Definitely hadn’t seen one since Jaden was born, so four months. Jared and I had split before I knew I was pregnant, so over a year, since I hadn’t been with anyone while I was pregnant. It was… it was nice. I mean, as far as dicks go. It looked sort of big… it was hard, veiny, I mean, that’s how they usually looked, I wasn’t like staring at this man’s dick. That would have been rude.
Besides, he was Jessica’s boyfriend. He looked like he would be the kind of guy Jessica liked. He was like her—alternative. His hair was long, down past his shoulders, and he had more tattooed skin than virgin skin from what was exposed. There was even one on his face.
His face was, you know, a face. Two eyes, one nose, one mouth… a face. Pretty standard. Also, none of my business. I’m sure they were very happy together. Even if I was going to replace her, it would take a while to find someone suitable. Sophie was my neighbor. My happily married neighbor who lived a couple of floors down with her husband. They didn’t have kids and as far as I knew didn’t want any, but she worked from home meaning I took advantage of that and asked her to watch Jaden sometimes when Jessie couldn’t make it because she had class.
Jared followed me upstairs silently. We walked into the house, finding Sophie on the phone, walking around the room with Jaden cradled to her chest. She saw us and hung up.
“Hey, Dee,” she said.
“Hey, Sophie, this is Jared. Jaden’s dad. He’s here to take him for the weekend,” I said introducing them. Sophie had heard about Jared, plenty about him but they’d never met before. She shook his hand and handed the baby over.
“I changed him about half an hour ago,” she said. “I gave him a bath too because I wasn’t sure when you’d be back.” I thanked her and ushered her out so I could be alone with Jared. Some time had passed since being with the doctor, so maybe he was ready to talk.
After she’d left, I went to Jaden’s room to get a bag packed. Jared walked in slowly after me. Jaden’s room was less Jaden’s room and more his dressing room. All his clothes were there, but he didn’t sleep there. I kept his crib in my room mainly for my comfort and convenience.
He was sleeping maybe six hours through the night by now, but initially, he could barely stay down for two. I had lived in this apartment for no time at all. I had moved in when Jared and I had split when I was pregnant. Believing that I wouldn’t be there long made me not really bother with doing a proper nursery. After he was born, I had to go back to work as soon as I could because rent didn’t pay itself. It was cold and bare in there. I should have just painted it but, call me stupid; I was holding out hope that Jared and I would have reconciled by then.
“Could I ask you to come here for more milk if you run out over the weekend? I don’t want him on the formula,” I said as a conversation starter, stuffing a bag full of enough clothes changes for the remainder of the weekend.
“If I can, Addie. I can’t just drop by whenever he’s hungry. Is that his babysitter?” he asked.
“No, Sophie’s my neighbor. I might have to start looking for a new sitter soon.”
“What happened to your last one?”
“She… has other things she wants to do,” I said, not really wanting to say what had really happened with Jessie. He would latch onto it and blame my bad decision making, trying to make me feel foolish.
“Maybe we should just hire the same sitter,” he said.
“Why? You think too many people will confuse the baby?”
“Stop it, Addie. I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
“I’ll think about it. I have to meet your babysitter before I make a decision about Jessica.”
“Fine. You can probably meet her tomorrow if you’re picking Jaden up.”
“Can you drop him off?” I asked. I was working the next day. We were catering a brunch in the Upper West Side, and even though it was a brunch, it was most likely going to go long, into the afternoon.
“I have plans.”
“Could you at least try?” I asked.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t make any promises,” he said. Good. That was all I wanted—a little effort. I kept going to see how much he would give.
“Jared, can we meet tomorrow? When you drop Jaden off, can we go out to dinner or something?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said.
“How are we going to work on our relationship if we don’t spend any time together?”
“We’re on a break.”
“But you’re acting like it’s indefinite. Dr. Menendez wants us to spend time together. I think we should too. It doesn’t have to be weird. We can just talk, not even about that stuff she wanted us to talk about. Just, whatever. We used to be able to talk about anything.”
He sighed and looked at me. I couldn’t read what was on his face.
“I think we should spend some time together too, but I think we should work up to a dinner,” he said. I nodded just because I didn’t want to cringe. Daytime dates weren’t dates. Those were mistress hours.
“Will you call me?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’ll call you.”
I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He didn’t do anything, not back away, not kiss me back, nothing. I said bye to Jaden, kissing him on the cheek as well. He took Jaden’s bag and walked to the door.
Maybe soon, I wouldn’t have to watch him do that anymore.
4
Marcus
You know how people say things like alcoholism and abuse can run in families?
Our mother never hit us. She didn’t even really drink either. Her bad decisions generally had to do with the men she let get her pregnant, but she probably wouldn’t agree if I asked her. After like, the third kid, it was probably intentional—what she was doing?
The count was four fathers and five kids. I had only met my father a couple of times, Willow and Kevin’s dad once and I might have met Jonny’s father once too, but it’s hard to say. It was pretty safe to say, however, that all she had wanted in the first place were kids, and she had gotten them.
Besides our mother, our dads probably had something else in common. Part of recovery was taking responsibility for your addiction, but I was willing to go out on a limb and say my father was not a college-educated professional. He might have dabbled in mind-altering drugs. Who else would have a kid and not give a fuck about them?
There were five of us and just one of her. There hadn’t been an hour of the day that she wasn’t working to feed us all. Five bored kids and no supervision? It was literally just a matter of time before one of us ended up in jail. Almost all of us did.
I had four brothers and sisters. Willow had gotten married and moved out of state the minute that the clock struck twelve on her eighteenth birthday. She could have been in Jersey, or in Alaska for all I knew; she never got in contact. Kevin was just eleven; he was still at home. It was the anniversary of Henry’s death a month ago, and Jon was going to serve the rest of his sentence under home confinement. He was coming to live with me.
If there was something that ran in our family, it was probably drug abuse. The Kissels, we sure love our dope. That was what had taken Henry out. That was what had gotten me locked up. That was what had gotten Jon locked up too. Not the actual drugs but junkie crimes. The stupid shit you do so you can get your hands on some more drugs. Jonny, to make sure he kept up with his older brothers, had made sure he committed a felony offense too.
But he was getting out now—sort of.
I’d been sober—Catholic priest sober—since I’d gotten locked up. Once you got through thinking you were going to die during your withdrawal, the world gets a hell of a lot clearer. Jonny was an idiot and who was to say that he wouldn’t try to score some dope as soon as he was allowed to walk around outside on his own. I wasn’t going to trust him with the responsibility of looking out for himself.
Nobody believed us when we said we were brothers. Last I’d seen him; he was pretty scrawny. Dope will do that t
o you. He was shorter than I was, and his head was always shaved. We had the same last name though because our mother gave her last name to all her children. Only Kevin and Willow had the same father, but it wasn’t even worth mentioning because he wasn’t around to claim either one.
You could say we were close, Jonny and me. We tried to be, in the beginning, but never really got friendly until Henry died. You never think it’ll be your brother or your family, but then it is, and you don’t know what to do. I only had two brothers left, and that’s fucked up when you used to have three.
I became the oldest once Henry had died. I didn’t have to let Jonny stay with me. He was perfectly fine staying at the halfway house. If he was going to get into trouble, he didn’t need any help doing it. Jonny was a professional troublemaker. I just had to do something.
It was me. It was me, and it was Jonny too. It was probably Kevin after us. Henry had died from an overdose, and it sucked that that was what it took for me to wake the fuck up, but now I could make sure I wasn’t next. I didn’t trust Jonny not to die on me. If he was under my roof, I could keep an eye on him.
I spotted Jon walking out of the facility. He had his duffel in one hand and nothing in the other. He’d packed light. He looked the same, mostly. I could recognize him, but he looked deathly pale. White like a ghost. He had looked like that coming out of jail too. It just made you really look like you had served time. Like a creature crawling out of a cave after a thousand years, or something pulling itself up out of a swamp.
I waited for him to spot me and come over.
“What took you so long? They wouldn’t let me wait outside for you,” he said. I didn’t know why he was so grumpy; the place he had stayed at was great if you believed what you read on their website. I had stayed somewhere else—upstate. Far, far away from my dealer in Harlem. They could have put me in the middle of rural Philippines with nobody else that spoke English, and I would still have been able to find the heroin. Drug addiction turns you into a nothing human being but heightens some specific skills that you can only use when you’re a junkie.
Junkie superpowers, like always having money for drugs, even when you had no money for anything else. Or always finding the drugs. I had never failed to find heroin wherever the fuck I was. Even in prison. I didn’t take it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know how to get some. At that fucking halfway house too.
“Get in the car. We need to go.” He threw his duffel in the back and got into the passenger seat. I had collected him from jail on his release day too. You couldn’t take your time when it came to the Prisons Bureau. They basically wanted to throw your ass back in jail. They just waited for you to give them a reason to do it. If you weren’t where they expected you to be at any point, they could declare you an escapee, and that was a whole other truckload of charges.
He was going to serve the rest of the time he had to spend at the halfway house on home confinement, but we weren’t going home. Not yet. They couldn’t just send you home and trust you to stay there. Chances were you wouldn’t. God knows Jonny wouldn’t. They had to make sure that you did. There was one more place we had to go.
This I hadn’t done. After my release from the halfway house, I just went home. All this had been familiar up to this point. We pulled up to his PO’s office, and he got out of the car. I couldn’t go in with him.
After about two hours, Jonny walked back to the car. He slid into the passenger seat without saying anything.
“What are you waiting for, let’s go,” he said.
“Can I see it?” I asked. He glared at me before he raised his pant leg over the thing around his ankle. It was smaller than I had expected, but it was big enough that you’d be able to see it under his pants if they were tight enough. “How does it feel?”
“Like I want to take it off. Like I have a fucking computer on my leg.”
“They can see everything?”
“They can see that we’re still here. If we don’t get to the house soon, it’s gonna be my ass. Let’s go.”
I started the car. I wasn’t the one who had put him in this position. He had. I wasn’t going to be his punching bag because he couldn’t stay on the right side of the law. They could dust his bed off in county, and he could go the fuck back.
“Watch it, Jonny. It’s not too late for you to walk home.”
“Just drive,” he said, looking out the window.
I lived in Spanish Harlem. I had had to do everything short of begging to get my probation officer to approve my old apartment. I didn’t want to try to find somewhere else to live. New York rent was out of control, and I didn’t want to move out to the Bronx or Queens. With rent assistance, I wasn’t living in Section 8, but I had before, and if my employment issue didn’t get better, I would be again—me and Jonny.
“Here we are. Home sweet home,” I said, opening up the door. Jonny walked in and dumped his duffel on the floor. “Pick that up. Your mother doesn’t live here,” I told him walking in behind him. I locked the door and went to the kitchen. It was a studio; there wasn’t really a kitchen, just the part of the house where the oven and fridge were. “Did they feed you before they cut you loose?” I asked.
“How’d you get this place?” he asked, walking around the room. When I’d moved in, I’d whitewashed the walls and gotten a fold-out futon, throwing out basically everything else except the television.
“I lived here before I got locked up,” I said.
“With Henry?”
I nodded. Mom had sort of taken a break after every second kid. Henry and I had about a year and a half between us, and then she waited about five before she had Jonny and Willow. I was moving out when Jonny was just starting high school. I’d only sort of lived with Henry in this place. He’d only sort of lived here too. He had months of rent paid in advance so he could come by whenever he was sober enough to.
I’d lived in and out of here before getting arrested. Henry had died when I was still in prison, but I’d managed to get the place back when I got out of the halfway house. When Henry died was the first time I had written a letter to someone other than my mom when I was locked up. To Jonny, this asshole. He was arrested less than two months later.
“Do you hear his ghost or whatever?” he asked jokingly.
“Can you imagine Henry’s ghost?” I asked. “He’d be passed out in the corner under a pile of dirty laundry.” Jonny laughed. It was dark, but you had to cry if you wouldn’t laugh.
“Did they read you the riot act?”
“I can’t do anything. No alcohol, smoking, weed. No leaving until my next probation meeting. They basically said all I could watch is the fucking food network.”
“No visitors.”
“Groups no larger than three,” he said.
“No, that’s my rule. You can’t invite anyone over.”
“Marc, come on. You can’t do that to me,” he said. I knew what he meant, but Jonny made more bad decisions than he made good. I was no Pope, but I had more respect for law enforcement than he had. Who was he going to call if not one of those birds he used to date when he was using? He wasn’t picking up girls from the non-fiction section of Barnes and Noble who were going to talk to him about current events and make him tea. Besides that, I really didn’t want him fucking on my couch.
“You’re still paying for your sins,” I said, “I can’t let you fuck up again.”
“Let me fuck up again? I’m not a kid. I didn’t need you to bring me here, and I don’t need you to babysit me.”
“My house, my rules, Jonny,” I said. “If you don’t like it, the door is right there.” I took a bottle of water over to my bed and lay on my back. There was no way I’d be able to spend the night there. It was still only four in the afternoon. I got up and looked for my keys.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I thought you didn’t need a babysitter,” I said walking past him.
“I just got here, you want to leave already?” he asked. I mean, yeah
? No? I did want to leave. I didn’t want to be there when he cried, or whatever.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“How’s Mom,” he started.
“Fine. She’ll want to hear from you.”
“I know. What about Kevin?”
I ended up ordering pizza and staying up talking with him till ten PM.
5
Adina
“Sorry I’m late. The event went a little long,” I said when Jared opened the door. I walked into the apartment we used to share—the apartment that I had decorated. It looked the same; like I still lived there. Great, I wouldn’t have to redecorate when I moved back in. The room wasn’t baby-proofed, but Jaden wasn’t moving around on his own yet. He still had some time.
“I wish you had called or something,” he grumbled.
“Even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to come till now. Are you heading out somewhere?” I asked. “Where’s Jaden?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, leading me into the house.
“Is he asleep?”
“No, he’s-”
“Jared? Is she here?”
Neither Jared nor I had asked the question. I turned towards the hallway and saw the person who had asked it walking out. It was a woman I had never met before, but more than try to recognize her, all I saw was she was holding my son.
“Jared? Who is this?” I asked. I walked over to her and took Jaden.
“Sorry, I thought Jared had told you about me. I’m Janice,” she said offering her hand for me to shake. I looked at her hand, then at her face, then finally Jared.
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked him.
“I wanted to… just sit. I want to talk to you. Both of us need to talk to you.”
“Both of you? Jared, you had the woman you cheated on me with watching my son? Oh, my god, have you been… this is your babysitter?” I asked incredulously.
Marcus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 5) Page 3