by Blake Nelson
But then I see him as he is: Neon blue hair. Filthy trench coat. Hollow, gaunt face.
A bottle of cheap whiskey is hanging out of his pocket.
I’m embarrassed. I’m horrified. I don’t know what to do, where to look. I turn away. My heart feels like it’s stopped in my chest.
“Maddie?” says Simon. “What is it?”
I have to leave. I turn and begin walking in the opposite direction. I hurry down the sidewalk, then dash through the intersection, against the light. A car slams on its brakes, honks.
Simon dodges traffic to chase me. He looks around, trying to understand what just happened.
“Maddie?” he yells. “Maddie! Wait!”
Across the street, I walk as fast as I can. I don’t look back, I won’t even turn my head. “I have to go,” I yell to Simon as he runs to catch up. “I forgot I have to do something.”
“What happened?” he asks. “What’s the matter?”
I walk. My eyes fill with tears. I round a corner and I can see my car. I clear my eyes with my coat sleeves.
“Maddie…?” says Simon, finally catching up.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “I’m fine. I’m sorry.”
We get to my mom’s Volvo. “No, it’s okay,” he says, out of breath. “You just scared me.”
“I have to go,” I tell him. I unlock my door. I wipe my eyes again.
“Seriously, Maddie, what is it? What just happened?”
“I’m fine. I’ll call you about the party.” I get in my car.
He stares. I shut the door and lower my window.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I get stressed out sometimes over the holidays.”
He stands, baffled. But he accepts what I’m telling him.
I start the car and he moves a few steps back. “Will you call me?” he says.
I nod that I will and watch him walk away. I pretend I’m going to drive away but I don’t.
When he’s gone, I turn the car off. I lean my forehead against the steering wheel. I close my eyes and breathe and try to comprehend what I just saw.
2
I drive home and spend the rest of the night in a daze, staring at the TV as my parents fuss around.
I tell them nothing. I don’t dare.
I take a hot bath that night, brush my teeth in my brightly lit bathroom, crawl into my clean bed of fresh linen.
Outside it is cold and raining. Stewart is out there somewhere sleeping on concrete.
I toss and turn in my bed. I get up at 2:00 a.m. and call Susan, my old AA sponsor.
She is asleep but she wakes up immediately when she hears my voice.
She stays up and talks to me for an hour. She understands my situation. But she is very afraid of it.
“I know,” I tell her. “But I have to go down there. I have to try to find him.”
She reminds me of the drowning-man scenario. You try to save the drowning man but he grabs you, clings to you, takes you down with him.
And then you have two drowning people to contend with.
3
I don’t care. I’m going.
The next day, I dress for the weather: jeans, a thick sweater, my rain parka. I drive downtown.
What will I say to him? I have no idea. Why didn’t I call Kirsten back a year ago? Why didn’t I stay on top of that?
I park and walk the streets around Pioneer Square. That’s where the street kids usually are. They are here today too, little pockets of them, like litters of abandoned puppies.
I walk through the square. I walk farther downtown. I find the shop where Kirsten sold flowers. A girl is helping customers. I approach her. “Do you know a girl named Kirsten? That used to work here?”
“No, but the woman back there probably does.”
I go to the back of the shop. There’s an older woman there, moving bags of dirt around.
“Do you know Kirsten?”
The woman looks back at me. “Yes. What about her?”
“Does she still work here?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I would guess she went home to Centralia.” The woman avoids looking at me. She looks sad, though. She must have liked Kirsten.
Kirsten was a sweet girl. I hope she’s okay, wherever she is, I think to myself.
4
An hour later I find Stewart.
He’s on the River Walk with four other guys under the Morrison Bridge. They’re sitting on the cement wall, out of the rain. One of them has a skateboard; they’re taking turns on it. They drink beer from forties they have stashed in brown paper bags.
I walk up slowly, my hands in my pockets, my clean, college-girl hair neatly tucked under my clean, college-girl hat.
Stewart wears fingerless gloves, the same ragged trench coat, a black hoodie underneath. He doesn’t see me at first. He takes the skateboard from a short Mexican and rides it in circles, doing kick turns and nearly falling off backward.
I walk closer and then stop, standing on the edge of this gang, watching them. They are hardened streeters. They are some scary dudes.
The short Mexican is the first to notice me. “Hey, señorita!” he calls to me.
I say nothing. The other guys gawk at me. Finally, Stewart turns. When he sees me the others grow quiet.
Without taking his eyes off me, he reaches for his forty, takes a deep swig of it, and replaces it on the wall.
He belches loudly.
“That ain’t no way to address a fine chica like that!” jokes the Mexican kid.
Stewart says nothing. He stares at me. He’s still tall. He’s still imposing. But now he looks like a skeleton.
He begins to walk toward me. My heart skips a beat. The bottoms of my feet tingle with fear.
But I stand my ground.
“What do you want?” he says.
“Nothing,” I answer. “I…wanted to see you.”
“What for?”
“No reason.”
He looks over my head for a moment, like he doesn’t know if it’s worth wasting five minutes talking to me.
“You got a cigarette?” he says.
“I don’t smoke. Remember?”
He leads me away from his friends. We walk across the grass toward Front Avenue. He stops at a little store to get cigarettes, but he only has a dollar, so I put in four dollars of my own.
He takes the pack and we walk to another little park, also covered. He seems to know all the places where there’s shelter from the rain. We sit on a bench and he lights a cigarette with dirty, knobby fingers.
“I saw you last night with your boyfriend,” he says.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
He smokes. Slowly I begin to look at him. He’s deeply dirty, the way homeless people are. His face, so young and carefree before, now looks ravaged. His eyes shine in a sickening way, as if they want to burn themselves out as fast as humanly possible.
It’s too much. I can’t face him. I look away.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asks.
I shrug. “You don’t look too good,” I say into the ground.
“Yeah? Well, life’s not too good at the moment.”
“You look like a junkie.”
“Well, I am a junkie. What did you think I was?”
I say nothing.
He smokes.
We sit and watch the rain falling in the street.
“You look different too,” Stewart says when we’re walking again. “You look older.”
“I am older.”
The rain has let up for a moment. We walk in the open air. You can see patches of fog in the hills above the city.
“How’s college?” he asks.
“Good.”
“You learnin’ anything?”
“Probably not. But it’s good. It’s a good life.”
He’s so skinny, so starved. I want to buy him some food. I delicately steer us toward a burrito trailer I saw earlier. Wit
hout asking him, I stop and casually order us two burritos.
“What happened to Kirsten?” I ask.
“She left.”
“She called me. Like a year ago.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said. She said you didn’t want to talk to her. She said you didn’t care about us anymore. You’d washed your hands of us.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
“That’s what she said.”
“Don’t be like that. I did my best with her. You know that.”
“She sure thought the world of you. She couldn’t shut up about you going back east to college. I tried to tell her the truth. You were born into that. Your dad’s a rich business guy.”
I say nothing. I take our two burritos and lead him to a covered table where I’m hoping he’ll eat.
“What are you gonna do now?” I ask, pushing his burrito toward him.
He ignores the food. He lights another cigarette.
“You can’t stay on the street forever,” I say.
“You’re right about that. People die down here. That Mexican kid I was with just now? A cop tried to run him down last week, tried to kill him with his car. Fuckin’ pigs. We have ways, though. We’re not as helpless as we seem. We can make you pay, if you mess with us.”
I watch his face as he says this. I’ve never heard him talk like this before. He’s like a totally different person.
I set down my burrito. “Stewart?”
“Yeah?”
I choose my words carefully. I speak as clearly and calmly as I can. “Whatever you think you see right now. This whole situation. Whatever you think is right or logical or makes sense…none of it is real. It’s an illusion. You can walk right out of here. You can go back to Spring Meadow. You can clean up. You’ve done it before. You know that it works.”
“I can’t, though,” he says.
“Why can’t you?”
“Because. It’s just delaying things. It’s delaying the inevitable. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
“But it’s not, though. You know that. I know that. We forget. Of course we do. I forgot that time I got drunk at that party. You forgot that time in Redland. That’s why we have to stick together.”
He stares into the distance.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say. “My car is four blocks from here. We can just walk up the street, get in my car, and drive to a detox. And then this whole nightmare is over. We can end it right now. In the next twenty minutes.”
He shakes his head. “I…I can’t.…”
“Why can’t you?”
“Well, look at me. You have eyes!”
I absorb this sudden outburst. I remain calm, patient, clear. “You’re right, you look terrible. But it doesn’t matter. Not in the slightest.”
He thinks about this. He knows I’m right. I can see that it’s sinking in.
But then he takes a violent hit off his cigarette. “I cheated on you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Stewart, it doesn’t matter. None of that matters.”
“But it does matter. Because I screwed you over! And then I screwed Kirsten over!”
“Nobody cares.”
“Kirsten cares. Just ask her if she cares. You don’t know what I did to her. I stole from her. I took her rent money that she made selling flowers. I lied to her face.”
“Those things are fixable. The point is, nobody wants you to die out here. Not her. Not me. Not the people in Centralia. Remember those people? At the AA meeting? How proud they were of you? People care about you, Stewart. People love you. Don’t you know that?”
Suddenly his face changes. He’s pissed. He stands up, throws down his cigarette, and begins striding back toward the river.
I jump up too. I hurry after him.
“Kirsten made you do this,” he snarls at me.
“No,” I plead. “It’s not true!”
“You’re both just trying to get back at me. I’m not going to be some pawn in your game. You can’t control me.”
He suddenly turns back toward me. He looks like a man possessed. His face has become an ugly, twisted sneer. That phrase people use: He was struggling with his demons. I see them. I can see the actual demons.
“Come down here on your high horse,” he growls. “Telling me what I have to do. What about you? What do you have to do? Huh? Why don’t you take some responsibility for what goes on around here? The cops almost killed my friend. They think they own the streets. They don’t own nothing!”
I stand there, staring at this person, this crazy street person.
For a brief moment, I don’t see anyone I recognize.
He won’t come with me. He walks back toward the river and I follow him, though he isn’t speaking anymore. I try to give him money but he slaps the bills out of my hand. He tells me to get away from him. He never wants to see me again. He hates me. He spits on the ground at my feet.
I stop then. I let him go.…
5
The next day, I try again. I park and walk around Pioneer Square. I check the River Walk. I see other street kids, other homeless people, but I can’t find Stewart.
I try the skate park across the river. I see Jeff Weed in the afternoon and ask him.
“Yeah, he’s been around,” says Jeff, unsure of what my purpose is. “Don’t know where he is today.”
For the most part, people try to help. One kid says he may have left town. I can’t tell if this is true or if he’s been told to say it.
I finally give up and go into a Starbucks downtown. I get coffee and sit at the window and call Susan. Then I call Gina in Northampton.
“You gotta prepare yourself, Maddie,” Gina tells me.
“For what?”
“You know.”
This sends me into a panic. “He’s not going to die down here! I won’t let him!”
“He’s going to do what he’s going to do. And you can’t stop him.”
Later, in my car, I see the short Mexican kid from under the bridge. I honk and pull over and try to talk to him, but he runs away when he sees me.
I run after him. I chase him down the street. “No, I’m your friend!” I yell. “I’m the chica from yesterday!”
He vanishes down an alley.
That night, I track down Kirsten on the computer and call her at her mom’s house in Centralia. She’s pregnant by a new boyfriend. She hasn’t talked to Stewart in a year. She thinks he got into drugs again. In any event, he stopped living in their apartment and paying their bills. She was forced to move home.
“I miss him, though,” she tells me in a shaky voice. “Have you seen him?”
“Just once.”
“Is he bad?”
“Yeah. Pretty bad,” I tell her.
“Thanks for trying to help him. I would come down there, but my mom doesn’t think I should. You know, with the baby coming.”
“Yeah,” I tell her.
I spend a couple more days wandering around downtown. But time is running out. He’s obviously left the area, or made it impossible for me to find him. And I have to go back to my own life. Both Susan and Gina are adamant about that. I have to go back to UMass.
On the last day of my vacation, I set my suitcase on my bed and begin organizing my stuff. As I do, a rush of panic comes over me. I can’t leave him here. I can’t.
But even as I think this, even as tears form in my eyes and fall into my suitcase, my hands continue to pack.
6
I fly back east, over the clouds, a perfect blue sky enveloping me, cleansing me, freeing me from my past.
At least that’s what it feels like.
Gina picks me up at the airport. There is nothing to say. She knows how hard it is. We exchange a long and tearful hug.
It’s good to be home. Our off-campus house is my home now. More than my parents’ house. It’s where I feel the most like myself. I lie in my bed here, surrounded by my books, my plants, my laptop. I have become a new person in my time at UMas
s. I was right to come here.
After a couple days, I get back into school stuff. I pick my new classes. I find out I’ve been admitted to an advanced Emily Dickinson class at Amherst College. So that’s good news.
The day before the semester begins, Gina takes me out to dinner. We talk about normal things: a guy she met over vacation, a new professor in her department.
She thinks I should date this semester. She thinks some new romantic possibilities would be good for my mental health.
I don’t know how that’s going to work. I couldn’t even make it to Simon’s New Year’s party. She’s probably right, though. I resolve to get a haircut, and buy some new sneakers.
Sure enough, I get asked out twice in the first week of school. I say yes in both cases, and politely sit with both of the young men, drinking coffee and smiling at the appropriate times.
7
But I still think about Stewart. I think about him every day. The New England sky is so different from the Pacific Northwest. It makes him seem so far away.
Then one Tuesday night after dinner, I find myself walking across campus to the far edge of town. I do this because I saw an old movie theater there and I want to check it out.
It’s a long walk, but I’m happy for the exercise. I feel strangely at peace. I’m not lonely tonight. I’m going to the movies.
The theater is called The Academy. It’s a lot like The Carlton. I pay my five bucks and get some cheap popcorn. I thank the local girl who stuffs my bag until it’s overflowing.
Inside the theater, I sit by myself near the back, a dozen other people scattered around me. The lights go down and I begin chomping popcorn and letting my brain drift slowly into the story.
The next Tuesday, I do it again. I walk across campus, through the cold, to The Academy theater. It’s a good way to relax, get away from campus, take a break from the pressures of college life.
It’s something I still do to this day. Not every Tuesday, but a lot of them. Movie night. And of course I think of Stewart whenever I go. Maybe I’m waiting for him to come join me, come sit with me, come flop his big feet over the seats in front.