First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  I wasn’t in the mood to guess the movie that she was describing to me. “Sure, yeah, I remember. What about it?”

  “You know how that one time, those kids left and got into a car accident?”

  “Wait, were you in an accident?” I demanded. “Were you driving? Where did you get a car?”

  “Can you come get me?” Jade asked. I heard sirens scream by, close to wherever she was. “I’m ready to go home.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I’ve been having so much fun and—”

  I interrupted again. “Where are you?” I asked, but I tried not to sound mad so that we would start fighting and she would hang up on me. She told me her location only vaguely, giving me the names of a few streets that didn’t intersect before I finally pinned her down and said to stay exactly there, and that I was coming. I thought briefly about Rory telling me not to leave the apartment before I grabbed my keys and got the kitten and went to get my mom.

  ∞

  Rory

  “Goddamn bitch!” Leopold seethed. “Goddamn whore!” He picked up a vase and threw it against the wall where it shattered. The fake flowers fluttered to the floor.

  “Calm down!” I growled at him, and he stopped pacing. “Tell me what happened.”

  He started to go on about his girlfriend, tossing out the same insults as before and nothing useful, so I walked out of the room to find Ronnie so he could tell me what was really going on. He was outside banging his fist into his palm, looking even more angry than Leopold did.

  “What the hell happened with Jourdan?” I asked him.

  “She was cheating on me!” Ronnie said. Loudly, he said that way too loudly.

  “Quiet down, man. You knew she was still sleeping with Leopold—”

  “Not Leopold,” he said, at the same volume. “She had another guy on the side. Leopold’s friend, that stuffy one he used to take out to get drunk. Bernie something.”

  “Bernie Tollman,” I said slowly. “Bernard Tollman. He was carrying on with Jourdan, too?”

  “She swore I was the only one!”

  The only one besides Leopold, he meant.

  “I dropped her off at my place and was driving Leopold back here and a phone started ringing,” Ronnie went on. “Jourdan had dropped it between the seats. And I hear Leopold go, ‘Bernie? Why are you calling Jourdan?’ The idiot couldn’t think of a lie. Leopold had me drive over to the lawyer’s office and if they weren’t both such chicken shits, they would have thrown down right there. I’ve never seen Leopold so pissed. He came back here, yelled at Deanna and the kids to get out, and…oh, shit.” His eyes widened as he looked past me, up the driveway.

  I turned and saw Leopold’s dad, the old man, coming toward us in his motorized wheelchair, flanked by two nurse-looking people toting an IV pole and some kind of breathing machine.

  “He never leaves the house,” Ronnie whispered. “Deanna must have gone straight to him. Leopold is screwed.” He started to get into the car and I grabbed his arm.

  “Wait a minute. What are you going to do about Jourdan? Is she still at your place?”

  “I don’t know where she is.” He shook his head. “What am I going to do with a girl like that? She’s a liar.” I let him go and he got into Leopold’s car and threw up a cloud of dust as he pulled away, escaping.

  A liar. I thought about Isobel, and I thought about myself, too, as I watched the slow procession toward Leopold’s house.

  “Mr. Morin,” Leopold’s dad croaked out when he finally arrived at where I was standing. I felt like I should bow or something. “Is my son at home?”

  There was another crash from inside the house. “I’ll go in first,” I suggested, and I told Leopold to calm the hell down because his father had arrived.

  His eyes got big and scared. He was afraid of that shriveled up old man who couldn’t get around without two helpers. But the way his dad had looked in the driveway, if I had been Leopold, I probably would have been scared, too.

  “Is he mad?” he asked me, his voice low.

  Yeah, but by now his dad was used to his ass-wipe behavior. I shrugged.

  “I never should have gone back to see Jourdan!” he moaned. “She’s a damn honeypot! And her, with Bernie Tollman…can you believe she was cheating on me?”

  Right, it was pretty hard to believe that Jourdan, with whom Leopold was cheating on his wife, would turn around and do it back to him. He was too keyed up to see me nodding like I really could believe it. At least he didn’t know about Jourdan and Ronnie, or about what she had offered to do to me in the back of the SUV. I had declined.

  I heard the procession enter the room before Leopold’s dad spoke. “Leo, you dumb…” He lapsed into another language I didn’t recognize and I turned to go.

  “You can stay, Rory,” Leopold called, like now I was the protection from his father.

  “No, he’ll leave. He’ll go and tell that woman that you won’t be seeing her again, and it’s final. Give her this,” the dad said, and handed me a heavy envelope. I weighed it in my hand, figuring out how much he was paying Jourdan to stay away from his son since he couldn’t trust Leopold to keep his pants zipped. It was more than what I owed for the drugs, that was what this thick envelope felt like. There was enough in here to get myself free and clear, to start things fresh with Isobel, and no one would know what had really happened if I told them that I’d given it to Jourdan.

  I tapped the envelope against my palm. “Done,” I said, and walked out to Leopold apologizing and his dad reaming him in two languages. I got in the car and thought a while longer before I started it and drove, calling Isobel as I went. She didn’t answer, God damn it. I thought about calling Rella to see if they were together, but it was getting late now, with all the screwing around I’d had to do in dealing with Leopold.

  “Isobel. Where are you?” I asked her phone. “Are you in my apartment or did you go looking for your mom?” I reached on the seat next to me and picked up the envelope. Isobel needed me around. She needed somewhere safe, somewhere permanent. I thought about the things that Rella had told me, things that Isobel had never admitted but that the old lady had guessed.

  “Jade was an alcoholic, an addict, and a prostitute,” she’d said to me. “There were always men cycling around of whatever hole they were living in. And I think Izzie had to deal with them too. She would come to me, sometimes, and I used to hear her crying. The nightmares.”

  It had been hard to stay seated in my little chair, holding my Grand Canyon tea cup and not throwing it across the room. “They touched her? They hurt her?” I’d asked when I could do it without yelling.

  Rella had sighed, and wiped carefully at her eyes with one of her little lacey napkins. “Jade didn’t protect her from them. Lord knows no one else did, either.”

  I crushed the envelope in my fist as I thought about Isobel as a little girl, hiding and afraid, crying and hurt. I could use this money to start a better life for her, a home with plants and the spoon thing that she wanted. What would Jourdan do with it, anyway? Blow it on drugs, booze, cheap crap to wear, shiny polish on her nails, like Jade did? Isobel had one dress, just the one, and her hands had scars from work and mistreatment. She was probably driving around the city right now, looking for her mother, rather than letting her rot out on the streets.

  Ronnie opened his apartment door when I pounded on it. “Yeah, she’s still here,” he said, and stood aside to let me into his crappy place. Jourdan was curled on his couch, her eyes puffed from crying and her makeup dripping down her cheeks. She sat up straight when she laid her red eyes on me, and her face went from miserable to petrified.

  “Did Leopold send you here?” her voice trembled out. “Did you come here to kill me? I’m sorry, ok? Bernie was just so nice to me. He said that he would get me those Chanel sunglasses, you know the ones I mean? The gold frames and—”

  I threw the envelope onto the couch next to her. “That’s to stay away from Leopold. From his father. If yo
u come around again, there’s going to be a serious problem that you don’t want to have. Do you understand?”

  She stopped yapping about the sunglasses and nodded silently.

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  She repeated my words and shivered. I was pretty sure that it was done between her and Leopold now, so I turned to Ronnie. “What are you doing, man?” I asked him, and he shrugged.

  “What are you going to do when you’re crazy about a girl?” he asked me.

  “Oh, are you, Ronnie?” Jourdan jumped up and threw herself at him and he shoved his tongue down her throat.

  “Jesus fuck.” I could hardly stop myself from grabbing Ronnie and hitting him for being so stupid, but I left them at it and went to find Isobel. What were you going to do when you were crazy about a girl?

  Chapter 13

  Isobel

  Jade took down the hot dog like she hadn’t eaten in days. She probably hadn’t.

  “This is so good,” she moaned, loudly enough that the waitress on the other side of the restaurant looked over at us and scowled.

  My mom had been attracting a lot of attention from the staff since we’d first walked in, sometimes because of her volume, but mostly because she was so dirty that she actually smelled. It was late enough that we were the only customers in there, but I still felt bad taking her to a restaurant. I just hadn’t been sure of where to go. The thought of sitting in her apartment, among the trash and junk and the floor as the litterbox, was something I couldn’t quite face, and Rory didn’t want me to go back to my place. I certainly couldn’t take her to his, either—I blushed just thinking of how she would act with him, about her flirting and touching everything he owned, trying to claim his bed, his clothes, his body. But I couldn’t leave her on her own, either.

  She reached and picked up a handful of fries and shoved them into her mouth. Chili and grease dripped down her chin. “I’m glad we came here. Did you know that I was a waitress at this place? This is where I met your father. He left me a hundred-dollar tip.”

  “Yeah?” I asked listlessly, staring at my phone. Jade went on happily as she ate, telling me about my father, how he was in the Air Force and about his friends and going through training. I recognized the plot right away and listened with half an ear for her pauses so I could make appropriate sounds of appreciation or agreement. My screen didn’t change as she chattered, because Rory hadn’t written in a while. I had been afraid that he would be mad that I had left his apartment to go find my mom, but he had written back “ok” when I’d answered his messages and told him that I was picking her up. I guessed that he understood that I’d had to. I’d said that if I’d let her get away this time, I didn’t know if I’d ever find her again, and I told him we were going to this restaurant.

  But now that I had her sitting across from me in the booth, I was so disgusted and angry that I almost wished I hadn’t been looking. She was fine, apparently, and had given me a vague story about leaving her apartment with a “friend” (a guy, I translated) and going to have fun with him (sleep with him for money and do some drugs). But when he’d run off and left her (and if I guessed right, not paid her), her luck had gone downhill.

  “You’ve been missing for days. Where were you sleeping, Mom?” I had asked her in my car, as we drove through the night with the windows rolled down to blow away her stench.

  “Around,” she’d told me, playing with the cat. “So cute, Izzie! Can we stop? I need some cigarettes. I like what Rory smokes. Where is he?”

  “He quit smoking,” I’d told her shortly.

  Now I watched her as she gestured to the waitress to refill her glass of pop and picked up the plate of fries to lick it. “Jade, no!” I said sharply and she looked at me, pissed at my tone, but put it down.

  I remembered that when I had first met Rella, I had eaten in just the same way, shoving the food into my mouth with dirty hands. She had watched me and not said a word about it, as crazy as she was about manners and table rules. Instead, she’d told me that there was plenty of food at her house and she would be happy to have me over to eat anytime.

  I closed my eyes as tears filled them up, because I wanted to go see her right now, to talk to her about Jade, Kash, and about Rory, too. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling about him—it was an emotion that I couldn’t pin down or name, and in my experience, new things were usually bad things. Rella could help me figure this out just like she had helped me fill out all the forms and applications for aid and medication and hospitalizations for Jade. I wasn’t going to be able to stay away from my building, not with Rella in it.

  “There he is!” Jade suddenly sang out, and my head swiveled over to see Rory come into the restaurant. Now the waitress looked scared instead of disgusted by Jade, because he was dressed all in black and he was so big and fierce, and especially because of the frown on his face. I wanted to tell her not to worry because he wouldn’t hurt her, not ever. I knew that now, for sure, but I did understand her concern because I had been afraid of him before, too. And he did look pretty angry.

  Not at me, it turned out. “Hey, baby,” he said, and slid into the bench next to me, making it creak. He kissed me and Jade squealed in excitement, but he looked over to glare at her.

  “Where have you been? Do you know how worried your daughter was?”

  Her happy face turned to a pout. “I went out.”

  “You went out for days without telling Isobel and you didn’t answer your phone.”

  “I lost it,” she said, and looked superior, like she’d made her point.

  “Jade, no! Those are expensive!” I said. “Did you really lose it? Or did you sell it?”

  Her face fell but her voice went up. “It’s gone, Izzie! Who cares where it is?”

  I shifted uneasily but Rory went on, not minding that she was starting to make a scene in front of the small audience of the Coney Island employees. “You can’t take off like that. You had Isobel running around the city looking for you. What if something had happened to her?”

  “What would happen to Izzie?” she scoffed, and my own anger burned inside me. She had never, ever cared about that.

  Rory spoke first. “Her ex-boyfriend could have come after her, for example. He was hitting her, beating her up really badly. What if he had gotten to her because she was out looking for you?”

  Jade focused on one fact. “Kash? You broke up with him? And now you’re with Rory?”

  I opened my mouth but Rory answered again. “Yes.”

  “Oh, Izzie, he’s so handsome!” Jade gushed, like he couldn’t hear her across the table. “What’s he like in—”

  I knew that the conversation was turning to sex, and that wasn’t something I was going to allow. “Jade! Your apartment isn’t fit to sleep in. I’m going to bring you back to my place for the night until I can figure out what to do next. Rella is going to watch you to make sure you don’t leave the building,” I warned her.

  My mom muttered under her breath, words like “nosy” and “bitch.”

  “You be nice to her,” I said. Jade just didn’t like that Rella had pointed out some of her shortcomings, like how she’d let me roam the streets as a kid, not watching me or knowing where I was or how I was going to be fed or anything else.

  “Next week, I made an appointment for you with a new doctor,” Rory announced to my mom. We both stared at him.

  “No, no more doctors,” she answered, her voice surly. “No more medicine, no more appointments.”

  “Yes, to all of that,” he told her. “I’ll go with you and we’ll figure out something that makes you feel better. Do you really want to be out on the street, dirty and cold, with Isobel all worried? Wouldn’t it be better to be in a nice apartment where we can visit you and you can have a cat? Just one,” he added, and I watched my mom start to nod.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I would like that. Also, I want a new phone.”

  Rory put money on the table before I could get out my wallet. “If you go to the doctor
and promise to take your medication, we’ll get one. Isobel, let’s go to your old apartment. I’ll follow you.” And he did, so that every time I looked back in the mirror, I saw him there in his big car. He would nod a little when he spotted my eyes on him and I nodded back. I thought about what he had said, about getting her to take her medication, which would have been a small miracle. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope, but maybe.

  I also thought about what Jade had started to say, asking me what he was like in bed. I was probably going to find that out soon, because men just didn’t like to wait. I would be sleeping in his bed tonight with Jade at my apartment, unless I wanted to take Rella’s uncomfortable couch. No, I’d rather be with Rory, no matter if we had to do it or not. He would definitely be gentle. Or maybe he would make it like his kiss, which had not been not gentle, and had made me get…quivery. Hot.

  “Do you like him better than Kash?” my mom asked me, and I broke this train of thought. I nodded at her as a streetlight illuminated the inside of the car.

  “I like him a lot better,” I answered.

  “He picked up the tab,” she pointed out, and retrieved the kitten from the carrier. “Sweet kitty,” Jade purred at her, and the cat purred back.

  “I don’t like him just because he pays bills. He’s nice to me in a lot of ways.”

  She huffed. “He’s bossy.”

  “Maybe, but it’s because he cares. It’s like how I try to get you to do stuff, because I care.” I looked briefly across the car at her, wondering why I did. I always had cared, even when I wasn’t sure at all how she felt about me. “Right?” I prompted, but Jade only shrugged.

  As the person who knew her best, it had always been pretty clear to me that she just wasn’t capable of making good, normal choices, or of taking care of herself or anyone else. I had told myself not to be angry, not to hold grudges, not to get frustrated, but sometimes, like tonight, I couldn’t help myself. I took a deep breath before I spoke to her again. “Would you really try, Jade?” I prompted. “Try to get to your meetings and appointments and to take your medicine so that we don’t have to go through this again?” I looked at her again as we passed under another light, but she was just staring out of the window.