Running Against Traffic

by Gaelen VanDenbergh

  Paige sat bereft at her desk the next morning, staring at her journal but unable to write. Hackney was in his office, ranting on the phone to another attorney, probably about something insignificant.

  The house had indeed been empty when she rose in the morning and poked her head in doorways, walked through empty rooms, scrounging for life. That was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? She tried hard not to think of how the boys were, or where they were.

  She picked up the phone when it rang. “Mr. Hackney’s office.”

  “Paige, dear. Dear Paige, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, Mindy, but your husband is on the phone. Would you like to hold?”

  “Oh, thass alright. We can chat until he gets off.”

  “Mindy, I really can’t chat this morning. Make yourself some coffee, okay?”

  “Okay.” Her voice sounded small and sad. Paige felt wretched, but she truly couldn’t deal with another drunk, after seeing Bryce on the floor the night before and waking up to a black eye and sore back.

  “Mindy?”

  “Mm-hm?”

  “Take care of yourself. Is there anything I can do to…Help you?”

  “No, just ask Howard to call me. He prolly won’t, though…”

  She hung up.

  Paige put down the phone and walked to Hackney’s door. She raised her hand to knock, but he was on the phone again.

  “Your cat was like eighteen years old. Do you know how old that is, for a cat? Walking death, that’s right. No, you can’t sue your neighbor for poisoning it. Because she didn’t poison it. No, I truly believe she didn’t. Autopsy? No. No, no, as your attorney I am strongly advising you don’t do that…”

  Moving through her daily routines felt like swimming through soup. Work was slow and dull. The air outside was humid and buggy, but Paige wandered around in her backyard for the next two evenings, slapping at mosquitoes and half-heartedly watering the vegetables, and not answering her phone when Deirdre called frequently. Finally, after a few days, Deirdre stopped by.

  Paige poured them tall glasses of iced tea and they took them into the back yard and dragged the chairs into the shade of a tree.

  Deirdre smoothed her baby blue cotton skirt and kicked off her wedge sandals. “I know you’re worried,” she said, tapping her bare toes on the grass, “so I wanted to let you know that the boys are temporarily using empty rooms at the guest house.”

  “It’s like a family reunion,” Paige said. She wasn’t feeling generous toward any of them. She watched Deirdre tilt her head to one side. She calmly scratched a mosquito bite on her ankle, glancing up through the tree branches.

  “Bryce seems to be doing okay,” Deirdre continued, leaning back in her chair and drumming her fingertips against the chair arms. Her constant, fidgety movement reminded Paige of David.

  “How do you know?” Paige retorted. “Is he coming home at night?”

  “Now, now.” Deirdre’s voice was smooth and slow as honey. “Listen, I get it, okay? I do. When I was a young mom, running the guest house and trying to raise my baby, I had little Bryce, and Al too for a few years.” She smiled to herself. “Funny, you’ve inherited my boys!”

  “Thank you. They are gifts to be cherished. But I’m returning them.”

  “Bryce was always a handful. But that’s Bryce, you have to deal with it.”

  “Do I? How do you figure?”

  Deirdre looked at her, her eyes clear and wide. “Are you going to just take for the rest of your life?” She asked. “Bryce was there for you when you needed it most. When you didn’t have anyone.”

  “How? What have I ever asked from him, or from Al? They’re the takers.”

  “If it weren’t for them coming into your life when they did, you would have given up and died.” Deirdre sipped her iced tea primly and reached to set the glass down on the grass by her chair. “I know you don’t understand. But without them, you were alone in the world, and there was nothing but them to keep you from slipping away for good.”

  Paige felt her insides begin to ache again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am. Sorry. It’s just that…I don’t know how you did it. How do you do it? How do you live with someone, care about them and have to watch them killing themselves? How did you?”

  Deirdre shrugged. “Isn’t that the question of the year. I had Carmen to care for, so I couldn’t go driving around looking for him. I just told him if he wanted to live with me he had to be home by eleven, no matter what he was doing.”

  “Did it work?”

  She half smiled, sadly. “Sometimes.”

  Paige leaned back in her chair. “Bryce should come with a warning label,” she said.

  Deirdre nodded. “Hell, he should come with a warning manual. So should you.”

  “Hey, I thought you liked me,” Paige complained.

  “I do! But come on, if the shoe fits…”

  “I don’t understand people,” Paige said. “They have so many issues that I don’t understand. Al, for example…”

  “You don’t have to understand them,” Deirdre said, staring forward. “You might never understand them. But you have to respect them. Let them figure it all out and get back to you.”

  Paige looked at her quickly. “Who?”

  Deirdre stood and placed her hands on her hips. “I need your help at Darnell’s next weekend. We’ve invited some families in to eat that could use a hot meal and a worry-free evening. Quite a few, in fact.”

  “How many?”

  Deirdre’s blue eyes clouded. “There are so many people in need.”

  “I’ll help,” Paige promised. “But I can’t cook, and I’m not great with cleaning. How about I serve?”

  Deirdre nodded and pushed her feet into her shoes. “Bryce and Al will be helping out in the kitchen and bar. Well, Al will be behind the bar, Bryce will be in the kitchen. You can’t ask a monkey to serve bananas, after all. You can talk to them then.”

  Paige opened her mouth to reply but her companion was already striding away to the gate.

  Paige stretched out her toes into a patch of sun and began crafting her warning label. She turned words over in her mind the way she would pick through a handful of marbles, extracting from the rolling pile and turning them over, holding them up to the light. Warning: she thought. Warning: The words that followed jumbled incoherently. Emotionally crippled…Do not expect anything at all…Will shut down…Give up…Run away…

  Lucien faded in and out of her mind. She should have had a warning label glued to her forehead for his benefit. Jeremy should have come with his own warning label. And then David…He wouldn’t have bothered to read it, being just arrogant enough, and sharing a certain comradery of cynicism with Paige, that comes with age, that comes with being the same in their self-centeredness, separate but in the same spirit, he playing with and mocking the rest of the world, and she turning her back on it entirely.

  Paige was surprised when her cell phone rang the next day and Bryce’s name popped up, as she was writing in her journal in the back yard.

  “What’s up?” she asked, mentally stiffening.

  “Paige, can you come pick me up? Use Al’s car, it’s at the guest house.”

  He sounded as if his mouth was stuffed with cotton. He mumbled an address and Paige scribbled it on the cover of her journal.

  “Bryce, are you okay?” Paige felt her body grow cold.

  He didn’t answer. The call disconnected. She covered her face and screamed into her hands. She called Al’s cell phone but his voicemail picked up immediately. She ran into the house, grabbed her purse and Al’s spare keys from the hook on the wall and flew out the front door.

  Paige jogged to Deirdre’s door and banged on it, her fist slick with sweat. When no one answered Paige climbed into Al’s dented old car and punched the address that Bryce had given her into her cell phone’s navigation system. The phone slid across on the dash as she swung the car back out the guest house driveway.

  The navigation system guide
d her straight into Pleasantville. It was an eerie, rural wasteland, with clusters of houses separated by overgrown stretches of land strewn with bottles and other garbage. Some of the houses were boarded up and some were guarded by sullen, silent people watching her drive by. A few teenage girls stood outside a shack of a convenience store on a corner, wearing next to nothing and smoking cigarettes. A few scrawny young men in wife-beaters and jeans pulled low on their hips hung together in a parking lot. Other than that, the town felt abandoned, like many of the houses and stores. Paige’s hands were shaking as she pulled up to a partially boarded-up house on a side street. The sidewalk was cracked to rubble and overgrown with tall weeds. The other houses on the block were either burned out or sagging into one another.

  Paige saw Bryce on the porch, lying in fetal position with his back to her. She swerved so hard to pull the car over that she drove up onto the curb and crashed into the edge of the porch. She wrenched open the car door and flew up the steps, dropping to her knees and grabbing Bryce’s shoulder to shake him a little. He rolled over onto his back, opening his eyes. She burst into tears when she saw his blood-covered face. The blood had soaked into his stained white tee shirt. His eyelids were turning purple, and when he opened his eyes, they looked like red gashes in his skin.

  Paige wiped her eyes on her sleeve and crawled behind him, somehow working her arms under his, dragging him to his feet. His cell phone dropped out of his hand and she bent to retrieve it, staggering to keep her balance under Bryce’s weight. “Come on, Starfire,” she sniffled, shoving his phone into the pocket of her shorts. “We have to get out of here.”

  Bryce managed to throw his arm over her shoulders and she helped him limp to the car where he flopped like a rag doll into the passenger seat and passed out again. Two scary looking men had rounded the corner, heading for the house. Nothing stood out about them aside from their leathery skin and hunched, determined gate, but Santa Claus could have been rounding the corner, and Paige would have thought that’s the scariest looking Santa I have ever seen. Probably some guns and drugs in that sack he’s carrying. Yup, that is the scariest, potentially-drug-dealing Santa ever. One of the men pointed to Paige and said something to the other, and they picked up their pace, heading straight for the car. Paige darted around to the driver’s seat, threw herself in and maneuvered the car off of the curb, doing a bumpy K-turn through potholes before slamming on the gas.

  A safe distance from the drug house, her cell phone lost its signal. She pulled the car over, locked the doors and pulled Bryce’s phone out of her pocket. A wave of fresh tears flooded her eyes in relief when she saw it was working. She dialed Al’s number, dropping the phone between the seats a few times, her hands were shaking so hard.

  “Yello,” Al said, picking up. Paige could hear the cheerful sounds of Darnell’s in the background. She longed to be there with him.

  “Al. Al. Al. I need your help. I’m lost. I have Bryce. We’re in your car. I sort of crashed it a little bit.”

  Al’s voice was instantly soothing but she could tell it was forced, for her benefit. “Paige, it’s okay. You’re gonna be fine. Is Bryce alright? Don’t worry about the car.”

  “Bryce is alive, that’s all I know!” Paige heard her own voice rising to a higher octave. “Anyway, we’re here in Pleasantville and lost as can be! Can you direct me out of here, please?”

  “Not a problem. Calm down. Give me the name of the cross streets at the next intersection.”

  Al stayed on the phone with her, telling her where to turn. When she rounded one corner too fast, Bryce’s head, which had been lolling from side to side, smacked into the window. He lifted his head and opened one swollen eye.

  “Are you alright?” Paige yelled.

  “Why?” he mumbled. “Need me to drive?”

  “Isn’t there a doctor in town, one who would be willing to make a house call?” Paige slumped at the kitchen table. Al poured martinis from a shaker into glasses and sat down heavily, handing one to her. “Yes, there is. Doc MacLauchlan.” Al looked at his watch. “You won’t get him now, though.”

  Paige sipped her martini. “Well, Bryce won’t go to the hospital. He says he’ll refuse treatment. What are we going to do?” She and Al had gotten Bryce into a warm bath, and dressed the cut above his eye which had been the source of most of the blood. They had worked him into a clean tee shirt and shorts and helped him into bed, on clean sheets under a cooling fan, where he had instantly fallen asleep.

  “How about a witch doctor, or someone into voodoo or something?” Paige asked.

  Al shook his head. “There very well might be, but they won’t be able to help. Look, he has no broken bones, obviously, so just let him sleep it off.”

  Paige plopped her chin in her hands. “Maybe we need to call Darnell,” she said. She couldn’t see the end of this tunnel, but she thought she could see a crack, a sliver of light glinting through.

  Al sipped his drink, considering this. “He has broken up more than a few fights in his day,” he said. “And tended to the wounded afterward. Present company not excluded.”

  “Yes, good,” Paige said, “but there is something else I want to talk to him about. Deirdre, too.”

  Deirdre brought over a pot of chicken soup, filled with fresh vegetables. She set it simmering on the stove, while Darnell headed upstairs to check on Bryce. He returned shortly after to report that Bryce was fine, just bruised. “I’m surprised he’s doing so well. I don’t know what he did,” Darnell said, “but someone really kicked the snot out of that kid.” He and Deirdre sat down at the Ugly table to have some soup and quiet time together. Paige gestured to Al to join her in the living room.

  Al went to the kitchen and retrieved their drinks. She heard him exchange a few words and he and Darnell laughed. Then he returned to Paige and set their glasses on the coffee table. He kicked off his work boots and flopped onto the couch, stretching his legs out and up onto the table. He rested is head back on the sofa cushions. “So, what did you think of Pleasantville?” he asked her with a wry smile.

  “Not pleasant at all,” Paige sighed. She sat down beside him, close, feeling his comforting warmth. “Depressing and a little scary, actually.”

  Al put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “Try growing up there.”

  “Al, we need to find Bryce some help. And, you both should probably move back in,” she added, shyly. “So that we can work together on this.”

  Al nodded. His hand reached for hers and closed over it. It squeezed warm and tight. “Let’s talk to Darnell. He’ll know what to do.”

  Paige shook her head. “Tomorrow. Let them relax, this is probably the first time they have sat down all day.” Then she turned toward Al. “Do you call on Darnell for everything?”

  Al shrugged. “He practically raised me,” he said. “So yes, I turn to him when things go wrong. And in case you haven’t noticed, things go wrong a lot.”

  Paige perched on the edge of Bryce’s bed, helping him prop himself up against the pillows so that he could eat some soup from the tray that she had put together. Deirdre’s chicken soup, a glass of milk, crackers. His torso was so thin it looked concave, lately, his pretty cheeks gaunt and covered in stubble. He had aged twenty years.

  Paige picked his sticky hair off of his forehead. He grimaced feebly. “Sorry,” she said.

  He sipped a spoonful of soup and pushed the tray slightly. “It’s okay, ‘mommy’.”

  “Why did you go to that house? Is that where you usually go to get drugs?”

  Bryce shook his head and leaned back on his pillows. He looked out the window, as if gazing into the world to see what was out there for him. Seeing nothing, he looked back at Paige, then picked up a cracker and turned it over in his hand. “My mother called. She goes there a lot. She wanted company.”

  “Your mother?” Paige picked up the tray from his lap and set it on the floor.

  “Yes. I biked over there and she was all tweaked out on something and
all excited ‘cause she had scored an eight ball of coke and a bottle of Jack and we did everything.” Bryce swiped the back of his hand across his nose.

  “Holy cow.”

  “It went fast,” he said. “She must have owed someone something because there were a couple of druggies there with us and she was sharing freely. Then the dealers dropped in to replenish the supplies, and we didn’t have any money, so I offered them my services, you know. An exchange.” He slid down in the bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin. He turned his head away and closed his eyes. “They weren’t interested.”

  Paige felt herself shivering. “Your mother was in the house when I came to get you?”

  Bryce nodded, his eyes still closed.

  “What was she doing?”

  “Dunno. She traded my bike for something and went back inside.”

  “She didn’t try to get you any help?” Paige whispered. Bryce was falling asleep, his breathing soft and steady.

  “She didn’t know who I was, by then,” he murmured before drifting off.

  Chapter 22

  Paige had never cared for so much as a sick goldfish in her life, with the exception of agreeing to stop smoking in his apartment when Lucien had the flu, back in college. Grappling with a deathly ill, sweat-soaked grown man was an experience that Paige entered blindly. Though, unfortunately with her sense of smell in tact.

  She fed him juice that he sipped and then threw up on her, hot, bilious slime. She wrapped her aching arms around his wet, shaking body as he slept, trying to stop the rattling. She half-walked, half-dragged him from the bedroom to the tub, where it took several laborious minutes to help him climb into it, where she could work his tee shirt and shorts off as they resisted, sticking to his weak limbs. She filled the tub and stayed, kneeling on the tile so that she could reach in and pull him above the water as he lapsed in and out of consciousness. Al helped her help Bryce to move from room to bathroom and back again, when he wasn’t at Darnell’s, but Al was working overtime, lately. Paige wondered if he was purposefully avoiding taking a nursing shift. She wondered if Darnell would hire her.