Out of Orange: A Memoir

by Cleary Wolters

  She smiled when she caught me staring blankly. Her smile was warm and her blue eyes sparkled in the low light of the votive candle in front of her. An image from the previous night and that same smile warmed me the same way the drink would. In love and intoxicated by its euphoric chemistry, my world’s colors were made more brilliant. I was more attuned to the beauty Piper cast on every little thing around me than the mundane task of the accounting Phillip was doing.

  Phillip handed each of our friends an envelope filled with the same amount of cash for tickets he had priced earlier. The difference between round-trip Chicago and Boston fares was negligible. He had prepared one for each of them; what they did with it was up to them. Our only string was that they let us know what they were doing. My heart sank with a loud thump in the pit of my stomach when he handed Piper an envelope. The expression on her face when he handed it to her broke the delicious spell I was under. Is she mad?

  I did not know Phillip had already gone so far as to get the money ready to dole out to our friends. I thought they would decide what they wanted to do for the next two weeks, then we would either get their tickets home or give them money the next day. I certainly had no idea he had produced one of these for Piper. Did he think she would go with Donald? Was I wrong to not even think of that? Without a word to me, she finished her drink and left the bar. I didn’t want to follow her to the bathroom. If she had something to say, she would without my intruding on her in the bathroom.

  Garrett and Edwin were going to London. Donald was meeting a friend in Madrid. Phillip said we were going to Amsterdam. I had said at one point that I wanted to celebrate my thirty-first birthday there. I assumed that Phillip and Piper had plotted something involving Amsterdam behind my back. Perhaps at the same time Phillip had done all this ticket pricing and banking I had missed. But why then was she mad? She didn’t come back from the toilet.

  Piper was sitting at the desk and was on the phone when I walked into the room. Her bag was lying open on our bed and it was already packed. A T-shirt she had borrowed from me was neatly folded and sat atop the dresser. I sat down in the chair and quietly waited for her to finish her call. All she said into the phone was a time and then looked at her watch. She was apparently repeating this back to whoever had her on hold for a silent century. Piper looked as though she had the weight of the world on her shoulders when she hung up the phone and turned her chair to me.

  “I can’t do this, Cleary.” She looked me straight in the eye. Were we fighting? Was it the cash Phillip had handed her to go away? Is that what she thought? I couldn’t read any emotion in her blank expression. It could have been anger, sadness, hatred. I had no clue. I could see no hint of our reality staring back at me in her piercing blue eyes, but my questions did not fit the occasion. This was no fight. This was an absolute certainty. She was leaving. Was she breaking up with me?

  “I thought we were going to Amsterdam for my birthday.” I made no effort to hide my own disappointment or sadness. I didn’t cry or anything as melodramatic as that, and I didn’t really care about Amsterdam. It’s just the only thing that came out of my mouth. If I had said what I really felt, it would have been that I wanted to go with her right then, or I would have begged her to please not leave me there, just stay. But I knew she wouldn’t stay and she knew I couldn’t go.

  “I just can’t do it, Cleary.” Then I understood. She wasn’t talking about Amsterdam, or us, she was talking about carrying bags full of heroin home. It didn’t matter if it was because she almost lost her luggage in Brussels, or when the bag she was supposed to carry didn’t show up in Zurich—she thought it was a bad omen or a stroke of miraculous luck she shouldn’t ignore. It didn’t matter if it was the lies she didn’t want to tell her family anymore, the ones she didn’t think they believed. I would not try and change her mind. I wouldn’t tell her what Phillip and I had hoped she might do instead. She was doing exactly what I knew she would do, exactly what she had hinted she was going to do, and I had been too caught up in my own plans and schemes for her future to listen to her in the moment. Piper was doing exactly what she should do, and what I wished so desperately I could too: she was walking away.

  The phone rang and I stared at it. Piper ran over and picked it up, listened for a minute, and replied, “Okay. Bye.” She hung up, then told me where the guys were going. They were waiting, and I should go. We stood staring at each other for a moment, then she told me again that I should go. For a millisecond I saw Piper there, not the stubborn decision she had become, the resolution that wouldn’t allow her to so much as smile at me or she might not leave. I didn’t go, though. I didn’t hear where she had said they were going and I didn’t care. I sat while she finished packing. I told her how long I thought it would be before I could be back and get out to San Francisco.

  Then she had her coat on, then her bag was on her shoulder, and then she walked to the door. I got up, held it open, and watched her walk down the hallway to the elevators. She turned around in the elevator with a sad smile and said, “Hurry up!” before the elevator doors closed. I couldn’t.

  11 Going Postal

  Brattleboro, Vermont

  Up to June 6, 1996

  I FLICKED MY VERY LAST CIGARETTE out the car window after smoking it to the butt. The pack was crumpled on the seat next to me, but I checked anyway. Maybe one was hiding in there. I glanced down at my ashtray, full of half-smoked cigarettes from better days. I was flat broke, but if the check I’d written to the gas station and store the day before hadn’t already bounced and the bank would let me keep twenty dollars out of my precious deposit, I could buy cigarettes, lunch, and cat food. I could even get the car washed.

  The day was gorgeous, making it difficult to maintain my discipline and focus on going to the bank, buying some lunch, getting cat food, and getting back to work. But I had to. Being hungry and out of cigarettes helped to motivate me. I had the windows open, and my wet hair in the wind felt refreshing, though not quite as invigorating as a swim in the mountain spring I was passing would have been. Every time I drove down this road to Brattleboro and saw the big rocks decorated with sunbathers, I recalled Piper promising me “Next summer” with the top down on my Miata as if it were a dream, someone else’s life. At the same time, it was hard to believe that two and a half years had already passed.

  It had been a long time since I was down to my last cigarette, not a penny to my name, and on the brink of despair. Ironically, it had been just as long since I’d felt this happy and sane. My little paycheck certainly wasn’t like the payday I used to have in Chicago, but the three-hundred-dollar check sitting next to me, atop the collection of love letters from bill collectors, meant more than the sum of dollars printed on its face. It meant victory. I was pulling out of my nosedive just in the nick of time.

  I was no longer escorting drug smugglers. I had gotten away. It had been almost two years now and nothing happened to me or Hester. I owed my freedom and safety to two guys I didn’t even know, two guys who got busted actually carrying the drugs into the country. That had shut Alajeh down, at least for the people I knew. It was over. Bradley got busted trying to collect one of these fellows from the airport in San Francisco. The guy had been caught and decided to identify Bradley, who was waiting for him at Arrivals. They got hurt, but not by Alajeh, and as far as I knew, Bradley was being taken care of. He had kept quiet. He had not gone to jail yet, and I guessed by now that wasn’t going to happen. The other fellow got nabbed in Chicago; he was with Phillip. Luckily for Phillip, this guy had not done the same thing as the one in San Francisco.

  Vermont’s Department of Education had cut the check to pay me for just one half day of computer training for their high school teachers. I was a professional computer geek now. If all I did was that, twice a day, five days a week, I would be sitting pretty. It wasn’t the writer I had come to Vermont to become, but I would be able to pay my bills and feed my kitties in a more purposeful way than waiting on tables until I retired. That was wh
at I was so happy about. I was at the end of my rope, flat broke, but my big bet had paid off. I had taken a huge risk on the crazy notion that the Internet was going to be as big as cable, maybe even as big as television, and I had a place in it. Quitting my job as a waitress at the Four Columns Inn and selling my Miata for enough cash to get by while I turned my hobby into a paying job hadn’t been as insane as my friends had warned.

  My new friends had good cause for concern too. I had told them all about my crazy past, so the notion that perhaps my grasp on reality was a wee bit shaky seemed more plausible than the idea that I could make a living out of this World Wide Web thing. The Internet was something no one in my new circle of friends had even heard of a year earlier, so they really thought their warning about spending so much time on my computer, quitting my job, and selling the cute car was all prudent advice. The check sitting next to me was my proof; all my work had not been in vain and I was right.

  Janice was to blame. Janice was a middle-aged screenplay writer from Los Angeles who had helped me adapt my first horrible novel into an even more awful screenplay. Janice was one of Larry and Melony’s friends. She lived on top of Black Mountain outside of Newfane, Vermont, in a little modern cabin. She was an oddball transplant from Los Angeles who had allegedly dated a movie director in Hollywood in her day. I’d met her at one of Larry and Melony’s parties. They loved hosting parties. When they introduced me to their friends it was always as a writer and with some people it was clear they had already shared stories about my interesting past.

  Janice fit the latter group. She had told me my life should be a movie and had read my first novel, which was a poorly disguised version of my reality, and she had thought it would make a good screenplay. She had wanted to help write it. I knew she was a copyeditor who got to work from home in Vermont for a company in California, which I thought was amazing in and of itself. But Janice was more. She could shop this screenplay to some of her connections out there in La-La Land. I had paid her to work with me to do this. That hadn’t worked out, but it had led to a fruitful introduction. She had introduced me as a computer genius to a fellow named Nicholas. He owned the only computer store in Brattleboro. With Nicholas’s guidance, I had helped Janice to get online and had fun doing it. Janice’s company was asking its contractors (her) to connect to something called CompuServe, get email, and be able to access an FTP server. This was not a simple task in 1994, but Nicholas had walked me through it, then asked if I would do the same for other customers.

  Nicholas was an Englishman in his midforties, really tall with short dark straight hair, always well dressed, and oh so proper. He owned the computer store on Main Street in Brattleboro. He was also part of a chess club, of all things, and invited me to join. I liked the idea of playing chess at the Commons Tavern on Sunday nights. It was something new to do, there would be new people to meet, and who knew? I might even find another lesbian living in Vermont. It had been a long time since I had anything bigger than a cat in my bed. They had a big fireplace there, open mic nights, comedy nights, and bands. The Commons Tavern was the heart of Brattleboro’s social scene.

  Nicholas’s chess club included a bunch of computer hobbyists and professionals, and this was when my simple plan to write until I ran out of money was diverted. I had bought a new Power Mac from Nicholas to replace my obsolete notebook and then a modem for myself, after I got Janice online. Nicholas had started paying me to do this for his customers, and so I had some insight into just how many people were buying these doohickeys and getting online. The guys talked about the Internet and how you could broadcast to the entire world for free and communicate with anyone on planet Earth. Nicholas had expressed an interest in offering web design services out of his computer store and I got curious.

  I downloaded HTML 1.0, and an obsession ensued. Melony and Larry had gotten photos of most of their sellable art onto Zip drives. In fact, most of the artists who gravitated around them had done the same. Their studio was outfitted with all the new tools of art and design. I already knew my way around Photoshop and Illustrator so I could help, but I wasn’t a graphic designer and didn’t want to be one. I wanted to build something on the World Wide Web and tried to explain to them that they should be putting their artwork there, not on Zip drives. Everyone but my geek friends thought it was a crazy waste of time and energy. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before they would see what the hell I was talking about.

  It had been a struggle, but my regular paycheck from Twelve-Twelve, as director, was about to begin. We formed the company on December 12, 1995, the previous year. Nicholas knew business; I knew the technology. The paltry check on the seat next to me from the Department of Education meant that I had been right and all the eighty-hour workweeks hadn’t been a waste. The check I was about to deposit, and that would save me and my kitties from starvation in the nick of time, was the first of many much bigger ones to come.

  I habitually slowed down to thirty miles per hour at the entrance to Brattleboro, rolled up my window, and turned on the air-conditioning. The cop who usually hid in the roadside lot, right where the speed limit changed to twenty-five miles per hour, was in his usual spot with his radar gun fixed on passing cars. Locals always flashed their lights and honked at him as they passed. I was a local now and the speed trap was for tourists, but police still spooked me. I quietly proceeded by the cop without flashing my lights, checked that my speed was under thirty miles per hour, and avoided Main Street’s lunch hour bottleneck.

  Instead, I cut over to a tiny side street that ran between the river and the back of the buildings lining Main Street. Main Street was more like a parking lot on most weekdays at noon. Thankfully, the drive-thru entrance for my bank could be accessed via the back alley and I could make my dash into and out of town quick and painless. If I was able to get cash, I would buy a ham and cheese sub from Subway, stop at the gas station and fill up, buy some cigarettes and cat food, and go home.

  I made my way down the alley, into the bank lot, and up to the drive-thru window and slowly pulled forward. Once stopped at the teller’s window, I signed the back of my little check from the State of Vermont’s Department of Education. I would hold out some money, if I could. I wasn’t sure if I was overdrawn yet or not. If I was, it would only be by a few dollars, but they still would only let me deposit my check. I wouldn’t get any cash back. If that happened, making it back to my house would be dicey with as little gas as I had left in my tank. I wouldn’t be able to go to the gas station on the way home, because if I was overdrawn, it would be the check I had written to the same gas station the day before that had caused it.

  In any case, I needed a withdrawal slip to try to get cash back, and I had forgotten my checkbook. “Can I get a slip, please?” I asked after handing an already made-out deposit slip and my paycheck to the cashier. The cashier smiled her you-again-with-no-check smile and handed it to me. I quickly filled it out, handed it back, and watched the teller, hopeful she would give me back cash. I was so relieved when the teller started counting out bills.

  Until she stopped counting, anyway, and looked up at me. “Excuse me!” the teller stammered strangely. I couldn’t tell if she was apologizing or thought I had said something to her. She looked shocked, which made no sense in either scenario. Something flashed in my peripheral vision and caught my attention. It came from in front of my car. I had been too focused on the teller counting out my twenties to notice somebody had pulled a dark SUV into the drive-thru directly in front of me.

  The manner in which they had pulled their vehicle into its place was rude and aggressive, but they stayed there instead of maneuvering out of the lot, as I had thought they were doing. The SUV blocked my exit, so that I was trapped in the bank portal. I forgot about the money and the teller for a second and I panicked. Something akin to my cats’ instinct whenever they saw their cat carrier brought out into plain view kicked in and I wanted out of there. The only way out of my spot would be to back up. I surveyed the world behind m
e via my rearview mirror as I twisted in my seat to negotiate reversing out of the trap. But I was blocked in at the rear too. Another SUV was behind me.

  Behind that sat a string of state and local police cars with their lights on but no sirens. I looked back at the teller, wondering for a moment if the bank was being robbed. This was not a scene one would expect to find in Brattleboro, Vermont, on a gorgeous summer day, lunch hour or not.

  In spite of the traffic, the town was still quiet or I had gone deaf. There was a smattering of nine-to-fivers, new age hippies, and vegetarians milling about in search of food. They meandered down the sidewalk like they normally did. But in front of the bank, they were starting to gather. They knew something very odd, something big was under way at their happy little bank. From their perspective, I was the spectacle, not just stuck in the middle of it. I saw U.S. MARSHAL imprinted in huge golden type on the sleeve of a man getting out of one of the SUVs. There were more of these creatures emerging from everywhere, like they were just dropping from the sky. My heart stopped. I knew what this was. It was here, the thing I had begun to believe would never come.

  “Catherine Wolters! Please step out of the car with your hands in front of you!” The guy in marshals’ duds had walked up to my passenger door, opened it, and he was leaning in, as though he meant to join me. Nobody calls me Catherine Wolters but my mother and bill collectors. “Do you have any weapons in your possession?”