The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  The cab swerves across the empty lanes.

  “You bitch,” says my boyfriend, says the man from whom I have stolen. “You fucking bitch, I’m coming after you.”

  But seeing the cabbie, a remarkably big Trinidadian man, my boyfriend hesitates, and I am gifted at time. My timing is perfect and I run, and the door opens and Mr. Boyfriend jerks into action too late and I am sucked into the sphere of dispatcher static and Hot 97, the safe smell of air freshener.

  “Pull the door close,” says Bill Johnson, medallion number 4567. “Where you heading, girl?”

  “Round frown,” I tell him. I shake my head to clear it, and the adrenaline, the passage of time, the mystery of cloud sickness, it passes. “Downtown. 4th between 2nd and Broadway.”

  “You like jazz?” asks Bill Johnson. “You listen to hip-hop?”

  Mr. Boyfriend is a block away now, a block and a half. I imagine him scoring his own face, practicing the story. This is one trouble with cloud sickness, how you lose your grip on what’s actual. But then I think of his black and white house, of his trouble with his gold painting, and I realize he doesn’t have a lie in him, that the only kind of story he knows is one that’s actually happened.

  Ten

  Roslindale

  2010

  After the encounter at MCI Framingham, I considered cancelling my trip to Roslindale. I explained it to my therapist like this: there were these two old junkies, used together for something like forty years. Opioids, in this case. One day, they got some bad stuff, or accidentally OD’d. They were on this street, this busy street, and they were dying. The woman was dying on the ground, knees bent, mouth open to the sidewalk, and some part of her, her thighs, were trying to keep her alive. They were twitching. That was all that was left of her will to live: a twitch in her thighs. The man, her partner of forty years, was hanging off the bench, drooping, then jerking awake, then drooping, until he too slid off and faceplanted. The thing is, to onlookers, it was funny. They were shooting it, on video, instead of calling the ambulance. They were uploading it for strangers to laugh at. The worst tragedy of these people’s lives, and it would be viewed again and again. In the end, they both got clean. Separate facilities, a thousand miles apart. This is a true story, I told my therapist. This actually happened.

  “Your point is humiliation?” she asked. “Mellie, you don’t even know if the woman in Ruin Tape is you.”

  I shook my head. “My point is, they never saw each other again. The man and the woman survived forty years of junkie life together, but to get clean, they had to end it. This thing, Valerie’s movie, it’s technically two years old. Is it my actual face? The woman’s so messed up you can’t really tell, but I know that face. It might as well be mine. And not back then, in LA. It’s me five weeks ago, licking dirty paper in my garage. I can’t ever meet that woman again.”

  “That’s cloud talking. That’s why you took cloud, to leave yourself behind.” She looked at me. “You don’t really get to do that, in life.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You want me to rely on my judgment, to remap. There are things worth pursuing, and things that turn into obsessions. I’m saying this is the latter territory.”

  “Acknowledged,” said my shrink. “Like how you’re staying off the computer, avoiding falling into that. I think that’s healthy. But a place like Independence can be its own loop. Step out. You might be surprised, what you can handle. You might be underestimating yourself.”

  “And,” I’d said. “You might be overestimating me.”

  Then, the morning of my release—this morning—something happened to change my mind. Now, all of a sudden, and completely, everything looks different, and so here I am in the Independence Van, heading home for the first time in five weeks. Emily’s Focus is in the shop, and my car is still in my garage, so we’re getting the guy to drive us. This is the season when the world becomes pink and white. Outside, it’s a gorgeous spring day and we’ve cranked down the window and turned up the light rock. I’m smiling and for once I’m not faking.

  The thing that happened this morning was I got the results of Juni’s medical. The breathing issue was a consequence of lingering bronchitis. Now she’s on liquid antibiotics and symptoms should clear up in a couple of days. She’s OK. She’s going to be OK. I get that this is not a ringing endorsement of my parenting, that the bronchitis is a condition I failed to treat, but she’ll recover, and it’s a reprieve I couldn’t have earned, a commutation of a sentence I didn’t know how to bear. I was standing there, with the medical report in my hand, and I couldn’t believe it. Meanwhile, the day attendant was gushing at me. This new thing with sorting Juni was doing, how actually pretty advanced it was, how it was more of a three-year-old skill. Of course, sorting was what my forbears did in their sweatshops. It’s not higher-level math or baby engineering, but still. I am not a mother used to hearing her child praised.

  Juni is healthy. I have heard stories like this from other addicts. It’s tangled up in the G-d stuff for them; they use the language of miracles. Emily has said, even if you don’t believe, you’re going to get socked with one. And here it is, miraculously. In recovery, they come, these things you don’t dare to hope for. They come even for people like me. Suddenly, I can imagine us going home for good, just a mother and her healthy baby. Suddenly, I can begin to imagine life after. The smile is real.

  Emily and I turn up the volume on the easy listening. The van guy is a former postman turned meth head who used to dump his mailbag in the woods behind his house in order to spend his shifts getting high and so he’s cool with Emily smoking her New Hampshire cigarettes, doesn’t care what we play on the radio, even if he is more of a metal guy. I’m a New Englander who hates winter, a freckled Jew who loves the sun, and Emily is a Dorchester blonde, and we all sing along. This glorious day, this dear friend, each breath my baby girl takes. Everything is miraculous.

  The van driver pulls in front of my house. The garage door is stuck half-open, just as I left it. The pavement is littered with petals and everywhere but my own neglected lot, the neighborhood sparkles with the efforts of human industry. The driver cuts the engine, and hands me my dead phone and charger in a baggie, and begins to fill out the drop-off paperwork. In the sudden silence, something passes over Emily’s face, and I recall she’s nursing her own troubles.

  “How’s Leo?” I ask Emily.

  She shrugs. “Shitty.”

  “You decide if you’re testifying?”

  Emily shakes her head. “You think I’m chickenshit?”

  “No. I’m surprised, is all.”

  “It’s not about backing down from a fight,” she tells me. “I just can’t ever be in a room with him again. Not ever.”

  “So? What do you think they’ll do?”

  “I don’t know. They’re deliberating.”

  “This very moment?”

  She nods. “One of my contacts at the court says he lawyered up big time. Fucking Irish families. His dozen cousins chipped in, got him some 10,000-dollar barracuda.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, shit is right. I don’t know. They’d put an anklet on him; an alarm supposedly goes off if he’s within a 1000 feet of me or Leo, but I’d rather him in prison. Don’t you think crazy is a little bit like smart at the outer edges? My ex is no genius, and still, he always managed to hunt me down.”

  The van driver is waiting for us. When it’s Emily’s turn to sign, he says something low to her, and she gives him a faint smile. Then he pulls away, and we find ourselves among the shin-high weeds. Emily steps between the abandoned garbage cans which still block the garage.

  “Help me get these in,” she says. She holds out the keys she’d confiscated from me a month earlier.

  I have not yet allowed myself to take in the house, and as I turn, I gaze at the uneven tufts of grass, the brown daffodil stems, and scatter of uncollected mail, something in my chest contracts.

  “I get it,” says Emily. “The garage is the
addict mommy’s refuge. When I was still with Leo’s father, we had one, and I’d go out there with the baby monitor and eat cloud until I couldn’t remember what street I lived on. I acknowledge your feelings, honey, now get over yourself and put some muscle into it.”

  I take the keys. Lawn sprinklers tick. Birds chirp and flutter. The garage door sticks, grinds, and then opens to allow us inside. A hundred years have passed in the last thirty days. So much life sleeps within; so many bad old habits could push in like a splinter.

  “That woman I connected with at Framingham,” I say. “She’s no one I trust. I mean, she’d say whatever to get a reaction, but Emily, it’s messing with me. I’m trying to stay put, but the current just gets stronger and stronger. Is this what it’s going to be like? I’m just supposed to stand here and let it all rush around me?”

  Emily hoists the last garbage can. “You know, I was the one put my Leo’s dad in prison, right?”

  I nod. I’ve heard Emily’s story at meetings, and other bits have dribbled out in our sponsoring sessions, but I haven’t dug into the details. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should make it my business to ask.

  “My regret, right, my thing I was always wanting to go back and undo, was never that. Or, it was related, but not like regret for locking him up. Shit fucker deserved it. Deserves it still, lawyer notwithstanding. Naw, what gives me that aspirin thing, bitter, in my mouth, wishing I could go back and change it all, is that I waited too long. If I was going to do it anyway, get my own son’s father sent up, file the protective order, go through all that, why not save Leo the scenes that came first, the times he found me bruised and hungover, the things his friends said when they saw me with a black eye, the times the man I loved and defended raised a hand to my sweet baby boy. That’s my cross, you know? Those years, before I found my strength.”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking of Juni’s cough, of my enormous luck.

  “I didn’t get clean instantly, after they put him behind bars. I stayed high for a while after. Loneliness, which I know you know about, was part of it, but there’s a thing I need to tell you, Mellie. It happened one night. I was just high as Jesus after the Resurrection; I went into Leo’s room and he wasn’t there. It was another kid lying in his bed. No scar where he’d fallen on the smashed bottle. No indentation at the side of his head, where the doctor had to pull him with a forceps because I was too fucked up to push when he was born. Mellie, it was the son I would have had. If I’d done the right thing all along.”

  “Do you have any fucking clue? I like my Leo, my damaged Leo, the stupid little shit who curses too much, and won’t do his homework, and screams at his nightmares, and fails his Paul Revere quiz. But. But. What it was like to see the whole story, laid out there, the impact of my own idiot choices. This perfect kid, how he would have been if I’d never gotten high. There are things we recognize, Mellie. We recognize them deeply, even if they are strange to us. Of course, I did what you do, what junkies do when they have too much feeling. I ate cloud. In the morning, it was regular old Leo, bottle scar, forceps head, bad fucking attitude and worse hygiene. My kid.”

  “I didn’t know,” I say.

  “What’s there to know? In normal terms, nothing happened. My point is, Mellie. Here’s my point, the likely world, what we see on cloud—obviously, do what your shrink tells you. Do a curriculum, go on a field trip, remap the circuitry. Fine. What they do with you at Independence House, follow along—but maybe don’t totally fucking buy into it. I’m sorry, I know it’s the opposite of what I usually tell you, but Mellie, this is important.”

  I’m disconcerted by the sudden disclosures. Her ex is weighing on her, obviously. Which doesn’t mean she isn’t sincere.

  “OK,” I say. “Check.”

  “Mellie, that’s how I got clean. For real. That perfect Leo lying in the bed. Did it actually happen? Did it not happen? That’s not the point. It happened for me, and it’s part of who I’ve become, how I’ve become who I’ve become.”

  “I hear you,” I say. I’m trying to listen.

  “There is truth there. That’s the—shit—it’s the only thing that makes my life more than a big ball of waste. That woman, the artist, she doesn’t sound like a reliable witness. Take it with a grain. But these videos, I mean. That cloud woman in the tape? I think you should watch it. It could be like me, and my perfect Leo. We get truth back when we get sick, and being sober, honey, it helps you get the message.”

  For the first time since we’ve known each other, I can pierce the foil of her solid present and see clearly into her junkie past, can glimpse why she might have cornered the pathetic mom who was pushing a stroller endlessly around a block, why Emily might have been the one to drag that mother in to her very first meeting. She is shakier than I have seen her look, more wild.

  “Hey,” I say. “I’m here. If you need anything.”

  “You?” she says, but she smiles. “I know you are. And someday, when you’re not falling into your own hole every second, maybe I will.”

  There’s a moment, one which I will recall later, where we recognize something in each other. The thing of her sobriety, of her being my sponsor, drops away, and I feel like some other Mellie, one who could be leaned on, relied on, who occasionally could make things better instead of worse.

  “Count on it,” I say.

  “I will. You’re doing great. And Juni, seriously. She’s grown about two sizes since you’ve moved in. You’ve got to be proud.”

  “I am,” I say. And the weird intensity seems to lift; we are not natives to sentiment, and we dwell there only briefly before our Boston-bred aversion forces us to move along.

  My lawn is shaggy, green shoots pressing through last fall’s unraked leaves. As I step onto the sidewalk, the woman next door sticks her head out. I have been aware, as Emily and I have moved between the sidewalk and the garage, of a certain nosy rustling of curtains and breath-gathering on the neighbor window glass.

  Emily secures the last garbage can. Lining my walk, there are rubber-banded circulars advertising faded pink Easter hams. Mail spills from my box. My neighbor emerges onto her stoop. She’s in flannel pajama bottoms with what appears to cupcakes, has her hair in a hairnet. One hand holds a scrub brush.

  “I thought that was you,” she says.

  “Here I am,” I tell her. “Still myself.”

  “How was Aruba? I didn’t think it was a big enough island to stay on more than a week. We thought you’d pulled a runner.”

  “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Death in the family,” Emily stage-whispers as she secures the remaining trash bin. “Colon cancer.”

  “You know,” says the neighbor. “Robbers case neighborhoods for houses like yours. All the neglect. It’s like an invitation.”

  “I’ll look into it,” I say, which I’ve found is a catch-all.

  “I have a brother-in-law. Does property management. You might not realize, but an uninhabited property, in a storm, what could happen is—”

  Emily and I duck under the eaves of the porch to shelter from the volley of her suburban concerns.

  “It takes a village,” I call.

  “Many hands move mountains,” yells Emily.

  We muffle our laughter as we gather up the envelopes from my steps.

  “A raccoon has been trying to get into your cellar,” the woman hollers, thereby proving she stays up all night just monitoring my house for fault. I am on the side of the raccoon. Though, of course, my neighbor is right. It’s time to clear the downspouts, to plant the garden, to lay the mulch, but I have never been good for these things. I have never been the sort who ought to own a house, and yet I do. For years, I hid the money Lew paid me in shoeboxes. I know now you can’t buy a home with shoebox cash. Lew had fixed it for me in some way I’d remained willfully ignorant of. Laundering was probably involved, perhaps the invention for me of a credit history. I’ve been mulling what Valerie said at the commitment, and I have to conclude I have my own missing
middle. Something between the conversation I had with Lew while we watched his house burn, and my arrival back East, the towering pines where I’d dropped my bus ticket have been blurred by deliberate blindness. There had been bad people in LA, and we had been involved with bad things, and my idea, that Lew would wave a lawyer at it and everything would fix itself, is another example of junkie solipsism. There are distinct, particular questions I have not investigated. Something had happened, at the end. There is a sense memory of exhausted thirst, and of sand, sand stinging my skin. Of a weeping that lasted until I was as dry as dust. There was someone I’d left behind. Someone in particular. Then, I was beneath the tall pines. There is a mismatch here, how I’d been dropped into a better life while everyone else had stayed and paid the price. How could you fail to pay that kind of favor back?

  I collect the bright red of the overdue envelopes, the third and fourth notices. It was possible, at Independence, to feel as though the world was on hold, but it hasn’t stopped while I’ve been gone. At the end of the weekend—in three days’ time—the countdown will run out. The Found Footage is due to drop. I had planned to wait it out, let it appear or not appear, but now I see that I may have a stake in the outcome, that I have a part in the missing middle. I had been picked up out of a bad place and dropped into one with a future. But there are pieces of the old life that follow me, and some I have left too long unattended. Deliberately avoided, my therapist would say. It is useful, sometimes, to push worries aside, but you must return to them in time. A woman with a home, a healthy little girl, she cannot hide out forever. I fish out my key over my neighbor’s continued scoldings.

  “You look scared,” says Emily. “Are you scared?”