Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  I withdrew my hand from my pocket and held up the pack. “Want one?”

  Her eyes widened.

  “What?” I asked, pretending it was no big deal.

  “To quote Mom,” she said, “‘are you shitting me?’”

  I didn’t move, and a small eruption of laughter came out of Dixie before she put her hand over her mouth. I had to laugh, too. Her imitation of Mom was perfect, and I could imagine how strange me smoking looked to her. Then our hands shook with trying not to laugh too loud as we lit our cigarettes—that crazy kind of laughing that feels almost the same as crying.

  From the way she inhaled I could tell it wasn’t her first; I wasn’t introducing her to anything.

  “Mom threw away the food,” I told her after we’d each taken a couple of drags.

  “What food?”

  “The food.”

  “Like, the leftovers? From dinner?”

  I blew smoke into the air, watching it curl and wind through the fire-escape grating. She had such faith in Mom. “All of it, Dixie.”

  I felt her letting it sink in.

  “I tried to stop her.”

  A man was looking through a Dumpster in our alley. We stayed quiet until he’d gone; then Dixie flicked her half-smoked cigarette off the fire escape like she’d done it a hundred times before. She shivered.

  “Is she still up?” she asked.

  “She went to her room.” I stubbed my own cigarette out. “She said to leave her alone.”

  “I want to get the stuff out of the bathroom before she finds that, too.”

  She meant the tampons and shampoo and everything. When she turned to climb back through, I figured that was it, our moment together was over. But she glanced over her shoulder and said, “Come on.”

  We crept down the hall. The bathroom light was on, the door ajar. We waited a second to make sure Mom wasn’t in there; then I went in, knelt on the floor, and opened the cabinet under the sink, pulling out the boxes of pads and tampons, and the shampoo with its matching conditioner that had the words “Hydration Balance Shine” lettered onto the bottles. A jar of hair cream Dixie had gotten, the serum I was going to try. The razors. Dixie found a plastic bag to put it all into.

  Back out in the hall, I couldn’t help but notice how quiet it was. Dixie felt it, too. She handed me the bag of our stuff and went to Mom’s door, nudging it open.

  “Dixie,” I whispered. “Let’s just go to bed.”

  Mom lay on the bed in her clothes, blankets half pulled over her, and from the position she was in you could tell something wasn’t right. Her body was too loose. Dixie went farther in. “Mom?”

  “She said she wanted to disappear.”

  Dixie knew what that meant as well as I did. But she still kept walking. I stood frozen in the doorway.

  “I just want to make sure she’s breathing and everything,” she said.

  I watched as she tried to get some response out of Mom. For years it had always been me trying to wake Mom while Dixie hung back. I watched as if watching myself, trying to remember the girl I’d been, the girls we both were, how small we must have been, and how scared.

  Now, Mom mumbled something unintelligible, waved one of her arms as if shooing Dixie away. “What did you take, Mom?” Dixie asked. “Mom?”

  I took a step closer.

  “She’s breathing okay,” Dixie said to me. “Come help me look around.”

  I finally went in. The room smelled stale and was colder than ours. Mom had her window open about an inch. We silently searched, moving aside clothes and jewelry and makeup. We opened drawers and all the little decorative boxes Mom kept on her dresser and bedside tables. Dixie found it on the bookcase by the window—the chalky residue of something.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Probably oxy. Maybe mixed with something else.”

  She kept searching. She reached her hand under the mattress and felt around until she pulled out a handful of tiny plastic bags. “These are old ones, empty.”

  “How do you know what it was?”

  After a pause Dixie said, “Because I got it for her. At school.”

  She pulled the blankets up around Mom’s shoulders, then walked out. I followed, not as shocked as I probably should have been. Nothing about our family surprised me, I realized. It was following exactly the path it had been on for a long time.

  When we got to our room, Dixie sat on her bed. “She’ll be okay. I get her stuff sometimes. Don’t yell at me, Gem.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” I flipped on the overhead light. One of the two bulbs flickered, then died. “She hasn’t been in there that long. It works that fast?”

  “If you snort it. And maybe she was already on something when she got home from work. I didn’t think—”

  “I don’t care,” I said. And I didn’t. I didn’t care.

  Our room looked dingy and sad in the low light, more so than usual. And it smelled a little bit like smoke. I smelled like smoke, too—smoke and sweat. It was only a few hours before dawn, then school. “I’m taking a shower.”

  “Now?” Dixie asked.

  “Yeah.” I carried the plastic bag of our stuff into the bathroom.

  The new shampoo smelled like coconut. I used it all over my body. I shaved my legs with a fresh razor. I massaged the conditioner into my hair and stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out, then sat on the closed toilet in the steam for a long time, working the serum through my split ends, my arms heavy, full of little pebbles.

  Dixie was on her bed, on her back, her arm crossed over her face. “I’m awake,” she said without moving. There were more tissues piled up and tears in her voice when she said, “I checked on Mom again. She’s the same.”

  “I don’t care,” I repeated. I let my towel drop to the floor and dressed for school, limbs heavy, moving in slow motion. “You’re the one who’s worried. Or do you feel guilty?”

  She sat up, and her face was puffy from crying but also glowing, like crying made her even more herself, her eyes brighter, her lips redder. “She made it sound like no big deal, Gem. She said her shoulder hurt from carrying trays of drinks and whatever, and she just didn’t have time to go to the doctor, and she knew there was all kinds of stuff to get at school. She didn’t beg or anything. She didn’t seem like . . . you know, desperate. She seemed—”

  “I said I don’t care.”

  She fell back over onto her side. “Dad was such a dick to me.”

  “Not just to you.” I got down on the floor with the bag of shampoo and stuff. “I’m hiding this under the bed.” There was room for it in the box with the cartons of Haciendas. I reached under to drag it out, and the tips of my fingers felt something else there. I couldn’t quite reach it, so I lay down on the floor to get more of my arm under, and pulled it out.

  It took me just a second to recognize the brown backpack Dad had been carrying around.

  Feeling suddenly sharp and awake, I looked at Dixie. “Did you put this under my bed?”

  She rolled over to the edge of the bed to see. “No.”

  “Did you see him put it there?”

  “No!” She sat up, indignant.

  “Well, when did he, if you didn’t know? Did he come in here when I was doing the dishes?”

  “I don’t know, Gem. I guess he could have?”

  I looked at the worn brown canvas, imagining Dad in our room, rushing around looking for a place to stash the bag. Mom’s words repeated in my head: He’s into something, I guarantee it. Drugs, probably. It would make sense, that his big plan for success had been to bring in a stash from the border and sell it in Seattle. Just another unsurprising development in the mess that was our lives. I reached for the zipper.

  Dixie was up and grabbed the backpack away. “Wait. I should call Dad. Let me call him.”

  For a second I doubted her claim that she didn’t know any more about it than I did, especially having just found out she’d been getting pills for Mom. Maybe Dad was going to
get her to deal at school, maybe that’s what he meant when he’d said how important it was for him to be able to trust her. Would he do that? Yes, I thought. He would.

  I watched her face and she didn’t avoid my eyes, which made me think she really didn’t know. “We’re opening it first,” I said. “And if it’s drugs, we’re calling the police. Then you can call him all you want.”

  “The police, Gem? With Mom like she is right now? I could get in real trouble if they found out what I did.”

  I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble, not that kind of trouble. “I just want Dad to go away,” I said.

  That wasn’t it exactly. I wanted my father. But I wanted him to be a different person than he was.

  Dixie cradled the bag in her arms like it was a baby. “He’s probably—”

  “Fine,” I said, stopping her before she could voice another excuse for him. “Call and ask him what’s in the bag. You think he’s that great? Ask. Ask him if everything today—buying us groceries, cooking dinner—was all so he could stash this here without us noticing.” She held the bag against her chest. Her phone was on the floor by the bed. I picked it up. “Or I can call him and ask.”

  Dixie slowly lowered the bag and slid to the floor with it in her lap. She looked at it a few seconds, then passed it to me. “You open it. I don’t want him getting mad at me.”

  Maybe it was her being younger that made her care so much what he thought. Fourteen—even almost fifteen—is pretty far from seventeen when it comes down to it. Or maybe it was that she had better memories of him than I did, a different picture of him, since he’d always paid her more attention. Unlike me, she still had something left to lose.

  I can remember the sound the zipper made. It snagged a couple of times; then I got the bag open in three short bursts and peered inside.

  “What is it?” Dixie asked.

  I reached my hand in to widen the opening, to see how much was in there.

  Then I stared at Dixie and dumped the contents of the backpack onto our floor.

  Her mouth fell open. She got up onto her knees and bent over it.

  “Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”

  10.

  EVERYONE PLAYS the runaway game when they’re little. Maybe they run away in the house, like we did, only pretending to be gone. Or if they’re in an okay neighborhood, they might run away down the street, to a park or a neighbor’s house. But it’s a game you grow out of. Most kids, when they get older, realize they have things pretty good, that their parents love them and that not getting dessert every night or having to share their toys isn’t the end of the world.

  Besides, those who really do want to leave, who need to, have to figure things out. Like how they’ll survive. They need a plan, they need help.

  Or they need money.

  “How much do you think this is?” Dixie asked as she stared at the cash on our bedroom floor.

  Stacks and stacks of it. It wasn’t all neat and organized and new looking, like on TV. Some of it was bundled, some of it loose and crumpled. There were ones, and there were twenties. There were fives, lots of fives. Literally at our feet.

  I picked up a bundle and flipped through it. “These are all fifties.” I put that one down and picked up another. “Tens.”

  Having it all spread out on the floor made me nervous; with our luck, I could imagine Mom miraculously coming out of her drug stupor and walking in on us, or Dad turning up with an apartment key that he’d somehow gotten. I started to put it all back into the bag.

  “Wait,” Dixie said, grasping at the money. “I want to count it.”

  I sat back on my heels. I made my thoughts slow down, I made myself breathe like Mr. Bergstrom taught me. What were the facts? What was reality? A pile of money. That Dad had hidden in our room. Another reality was Dixie, and that she still felt loyal to him and could pick up her phone any second and call to tell him we’d found the money. But she also still felt loyal to Mom and might tell her.

  And another reality, one that I pushed to the side for later, was what a person—a person like me—could do with that money.

  My goal, my only goal right then, was to keep Dixie from telling either of our parents what we’d found.

  “Weren’t you going to call Dad?” I asked her carefully. “You could ask him how much it is.”

  She drew her hands back. Her phone was right next to her on the floor. I held back the impulse to grab it, knowing that would backfire.

  “Or,” I said, “do you want to wait until Mom wakes up and ask her what to do? Remember how she said she’d burn any money we got from Dad?”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “You didn’t see her, Dixie, throwing bags full of food down the garbage chute. But go ahead. I’m sure the mom that got you to buy drugs for her will give great advice.”

  Dixie’s expression clouded. “Why are you being like this?”

  I stood. “I’m being like this because after everything we’ve been through you still act like they’re normal parents who are capable of doing normal parent things like solving problems and taking care of us. I mean, look at only everything that happened today, never mind our whole lives.” I pointed to the money. “Think about it, Dixie. What kind of a father would use his kids’ room to stash drug money or whatever it is?”

  “You think it’s drug money?”

  “Or whatever it is. You think he earned this? At a job?”

  She halfheartedly straightened a stack of the bills. “I’m sure he has an explanation.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  I sat on my bed, barely breathing now, and she stayed on the floor between the phone and the money, staring blankly, looking at neither. After a few seconds she reached over for the backpack and slowly started putting the money into it. “Okay. So what do we do?”

  I exhaled. “Let me think.”

  The window was still open. Heavy mist had coated the glass in droplets. Sounds from the street—cars, mostly, and a few voices—floated up to me. I’d done it, kept Dixie from calling him, gotten her to look to me for the answers like she did when she was six, eight. Now, I wanted to figure out what Dad would do next, how much time we’d have to come up with a plan. But I was exhausted and cold and the only thoughts I could manage were about myself.

  “It’s a shitload of money, Gem.”

  “I know.” I stared at the bag and thought about what I would have done if I’d been all alone when I found it. “Let’s put it back under the bed for now. Like it was. And don’t say anything to Dad.”

  She’d drawn her knees to her chest. “Maybe he wants to give it to us. Maybe he did earn it, Gem. Maybe he wants to take care of us. This must have been what he used to buy us groceries, right?”

  I saw the little girl she’d been, saw it in her face, but more in what she was saying and in her voice—the tired, desperate hope of having to convince yourself of something that should be unquestionable.

  “Maybe,” I said, slipping easily back into the role of big sister, comforter. “For now, don’t say anything.” I put the bag back under the bed, right where it had been.

  “I won’t.” She got up and crawled under her covers.

  I turned off the light and lay on top of my bed. We had a couple of hours before we’d have to leave for school. Despite how exhausted I was, I decided not to let myself sleep. I still had to make sure Dixie didn’t call him, or text him, or go to Mom. No matter what my sister promised, or how tough she thought she was, how grown-up and world-wise and smart, when it came to them she was more fragile than I’d ever been, or would ever let myself be.

  11.

  I SKIMMED the dense blocks of text in The Grapes of Wrath, hoping to get something down about it in my overdue reading journal before class started. Focus never came easily for me, and that book, full of dust and farms and a hundred different characters, was especially hard to follow. But Mr. Bergstrom often reminded me how important it was to graduate, so I tried.

  My feet rested o
n my backpack under my desk; I tapped my pen against my notebook. I wrote two sentences about how confusing the story was, then got distracted by wondering if Mom had gotten up yet. She’d still been in bed when I left, and Dixie had been in the shower.

  Helena Mafi came in and hung her jacket on the back of her chair. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but if I had to stare at the back of someone’s head for an hour every day, hers was better than most. Her hair was black and always shiny, with a slight wave to it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She turned, with raised eyebrows.

  “Did you do the reading?” I asked, holding up the book.

  “Yeah.” She sat down and got out her own copy.

  Mrs. Cantrell had gone to the door to call in stragglers.

  “What happens?” I asked Helena.

  “It’s a little complicated to explain in two seconds.”

  “Where are we even supposed to be? In the reading?”

  Flipping pages, I jiggled my leg up and down. What if Dixie was telling Mom about the money right now? I knew it was a risk to leave her there, but I hadn’t wanted to be late, hadn’t wanted to do anything that would call attention to me, and most of all hadn’t wanted to have to see Mom, myself, before I got out.

  “Here,” Helena said, annoyed. She took my book and found the page. “Your leg is bumping my chair.” She handed the book back to me. “It’s annoying.”

  I stopped. “Sorry.” I tried three deep breaths. It helped slightly. I read the page Helena opened to. There were children in this chapter, children barefoot—in dust, always dust—and watching a man eat a sandwich, wanting it.

  I tapped Helena’s shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m really sorry,” I whispered. Cantrell had started class. “About jiggling your chair.”

  “I know. You just said that.”

  “I am.” I wanted her to remember me in a nice way.

  She tilted her head toward me. Her hair touched my desk. “It’s okay, Gem. It’s not a big deal.”