The Ninth Step

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Amends.

  What did that mean anyway?

  Sonny said Cotton would never know until he opened up and came clean at a meeting. “One step at a time, that’s how you climb a mountain,” Sonny said. “But you? Hell no. You want to carry the load like a boulder on your back.”

  Let it go, Sonny said.

  Take it to the police, Anita said.

  Cotton drank from the mug Wes had brought him, scalding his tongue.

  Wes looked around and asked Cotton how long he thought it would be before the studio was finished.

  “A week,” Cotton said, “maybe ten days.”

  Wes nodded. “Nikki sent out the invitations. We’re the only guys she’s inviting, did you know?”

  “Yeah, she’s off boys apparently.”

  “Something went down with a kid at the end of school last year. Dylan something. He asked her to some shindig the school was having and she said she’d go, then at the last minute she got cold feet and broke the date. She made me call him and say she was sick. I was not happy. I told her not to expect I would do that again.” Wes went to the window, ran his hand along the trim. “Women,” he said. “Who can figure them?” He looked at Cotton. “You ever been married?”

  “No, I came close once.” Cotton set down the mug and Wes must have seen something in Cotton’s expression because he said it looked as if whatever had caused it to go wrong, it had hurt. Cotton answered that Wes didn’t know the half of it. He shoved his hands over his head and said her name: “Livie-- She was-- She made the world okay, you know?”

  “Livie, huh?”

  “Short for Olivia.”

  “Pretty name. It didn’t work out?”

  “Nope. I screwed it up.”

  Wes turned back to the window. “I loved my wife, but I can’t lie, sometimes she made it hard. Joan had a real temper.”

  The silence that lingered was as thin as gauze.

  Wes blew out a mouthful of air. He said he had to go, headed toward the door. Paused when he got there. “Nikki has taken a real shine to you, but I expect you know that. I’ve got to say I’m sure glad you came along when you did. If you hadn’t been around when those thugs were working the neighborhood, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  Cotton said it was nothing. He said, “Forget it. I appreciate the job.”

  He looked through the window to the street at his Mercedes that was parked at the curb. He could feel himself at the wheel, feel his foot hit the gas.

  “You’ll meet Trevor,” Wes said, “if you can make the party. He’s planning to surprise Nikki.”

  “I hope I can get here for it,” Cotton said, “but, you know, with my mom . . . the shape she’s in. . . .”

  “I hear you.” Wes took a moment, shifted his glance, looked back at Cotton. “I don’t know if it’ll help you and I damn sure don’t like admitting it, but I was a boozer once, probably as bad as your mom. I hit the bottle pretty hard after Joan died so, believe me, I know what it’s like when your life lands in the shitter.”

  Cotton didn’t know what to say and before he could come up with anything, Wes was gone.

  #

  The noise was loud and insistent, and, at first, swimming for consciousness, he thought raccoons were knocking the garbage cans around, but then he realized the clangor was coming from inside. Kitchen, he thought. Rising on an elbow, Cotton squinted at the clock. Another crash sounded like the banging of cymbals. He sighed and pulled on his jeans.

  What the hell was she doing now?

  He found her on her knees in front of a kitchen cabinet. “Ma? It’s four in the morn--”

  “Shhh, or you’ll wake him,” she admonished.

  “Who? You’re making enough noise to wake everyone the dead and if it’s booze you’re after,” he flipped on the light, “I told you, I threw it out.”

  She sat back on her haunches, blinking. The pots and pans she’d pulled out of the cabinets were strewn around her. “I’m looking for his bottle,” she told him, but her brow knit as if she weren’t sure.

  “Who’s bottle? There’s no one here but us.”

  “Scotty. He’ll want a bottle now that you’ve waked him up. He’s crying. Can’t you hear him?”

  “No, Mom, you’re dreaming.” Cotton bent over her, cupped his hands around the points of her elbows, lifting her. “C’mon now. You should be asleep.”

  Her eyes searched his. “You’re--”

  “Cotton. I’m your son Cotton and I’m taking you back to bed.” He ushered her into the hall.

  “But I have to take care of Scotty first.”

  “Scott’s in Seattle, Ma. Don’t you remember? He called you earlier.” Cotton sat her down on her bed, kneeling in front of her. “Look at me,” he said. “You know me, right? You know where you are.”

  She studied his face and he waited for her to come back all the way.

  She touched her fingertips to his hairline, feathered them along his brow. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “You and your brother were always such good boys.” She started to cry.

  “Aw, now, Mom, c’mon, don’t do that, okay?”

  She snooted into the tissue he handed her. “I’m sick of feeling this way.”

  “It’ll get better. You just have to give yourself a chance.” He stood up. “I have to be at work in a little while. Let’s get some sleep, okay?”

  “If I’m a burden to you, it’s because of her.”

  Delia’s voice caught Cotton at the door. He turned. “Because of who?” he asked, but he knew, knew exactly, and the sense of it was armed with the anger he’d kept a mental foot on since he’d brought his mother home.

  “You know who,” Delia said. “Livie. She’s the reason all this has happened.”

  “She’s the reason you’re not dead.”

  “Maybe I’d prefer to be.”

  “Why? Because it’s too hard to live sober, is that what you’re saying?” Cotton took a couple of steps back into the room.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that.” She dropped her glance. “Why don’t you try it, if you think it’s so grand.”

  “You’re right,” he said, “it does feel like shit a lot of the time.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t think you really want me to start.”

  “If you’ve got something on your mind, say it.”

  “Okay, fine.” He yanked her dressing table chair out, spun it around and sat on it. “First off, none of this is on Livie. You’re pissed because you lost your drinking buddy. You’re pissed because I got rid of your gin. You’re pissed because the old man down the street, Max whatever, won’t be your errand boy and run you to the liquor store anymore.”

  “Why are you shouting at me?” Delia’s voice tremored.

  “Why did you lie to Livie?” He stood up, glowered down at her.

  “I never--”

  “Why would you tell her things about me as if they’re true? You don’t even know me.”

  “You’re my son.”

  “You can’t honestly believe you were ever any kind of mother to me or Scott. I doubt you even remember half of it.”

  “How can you say--?”

  “Because, Mo-ther, I barely remember the last fucking six years of my life in Seattle for the same reason. I was drunk. Falling down, flaming ass drunk and I still would be if it weren’t for a woman named Anita Eames who happens to be an ex drunk and a member of AA and a lawyer, all of which I needed--need--”

  Delia’s fingers fluttered near her throat. “I don’t believe it.”

  He looked at her. “Sometimes, I don’t either.”

  “So you joined AA, took the pledge, is that what you’re saying?” The faint sneer in her voice was unmistakable.

  “I’m trying it out, I guess. Trying it on for size.”

  It’s not a dress, Cotton, not a suit of clothes. Cotton heard Anita speak in his brain.

  “You could come with me to a meeting,” he told his mo
ther. “We could do this together.”

  Delia started to object. Cotton spoke quickly. “You want Scott to come home, don’t you?” He sat beside her and picked up her hand and he had a sense of age, of frailty. A sense that she wasn’t well and might never be again, that this would never be resolved.

  But why did he care about them? A family he’d never had? How could he hurt so much, want so much, so desperately, for them to become something to each other now?

  What difference did it make?

  “You said she was a lawyer,” Delia said.

  Cotton wiped his face with both hands.

  “That you needed a lawyer.”

  “Anita, yeah--”

  “But why, Cotton? Why do you need a lawyer?”

  He went to the bedroom window, raised the shade and looked at his image in the glass and at Delia’s behind him, at her eyes that were like hollowed out wells of ink, and he told her.

  Chapter 15

  Her crew brought in the statue of Quan Yin and stood the Oriental goddess to the left of the waterfall in front of a thick stand of black-stemmed bamboo in the Tranquility Garden and when Dexter French clapped, Livie sighed. She left then at Dexter’s request. He wished to be alone to meditate, he said, to study the flow of the water, to contemplate the movement of the fish. Whatever. He could contemplate his navel for all Livie cared. He was happy. For once he was pleased. She could go home early, have the afternoon off to play in her own garden.

  But she didn’t go home after all, she went to the mall. To Macy’s, to wander around in the baby department.

  “You’re expecting a girl I gather.”

  Livie looked up from the tiny shoe, a miniature pink patent leather Mary Jane, she held in the palm of her hand. The sales clerk smiled, her gaze rising. Livie hadn’t realized it, but she was cupping her abdomen with her other hand. She put the shoe down, abruptly, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen a doctor yet,” she added and her face warmed.

  The woman furrowed her brow, sympathetic, curious.

  “I’m--I’m not very far along,” Livie stammered, moving away. “I’m just looking.”

  “Well, let me know if I can help you,” the clerk said, “my name is Cindy.”

  Livie said she would and walked along the aisle, hunting for an exit, but finding herself in the baby furniture department instead, fingering the bonnet of an adorable organdy-skirted bassinet. Who did she think she was, to have a baby alone, to raise a child without a father? It hadn’t worked out so well for her and Kat, had it? They didn’t know where their dad was or even have much of an idea of who he was. Gus said their father was the only one she had been foolish enough to marry, the only one she’d taken back more than once after he cheated on her. Livie didn’t think she would recognize him if he were to walk up to her and introduce himself.

  She had used to make up stories about him; she had invented excuses for his absence. She had blamed her mother for having boyfriends that kept her daddy away. She had blamed herself for being bad. At school, it was easier to say he was dead. Sometimes, Livie had even wished he was, then she’d been terrified her wish would make it happen.

  She turned from the bassinet, went into the aisle. Would Joe say that Livie had gotten pregnant on purpose? Did he want children? Did she? Was her longing for a family real or just an abstract idea, a foolish fairy tale? The questions dropped into her mind like hail stones. She ducked her head, walking faster, wanting to get out of the store.

  She would get an abortion.

  But how could she?

  This was a tiny life she carried. Real, not a dream. Not some inconvenience. Livie pushed through the exit door, almost running now. Gasping as the afternoon heat took her breath.

  She had imagined Cotton’s baby, that she and Cotton would be parents. She had imagined them as a family, but she’d lost Cotton, lost his baby. She jerked open her car door and got into the driver’s seat, panting, weak. She bowed her head to the steering wheel, waiting for the nausea to pass.

  From the dark behind her eyes, a stick figure formed, then another and another until there were four. The mom and dad stick figures were holding the stick-fingered hands of two pig-tailed girls. A thick-crayoned outline of a house rose behind them. Curtains with bows adorned the windows. An improbable curl of smoke rose out a brick chimney. There was a yard with a green, puffy-canopied tree. Flowers sprung in a haphazard pattern out of the grass. Above it all, the sun poked bold-crayoned rays from beneath a stripe of blue sky. It was her picture, the one that as a child, she’d sketched over and over. Every detail had symbolized home to her. Symbolized safety and love. All the small intangible comforts that she’d never had.

  A sound rose in her throat, a half cough that hurt. She bit her lip. What was she going to do? What was the right thing to do?

  #

  “I don’t know if I want to be a mother,” Livie said. She had left the mall, but when she’d started to cry in earnest, she’d pulled onto the freeway shoulder and called Kat.

  “It’s all you’ve ever wanted,” Kat said.

  Livie looked at the traffic that passed. The wind from it pummeled her car making it rock gently.

  Kat said, “Remember that time, I think it was my eighth or ninth birthday--”

  “The one Mom forgot?”

  “Yeah, she had that new boyfriend and I told you--”

  “--she was farking some guy,” Livie finished, laughing, sniffing, pinching her nose.

  “You said I shouldn’t cuss--”

  “--and the word was fucking not farking.”

  “Farking straight!” Kat exclaimed.

  “We’ve said farking ever since.” Livie traced the lower curve of the steering wheel.

  “You took me to get a triple hot fudge sundae. You made the lady put a candle on it. Do you remember? You bought me a charm bracelet with the money you earned pulling Mrs. McIntyre’s weeds.” Kat’s voice sank. “You took such good care of me, Livie.”

  #

  Kat saw Livie from the outside. She wasn’t looking from inside Livie’s heart that was so often dark and clenched with resentment. Livie hadn’t wanted the responsibility of looking after her little sister. She hadn’t wanted to give up the twenty-five dollars she’d spent on the charm bracelet. It had been her nest egg and she had hated losing it, had tried, unsuccessfully, to guilt her mother into paying her back. Livie wouldn’t call that true giving.

  She wouldn’t call that taking good care of Kat. She switched on the car radio, a man was shouting about a furniture store going out of business, she switched it off, exited the freeway. A mile or so from home, her cell phone rang. It was her mother.

  “Where are you?” Gus asked. “We have to talk.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Livie made a face. Her mother didn’t put on her Queen of Sheba voice over nothing. She didn’t command her subjects over nothing. Livie said, “I’m nearly home.”

  Her mother said, “I’m in your driveway.”

  #

  “Your sister has told me the most awful story about you, one I find very hard to believe.” Gus took down two ice tea glasses from the cabinet in Livie’s kitchen.

  Watching her warily, Livie sat at the table in the breakfast nook. “What story?” she asked, but she knew. Knew exactly and she thought when she saw Kat again, she would kill her.

  “After the hell you put me through about my lifestyle.” Livie’s mother talked over the rattle of the ice maker, the slam of the refrigerator door, the clank of the spoon as she stirred in the juice from a fresh-sliced lemon and spoonfuls of sugar. She plunked Livie’s glass down in front of her. “It would seem that Little Miss Glinda isn’t so Good after all.”

  Livie raised her voice too, hotly defensive. “I did not expose my children.” She spoke to her mother’s back.

  Gus wheeled. “What did I expose you to? I wasn’t in and out of bars, draggin
g home strange men.”

  “I didn’t drag them home.”

  “You accused me of being a whore. Do you remember? And yet here you are and pregnant to boot.”

  “I was seventeen when I said that. You came out on the porch shouting at me for being five minutes late for my curf--”

  “You were with that hoodlum from down the street. What was his name? Danny, Devin, something. He’d been arrested--”

  “You chased me down the street and you weren’t even dressed.”

  “What? I was too.”

  Livie snorted. “If you can call wearing a see-through camisole and tap pants dressed. It was all over school the next day how you were running after me half naked. It was humiliating, Mom. Everyone--a lot of the guys assumed I was like you, that I was--” Easy. Livie caught her lip, caught herself before she could say it, say: Everyone thought I was easy.

  It--her mother’s antics--had made it hard, hard not to be easy.

  “You were old enough to know better than to call your mother names.”

  Livie made no response; she looked out the window.

  “I wasn’t then, nor am I now, a whore.”

  “Neither am I.” Livie brought her gaze back to her mother. For a moment the entire world was their locked stare, the ringing silence. Livie broke it. “You were so careless with us, Mother.”

  “You have no idea how difficult--”

  “Don’t start with the I’m-a-single-mother routine. That doctor might have bought it, but I don’t. Didn’t then either.”

  “What doctor? What are you talk--?”

  “When we took Kat to the emergency room.”

  “When she fell off her bicycle?”

  “You lied, Mom, to her doctor. You told him you looked in on Kat several times in the night and she was fine, but you didn’t. You never came once and she wasn’t fine. I almost said something, did you know it? When they took Kat up to the ICU, I made up my mind I was going to report you for neglect.”

  “Oh, Livie, honestly--”

  “You left me alone with her.” Livie hadn’t realized the memory of that horrible night was so close to the surface, that she was still so completely furious and panicked by it. “You were in bed with your latest fling, screwing his brains out and you couldn’t bother to open your door to me. I was so afraid when Kat wouldn’t wake up.”