by Tommy Orange
Long after Jacquie’s mom had left her dad for good, during one of the many times her mom had left her sister’s dad, when Opal was just a baby and Jacquie was six, they’d stayed in a hotel near the Oakland airport. Their mom told them stories about moving away for good. About getting back home to Oklahoma. But home for Jacquie and her sister was a locked station wagon in an empty parking lot. Home was a long ride on a bus. Home was the three of them anywhere safe for the night. And that night in the hotel, with the possibility of taking a trip, of getting away from the life her mom had been running down with her daughters in tow, that night was one of the best nights of Jacquie’s life. Her mom had fallen asleep. Earlier she’d seen the pool—a bright blue glowing rectangle—on the way to their room. It was cold out, but she’d seen a sign that read Heated Pool. Jacquie watched TV and waited for her mom to fall asleep with Opal, then she snuck down to the pool. There was no one around. Jacquie took her shoes and socks off and dipped a toe in, then looked back up at the door of their room. She looked at all the doors and windows of the rooms that faced the pool. The night air was cool but didn’t move. With all but her shoes and socks on she walked down the pool stairs. It was her first time in a pool. She didn’t know how to swim. Mostly she just wanted to be in the water. To go under and open her eyes, look at her hands, watch the bubbles rise in that bluest light.
* * *
—
In her room she threw her bags down, took off her shoes, and laid on the bed. She turned the TV on, muted it, then rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling for a while, appreciating the blank white coolness of the room. She thought about Opal. The boys. What they might be doing. Over the past few months, after years of silence, they’d been texting. Opal took care of Jacquie’s three grandsons—whom she’d never even met.
What r u doing? Jacquie texted Opal. She put her phone on the bed and went to her suitcase to get her swimsuit. It was a black-and-white-striped one-piece. She put it on in front of the mirror. Scars and tattoos spanned and bent around her neck, stomach, arms, and ankles. There were feather tattoos on her forearms, one for her mom and one for her sister, and stars on the backs of her hands—those were just stars. The webs she had on the tops of her feet had hurt the worst.
Jacquie walked to the window to see if the pool was still empty. Her phone vibrated on the bed.
Orvil found spider legs in his leg, the text said.
WTF!? Jacquie texted back. But the sentence did not really take. What could that even mean? She would look this up on her phone later, “Spiders legs found in leg,” but find nothing.
Yeah idk. the boys think it means something ndn.
Jacquie smiled. She’d never seen Indian abbreviated as ndn before.
Maybe he’ll get powers like spider-man, Jacquie texted.
Anything like that ever happen to you?
What? no. i’m gonna go for a swim.
Jacquie kneeled in front of the minifridge. In her head she heard her mom say, “The spider’s web is a home and a trap.” And even though she never really knew what her mom meant by it, she’d been making it make sense over the years, giving it more meaning than her mom probably ever intended. In this case Jacquie was the spider, and the minifridge was the web. Home was to drink. To drink was the trap. Or something like that. The point was Do not open the fridge. And she didn’t.
* * *
—
Jacquie stood at the pool’s edge, watching the light on the water wobble and shimmer. Her arms, crossed over her stomach, looked green and cracked. She inched down the pool stairs, then pushed lightly off and swam underwater all the way across and back. She came back up for air, watched the surface of the water move for a while, then went back under and watched the bubbles gather, rise, and disappear.
While she smoked a cigarette by the pool, she thought about the taxi from the airport and the liquor store she’d seen just a block away from the hotel. She could walk down there. What she really wanted was that cigarette after six beers. She wanted sleep to come easy like it could when she drank. On the way back to her room she got a Pepsi and trail mix from the vending machine. On her bed, she flipped through channels, landing here and there, changing the channel at every commercial break, devouring the trail mix and Pepsi, and only then, her appetite awakened by the trail mix, did she realize that she hadn’t eaten dinner. She stayed awake with her eyes closed in bed for an hour, then put a pillow over her face and fell asleep. When she woke up at four in the morning, she didn’t know what was on top of her face. She threw the pillow across the room, then got up and peed and spent the next two hours trying to convince herself she was asleep, or sometimes actually sleeping but having the dream of not being able to sleep.
* * *
—
Jacquie found a seat in the back of the main ballroom. There was an old Indian guy in a baseball cap who had one hand up like he was praying, while the other flicked water out of a water bottle at the crowd. She’d never seen anything like it before.
Jacquie’s eyes wandered the room. She studied the Native decor. The room was big, with high ceilings and massive chandeliers, each one of which consisted of a grouping of eight flame-shaped lightbulbs surrounded by a giant band of corrugated metal with cutouts of tribal patterns, creating tribal-patterned shadows on the walls—multiple Kokopellis, zigzag lines and spirals, all up there at the top of the room, where the paint was the brownish red of dried blood. The carpets were crowded with winding lines and variegated geometric shapes—like every casino or movie-theater carpet.
She looked around at the crowd. There were probably two hundred or so people, all of them sitting at circular tables with glasses of water and little paper plates stacked with fruit and Danishes. Jacquie recognized the conference types. Most of them were old Indian women. Next came old white women. Then old Indian men. There were no young people to be seen. Everyone she saw seemed either too serious or not serious enough. These were career people, more driven by concern about keeping their jobs, about the funders and grant requirements, than by the need to help Indian families. Jacquie was no different. She knew it and hated this fact.
The first speaker, a man who looked like he might be more comfortable on a street corner than at a conference, approached the podium. You didn’t often see men like him standing on a stage. He wore Jordans and an Adidas tracksuit. He had an unrecognizable faded tattoo above his left ear that went up to the crown of his bald head—it could have been cracks, or webs, or a half crown of thorns. Every few seconds he opened his mouth in an oval shape and wiped the outside of it with his thumb and forefinger, as if there was excess saliva there, or as if, in the wiping, he was assuring himself he wouldn’t spit and look sloppy.
He stepped up to the mic. He spent a long, uncomfortable minute surveying the crowd. “I see a lotta Indian people out there. That makes me feel good. About twenty years ago I went to a conference like this, and it was just a sea of white faces. I came as a youth. It was my first time on a plane and the first time I was away from Phoenix for more than a few days. I’d been forced into a program as part of a plea bargain I took to stay outta juvie. That program ended up being featured at a conference in D.C.—a national highlight. They chose me and a few other youth not based on our leadership skills or because of our commitment to the cause, or because of our participation, but because we were the most at-risk. Of course all we had to do was sit on the stage, listen to youth success stories and to our youth services staff talk about how great our programming was. But while I was on that trip my little brother, Harold, found a gun I kept in my closet. He shot himself between the eyes with that gun. He was fourteen,” the guy said and coughed off-mic. Jacquie shifted in her chair.
“What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This i
s what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out. That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.”
Jacquie was out of the room before the audience even started its hesitant, obligatory clapping. As she ran, her name badge jangled around her neck, sliced at her chin. When she got to her room, she closed the door with her back and slid down, collapsed and sobbed against it. She pressed her eyes into her knees and bursts of purple, black, green, and pink splotches bloomed there, behind her eyes, then slowly formed into images, then memories. She saw the big hole first. Then her daughter’s emaciated body. There were little red and pink holes up and down both her arms. Her skin was white, blue, and yellow, with green veins. Jacquie was there to identify the body. The body was her daughter’s body, had been the little body she carried for just six months. She’d watched the doctors put needles in her arm then, there in the incubator, back when all she’d wanted in a way she’d never wanted anything before was for her new baby girl to live. The coroner looked at Jacquie, pen and clipboard in hand. She spent a long time staring somewhere between the body and the clipboard trying not to scream, trying not to scan up to see her daughter’s face. The big hole. The shot between the eyes. Like a third eye, or an empty third-eye socket. The trickster spider, Veho, her mom used to tell her and Opal about, he was always stealing eyes to see better. Veho was the white man who came and made the old world watch with his eyes. Look. See here, the way it’s gonna be is, first you’re gonna give me all your land, then your attention, until you forget how to give it. Until your eyes are drained and you can’t see behind you and there’s nothing ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that makes any sense. In her car, Jacquie slammed the bottoms of her fists into the steering wheel until she couldn’t anymore. She broke her pinkie on the wheel.
That was thirteen years ago. She’d been sober six months then. The longest since she’d started drinking. But after that she drove straight to the liquor store, spent the next six years stomaching a fifth of whiskey a night. She drove an AC Transit bus, the 57 line, in and out of Oakland six days a week. Drank herself into a manageable oblivion every night. Woke up every day to work. One day she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed her bus into a telephone pole. After a month in residential treatment, she left Oakland. She still doesn’t know, doesn’t remember how she got to Albuquerque. At some point she got a job as a receptionist at an Indian Health Clinic funded by Indian Health Service, then eventually, without ever achieving any significant sobriety, became a certified substance abuse counselor through an online course her work paid for.
There in her hotel room, down against the hotel-room door, she remembered all the pictures Opal had emailed her over the years of the boys, which she’d refused to look at. She stood up and walked to her laptop on the desk. In her Gmail account she searched Opal’s name. She opened each email with the paper-clip icon. She followed them through the years. Birthdays and first bikes and pictures they’d drawn. There were little video clips of them fighting in the kitchen and sleeping in their bunk beds, all in one room. The three of them crowded around a computer screen, that screen glow on their faces. There was one picture that broke her heart. The three of them lined up in front of Opal. Opal with her static, sober, stoic stare. She looked at Jacquie through all the years and all that they’d been through. Come get them, they’re yours, Opal’s face said. The youngest one was half smiling like one of his brothers had just punched him in the arm but Opal had told them all they better smile for the picture. The middle one looked like he was either pretending to or actually was holding up what looked like a gang sign with his fingers across his chest, smiling a big smile. He looked the most like Jacquie’s daughter Jamie. The oldest one didn’t smile. He looked like Opal. He looked like Jacquie and Opal’s mom, Vicky.
Jacquie wanted to go to them. She wanted a drink. She wanted to drink. She needed a meeting. Earlier she’d seen that the AA meeting for the conference would be on the second floor at seven thirty every night. There were always meetings at conferences, it being a mental-health/substance-abuse-prevention-based conference, full of people like her, who had gotten into the field because they’d been through it and hoped to find meaning in their careers helping other people not make the same mistakes they had. When she went to wipe sweat from her face with her sleeve, she realized the air conditioner had been turned off. She went to the AC unit and turned the cold air on high. She fell asleep waiting to cool down.
* * *
—
Jacquie walked into the room in a hurry, thinking she was late. Three men sat in a small circle made of eight folding chairs. Behind them were snacks that nobody had touched yet. The room was a mess of fluorescent buzzing, a smallish conference room with a whiteboard on the wall in front, off-whitish light, which encased them all in its flatness—which made everything feel like it was happening a decade ago on TV.
Jacquie went to the back table and looked at the food spread—a pot of coffee in a very old-looking auto-drip coffeemaker, cheese, crackers, meat, and mini–celery sticks fanned out in a circle around various dips. Jacquie picked up a single stick of celery, poured herself a cup of coffee, and walked over to join the group.
All of them were older Native guys with long hair—two wore baseball caps, and the one who seemed like he was probably the leader of the group wore a cowboy hat. The guy in the cowboy hat introduced himself to the group as Harvey. Jacquie turned her head away, but the face embedded in an orb of fat, the eyes and nose and mouth, they were his. Jacquie wondered if Harvey recognized her, because he excused himself, said he had to go to the bathroom.
Jacquie texted Opal. Guess who im in a meeting with rt now?
Opal responded immediately. Who?
Harvey from alcatraz.
Who?
Harvey, as in: father of the daughter I gave up.
No.
Yes.
You sure?
Yes.
What you gonna do?
Idk.
Ydk?
He just got back.
Opal sent a pictur
e of the boys in their room, all of them lying the same way, with headphones on, looking up at the ceiling. This was the first picture she’d sent via text message since Jacquie told her not to, that she was only allowed to email pictures of them because of how it could mess with her day. Jacquie reverse pinched then pinched and repeated to see each of their faces.
Will talk to him after meeting, Jacquie texted, then switched her phone to silent and put it away.
Harvey sat down without looking at Jacquie. With a simple hand gesture, a palm facing up, he pointed to her. Jacquie wasn’t sure if this not looking at her, plus the trip to the bathroom, meant that he knew. Either way, it was her turn to tell her story or share whatever she felt like, and he would know as soon as she said her name. Jacquie rested her elbows on her knees, leaned into the group.
“My name is Jacquie Red Feather. I don’t say the I’m an alcoholic thing. I say: I don’t drink anymore. I used to drink and now I don’t. I currently have eleven days sobriety. I’m grateful to be here, and for your time. Thank you all for listening. I appreciate all of you being here.” Jacquie coughed, her throat suddenly rough. She put a cough drop into her mouth so casually that you could tell she probably ate a lot of cough drops and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and never quite beat the cough, but beat it enough while she was sucking on a cough drop, and so ate them constantly. “The problem that became a drinking problem started for me way before the drinking was even related to it, though it was when I first started drinking. Not that I blame my past, or don’t accept it. We’d been on Alcatraz, me and my family, back during the occupation, in 1970. It all started for me there. This piece-of-shit kid,” Jacquie made sure to look right at Harvey after she said this. He squirmed in his chair a little, but otherwise just stared off toward the ground in a listening pose. “Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing, but then again maybe he went on to fuck over a whole line of women, used force to stretch a no into a yes, assholes like him, I know now, are a dime a dozen, but I suspect, from what little time I spent with him on that island, that he went on to do it again and again. After my mom died, we lived in a house with a stranger. A distant relative. Which I’m grateful for. We had food on the table, a roof over our heads. But I gave up a daughter to adoption at that time. The girl I birthed came from that island. From what happened there. When I gave her up, I was seventeen. I was stupid. I wouldn’t know how to find her now even if I wanted to. It was a closed adoption. And since then I have had another daughter. But I fucked that up too in my addiction—fifth a night of anything ten dollars or less. Then it got so bad they told me I had to quit if I wanted to keep my job. And then, as it goes, to keep being able to drink I quit my job. My daughter Jamie was out of the house by then, so it was easier for me to fall completely apart. Insert endless succession of drinking horror stories here. Today I’m trying to make my way back. My daughter died, left her three sons behind, but I left them too. I’m trying to make my way back, but like I said, eleven days. It’s just, it’s that you get stuck, and then the more stuck you get, the more stuck you get.” Jacquie coughed and cleared her throat, then went silent. She looked up at Harvey, at the others in the group, but their heads were all down. She didn’t want to end on that kind of note, but she didn’t feel like going on. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m done.”