Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  * * *

  Kaylyn twisted her wineglass and watched the liquid chase gravity at the bottom.

  “It’s not important, Bill,” she finally said. “You helped me when I needed it. That’s all that matters.”

  He’d finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the step, but he still held it between his fingers, twirling the blackened end. A Camel talisman. “What I’m saying . . .” He dropped the cigarette butt and put his hand on hers. “If you need help, I want to help. If you need money, if that brick is what you’re doing to make ends meet, I can—”

  “Bill.” Her voice trembled, and very abruptly tears shimmered in green irises. “I cannot—I mean it—I cannot tell you. All I can . . . I’ve messed up. Got involved with—just—some bad people. I did some incredibly stupid things, and . . . Now I’m just trying to save myself, stay out of prison, stay clean, and give Barrett and my mom and this baby any chance. And I can’t tell you what this involves because I don’t want you involved. You just have to trust me.”

  Her throat clicked. A calving cloud passed overhead. He gripped the bones in her hand.

  “I’ve done those stupid things too,” he finally said. “And that’s even when I’ve been trying to do good. Nothing feels like it does any fucking good. Because people only act—they only change—with a gun to their head. I’ve been depressed, I’ve been miserable, I’ve hated myself. But through all of that, Kay, you know what I keep coming back to? You. You’ve never been out of my mind.”

  She took her hand back and held her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “You don’t understand what I’ve done.”

  Then, with Bill working around her obfuscations—excavating much, but deducing little—Kaylyn told her story. Not so much an explanation as a fogged, opaque confession.

  * * *

  In the long list of regrets, mistakes, and nightmares, the thing that haunted her when she couldn’t sleep wasn’t even the worst thing she’d done. She’d given them all an order and moved those rankings around depending on what shame she wanted to fill herself with on a given day. She tried to decide when she’d learned to be so cruel. At a middle school dance, she’d ridiculed Hailey Kowalczyk for wearing a basketball jersey: “You look like a boy with smaller tits,” she’d quipped to the raucous laughter of those within earshot. Later, before her mom picked her up, she saw Kowalczyk wiping at tears. But that was the thing about having younger friends. Now that Hailey and Lisa were in middle school with her, they got clingy, called every night, tried to trade on their friendship with the girl a grade above them. The flipside was that they never doubted her, never questioned her knowingness.

  That’s how two years later, during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, she got Kowalczyk to give Curt Moretti a blow job. She told the participants she would join them in the bathroom to make sure things went well, and after the hoots and cheers, Curt sat on the closed toilet while Kaylyn perched on the rim of the tub and directed her younger friend: On your knees. Put the bath mat under them so they don’t get sore, etc. Kaylyn watched with her chin propped on her hand and felt both lascivious and powerful. Hailey kept her eyes open, a dumb bovine quality to her expression.

  “You want to join in?” Curt asked her as Kowalczyk mumbled the kid’s cock.

  “You wish, Moretti.”

  But she did put her hand on the back of Hailey’s head to test her limits. Kowalczyk had no idea what she was doing, and in fact, when Curtis blew his load, she just swallowed and kept right on going. He came again a few minutes later. She’d never had a thrill like that before. She wasn’t sure why she’d picked on Kowalczyk, this cute, funny little tomboy chick, who played point guard for the basketball team. Everyone fawned over her for how she took on the household responsibilities when her mom got diagnosed with bone cancer. Lisa called her “Triple Threat,” and the name spread. Hailey could do it all, they claimed. Therefore, Kaylyn wanted to make her try it all, and in doing so, she discovered Life in all its manipulative, wet, pornographic glory.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” she said to Hailey later that night.

  Hailey averted her eyes. “Had to happen sometime.”

  When Lisa heard, she was horrified. Not at Kaylyn, but at Kowalczyk. Kaylyn couldn’t have cared less that Lisa and Hailey stopped speaking. By then, she was with Rick, the brawny stud football player of her class. He did her math homework and got just the right amount of jealous.

  As an adult she’d wonder where this streak in her came from, if she’d just been born bored and intrigued by the lengths people would go to in order to please her. When her father crashed to the floor while eating dinner, she knew before her mom dialed 911 that he was about to leave her. Growing up, if he was on his double-digit wine cooler of the night he’d tell her she was the moon and the stars and the sky, the only thing that kept him going. Kaylyn took this to mean he hated her mother and Barrett as much as she did. When he died and left her with them—a crumpled shell of middle-aged passivity and her only sibling, not an ally or a friend or a person she could lean on, just a vicious, mean-spirited lunatic no one could control—she was furious and something else. Envious of him maybe?

  By then she was already on to the Third and Fourth most terrible things she’d done, having grasped the incalculable pleasure that could be wrung from manipulating people to her desires. The addiction was like a wet washcloth, no matter how many times you twisted it, water would always wring out, even if in diminishing returns.

  She should have been more on the lookout for the other addictions. When Ben Harrington started having certain meds around, she stole or cajoled them. Once a month he’d come by her locker and offer her an aspirin bottle with three or four Percs rattling around in it. Once, after school with the hallways empty and eerie, she dipped two fingers into the pocket of his jeans and pulled him close, not because he was giving her pills but because he would complete a satisfying triple crown.

  “No, c’mon,” he said, turning bright pink in the high parts of his fine cheeks and pulling his hips away from her. “That’s not even funny.”

  How did the line go in his song? Pretty, sad girl / offering a glance for pills / pretty, sad girl / throwing her battered heart into the hills. She hated him for that.

  The Fifth and Sixth worst things she’d ever done toggled between a few contenders, but lately not marrying Rick was pushing up in the order. Not that an eighteen-year-old girl should be on the hook for an idiot boy’s sense of romanticism. When she turned him down, she wanted to add, “Are you insane? Don’t you realize that you were an accessory like a purse or a nice pair of earrings?” Later, she took a flashlight, found the ring he’d hurled into the woods by his house, and pawned it for nearly a thousand dollars.

  The problem was, by the time she got to Toledo, she’d moved on to Oxy, which was a hell of a nice feeling, but expensive and all-consuming. She had to find a couple of guys who were willing to share their stashes, and this project took up so much of her time, she never even completed a course. She dated Mitch, this American History X–looking guy who had a direct line to all kinds of party drugs. Together, they went to basement raves on the outskirts of the city with metal raging through speakers, the whole joint rigged to be a fire hazard. He was an amazing lay. They’d snort a line of crystal and fuck for hours, then snort an Oxy so the comedown wasn’t too harsh. It was the most carnal and delicious period of her life, the evolutional training for food and sex and other pleasures suddenly rendered cheap and inert by a sniff.

  When she ran out of money, she lost her apartment and her enrollment in the same week. She went to live with Mitch, which she quickly understood to be a mistake. He’d leave her alone with his friends for days at a time, and she would lock herself in the bedroom because they all had the glazed quality of rapists who were just too tired to make the effort. Once, when a particularly evil-looking guy was spending time there and she was in a paranoid mood, she even stuck her butt out the window to pee so she wouldn’t have to leave the room
.

  She knew she had to stop with the crank. One night she left a few shards of it on a butter knife and passed out. In the morning she saw the coating of rust it left on the metal and began having horrific visions of the insides of her lungs and sinuses. She’d heard of people developing sores, their teeth falling out. In the end, her vanity probably saved her from herself.

  She stole as much Oxy as she dared and went home, crushing and snorting the pills in her childhood bedroom to help with the tweak. For days, her body shook like she had Parkinson’s.

  New Canaan was flush with glass, though, and she needed the occasional bump to get through her waitressing shifts. It allowed her to work seventy hours a week sometimes so she wouldn’t have to be home with her mother and brother. She could pull off the long hours and then settle down to sleep with an array of prescription meds. That helped lead to what was obviously the Most Terrible Thing she’d ever done, the summer of 2004, when she set in motion a thing she could never take back and never make right (and when Bill pressed and pressed her on it, she finally said, “No. Stop. I’m not talking about that—let it be,” and he did).

  Not long after that, Hailey laid it out: “I’ll help you if you promise to get help.”

  Kowalczyk was a smart cookie and now her last friend. She drove her to NA meetings for the rest of the summer until she left for school at Bowling Green. The problem was, at NA they basically wanted you to confess all your sins, and there was no way Kaylyn could do that. No way. Her solution was to go to one of those doctors at a pill mill and complain about an aching back. She stopped going to NA but she was no longer messing around with meth, so she counted it as an improvement.

  In high school she remembered days when she couldn’t leave the house, when the thought of stepping outside filled her with so much panic that her chest cramped up and she couldn’t breathe. Sometimes she’d put a disc on in the boom box in the bathroom and take hour-long showers. Her mother accused her of preening, and wasting all the hot water while doing so. The truth was, she used this time to cry. To weep and weep until her stomach ached. It wasn’t until she found the relief of an opiate dose that she realized she’d needed this for as long as she could remember.

  In the years that followed, the pill mill worked just fine. Dr. Redding would pull out his pad, scribble, and she’d be on her way. Sure, there was the interminable line where she would get harassed by the scuzziest refuse of Northeast Ohio, where fights would frequently break out in the parking lot, where broken old men would offer her pizza for a kiss, but at the end of that rainbow was a scrip to get her through the month. If she needed more, all she had to do was complain about the pain getting worse and Dr. Redding would oblige. She liked his no-nonsense business model. As long as she had cash.

  When she stopped going to work and lost her job, he wasn’t as accommodating.

  “Please,” she said. “I can’t find work without it. You get it? Like in order to get a job to make money, I need it or I’ll crash and I’ll never show up and I’ll just get fired all over again.” She heard how frantic she sounded but was helpless to stop.

  “We could make an arrangement,” he offered. That same all-business attitude. She wouldn’t have expected it from him. He had the thinning peach-fuzz hair and frumpy midwestern features of an asexual toad. It wasn’t a pleasant solution but she could sleepwalk through it. Bend over the exam table and after fifteen minutes or less she’d have the scrip. Of course, she never did find a job. Not when she had this simple a trade.

  Events passed her by, and she was indifferent to all of them. Curt Moretti died of a heroin overdose and all she thought was, That’s why I’m sticking to the safe stuff. Her mother kicked her out for stealing, and all she said was, “I’ll find other arrangements.” And she did (though she kept going back to fleece what she could until her mom changed the locks). Rick was killed, and she went to the funeral and parade, but she was high for both, her mind as blank as a Buddhist monk’s. There were a lot of people there whom she hadn’t seen in a while, and they all kept coming up to her—Rick’s sweetheart—and she had to fake like she was stunned. Marty and Jill insisted she stand with them at the parade, still looked at her like she and Rick had been in love. Like she’d spoken to him since high school. Like she cared.

  What she did care about was when the pill mill shut down and Dr. Redding lost his license and came under indictment. There were two months of full-on panic when she was rationing her stash, scraping together money to buy from some of the dealers in town. Later, she’d learn the term “junky luck,” which perfectly described what happened to her. Dr. Redding gets shut down and Hailey walks back into her life with a proposition.

  “I’m getting married,” she told her.

  “Congratulations.” They had this exchange in La Paloma, New Canaan’s most mediocre Mexican. “To who.” Not that it mattered. The last thing she wanted to do was catch up with a childhood chum. She’d crushed one of her last pills that morning.

  “Eric. Frye.”

  “That black kid? Wasn’t he a little weirdo?”

  “We reconnected. He’s actually a great guy.”

  “What happened to Eaton?”

  “We broke up. A while ago now.” She looked sick that Kaylyn had forgotten this fascinating piece of trivia about her dating life. Like a goddamn breakup with Danny Eaton was any kind of monument in time.

  “Okay. Cool. Congrats, Kowalczyk.” She sipped a Corona and thought of choking this girl on Curt Moretti’s dick. The memory brought her a lot of satisfaction.

  “I’m pregnant,” Hailey said. “And also, we’re just in a tough spot right now. Both Eric and I have so much student debt, and he’s substitute teaching, and that’s like—you know, he might as well be working for free.”

  “Yeah, it’s hard times. They’re calling it the Great Recession, if you don’t catch the news.”

  “Well. So.” She fidgeted with a fork. “What I wanted to ask you is. I work at the retirement home.”

  “I know. My grandma died in there, remember?”

  The waiter arrived with their meals. Hailey left hers untouched.

  “What I want to know is—I have access to a lot of stuff. Like a lot of different prescriptions. I know a couple of the nurses already do it.”

  Junky luck.

  For three years, this worked about as brilliantly as one could hope. Hailey made some money while Kaylyn got her fix and a modest income. She could stay in her fog undisturbed, passing the days watching television, drinking nights away in the bars, walking the railroad tracks out over the Cattawa so that she felt like she was traveling to distant lands, like she didn’t miss anyone or regret anything. Like all the awful things she was responsible for were the faraway memories of another woman.

  Then in 2011, not long after Ben overdosed, Kowalczyk pulled the plug on their operation. A girl had been caught stealing prescription pills at Eastern Star, and she was going to jail. “Eric and I are doing well. He’s working, we don’t need this anymore.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Kaylyn. “These people I’m working with, you can’t just walk away from it.”

  “I don’t have a choice, Kay. I’ve got a daughter—I’m not going to jail for fencing prescriptions for a few extra bucks. I’m sorry.” Kowalczyk had gotten so fat. Kaylyn hated the bloated look of her face, like she’d just had her wisdom teeth out.

  What Kaylyn failed to mention was that she actually owed the Flood brothers a bit of money. She’d been holding on to more of their supply but taking the payments with promises to supply the rest of the pills later. Instead of paying these local dealers back, Kaylyn instead kept buying more from them on the false pretense that her supply would return. So she was good for it. Owing a bit of money became owing a lot of money. She went smurfing in drugstores to try to pay it down, but there was only so much pseudoephedrine you could get away with purchasing at the few locations she could walk to. Then these guys cut her off. That’s when she started catching rides
down to Columbus where heroin cost as much as a six-pack. She snorted it, smoked it, promised herself she’d never inject it, and within a few months was shooting it between her toes.

  Amos Flood, who she’d known since Elmwood Elementary, came to her, and very apologetically put it to her like this: “We need you to do us a favor. It’ll be later this year, maybe summer. You do this, all your debt’s forgiven. You don’t, well—you gotta think about if anyone would even miss you.”

  She was to make a trip to New Orleans to pick up a package. On top of that, she hitchhiked to Planned Parenthood in Mansfield to have something checked and found out she was pregnant.

  Coming down from the fix she’d allowed herself in an Arby’s bathroom—slumped against the grimy tile, all terrors forgotten, all nightmares vanquished—she realized she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t go back to where she’d been staying. The father of her child had kicked her out because she was dragging him back into this life. Her own mother wouldn’t let her through the front door even if she were bleeding to death on the lawn.

  She found herself ringing the doorbell at Hailey Frye’s. When she answered, Kaylyn could see into the warm light of the dining room, where Eric (bearded, so much older than she remembered him, but still with a boy’s cheeks and the same wide, freckled nose) and a dark-haired, light-skinned little girl peered at her with curiosity. The kid demanded to know who it was.

  “It’s Aunt Kay,” Hailey told her. “Hold on.” She stepped outside and closed the door, regarded her with crossed arms: I’ll listen to you, but I won’t let you near my family.

  “I’m in so much trouble, Hailey.” Kaylyn started crying. She told her story with snot pouring out of her nose. She spilled everything except for what Amos Flood was asking of her.

  Hailey went back inside to get her car keys. She came out with a piece of fried chicken and made Kaylyn eat it while they sat in her car. When Kaylyn finished the chicken, Hailey wrapped the bones in a napkin and held them on her lap.