North of Nowhere, South of Loss

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Shock,” Solana whispers.

  “She’s under sedation.” Carol’s lips move, but we have to watch them to hear. “He’s lost most of his skin. There’s nothing left for grafts.”

  We can’t look at the child and we can’t look at each other. “Where are the others?” I ask Carol in a low voice. “Jimmy and the little ones?”

  “Tirana’s got them, didn’t she tell you? She was here all morning. She offered to look after them as long as Jamika needs.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Solana says. “And you let her?” Her voice comes at us low and intense, almost soundless, like a bullet from a gun with a silencer.

  Jamika looks at us the way a sleepwalker blinks at an obstruction. “Tirana’s been wonderful,” she says.

  “Can I drive?” Solana asks.

  I can’t pretend I’m not surprised. “Sure,” I say. “If you want. I hadn’t picked you for a ’93 Ford minivan type.”

  “You know nothing about my type.”

  She guns the engine. I raise my eyebrows at her, but she’s oblivious. “This is an elderly car,” I remind her, but she is fixed on some urgent target in her head. I’ve never seen my speedometer needle move so fast. We’ve passed take-off and gone straight to the van’s wheel-wobble range. “Solana, for God’s sake, you want us to fall apart on the Interstate?”

  “I have to burn something,” she says.

  “Yeah, well.” My mind skitters away from the plastic bubble and the small skinless body. “Better get used to it, though. Hey, slow down, slow down.” She’s changing lanes like someone on speed and I’m pressing brakes on the floor-mat on my side. “Breathing Space is what we try to give them, but Crisis Central’s more like it.”

  “I don’t think you get it.” She accelerates. Her foot is emphatic. “I’m talking about Tirana. I’m talking about Carol. I’m talking about shooting yourself in the foot. I’m talking about this whole endless merry-go-round of willed haplessness. It makes me so furious, I could –”

  “Kill us?”

  She weaves out of the fast lane, overtakes on the right at somewhere above eighty, weaves left again.

  “High chance of success at this moment,” I say. I’m calculating my chances of leaning over and taking the wheel. I can practically hear the chemicals shloshing around in her veins: anger, exasperation, smashed idealism, despair. It’s a white-lightning mix. Her blood makes the sound that skyrockets make just before they fizz into coloured moons.

  “Any last wishes?” I shout.

  “What?”

  “Any final messages?” I’m feeling dangerously light-headed myself. “Last will and testament? Last rites?” I’m screaming at her now. I’m thinking about my kids who are with their father this week. “Any regrets? Anyone you wish you’d fucked or fucked over but never did, you raving maniac?”

  She glances at me, and my face must sober her up. “Oh shit,” she breathes. “Oh shit, oh shit.” Her hands start trembling on the wheel.

  “You,” I gasp. I’m slapping her: face, arms, anywhere. “Mother of all mistakes. Because Carol thought you’d be perfect, what a laugh.”

  “Oh shit, I’m sorry. I’m a time bomb. I’m losing it.” Her hands are trembling so violently that the old rattle in the dash – the one I’ve had fixed – kicks in.

  “Should’ve trusted my instinct” – slap, flat of hand on cheek, shoulder shove – “I knew you couldn’t cut it. Useless law-school bimbo.”

  “What the – Stop it!” she yells at me. “Stop it! Crazy white bitch, you want to kill us?”

  We’re almost down to normal just-over-the-speed-limit speed. I take a breath that goes down to my ankles. Another crisis come and gone, you get the knack of it. She scoots across four lanes at an angle of sixty degrees and I can feel everything south of my waist turn to mush, but then we’ve made it. A guy on our left leans on his horn and gives the finger and I give it right back, but then I tap my forehead and point to Solana and make a gesture of what-the-hell-can-I-do? with my hands. He grins and shakes his head and I grin back. Solana’s oblivious. She’s got the shakes.

  “Hey,” I say gently. “It’s okay. It happens. There’s a Shoney’s at this exit. Let’s have some fries and a coke, then I’ll drive us home.”

  In the parking lot, she slumps across the wheel. “Jesus,” she says. “I really lost it. I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  When she gets back from the bathroom, I’ve got our order. Over fries, I say: “You’re not cut out for this. It’s no big deal. We go through two lawyers a year.”

  “I’m not quitting.”

  “Then you’d better learn to think in a different way, or you’ll never last. A completely different way. You have to approach each day like Sisyphus rolling his rock uphill or Hercules –”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Not Randolph Macon.”

  “Where?”

  “University of South Carolina, the Honors College, if you must know. To get back to the subject, you have to think of this like Hercules emptying the ocean with a shell. It’s not that you’re getting anywhere. You’re not ever going to get anywhere. It’s just something you do each day because you can’t not.”

  “Bullshit to that.” Solana crunches hard on an ice cube. “You’re trying to believe I’m suffering from missionary burnout. I’m not. I don’t have a single do-good cell in my body.”

  “Oh right. You’re just in Legal Aid for the money. Using a Yale law degree to claw your way up to the Public Defender’s office, a well-known shortcut to wealth and prestige.”

  “I’m in it for the rage. There is no possible way you could understand.”

  “Oh no? I know what a rage high feels like. Who’re you hooked on hating, girl?”

  For a second, I think smoke might come out of her ears. I think she might stab me with a fork. Then she says: “My father. My tail-chasing work-allergic alcoholic bum of a father. My mother always took him back and gave him money and covered up for him and prayed for him and worked two shifts to put us through college and wore herself right into the grave at fifty-three.” She breathes a few fire breaths. “What about you, white girl? Who’s pushing your stops?”

  “My perfect sister,” I say. “The hot-shot lawyer.” I look Solana dead in the eyes. “You remind me of her. Everything she touches stinks of success.”

  We smoulder at each other for a minute or so, and then she says: “We could arm wrestle for the Rage Cup if you like.” “

  What?” I start to laugh. And then she starts. And then we can’t stop. We’re holding our sides, rolling about, knocking flatware off the table, until the waitress comes to ask what the problem is and all the other diners are staring and we still can’t stop and then the manager comes and asks us to leave.

  We’re in the parking lot facing Tirana’s unit, bracing ourselves to go in.

  “You want a cigarette?” I ask.

  “Quit years ago,” Solana says. “But I think I will.”

  “It’s pot, actually. Hand rolled.”

  “Then I definitely will.”

  We just sit for a while, inhaling, breathing out, inhaling.

  “So you’re a scholarship kid too,” Solana says.

  “Yep.”

  “And your father?”

  “Construction. Small time. Odd jobs. Fences, decks, building screen porches, that kind of thing.”

  “Honors College. So how’d you get from an Honors College degree to this dump?”

  “Dropped out in my senior year, for a start. One of my many unfinished projects.” I inhale slowly and hold the sweet smoke in my lungs for a while. “I don’t know. It sort of creeps up on you,” I say. “It’s not like you decide on it as a career. You just get into the habit of expecting to fail or mess up, and after a while you simply find you know how to be a loser. You’re good at it. You know the ropes, if you see what I mean. It’s something you can count on.”

&nbs
p; Solana says: “I can feel anger coming on again, just listening to you.”

  “But that’s it, you see. That’s why the two kinds just separate out, winners and losers, like oil and water. That’s why I choose to live here and not where you do.”

  “Look, the reason people like my father and Tirana never change is there’s always someone to bail them out. They know it. They know a good thing when they see it. They need the rug pulled out from under. They need a kick in the butt.”

  I inhale and let the pot float around behind my eyebrows for a while. “It should work like that” I say. “But it doesn’t. I don’t know why.” I breathe out slowly. I think of the pot as white coming in, blue going out. When it eddies up from my lungs to my brain, it’s an in-between colour, milky opal. “What happens is you realise that life in loser-land is not so bad. It’s actually kind of warm and fuzzy, and you have this fondness for other losers. You know they’ve got the same little broken spring inside them as you have. It’s not that they dug out this pit for themselves. It’s just that they found themselves in it, and they know it’s hopeless to try to get out.”

  “I can feel a rage high coming on.”

  “Feel free. Other side of the coin.”

  “What? Bullshit.”

  “You going to tell me you never panic about having your father’s loser virus in your blood? I bet you wake in a sweat some nights.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Ever dream you’ve turned into your father?”

  “Look,” Solana says. “You make a decision. You decide it’s either drown in his cesspool or climb out. You decide you will not be your mother. You decide you will not throw lifelines to idiots who can hardly wait to dive back in.”

  “So how come you’re here and not in some glass tower doing corporate law?”

  “I told you. Rage. I’m not here to pull losers out. I’m here to punish them.”

  “That’s an interesting angle.” I can feel the mellowness coming in, a lovely slow tide. I close my eyes. “When I was a kid, we used to spend summers at this nowhere beach in South Carolina. Helen, that’s my sister –”

  “The hot-shot lawyer.”

  “Right. She’s two years older than I am. Funny thing is, I was the daring one. I was the leader then. She was always getting sick and missing school, she was a very timid child.”

  “So she got more attention.”

  “I guess. I don’t think I minded. I think I adored her really. I mean, the whole family did. She was much prettier than me and much much smarter, and my mom and dad always said: Helen’s going to put her mark on the world. She won a scholarship to a private school and after that the family embarrassed her. At school, she’d say Dad was in business, in real estate, a developer, she said. At home, she was a bundle of nerves. I worried about her.”

  “Got it,” Solana says. “It makes sense now. You’re mama’s type. Branded as caretaker for life.”

  “We were out in a row boat. We weren’t out very far.” Helen’s so close I could touch her. I’m ten, she’s twelve. There is one oar in the bottom of the boat and Helen still has her sandals on. I dive in and tread water. I dare Helen to jump in too. I tell her it’s shallow. I tell her I’m touching bottom, but I’m not.

  I try to explain for Solana. “I don’t know why I did it. I think I thought that if she had to swim, she would. She’d learn how. She’d learn to protect herself.” I light up again. My hands are sweating now. I remember the blue around Helen’s lips when they pumped her lungs. I remember getting her hair in my mouth.

  “Can I borrow your cell phone?” I ask Solana.

  I dial a number. “Hi,” I say brightly to an answering machine. “Just wanted to know how you’re doing. It’s been a while.” I nearly don’t say it, then I do. “I miss you, Helen. Give us a call when you’ve got a minute, okay?”

  “There’s no comparison between you and losers like my father,” Solana says. “You did save her. And you do fend for yourself. Hell, I’ve watched you for three months. You’re a fake loser. You could be superwoman if you want.”

  “She used to make the most elaborate sandcastles you’ve ever seen.” I remember the cat’s eyes for windows, the mussel shells for doors. “When she was eight and I was six, she used to read me stories at night. She used to hide a flashlight under her pillow and we’d wait till Mom and Dad had gone downstairs and then I’d crawl into bed with her.”

  “Will she call you back?”

  “The Little Mermaid was my favourite.”

  “Will she call you?”

  “She might,” I say. “Eventually.” I inhale slowly. “She’ll tell me I’m my own worst enemy. I make her feel the way you feel about your father.”

  And then I tell her: “I didn’t actually call her. I dialled my own number and left a message on my answering machine.”

  There is a long orange electrical cord snaking across the hallway and disappearing under Tirana’s door. Solana trips on it.

  “God,” she says. “I thought your building was the pits. What’s that stench?”

  “Sewer back-up. A lot of the toilets don’t work.” I look at her curiously. “You must have lived in projects somewhere. Back before college and Yale law school. Where’re you from?”

  “Atlanta,” she says. “This is my home town. We never lived in housing projects. My mother would rather have died.”

  “Well now you know. For Eden Gardens, my block is upper middle class. Block C’s pretty bad,” I acknowledge, eyeing the squalor. “But it’s not the worst.”

  I knock on Tirana’s door.

  “What’s this frigging cord for?” Solana says.

  “A neighbour’s feeding her power.” I bang on the door again. “That’s the way people manage. Losers look out for one another, that’s why I like them.”

  “Don’t make me puke.”

  I put my ear against the door and hear the TV Cartoons. I thump with my fist. Everything’s quiet except for Spiderman’s voice. “Tirana,” I call. “It’s me. It’s just me and Solana.”

  There’s a fumble of sound and the door opens a crack. The chain is on, and Evie’s sweet and dirty little face peeps through. She’s standing on a chair.

  “Hi, Evie,” I say.

  She puts a finger to her lips. “Mama says don’t wake the baby,” she whispers.

  “Okay,” I whisper back. “Can we come in?”

  “Okay,” Evie says. She unchains the door and climbs down off her chair and lets us in. The TV set is running off the orange extension cord. There’s not much else in the room: a formica table, two plastic chairs, a carpet remnant on the floor and a yellow vinyl beanbag on top of it. There is no air-conditioning. The windows are open and the children are wearing nothing but underpants, but it doesn’t help. The room feels like a furnace and stinks of body sweat.

  “Jesus,” Solana says under her breath.

  Everyone is snuggled in the beanbag. I think of bees clustering on pollen. Tirana’s the sunflower, and on her stomach, curled like a petal, Jamika’s baby sleeps. Jimmy the Pyro and Jo-Jo and Evie and CJ and Dessie all seem attached. You can hear all those baby bees purr. In the background the TV drones, but no one pays it any mind.

  “Mama’s telling us a story,” CJ says.

  “If you want lemonade,” Tirana offers, “it’s in Denise’s across the hall. Or there’s beer. Evie can get it for you. My fridge don’t work.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “Just came by to see if you needed help.”

  “Mama,” Dessie says, pulling at her sleeve. “Don’t stop. Tell what the mirror said.”

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” Tirana begins.

  No, they all clamour. You told that already. Tell what the mirror said, tell what the white queenlady did.

  Tirana’s eyes glitter. “You want to know what that ol’ mirror said?”

  Yes, yes, they breathe, eyes shining.

  “You gonna be very quiet and listen up?”

  Shhh, they
all chorus, fingers to lips.

  “’Cause that mirror got a voice as soft as cream,” Tirana warns.

  Shhh, the children say.

  “Listen up then,” Tirana whispers, and they squirm in close.

  “The mirror say: you got a big shock coming, white queenlady. Yes, ma’am. ’Cause I got news for you, I got a announcement to make. You not the hottest babe in Block C. Not no more.”

  Mirror, mirror, you tell ME, the children chant on a rising curve of excitement. Who the hottest lady in Block C?

  “If you wake the baby,” Tirana warns, “the mirror won’t tell.”

  Mirror, mirror, you tell ME, the children repeat, whispering but insistent. Who the hottest lady in Block C?

  “Now here is what the mirror found,” Tirana says. “Black Velvet be the hottest chick around.”

  The children scream with laughter and clap their hands. Jazz be nimble, Jazz be quick, Black Velvet be the hottest chick, they chant. They tumble together, licking pollen and rubbing legs. Jimmy the Pyro tickles CJ and CJ shrieks with pleasure. The baby cries.

  “Now look what you gone and done,” Tirana says.

  The children smother the baby with kisses. Tell what the white queenlady did to Black Velvet, they beg. But the baby is fretful now.

  “If someone take the baby,” Tirana says. “If someone get the baby’s bottle from Denise’s.”

  “I’ll do it,” Solana says.

  “Denise will show you.”

  Solana holds the baby against her shoulder and rubs her cheek against the peach fuzz of its head. She won’t catch my eye.

  Tell about Black Velvet, the children beg.

  Solana closes the door.

  “The white queenlady, she call takeout,” Tirana says. “Express home delivery. And what she ask for? What she order now?”

  A poisonapple! the children respond.

  “And why she do that?” Tirana wants to know.

  Because she want Black Velvet to die!

  I wait, half listening, for Solana to come back but she doesn’t. Ten minutes, fifteen. Tirana doesn’t seem worried, but I am.