Rook opened her eyes.
She was cocooned under a blanket of CDs. The black fan was lying next to her like a hatched egg, with the cage cracked open and the blades having slithered off somewhere. It had smashed into Rook’s face. She put a shaky hand to her cheek. It hurt like hell but no blood. The Coke machine door was open and askew, allowing for a pocket over the two girls. But Rook’s back and leg had taken a mean knock.
“Daryl?”
No reply though Rook could feel the rise and fall of her sister’s thin rib cage beneath her.
“Daryl!”
She couldn’t stand up. A spark of pain in her shoulder when she moved but it shrank against something bigger: a welling of panic over Daryl. Daryl still said nothing.
“Daryl, baby, you alright?”
And then a simple monotone: “Yes.”
“Oh, thank Jesus,” Rook breathed, then gingerly extricated herself, holding the machine steady so it wouldn’t collapse onto Daryl.
Daryl pulled herself out, too. They were both good and bloody. After a head to toe check it seemed Daryl hadn’t gotten hurt much beyond some cuts from the candle. She had more of Rook’s blood on her than her own. Daryl blinked at the room, looking vulnerable without her glasses, the old scar curving from the middle of her forehead down her nose and over behind her ear like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Fleecey was still slack-jawed and panting in the cardboard box.
Rook looked around but didn’t immediately see where Daryl’s glasses had gone. The clock was nowhere to be seen either, not that it mattered anymore. Rook was officially going to be late for work.
She eased herself to the bathroom though her left leg didn’t want to take her there. The mirror was still fogged as though it had no idea what had just gone down. Rook wiped a bare hand over it and left a blood smear. Her face, dear God! Split lip and a big mean anthill under her eye. Looked like a pimp-smacked junkie chick.
She wet down a washcloth and took it and a box of Band-Aids back to the living room, grabbing her cell phone along the way. She wiped the blood from her sister’s arms and called the drug store to let them know she’d be late.
“Rook,” Daryl said.
Rook shook her head to quiet Daryl as she spoke to Sadie on the cell phone. “Another half hour is all. I’m sorry, I haven’t had any sleep since… Has Kent made it in yet?”
Sadie replied, “Nuh-uh, I ain’t seen him. But get here quick, will you? I got problems of my own.”
“I will,” Rook said. “Please don’t say anything. I’ll cover for you anytime you need something.”
“Rook,” Daryl said again.
Sadie sounded annoyed. “Oh yeah? How you gonna cover for me when you goin to school and taking care of your mental baby sister?”
“I’ll miss school if I have to.”
“Might as well face up, Kent’s liable to find out anyway. Didn’t he say he’s gonna fire you if you’re late again? You’d think you’d just show up on time.”
“I know I just—”
“Just get your ass in here.” Sadie hung up.
Rook held the phone in her hand, staring at the door, wondering what she was going to do about the sitter. Daryl was guaranteed to pitch another fit just like the first one.
“Rook!” Daryl was pulling on her arm.
“What!”
“Fleecey’s dyin.”
Rook threw a hard gaze at her sister. “What? Are you kidding me?”
And in that everlasting, ever-loving monotone voice. “No. Fleecey’s dyin. Look.”
Rook stared. Daryl was staring back with a look of dismayed awe. She must have found her glasses because they were reseated on her face, frames bent. She tugged at Rook’s wrist and pointed down at the cat, who was of course panting and curled and white and limp with her tongue hanging out.
Reset. For-get. Back to Hell, you’ve lost the bet.
Rook felt the pain resurge in her back and realized that her shoulders were shaking.
She said, “Yeah, baby, she’s dying alright.”
“You have to give her the breath.”
Rook closed her eyes.
She felt Daryl’s cool little fingers closing over her forearm. “You have to give her the breath, same way you saved me when I was little.”
Rook said nothing. Her mouth tasted like blood. She opened her eyes and her gaze went to the door. Suppose that door opened and carried her off on a breeze. Maybe she’d get drunk or fuck a stranger or become someone else.
“Rook, Fleecey needs—”
“I can’t just give her mouth-to-mouth, Daryl. It ain’t gonna save her life.”
“You saved me that way.”
“No I didn’t save you. That was years ago and I was just a stupid kid and didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
“But you fixed me. I’m alive.”
Rook looked at her. She most certainly had not fixed her that day. If anything, she’d broken her.
“I didn’t save you, Daryl, you would have been alive anyway. Mom called the ambulance and they came and got you, and that’s why you survived. Not because I resuscitated you.”
She had to call Ingrid. Ingrid would come over and watch Daryl. And later, when Rook came home, Ingrid would determine whether to stay the night with her or head back home, but either way she would bring up the matter of moving in together. Rook and Daryl and Ingrid, the happy family. And maybe they should move in with Ingrid. Maybe they should.
Chapter 3
Rook slipped the box of tampons into her cargo pants pocket. She didn’t like to steal and only did it when she was nervous. She’d feel a rush, and then after a few minutes a hard numbness would set in and her nerves would be calm but alert. In the beginning she’d believed she was going to find a way to pay it all back. She’d bring home candy for Dar, or canned soup. A box of highlighters. Now she knew good and well she wasn’t going to repay jack shit but she kept it up anyway. She wasn’t sure why. She felt really bad.
But not bad enough to stop. If she could fit a box of laundry detergent in her pocket she’d be taking that, too.
She cast another glance toward the back of the pharmacy. Kent was the type who liked to remind everyone how he'd made floor manager within three months of being hired, and he loved to spy on the employees so he could hold things over them. What were the chances that she’d get away with this? Kent had gotten there after she’d already arrived, so he didn’t actually see her come in late. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe no one had told him and he hadn’t checked the time cards. Maybe she could limp things along another month. One more month.
A customer was making his way to the check-out, so Rook walked around the counter to meet him. Young guy with his pants hanging down and boxers hiked up. He wanted a pack of Marlboros. Rook ID’ed him.
Ingrid had said that if they lived together, Daryl would never need a sitter again. Ingrid hinted she could also help make sure Rook took her pills. Rook was studying to be a pharmacist for chrissake, you'd think she could be trusted to take her own pills. If she actually wanted to take them, that is.
The boxers boy handed her his driver’s license. “What happened to your face, lady?”
“I don’t know, what happened to your pants?”
She handed back his ID. His gaze went from the cuts on her face to the tremor in her hand. She jerked it away and rang him up.
He paid for his smokes and turned to leave, muttering, “Twitchy junkie bitch.”
Rook checked herself in the thin band of a plastic mirror on the sunglasses display. She’d looked worse before. Not often.
The smart-mouthed kid was already gone, but she wished she could yell after him that she wasn’t a junkie. She only took prescription. She wanted him to know that she looked like shit because she hadn’t slept in days and had just got eaten by a Coke machine.
Back home as they’d been waiting for Ingrid, Rook had braided Daryl’s hair into a long rope while Daryl stared at Fleecey, watching for her lungs to st
op filling in case she needed to “give her the breath.” Rook had explained that they resuscitate animals with mouth-to-nose, not mouth-to-mouth. Daryl actually took a moment to corroborate this on the Internet. Damned if there weren’t instructions on a Web site for dachshund owners.
Well, Ingrid had been warned.
Rook looked up to see Sadie walking by, her white lab coat cast over her arm, eyes forward as she headed for the door.
“Night, Sadie,” Rook said, but Sadie kept walking like she hadn’t heard her.
Rook looked back toward where Kent was. Hard to tell if he and Sadie had spoken. That silent exit of hers wasn’t a good sign. Truth was, Rook had over-borrowed favors from Sadie and it was hard to blame her if she was now pissed. Sadie was cranky but dependable. Kent, though. On a good day Kent was a twat. Kent was very tall and skinny with chipped teeth, and when he spoke his head rolled like he was missing a vertebrate. Rook once witnessed wax drop from his ear and thwack the counter. God, she hated Kent.
“Hi Rook.” It was Kent.
“Hi Kent!” Her voice sounded charged with way too much nirvana.
She tried not to think about how she must look right now. Her memory conjured her scary reflection in the foggy, blood-smeared bathroom mirror at home.
He said, “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure!”
Kent turned and started to walk toward the back and Rook stayed put like the sword in the stone.
He turned and looked at her. “Come on back.”
“I think there’s a customer…”
“We got it covered.”
She fingered the box in her pocket and followed him. This was it. If ever there was a man who looked about to fire someone, it was Kent. How gruesome, getting fired by Kent.
Chapter 4
He fired her. She had no job.
The landlord was already on the verge of kicking them out. How long before he showed up with eviction papers and a drill for the door lock? A month? Two weeks? And the other bills were so far behind already. Her credit was crap. She was nineteen years old with crappy credit and tons of debt. At least she’d snagged that box of tampons before going down. One less thing to pay for.
She’d thought that if she could string by and just get through pharmacy school, she could make real decent money as a pharmacist and she and Daryl would be set. She believed she could actually make it because her grades were always good. Not the top of her class, but close. However, her brilliant strategizing skills ended somewhere in the neighborhood of making her way through school by getting fired from one drug store after another. She should’ve just been clerking at Circle Ks. Not like she was working the actual pharmacy in those drug stores.
The irony was, not a one of them had caught her stealing. Ingrid didn’t even know! Nobody knew.
She walked along South Claiborne, passing fast food joints and outdated service shops, turning it all over in her mind. Moving in with Ingrid was the next step. If she wanted to stay in school she had no choice. She loved Ingrid, but, damn. And Ingrid was so patient. They had an open relationship because Ingrid said Rook was young and so she forgave her for wanting to sow her wild oats. Those were her official words, anyway. Rook could tell Ingrid hated it when Rook was off with some guy. Truth was, between the job and the school and looking after Dar, it was tough to find time for a decent tumble, no offense to Ingrid. Living separately just helped keep it open. It also made it easier to skip doses on all those pills. Ingrid was a social worker, so she knew a lot of shrinks who managed to keep Rook zombified enough to march through the daily demands with a clenched grimace on her face. Not to mention keeping the wild oats to a minimum. A tidy coincidence that the psychotropics kill libido.
Since Rook had racked up a couple of years at pharmacy school, Ingrid wasn’t the only one who knew a thing or two about prescriptive medicine.
If they moved in with Ingrid, the Daryl thing and the financial thing would suddenly get a whole lot easier. So why did Rook feel the urge to stowaway with Daryl on a tramp steamer to China?
The air was so heavy and thick that Rook knew rain had to be coming soon. If only it would break through this heat and get it over with. She could catch the streetcar if she wanted to but she needed to walk and think, even if it meant sacrificing oxygen. Even though her left leg still ached a little. She’d played that one up for Kent but he’d still fired her.
She could just keep walking and not go home. Keep going until her would-be shift was over and not tell anyone she’d been fired.
“Get in.”
She looked. A red Voyager had pulled in to the Popeye’s parking lot and the driver’s window was down.
She took a step closer and squinted. “Adam?”
Adam was an old flame who made his living selling dope. He’d actually been the one to talk her into pharmacy school, telling her that pharmacists were one of the top-paying professionals out there. And he said if she didn’t make it through to the end she could always use the knowledge to sell dope, like him, and that option paid even better but meant the risk of jail. He was older than she was. A lot older. Married to a former stripper. Two kids. Rook and Adam had had a supernova of a fling right after her parents’ car accident when she’d been slapped into foster. Adam was her first taste of just how effectively sex can disconnect you from your problems. But then she’d met Ingrid, who’d helped her get custody of Daryl, and Rook gave him up.
He was smiling at her. “Where you headed?”
“I’m on a path to destruction.”
“You’re in luck. I was heading that way myself.”
Chapter 5
The sheets were cold and white. His skin was hot to the touch. In the darkness, she could see only silhouettes of their twisting limbs and the faint glow of those white, white sheets.
Further down, a bare fluorescent bulb illuminated the racks. Gleaming metal alloy rails in neat rows, with things stacked high toward the ceiling of the bay. Little seemed to have changed over the years. Same shop-style open bay with a bed and kitchenette thrown in. She smiled, feeling him all over. Good to let her mind forget everything for a while and just focus on what was going on with her body.
He covered her mouth with his lips but she turned away, arching her neck and softly biting his ear lobe.
The way he pressed into her, it brought that delicious charge, but he kept moving wrong and the feeling kept going away. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled. This time, he worked with her, and the sensation started growing. She dug in, determined that he keep at it.
He grabbed her hair and gave her a hard, coffee-and-cigarette kiss. She jerked away.
The sensation stopped again. “Damn it!”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He cupped his hand around her jaw and pulled her face toward him. “Just give me your lips, baby.”
“Cut it out.” She rolled over halfway and folded her arm across her chest with her face toward the wall.
“What?” he said, his voice sounding pissed.
She felt his eyes on her but she said nothing. The swamp coolers hummed loud enough to cover any street noise. He actually had two of them. Two! He hated to sweat.
He rolled away and a moment later the lights came on. The walls were made of corrugated metal, with exposed steel framing studs and racks and racks of particle board shelves. Along the far walls were unidentifiable metal or plastic objects where you could never guess which greater whole was once the sum of these parts. Closer in, the shelves were smaller and lined with stuff like plastic cups, magazines, some dextrose and lactose, empty and half-empty bottles of Abita Light. He was always making a case for buying local.
What a hole. She used to think it was exciting.
He said, “Is it because I tried to kiss you?” The sound of a lighter flicking and an intake of breath. “That it?”
“I got a split lip if you haven’t noticed,” Rook said, but they both knew that wasn’t why.
“
Oh, come off it.”
These secret digs of his were supposed to be a salvage yard. He actually sold things on eBay every once in a while to keep up appearances. But with all the junk lying around, Rook saw no sign of any paraphernalia. Not even for his own use, except for one single X tablet on the nightstand. No sign the wife came around much either. He always kept her neatly away in some mansion uptown.
A long exhalation as he blew out the smoke. “So you’ll spread your legs for me but you won’t let me kiss you?”
She sat up and started for the edge of the bed.
He held her arm. “Wait.”
She glared at him.
He said, “I’m sorry. Just…” He moved his hand in a gesture that meant, ‘stay.’
She said, “I should probably go.”
He winced. Another drag on his cigarette, shaking his head. “Damn it. Goddammit.”
But then he said, “Alright. I’ll give you a lift home.”
And yet she didn’t move. She remained there, her butt on the bed, a foot on the floor. He set his cigarette in an ashtray next to the pink X tablet stamped with a fractured heart.
Adam said, “But for what it’s worth I didn’t mean it like that. Look, you don’t want to kiss we don’t have to kiss. You got a boyfriend now or something?”
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