How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  “Hey.”

  I turn.

  “Take me to Silver’s,” Whit says.

  I want to give her the whole “don’t you ever” speech, but I’m not Pops and I’m fucked up—in no state to talk. “What’s Sil—”

  But Whit is already walking back toward the parking lot.

  In the car, she looks straight ahead like she can see through the night into the past. I think I might see it too and finally give in and sneak a second pill from my pocket, chew it slow, blind to the taste.

  SILVER’S IS HAZE-FILLED. They don’t even bother carding Whit at the door. The karaoke is ugly. Some college-age kids spill their hearts on the mic singing Creed or Bon Jovi. I don’t really know if it is Bon Jovi because I know nothing about rock, but it sounds like something a singer named Bon Jovi would sing.

  I try to take Whit in again through my newly gauzy world. People bump and shove and I pull her close.

  “You see her?” she asks.

  I lean down and tell her no. Nuzzle her a bit. She cringes. I dig my beard into her like Pops used to do to me but she shrugs me off.

  “Stop,” she says. She isn’t the same girl I took to Build-a-Bear when she visited. But I’m not the same man either. I’ve betrayed her trust, maybe we were never that close. I’m a light-year away and drifting farther.

  I survey the riffraff, search for Dee in the crowd shaking her bony body, swaying among the college kids while belting out I will survive. I imagine harmonizing. But there are only some regulars staring down the college crowd.

  I can’t shake what Whit said, the image of Dee crying. Her frail body shuddering. Whit will be lost to me forever if something happens to Dee tonight. This I know. She’ll remember me getting high and drinking when we should’ve been searching. She’ll remember me lying. My imagination gets desperate—Dee asleep on a sidewalk or holed up in a den somewhere, like the stories I’ve heard about how she and Pops used to do when Whit would be at Madea’s for days. Dee told me once about a crackhead chick Pops used to hide out with in Everett when things were going south and he’d been on one. She’s told me too many stories like this and too late for me to ever hear the other side. Sometimes I wonder how much of it Whit knows.

  “Let’s check the street,” I say. “You know anywhere else she might be?”

  “Like where?” she says.

  “Around here. A house, maybe?”

  She looks at me confused. If I say anything more, she’ll get defensive. I want her mom to remain a champion and Pops to remain a kind old soul. I want her to believe anything that won’t sink her.

  Outside, we walk along Tacoma Way, scanning for the Mustang on sidewalks and in handicapped spots. Some cars pass, not too many pedestrians. We do a quarter-mile loop and come back on the other side. I’m tired and sit down on a bench across from Silver’s.

  Whit joins me but keeps her distance on the bench. She starts crying, silently, and I stare off, get drowsy.

  Mom calls again. I want to answer but I’m too high. My voice will pinch and she’ll hear it. The pills are doing their work on me. My neck is a Slinky and Whit’s face becomes inverted as my head nods. Mom texts me 911.

  I slide an arm around Whit, but she springs up, walks away to make more calls. I put my face in my hands to try and steady the world. Dee and I always think we’ll make it home. Even unconscious, we’ll drive. My head gets heavier and my mouth feels numb. I feel good, flushed. I tell myself this is me. But the truth is I’m over-faded. I dry-heave.

  Sliver’s spews out the last-call victims, but I can still hear Whit between the voices. “Can you pick us up?” she says into the phone.

  I catch up with her and pull the phone from her ear.

  “It’s Madea!” Whit yells.

  “Bullshit.” The screen shows LETTY.

  “Your son’s high,” she yells.

  The blood in my calves is heavy and slow.

  “Hello!” I hear through the phone.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  We are both silent instead of acknowledging the lie.

  “You’re just like your father,” Mom says.

  I hang up. Whit is smirking at me and I want to shatter her phone. But the Percs close in on me and settle me down. “Don’t put this shit on me,” I say to her, even though she has every right to. “That’s your fucking mom, not me. I’m here.” Even as I say it, I feel pathetic. “I’m here,” I repeat, because it feels better than the truth.

  My mom calls my phone and I turn it off. I shake my head to clear my mind and breathe in the cool, crisp air. The old drunks in front of Perry’s, a bar across the way, are still smoking cigarettes and hanging around. Dee tried quitting a few times, but I know she’ll burn until her face looks like it’s made of chiseled oak.

  “Get in the car,” I tell Whit.

  Her eyes are heavy, but she listens.

  The stars are out, bright enough to see even in the city. I love Washington for that. I don’t blame my mom for changing her tune after Pops’ death, smoothing over his inadequacies. I’ve eulogized his memory too. I don’t blame her for her nerves either. She’s right, my life needs correcting. It’s a little clearer now, after sorting through Pops’ papers, the names on the check stubs like a hood genealogy test. I don’t want my memory to ring the same.

  As I drive, I pray for real, try to remember the Serenity Prayer that I read off Pops’ NA books. It’s a simple one, but I still can’t find the words, can’t fake the feeling that was real for my pops and our aunts and cousins who lived by it. Still, I pray—a long and undisturbed sleep would be worth it.

  “You got a problem,” Whit says. And she’s right, but she’s only saying it ’cause she doesn’t want to think about her mom. Then she is crying. If you can watch someone you love crumble without crying yourself, you need to look for someone new because it ain’t real. That sounds like something my aunts would say, but about soulmates. I wonder if the same goes for siblings. But you can’t exchange blood.

  It’s hard to remember how to get back to the unit so I drive slow. Everything I have is focused on the road.

  I remember when Whit called last Christmas. I was with my girl Madie’s family. Whit said we should get to know our Big Momma before it was too late. We’d missed our chance with Big Daddy, and I’d missed mine with Pops. I wanted to tell her that I just needed to know that we’d be okay. Back in the other room, my girl’s family was huddled together near their piano and a Christmas tree bigger than any I’d ever seen before—so big it must’ve been a twelve-footer. I told Whit she was right and that I was proud of her. We made plans to take Big Momma out for her eighty-fifth. But I never came through on them. Months passed and we let the gaps grow wider.

  The storage complex is dark when we arrive, rows and rows of units—a miniature city of material lives. I pull up and park so that the headlights show on Pops’ unit, which is open, with an empty wooden folding chair sitting out front.

  We get out and look for Dee. I call her name, then again, get mad and yell louder. After a minute of this, Whit collapses on a sofa that’s been dragged out and lets the tears go. The Baccarat almost slides off the sofa. I catch it just in time and set it down inside the unit. Dee must’ve been holding it, a vestige of Pops’ life before her, or maybe my mom came back and was remembering the life she can’t seem to move past. I keep poking around, afraid to look at Whit. There is a metal trash can filled with a bunch of things half burnt. I call Whit twice because she can’t hear me over her own tears. She rises off the sofa like she is fifty years older. I turn on my phone for the flashlight. We start sifting through the can.

  Dee must have been burning things—pictures and papers mostly, the huge binder of check stubs, a couple of old Kodak disposable cameras. The smell of melted plastic is harsh.

  Whit pulls out a soot-stained pair of panties.

  “What the fuck?” I say and start laughing, hoping they weren’t my mom’s. I take them from her.

  “What’s wrong with y
ou?” she says.

  I turn the phone flashlight up higher and find a half-burnt letter addressed to Pops.

  Dear Lonnie,

  In case you haul off and finna forget where you rest your head, I’m sending you a snack for the road.

  It’s signed Deandra Campbell. There is more but I double over.

  “What’s so funny?” Whit asks.

  “Pops and I had more in common than I thought,” I say, and hold the panties up.

  “Gross,” she says.

  A flashlight comes on in the distance.

  I stop smiling and steel up. “Ay,” I yell out.

  When the figure holding the flashlight gets closer he lowers it so it doesn’t shine in our eyes. It’s Big Al.

  “What do you want?” Whit’s voice surprises me. It’s got grit.

  “I got a call from security,” Al says. “A complaint about loud music playing and the smell of something burning.”

  It’s 3:30 by now, but I think Al’s full of shit.

  “I was gonna call the cops,” he says, “but didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. Came down and she was dancing like a madwoman, throwing shit in the can, looked like a séance. She’s been sitting in the office. No phone. Can’t remember a damn number. She’s lucky I came when I did. Had a bottle of kerosene not six feet away. She coulda blown her ass to Timbuktu.”

  Whit starts laughing so hard she’s crying again.

  “You people are fucking nuts,” Al says.

  “Shut up, fluffernutter gut!” Whit yells.

  Big Al looks down at his stomach.

  I burst out laughing like I’m traveling back in time. Whit’s her mother’s child. She can deal.

  The nausea from the pills smacks me hard again. I put one hand on my chest and focus on breathing, in through my nose and out through my mouth. The panties, part white and part discolored from the fire, hang from my other hand like a meager peace offering.

  Rye and I didn’t talk much after I left Pawtucket, but he’d mentioned firefighting before so I wasn’t surprised. I tried to keep tabs on him through Marissa Sr., his girl, and my mom. After I went off to college, I stopped coming around much. Aside from a quick stint living back in the city with my old girl Madie, I was a ghost—nine years a stranger.

  In all that time, I watched him cycle through his life. First it was police academy. He’d been on the other side so long he was already half trained. Nobody wants to be a cop, I told him. After he failed the officer exam, he tried for export work but ended up shoveling snow for the city. Then it was corrections officer. Nobody wants to spend their days in prison, even if they get to go home at night. I told him if he’d failed one test he’d fuck up the other. He said I wouldn’t make it in prison. I’d grow a beard and take steroids, I said. Let your degrees keep you warm, he said.

  We spoke just after his daughter was born. He had named her Marissa Jr. to keep things simple but wanted to name her Minnijean, after a girl from the Little Rock Nine who’d dumped her chili on a racist white boy. He liked the nickname Mini. His lady wasn’t with it.

  He went on to tell me about his scores on the firefighter physical aptitude test. They made me proud. I imagined Rye climbing all those steps again and again until the PAT officers told him he had done enough.

  As he spoke, his words bled and rippled into my memories of us. I couldn’t shake the image of us taking the SATs in a cold room at the community college. He’d kept his stuffed parka on and had fallen asleep halfway through. The whole way home he talked shit about how great his NFL combine numbers would be. I told him college comes before the league, but he just laughed and made me stop for pastelitos.

  I could see the PAT officers watching him maneuver the ladder like it was a small woman. He worked the hose with ease, hitching and unhitching it with speed. The rubber mallet seemed to swing down from his hand like it had a life of its own, moving the sliding weight almost a foot every time he made contact. The plate leapt as he struck. He finished so fast—eight seconds—that the officers forgot to look at the clock. The physical stuff was all light work for him.

  Even with fucked-up SATs he’d still managed to get a full ride to Morehead State, in Kentucky. I remembered how he kept lying to my mom after he blew his scholarship. He had been working at the PriceRite for a whole semester before she came in to shop and saw him bagging groceries. She called me after that and asked if we’d been in touch. Last I’d heard from him, he’d said Kentucky was on some redneck shit. I lied and told her we’d been keeping up. I should’ve asked him more about how he was holding. In the summers, when I was home from school, we still lifted and balled together. I used to give Rye the business in one-on-one and we’d gamble until he lost enough to want to throw hands. We’d end up slap-boxing like always, but I could see his life was in a real hurry. He was getting into some heavy weight, nothing like the little dime bags we fucked around with as kids. He said he had “diversified.” He smiled a lot less. He’d never talked much, but he’d gotten even quieter.

  The PAT people must’ve wondered if the dummy for the drag drill had somehow gotten lighter. Rye pulled it with so much strength that he lifted the rubber feet off the ground. The ceiling wasn’t low enough to make him really hunch—burning rafters might, buildings collapsing in piles of their own histories might make him duck, but the practice course didn’t. He said the ankle weights they used to simulate boots were lighter than Timbs.

  After I finished at Cornell, I stayed in Ithaca. I toyed with some fine-arts programs abroad, leaned on new connections, tried not to fall back to earth and wake up in my old bedroom. Over the phone Rye and I still talked about training programs. We understood lifting—moving the immovable until we were too tired to move it another inch.

  The final firefighter PAT asks fighters to simulate tearing down walls and ceilings with a pike pole. It calls for endurance. Rye took to it, pulling and pushing in rhythm, moving the suspended metal weights again and again. He was gasping when the officers called time, but even though his shirt was fastened to him and his breath wavered, he refused to hunch over.

  On the phone, I congratulated him on his baby girl because both our fathers hadn’t been shit and he’d be a good one. He was well cut for fatherhood—I remembered him on the block all those years ago, keeping watch in case the cops came through, his stash behind a loose brick in a wall on Beverage Hill where I’d gotten head for the first time. He always looked so focused and in control.

  The PAT officers had to tell him to let go of the pulley. His lungs begged for breath, but he still wouldn’t hunch over. The benefits of working for the city were too sweet to give in, the comforts he could provide too good—space to breathe in a wide room with the NBA playing on TV, a crib with gentle wood edges, a flame-resistant wool mattress courtesy of my mom, Baby Jordans in pink and purple smaller than a fist. He’d be able to come home and keep coming home. The Marissas would know his footsteps on the porch, the same every time—a wolf’s howl, calling, and Rye returning with some food to break and share. Simple hopes. He thought he could be on the right side of things for a change. He was never the type to pitch for the rush. He hated being one wrong move away from ten years. Ten years is a lot of life. Ten years would mean coming out to a different child, a child he had no part of—it meant being our fathers. He thought firefighting was his last chance for stable. And it was time for stable. But a fireman’s hours were just as bad as being on the corner, maybe just as dangerous.

  After the PAT we didn’t talk much. When we did get up, it was about music and people from around the way, about women and who was still balling—conversations that slowly burned to the roach. Our language was breaking.

  IN EARLY MAY, right after Rye graduated recruit school at the department, Marissa called from a cookout my aunt had thrown them. Her voice was creaky on the phone, and she wasn’t the creaky type. We’d been family since high school, since she and Rye had gotten together. When I heard her gushing, I smiled, looking out my kitchen window onto
an overgrown field in Ithaca. The white noise of the insects dropped out for a second and all I heard was her repeating best of this city, and pride and honor, words that weren’t thrown our way often when we were young. She told me how official Rye was all decked out in his uniform, feeling as good as he looked—on the right side of things. He walked steady when the deputy called his name. His gaze was clear. He’d always been welcome in my mom’s house because of that gaze and now he’d have the career to match. The Marissas were dressed up in the crowd. The baby in virgin white with a little bow, Sr. in something floral, looking sexy as the day that they made the little one, so proud of her man that they’d be at it again almost before the reception was over. My mom snapped pictures. She’d mailed me a few. I’d intended to get them framed but they’d gotten lost in the stacks of books and papers crowding my place.

  Rye didn’t think of the product he had left to move. That part of his life was smoldering. Instead, his mind was on the fire station he used to run by when he was still training for football—the men in their academy T-shirts, hosing the engines down outside, the whole day shining like it was nickel-plated. That’s what he wanted his Marissas to see too.

  THEN, A FEW weeks into being a probie, Rye turned up at my friend Blake’s, where I was crashing. Blake and I were sitting on his family’s penthouse terrace in Manhattan when the doorman called up and asked if Blake knew a Rydell James. I thought it was a joke. I’d texted Rye the address when he said he was coming through New York but figured he was bullshitting.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I said, smiling, when he got off the elevator.

  He looked healthy, leaned out a bit. Rye pulled a bottle of pills from his backpack with a wad of twenties rolled like a newspaper.

  “C’mon, man.” I sucked my teeth.

  “Same shit.”