by Carrie Arcos
“Can I see?” She pointed to Tyler’s sleeve where part of his tattoo showed.
Tyler pulled up his shirt to show her.
“Good work. Most of those I see are pretty cheesy.” She blew on her tea before taking a sip. “Know what it means?”
“Yes,” he said, but didn’t offer the meaning.
Dillon pulled up his shirt and turned around to show off one of his tattoos—his name in cursive along his waistline. “This was when I thought I was all gangster and shit. But this—” He rolled up one of his sleeves and revealed a large skull. It reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. “This is what happens when you get shit-faced and wake up the next morning on a buddy’s couch.”
Finn smiled. “I’ve done a few of those.”
“Maybe this was your work.”
“Not my style. I would have added a yellow smiley face.”
I sat on an orange pillow and studied Finn above the rim of the cup. She was older than Micah, more like Dillon’s age. She was thin, too thin, just like those girls in Micah’s rehab. But she was beautiful in a natural, no-makeup kind of way, not even mascara. She looked like the type of girl Micah would date. And then I knew.
“You said Micah wasn’t here,” I said.
“He left a couple of weeks ago.”
If only I hadn’t waited so long to come.
“Any idea where he went?” Tyler asked.
“Nope.” She put her cup on the floor. “Most of his stuff is gone, but he did leave a few things.” She gestured toward a room. “They’re in the back corner of the bedroom if you want to take a look.”
I got up and walked to the room. A queen-size mattress lay on the floor, next to a red lamp. A tall brown dresser with a vase of dead roses stood in the corner. Next to it was a black trash bag. I sat down on the bed and opened the bag, dumping the contents onto the floor: a pair of jeans, three socks, a guitar pick, a black cap, a broken pair of sunglasses, and The Hobbit. Of all my books, he’d stolen that one. I hadn’t even noticed. I studied the contents of the bag as if they were a trail of clues Micah had left for me to follow. Why else would he have left the book?
I looked through the jean pockets. There was a crumpled dollar and a receipt for Chinese food in a front pocket. In the back, I pulled out a small white piece of paper with a telephone number scrawled in pencil. I stuffed the paper with the number and the dollar into my own pocket.
I stood up and surveyed the room again. Even with the window partially open, the room smelled sickly sweet, but it also smelled faintly like Micah. The flowers were shriveled and sat in yellowish-brown water. I wondered if Micah had given them to Finn. Was that why she’d kept them?
A small bookshelf held old magazines and art books. I pulled one out and was surprised to find The Secret lying on its side. It made me think that maybe I hadn’t had enough positive thoughts about Micah. Maybe if I visualized finding him, we would.
I sighed. There was nothing here. Nothing that would lead me to Micah.
I tried picturing him in the room. His amp would have been plugged into the outlet with the light. He’d sit on the bed and play his guitar. I could almost see him, hunched over, concentrating.
I closed my eyes and tried to hear his voice, but I heard only the silence of the room and the murmur of voices in the other room. I couldn’t hear Micah, and the fear that I had been evading found me: I’d forgotten the sound of his voice.
Tyler cleared his throat behind me. “You find anything?”
I pointed to the junk on the mattress.
“Hmm. Not very interesting prospects.”
“No.” I felt despair creep over me along with the familiar guilt. “Tyler, I think I blew it. I think if I had acted right away, if I had come down here right when I’d gotten the e-mail, I wouldn’t be staring at an empty room. Micah would have been here.”
“Yeah, he probably would have.”
I turned toward him, surprised.
“You said not to sugarcoat anything.” Tyler walked over to the bed and picked up the guitar pick. “Or maybe he wouldn’t. Life’s not determined by ‘probablys’ and ‘would haves.’”
The way Tyler said things made sense, even when it was hard to hear. “What’s Finn like?” I asked.
“She’s his usual type. Skinny. Pretty.”
I nodded. “She’s an addict.” I had intended it as a question.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s how they met.” He paused. “Come on, we should save her from Dillon. He’ll be asking her out any second now.”
“Find what you’re looking for?” Finn asked when we walked back into the living room.
“Not really. How long have you known Micah?” This time I opted for a thick black beanbag.
Dillon interrupted, “Time for a smoke,” and stood up. “Tyler?”
Tyler looked at me as if to make sure I’d be all right.
I nodded.
“Sounds good,” he said.
“We’ll go outside,” Dillon said. “Let you ladies have your girl-time. Finn,” he bowed. “Pleasure.”
“Can you spare one?”
“Sure.” Dillon handed her a cigarette from his pack.
“We’ll be right outside,” Tyler said, and he followed Dillon out the door.
Finn got some matches out of a drawer in the kitchen. “I’ll give you the fast-forward version.” She lit the cigarette. “We met on the boardwalk. He was playing his guitar. I sat and listened to a few songs because I didn’t have anything to do, and I thought he was good, really good. I bought him lunch. We partied a little that night. He moved in a week later.
“It was cool. He was cool, but then things started getting weird. One night I got a phone call from him, and he was talking so fast I could hardly understand him. He said the cops were after him. I asked him where he was. He didn’t know. All he could tell me was that he had borrowed someone’s phone.”
She smoked the cigarette hard and fast.
“I’d hear him pacing and talking to himself, instead of sleeping at night. He said our phone was tapped. He wouldn’t talk to me in the apartment in anything over a whisper because of the wires. I was worried about him. He wouldn’t let me call your folks.”
“So you sent the e-mail.”
“I sent the e-mail.”
“In the e-mail you said he was, and I quote, ‘into some serious shit.’ What did you mean? The drugs?”
“He was using too much. I kept telling him. And the selling. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but he’d met some guy who’d gotten him into it, before we were even together. He said the cops had found out and were watching our apartment.”
I was having a hard time believing that Micah was caught up in dealing and police, even though the guys at the surf shop had said something similar. Was he really that stupid? That far gone? “Did you believe him?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. He had all kinds of people in and out of here—businessmen, surfers, moms, teenagers. Maybe the cops wanted to watch him so they could catch the bigger fish.”
“Dillon said you were his sugar momma.”
Finn laughed. “No.”
“So he left because he thought the police were after him?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t exactly leave a note.”
“Any idea of where he might have gone?”
“He could be anywhere. Some friends spotted him in Ocean Beach. Hell, he could still be in San Diego. He mentioned LA from time to time—that’s where he wanted to go and do his music.”
My stomach sank. LA was huge. If Micah had gone to LA, he was lost. He would be lost forever.
Finn pressed her cigarette into a turtle-shaped ashtray. She got up and went into the bathroom. I guessed she was finished with her story. I wanted her to keep talking, to tell me more about her time with Micah. She might be the last living connection I had to my brother.
“Where are you from?” I asked Finn when she emerged from the bathroom. I wante
d to know more about her, about why Micah chose her.
“Ohio.”
“How’d you get here?”
“A bus.” She opened a jar of nail polish and started painting her nails a deep green.
“Did you always want to be an artist?”
“I used to carry a sketch pad with me when I was a kid.” She didn’t look up from her nails.
“I wanted to be a dancer,” I said, trying to relate. “I used to close the door to my room and practice.”
“What happened?”
“I wasn’t very good or maybe I just lacked the confidence.”
“Which one was it?”
I answered truthfully, “No confidence.”
I sat and watched her for a while. I didn’t know what else to say, and she clearly was over our conversation.
“Well,” I finally said. “Thank you for . . . your time.” I stood up to go.
“Rachel,” she said.
I looked at her and there were tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry I’m such a bitch. Your brother . . . God, what an asshole. You’d think he would have at least said good-bye. I mean, how much easier is it to say good-bye than I love you?” She waved her hands around to dry them. “Just don’t give up, okay? He’s fucked up, yes, but he was also—I mean, he is also hurting, you know?”
I looked away. I didn’t want to hear about how much he was hurting. He chose to hurt. My parents, who couldn’t sleep and watched TV instead of talking and avoided friends and family, didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have a choice. We were the ones who were hurting.
“When you’re like Micah, when you’re that low, you don’t know how to get back up. And even when you get to the place where you want to call someone or go home, there’s this enormous load of shame.”
She spoke as if she carried some of that shame. I wondered how much she was talking about herself instead of Micah.
“He always talked about how smart you were, how good you were at everything. He told me about how you were in the top classes, about how everyone looked up to you. He was proud of you. I think he wished he could be more like you.”
I knew she was laying it on pretty thick, but I wanted to believe her. I wanted to know that part of the old Micah was still out there.
“I know you may not believe me, but Micah loved you. He felt the most guilty about leaving you.”
“Well,” I said. I could see the day changing through her windows. “The sun will be down soon.”
“He even told me about your ex.”
I glared at her. “Keith?”
“Yeah. Micah said that he’d cheated on you and tried to ruin your reputation. I guess he beat the guy up pretty badly. Micah told him he would kill him if he ever came near you again.”
I couldn’t stop the tears from forming. So that explained why Keith had been absent for a week not long after our breakup (he told everyone he had the flu), and why he’d avoided me when he returned to school. It was Micah. He had still cared.
“I just thought you should know.”
“Thank you,” I said, and smiled.
“It’s so hard,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“When you love someone. It’s hard to let them go.”
“Yeah,” I said, and headed for the door.
Chapter Twenty
Micah was exactly eleven months and seven days older than me, which meant he was a full year ahead of me in school. This also meant that I had the privilege of always being compared to him because he went first.
The first day of class always began with a roll call. “Rachel Stevens?” The teacher would stop and look up.
I’d raise my hand. “Present.”
“I didn’t know Micah had a sister.” Pause.
“Yes.”
This was followed by one of either two moves. The first was a raised eyebrow and tightly pursed lips. That was the signal for trouble. The other response was a large smile followed by, “Welcome.”
Through seven years of elementary, two years of junior high, and three years of high school, I was known as Micah’s younger sister. I often wondered if I had been the older, would he have been known as Rachel’s younger brother. I doubted it.
We both played our roles with seeming ease. I was the A student. I took college prep and advanced classes. I served on student council. I ran and played volleyball. Micah, on the other hand, was an average student. He did not play sports or volunteer. He led a band, embraced his inner rebel in ninth grade, and didn’t look back. He didn’t cause trouble, he just didn’t engage. He always stood a little apart, approaching life in a nonchalant kind of way. That is, until he met meth. He committed to her with a passion that I had never seen in him before.
When Micah came home from rehab, our quiet house became silent. It was as if we were holding our breath, waiting to see what Micah would do.
According to some book my parents had read, over 50 percent of users relapsed. For meth users, the statistics were worse. As if to account for this, drug programs believed relapse was actually part of recovery.
The first dinner after Micah had come home, my mom spoke quickly as if any space in the conversation frightened her. She talked about the weather, mild for that time of year. Then she spoke of her work, but saw that she was quickly losing us. She asked me about school. I said it was okay. She looked at me with wide eyes, pleading for my help. I looked down at the bloody steak I was eating. She asked my dad about his day. She did not talk about Micah’s rehab or his drug situation, but it didn’t matter. In my mind, everything she said circled back to Micah. She might as well have been saying, “Blah, blah, meth, blah, Micah, blah, rehab, drugs, blah, screwed up his life.”
“This was good, Mom,” Micah said after he finished dinner. “Much better than the food in rehab. Thanks.”
He said the word and I could feel the house give a little, releasing some pressure, like an overfilled balloon.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and she gave my dad one of their “secret” knowing looks.
Micah stood up and took his plate and cup to the sink. He rinsed the plate, because there was nothing to scrape off, and put it in the dishwasher. Standing at the counter, he finished his water and added the glass to the rest of the dirty dishes.
“I think I’m gonna go chill for a while.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mom tense.
“Chill?” my dad asked, an edge in his voice.
Micah stopped on his way to the stairs. He remained calm. If he was angry, he didn’t show it. I felt as if I might lose it. “Yeah, I’m tired. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.” He grabbed the railing. “Maybe later we can talk about that job you were telling me about?”
My dad said, “Sure. Later.”
“Good night, honey.” My mom’s nervous voice trailed after him.
I finished my food and repeated Micah’s routine at the sink. I scraped chunks of gray and pink flesh into the garbage disposal and felt sick. My mom joined me at the sink, but my dad still sat at the table. I plopped myself down on our dark leather couch in the family room and quietly turned on the TV, so as not to irritate my dad.
I watched some show about a family, the kind with the distracting built-in laugh track. I observed the episode like a science experiment. It contained all of the usual suspects. Wild teenage daughter. Check. Loving but ignorant father. Check. Working mother, juggling it all. Check. Annoying little brother. Check.
The major conflict in the episode was that the daughter wanted to go to a party. Her parents said no. She went anyway. Under pressure, the little brother squealed. By the end of the half-hour show everything was resolved. The daughter, though upset at being grounded, understood that her parents were really trying to protect her because they loved her.
The last scene showed the whole family in the kitchen, standing over a cherry pie the mother had baked. There was no tension, nothing that needed further discussion, no lingering pain or hurt. I turned off
the TV, feeling gypped at having wasted half an hour of my life.
Before I went to sleep that night, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and read until I was good and tired. I said Micah’s steps. But instead of turning on my fan, I lay back in the bed and listened for Micah. I tried picturing my brother through the thin wall that separated our rooms. I barely breathed.
The sounds of TV drifted up from downstairs. I could not hear anything coming from Micah’s room. No pacing. No banging. Only quiet.
I reached over and turned the fan on medium. I stared at the ceiling while the fan purred, and thought, We’re going to be okay; we’re going to be okay. Then I drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-One
The fire crackled through faint rhythms from portable stereos and guitars and voices. It flickered, changing colors from sunset orange to sunrise yellow. The smells of sweet sage, ash, and beer blended into a familiar party scent. I wasn’t close enough to the fire pit to enjoy the warmth, but at least I had on my sweatshirt. I covered my head with the hood. Since the sun had gone down, the temperature had dropped quite a bit. I felt sorry for Tyler; he must have been freezing in his T-shirt and jeans, but of course he tried not to show it.
After leaving Finn’s apartment, Dillon said we needed to unwind. All the tension was starting to get him down. We grabbed a couple of burgers and asked around some more about Micah. After the sun disappeared, Dillon took us to a party on the beach, which had a hundred or so stoneys and surfers scattered around three fire pits.
In theory it sounded fun, but now that I was here, I wanted to leave. I didn’t know anyone and felt that familiar shyness I got when I was at a party. In addition to being the usual designated driver, I was a typical wallflower. I never knew what to say. This party was no different.
I could hardly even see the people around me. Their faces were only partially illuminated by the light from the half-moon, stars, and fires, but I couldn’t help but search the distorted faces for Micah. Even though Finn had proved to be a dead end and we were no closer to finding him, I felt hopeful. He was still out there. Finn had given me back a small piece of my brother. Maybe if I just stayed put, he’d come and brush up against me. Maybe I needed to stop searching.