Down City

by Leah Carroll

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We’re practically there.” Then I slip out of the car before he can say anything else. As I walk around the hood to get to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, I glance down at the puddle of vomit on the ground. It’s pink and foamy, as if he has been throwing up blood.

  WEEKS LATER, WHEN I come home from Dave’s house, Ann-Marie is waiting up for me.

  “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she says.

  Her contacts are out for the night and she has on her large glasses and white sweatpants. “I’ve decided that you can come and stay with us,” she says. “If you want. It’s your decision.”

  When she says “us,” I realize she’s talking about Taylor and Derek. I don’t want to be without my sister.

  “Okay,” I say, right away.

  I try to summon the appropriate emotion but can’t figure out what it should be. Their divorce seems inevitable. For the last year they’ve barely talked. Dad has cut himself off from all of us and is drunk all the time. When he lost his job we all doubted he’d really try to find a new one. Ann-Marie explains that we’ll move to the apartment building her parents own, the one she lived in when she and Dad first met. They’ll sell our house. Dad will have to find an apartment to live in. When she’s done talking I go to my room and try to cry. I think if I can cry I’ll figure out how I should feel about the whole thing. I think if I cry, it will make me a better daughter for abandoning my dad. But I can’t cry, no matter how much I screw up my face and heave my gut, trying to force out emotion.

  That weekend, as I pour myself cereal in the kitchen, Dad comes in. His silver hair is a crazy mess around his head. He leans against the kitchen sink and puts his palms behind him on the counter. “Well kiddo,” he says, “looks like it’s just you and me again.”

  My stomach flops. I was sure that he and Ann-Marie had talked about who would go with whom.

  “I’m going to live with Ann-Marie.” I avoid eye contact. “She asked me to, so I thought you wanted me to,” I add quickly.

  “Oh,” says Dad. He walks from the kitchen to his room, and slams the door shut so hard that all his framed photos on the wall rattle.

  For the next few weeks as we pack up our stuff in boxes and stack them along the wall in the kitchen, Dad ignores me. He won’t look at me or speak to me. It’s one thing if he’s sleeping, like he always does, but to actively act as if I’m not there is something I’ve never experienced. I try talking to him about what I’m reading, about what he thinks about a certain band, but my questions are met with a determined silence, as the boxes pile higher and our move date gets closer.

  ANN-MARIE STARTS DATING almost as soon as we move out, and I babysit for Taylor more and more. Fifteen, with no job and no money, I take Taylor for long walks in her stroller down to the Barrington River. I remember being little and walking with my grandmother around her little cul-de-sac and how it always made me happy. As spring comes and with it that old creeping anxiety I get with the changes of the seasons, I hope the walks with Taylor might make me feel better. But my stomach still turns nervously as I push her stroller down these new suburban streets and along the murky edge of the river where we collect pebbles and broken bits of clamshell. I’m nervous all the time, it seems, but I’m never sure why.

  Our downstairs neighbors in the apartment building are a family of five, three small children, their mother, and their father, Doc. Ann-Marie quickly begins dating Doc’s friend Marco. Marco is young and handsome, with black hair and brown eyes and a thick mustache and beard. He has a small commercial fishing boat, a clam dragger, and he gathers up quahogs from the ocean floor. He brings them home, and we boil the clams in a stockpot with potatoes and Saugys. He’s nice enough, and seems to like Ann-Marie, but it’s clear he has spent his life dragging for shellfish and not necessarily getting an education. Trying to connect with Derek one night he offers to take him out on the boat, promising he’ll be able to make lots of “moneys.”

  “Money,” Derek says.

  “Yeah,” says Marco, “that’s what I said. Moneys. You can make lots of moneys.”

  “You can’t say moneys,” says Derek. “It’s not plural. You make money.”

  Marco, perplexed, tries to brush off Derek’s tone. “I’m just saying, if you wanted…”

  It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Marco’s lack of education isn’t his major flaw. At night sitting on the couch with Ann-Marie while we watch TV, or at the dinner table while we eat oyster stew, he trails off mid-sentence into quiet gibberish. His eyelids droop once, twice, three times until finally his chin comes to rest against his chest and he starts snoring.

  “Marco’s on heroin,” I tell Ann-Marie as she shakes him by the shoulder.

  “He is not!” she says.

  We’re sitting at the dining table. From where I am, I can see out over the backyard—a rectangle of patchy grass set off from the gravel parking lot by a series of railroad ties. Across from me at the table, Marco’s head bobs up and down. Taylor sits happily in her booster seat playing with a pile of oyster crackers. She and Marco are occupying the same mental space, some different place from Ann-Marie and me.

  “Then why does he nod out all the time?” I ask.

  “He’s tired,” says Ann-Marie. “He fishes all day.”

  Marco’s upper body flops face-first onto the table, just missing the bowl of soup. He snores contentedly on the vinyl place mat. I smirk at Ann-Marie. She stands up and strokes his head. He opens his eyes and smiles at her, his head sideways on the table, but doesn’t sit up.

  “Well, what the hell do you know about heroin anyway, smart-ass?” asks Ann-Marie.

  It’s a good question and one that, wisely, I don’t answer, despite my natural inclination to be the expert of all things. Toward the end of that school year my loser boyfriend has gotten into snorting heroin, because he decides pot makes him paranoid. I drive with him to the Manton Heights Housing Project in Providence where he buys the drugs. Before pulling in, Dave will have me rifle through the pile of cassette tapes on the passenger-side floor.

  “Find the Beastie Boys,” he’ll say. “We need them to know we’re cool with them.” Then we pull up to a corner in his hatchback, the rear window all but covered in Grateful Dead stickers, white-boy rap blaring from the crappy speakers in the tape deck.

  At first Dave only snorts the heroin instead of shooting it, but he has a friend Lindsay who regularly shoots up. Lindsay is infamous in Barrington. The summer before I started high school, there had been MISSING CHILD posters of her taped to telephone poles and hung in storefronts across town. She’d gone to a Phish show and run off with a group of kids for months. Now back in Barrington, she seems to me the most world-wise teenager I’ve ever met. And she’s an honest-to-goodness heroin addict at seventeen, having already gone unsuccessfully to rehab and to treatment at a methadone clinic.

  The three of us go together to buy heroin, which I never do because I’m too scared. Lindsay has a tiny scrappy voice and talks in slang I do my best to imitate. Looking up at Dave beneath a mop of matted hair, she’ll smile sweetly and blink her large dark eyes. “Dave,” she’ll say, “let’s get some diesel. I wanna get high.”

  She carries a syringe in her enormous canvas army bag and shoots up in the backseat of Dave’s car. Once when she can’t locate a vein in her arm, she asks if someone will hold her wrist tightly so she can shoot into a vein in her hand. I volunteer right away, squeezing her wrist tightly so that her veins puff up big and blue.

  Later Dave tells me that I didn’t have to do that, that Lindsay sometimes makes people uncomfortable, and that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. I don’t explain to him that I’d never do the drug, but that I think being around it is cool and that Lindsay is way more of an authentic junkie than Dave will ever be.

  I try to impress Lindsay with stories about my mom that are mostly made up.

  “We used to have junkies stay at our house all the time,”
I tell her once. “One time one of them ate his own puke on a bet for money to get high.”

  Lindsay nods as if this is something she’s witnessed many a time. I try to conjure a narrative of what it had been like being the child of an addict mother, but really I remember mostly brief and benign glimpses of my mom. Her silhouette in the open door, her hanging strips of film from the shower rod, her brushing back my sweaty hair when I must have had a fever. I can’t really see her in any of these memories. There’s just the sense that she’s there.

  But for all my efforts, Lindsay seems most impressed by the fact that I don’t do heroin.

  “You’re really smart,” she says to me once. “You don’t act like these other dumb Barrington girls. Like, obviously you’re smart because you don’t do dope and stuff. But you are really smart about books and things, too.”

  I MISS DAD. When we spend time together it starts out awkward, but then we go to a movie or up to Boston to take pictures, and we have things to talk about. On the hour-long drives back from Boston, Dad tells me about things like this new show he has been watching on Comedy Central called The Daily Show, and how funny it is. In between the times we see each other, in the days before Google, I save up questions about things that are in the news to ask Dad, later.

  He explains the centuries-old conflict in Bosnia to me and why hopes for any kind of resolution without understanding the history are pointless and shortsighted. We talk about Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. I’ve recently joined the brand-new gay/straight alliance at my high school. Dad explains that it’s akin to a Jim Crow law, something separate but equal and therefore not really equal at all. “What’s Jim Crow?” I ask, and then recite his answer nearly verbatim to anybody who will listen for the next few months.

  On one of our outings I tell Dad how unhappy I am at school and how much I want to transfer. Dad agrees that School One, an alternative school in Providence, seems like a good fit for me and takes me on an appointment to interview with the faculty and take the placement tests. In my interview with Dad and the principal, Dad smiles charmingly at the woman and crosses his heel over his knee, leaning backward to rest his hand on the back of the chair.

  “I’ve thought for a long time that Leah and public school are a bad fit,” he tells the principal. “I mean, this is a kid who reads Goethe in her free time.” The closest I’ve come to reading Goethe is when I asked Dad what Faust was and who “Geth” was, while reading Anne Rice, but the principal is so impressed I don’t dare contradict him. She escorts us out, handing over a large manila envelope of financial aid information for Dad to fill out. She beams at me as we walk out onto the sidewalk. “I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better, Leah!” she says. In the car I look into the envelope. There are a bunch of tax forms that Dad, as my legal custodial parent, will have to fill out. “You’ll do it, right?” I ask.

  “Of course,” he says. “I think this is really good move for you. You need a place like this, I think.”

  Over the next few weeks I abandon any semblance of finishing up my sophomore year with passing grades. I tell everyone that it doesn’t matter because I’m going to School One. But soon the school starts calling, saying they haven’t received Dad’s paperwork. The next time I see him I ask him about it.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “I have it. I just haven’t mailed it in.” As the summer comes and goes I realize I’ll be going back to Barrington High School in the fall.

  “My dad is so fucked up!” I whine to Dave. We sit on the front porch of my three-family house, smoking cigarettes. “I hate Barrington. He just doesn’t want to fill out tax forms. It’s so unfair.” I flick my cigarette onto the street and light another one. I puff angrily and exhale into the thick summer air, cicadas buzzing loudly all around us. I think about Dad and how it always seems like he drinks more in the summer and becomes more dangerous. I’m furious with him. I turn to Dave. “If something ever happens to me,” I say, “my dad probably did it. I’ve been afraid before that he would murder all of us.” I stare hard at Dave, daring him to doubt the conviction of my statement.

  “Yeah,” says Dave. “But I always kind of thought your dad might kill himself. Since you didn’t go and live with him and stuff.”

  I reach over and pinch Dave’s arm, twisting his skin between my fingers as hard as I can. “Ow!” he whines. “What are you doing?”

  “I fucking hate you,” I say. And I do. I hate his big black cow eyes with their long lashes and his slender nonthreatening limbs and the stupid poetry he writes me, where instead of saying “you” he says “thou” and “thee.” And I hate that this ridiculous person would dare to insinuate that somehow my dad is not strong enough to go on with life. He has never met my dad. He doesn’t know his booming laugh, or how he’d worked his way through the seven-volume Shelby Foote history of the Civil War in a single month of intense concentration, or the way that people cluster around him to hear his stories at the bar, or how people cower if he just looks at them a certain way, with a certain turn of his body, and a certain tilt of his face. He wasn’t there the other Saturday morning in Dunkin’ Donuts, like I was, when a woman held up a long line of people by going back and forth on what choices to include in her dozen donuts until finally, exasperated, my dad called out from the middle of line, “Lady, they’re just fucking donuts,” and the whole store erupted in spontaneous applause.

  Fuck this kid, I think, and walk back into the house, locking the door behind me. From the street Dave calls my name and weeps loudly until one of the neighbors sticks his head out of a window and threatens to call the cops.

  I’m done with him. Done with his heroin snorting and doing nothing but riding around in his car and listening to terrible live Grateful Dead shows on his tape deck. I’m mortified by the way I’ve taken to wearing hippie clothes and singing along to Phish songs to fit in with him. But no matter how much I try, I can’t be done with the idea he has planted, the idea that my dad might hurt himself, and that if he does, it will be all my fault.

  I SULK MY way through my junior year of high school, failing so epically and unequivocally that the assistant principal points out how I easily could channel just some of that negative energy into passing at least one class. I scoff at him.

  We’ve always worn off-brand clothes, purchased on layaway, but now with only Ann-Marie’s income, there is no money for anything new; Ann-Marie no longer buys us “school clothes.” So my wardrobe is almost entirely comprised of Salvation Army finds that I alter on the sewing machine Grandma Ann buys for me. During classes I sketch out patterns for skirts and dresses. I spend hours sewing a long dress with bell sleeves that becomes my favorite. I buy six different types of scrap fabric, cut them into large triangles, and sew them into a pair of Salvation Army corduroys—it’s a version of a popular trend in my high school of taking straight-legged pants and turning them into wide-legged ones. I love making my own clothes. My room is scattered with long strips of ragged ribbon I’ve salvaged from a craft store liquidation sale, musty piles of old cardigans and skirts that I buy on blue-tag days at the Salvation Army and think I might repurpose, and, much to Taylor and Ann-Marie’s continued annoyance, straight pins and spools of thread that tangle around our ankles and stab the soles of our feet.

  I start to hang out with a group of girls, and the five of us, Reba, Alex, Heather, Sarah, and I, form an unlikely but inseparable alliance. Reba and Heather are clearly headed to the Ivy League, but we still spend our nights and weekends parked at Barrington Beach smoking cigarettes and creating derisive nicknames for all the people in our high school. I laugh harder sitting in Alex’s little black Honda Civic than I ever have before as a teenager.

  My friends’ families became a support system for me. Heather’s parents stock their basement fridge with microwave burritos and cans of Dr Pepper for when I come over after school. Reba’s parents encourage my writing and pay me to take photographs for them. Alex drives me everywhere, to and from school, to my
part-time job at the supermarket, and to doctor and dentist appointments. The group of us confess everything to each other, conducting mini therapy sessions on the beach late at night while sipping from a bottle of vodka. Alex feels terribly out of place, Reba feels she has too much to live up to, and Heather wonders why old friends are now mean to her. And of course we are all madly, wildly, and unrequitedly in love with boys.

  The summer after my junior year, I go to an outdoor music festival with my friend Rick and we meet up with some guys from school. John, who is a grade younger than us, is with them. It’s a beautiful day, hot and sunny, and the concert takes place at a campground. We smoke pot and strip to our underpants and go swimming in the freezing-cold pool at the edge of the tents. Normally, I’m embarrassed by my body. I’m barely an A cup and at five foot five I weigh less than a hundred pounds. I have the long, gangly arms and legs of a praying mantis. But that day, something is different—I feel calm and confident for one of the only times I can remember. Nobody has seen me in just my underwear since I was a child, including my ex-boyfriend. Later, after borrowing a giant T-shirt from one of the guys who is camping out, I see that my camisole top has been neatly laid out to dry.

  “Thanks, Rick,” I say to my friend, oddly touched that he has taken the time, when I would have thrown the shirt in a ball on the ground and probably forgotten about it.

  “I didn’t do it,” he says. “John did.”

  I’m stunned. John is by far the handsomest boy I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s on the soccer team and doesn’t smoke cigarettes and I’m sure he doesn’t really even know who I am.

  “Oh,” I say, watching John and a friend kick a Hacky Sack to each other.

  As the sun sets, Rick trades some of the quarter pound of pot he has brought with him for a sheet of acid.

  “It’s white blotter,” he says. “I don’t even know if it’s real.” We all divvy it up generously, sure it won’t work. An hour later I am—as I keep repeating over and over to Rick and then collapsing into giggles—“tripping face, man.” I find myself in a stand of trees, clutching a warm Miller High Life, engaged in a passionate discussion with John about colors and what they really mean. Later we make our way over to where a reggae band plays. I look up at the crystal-clear night sky and when I look back down, the stars are suddenly all around my body and I can move them around with my hands. I sit down in the middle of all the dancing people and stare up at the moon. A shadow moves slowly across its surface until eventually all I can see is a ring of beautiful white fire at its edges. Then the shadow dissolves.