A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

  She said, “So okay, then you can imagine how I felt when I got home from work that evening and the first thing Helene tells me is that the man who threw the knife at the door was here. ‘But he’s gone now,’ she says. ‘Veronica told him to fuck off.’

  “I said that’s great but she shouldn’t say fuck. The kitchen was all neat and clean, spotless actually, much cleaner than when I do it, dishes washed and everything put away. I went into the living room and it was the same there. She’d even folded my laundry and stacked it neatly on my bed. She was in Helene’s room putting away Helene’s dozen Barbies and all their flimsy wardrobes and accessories.

  “I said, ‘So you told Rudy to fuck off?’

  “She just smiled.

  “I said, ‘Good girl,’ and thought that was the end of ol’ Rudy. But of course it wasn’t. Any more than her being clean for a few weeks was the end of her using drugs. But for a while, for a week or ten days, though she talked about Rudy constantly, she referenced him strictly in the negative, saying things out of the blue like, ‘I can’t believe I stayed with such an asshole,’ or when I offered to let her use my phone in case she wanted to call somebody to say where she was, she goes, ‘Rudy never let me call anybody.’ I guess there wasn’t anyone she wanted to call, though, because she never used the phone that I know of, and people didn’t have cell phones then.

  “It must’ve been obvious to her by now that I wasn’t going to rip her off or drop a dime on her with her mother or some social worker and certainly not the cops, so she was talking to me more easily. Plus she was making eye contact with me and not just with Helene, which she wouldn’t do at first, like an animal that’s been abused by adult humans in the recent past and only expects more of the same. By this time I was really into mothering her. Something about her childlike physical awkwardness and her ignorance of the world, which usually make me impatient with people, in her case made me feel protective. Also I liked her company. Nights were a lot less lonesome in the apartment than they had been. I’d gotten over her pierced eyebrows, nostrils, ears and lips and had even started liking her tattoos, especially the Rastafarian lion’s head on her right shoulder. The rattlesnake around her left wrist and the World Trade Center in New York on her upper back were cool, too. This was before nine-eleven, of course. Someone other than Veronica must’ve tattooed the Trade Center because it was on her back, but even so, I could tell from the others, since she’d drawn them herself and tattooed the ones she could reach, that Veronica had a real talent for art.

  “All the time, though, like it’s her only subject, Veronica is talking about Rudy, only I notice it’s not as negative as before. Slowly certain positives are creeping in, like, ‘Rudy’s this amazing mechanic that can fix any kind of bike and even fixes cars for his friends who have them,’ and one night we’re burning a pretty inferior joint, regular ditch weed, and she says, ‘Y’know, Rudy grows the best boom in Oregon, but he’d never show me his patch. He said it was to protect me in case I ever got busted.’

  “‘Yeah, right,’ I say. ‘Mister Fucking Protective.’ Obviously she needed a lot more instruction and self-confidence in order to kick this guy. Still, although on a deep level I know better, I’m telling myself this is turning into a successful home-detox-slash-rehab, and I’m thinking of tossing another party to finish celebrating my thirtieth. Plus I want to introduce Veronica to some new people so she won’t be so dependent on me and Helene for company, when one Friday I come home from work and the second I walk through the door I know Rudy’s been in the apartment.”

  I asked her how she could tell.

  She said, “I could smell him. Grease, oil, gasoline fumes and something coldly chemical, almost medicinal. My first thought of course is where is Helene? That junkie punk bitch Veronica better not put my baby in danger or I’ll kill her, I’m thinking as I go from room to room, until I find Helene in her bedroom down on the floor marrying Barbie and Ken with Share a Smile Becky as the bridesmaid. Everything looks okay, even the cats are there for the wedding, so I give her a hug and say, ‘Where’s Veronica?’

  “Helene says, ‘They went out, her and the man who threw the knife.’

  “I asked her a few more questions, like how long was he in the apartment and how long ago did they go out, which turned out to be only a few minutes of each, and Veronica promised she’d be right back, which in fact she was, while I was still sitting there on the floor with Helene. She comes into the bedroom and leans against the doorframe and says, ‘Awesome you’re home. I was just getting rid of Rudy. On account of how you feel about him and all.’ ”

  I said to the woman, “That’s really good, right? That Veronica was just getting rid of Rudy?” I was into her story by now and was starting to hope everything would turn out for the best, even though I knew from the way she’d begun her story that it wouldn’t.

  She said, “Yeah, right, really good. Not. Because when Veronica shoots me this big intense smile, I can tell right away from how she’s handling her body and her breathing rate and her lying smile that she’s high, and it isn’t from weed, it’s crack or meth. Which means that anything she says is pure bullshit. She says she has to pee and goes into the bathroom and closes the door. And of course that’s bullshit too. It’s just to keep me from looking at her.

  “Since the girl doesn’t know what’s real or isn’t real, there’s no way I’m going to know it either. That’s the way it goes down with junkies. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. They make up and shape reality with their jones, and if you buy even a small part of it, your own reality gets infected by it, until their jones is yours too, and all the time twenty-four-seven you’re thinking about whether she’s high or not, holding or not, going to rip you off to buy drugs or not, telling the truth or not, or if she even knows the truth. It’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. The only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them, don’t listen to word one of their elaborate explanations for their actions or inactions. Assume everything is a lie and just throw them out of the house. Even if it’s your own kid. Which is what I did.”

  “You mean Helene?” I ask her.

  “No, Veronica! It’s like you can’t think about the consequences. You can’t think about what’ll happen to her now down there on the streets traipsing after the Rudys of the world until finally he decides she’s too high-maintenance and is losing her looks, so he tosses her out like garbage for somebody even worse to scoop up, because no matter how far down the ladder of men she goes there’s always some dump picker on the rung below glad to grab what little body and soul she’s got left. That’s why I believe Veronica is dead. She could’ve hooked up with one of the hundreds of losers heading south to Cali these days, of course, and maybe she did, or she could’ve gotten busted for manufacture and distribution and has been doing time at Coffee Creek Correctional down in Wilsonville. But something tells me she never left Portland. Maybe because in spite of the lousy climate I stayed here myself even after the dot-com bubble burst back in 2001 and I lost my job at the agency and had to go on welfare until I got hired at Wendy’s. Because this is where Helene grew up. If she’d been busted and sent to Coffee Creek I would have heard about it from Huey, Dewey or Louie, although since they moved back to Eugene to start their own motorcycle repair shop I never see them anymore. But somebody would have told me. Everyone knew how attached I was to that girl and how rotten I felt when I had to throw her out on the street.”

  I said, “You don’t mean Helene, do you? You sure we’re still talking about Veronica?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve never once run into her anywhere in the city, and Portland isn’t that big and there are only a few neighborhoods where people like her, or like me for that matter, can afford to live. Like I said, I look for her everywhere, and you’d think I’d see her standing in line outside one of the soup kitchens or panhandling downtown or waiting in the rain for one of the homeless shelters to open. But I haven�
��t. That’s why I think she’s dead.

  “Anyhow, when Veronica finally came out of the bathroom that day I was waiting for her in the living room by the door with a trash bag filled with the few things she’d accumulated while living with me, the T-shirts and flip-flops and some underwear I’d laid on her and the junk she’d bought with the hundred bucks a week I was paying her, like a half-dozen CDs and a stack of fashion magazines that she liked to cut up and turn into these weird Goth-type collages and a pair of sunglasses that she wore just for looks, since the sun never shines in Portland.

  “‘Here’s all your shit. Take it and get out,’ I told her. ‘We’re done, you and me.’

  “She stared at me, wide-eyed and openmouthed like she was in shock. Her teeth were already starting to rot from the meth, and for a second I could see how she was going to look a few years from now, and I wanted to cry for her. I wanted to change my mind and hug her and believe whatever bullshit explanation she offered for having let that scumbag criminal into the apartment and then going off with him to get high while my daughter was still a vulnerable little girl, at least in my mind she was. But I couldn’t. I had to be strong. I told her I don’t want to have to change the locks to the apartment, so give me the keys.

  “She doesn’t say anything. Just hands over the keys.

  “‘Now go,’ I tell her.

  “‘Where can I go?’ she says in her little girl’s voice.

  “‘Anywhere. Just not here.’

  “‘I was only trying to get rid of him without getting him pissed at me,’ she says. ‘He gets real mean when he’s pissed.’

  “‘Don’t talk. Just go,’ I told her. I pulled open the door for the girl and she stepped out to the hall and turned back one last time.

  “‘I bet someday you’ll be sorry you did this to me,’ she said.

  “‘Only if you turn up dead,’ I told her. It was the first time I thought it. But I had to take the chance on her turning up dead. It was like she hadn’t given me any other choice. As a mother, I mean. I was only trying to save my daughter from ending up like Veronica, that’s all. That was so long ago. But it’s why every time I read in the paper or hear on the evening news that some young woman’s unidentified body has been found down along the Willamette River or in Washington Park or in a vacant lot in Northeast Portland, I take the bus over to the morgue on Northwest Nicolai Street near the port, and I offer to identify the body, since I know all her tattoos and most of her piercings. But so far it hasn’t been her. It’s been some other young woman. The guys at the morgue, they know me now and know why I’m there. I don’t even have to tell them that I’m searching for Veronica. Of course, they probably think I killed somebody and am checking to see if the body’s been discovered yet.”

  I ordered another round of drinks for both of us, our third. I said to her, “When you go down to the morgue, you’re not searching for Veronica. You’re searching for Helene, aren’t you? All along you’ve been talking about your daughter, Helene. She’d be twenty-six or twenty-seven now, right? Helene, I mean. You kicked Helene out of your apartment. Veronica, if she’s alive, would be in her early forties. If she existed in the first place.”

  She said, “You don’t understand! I’m looking for them both. I might be the only one who can identify them, you know. It’s like I’m having a bad dream, and I want to wake up from it, but I’m afraid that when I do, the reality will be worse than the dream. I don’t even know your name,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

  I told her my first name and asked for hers.

  She said, “Russell is a nice name. You don’t hear it much anymore, though. I’m Dorothy. You don’t hear that one much anymore, either.”

  We both went silent then and for a few minutes watched the end of a Trail Blazers game on the TV above the bar. Without looking down from the screen she said, “You’re right. About Helene, I mean, and me having to kick her out and it being recent. A year and a half ago is recent, right? But you’re wrong about Veronica. She existed. It all happened the way I said, and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Sometimes I thought I found her in Helene, especially after Helene got busted two years ago for dealing meth for her piece-of-shit boyfriend and spent six months at Coffee Creek and had to move back in with me when she got out.” She sighed loudly, longingly, like a smoker wanting to step outside for a cigarette, and said, “Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole adult life searching for Veronica.” Then she suddenly grabbed my sleeve and laughed, the first time she’d laughed all night. It was a slightly mocking laugh at something she found ridiculous. She said, “Maybe I’m Veronica! You ever think of that, Russell?”

  I turned and looked at her face and tried to look into and beyond her eyes, but her eyes coldly kicked my gaze back out. She was smiling, almost in triumph.

  I said, “No! Not until this moment. But now I do. Now I think in this story, your story, you are Veronica. And you’re Helene, the daughter, too. And you’re Dorothy, the mother. And I think all three of you combined and did something very bad together. I think that’s the reason whenever they discover the body of an unidentified young woman you go down to the morgue.”

  I stood up and waved for the check and paid for our drinks. “You’re not looking for Veronica or Helene,” I said. “You’re looking for someone else, someone the three of you did a very bad thing to. Someone whose name you haven’t revealed yet. And that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me tonight. And trying not to tell me.”

  “I’m only telling you what I know, Russell.”

  “That’s why you scare me. It’s like you said about Veronica and junkies like her. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. You said it’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. You said the only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them. You said to assume everything is a lie. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Good night,” I said, “whoever you are. Wherever you are. Whatever you’ve done.” I left the bar then and, shaken, walked straight to the gate to wait for my flight to Minneapolis.

  THE GREEN DOOR

  The Piano Hollywood is a piano bar squeezed between the casino and the hotel at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, and like I deal cards instead of drinks the guy wants me to tell him the rules for Texas Hold’em. I know the rules, of course—who doesn’t?

  This guy doesn’t. He’s a somewhat oversized, maybe fifty-year-old pear-shaped dude with pink skin and a thinning gray-blond comb-over. He’s wearing a blue-on-gold striped bow tie and a tan tropical-weight suit that at first I think is J. C. Penney or Sears, only when I have a chance to check the lines and workmanship close up I decide it’s quality garb, nice cloth, probably Italian with a two-K setback, and the problem is not the suit, it’s the guy’s Sears, Roebuck body.

  He’s on his second Long Island iced tea when he pops the Texas Hold’em question. It’s early, a little after four in the afternoon, and the Piano is quiet—the day-trippers from the Fort Lauderdale and Miami old-age homes are over at the slots giving away their social security checks and the high rollers like bats in their caves are just waking up—so I give him the short form. I tell him about hole cards, the burn card, which amateurs sometimes think is the dealer cheating, but it’s the opposite. I describe the preflop and the flop and the turn and the river, by which time the guy’s eyes are glazed. He’s going to get skinned eight different ways, I think. I tell him he should watch a few games before putting any chips on the table. But then I lie and say it’s like seven-card stud, only simpler. For some reason a part of me doesn’t feel like protecting the guy from himself.

  He thanks me a little too much and orders another Long Island iced tea. I’ve got my back to him, jiggering the contents into an ice-filled glass—vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, sweet-and-sour mix and a splash of Coke. It’s an alcohol mash-up for drinkers who don’t like the taste of alcohol but want to get wasted. While I’m pouring the mix into the shaker, out of nowhere
he asks me in a too-loud voice, “Where can a fellow find himself some interesting sexual companionship for a few hours?” He’s southern, Georgia or South Carolina, with a suburban, gated-community accent. You see a lot of them down here, men and women both, mostly good Christians sniffing for stuff they can’t get back home.

  I whack the shaker once and fill the glass from it, making sure there’s a signature touch of fizz at the top, and plant a lemon wedge on the edge and set it in front of him. “Depends,” I say.

  “On what, pray tell.” He takes a sip of his drink, closes his eyes and smiles appreciatively, like he’s a connoisseur of Long Island iced teas and this one’s a ten.

  “Depends on how much you want to spend. And whether you have a car and are willing to drive down to South Beach or over to Fort Lauderdale or need to stay here on the rez. You bedding down at the Hard Rock?” I ask him.

  He says yes, he’s at the Hard Rock on business, but he has a rental car and can drive to wherever the women are. He calls them “ladies of the night.” I can’t tell if he’s being funny or is just a total cracker asshole. I’m in my sixties, and it’s the first time I’ve heard the expression.

  “Also it depends on what sort of action you’re looking for,” I say.

  He sips his drink with his eyes closed again. “I wouldn’t mind a variety of activities. Something a little de trop, if you know what I mean.”

  I don’t speak French but I get his drift. I explain that if he wants something other than the two or three more popular items on the menu he’ll probably have to leave the rez, because the Seminoles run a pretty tight ship. “They’re first and foremost in the gaming industry, you understand. They don’t mind a working girl or two trolling the casino or the strip malls, so long as the girls are discreet and do their transacting in private, but the Seminoles are businesspeople and need to look squeaky clean. Even if they’re not, exactly.” I can add that because, although I’m told I look like a Seminole, I’m Jewish and am paid by the Piano, which is independently owned by Brits from Hong Kong.