They fell silent, the only sounds the river lapping at the concrete under their feet and the distant hum of traffic on the FDR. The night was cold, and Maria hunched deeper into her sweatshirt, her face disappearing within the hood.
“I keep thinking about Lenny,” she said. “Can you imagine how hopeless he’d have to feel to do something like that? How worthless?”
“I can imagine,” Simon said, “but that’s all I can do. I haven’t been there, you know? I’ve been low, but not that low.” And it was true: even in his darkest moments after Amelia’s drowning, he’d never truly wanted to die. He could thank Michael for the idea that suffering was something to be endured, not avoided, a concept his father had taught by example.
“Yeah. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never thought about it. But probably everybody thinks about it at some point.” She turned away from Simon, looking downriver toward the three twinkling bridges. “Big difference between thinking and doing.”
“When did you think about it?” Simon said.
She turned back toward him. “You’re asking what was my lowest moment?”
“I guess so.”
She snorted out a laugh. “Take your pick. There’s a whole fucking banquet of misery to choose from.” She touched her stomach. “I’m sick of it. Sick of being miserable. Sick of being the victim. I’m done with that forever.”
“You’re not just talking about the surgeries. About getting ill.”
“No.”
“What happened to you, Maria?” He spoke softly, as though she wouldn’t notice the seriousness of the question if he asked it gently enough.
She seemed to retreat even deeper within the hood, and he was afraid that he’d pushed too far, that she was going to shut him down again. Instead, she said, “What are you supposed to do when something bad happens to you? You’re supposed to process it. Understand it. Right? You’re supposed to work through your feelings, as if thinking about something terrible over and over and over again will make you feel any better about it. It’s an idiotic idea. But I can tell you that avoiding the thing doesn’t work either. You can’t forget something just because you wish it hadn’t happened.” She paused. “You know all about that too, don’t you? With Amelia.”
“Yes.”
“You keep reliving the night she drowned, right? You wonder if you’d done something differently that night, maybe she’d still be alive. And you know what? Maybe she would be. But that doesn’t matter now. It’s not your fault. You didn’t want her to die. It was a tragedy, an accident. There’s nobody to blame.” If you only knew, he thought. “But what if there were?” she continued. “What if there was one person who caused your pain? One person who deliberately hurt you?”
“Who? Who are you talking about?”
She pulled back her hood and looked at him, her eyes searching his face for—what? He tried to show her what she needed to see, which in practice meant holding his face very still, as though he were having an X-ray taken.
“I don’t know how to talk about this,” she said.
“Can you try?”
She shook her head and looked away.
“Wait,” he said, desperate not to lose her. “Please. You can trust me. I would never tell anybody.” He gave her a rueful smile. “And even if I wanted to, you know I don’t have anyone to tell.”
She returned the smile. “That I believe.”
“I want to understand you,” he said. “Please let me try.”
She stared at him, her eyes dark and shadowed. Weighing, judging. “If I tell you this,” she finally said, “I’m going to start at the beginning. I want you to listen until I’m finished before you say anything. All right? Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” He was suddenly nervous, as though he could somehow fail at the simple act of listening. “I can do that.”
“All right.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she seemed nearly in a trance, speaking as though her words were already fully formed and she was simply reciting them, delivering something that had been crafted long before.
“I told you my mother died when I was thirteen,” she said. “That’s true. I also told you I don’t know who my father is. That’s also true. Of course, I asked my mother about him, and she said she could give me a name if that’s what I really wanted. But she didn’t know where he was and she wouldn’t help me find him. She said I’d be better off never knowing him, and even though she was maybe not the most reliable narrator of her own life, I believed her about this. So for thirteen years it was just the two of us. I don’t remember how old I was when I realized she was an addict. I guess I realized it before I knew the word ‘addict,’ before I understood why she passed out on the couch at eight o’clock every night—you could set your watch to it—or why it always seemed like she was talking to me from deep inside a plastic bubble. It was pills, painkillers. Before I was born, she preferred to get drunk, at least according to her. But I was a difficult birth, didn’t want to come out, and they ended up performing a cesarean. She was in a lot of pain afterward, so they did what overworked doctors do—they gave her a prescription, and she basically kept refilling that prescription for the next thirteen years.
“She definitely was an addict, but I still don’t like using that word to talk about her. Not because I’m ashamed, but because I’ve seen addiction a lot since then and I know what it can look like. Or at least I know what most people picture when I say that word. They picture squalor. Filth. Some shitty house with a bunch of junkies sitting around on duct-taped couches, shooting up at noon on a Tuesday. And, yeah, I’ve seen it like that—it just wasn’t like that with us. She kept her job right to the end. Our house was small and rented, and the neighborhood wasn’t great, but inside it was clean. It was a home. She might have passed out every night at eight, but she was up and going by six the next morning. Getting me ready for school, getting herself to work. Things changed some in the last two years, when she switched out her Vicodin for oxy, or really in the last few months, when she started crushing the oxy. Here’s a rule: if you’re snorting or injecting something, it’s going to catch up with you soon enough. Something I learned when I was a kid but forgot about for a few years there.”
Maria paused. Simon pictured the pile of red powder on Katherine Peel’s coffee table, and he felt an echo of the slow sweetness of that drug, whatever it had been, spreading through his veins. It would be easy, he knew, to want that sweetness every day, to depend upon it until it didn’t matter if you wanted it anymore or not.
“My mother OD’d on a Monday,” Maria said. “She was off work for some reason, and I guess she was celebrating. I spent a week at a youth shelter, and by the next Monday they’d placed me in a foster home. I was officially a ward of the state. They couldn’t find my father. Maybe he’s dead too, who knows. My grandparents didn’t want to take care of me, and I don’t blame them. They lived in East Texas—still do, I think—and they were both sick and barely getting by already without a teenager to deal with. There was nobody else. So I went into the system.
“The first family didn’t work out. Neither did the second or the third. When I was sixteen, I was taken in by the Dreesons. They’d never had a foster kid before, and God knows why they took me on, a sixteen-year-old punk. Maybe Mrs. Dreeson was bored and wanted a girl around, somebody to talk with about, you know, womanly things or whatever. If that was it, I’m sure she was sorely disappointed. Anyway, they weren’t so bad, the parents, just regular middle-class Southern California people trying to get through life without the whole thing collapsing on their heads. And I liked San Gabriel fine. It felt like a real neighborhood. People knowing each other’s business, but in a good way. I even got along all right in the high school there.”
She stopped again. Simon nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging way. She chewed her lip for a moment, and when she resumed speaking her voice was flattened out
even further, emptied entirely of inflection and emotion. She would be a conduit for her story now—a neutral medium—and nothing more.
• • •
The problem, she continued, was the Dreesons’ biological son, Thomas. He was a year older than Maria, a gangly kid obsessed with his dirt bike, which was perpetually half-dismantled in the family garage. At first, he seemed excited to have Maria around. And why not? He was a bored seventeen-year-old kid—bored with his parents, his neighborhood, his school, his life—a high school senior treading water until he could get the hell away from home. And here, suddenly, was a girl with dyed purple hair, a pierced nose, and a safety-pinned Circle Jerks hoodie, sleeping in the spare bedroom down the hall. Here, suddenly, was a badass younger sister—or at least that was the role into which he first cast her.
She’d lived in San Gabriel for two months when he showed her where his parents kept their petty cash. He waved her into the master bedroom, a shadowy, musky space she’d been told was off-limits. This was during the drowsy late-afternoon hours between the end of school and the Dreesons’ return home from work. Thomas hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, and he stood, stoop shouldered, in the murk, his hand resting on his parents’ dresser.
“Listen, M.,” he said, “you keep lifting cigs from Chet’s place and he’s gonna bust you.”
“I’m not stealing—”
“Save it. First off, I’ve seen you doing it. Second, Chet already knows. I had to tell him to chill and let me talk to you before he called the cops.”
Was it true? Maria thought she’d been smooth at the newsstand, palming the packs while Chet—she hadn’t known his name until then, the stringy white guy with the ponytail and tobacco-stained fingers—bent to the register to make change for some deliberately convoluted transaction, like a handful of pennies and nickels for a candy bar. The open-air newsstand was the only place she could pull it off, since the cigarettes were right out there with the magazines instead of barricaded behind the counter like in every other store. If the guy—Chet—had seen what she was doing, wouldn’t he have stopped her on the spot? Why would he wait to talk it over with Thomas? Or maybe Chet hadn’t seen anything, and Thomas had told him about it himself. But, then, how did Thomas know what she’d been up to?
“They don’t give you any spending money, do they?” Thomas shook his head at such gross injustice. “Never gave me shit either.” She didn’t think this was true—she’d seen all the gadgets in his room, the PlayStation, the TV, the stereo—but she didn’t say anything. “Anyway, I thought I’d let you in on a little secret, being that you’re my new sister and all.” He opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and beckoned her over. In the drawer was a simple metal cash box with a three-digit combination. “Combo’s one, two, three,” he said. “No joke.” He opened the box. Inside was a jumble of bills, mostly fives and ones. “Rainy day cash,” he said. “Car wash, carton of milk, et cetera. You know how they have that old-person thing about using a credit card for a small purchase? Anyway, they have no idea how much is in here. You take ten bucks for a couple packs of smokes every week, they’ll never know.”
She stared at him. “Thomas, I’m not going to steal from your parents. They’ve taken me in, and—”
“Gimme a break. They’re not fucking saints, trust me. And this money’s not going to make any difference to them.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, so now you’re above stealing anything, and I’m the asshole? Who was ripping off the newsstand in the first place?”
She looked down into the cash box. “But even if I take this . . . I’m too young. He won’t sell to me.”
Thomas grinned. “This is the good part.” He told her that he’d cut a deal with Chet: if Maria paid him back double for the two packs she’d already stolen—four, she said silently, but okay—he’d sell cigarettes to her for now on, with an extra fee of two bucks per pack tacked on, no ID required. And, unbelievably, it worked: Chet accepted her mumbled apology, took her money, and gave her the American Spirits she asked for. What she hadn’t told Thomas was that the cigarettes weren’t really for her. She didn’t care about smoking one way or another, but the school’s punks, in their Rancid and Bad Religion T-shirts, did, clustering in a corner of the school lot to suck a few butts during lunch. She’d figured this was her way of getting in with them: not by smoking herself, but by being the provider of what was—for a bunch of kids—a precious commodity, almost a currency, she thought, like in prison. Basically, she was a newbie freak with dead parents who needed some friends, and the cigarettes were how she was going to get them. Thomas had been right about his parents too: they didn’t notice the missing cash, or at least they didn’t say anything about it to her. And after a few weeks of stealing from the box, she forgot to feel guilty about it anymore. But what about Thomas? What was in it for him? At the time, Maria left the question unexamined, but even then she understood, uneasily, that he’d both made her into his accomplice and placed her in his debt.
The change in Thomas’s behavior toward her was at first subtle. The way his eyes lingered on her ass for a breath too long, the way he seemed—deliberately, she wasn’t sure—to get in her way in the kitchen, contriving superfluous little jolts of physical contact. He was suddenly obsessed with whether she’d found a boyfriend, what she thought about the pickings at San Gabriel High. He himself, he took pains to inform her, had a girlfriend at the beginning of the school year but had dumped her—it was now April—for being “too clingy.” As a senior, he believed it was his right to “sample the wares.” She’d wrinkled her nose at the phrase, and he’d assured her, with an unnecessary squeeze of her shoulder, that he was just joking around and that she should try to loosen up.
In the beginning of May, he tried to kiss her. He’d lured her out to the garage with an unlikely story about finding a stray kitten curled up in the wheel well of his mother’s Accord. She followed him out there, already pretty sure he was full of shit. His dirt bike was propped up on a lift, its engine in a dozen pieces. He led her over to the Accord and squatted down by one of the back wheels. “Come on,” he said, “help me look.” Maria kneeled down next to him and peered halfheartedly under the car. “It was here,” he said, “just a few minutes ago.” He took a small flashlight out of his pocket and made a show of pointing the light around the car’s undercarriage. “Ah well.” He snapped the light off. “Guess it got spooked.”
He turned to her then, their faces only a few inches apart, the two of them crouched behind the Accord and hidden from the doorway that led into the house. He smelled like cinnamon gum and motor oil. Oh shit, she thought, and then it happened before she could stop it: Thomas pressing his face against hers—because that’s what it felt like, him pressing his whole greasy, pimply, hormonal face into hers, the lips basically incidental—and his hand latching on to the side of her neck like it was a pole in a subway car. She pulled back and slapped his hand away. “Thomas, what the fuck?”
He gave her a slack-jawed look that suggested he was genuinely surprised by this reaction. “Hey, M.,” he said, “chill out. We’re just having fun.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said, and moved to get up off the floor.
He grabbed her wrist and yanked her back down. “M., listen—”
“Get the fuck off me.” She tried to free her wrist, but he held tight.
“Hey, think about it.” His eyes were bright, evangelizing. “We mess around a little, whenever we feel like it. Nobody has to know. It’s perfect.”
“Thomas, let go of my wrist.”
“Maria—”
“Let go, or I’ll tell your parents about this.”
His eyes went dead. His face turned hard and mean, and Maria thought she was looking through a window into the man he would become ten or twenty years from then—pissed off and aggrieved after he’d been told, yet again, that he couldn’t have every last thing he bel
ieved himself entitled to. He let go of her wrist. “You say a word to my parents, and I’ll tell them about the money. Think they want some klepto gutter-punk bitch sleeping in their house?”
Maria’s face went red with anger. “You wouldn’t.”
“What’re you, sixteen? Nobody wants teenagers anyway, and definitely not a klepto. Too much trouble. Everybody’d rather adopt some cute little kid. How’d you like the shelter? Wanna go back?” Maria said nothing, just stared at him in fury. “Didn’t think so,” he said dismissively. He got up, walked over to his dirt bike, and started wiping down a piston, turning his back to her as though she weren’t even there.
She said nothing about this episode to the Dreesons, nor to the distracted child-services rep on his pro forma visits to their household. Maria figured she only had to endure Thomas for another few months—he’d graduate in June, leave for college in August—and then she could finish high school here in San Gabriel. She would turn eighteen a week after she graduated the following spring, and after that she’d be free to—well, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Get a job, she supposed. Whatever she did, though, it would be hers. She’d be free of the system. Nobody could tell her what to do.
After Thomas left for UC Santa Cruz, she didn’t see him again until Christmas break. His few months away had emboldened and hardened him somehow. What had been run-of-the-mill teenage disrespect—for his parents, for Maria, for sluts and jocks and fags and whoever else was pissing him off at any given moment—had refined itself into a purer form of contempt. Maria sensed it as soon as he walked through the door, eyes shaded by his flat-brim Monster cap: directionless hostility. He was itching for a fight.
She did her best to avoid him. The first week, when she was still busy at school, was easy enough. Christmas fell on Wednesday of the following week. Both of his parents went to work on Monday, leaving Maria and Thomas alone in the house together. Maria left in the morning, but without a car she could only go so far, riding her bicycle around the Valley, hemmed in by freeways and mountains. She returned home in the late afternoon, exhausted. She wheeled her bicycle into the garage, her stomach sinking when she saw Thomas’s dirt bike. She could hear them through the garage door: three or four of them, yelling and cursing over the PlayStation’s machine-gun chatter. She hesitated at the door. She had a strong impulse to turn around and get back on her bike and ride away—it didn’t matter where. But this was her home. Screw him and his dumb friends: this was where she lived. She opened the door and stepped inside the house.
The Dismantling Page 20