I shifted her son out of my lap and stood up. I wanted to apologize to my aunt, but I didn’t know how.
My aunt groaned, “Oh, fine,” then disappeared into the kitchen. Everyone seemed onboard with a love story but me. She returned with a can of beer and dropped onto the couch.
I fled the garage and tried to hide in the kitchen, but Portland followed me. I leaned against the kitchen counter, and he rested his hands on my hips. I pressed my palm into his chest and guided him into a chair and angled my own to face him, but at my own safe distance.
He leaned back and regarded me with eyes dark and serious. “You have a boyfriend, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I sighed, relieved.
“Then why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
He glanced around the kitchen and rocked his head side to side. “You have the cutest smile,” he said, finally.
My shoulders fell. It would be easy to fuck him, but I worried what my cousin-sister would think. Tomorrow, having fucked him wouldn’t be enough.
He stretched out his hands and lifted me into his lap. He slid his hands down the front of my jeans, but I grabbed his wrists and pinned them in place.
“I need to sleep,” I said, standing and backing away slowly.
“Come home with me,” he begged.
I shook my head and walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to my cousin-sister’s room. Portland followed. I held my hand on her doorknob, and he leaned down to kiss my neck. It was like I lived in two bodies: one, pushing him toward the living room; the other, dragging him into me. I tilted my head and whispered into his ear, “Tomorrow.”
He leaned back and smiled, “Okay.”
I ducked into my cousin-sister’s room and changed into my sleeping shirt in the dark. As I slid under the blankets beside her, she giggled, “Did he just walk you to my door?”
“Yeah,” I laughed, both nervous and surprised that she was still awake.
“What a dork,” she sighed sleepily.
I lay there in the dark, my eyes wide, and listened for the sound of her soft sleep breaths. If it weren’t for my cousin-sister, I thought, I would be with him. But I was trying to teach us another way.
* * *
—
LATE THE NEXT afternoon, my cousin-sister and I hiked to the top of Window Rock. Patches of snow still sheltered in the shadow of juniper and rock at the higher elevation. My cousin-sister, younger and fitter, scampered ahead. We reached the top of the sandstone cliffs as the sun began setting over the land, pale yellow in its winter dress.
I told my cousin-sister I would miss her. We promised to stay in touch.
Shorty gave me a ride back to the airport the next day, and both my aunt and my cousin-sister tagged along. The drive was strangely quiet. At the gate, we parted with dry eyes and reserved hugs.
In Boston, Marc met me at the gate. He carried my bag to the car. On the drive home, he rested his hand on my knee and asked me how my trip had gone.
I stared out the window at the thousand city lights. “It was pretty much what I expected,” I said, avoiding too many details. “It felt like home.”
The Art of Living Dangerously
MY SISTER WAS paroled early for good behavior. She gave her parole officer the address for my father’s motel. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but no one asked me what I thought. Two days after her release, they called me—both loud and angry-drunk.
“She told me it was okay to have a beer,” my father said.
In the background, I heard my sister yell that she hadn’t said that at all.
While I sat on the phone, they argued about who was the bigger hypocrite—my sister for having a beer while on parole, or my father for drinking an entire bottle of bourbon in front of her.
“It doesn’t matter,” I kept saying. “It doesn’t matter. You both need to stay sober while she’s there.”
He called me three times after I hung up the phone, and when I didn’t respond, he sent a series of texts:
Your sister left.
Blame me so be it.
PS. Your sister is a worthless bitch.
Call me after I’m dead.
See you in the next life.
Love Daddy.
I didn’t hear from my sister until the next morning, when she called me from a number I didn’t recognize. Over the line, I could hear the steady purr of tires against asphalt and a hollow rush of air. She was in a car, heading to Pittsburgh. I worried what her parole officer would say when they found out she was gone.
“He told me I wasn’t worthy of a son like Sebastian,” Eileen said.
“He was drunk,” I said, trying to excuse him; to diminish him; to help her believe that what our father said wasn’t true.
But Eileen wasn’t listening, not really. “I don’t think Sebastian even needs me, Danielle,” she said, casually. “He’s not like other kids.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about him right now,” I said. I felt guilty even saying the words—knowing my grandmother and my father wanted me to convince her to be a better mother, to find a job, to settle down. They wanted her to accept responsibility and build a home for her son. But that life felt too far away. “You need to worry about staying clean. Just focus on that, okay?”
She made a noncommittal sound.
I told her to call me later. To come see me in Boston. I told her I could help.
* * *
—
IN JULY, EILEEN hopped on a freight train from Pittsburgh to New York, then bought a bus ticket to Boston. She caught the last train from the station and landed on my couch near two in the morning. I made her a bowl of ramen noodles and brought it to her in the living room. She pulled a package of onion-and-chive crackers out of her pack and crushed them over the top.
I sat on the opposite end of the couch and watched her eat.
“How long do you plan on staying?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Some of my friends here are heading up to Vermont. I’ve never been up there, but I was thinking of going with them.”
“It’s pretty,” I said, remembering a long weekend Marc and I had spent there with Marie, who had moved there with her boyfriend to help him clear out an old family house. We picked black raspberries out of their garden. Went swimming in a bone-cold creek, where I met my first American dipper, a stocky gray bird twerking on the bank.
“Some of my friends want me to do the sugar beet harvest this winter,” she said.
I laughed. “You didn’t last two weeks on the fruit farm when you were a kid.”
She said nothing. She shrugged one shoulder and ate quickly and avoided my eyes.
I told her I needed sleep but offered to make breakfast in the morning.
She said okay.
I stood and walked to the stairs. I glanced back at my sister, lying on the couch and typing furiously on her phone. I couldn’t imagine this was a scene that would last.
The next morning, I tried making Eileen’s eggs the way she liked them—yolks runny and warm—but I overcooked them. The yolks were too firm when I flipped them out of the pan.
“People out West don’t know what dippy eggs are,” Eileen laughed, eating without complaint. “I asked for a dippy egg in a diner and the waitress looked at me like I was nuts.”
After breakfast, I carried our mother’s box downstairs. I lifted the lid off the box and pulled out a manila envelope of letters Eileen had written to our mother. I handed her one that she had written to our mother after she visited us in middle school. “I hope you still love me,” Eileen read aloud. “If you move up here it would be great. I could see my sister and you. You wouldn’t need a guy…if you would move up here I could visit you and sleep there and have fun and at Halloween you could dress me up like you used t
o.”
Eileen laughed bitterly and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I remember writing that—but I remembered it being a lot angrier.”
I handed her a stack of our mother’s diaries, and she flipped through the pages, skimming lines quickly, but she looked disappointed. I couldn’t tell if her impatience was simply withdrawal, the absence of her name in our mother’s handwriting, or both. We talked little as she read, but when she slid the last diary back into its box, she sighed. “She doesn’t say anything important.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew what she meant.
I had felt the same disappointment reading our mother’s diaries, filled with tallies of money owed, men kissed, meals prepared, houses cleaned. I had hoped to find more heartfelt expressions of our mother’s regrets—some accounting of the daughters she left, but I was forced to look for those sentiments between the written lines. I hoped Eileen would elaborate, or give voice to similar thoughts, but my sister shrugged and rubbed her hands over her face.
“I’m feeling dope sick,” she said, ending the conversation.
My sister was using again.
I took Eileen up to my room and turned off the window AC and wrapped her in blankets, despite Boston’s summer heat, because she said she was cold. I gave her my laptop to watch Netflix. On my desktop, I distracted myself researching rehabs and detox centers in the city to call the next day.
* * *
—
EILEEN FOUND A bed at a detox in Roxbury. She called me at work to tell me she would be in for six days and apologized for missing my birthday. Then she asked me to bring her a pair of pajamas and a pack of cigarettes. On my way home from work, I stopped at a Goodwill and bought her a pair of soft gray jersey pants.
Two days later, she left the detox center early with a kid she met there. They showed up at my apartment together, high.
“They had fucking bedbugs,” Eileen complained as she walked up the stairs, and in the light of the kitchen, she lifted her shirt to show me the raised red marks on her side.
She dragged her pack into the middle of the kitchen floor and began folding things into each of its pockets—her clothes, her map, her phone charger.
“You’re leaving?” I asked.
“Yeah. I mean, I feel like I’m in your way.” She was jumpy. Edgy. Her words drifted into one another.
“Eileen, all my roommates moved out. I’m basically living here alone with Marc. You aren’t in my way.”
“I just feel like you don’t want me here,” she insisted, disappearing into the living room.
“I think you should stay,” her friend chimed in. “If you want to get clean, Boston is the place to be.”
As if on cue, Eileen poked her head into the kitchen and waved a plastic package with a bright orange label in the air. “They did give us Narcan,” she laughed. “Other places don’t do that.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and drifted down the hall.
“Are you worried, Danielle?” she asked. She tried to focus her eyes on mine but they wandered, lost. “Are you mad?”
I was too angry, too frustrated, for words. I shook my head.
“Are you worried I’ll overdose?”
“I’m not worried you’ll overdose,” I sighed. I didn’t believe she could overdose—as if the amount of time she had been shooting heroin had inoculated her, somehow. “I just thought we would spend some time together. I thought we would talk.”
She rolled her eyes. “What are we going to talk about?”
“Everything? You said in your letters to me, over and over, that there are things you want to talk about. You can’t keep running away.”
“I’m not good at these things,” she laughed, circling the kitchen. “You know that.”
I told her I had a headache and that I was going to bed, but she followed me upstairs and sat on the corner of my bed. “Come here, Danielle,” she said, gentle and quiet. She opened her arms, and I relaxed into her hug. “You know I love you, right?” she said.
I told her I loved her, too.
“Are you scared I’m going to overdose?” she asked again.
I covered my face with my hands. “It’s not as simple as that. Can’t you see? Everything keeps repeating. All of this has happened before. I don’t want you to end up like our parents.”
Eileen took my hands, drew them down into her lap, and looked into my eyes. “I’m just happy you made it out,” she said, softly. “It had to get one of us, you know?”
* * *
—
“HAVE YOU HEARD from your sister?” Marc asked me, two days later, as we browsed gaming keyboards at a computer center. He wanted to buy me a new mechanical keyboard for my birthday because the keyboard that had come with my desktop was old, the letters worn off the surface of the keys. I didn’t need to look at the keys to type, but he swore mechanical keyboards were better.
I told him I hadn’t heard from Eileen, but minutes later, she called me as we walked out of the store and toward the car. She was sobbing so hard I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say. I kept asking her what was wrong, if she was okay, but it seemed like she couldn’t stop crying.
“I don’t know where I am,” she said, finally. “I’m scared.”
I asked her to describe her surroundings. She told me she was by the police station, by the woods. I asked her what police station, what woods, but she just kept repeating those two words.
“Can you go to the police station? Can you ask someone where you are?”
“No, Danielle!” she yelled. “They’re just going to arrest me. People keep. People keep walking away from me.”
“Can you just go ask them where you are?” I begged.
She screamed no, no, no. “You don’t even care,” she sobbed, and then she hung up the phone.
I pulled up the map on my phone and thumbed around the eight police stations pinged in downtown Boston. The police station, the woods. I wondered if she might still be in Roxbury, near where the treatment center had been. “Head toward the Fens,” I told Marc.
I tried calling Eileen back, but she wouldn’t answer. I’m trying to find you, I sent her by text.
When she finally answered, I could hear a man’s voice in the background.
“Who is that?” I asked. “Can you put him on?”
“Yeah,” she sighed. She told the man I was her sister as she passed him the phone.
He told me she was near the police headquarters on Tremont Street. We were heading the right way.
“I’ll be there soon,” I told him. “Can you stay with her?”
“How long you gonna be?” he asked.
“Ten minutes,” I promised, hanging up.
My sister was sitting in the parking lot across from the station when we arrived. “Can I see your glasses?” she asked as I approached.
“Why?”
“Because I want to fucking see where I am,” she yelled.
Reluctantly, I handed her my glasses, and she walked quickly toward a fenced-in wooded lot. The man I’d spoken to on the phone was still there, and he walked toward me. He wore a jacket over blue scrubs. “I tried to convince her to go to the clinic,” he said, pointing to a building nearby. “At least to get a drink of water.”
I nodded, staring after her. “Did she say what happened?”
“She said she lost her glasses,” he said. “I walked back there to try to find them—but, you know, it’s scary back there.”
I wrapped my arms around my stomach. “I think she was drugged,” I said quietly.
“You should get her checked out,” he said. “I can go in and give them a heads-up. They even have an NA meeting going on right now.”
I thanked him, but I couldn’t see Eileen anymore, and I was worried. I walked toward the woods and started calling her
name. To my relief, she answered, and I begged her to come back to me.
She walked out of the woods and handed me my glasses, but she refused to go to the clinic. “They’re going to admit me,” she said, her voice again breaking into a sob.
“They won’t,” I promised. “Please. Just do it for me.”
I picked up her pack and led her inside, and they rushed us through urgent care. But in the room she only cried. “I want to go home,” she repeated. “What are these people going to do? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”
The doctor told me he couldn’t treat her; they didn’t have the resources. He told me I should take her to the ER.
“I’m not going to the fucking ER,” Eileen yelled, jumping off the examination table and stalking out of the room.
My heart sank. I knew I would never get her there. “Thank you,” I said, turning to go.
The doctor reached out to me and wrapped her arm around my shoulders. “Is there anyone else with you?” she asked.
I thought of Marc but shook my head. He wouldn’t know what to do with Eileen.
“No family?”
I shook my head again. “Our mom died last year,” I said. The doctor sighed and hugged me tighter.
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “Come back to see us. We have counselors and support groups for families.”
I thanked her but quickly followed Eileen outside.
The entire drive home, she kept asking for my glasses, to look for the guy who had stolen her phone, her glasses, and some jewelry out of her pack before she had regained consciousness. “I’m going to beat the shit out of him,” she insisted. At an intersection where they had hung out, she leapt out of the car. I tried to grab her pack by its straps, but she beat my arm with her fists until I let go.
The light turned green, and Marc drove on, but I asked him to go back.
Whoever had stolen Eileen’s things wasn’t there. We found her at a bus stop down the block. She was talking to two crusty-looking punks, smoking under the glass shelter. Marc pulled over to the curb and I rolled down the window and asked her, again, to let me take her to the ER.
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