The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  Ten

  Roslindale & Dorchester

  2010

  Juni lands, surprised, halfway down the stairs. Her mouth opens, draws in a great breath, and then she begins to wail. I open the front door.

  “Christ,” says Emily. She pushes past me and launches herself toward my child. The room for me clarifies and I see it as Emily sees it: the shriveled and burnt hot dogs, the rotten carrots I had tried to feed my child.

  “Go back to the car, Leo,” Emily commands her son. He glowers from the doorway over his stack of three-ring binders and index cards. A cloud of sneaker musk hangs about him.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “He can come in.”

  “Are you high?” Emily asks. She is descending the stairs, my daughter coughing in her arms. There is a visible welt on Juni’s forehead.

  “Actually,” I say. “I know it looks—”

  “You know what? Shut up. And you—” she nods at her son. “Just, whatever. Find somewhere to finish your social studies.”

  I know I am blinking stupidly.

  “Is Juni OK?” Leo asks.

  Emily holds a hand in front of my daughter’s mouth and nods. Her expression is hooded.

  Leo lopes past us, watching the baby who continues to wheeze.

  “How long has she been like this?” Emily hands the baby over to me. The touch of her, her mucousy skin wakes up my mother feeling again, and I hold her to me.

  “It’s just a cold,” I say.

  “You know kids like ours can get respiratory sickness. Leo had it, when he was little. Still uses an inhaler.”

  “It didn’t seem like anything,” I say.

  “You should get some ice,” says Emily. “That thing on her head is going to bruise.”

  Eventually, Juni’s breathing calms to a slightly raspy normal. Reluctant and pissed at first, Emily bounces Juni and just her regular sleepy baby things eventually soothe my sponsor. My daughter curls her fist around a hank of Emily’s bleached-blonde hair, and rests her baby head on Emily’s breast. Juni’s eyes begin to flutter.

  Emily sends me to put Juni down again, and when I return to the ground floor, my sponsor is grunting her approval at Leo’s binder. He settles in with the remote, a bag of Cheetos, and a sleeping bag.

  “No point in going home now, anyway,” says Emily.

  Leo casts me a suspicious glance as I pass the doorway. The band on his t-shirt, Smoking Ruin, is nothing I’ve heard of but I know his joggers probably cost more than Emily’s weekly salary. They have their own problems, Emily and Leo. The dad that used to hit them is up for parole and in the meantime, he’s using his phone privileges to chat with Leo before Emily gets home from work. He’s like, does little man miss his pops? You’d think you wouldn’t have to explain to a child, Emily has told me, that a man who beat them isn’t any kind of a father, but for Leo, it’s not just one conversation. She keeps having to tell Leo, over and over.

  “It’s really fine,” I say. In my mind, of course, is concern for them, Emily and Leo, but also, I want to be alone with my paperback, to sort through the scraps, and see what I can uncover OD TO 2f. I can solve the puzzle of his life, figure out where to find him, and bring him back to me.

  “We’re spending the night,” says Emily.

  “OK,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “It’s not a favor,” says Emily, pouring herself a Diet Coke. “If a baby gets the respiratory thing, their breathing can fully stop. Just so you know the level we’re at.”

  I pop myself a soda, to keep her company. She is contemplating the tray of food leftover from dinner, the bloody entrails of ketchup and char and compost.

  “Also, you should have a baby gate. A fall like that—if she gets a concussion. Even if you don’t care, if DSS ends up here, that’s cause.”

  “Emily, I care about Juni.”

  “Obviously, I’ve made mistakes.” She sounds really angry. “With you, I mean. I let myself make exceptions.”

  All of a sudden, I know where this is going. I’m too much work, too much risk, too stubborn. Emily is going to dump me. She’ll be direct, and she’ll be thoughtful, and she’ll offer me the name of some environmental lawyer or children’s librarian. Which will not be OK. Which is not going to be OK, because I can’t do it without her. I don’t want someone who is going to talk about school board elections and Weekend Edition on NPR. It has to be Emily.

  “You’re my first sponsee with a little kid, and I let you convince me things had to go down differently in this case, but I was wrong.”

  I meet her eyes. “I swear to G-d. I did not get high.”

  In the next room, gunfire is exchanged on the television.

  “A guy from the Monday meetings saw you by your old dealer’s house yesterday. Did you buy? And then lie to me?”

  I shake my head. “I mean, I did go there. But I didn’t buy.”

  “And yet, today, you are sitting with a bounty of junk in your garage while your baby has respiratory failure. You got the cloud by accident? And you didn’t use? Keeping secrets is what an addict does. Even if they seem harmless, it’s part of that web of deception.”

  “I’m not trying to lie to you.”

  “You’re embarrassed? You want your privacy? Get over it. You don’t get dignity in this process. All you get is clean.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  “Let’s try the story from the beginning. With no details left out.”

  “All right,” I say. “OK.”

  Leo falls asleep during the late show and snores lightly at the muted screen. I pull up a chair, and I tell Emily everything: the way it felt to hear those wheels in the driveway; the man who turned into another man in the rain, who, as much as I could say, that I believed he was; the high I could not decipher; the confetti of cloud. Apollo Blue, the little sheen on the cloud paper.

  “So what happened,” she asks, “when you licked the paper? You get a little something? Did the world turn on is axis, and angels start to sing?”

  I shake my head. “There wasn’t anything left. I felt, for an instant, a pinprick, something, but then it was gone.”

  “That is how it always is, Mellie. That’s what cloud is like. It giveth nothing, and it taketh everything the fuck away.”

  “Not everything,” I say. “That’s what’s so difficult. When we were there, in my car, it was so close. I think maybe I knew him from California—maybe that was what I had wrong. There’s a pseudonym, and a thing he’s looking for. If I could figure it out for him—”

  “Drop it,” says Emily. “Guy could be Muhammed Ali with a rose in his teeth, and you still wouldn’t get to have him. People from the life, Mellie, they want you to fail at this. How come? Because that way, they don’t have to change a thing themselves. Whoever he is, your ex, some dealer, some fucking criminal-ass motherfucker, he’s a junkie and that means he wants you to get high.”

  “I know, but what if—”

  “Oh, my God, Mellie. This isn’t complicated. There aren’t extenuating circumstances. You need to stay away. No contact. No seeking him out or hanging at places he might happen to be or stalking him online. If he comes after you—and I know how this goes. He’ll come after you—you call me first thing. Can you do that for me?”

  “So,” I say, letting out a sigh I’ve been holding for what feels like an hour. “You do believe me?”

  “God help me, Mellie. I’m not saying I’m not a sucker, but yeah. Whatever. I’ve been there. For the time being, I’m sticking this out, but things have to change.”

  I know there’s a program line about addicts, how special we all think our pain is, how different and unique the shape of our dependencies. I know Emily has to tell me to humble myself. But. Part of what I think Emily gets about me is that my experience is not actually standard and I don’t mean because of Juni. I don’t mean, either, some entitled crap about the house, the job, having made good money for a while. I’ve met people in meetings who have fewer advantages and make more of th
eir lives than I could ever hope to. I know that. But still. Why I trust Emily, why it has to be her, and not some cokehead from Marblehead or some meth addict from Methuen, is that she has seen what I have seen on cloud. She keeps a wedding ring in a drawer that makes her cry, and it’s from a husband she never had. I have a baby whose father never existed. The edges of our lives are haunted by things we can’t reach. There are good lives for me—and probably for her—waiting one cloud over, and it’s not just dignity we have to sacrifice to get clean, but also happiness, also not being alone forever, also being loved by someone who loves us back. Every addict struggles, but I think our path, Emily’s and mine, is particular. How many people know what it is to walk away from the beautiful life ghosting your own?

  Before I lie down, I allow myself a visit to my study. From yesterday, the link to Lew’s video remains open, the woman in underpants frozen where I left her. When I tap a key, the screen shivers, and the counter in the corner registers traffic. 5062. 5063. 5067. The buildup. The come on. They want to see how it turns out. Then the video unfreezes, and the woman begins to pace. Don’t talk to me like I’m some animal, she says. The thing happens again, a shudder of sickness, and the next thing I know I’m lying in my bed. I don’t have an explanation. I try to hold the image of her, of the woman, in my mind, but it keeps vanishing. Then I am listening to the wind, and to Juni’s raspy breathing, and the acoustic strangeness of guests in the house, a slightly altered white noise form the presence of Emily and Leo.

  In my dream, I am back in the car with the man from the SUV. I can see his face clearly. I remember everything about him, but only in a dream way. I’m him, he says. I’m Apollo. He is my man, but not my man, and I understand precisely what this means: it means I’m in danger. There is a thing I have hidden even from myself. You’re so close, the man tells me. It doesn’t have to be this hard, and then he is handing me a spoon, and I am putting it in my mouth, and the thing dissolving on my tongue becomes the thing I’ve forgotten. I am beneath the towering pines. In my hand is the paperback. It’s right here. Slowly, I turn the page and suddenly I’m terrified.

  The buzz of the message indicator on my phone wakes me the next morning. I am already sitting up, the dream fear still clenching my throat. There are more question mark texts from the burner phone and below, the sound of movement, the smell of food cooking. For the moment, I ignore these things. Emily, last night: This isn’t complicated. You need to stay away. Yes, yes. But what if the danger comes after me? What if it comes after Juni? If I understood it better, I tell myself, if I could prepare, perhaps I would not weaken in the face of it. Perhaps I could resist.

  I rise and go to my desk, guiding my eyes away from the woman in underpants (just her torso; her head and feet cut out of the frame) until a fresh window replaces the video. The counter registers more traffic. 10,872. 10,872. 10,873. What compels, about this woman in her underwear? Why does the window appear, as if someone has already embedded the program?

  There is time to attend to this later. For now, I turn my attention to the tiny scrap of licked paper. OD TO 2f. The number is handwritten, in faded blue ink, the larger letters torn from a sheet of printed stationery. I examine the nervous scrawl of the characters, scratch marks of partial letters at the torn edges. I make out an image, it might be a wall, a game board. The search window yields ten results. Od is an archaic unit of measurement. OD TO 2f appears in an 1838 Australian newspaper archive, is an index number in an annual report, is nothing but nonsense. I try another. Kefeselyay. Some near-cognate calls up a Spanish-language page about cannabis, an old survey map, five sites in Russian. More nothing.

  I try again last night’s searches.

  Apollo Blue: three hundred thousand hits.

  Bright Big Future: two thousand.

  Together: one hit. I click the link, and I’m again watching the headless woman video. Apollo Blue: a pseudonym in the film industry, used on a project for which you’d prefer not to be credited. CA Plates, West Coast time. There’s some connection there, between the man and my video. And yet—there is a thing here which feels older. I have memories, deep brain stem responses to the smell of cheap tobacco mingled with spring, to the feeling I had dragging on that butt I’d found smoking in my gutter—Prince Rounded Flavor. Some tertiary tobacco company had marketed them to kids with a cartoon frog in the ’80s. There were congressional hearings, bad press and the line was discontinued. I would have been sixteen, when they were first selling them as two-for-ones.

  I make notes, am always making notes. What I transcribe is not happenstance, I have come to believe, but fragments that can occasionally coalesce. There is meaning here, I know, and the fear, which is not dream fear but real, urges me on. I page through my paperback, an old library book still with its lending card in the front pocket, until I find a photograph stuck face down. I peel up the image, the photo paper cracking. Young man—a blur around him. I try to look at him slantwise. Is he someone I recall? But the age of the photograph, the business of time and memory or my own broken brain resist me. The girl is clearer. She looks as though she has been swimming, and she gazes up at the older man with perfect trust. They are at a lake shore, surrounded by towering pines. The girl is not me, but I have been there, by the side of the road. I turn the photograph over, read the lettering on the back. Kif-Vesely’e. Kefeselyay.

  We go back, I think, this man and I. We go back before California, whatever he thinks. But the news feels like a flicker from the interrogator’s side of a one-way mirror. Something is over there, studying, assessing, but from my side of the glass, it remains a looming shadow, the nature of the threat only made more mysterious by the occasional strobe of light.

  In my paperback: illegible text, leaves glued together, paper always spilling from between the pages. I run my finger over the photograph. Kif-Vesely’e, the girl wet and the boy blurred. I am turning the pages, beneath the towering pines. I am going to find something I have hidden even from myself. Now, my fingers trace a shape, hard and small, the size of a penny, but with right-angle edges. The pages are thicker here, the yellow glisten of old glue at the edges. I slip a fingernail between the two leaves and hear the almost-inaudible crackle of adhesive releasing.

  “Mellie!” Emily calls. “Mellie! You awake?”

  She is coming up the stairs. I startle, pocket a handful of scraps into the jeans I am still wearing, have slept in, and close the paperback. Emily, in the doorway, looks me over, then grunts.

  “Stop it,” she says. “Whatever you’re doing. Put it away. We have to get going.”

  By the time I have pulled myself together and descended to the kitchen, Leo is gone, already picked up by some Dorchester lady on her way somewhere. Juni is eating Cheerios and cubes of cheese, neither of which I had in the house last night. Her breathing is still rough, but it isn’t stopping her from shoveling the nutrients in.

  Emily’s on the phone with another reporter, getting a sub for the morning court session. It’s like a super power, her ability to call a whole team of bossy brassy blonds into action at a moment’s notice. I envy her her collection of big-haired Our Lady ladies with tight pants and sun-spotted cleavage. But, this morning, at least, I have Emily. We do.

  “I think I need to go somewhere,” I say. “Away for a while.”

  Emily looks unexpectedly relieved. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  Florida, I’m about to tell her, can be cheap in the off season. I have a vision of myself and Juni, my pale skin, her slightly more olive tones, in the shade of a beach umbrella. Then, I notice my purse has been opened, its contents rifled through.

  “I thought you believed me,” I say.

  She hands me a plate of cold eggs and a cup of coffee. “I wasn’t checking for cloud. I needed your insurance info,” she says. “And also this.”

  She slides my OneLife card across the table, the little green cactus graphic in the corner.

  It’s my VIP pass. I start to explain how this particular ite
m ended up in my possession. It was pressed on me, you might say, back when the whole concern was new, which is why I wasn’t going to chime in at Uno’s yesterday. Obviously, I’m not the type to meditate with a rock, or pay a premium to have some yoga body tell me how to live my life, but I have some personal experience with them, the rock people, their cures. Emily isn’t interested in the long version.

  “It’s going to be your ticket.” She’s been calling all morning, but there are no beds anywhere. Until she tried the flakes.

  “Come again?”

  “Pack your bag,” says Emily. “You need to check in thirty minutes or they give the spot away. I’ve got Juni’s stuff already set.”

  “This is what? Rehab?”

  “Fact: you are not pulling this off,” she says. “You’re a handful, and I don’t have the hands. Thirty-day detox would be my first choice, but you’ve got Juni. Your mom’s in Belize, you’ve got no friends you trust, and I know, we talked about the father being out of the question.”

  OneLife runs this place, she tells me. Quincy Independence House for Women in Transition. It’s a public-private partnership, so not as much weird shit. It’s supposed to be pretty nice. You get your own efficiency. And it’s one of the few places in Massachusetts that does addiction counseling for people with kids.

  “Transition?” I say. “Is it a shelter?”

  “Actually, it’s focused on former inmates.”

  “I was going to sublet a timeshare,” I say. “Gulf coast, maybe.”

  “They have cloud in Florida, Mellie. This place, it won’t be a vacation; all the monitoring will make your head pop off. And given who runs it, there’s bound to be some hippie stuff: guided visualization. Art consciousness, clay therapy, you know. Plus, the state mandates parenting classes, checkbook balancing, how to boil spaghetti. You might hate it, but, you’ll stay sober, and Juni will stay safe.”