by Julie Smith
"Are you back on heroin?"
"Yeah."
"Where'd you get it?"
He shrugged.
"You got it from Turan, didn't you?"
"Turan?" He looked so puzzled she thought he probably was.
"Turan."
"Never heard of him."
"Who then, Dennis—who'd you get it from?"
"I can't talk about that."
"You got it from Delavon."
"I got it from who? Are you speaking English, lady?"
* * *
Jesus shit, thought Evie, I haven't had a drink in three days and I haven't halucinated or convulsed. Maybe things aren't as out of hand as I thought. She realized, further, that despite her desperate circumstances, she was possessed of a suddenly optimistic spirit. The thought came to her that maybe there was a way out. But looking down at her handcuffed wrist, that seemed preposterous.
Shit. How'd I get into this?
Mo's face swam before her. The face of her lover.
Its always a man, isn't it?
That and alcohol.
This time you really blew it, toots. This has got to be your all-time dumbest. Shit! I swear to God if I do get out of this I'll never touch another drop. Even though she was sure she hadn't hallucinated, there were things about her current circumstance that could hardly be explained any other way.
The fact that her lover was holding her prisoner, for instance. Because it was Mo's house that she was in. He was a lawyer with a beautiful house; a perfect marriage candidate .... .
Right.
Well, hell, I lied to him, maybe he lied too.
She had told him she was Yvette Johnson, a laborer's daughter from Mississippi. It was a persona she'd had for a long time; being Evie Hebert just hadn't worked out for her. She didn't like a single damn member of her family and she didn't see why she should use their name.
She'd looked pretty damn good the day she met him, wearing tight jeans and some sort of low-cut blouse, her hair in a ponytail like a kid's. Because of her private-school accent, she'd made her dad a carpenter this time—it was the kind of job that an educated man might do—and she'd said her mother was a schoolteacher and that she herself had gone a semester or two to Millsapps.
She knew he was hooked the minute she walked in that house. Before she left, he'd asked her to dinner, and before the date, he sent her a dress and shoes to wear; he had a thing about shoes. She didn't know if she should wear the outfit, thinking he probably expected a quid pro quo, but then she figured, what the hell, who cared what he expected, she could still say no if she wanted.
But he didn't even hit on her.
It was a while before he brought her here, to the mansion.
He'd treated her like a princess.
Of course, she did have to contend with Mrs. Garibaldi, the terrifying housekeeper, who acted more like she owned the place than like a servant, but that was the only bad thing.
That and the fact that Mo traveled a lot. Sometimes she wouldn't see him for a couple of weeks at a time, or even longer, though in the meantime he'd phone from whatever far-flung place he'd landed in. He could always make her laugh when he called, but then when she hung up, she got this empty feeling.
This sort of lonely, desperate, bouncing-off-the-walls kind of feeling. And what she'd do then was drink a lot to ease the melancholy.
Drink and fantasize about how her life ought to be. She ought to be with Mo in this house, for instance. With the man she loved, and who loved her.
And she ought to be with Sally. For some reason, Sally had loomed large in her thoughts lately.
Not the real Sally, whom she didn't know at all, but a kind of perfect, blond, laughing baby with the tiniest toenails anyone could imagine.
She loved babies' toenails.
She wanted her own baby.
If they were going to be together, she and Mo, she could have Sally. They'd have enough money, and Sally would have a father, and there would be no reason why not. Surely Dennis and Reed understood that Sally was just sort of on loan to them until she could get her life together.
Well, actually, she hadn't really thought that would ever happen, but it was about to, that was obvious. She was more or less Mo's hostess, and that was only one step from being a wife. When he had parties at the mansion, she was his date, and she did the hostess thing damn well.
Mo told her so all the time.
She ought to be good at it. As a little girl, she'd walk around Hebert's with her dad, watching him welcome the guests, shaking hands with everyone, making small talk. Then later, she'd done all that preteen crap, dancing lessons at Miggy's and everything. She ought to be able to handle herself at a party.
She looked classy too, when she was dressed up. That was Mo's word.
She looked like her mother, when Sugar was thin.
But Mo didn't know that, he thought she was from Mississippi, and he talked like he was from the Ninth Ward or something. But his friends were pretty impressive. A lot of them were politicians whose names she knew; plenty were businessmen and lawyers, from the looks of them.
Who knew who they all were? They seemed to have money. For once, she'd fallen in love with a man who had it together. She kept looking for flaws in him but she couldn't find any. The guy was perfect.
Yeah, and I was drunk most of the time.
He was perfect and he loved her, he told her so all the time. It would only be a matter of time till they were married, that was obvious.
She couldn't wait. It would be the perfect life, the three of them living here together. Of course she'd fire Mrs. Garibaldi; that was going to be the first thing she'd do.
Then she'd redecorate, get Sally in a good school, and then . . .then she thought she'd travel. She and Mo. Maybe she'd go with him on some of his business trips. And maybe she'd get him to go with her to some of the places she wanted to see.
China.
The Amazon.
Lots of places.
Or maybe she'd just go alone. Whatever she wanted would be fine with Mo. That was the way he treated her. He bought her clothes, he bought her shoes, he bought her underwear, and flowers. He took her to nice places. He always noticed if there was a draft blowing on her, or if she was tired, or if she wanted another drink. He knew things like that before she did, he was that carefully attuned to her.
He was far and away the most generous lover she'd ever had. That was the kind of man he was, and that was the way he felt about her.
What she wanted, he wanted for her.
Still, she didn't want to spring Sally on him.
He already knew she had a daughter who didn't live with her, and she'd told him how much she missed her.
"Maybe you should think about getting her back," he'd said. As if he'd read her thoughts. As if his thoughts were her thoughts.
The plain fact was, three nights ago, she'd gotten drunk and gone to get her daughter.
Oh, man. Drunk doesn't begin to cover it. What the hell did I think I was doing?
It made her cringe to think of it. She'd thought she'd just go get Sally and bring her home and that would be that. And then, when things got out of control, she'd acted perfectly rationally, even in her polluted state. She'd gone right to Mo, her dependable helper and protector who always knew what to do.
The part that made her cringe wasn't that, though. It was the way she'd had visions of Sally crying, "Mommy!" and leaping into her arms.
The child had never even seen her, not since the day she was born.
The other thing that humiliated her was her surprise when they'd all been awful to her. They treated her like dirt. Like she was some distant relative who embarrassed them. They'd always been that way. Why had she imagined they'd be glad to see her, or even civil to her?
She didn't know exactly how or why, but she'd found herself holding the gun Mo had given her, that he insisted she carry because her neighborhood was so dangerous.
Within seconds, the world had cracked and sp
lit open.
18
Sugar hated sitting still, it was unlike her to sit still; she was a woman of action. But there was nothing she could do right now except try to pick up the pieces. She had had a service come in and clean her house, but there were still grisly signs of what had happened. She had called painters. She was going to have the room painted another color—a peachy pink—so it would look completely different.
Grady had said, "Mom, why don't you move out? This place is too big for you and it has horrible memories. You don't need it, make a fresh start."
But she didn't want that. There were horrible memories, all right, but some of them were old and she'd been living with them a long time. She was going to go through everything and get rid of the garbage—get rid of everything that was Arthur's—and she was going to have the whole damned place painted, all in colors she loved that Arthur had vetoed. She might even get rid of all the furniture, piece by piece, and buy stuff Arthur would hate. Being a widow had its upbeat side.
But it scared her to death.
Now, when she should be mourning Arthur—and a piece of her was, she just didn't show it—she was also realizing how furious she was with him. It had been there for years—this smashed-down, walked-on, crumpled-up fury—and now she could no
longer stamp it down.
She hoped she wouldn't get up at the funeral and deliver a diatribe.
The funeral! Jesus. Where are Reed and Sally?
The question popped into her head every time she managed to distract herself from it, which was about once every six hours. Aside from these four (more or less) daily distractions, it was all she thought about. The worry was always just underneath whatever else she was doing, like some ferret or weasel gnawing at her vitals. It was always there, but she felt better, she felt almost good, when she was acting; trying to solve it; working to get to the bottom of the problem. Two people so far had told her they thought she was "in denial," whatever that was, because she was keeping busy. And she had seen how that cop looked at her, that Ms. Langdon, a huge brute of a woman—as if she were heartless. But it wasn't that. She should be so lucky. She just didn't show her emotions like other people.
She was putting things away in her buffet, so the painters could move it, when she came upon the photo albums carelessly stored there after some family dinner or other. Without thinking, she opened one. It was an old one, put together when the children were young, when they were all happy together. Before Arthur started cheating on her.
There was Reed with her complete set of kiddie kitchen equipment she'd gotten one Christmas, and in another, all three of them holding up their Easter baskets. That was the year she and Arthur had been so foolish as to get Grady a baby duck, which had grown up and chased Reed around the backyard whenever she ventured out.
There they were in their Easter clothes, Grady in a little boys' shorts suit and the girls in matching pink dresses. Evie had hated hers and wrecked it, falling down; purposely, Sugar was sure. Reed, true to form, hadn't gotten so much as a smudge on hers.
They were unbearably adorable—how on earth could they have turned out so abysmally? Grady a worthless failure. Evie a drug addict.
Was I that bad a mother?
No, that has nothing to do with it. Look at me—I had a dreadful childhood and I'm fine.
That was what she always came back to. She thought that a person had in her the seeds of ability to do and be anything she wanted, and she considered herself proof of the theory. She didn't think that you were shaped by your environment, and she wasn't even that sure about your genes. It was you. Your own character. Your own strength.
Sugar had been born the third child of an oil company executive and a professional mom. Georgina, her mother, had had to be a pro, because two more children came after Sugar. The stair steps were Michael, Patrice, Eugenie, Patrick, and Peter. Sugar had been nicknamed because the other kids couldn't say her name.
I didn't even get my own damn name.
Michael was the oldest, Peter was the youngest, Patrice was the first girl, and Patrick was a boy, which meant he outranked her. Everyone made that perfectly obvious.
There were four years between Michael and Patrice. Georgina probably thought she was off the hook when Sugar came along.
She took it out on me too. But she was oh-so-glad to have two more boys. There had never been anyone to play with. The two older kids had each other, and so did the two younger ones. Nobody ever even noticed Sugar; no one cared about her.
She should know. She used to stage crying jags and lock herself in the bathroom, just to get noticed.
It didn't work.
(But one thing, she knew what that was all about; Evie used to pull the same thing, always trying to get attention, and Sugar never let her get away with it.)
She got all A's. That didn't work either.
Once she wore the same clothes for a week. Nobody even said anything.
She had read that you spent your whole life fighting the patterns set early in life, and she'd certainly found it so.
I feel like I'm invisible; like I have to raise my hand and say, "Excuse me, I'm here. Would you look me in the eye now and then? Would you just pretend for one second I'm as important as my husband? Or even that you see me?"
That was the way things had been for her. Whereas nothing really awful had ever happened to any of her children.
At least until the Bad Day.
The pictures in this album had all been taken before that; back when the world was young and innocent.
That was the worst day of her life, or probably any of their lives. She would never forget the look on that poor child's face . . .or the wound, so angry, so inhuman-looking; or the sounds she made, later, during her therapy.
Sugar shook her body, willing the memory away.
But that was just one day in our whole lives; and in the end, it brought us closer together. We all had to rally around in the face of adversity. Arthur even dropped his current mistress. I'm pretty sure he did, anyway. He acted almost normal for a while.
Sugar closed the album and, to her intense surprise, found herself sinking to the floor, great, hopeless sobs escaping from her diaphragm.
When the phone rang, she thought, Reed. It's Reed! And she was almost right. It was Grady, with news of Dennis.
* * *
Grady was trying to recover, somehow make sense out of Dennis's story. Dennis had phoned him to come bail him out. The police had found heroin in his room, and they were going to use it to keep him.
Grady didn't know what to do. His mother was at Dennis's house; he couldn't let her junkie son-in-law move in with her, and he certainly wasn't going to move her into his own house. On the other hand, Sugar really had no right to be in Dennis's house. Sugar had settled the whole matter herself by saying she wanted to go home anyway. He'd found her there, cleaning up or something. "Tough old bird" was too mild a phrase.
Dennis was going to be a problem, though. No question he was using again, and Grady didn't see any signs that his brother-in-law was going to stop.
He should have left Dennis in jail—he'd have had to detox. But in the end he couldn't do it. He liked Dennis, and even if he hadn't, it would have been too mean.
He believed his story too.
Oh, yes.
The ring of truth was more like a peal.
That was like Evie. Exactly like her. To get drunk and go nuts like that.
That was Evie.
"She's bad! She's always been bad," his mother had blurted. She was a real primitif, his mother was.
But Evie—what was she?
This was the part of the story he was trying to make sense of, that he had struggled with for years. Who and what was Evie, and how did she come to be?
The Evie Phenomenon, he called it, and he thought it might be different from Evie herself, but he wasn't sure. His parents had considered her devil spawn without apparently seeing the irony of it.
The piece he was working on whe
n he got the phone call was called "The House of Blues Before The Thing." Oddly enough, it was about her.
She was so far out of control.
So terrifying. Somehow, everything she did ended up being frightening, he didn't know why. "It was a Sunday afternoon," he had written, "and our cousins had come over . . ."
* * *
Maybe it was Easter or something like that—we'd had some big family gathering and they were all there, Tante Patrice's kids and Tante Breezy-Ann and Uncle Patrick's. There must have been nine or ten of us, including a few grown-ups who'd been detailed to supervise, and we decided to play softball.
The grown-ups drifted away, all except for Uncle Michael, who was the black sheep, being gay, and probably didn't care much for the others his age.
We were doing fine, having a great time, when Evie hit a foul ball and it went through the kitchen window. That wouldn't have been so bad if Mama hadn't been standing at the sink, washing some crystal things she didn't want to put in the dishwasher. The ball whizzed by her ear, hit the refrigerator, ricocheted off it, and hit her smack in the middle of the back. Holy shit, you'd have thought she'd been shot. From the shriek she let out, you'd have got the idea she was paralyzed. Well, poor thing, she was probably scared to death. It's not ev ery day a flying missile doubles around and hits you in the back, chases you down like one of those vulgarly named pyrotechnical devices.
She started screaming, "You kids! You kids!" and someone said Evie did it—probably me—and she hollered, "Get in here, Evelyne Hebert. I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week."
Evie started crying and cringing—God, I was sorry for her! I don't think I've ever seen anyone look so scared in my life. It wouldn't have occurred to me to be so scared of either of our parents. I don't know if Evie was just a natural victim or what. Maybe things happened to her that Reed and I don't know about. She's the oldest—she was there before we were. Maybe her life was different somehow.