She wasn’t on track to get married. She didn’t have to get married, you didn’t these days. Even if you wanted a baby, you could have one on your own, it was no big deal. If you didn’t want some annoying baby daddy hanging around, you could go to a fertility clinic and choose a desirable donor. You could marry another woman. You could marry another woman and go to the fertility clinic, you could adopt an African orphan, or both. Or forget the kids, you could devote your life to art, or a cause, you could travel the world or start a religion, whatever you wanted, except it seemed that what you wanted at present was knock-down, drag-out sex with someone who profoundly embarrassed you. She was twenty-six going on twenty-seven. One of those modern women who was completely screwed up.
Les lit his cigarette and took some efficient drags from it. She always smelled like smoke when she’d been here and had to wash her clothes. When she complained, he suggested she strip down at the front door and save them both some time.
“Women worry about all the wrong shit. Their hair, their fingernails. But am I too smart, that’s a new one on me.” He put the cigarette out and sat down on the edge of the bed. His gray hair had come loose from its holder and the thin strands hung loose around his face. He was the ugliest man she’d ever seen naked. His hand strayed between her legs. “You want to go again?”
“No.”
“Your mouth’s saying no, but your pussy’s saying yes.”
* * *
In January the weather turned viciously cold. No surprise. Always there were two or three weeks when the temperature crept a few degrees above or below zero, when new snow fell on top of old snow, and a constant wind set in from the northwest. The cold followed you inside and made you curl into yourself, made you lose heart.
The health food store served up thick, hippie soups made of lentils, beans, and rice, yellow curries, pepper pot. Grace wore fingerless gloves when she worked at the cash register, and a mohair scarf wrapped twice around her neck. She never felt warm, either at work or at home.
What would it be like to live in a place where the weather didn’t fight you, where you didn’t have to give yourself a pep talk just to walk outside? She wished she could get in her car and drive south or west, out of winter, to somewhere you could see the sun and the whole sky. She told herself she didn’t have the money, which was true, but she didn’t have the nerve either. There might not be much that she felt good about in her present life, but she was afraid to walk away from it. Who were you when nobody knew you?
One frigid night her phone rang late, after ten, a bad-news time for calls, and when she saw it was her father, she thought, Michael. Her father started off shouting. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. “What, slow down.” Yes, it was Michael, something about Michael. “What did he do? Is he there now?”
No, he wasn’t. Grace could make out that much. Her father said he was going to change the locks, he might even do it tonight, they had twenty-four-hour locksmiths. They had them for just such situations.
“What situations,” Grace said uselessly. He wanted to kick and scream a while longer, he wanted, she understood, to complain to her and only her about the bad character and worse behavior of her brother. Drinking involved.
“I’ll tell you what. The police are looking for him. They’ll settle his hash.”
“Why police, did you call them? What do they want him for?”
“For being a damn druggie.”
“Tell me—”
“He can run but he can’t hide.”
From what Grace could tell, her brother had showed up at her father’s house earlier, saying he wanted to talk. But that was just an excuse to get in the door. He wanted money for drugs. He was stoned to the eyeballs. How did her father deduce that? Oh well, maybe you had to be there all those other times, when he swore up and down he didn’t touch the stuff, or sometimes he did but not tonight, or he did, but he was never going to do so again. How can you tell if a druggie is lying? Their lips are moving.
“What happened?” Grace repeated. She needed to know the police part.
“He wanted to talk. So we’re talking. He says he’s sorry we don’t get along better.”
Here her father went silent. Grace had to prompt him. “And?”
“You think I’m not sorry too? You think I don’t want things to be different?”
“Of course you do.” Maybe he did. That would be the sad part.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Dad? Where’s Michael now, do you know?”
“But it’s a scam,” her father said, sounding suddenly drunker. “Get old Dad right where you want him, all fat, dumb, and happy, and then you go for the kneecaps. Ask the guy if he can afford a lawyer. You tell him, he’s going to learn some lessons.”
“No, wait, why is it a scam? I don’t understand.”
Her father put the phone down but kept talking from somewhere else in the room. She heard him, far away, furious, his words just beyond the edge of her hearing, then footsteps coming closer to the receiver again. There was a shocking loud noise in her ear, something he was doing to the receiver, hanging it up, or trying to.
Then the null space of dead air.
The phone rang again. “Do you think I was a bad father?” he asked. “Honest Injun.”
“I think you and Mom both did your very best.”
“Ha,” her father said as if he’d caught her in a falsehood.
“Why? Were you and Michael arguing about it? Did he say you weren’t?”
“Just tell him, I’m not kidding around.” The phone went dead again.
Grace waited, but he didn’t call back. She raised the blinds in the living room and looked out on the parking lot, lit by a single mercury vapor street lamp that gave the humps of frozen snow a blue cast, like winter on a different planet. She texted her brother:
WHAT HAPPENED?
She hardly expected an answer, but it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before her phone screen lit up:
HE IS TOTALLY SICK.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Grace texted, and waited, but the phone stayed black and silent.
She tried calling and got the blast of music noise that was his voice mail and hung up without leaving a message. Goddamn them both, goddamn whatever failed and guilty part of her made her put on her boots and coat and hat and gloves and find her keys and start the car that didn’t want to start.
First she drove to her parents’ house. Her father’s house. She no longer had parents. The house was dark except for one light on upstairs, in the room where her mother had died. There was no police presence, nothing to see. The street was dark and quiet, stupefied by cold. The snow underfoot had hung on like a curse. A small white moon sat high up in the sky, emitting no light. Grace pulled up to the curb and stayed there with her motor running for as long as she dared, risking the attention of a vigilant neighbor. The upstairs light remained on.
Finally she drove off. Where was Michael, would he call her if he’d been arrested? Maybe that had only been part of her father’s angry carrying on. What if Michael was using again. And of course he was. She knew it as an ugly certainty.
It was now almost eleven, but that wasn’t late for the people Michael kept company with, even in this kind of near-hibernation weather. They’d still be up having grubby fun. She drove with care on the imperfectly plowed side streets, where the tire tracks had been frozen in place and sometimes the steering wheel left her hands as the car grabbed and slipped on the rutted surface. Grace knew where some of them lived, his friends, and the friends of friends, the bad influences and lost causes. She was going to find him one way or another, she had the sudden notion that she would take custody of him. He needed to be sent away or taken away, kept safe.
She let herself imagine it. She would call her uncle Mark. He could break off a chunk of their grandmother’s estate, surely there was enough money for whatever Michael needed, rehab, a new start. A new start for both of them, somewhere that was not here. Desert
, mountain, ocean: they’d pick a place they could look at every day and marvel. They’d find a house together, one with plenty of space, with good light and a garden. She imagined floors made of gleaming blond wood, oversized windows, a shady porch. Imagined her brother shaking off his sickness and sadness. She’d cook him healthy food that he’d make fun of, but he’d eat it and be better for it. There would be things they wouldn’t talk about, not for a while, not until they were a long way away from this night.
But tonight, right now, was here, and she made herself pay attention to traffic signals and the other occasional cars on the road, sitting at intersections in clouds of exhaust or cruising up alongside her. Her car’s defroster didn’t work very well and she kept having to wipe her windows free of ice, so that even if a car pulled up next to her, she couldn’t see who was inside, a friend, a stranger, a threat. Why would anyone be out on such a night, why was she out in it? Because my mother is dead, my father is drunk, my brother is sick. What she’d say in case somebody stopped her, stuck a gun or a flashlight in her face. Any or all of those reasons.
The first place she went was Jonesy’s, the friend Michael had stayed with for a while before moving on. Jonesy lived on campus in one of the new high-rises, vertical playpens that promised students the good life. Cable, Wi-Fi, exercise studio, bike storage, grilling in the courtyard, parties in the hall. Grace wouldn’t have lived in such a place, and neither would her friends. They would have scorned the whole consumerist, hedonistic vibe, so devoid of authenticity, individuality, etc. Well, she and her friends had graduated and were blazing trails at the health food stores and coffee shops, while the pampered children would go on to business school and earn their six-figure salaries and never worry about it for a minute.
She found Jonesey’s apartment number on the list in the lobby and rode the elevator up. When she walked down the corridor, the different closed doors throbbed with barely contained amplified noise.
She knocked, and after a time the door cracked open. It was one of the roommates she didn’t know, a baby-faced kid with a fuzzy chin beard that didn’t help anything, and Grace had to explain herself. Oh yeah, Mike, no, he wasn’t here. They hadn’t seen him. There was something going on in the room behind the boy, something he wasn’t going to let her see. Someone was talking loudly, saying fuck a lot, either angry or drunk or both. No, Jonesy wasn’t here either. She could try calling him. The kid actually yawned in her face then. Sleepy or just rude. It was so not his problem.
Grace had to stick her foot in the door to keep him from closing it on her. Well where might her brother be, did he know anywhere else could she try? He didn’t know. Well ask somebody. It was important.
Grace waited. The boy came back and said there was a girl, maybe her brother was with this girl named Georgia. She lived downtown someplace. There was another consultation away from the door. Yeah, over the shoe repair place. “Did old Mike get into something?” the boy asked.
“What?”
“Did he get into some kind of shit? You know.” The boy had an avid look she didn’t like. Energized, finally, by the possibility of bad news. She hoped he wasn’t in school. His tuition would be a waste of somebody’s money. “Trouble.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asked sharply. “What kind of trouble?”
But he wasn’t going to say anything more. He drew his head back inside the door, smirking, and closed it and left her standing there.
Now she had to imagine trouble, the great flapping bat shape of it, the different varieties of dangerous and stupid. Dealing? Stealing? And which substance or substances in the witch’s brew of possibilities was he taking? She didn’t know, but most likely crack. It was the cheapest and dirtiest and the one you heard the most about, and now she was probably going to have to find out for sure, find out every ugly truth.
The girl Georgia wasn’t home, or at least no one answered the buzzer at the street door next to the shoe repair. She texted Michael again, nothing. Miserable with cold, Grace trudged from one downtown bar to another, but Michael was not in any of them. She saw a group of his friends, who maintained their record of perfect ignorance as to his whereabouts. She saw a couple of people she knew too but she didn’t want to stay; the crowded bars felt exactly like one of those movies where people were photographed from grotesque angles, meant to show how depraved the whole thing was.
It was past midnight. She got back in the car, ready to give up. She thought about Les Moore, who would be off work now. She could call him or just show up there. But more and more, he was feeling like her own kind of drug, something unwholesome and illicit you kept hidden. She texted Michael one more time,
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
Stupid question. No wonder he didn’t answer.
Last stop. She drove to the house he’d been staying at over Thanksgiving. She’d wanted to avoid it; it was a run-down crash pad for outlaw band members and the rest of the damn druggies. Or so she gathered. She’d never been inside. But here she was, trying to be brave, though she was reaching the end of her nerve, and thinking there was no point in trying to help someone who would not help themselves, and working herself into some pointless melodramatic state.
Nevertheless. The blue Christmas lights sagged over the porch. Grace walked with care up the unshoveled pathway to the door. Other lights inside, television noise. The doorbell was taped over, broken. She knocked, waited, knocked again. As she was turning away to leave, the door opened.
“Oh, hey . . .”
She recognized a boy from Michael’s band, or one of his bands. A tall kid who moved as if his arms and legs were fastened with paper clips. She couldn’t remember his name, but Grace could tell he didn’t remember hers either.
“I’m looking for my brother, is he here?” The boy shook his head. “Has anybody here seen him recently?”
“I wouldn’t say recent.”
She put on her polite, questioning face: Then what would he say? “Come on in,” the boy said. “I’ll ask around.”
He held the door open for her. “Cold out there,” he said, by way of indifferent conversation, and Grace agreed, although it didn’t seem that much warmer inside.
It was a big bare room with a staircase leading to a second floor. The boy headed upstairs and Grace stayed by the door. Along one wall, a flat-screen television was turned to some true crime drama. On a couch in front of the television, giving it their entire attention, a boy and a girl. They looked young, high school age, like they should be home studying for an algebra test.
The couple on the couch paid her no mind, and that was fine with Grace. They were huddled under a blanket and the boy had his arm around the girl’s shoulders and was nuzzling at her neck. The television was on too loud, blaring its hyped-up and breathless account of gruesome crime scenes, autopsies, murder weapons.
Grace examined the room. It wasn’t messy, exactly; there wasn’t enough in it for that. More like unkempt and inhospitable. People had drawn and painted on the walls, inexpertly, in most cases scrawls and drips and spray-painted smiley faces. But on the back wall, a door had been surrounded by a pair of giant, bleeding crimson lips, rendered with unpleasant accuracy.
The boy came down the stairs again, swinging his arms in that strange, stiff-jointed way. “Nobody’s seen him for a few days.” To the boy and girl on the couch, he said, “Kenny’s on his way.”
“So . . .” Grace tried to sort this out. “So he does stay here?”
“I don’t know about stay,” the boy said, again sounding judicious, as if word choice was important to him.
“He’s not answering his phone.”
“Huh. Well, phones.”
Meaning maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you. Something Grace had considered herself. He spoke to the couple: “I’m telling you, five or ten minutes.”
“Is Michael . . .” Grace wanted to dump out her worries and demand answers, but either nobody knew anything or nobody was going to tell her. Her brother might as well ha
ve been a runaway slave being hidden in the underground railroad. “How’s the band?” she asked instead.
“Oh, we kind of quit.” He stepped closer to the couch. “Hey. Seriously.”
“I didn’t know that,” Grace said. Except she did, or she sort of knew. “I guess it’s hard to keep everybody motivated.”
“Yeah. If you talk to your brother, tell him we’re all real motivated to see him around here.”
“Why’s that?” Grace asked.
“Just tell him.”
“But I don’t know where he is.”
“Hopeless,” the boy said. It was unclear who he meant, Grace, Michael, or the couple on the couch, who were still going at each other and ignoring them. He turned and walked through the door shaped like a bloody mouth, which was designed to make it look as if he was being swallowed, an evil visual joke.
She let herself out the front door and into the cold, which felt almost welcoming after the strangeness of indoors. Before she reached her car, the door opened again. “Hey, wait up.”
It was the boy who had been on the couch. “You think you could give me a ride?”
“A ride?” Grace repeated, then, “A ride to where?” Because she needed to know but also because she had to process the realization that he was not a boy but a girl, the kind of girl who attempted not to be a girl.
“Not real far. The other side of downtown. Fuck, it’s cold.”
“Hop in,” Grace said, because she was tired and it was easier than saying no, and anyway she was thrown off her stride, having to recalibrate what she’d seen. “I’m Grace,” she told her passenger once they were settled. The girl slouched on her tailbone with her legs crossed, her feet in heavy ugly boots grazing the dashboard.
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 27