up and down my calf. I just sat there, pretending to listen to her and not look at him. Then out of the blue, Stefan leans over and says to me, “Hannah, why do you always dress like a man? You could be pretty if you did something with yourself. Maybe if you dressed more like Ellen.” I sat there stunned for a second. When I got up to leave, I couldn’t hear anything. I had to steady myself walking out.’
She looks down at the napkin she’s been shredding. ‘You think I’m pretty, Carrie, don’t you?’
I remember the story Gina told me about Hannah’s short stint in a sorority house. The knife. The threat she’d made to her body. Could that have been true? Is that what drinking does to young college girls? But Hannah’s unlike anyone else. You can look at her deep wounds that are slow to heal, and you wouldn’t think of telling her how others walk away from the things that hurt them. She doesn’t understand that. She understands the wound too well. ‘I think you’re beautiful.’ I say it quickly, without consideration. I say it as though it were simple.
‘I went after him, Carrie. After that. I humiliated myself. I can see myself doing it, walking up to his studio in a dress. I never wear dresses. And going behind that door, and behind Ellen’s back. That’s what started everything.’
I look over and notice the older man at the bar, his stare more pressing now. He lifts his beer bottle in my direction.
‘You’ll make me lose my job,’ I tell Victor. He’s unimpressed. He knows about my taking the state car; I told him that part of the story. Not the humiliation of my returning with it, how I stood weeping in the doorway, answering to Leslie.
‘You went through my things,’ she kept reminding me. Her bafflement made me continue stammering out my story, something close to the facts, but less ugly I had a knack for lies that could work again later. Lies that were always just at the edge of the truth. I told her I was detoxing from antidepressants. I was unreasonable, out of control. I couldn’t explain why I needed to get away, but I was suffocating in my skin.
I could see how she wanted to believe me. She wanted to help. I told her I didn’t know what I’d do if someone went through my purse, took my car. I know I screwed up, I told her. I’d made it impossible for her to trust me. But I wasn’t myself.
Victor didn’t care what it took for me to appear conciliatory. He didn’t know what acting it took to build Leslie’s and my other co-workers’ confidence after that. He knew his own needs – didn’t consider their deferral. I kept the job for three years, until living with Victor started to bleed through. Even, and perhaps most acutely, my clients began to notice. Sick all the time. All the sick days, depleted. And Leslie, who had said nothing to our supervisor about my taking the car, began to show the resentment of someone whose goodwill was betrayed. But for Victor, that was the way to respond to someone else’s gullibility. If someone opened a door to him, they might as well take it off the hinges. He’d be back for it.
‘Your friend’s got money’ he said. He was always going on about her, especially then, when he must have sensed I wouldn’t be working long. I should have never shown him and his friend Bobby her house. They liked circling up the mountain. ‘So quiet here,’ I said, as though I could make a car full of sick junkies appreciate the environment, the golden facade of wealthy people’s lives.
‘Filthy rich,’ Bobby said. And there it was, a home for the sun, sitting on stilts plunged into the ragged cliff. It catches all the light of the day, until the ocean sucks it back.
The Summer House. That’s where you retire from ugliness. Where you can walk out over the abyss and the battering depths, and find the whole thing energizing and natural and like it was the beginning of something, and not like the end.
‘It started right here,’ she says. ‘After he insulted me.’
I look around, consciously diverting my eyes from the man at the bar, trying to imagine this as the place where a girl’s murder might find its genesis. I settle my attention back on Hannah. It’s not places that make these things happen, not the dirty hotel rooms or the fine homes that are supposed to deliver you from them. It’s the rooms inside us, how we manage their emptiness.
‘I didn’t want to lose my relationship with Ellen. I’d ask about Stefan, but she stopped talking about him with me. She did say that I shouldn’t take Stefan’s comments to heart. She was sure he liked me. But I knew her sentiments weren’t with me; she was protecting him, her image of him. If I said his comment about my dressing like a man was abusive, she’d insist I had put a spin on it.’
While Victor was away, I curled up in bed feeling the cold blood coursing through me, knowing that soon my limbs would go numb – dying parts – the rest of me anxious, hyper-aware. Like a story where frostbite takes you out silently. But I was not silent. I choked out prayers and promises to God. Vicious Bastard, please don’t kick me while I’m down and I promise to get up again. I’ll get up and I’ll get on the wheel. You’ve made me what I am, and once I’m not sick I’ll get up and start running it again.
And then Victor came in with Bobby, and they had money, but they also had blood on them. None of us wanted to mention anything until we’d copped. Victor called the beeper number. Fucking beeper numbers, after you’ve done almost anything to get the money together. Because there’s no trusting anyone, even though the man hugs Victor like a brother. A brother you make from something terrible and shared. Jail time. Sells him any quantity, except lately he says we order too small. Not worth the time, not worth the risk. You want to buy from babies on the street? Go ahead, buy from babies on the street. You want them to cut it for you, jack up the price, sell you less at night than they do in the day, go ahead. Flacos happy to do business with you. Flaco has no teeth in his smile. Flaco
is just some urchin – one step above you – who sells a couple of tampered bags to get one for himself.
That night we had money. We could buy like we used to. If he called back. It was like him to let us know where we’d settled on the list. Victor’s source wasn’t like Josephine. No. Josephine you worry about when you get clean. You think she needs your business. You think that’s why she crosses herself. Not this guy. He’s no Flaco. He had a crew of cab drivers delivering for him. He had two drooling girlfriends trying each batch, but he never touched the stuff. ‘They are happy girls. They’ve got the one cock they care about,’ he said, holding up a syringe, ‘and they don’t mind mine.’
While we were waiting for the goods, I thought I should ask about the blood. I’d ask flatly, as though I wasn’t alarmed. There wasn’t a lot of it, so it couldn’t have been too bad. But they were awfully nervous, and it wasn’t just that we were dope sick. I couldn’t concentrate on anything until I was well again, so I didn’t ask. I’m like my mother; I think about asking. I’m almost interested, almost concerned, that something is terribly wrong. That there’s been a terrible wrong, but you can’t ask about it until you know you can handle it.
‘Janine was home,’ Victor said suddenly. He stripped off his shirt and I noticed how thin he was; it seemed to make him look more threatening, his fists seemed larger. He was so beautiful when I met him. Incarceration had been good for him. Dragon-slayer, his buddies called him. But his dragons were alive again.
‘We had her take us around the place. She packed one of the boxes. Then we drove her to a bank machine. Then we dumped her.’
The sound of the machine. It is, the only sound that has meaning.
Bobby was just sitting there looking at his hands. He saw the little half-moons where she’d fought, marked him, but not permanently. He was willing them away by concentrating on them, like the half of my face Hannah removed from the surface of the mirror. I wanted to make him and Victor invisible, but I couldn’t.
‘Where is she?’ I asked Victor.
‘Don’t ask,’ he said, walking the length of our battered couch. I was sitting on it, a hand in front of my mouth, and he walked back and forth like a rope swinging. We would have sold this couch if he hadn’t come up with this plan. He and Bobby. We couldn’t have gotten shit for it. It’s so worn out, it’s like sitting on a fence.
‘She’s dead,’ he said.
I started to ask what happened, and Bobby’s hand came up. He wasn’t worried about my getting anyone’s attention. People were always raising their voices down the hall. Long halls of identical lives. My voice was just an annoyance; his instincts were alive to quiet it. I didn’t bite his hand when he pushed me down onto the couch and sat on my chest, but I felt my eyes tearing. I wasn’t asking for her, after all. Hungry cells buzzed in my ears. My ears had buzzed for hours. Her screaming was buried beneath the buzz.
‘Don’t fucking say anything. Not a thing,’ Bobby advises.
I wanted to count her money. I wanted to get so high, and so far the hell out of there. Victor was no pro. He was too desperate. He’d kill to get us high that night. He’d kill for the promise of money or dope when he started to come down. That’s how much he hated pain.
‘Where’s her money?’ I asked when Bobby got off my chest and I was quiet and sick and restored. And he pulled some of it out to calm me. The money meant we were close to drugs. The money affects physiology. ‘We got jewelry too,’ he said. ‘A lot of money in jewelry.’
The call came, and Victor practically raced out the door. ‘It looks like you made out,’ I told Bobby after Victor left, a little fear in my voice. I never felt comfortable looking at him.
‘Lot more than that,’ he said, without much interest. He stared at the carpet. His attention moved from burn to burn.
Who was Bobby, and how did we get involved with him? But you don’t ask those things, and suddenly the involvement is deep. We sat there, not looking at each other, permeated by each other’s presence, our shared desperation and mutual secrets.
When Victor returned, I gave myself a big shot and nodded for the first time in weeks. My mind slid back along grooved passages.
A boy moved to Sweetwater when I was eleven years old. His name was Patrick, and I remember he had a sparse blond mustache that made him seem much older than he was. He said his parents were never home. I would visit him, and the house was always empty. We went through their drawers. He said I could take a bottle of his mother’s perfume. It had a long, gold tassel. He had his father’s dirty magazines; he would push them under his pillow when I sat with him on his bed. One day he invited me to see what he’d made. He pointed out a mound of dirt in the backyard. ‘A graveyard,’ he said, ‘for the ducks.’ He proceeded to dig them up, first the mother duck, eyes speckled with sand, but still alive. Then the baby ducks, all of them dead, powder-soft in my palm. I wanted to run, and I remember I cried with my face turned away from him, unwilling to let him see how he’d disturbed me. Because something in his sharing this with me made me feel for him. Perhaps I knew instinctively that he would never connect with people. He had adapted to a life where his parents never watched him. He was making sure that people would continue to turn away from him for the rest of his life. Someone else would have to teach him shame, and then he’d just keep his experiments to himself.
When Victor kissed me, I thought of how hard it was to look at him. Maybe he thought he could get away with this, that he didn’t register in the minds of others.
‘Let’s go back to your place, Carrie.’ She puts five dollars on the table and starts to slide out.
The man with the glasses and white hair moves from the bar toward the table with the seriousness of an assassin. I smile at him, at the predictability of it, the awkward amassing of courage he’s left undisguised.
‘My name’s Joel,’ he says, reaching for my hand.
I notice Hannah’s expression, the sudden rigidity of her mouth. ‘Go away, Joel,’ she says, not looking at him, but speaking firmly, as though she, too, has prepared for this.
For a moment I think she knows him. He asks her, ‘Was I talking to you?’
‘I said get out of here. Can’t you see we’re talking?’ She will not look at him, as though her provocation were directed at any phantom.
‘I see you’re leaving. I’d like to speak to your friend before you go.’ He’s flustered, and I feel badly for him, all that pointless inflation.
‘It’s OK,’ I assure Hannah. ‘If you want, I’ll meet you outside.’ Her eyes are full of rage. I stare at her for a moment, watching her slowly reason out that this is different from what happened between her and Ellen. She turns her face from mine. ‘It’s cold, Carrie. I don’t want to stand outside for long.’
‘I upset your friend,’ he says, watching her leave.
‘I think you did. But it wasn’t your fault. I’m Carrie,’ I tell him, offering my hand again. I feel I owe him this much for the trouble he’s gone to.
‘Is she always that possessive?’ he asks. I can see that he’s still reeling from her harshness.
‘I think she just really wanted some time alone with me.’
‘I understand that,’ he says. ‘Do you have a few minutes?’
‘I really shouldn’t keep her waiting.’
‘Can I give you my number?’ he asks, extending his card. ‘Maybe I can buy you a drink sometime.’
I take his card. Joel Case, MD PhD, Department of Psychiatry. I laugh, putting it in my purse.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asks.
‘I’m not really sure,’ I say, putting my gloves on. ‘I guess I was just thinking that meeting me and my friend – well, that we might have seemed a little unstable.’
He smiles at me, though there’s something apologetic about it, as though he’s recognized something unfortunate now that he’s close up. I excuse myself, suddenly concerned by what he sees, and by what I might have missed.
Hannah is standing by the car, smoking.
I should have given her the keys, I think.
‘Is everything all right?’ I ask.
She stands still for a moment, not responding. ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me to explain myself. I didn’t mean to get so angry.’
I unlock her door. ‘Get in,’ I say. I walk around the car, watching her reluctantly sit down, close the door after her.
‘I hope I didn’t ruin that for you,’ she says as I warm the engine. ‘I just hate it when a guy immediately assumes he can interrupt and be welcomed.’
‘Well, I think you ended that assumption, for him at least.’
‘You’re really angry at me?’ She asks me as though I’m persisting in this, not letting it drop.
I decide not to answer her. Telling her I’m angry might make her think I was interested in the guy. She’d find a way to confirm her fantasy. I turn on the tape recorder. We sit there quietly listening to Laura Nyro singing ‘Stoney End’, finding our way back to the familiarity between us. There’s a bruised quiet between us neither one of us wants to touch. After we’ve passed the last convenience store, the houses begin to thin out, the stars appear more dense.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I ask, leaning forward to take in as much of the sky as I can.
‘It seems like a big empty dome with a billion lights. You can almost imagine it echoing with voices, people who have never been heard.’ The snow has been falling steadily for the past week. The new cover is glinting innocently under the moon.
‘I can’t believe you’ve never met your grandmother,’ she ventures. ‘You have no other family?’
‘We were cut off,’ I say. ‘It was something my parents wanted, but I think it sort of got out of control. They could have used my grandmother’s help, but they were too proud.’ I laugh at the word.