Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Nicky purses his lips and looks up at the door, but Aaron’s already inside. “No,” Nicky says, quiet. “Won’t even give them the body for the funeral. I haven’t told Aaron yet, so —”

  “It’s okay,” Bird cuts in, suddenly sick and light-headed. “I won’t say anything. Jesus. How old was she? Six?”

  “Five.”

  In the sickly glow of the streetlight, she looks down the deserted road and counts each stoop blocked off with yellow police tape and red stickers on the door: two, maybe three, if she squints into the dark at the other end of the block. Her home, her uncle’s neighbors, her whole city, stricken by the flu they say came from narco-terrorists.

  Bird shudders, and the headache stabs her again. She drags herself up the stairs and inside her grandparents’ house. Uncle Nicky’s house. Her house.

  Bird takes Monique’s room, which Bird’s mom shared with Aunt Grace when they grew up here. Bird liked staying here overnight with Monique, but by herself she can’t help imagining her mother at her age, staring up into the glowing city night through the grimy skylight and dreaming of the day when she escaped — to college, to a fancy Northwest address, to a Jack and Jill husband and a skyrocket career in national security. Bird knows even her mother probably hadn’t figured everything out by seventeen, but she imagines it anyway: Carol Bird in miniature, the prototypical, soft-dough, wet-paint version of the brightly plasticated wonder woman she’s known all her life. Young Carol swears on the stars to get out, to be the one who goes places, the one who rules the world of her rich classmates at School Without Walls. She will have a daughter who will go even further, even higher than she, and that will be her solace and joy at the end of a long life filled with the pleasures of a sharply imagined wealth.

  Only, the daughter emerges wrong, resembling neither father nor mother but uncle — a nappy-headed, wide-eyed, crooked dart of fate. And though the daughter is neither as smart nor as pretty nor as ambitious as the mother, she tries her best every day to be someone her mother can stand to look in the eye across the breakfast table. To be someone her father can bestow a smile upon when she brings home a 2200 on her SATs. To be the girl who loves her uncle but will never, ever let herself be like him.

  Never, ever, Bird says to herself, even though Nicky is glued to the television downstairs and Carol Bird is in some undisclosed location, saving the world. Bird’s head hurts and so she fumbles through the bag for the prescription pain killers. She finds them wrapped in the black skirt she wore to the party. Bird pulls it out slowly, and lets it drop to the bed. Sweet alcohol and vomit perfumes the air for a moment. She grimaces and pushes the skirt from the bed and takes the pill.

  She doesn’t remember vomiting. If she doesn’t remember that, what else could she have forgotten about that night? Maybe taking some of Coffee’s drugs in a fit of reckless idiocy? Just like your uncle?

  The Vicodin starts its work a few panicky minutes later, making her languorous and sleepy, dulling the pain in her head. Vicodin is an opiate, the sort of pill that Coffee sells, alongside perennials like Adderall and Oxy. She wonders how much he gets for it, and why he needs the money in the first place. She strips to her underwear and tosses it all near the gift shop bag. She sits on the edge of the bed, aching with exhaustion. But she doesn’t turn out the light. She stares at the bag, fascinated and terrified of its contents. What else might she discover about that lost night? Emily Bird wants to go to sleep and forget about it. But she knows that Carol Bird would confront whatever frightens her without hesitation. She would pull taut any errant strands of her life and brush them down with good oil.

  Bird gets on her knees and upends the bag onto the carpet. Out tumble her cell phone, her pink shirt, and her black bolero jacket. Her shoes are missing, she realizes, though she finds the stockings stuffed into the jacket pocket. They have a run as large as her hand on the left leg, and dried mud on the feet and knees. She’s wondering why she kept them even as a small, crumpled paper falls from the tangled mess.

  She picks it up.

  C - 202.555.0198

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL.

  Coffee’s number. In case something happens, he said. Did he know? Had he already given her the drug without her knowledge, or was that later? Or maybe he has nothing at all to do with her fractured memory. Only, why is his number crumpled in with her stockings? She put it in the pocket of her skirt, she distinctly remembers, carefully smoothed out. Had she called him? Was that the reason why she caught him skulking outside the hospital? And what about the strange words beneath his number? She could have sworn they weren’t there when he handed it to her.

  She stares at the paper a moment longer, then shakes her head and puts it on the bedside table. She woke up in a hospital because of whatever happened that night, but even her most basic memories seem suspect. There are only two people who might tell her truth: Paul and Coffee. She flinches from the thought of Paul, but Coffee — her desire to speak to him is sharp, undeniable. But should she? She’s not in the habit of distrusting authority figures, a space that Roosevelt, however odious, clearly occupies. If she finds Coffee, she ought to turn him in. There’s a quarantine in the city after all. Congress is one declaration away from starting another war. It’s not safe for him out there. He would forgive her eventually, right? But first she has to find him, she has to hear his side of the story.

  Because if he didn’t give her the drug, it means that someone else did.

  It means that Roosevelt is lying.

  * * *

  Aaron runs into her room early the next morning. He would have startled her awake, but she’s been staring through the skylight since four. Her dreams were dark and frightening, but she can only feel their sticky residue. Shouted threats, locked doors, blurred shadows.

  She aches for sleep, but sits up when Aaron pushes his head under her chin.

  “Glad you’re awake, Em,” Aaron says. “Dad was worried.”

  He means that he was worried, but even at eleven Aaron has learned better than to express his emotions directly.

  “I love you, Aaron,” she says, and where normally he would groan, he just blinks and hugs her tighter.

  “Dad says to tell you Aunt Carol’s on the phone.”

  Bird lurches from the bed and follows Aaron downstairs. Nicky is sitting at the small, round table where she remembers her grandfather dumping Liquid Aminos on his runny eggs Sunday morning before church. The phone cord stretches from the receiver on the wall by the fridge, and Nicky hunches over it like a kid cowering from the playground bully. But it’s just her mom on the phone, and that’s Nicky all over. He’s weak-willed, her mom says. Goes along to get along and never goes much of anywhere. He doesn’t have a natural drive, and so he’s doomed by his circumstances to his lazy, shiftless existence. Bird has better circumstances, but her mother is convinced that this central flaw will overwhelm her better qualities without constant vigilance.

  “It’s been rough, Carol. Okay? You don’t always need to rag on the —” He glances up from the phone and jerks. “Hey, kid,” he says, not very happily. “Your mom’s on the phone. You want to talk to her?”

  Bird doesn’t see how she has a choice, but she appreciates even this paltry spark of defiance from her uncle. Nicky is the oldest, but you’d never know it from the way they act around each other. Carol Bird likes to call herself an old soul.

  Bird just shrugs and pulls up a chair. “Hi, Mom,” she says.

  “It’s good to hear your voice, Emily. I won’t ask how you’re doing. You’re awake, and that’s enough for the moment. Are you settled in at your uncle’s? You don’t know how much your father and I wish we could have come back there to be with you, but given the circumstances … well. You know we’d do it if we possibly could. Our work here is too important.”

  “Yes, Mom,” Bird says, obedient. “Of course. I understand.” Though she doesn’t, and she never has. From the vaguely portentous tones in which her mother discusses their work, you would think sh
e and her father were superheroes, saving the world each day from an international team of villains. And, hell, maybe it’s true. Maybe right now, Carol and Greg Bird are searching for the origins of this so-called v-flu, and will change global politics with their discoveries. What exactly is so important? She could ask, but she knows that she won’t. She never does. She can’t bear her mother’s disappointment — No impulse control, just like your uncle, Carol Bird would say, and sigh, and turn, turn away.

  “I want you to know, Emily, that things are going to be difficult for some time. It might seem frightening, but you’re in the absolute safest place right now. The security measures in place within the Beltway are very impressive. And the school has assured me they’re doing everything they can to protect you students from the flu. Just follow the rules, Emily. Do you understand? It’s very important that you follow the rules, and do everything that your teachers tell you to do, even if it seems strange. Mrs. Early is very well connected. She … well, suffice it to say that I feel safer with you there than anywhere else.”

  “Mom,” Bird says, a little baffled. “Do I ever break the rules?”

  Bird’s mom takes a breath, as though to launch into another of her speeches, but then stops. For a full five seconds, Bird hears nothing. She wonders if the line has gone dead. Then:

  “Sometimes I wish you would, sugar. You know, I swear I do. The doctor had to force you out, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Your girl doesn’t want to leave.’ But sometimes I wonder if you just didn’t know how. You’ve always waited for someone to tell you what to do. But I guess I’m grateful for that, now.”

  Bird gulps, chokes on her own saliva, coughs sharp and hard, each exhalation strobing through her stitches. She tries so hard. But she’s never the right kind of smart, the good kind of ambitious, the admirable kind of popular. Nicky shakes his head and herds Aaron out of the kitchen. For a moment she hates him; would it kill him to stand by her, even once? But Carol Bird is the immovable object, the unstoppable force. Carol Bird will break whoever goes against her — brother, husband, daughter. Carol Bird is not to be crossed.

  “Do you even know why I was in the hospital, Mom?”

  A hasty and riddled defense, but it’s all she has. “Well, Emily, you know I heard quite a few things. Some disturbing things. Pam Robinson called me herself, I’ll have you know, to apologize for having that drug dealer at her party. I told her that I’m sure you understand that you are responsible for your actions. I hope that you have the decency to apologize to her, Emily.”

  Bird almost laughs. Apologize for almost dying? Apologize for Roosevelt? For Coffee? “I’m sure I was just asking for it,” Bird mutters, and then clenches her jaw in horror when she realizes she said it aloud. She braces herself for the lecture, the just-like-your-uncle acid bath, but her mother doesn’t even respond.

  “Well. Would you like to speak with your father?” Carol Bird says with icy calm.

  Bird knows herself dismissed, recognizes it by her own signature response of fury and relief and longing.

  “Sure,” she says, as if this is a normal conversation, and hers is a normal family. She and her father talk about the Redskins losing again.

  “It’s bad luck, that name,” her father says, in his slow, careful way. “Could they go around calling themselves the Washington Niggers and get away with it?”

  “I agree, Dad, it’s a terrible name. But the universe is punishing them?” she asks, comfortable in this familiar territory.

  “I don’t know about the universe,” he says. “But I know about fair. It’s just bad mojo.”

  “Okay, Dad,” she says. “But I still think the defensive lineup has something to do with it.”

  “Oh sure. Sure. They really need to work on that for next season. Em?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take care of yourself, okay? Listen to your mom. She’s a smart lady. It’s dangerous out there. Don’t mess with anything you aren’t supposed to. Whoever this dealer kid is, let him be.”

  What do her parents know about Coffee? What did Nicky tell them — or Roosevelt? She thinks of the paper on her bedside table and presses her palm to her stomach.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” she says, and he lets it go. He always does.

  * * *

  Her cell has thirty-five new text messages. Twenty-two are from Paul. The rest are from Charlotte and Felice, asking if she’s okay — more from Charlotte than Felice, of course. It’s Sunday night, three days after her release. She has to go back to school tomorrow; she’s already so far behind. She dreads the questions and innuendo, the inevitability of her notoriety at school. But for now she stares at the paper with Coffee’s number and the cryptic message. The writing on the wall. The handwriting is blocky, possibly her own, but only if she were trying to disguise it.

  If Coffee did write it, he could explain what he meant. Coffee could explain a lot of things. She types the number into her phone, ten, fifteen times, but then deletes it. What if Roosevelt is tracking her calls? She should help him, she knows that, but she can’t quite bring herself to do it before she knows more. She looks at the clock — three in the morning. How long does it take to die from insomnia? She hasn’t managed to sleep for longer than two hours at a stretch since she left the hospital. Each time she wakes up, swaddled and perfumed in an inexplicable grief, she struggles to remember her dreams, the faintest hint of her lost hours. But she is always gasping and alone, slowly bleeding out from a wound she can’t find. She asks the skylight who she is now, this memory-free girl, this unhappily newborn orphan, adrift in a world of armored cars and military checkpoints and endless miles of quarantine tape.

  You are Bird, the skylight tells her. Emily fears the world. Bird can solve it. Bird will find her memories and break up with Paul and buy that store she’s always secretly dreamed of, and damn what her mother thinks of goals as humble and unambitious as shopkeeping.

  Bird will, Bird can, Bird might, but what Bird does is pull on her coat and sneak down the stairs. Nicky has passed out in front of the television. He doesn’t even stop snoring when she shuffles past, and the sound of McCoy lecturing one of his endless string of female DAs about a case covers the creak of the front door. Outside, the street is dead quiet. The District has been under a strict curfew since the Beltway quarantine. It’s illegal for her to even walk on the sidewalk without a permit, and this is the sort of neighborhood where the police love to harass people for no reason at all, but she hopes she’ll get lucky. She can’t leave this any longer. Her mother thinks that she never does anything without permission? That she’d never dare to break the rules?

  “Well, watch this, Carol Bird,” she whispers. Her words turn to cloudy vapor and dissipate into the dark, though they ought to shatter. She pulls the hood over her ears and hurries to the one pay phone in the neighborhood that still works, four blocks away. This isn’t The Wire, she knows that the government doesn’t need much of an excuse to bug every pay phone in the city if they want to, but she hopes that this will be safer than her cell.

  She pulls The writing on the wall out of her pocket along with some change. She doesn’t really need the paper anymore, it’s probably dangerous to keep it, but lately she feels as if it’s the only thing keeping her sane. The last object that she remembers from that night; the last time she spoke to Coffee and he told her …

  What did he think she would say to that? What she could be? Maybe she wouldn’t mind it if he stopped doing stupid shit like dealing drugs, but she never bothered him about it.

  She dials the number and holds her breath while it rings. She has to gasp for air before she acknowledges that she won’t even get voicemail. The phone rattling in the receiver makes her wince and she looks up and down the street. A few blocks up ahead, on Benning Road, a tank slowly trundles into view, mounted rifles swiveling. She crouches out of sight and shakes so hard that her head knocks like a maraca against the metal of the phone box. What if she gets caught breaking curfew? Should she call
her mom? Should she call Nicky? She tries to pray but finds her mind empty of even the most rote appeal for divine favor, for the most workaday intercessions. She’s reduced to closing her eyes and humming under her breath a song that she’s forgotten most of the words to, a song that her grandmother would sing to her when they went to church together. Oh happy day, she sings over and over to herself, and if the irony bites her, she doesn’t suppose it bit her grandmother any less.

  The rumble of the tank fades to silence. In the distance, a siren starts to wail, but that’s a city noise that she understands, the reassuring banality of someone else’s disaster. She rests her head against her knees and watches her breath cloud the hourglass between her ankles. Safe. She’s still safe.

  The phone rings. She jerks and smacks her elbow, hard, against the phone box. Cursing, tears in her eyes, she swings her head around. Is anyone watching her? Is that a faint light she sees in the window across the street? A second ring. Shit, she can’t let it do that, but does she dare pick it up?

  Bird is scared out of her mind, but she doesn’t want that tank with its big dick guns to come back for her either. So Bird dares.

  “Hello?” she whispers.

  “You’re really awake,” he says. “I wasn’t sure.”

  She rests her forehead against the polka-dot inside grille, oh happy day, oh happy day, oh thank you, Jesus.

  “I can’t sleep,” she says, though in all her looping anticipations of this conversation, she had never imagined this would be her opening gambit.

  Coffee lets out a shuddering breath, second cousin to a laugh. “I’m so sorry, Bird.”

  “So Roosevelt is right? It was your fault?” She didn’t mean to say that either. Carol Bird has never encouraged emotional vulnerability in her daughter, and Emily Bird learned very early not to show it. But the kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial.