What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  When we get out to the car, Carrie is sitting on the hood with her head in her hands. She jumps down and bugs her eyes out at me. “I don’t have the thingy.” She mimes the clicker with her hand. I fish it out of my purse and unlock the car, and as I walk around to the driver’s side, I hear my daughter tell Kandy she can have the front seat. On the way into town, the stoplights are all green.

  10

  THE OFFICIAL POLICE reports will say that the fire at the Emerald started around ten P.M., that the probable cause was bad wiring, and that it was purely accidental. If you ask any cop in Ocean Vista, though, he’ll say that the actual cause was my mother, who showed up grease-stained and filthy at the fire department, rang the bell for service, and rode in the fire truck back to the blaze. “I was cleaning,” she said. “Is cleaning a crime?”

  I am at Pam’s when it happens. Kandy has begged off due to some family obligation, and Pam and I are lying on her bed on our elbows, talking over reruns of I Love Lucy on her little rabbit-ears TV. There is a knock on Pam’s window, and she tumbles over to open it, revealing that public school girl with all the piercings. Does she often come by?

  “Hey.” The girl’s face is sweaty. “Hey. The Emerald’s fucking burning down. Right fucking now. Come on.”

  We fly out the back door, Pam’s mother calling after us, “Girls? Girls?,” and we don’t stop—Pam knows where to cut through backyards to get there the fastest. Her house is much closer to the water than mine is, so we just run for it, almost as if the Emerald is a friend in peril whom we must save. We stop to pick up the public school girl when she trips over uneven sidewalk, and we laugh, punchy with excitement.

  We approach the Emerald from the rear, and there is already a crowd gathered to watch in that scrubby field. The fire truck is parked up close, firemen yelling to one another and reeling out a yellow hose flat as Scotch tape. The windows on the sixth floor glow, and there is a crackling, rumbling sound that we might attribute to a heavy vehicle on gravel far away if we couldn’t see that the loudest noises correspond to bursts of flame through the windows of the honeymoon suite. The fire lights the field to an uncanny gold, and outside its reach, the darkness deepens. Pam and I stand close together and watch, exclaiming sometimes over debris falling from the high windows, or the incredible power of the stream of water that the firemen send through the window of the honeymoon suite, that same window we swung out of only weeks ago.

  It takes the firemen half an hour to tame the fire. It is more contained than it first appeared. From our vantage point on the ground, the fifth floor seems to be charred, but the fourth looks all right, and the building stands. What a miracle, people whisper in the field, that this never happened with all those teenagers inside. Later, after they investigate, they will tell us that the Emerald is full of death-trap wiring: old ungrounded power outlets and dangling ends of copper wire. It could have burst into flame at any moment, unaided. The toys have all melted out of the paint and the paint escaped skyward in toxic fumes. The sofas are skeletal. The mural is gone. That whole wall is gone. They will find buckets melted fast to the exposed floor struts, and traces of various household solvents, as well as a nylon-bristle scrub brush charred bald.

  When I go home, exhausted and a little somber, I find cops waiting outside my house. “Are you Olivia Reed?” they ask me. “Your mother’s at the station house. We need you to come with us.”

  OF COURSE IT is not a crime to clean, but it is a crime to trespass, so my mother is charged with a misdemeanor and held all night. I imagine that her misdemeanor is the very same one I wiggled out of by jumping out the window at the Emerald that night; it has been hovering mosquitolike, waiting for a Reed, any Reed, having gotten the taste for us. The police question my mother at length while I sit in the gray-green bucket chairs of the room reserved for the detention of minors. A chubby policewoman babysits me, every now and then offering me a magazine or a stick of gum. I am asked if I would like to be picked up by a responsible third party—a neighbor or a friend—but I say no, there is nobody. I want to see her face, to know for sure.

  Here’s what I think happened: The mural wouldn’t come off the wall with Brillo pads and turpentine or Drano or acetone paint thinner, so she tried heat. Just like that. The next logical step. She wanted to erase my new life.

  A police officer enters the room. It’s the cartoon hound dog, though he looks more or less human tonight. He sighs, recognizing me, but goes ahead with his question: “Does your mother have any medicines she needs with her?”

  I shake my head.

  “Any pill bottles in the bathroom, anything like that?”

  “I know what medicine is.”

  He leaves, and I am dozing when the door opens again. James is there in the doorway, looking mussed and woebegone. The policewoman hands him a clipboard so he can sign me out like a library book.

  “Where is she?” I ask him. “Is she arrested?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get you home.” I am not supposed to see my mother, but I do as we pass the cell block, through a glass pane in a door. She is pacing like a jungle cat behind a black aluminum folding table. I have my answer in the sly squint of her eyes, her dry-gummed grin. I am tired of being this woman’s daughter. I look at her and think, This woman. “What did you do?” I shout through the glass, and she rushes to the door.

  James puts his hands on my shoulders to steer me away, but I am already going as she shouts a string of our old jokes in response, “Olivia bunny rabbit light of my life!” and then, “Be safe, my love! Be safe, be safe, be safe!”

  James drops me off at home and doesn’t even come in the house. This stings; I was counting on his insistence that I eat and then sleep, his disapproval of the filth in our house, his snore. I wonder what he told the police to be able to sign me out. Alone, I have nobody to push against, and the house feels full of watchful and malevolent ghosts. I whistle for Blanche, and we run together all the way to Kandy’s house, where at least I can watch TV unobserved, and do, until morning, when her brothers descend on the living room and change the channel to wrestling.

  MY MOTHER DOESN’T come home. I send Jake into the precinct to ask after her, since my going would risk the disclosure that I am unattended. He comes out, blinking in the sun, to our rendezvous point in the park across the street, and says that she was released with a warning at seven in the morning. Jake cups my jaw with his hand in a gesture that is too full of tenderness for me to bear right now. I spit in the grass. “Fuck her,” I say.

  Later I search my mother’s bedroom and see that her suitcase is gone, and a few clothes. James must have come in the night. I wonder what it would be like if she never came back. I picture our house swallowed by ivy and the tomatoes gone wild. I make pancakes on a griddle over the fire pit and sit alone in the backyard eating them, watching the neighbor boys watch me from their living room window. Their little eyes rise beady above the level of the couch back, wide in horror, I think, at the way I have to live. I raise a pancake to my brow in salute, and they duck out of frame.

  THE MORE I know about Jake, the more exotic he seems: a boy born to privilege slumming it with shore scum like me and Kandy, and managing to come off like the worst of us. He played Little League as a kid but quit over an unjust call. He lost his virginity when he was fourteen to his adult cousin’s date at a wedding in Colorado. I’m the only one who knows how much better he does in school than the slackers he hangs out with; he makes A’s when he doesn’t cut.

  Ever since the joy boxes, Jake has been buying me things. He makes a killing selling weed. He says he is saving for something big and that he’ll know it when he sees it, which sounds to me like a fantastic luxury. Every couple of months, he drives to New York to pick up a package from his dealer, whom he refers to, reverently and frequently, as Max. Usually, a package costs him about two thousand dollars, and he makes four times that from the suckers in our town.

  “Ho
w much do you have saved?” I ask him.

  “Sixteen thousand.”

  “From weed?”

  “And work. And bar mitzvah.”

  Max gets shipments of weed from a grower and distributes them to dealers, some small-time underage kids like Jake, some full-timers. Jake explains how he met Max at a Bad Religion show in Brooklyn last summer, how they hung out socially before Max cut him in, so he’ll always get a good rate. Cut him in. It sounds to me like a gangster movie, all glitz and plans gone awry, late-night trysts, ducking into trash cans as packs of muscle-bound cops thunder by.

  Jake has been to Holland, Japan, Mexico, and Vietnam. On these vacations, he has gone bike trekking and gotten scuba-certified. At a restaurant in Mexico, he danced salsa with dark-haired women who stroked his neck and giggled to each other in Spanish. In Vietnam, his dad dared him to eat a still-beating snake’s heart in a shot of snake’s blood, and he did it.

  Jake takes me to his house. It is like my house only insofar as it has been a closed museum. I am the first girl he has let inside, he tells me. It is like walking into a furniture catalog, everything clean, a generic architecture book square to the corner of the coffee table. I see his bed, I sit on it, I lie on it, we whisper in it. Jake says he can’t sleep here—he misses the rusty bed in the dead green room on the beach. It is so private to lie in someone else’s bed. I can feel his thoughts rising from the pillow.

  He asks me if I like it, his house, and I say sure. How can I find fault with this place? How can it make me anything but jealous? It is a palace with carpets that feel like fur on bare feet and cutting-edge design elements, a chandelier of prisms in the kitchen that cast tiny rainbows across the creamy marble counters. Everything in shades of white. Jake’s mother lists these shades for me, leaning against her electric cooktop in a charcoal skirt suit: ecru, eggshell, snow, off-white, pure white, white sand, lily.

  Jake holds his hands behind his back and keeps from looking at me while his mother leads me on a brisk tour. “This is the dining room!” she says. “This is the downstairs bath!” I count the rooms: twenty, not including storage closets and the two staircases, one straight, one spiral. “And this,” Jake’s mother says, holding up her arm like Vanna White to showcase the shelves of canned artichoke hearts and the bulk bags of basmati rice, “is the pantry!”

  I ask her why they live in Ocean Vista year-round when they could afford a suburban plot in Connecticut or a Brooklyn brownstone.

  “She doesn’t pull any punches,” she says to Jake. “I like her, Jacob!” Jake stares at the floor. I have never seen him like this. His mother goes on to say, curling her hair around her pinkie finger, that it’s the air. The sea air is good for Jake’s father’s system. When Jake’s mother says “system,” he will explain later, she is referring to his father’s cancer of the intestine, which requires him to drive to New York City once a week for an afternoon of radiation.

  Jake’s father works at a flavor factory in the big industrial park a few miles down the parkway, engineering the tastes of everyday food. He sits at the kitchen table with a newspaper unfolded around the mass of his belly, and when Jake introduces me, he offers me a tiny packet of yellow liquid. “You know how they say everything tastes like chicken?” I nod, unsure. “You know, ‘Mmm, tastes like chicken’? Taste that. Taste it.”

  Jake rolls his eyes. I squeeze a drop of the liquid onto the back of my hand and lick it off. Rotisserie chicken.

  “Well, there’s a reason.” Jake’s father hooks his thumbs in the belt loops of his khakis and rocks back on his heels, his laughter ricocheting off the white surfaces. Later we make chicken-flavored milkshakes, and when Jake says he can’t wait to get out of this shithole, I pretend to commiserate. He has no idea how good he has it.

  ONCE AGAIN, I own my mother’s house. I come and go as I please, through the front door. I chat with my sisters sometimes. I drink my mother’s wine. I raise a glass to the babies, I spill a drop on their pillows not to be withholding. I realize quickly what I have to offer. It was my fault that we lost the Emerald, and now I can prove my loyalty and trustworthiness to my crowd. I put out the word: We need a new place, I got one, but give me twenty-four hours to clean.

  When I say this to Kandy, she laughs, but she hasn’t been over in weeks, not since I made the hole in the wall. She almost vomits when she walks in. Dog shit and rotting food, maggoty scraps of chicken skin, moths beating their wings at all the lamps. The water has been turned off, so the toilet won’t flush. Pam brings surgical masks and brooms. James comes by to check on me just as we are starting, and when he sees what we’re up against, he goes home for his Shop-Vac and a supply of gloves. Nobody seems to blame me for the filth. It seems organic to the house and the situation.

  It is hot and vile work, and the single battery-powered oscillating fan cools only one person for one moment before moving on. Pam and I take a break to lie on our backs in the yard and chug soda. Blanche chews on a Nylabone; all her legitimate dog toys are stolen from other dogs’ yards. Pam grabs the Nylabone and waves it around in a way that frustrates Blanche, who wants to chew, not play. Pam gives up and props herself on her elbow beside me. She puts her hand behind my neck and pulls my head toward hers. I resist. Nobody is watching us. “We don’t have to anymore.”

  “Don’t have to what?” The pull goes out of her hand, but she leaves it there, on the back of my neck. She closes her eyes, and the corners of her mouth turn down in a tense little frown.

  “If you don’t tell Kandy about Jake, I’m going to.”

  “No, don’t. Pam, don’t.”

  Pam scrambles to her feet and brushes the grass off her T-shirt. She looks at me with broad disgust. “I can’t believe you haven’t told her. Jesus Christ.”

  I shrug.

  “Are you kidding me?” she says. “You’re such a chickenshit.” She stalks off. I think she is going to get something from her car, but then I hear the motor start and the gravel crunch.

  Kandy leans in the doorway. “What’s her problem?”

  “Beats me,” I say.

  WHEN THE HOUSE is clean—or as clean as it needs to be—we open a bottle of my mother’s cabernet, and James makes a toast: “To health-code compliance.” Kandy laughs her “haw” donkey laugh. That night, kids tramp through the kitchen and into the living room in twos and threes, refugees from the adult world. They explore the house, locating the beds. The one room we did not clean is the nursery, which was more or less clean already, though changed in what I considered subtle and insidious ways. I duct-tape the door shut and tack a sign on it that says, THIS ROOM CONTAINS AIDS. People know just enough about AIDS to laugh but not enough to go in the room.

  James doesn’t leave. At first I think he is trying to chaperone me, or spying on me for my mother, but then I see him smoking a joint. He winks at the boys and chats with the girls, and everyone thinks he is strange until he goes out and comes back with a case of vodka, and then he is a hero.

  I let people into my basement darkroom, where I have hidden all my expensive stolen chemicals and my prints. Kandy nicked an Oriental carpet from her parents’ storage attic, and we threw as many mismatched cushions down the stairs as we could find. It looks like an opium den and quickly becomes the most popular spot in the house. There must be thirty kids down here, watching a stocky boy with the brass nose ring of a bull ink a fairy tattoo onto a girl’s wrist. The girl lies with her arm flung out across his lap, trembling and sweaty, and a team of friends pour shots of vodka down her throat.

  It is strange to see James down here; nobody else knows this as a private space. My mother has always defended my right to disappear down here without fear of intrusion. For years, James has needled me about what I do down here, and it has been my pleasure to torture him with vagueness. Now he peers into the metal cupboards in the corner and pokes at their contents with pleasure. When he squats to pull out the bins in which I have hidden my
prints, I separate myself from the crowd on the floor and walk over to him. He shuffles through the prints, smiling at some. He is careful to hold them at the very edges.

  “You’re a talent, kiddo,” he says. He fixes his gaze on a print of Laura and Courtney on the beach. He smooths his hand over his beard. “Are these they?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sisters. The girls who got you so wound up.”

  I nod.

  James studies me. “I do see a resemblance.”

  Pam speaks from my side; I didn’t know she was there. “I thought your sisters were dead.”

  I feel caught, though I haven’t lied to anyone.

  James says, “Did you ever ask them anything?”

  “I tried. They kept running away.”

  Pam says the thing that has been wavering darkly at the edges of my brain all summer, and then there it is, out in the open: “If they’re just random strangers, why would they run away from you?”

  I shrug, pivot, and charge up the stairs to the kitchen, where I have a particular bottle of tequila in mind. I shout, “Tequila shots!,” and kids break off from other groups to follow me. I can’t think about my sisters. I throw my head back and let the tequila soak through my tongue to my brain, to soften the edges of all things and cast over me a sweet incandescence.

  The night wears on, wild and interminable. Kids leave on strange missions and return in different numbers, with supplies, with stories, with grass stains. Jake shows up late, and we are both too far gone to pretend distance. We are in the kitchen standing and talking with a bunch of kids, and the secret keeping is too much for me, the warmth of his shoulder as it bumps against mine accidentally on purpose, over and over again, his hand on the small of my back as he moves past, muttering, “Excuse me.” I fling open the back door and stumble out for some air, some relief.