Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  He had been there for more than a week, watching HBO, doing lines, having a one-man party with the PRIVACY PLEASE sign hanging on the door, going out to celebrate, then coming back to the room and celebrating some more. This was the biggest score of Slash’s life and he had been enjoying the hell out of it.

  Because, man, when you compared it to the mission—or to sleeping in the woods—life was pretty damn good at Howard Johnson. Nice roof over your head. Soft bed to sleep on. No one to say you couldn’t be high or you had to wake up and get your ass out at a certain time. No one to throw Jesus in your face.

  After he reentered the room, he put the chain on the door, suddenly curious as to how his supplies were holding out. He removed his stash from its hiding spot.

  At first, he had tried to be judicious in how much he used, rationing himself. No more than, say, eight lines a day. Well, okay, maybe twelve. Or sixteen, but that was it.

  Lately, he maybe hadn’t been paying as much attention. And there was a woman or two he had partied with, and . . .

  Wait. Was that all he had left? Where was the rest of it?

  The money situation was even more startling. Out of the original $5,000, he was down to fourteen hundred-dollar bills. Yeah, Howard Johnson was expensive—and the manager had insisted on a $500 deposit against damage, because Slash didn’t have a credit card. And yeah, he had gone out a lot. And yeah, there had been those women.

  But had he really gone through that much cash already?

  He needed another line. Now. That would help him think straight. He got out his razor blade, mirror, and the rolled-up hundred he had been using—because it made him feel like a tough-ass gangsta.

  Except the coke didn’t settle him. It only made him more anxious.

  Where had all the money gone? Had someone stolen from him?

  And who was that guy with Wendy? How had they known about him in the first place?

  He looked at the coke. He did another line.

  The thoughts in his head were a real jumble now. But eventually one kept coming back to him.

  He should call the man, the one who hired him. That would fix everything.

  Slash fumbled with his phone until he finally got it to make the call.

  “What do you want?” the man answered.

  “Hey, it’s Slash.”

  “Yeah, I know,” the man said. “What do you want?”

  “I just had some dude asking me if I could plant coke in someone else’s house. He acted like he knew about that woman I did it on.”

  “What? Who?”

  “I don’t know,” Slash said. “Just this dude. I don’t know him. He had this chick with him. I think her name is Wendy.”

  “Wendy? Describe Wendy for me.”

  “She’s . . . damn, I mean, she’s a piece of ass like you wouldn’t believe. Superhot.”

  “What color is her hair?”

  “Brown. Black. Whatever.”

  “What color are her eyes?”

  “I don’t know. I was too busy looking at her jugs.”

  “What else? Does she have any tattoos?”

  “Yeah. Couple of ’em.”

  “Okay,” the man whispered. “Then it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Hell it’s not. How did they know about me?”

  “I don’t know. Did you tell anyone? Brag to one of your drug friends?”

  “Naw, man. I didn’t say nothing to no one.”

  “Well, I sure didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Then how do they know about me?” Slash asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  And then Slash came out with it: “I want more money. And more coke.”

  “What? No. Forget it.”

  “There’s more risk now. These people know about me. That’s risk I hadn’t planned on.”

  “That’s your problem, not mine.”

  “If this gets out, it’ll be worse for you than for me. I’m not the one who pretends to live this straight life.”

  That was true. They both knew it.

  “No way,” the man said. “I don’t have it anyway.”

  “Which? The money or the coke?”

  “Either. Don’t call me again.”

  The man hung up. Slash did another line.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  My first instinct—as it always had been around my parents—was to protect Teddy.

  I had no idea why they were suddenly showing up in my driveway, or how they found me, or what they hoped to achieve there. Whatever it was, I didn’t want Teddy to be anywhere near it. His recovery was teetering on a precarious ledge, which crumbled just a little more every time he looked at Wendy. I feared if he understood who these two strangers were, it would be the small shove needed to send him toppling into the abyss.

  “Stay right there,” I snarled at my parents. “Don’t move.”

  Still using the truck for balance, I forced myself back to the door and yanked it open.

  “You have to leave. Now,” I said, a little too breathlessly.

  “Who are those people?” Teddy asked.

  “No one,” I said.

  “O . . . Okay,” Teddy stammered. “Are you sure you—”

  “You have to leave now, goddammit,” I said through gritted teeth.

  My parents were walking toward the truck. I slammed Teddy’s door.

  “Stop right there!” I yelled at my parents.

  I couldn’t allow them to see Teddy through the windshield. There was probably little chance they would recognize the baby they had last seen at nine months now that he was a twenty-three-year-old man. But I didn’t want to risk it.

  They stopped. I could feel Teddy’s indecision from inside the truck, so I banged twice on the hood and again yelled, “Get out of here.”

  As he finally began backing down the driveway, I squared to face my parents for the first time since they abandoned me twenty-two years earlier.

  My mother’s hair, which had been dark brown like mine the last time I had seen it, was now almost completely gray. Her face was weathered. But she was far more clear-eyed than in most of my memories of her; and, all things considered, she definitely looked better than I assumed she would.

  Then again, I thought she was dead.

  My father was still broad-shouldered, though more hunched, and not nearly as tall. His hair, which had been bushy and sand-colored, was now gray and mostly gone. He had grown a mustache, which was closer to the color his hair used to be.

  They stood there at the bumper of their car with nervously hopeful expressions.

  I couldn’t count the number of times during my teenage years I had imagined this moment—my parents showing up unexpectedly, announcing they were ready to resume their roles in my life. Most of the time, the scene involved me reciting a long list of the horrors and indignities I had been subjected to because of them, because before there was any talk of absolution there had to be punishment. In those waking daydreams, I tried out a great variety of emotions, typically beginning with fury over what they had done before moving on to gratitude at being rescued.

  But now that they were actually here, I was mostly just stuck on fury.

  “How did you find me?” I demanded.

  My mother started with, “Pumpkin, I’m sorry, I just—”

  “Stop calling me pumpkin. I’m a grown woman. My name is Melanie.”

  “Yes, Mel . . . Melanie, of course.”

  “We wanted to call first,” my father said. “But all we could find for you was an address, not a phone number. I’m sorry we—”

  “Answer my question: How did you find me?”

  My mother started shaking and crying. I would have felt sympathy for any other woman in that situation. Not her. She had been the cause of too many of my own tears.

  �
�Your mother read about you on the Internet,” my father volunteered. “She’s been looking for you for years.”

  “I prayed and prayed I’d find you,” she said. “The social workers would never tell us where you and Teddy had gone. We knew the family that adopted Teddy had left the area, but we had no idea where they moved. The people at Social Services said if you wanted to reach out to us, that would be one thing, but they couldn’t give us any information about you.”

  “Privacy laws,” my father volunteered.

  My mother continued. “Your father was out long-lining when I saw an article about your . . . your problem. We came here as soon as he got back. I didn’t realize you had changed your name. Are you . . . Are you married now?”

  “What do you care?” I snapped.

  “Melanie, honey, I’m so, so sorry. I’ve done . . . so many terrible things in my life, so many things I . . . I can’t tell you how much I regret them,” she said, her voice trembling. “After we lost you—”

  “You didn’t lose me; you abandoned me.”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I can’t expect you to understand what a dark, dark place I was in. I just . . . I hated everything about myself. There was this hole in the middle of me and I . . . I know you might not believe this, but I really thought that terminating our rights was the best thing we could do for you.”

  “Great. Congratulations on that,” I said.

  “Melanie, please. We don’t deserve your forgiveness and we’re not even asking for it. But . . . We got cleaned up. It took some years and a whole lot of pain, but we both came to realize how sick and destructive we were, and how substance abuse was at the root of all of it. We gave our lives over to Jesus Christ and with his love we don’t use drugs or alcohol anymore. We go to a wonderful church—”

  “Fabulous,” I said. “Why don’t you go back there now?”

  My mother brought her hand to her mouth in a failed effort to stanch a sob. I was being cruel and juvenile—like I was reverting back to the nine-year-old I was when they left me—and I didn’t care. They deserved so much worse.

  “Melanie,” my father began, “we know you’re angry, but—”

  “Stop talking,” I growled at him. “You don’t even have a right to talk. Forget about what you did to me and this poor woman. How are you not in jail after what you did to Charlotte?”

  His head immediately went down.

  “Oh, what? You think I didn’t know about that?” I said, yelling now. “Or did you think I would forget? What kind of man has sex with any fourteen-year-old girl, much less his wife’s daughter? You’re a disgusting, disgusting human being.”

  It was strangely exhilarating to have this confrontation, to say the things in real life I had said in my head so many times.

  “We didn’t have sex. When I was drunk, I would just—”

  “Shut up!” I shrieked. “Just shut up. There’s no excuse for what you did. None.”

  “Your father spent five years in jail because of that,” my mother said quietly. “That’s when he stopped drinking and was born again. He’s been sober since he came out. It wasn’t him, doing those things to Charlotte. It was the alcohol. He never would have—”

  “Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?” I railed at her. “Well, I’m glad that works for you. It doesn’t quite cut it for me.”

  “I know, I know,” my father said. “I don’t blame you one bit. I’m . . . I’m ashamed of what I’ve done and . . . One day I’m going to be judged for it, I know. All I can do for the rest of my time here is try to live in the word of Jesus and ask for his forgiveness. I—”

  “Why don’t you start by asking Charlotte?” I sneered.

  This brought a lurching halt to their attempts at explanation and apology. My mother and father bounced glances off each other. They shifted their weight. My father exhaled noisily.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” my mother asked.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Charlotte, she . . . Oh, honey, this was so long ago. Charlotte . . . died of a drug overdose when she was nineteen. She had run off to New York City and had gotten into . . . into some bad things. And . . . Oh, Melanie.”

  The news of my half sister’s death, delivered however many years too late, was one more piece of information I couldn’t put in proper perspective. Not standing in my driveway. Not while facing the parents I hadn’t seen since I was nine years old.

  I always assumed Charlotte had been like me: off with a new life somewhere; surviving, even if she wasn’t fully healed from the scars inflicted by Mr. and Mrs. William Theodore Curran.

  Instead, it turned out she was their most profoundly affected victim. All this time I should have been mourning her. If only I had known. Yet when she succumbed to her sadness, she had already aged out of the system and I was halfway across the state. There was no one who would have even thought to tell me. There was no one who cared.

  “Well, that’s just great. Thanks for letting me know seventeen years too late,” I said, using my sarcasm as a shield. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go into my house now and enjoy that news. Good night.”

  I stomped off quickly toward my front porch and those overturned bulbs, which were still exactly where I had left them—but now browner and frostbitten.

  “Melanie, we’re here because we want to help,” my mother said plaintively, taking a few steps toward me. “We’ve hired a lawyer. We’re asking the court to consider placing your son with us permanently. We’re his grandparents, you know. We can take care of him while you sort through your issues.”

  I whirled to face them again. This was beyond any nightmare the darkest reaches of my subconscious could have whipped up for me.

  “Oh. My. God!” I screeched. “You think that’s helping? You think you did such a bang-up job raising me and Teddy and Charlotte that you really deserve a shot at screwing up the next generation too? Are you really serious? You people are unbelievable.”

  My father put his arm around my mother. “I know this is a shock, seeing us,” he said. “And I know you’re upset and you have every right to be. But our lawyer says—”

  “I don’t want to hear—”

  “This is the best way for you to be able to keep your child. We can adopt your son and he can live with us while you serve your jail time. Then, when you get out, we can all be together as a family.”

  I brought my hands to the sides of my head, clutching two fistfuls of hair. “A family? Is that a joke? You’re really talking to me about family? We were a family. And you, sir, threw it into a big drunken meat grinder until there was nothing left of it.”

  “I know, I know,” my father said. “And I can see you’re too upset to talk right now. We’re staying at the Econo Lodge not far from here. Can I at least leave our phone numbers with you so you can call us if you want to talk?”

  “You know what I want?” I said. “I want you to get out of my driveway and get out of my life. You were doing the best parenting you could do by staying away from me. You should have kept it that way.”

  I opened my front door, then slammed it behind me with all the strength I could muster.

  * * *

  • • •

  At first, I was too angry to even have distinct thoughts. I ran upstairs to the nursery, if only to put that much more distance between myself and them.

  From the relative safety of the second floor, I watched them. They leaned against each other in a sort of hug and seemed to be talking things over. Then they walked slowly back to their car.

  For a minute or so, they just sat there with the engine running and the lights on. It was hard to tell what they were doing from my angle. I worried they were just regrouping, trying to decide on a new line of attack.

  Finally, they backed down the driveway. At the end of it, they stopped. My father got out, open
ed my mailbox, and put something inside of it—A note? A piece of paper with their phone numbers on it?

  Then they drove away.

  The first identifiable emotion I felt after they were finally gone was that I was furious with myself for being furious. I wanted to be the grown woman who had moved on, not the petulant teenager flailing at them, landing cheap shots wherever I could. They shouldn’t have been able to reach me like that anymore.

  But I couldn’t stop the anger. With my entire life in turmoil, with forces unknown conspiring to separate me from my child and send me to prison, Mommy and Daddy Dearest chose this time, of all times, to reenter my life. And they did it not with a letter, or with some noninvasive approach that put the interaction on my terms and allowed me to decide whether I wanted it. They did it on their terms.

  Which was nothing unusual, really. It had always been all about Billy and Betsy. Even now, when they were coming with this offer of so-called help, I felt like they were really just trying to use me as another piece of the testimony they would offer their congregation: Jesus is so good, he even gave us back our daughter after all these years. Hallelujah! Praise him!

  Not knowing what else to do with myself, I took Mr. Snuggs into the crook of my arm and sat in the nursing chair. I thought about what my father had said, about them adopting Alex, or fostering him, or whatever absurdity they were proposing.

  Unbelievably, I was actually considering it. Was it, in fact, the best of my nonexistent options? My father was right: If the courts would give Alex to his grandparents, he would remain in my life even if I did end up incarcerated.

  There was a state women’s prison in Goochland, less than two hours from Northumberland. If I were sent there, they could visit every weekend. I wouldn’t miss him growing up. More important, he would know that he still had a mother, that his mother loved him more than anything, and that all she wanted was to be with him.

  Then, when I got out, we could be together again. Alex would be, what, six? It would be strange for him at first, sure. But there was still a whole lot of parenting left to be done from age six until whenever he left the nest. Six-year-olds were just losing their first teeth. They hadn’t read Roald Dahl or learned to play complex board games or been introduced to multiplication or done any of the things I imagined myself doing with Alex.