“I like it here,” she says with a shy smile.
Blue has made the apartment more of a home in six weeks than I did in the six months I was here.
On the card table, a painstaking project: Blue has been taping together the contents of my ripped sketchbook and the torn Land Camera photographs of Ellis and me. Some of the pieces are tiny; Wendy was very thorough.
Blue stutters. “It—it was Jen S. She called me after you left for work, about Louisa, and, Jesus, Charlie, I just lost it. I found Riley and we went to that girl’s house. I just wanted to get high, you know? I didn’t…I didn’t know it was going to be that stuff, but I couldn’t stop myself. Jesus, Charlie, did you know about him?”
The little crystalline bags. The plastic smell the first morning I came to wake him up. I look at Blue and start to cry. Her eyes widen in alarm. “Charlie, what?”
I tell her I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but that I lied, that I bought drugs for Riley, that everything was horrible, and that I was drowning, and that I don’t want to be underwater anymore.
Blue shakes her head violently. “I’m out, Charlie. I’m really done. I’m not gonna do that stuff anymore. I promise. I like it here. It’s fucking nice, this town. My God, the sun.”
I press my forehead against the wall, suddenly exhausted all over again, emptied, now that I’m back.
She says, “That person I was at Creeley, that wasn’t really me. Sometimes with people, you just become something, like, your role happens to you, instead of you choosing it. I let that happen when I got here. I let it slip over me, even though I didn’t want to. I don’t…I’m not that, Charlie. I want to be friends. I think we could help each other. I like you so much.”
Her hand on my back is warm through my shirt.
“I don’t want to be Louisa,” she whispers. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be that, ever. Help me not be that and I’ll help you.”
I believe her. She says my name. She says Louisa’s, over and over. We cry like that, for hours, together, me against the wall, Blue pressed to my back. Holding each other, like you’re supposed to.
The green screen door slams shut behind me. Everyone turns around; everyone’s face closes up. I hang my backpack on the wall peg, walk to the dishwasher, tie on my apron, jerk out the dish rack, and start to unload plates and cups. When I turn around with a clean dish tray, they’re staring at me: Randy in her saddle shoes, Temple busying herself with the coffee urns, silvery ankle bracelets tinkling.
Randy dumps an armload of cups into the soapy water, splashing my apron. She knocks me in the shoulder lightly.
“It’s about fucking time,” she says. “We’ve been reopened for three days already and wondering where our favorite disher was.”
—
My second night back at work, Julie pulls me into the office. I don’t look at the couch. I try not to look at anything except my water-pruned hands as Julie tells me what I already mostly know. That Riley and Wendy totaled Luis’s car; Wendy broke three ribs, cracked her collarbone, and punctured her intestine. That Wendy attacked Blue at the apartment when Blue tried to get her to stop destroying my things.
Julie twists the rings on her fingers, her voice wavering. “Riley came out with bruises, a DUI, driving without a license, a possible robbery charge for stealing the night deposit, and the theft of an automobile.” She lays a hand on the bowl of lapis lazuli.
“He was in jail. Now he’s up north at a men-only rehab. It’s not his first time in rehab, but you probably guessed that.” She clacks the stones together. Her eyes well up. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, you know? Maybe some of this is my fault, always helping him when he fucks up. He can’t come back here, ever, to work. He can’t. And legally, holy hell. If he wants to stay out of jail, he has to complete a yearlong work-rehab program and stay clean. And am I supposed to press charges about stealing my money?” Tears run down her cheeks. “The world is so fucking awful sometimes and then you have to really start thinking, what’s my role in this awfulness? Did I make some of this awful?”
There’s a heavy weight inside me. I have to get rid of it.
“Julie,” I say. “I knew, I mean, I think I knew, but I didn’t want to know, that he was stealing from the register. And…I helped him. I…bought stuff for him. And I’m sorry. And I understand if you want to fire me.”
Julie shakes her head, wiping her eyes. “You bought stuff for him?”
I nod, my face burning with shame. I wanted him to love me.
I say it aloud, but very quietly.
Julie reaches out and takes my hand. “Love is a real shit show, Charlie, but it’s not that. It’s not buying drugs for someone. You don’t deserve that, honey. You just don’t.”
I try to let her words just sit in me, rather than rejecting them. It’s hard, but I do it.
I keep going, my words spilling out fast. “Linus said Grit is in real trouble. We talked about it on the way back from New Mexico and I’ve been thinking, well, Linus and I have been thinking, and talking, and we have some ideas about how to get Grit on track, if you want to listen.”
Julie blinks, snuffling. She finds a pen and opens a notebook.
“I’m listening,” she says. “Fire away, because I’m dying here.”
I like living with Blue. I like having a friend, a girl friend, again. Ellis is still inside me, and she always will be, but Blue is good in her way, and kind.
Sometimes, when I get home from my shifts at Grit, we take the bus to the midnight movie and buy salty yellow popcorn and chilly, overly iced sodas. I’m pleasantly surprised by Blue’s endless supply of money. She shrugs whenever I ask; My father feels guilty, she says. Money is his salve. “It’s weird,” she says, her face assuming a complicated texture of pain and grief. “I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe we can talk about it someday. Can we get extra butter on the popcorn this time?”
I can’t sit at the card table weeping or in the tub staring at the ceiling, thinking of ways I could have done better, could have helped Riley more or gotten out sooner, saved Ellis, made myself better, because all those things are wrong, I realize; they solve nothing, wondering what could have been done; I know that now.
I have to wait my bad feelings out and that means staying busy, means working at Grit, means spending time working on my comic, rereading Louisa’s composition books, thinking about who might want to read her story and mine.
It means going with Blue to meetings. It means sitting in the brightly lit basement of a run-down church on hard chairs that scrape the cement floor, drinking muddy coffee and listening to people stutter out their stories. It means really listening to them, and thinking about them, and thinking about myself.
Blue and I look around for a group like us, cutters and burners, the self-harmers, but we can’t find one. Blue says, “Heh, I guess we’ll just have to keep talking to each other, then, huh? Who would have thought it’d be us, eh, Silent Sue?”
I miss Casper, but I understand now why she had to let go. Maybe I was, in the end, just one more hurting girl for her, but she was kind to me, and she has to be kind to others, too, because even that small kindness, even for such a brief time—it was something.
It was something.
—
One night Blue comes home with a shiny new laptop. Once she gets it set up, she makes me get a Facebook account. Laughing, she says, “Social media is perfect for you. It’s totally for people who don’t like in-person interaction. But Twitter isn’t you, because it’s chatty, so don’t go there.”
I don’t do much on it, mostly just scroll around the news or look at Blue’s page. But one night I see I have a friend request.
It’s Evan.
I don’t feel scared that he’s contacted me, or nervous. I feel fucking grateful, in fact, that I can press Accept with all my heart, because he’s alive, and I thought for sure that he’d be dead.
The first thing he messages me is a newspaper story. The story is a few months old,
but it has a photo that stops my heart.
Evan writes, EVIL HAS BEEN CAPTURED.
The house, Seed House, was shut down, Fucking Frank arrested for selling underage girls for sex, providing drugs and alcohol to minors, and so much, much more. In the photo, his face is gaunt, no longer full and angry. He looks frightened.
And then Evan says: In other news, this is day 92 of sobriety for me. How the hell are YOU, Charlotte?
I can’t stop smiling as I write back.
The panadería pastries sell out every day. Linus and I had the idea to get them for a discount before they threw the leftovers in the Dumpster. Julie lets Linus work on a new lunch menu with more healthy items, less reliance on potatoes, grease, and cheese. She agrees to a punch card for coffees. One day as I’m clearing dishes and lugging my tub from table to table, I look up and see a new splotch of real, vulgar graffiti on the fake brick walls of the coffeehouse. I stand, looking at the walls for a long time, turning, taking in the whole space, the amount of light from the windows high on the walls, thinking about how we can fix this.
Blue comes in one night to help paint the walls and the bathrooms, arriving with cans and rollers and brushes from the shed at Leonard’s. Temple helps me haul out ladders from Julie’s office and push the tables and chairs into the center of the room. Randy and Tanner work on the tops of the tables, painting them different colors, adding different patterns to some, sanding and gluing old postcards to others. Blue and Julie and I paint for hours, a soft wheat color that glows in the morning and looks ethereal at night. “But now there’s nothing on the walls,” Julie says. “They look so empty.”
“Not for long,” I answer.
I’m working the counter on Temple’s smoke break one evening when Ariel comes in, tentatively, as though unsure if she’s in the right place. Her mouth opens in pleasure when she sees me. “You! What a lovely surprise. I was at your show, but I didn’t see you.”
I take a deep breath. “I stole your cross. It was me. And I’m sorry.”
Ariel dips her head. “I know. I understand. Thank you for returning it.” She reaches out. “May I?” she asks. I nod.
She lays her hand carefully over mine. “I lost my son, so I know what it is like to be…empty, but full, with hell. I know you know what that means. That’s all I want to say about that. But I want you to know that I am glad you are okay. I am so, so glad.”
I nod, trying not to cry. She pats my hand, asks me for a double espresso. I’m relieved to be able to turn away and do something so she can’t see the tears falling. She walks around while I work the machine.
“I haven’t been in here in years,” she shouts over the noise of the machine. “It had gotten so grungy. My friend told me to stop by.” She peers at the walls. They’re hung with brilliant, intricately woven landscapes: women working in fields; complicated cityscapes; a tawny mountain with a sun hovering just above.
“My goodness,” she says breathily, moving closer to the walls. “These are rather exquisite. Who did them?” Her voice rings out in the new, clean café.
“The cook,” I answer proudly, swiping my face dry and turning around with her demitasse. “Linus Sebold.”
Linus asks to me to find a new box of order pads for the waitstaff in Julie’s office. It’s a busy evening; we’ve been packed with a different, older crowd since we made changes. The art kids still come, but we’ve lost some of the rockers. I miss them, but Julie needs this thing to run, so Grit needs people who buy food and drinks, not throw up on the floor.
As I’m puttering behind Julie’s desk, searching through boxes, it appears before me, tucked plain as day underneath the corner of her office phone.
A piece of paper, a phone number, his name, scribbled doodles and circles and stars.
One moment I’m looking at the paper and the next I’m saying, “May I please speak to Riley West?”, feeling myself high above, floating near the ceiling, watching my hands shake as I press the phone to my ear. On the other end, there’s the sound of slow feet, a heavy sigh.
“Yeah?”
Can he hear my thudding heart through my body? Does he know it’s me by my silence? The words clog in my throat. Is that why I hear him sigh again, why he says, “Sweetheart”?
“Riley.”
“You can’t call me here, okay? Listen, you can’t—” His voice is measured, careful, soft. He’s trying not to attract attention, I bet. I feel a flush of anger and try to bat it down, but before I can, it’s up and swinging. It’s out before I can stop it.
“Do you even remember being with me, Riley? Did you even care, at all, like, ever?”
Adrenaline forces me along. “I mean, was I just a freak show for you? Was I?” I feel scared, I feel loose and lost, but each word that comes out feels powerful.
A sterile, automated voice cuts into the line. This phone call will reach its limit in four minutes. That’s right. I remember that; at Creeley, the community phone shut out after ten minutes.
“Charlie.” He’s crying, a childish whine, like something a person does when they don’t want other people to hear. The sound of his crying sneaks into me, scratches at my heart. He says my name again. I scrape at my wet face with the back of my hand.
“I loved you, Riley.” It hurts, saying it out loud, letting it balloon up and away from me.
“Please,” he cries, “baby—”
The line goes dead.
I open the drawer in Julie’s desk: a stapler; heavy, gleaming scissors; thumbtacks. Roll call of easy elixirs.
On the drive back from Santa Fe, Linus said to me, “My life is like a series of ten-minute intervals sometimes. Sometimes I want to give myself a fucking medal for making it through an hour without a drink, but that’s the way it has to be. Waiting it out.”
I slam the drawer shut. I have to make myself wait it out, this thundering inside me, wait it out in ten-minute intervals, five-minute intervals, whatever it takes, always, now, and forever.
I gather the order pads in my arms and walk out the door, shutting it firmly behind me.
Temple is emceeing another open mic, this time with fewer rockers and more poets, when Linus hands me the counter phone. I have to bend down to the floor to hear the voice on the other end. I notice the dust motes and coffee grounds lingering beneath the lip of the counter and make a mental note to clean more carefully later.
“Oh, my dear Charlotte.” An old man’s voice, soft and crackly. “How would you like to come and work for me for a while?”
Felix Arneson says, “I’m in New York and Devvie—you remember my assistant, Devvie—has finished her dissertation. She’s leaving me. I’m bereft, but I’ll survive.”
“I don’t…what?” I lean closer to the phone, unsure if I heard correctly. “You want me to work for you? Me?”
Felix chuckles. “I need someone who doesn’t mind the desert, the isolation. It’s fairly boring out there, you know. I mean, there’s a wonderful city nearby, but out where I am, well, you know. You were there! You’d sort my slides, put my files in order. Lots of things, really. Answering the phone, email. Ordering my supplies. It’s room and board and just a little money. What do you say? I think you rather liked it out there.”
I don’t think about it all that long. It hurts here, I’m okay, but it hurts here, and I want to be somewhere quiet, where the ghost of Riley isn’t everywhere.
There was such a stillness in the land around Felix’s house.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I do want to work for you.”
He’ll arrange a ticket for me to New York, where I’ll meet him at his hotel. He promises to take me around when he’s not in the gallery, to museums, to bookstores. Then we’ll fly back together. “I’m afraid to fly,” he whispers. “Isn’t that funny, at my age? I am going to die, after all, but I’m afraid of a little hop across the sky. I’m willing to fly you all the way out here just so I don’t have to fly back by myself.”
I admit that I have never flown in an airplane.
/> “My goodness, then,” he says. “What a pair we’ll make. And you’ll have that little room, too, to do your own work. Linus tells me you’re working on a kind of book. I can’t wait to hear about it.”
Julie and Linus stand before me, resolute. I tell them no again. “I leave in four days,” I insist. “I don’t want to go with you.”
Linus says, “I know it seems horrible, Charlie, but he’s worked really hard for this moment and I think it’s important to support him in his recovery. Even assholes need help sometimes.”
Julie takes my hands. “He’s making his amends, Charlie. This is one of his steps. Honestly, I’ve never seen him like this.”
They’re letting Riley out for Luis Alvarez’s benefit concert. He’ll be accompanied by an aide; he’ll wear an ankle monitor. Performing is the only way Luis’s wife won’t press charges against Riley for stealing Luis’s car. He’ll still have to do the yearlong work-rehab program. He wants me to go to the concert.
Blue sets her cup of coffee on the counter at True Grit; she’s been listening to the conversation quietly. She makes the tiniest of motions with her chin, a shadowy Don’t let anyone make you do anything. I’ve come to know all of Blue’s new looks, the chin dips, the eye wideners, the disapproving scowl. In Creeley, she had only two looks: anger and misery. It’s as though being here has opened Blue up in ways that haven’t happened for me.
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