by Brian Selfon
There’s a silence until she raises her eyes. “Sometimes there’s a gap,” Dr. Xu says, “between the court’s requirements and the patient’s.”
She studies the space just above his nose. Scans his receding hairline, his slender fingers, his tiny mouth. There is no warmth coming from him, but for the first time she sees his restraint as a type of kindness. She asks, “I’m not going back in the cage?”
“I’m not recommending that.”
She picks up the evaluation again, turning pages but reading nothing except the last sentence. She feels the burn on her chin once more. It’s a draft, she reminds herself. The evaluation won’t be filed until next month. Nothing to get excited about, she still has time to fuck things up. And yet she’s given herself goose bumps again, and feels preternaturally sensitive to the fabric of the couch she sits on, its softness; to the floor beneath her shoes, the gentle push of the rug, and the hardness beneath. And more than ever she feels spatially sensitive, physically tuned into her position in the world. Here she is on the top floor of a three-story cinder-block-and-glass commercial building, and beneath it is the foundation, stone and concrete and steel, and beneath that, past whatever rubble and human detritus has been crushed and mixed together—down below is the earth. Her earth, the same as Mama’s, Uncle Shecky’s, and the little man’s—here it is, here it’s always been, touching her all this time. She’s held up by a fucking planet. And whatever mistakes she’s made and will make, whatever defects she will patch over or succumb to, there’s space here for her little life.
“Are you surprised?” Dr. Xu asks. It takes her a moment to understand that he’s still talking about the evaluation, that he wasn’t privy to her lofty thoughts, which embarrass her now, and which she will never discuss. “Did you expect something else from this session?” His plain, narrow face is toying with a smile.
She finds nothing funny in any of this, including the grace he’s shown her. “Last night I shot heroin and broke into your apartment,” she says. “I didn’t expect us to be talking about hope.”
“Relapse is part of recovery.” Back to pedant mode, before he softens: “But it’s not the only part.” One last look at his watch-less wrist and he says, “Now it’s time. But to your point,” he continues, looking up, and now his smile is big and warm, “of course there’s hope. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in your recovery.”
And neither would I.
Fuck, am I really here because I believe in therapy?
No, not belief. Hope. And there’s a wonder and a joy in this, and in learning that there’s still hope.
She leaves the office by the front door and takes the bus like a normal person. She walks in the sunlight and drinks a half-dozen ginger ales over the course of the day, and then her stomach is right and her head is sleepy but clear. Under a reddening sky she walks to her uncle’s house, which she hasn’t been back to since she laid out that breakfast early this morning. This feels right, coming home now. She’ll have a good dinner tonight, and her bedsheets will be clean and smell of lavender. The smell of a charcoal barbecue she passes, two kids chasing a third on a bike, a sweaty couple repainting an old truck—my city, she thinks, my web. She crosses the street, turns a corner, and smiles at the sight of her uncle’s house. Upstairs, on the bookshelf Henry built for her, is her copy of June Jordan’s Directed by Desire, and already her head is full of it: the scent of the paper, the dog-eared page where “Poem About My Rights” begins, the shape of the text on this page:
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
After a good dinner she’ll fall asleep with this book, and she’s smiling as she walks up the cracked porch steps, feeling tired but at peace with how everything is.
But she’s not quite at the door when she feels the itch.
* * *
Midnight, she’s been wandering for hours. One step ahead of a second relapse—not this time, fucker. What, you don’t know about the spider? I run, I hide, I know every nook and shadow. I won’t let you catch me, not again, I’ve got family. I am more than the history of the rejection of—
Blasting its horn, a flatbed guns a yellow light and nearly runs her over. Coughing dust, hurrying to the curb, she checks herself for injury: scraped knees below her dirty shorts. The spot on her arm still sore from the previous night.
Kerasha comes to her senses. She is holding a bucket, and she is not where she ought to be.
The corner of Himrod Street and Cypress Avenue is almost a mile from her uncle’s house but just four blocks past the Moses Houses. What is this, she thinks, a test? Haven’t I failed enough already? She looks down at her bucket. The closest streetlight blinking orange, it’s too dark to see the needles, but she’s knows they’re in there, knows they’re dirty with her blood. And here I am, four blocks past the Moses Houses—why would a legacy junkie be here, except to score?
Reassurance comes, unexpectedly, from little Kerry. The child thief, still alive in big Kerasha’s head, makes her point with emphasis: yes, you’re almost a mile from Uncle Shecky’s house, but you’re four blocks past the Moses Houses. In your broken-headed ramble, Kerry explains, you walked along the fence of the Moses Houses and directly before its towers, and then got yourself a full quarter mile past all the slingers and ball boys and gawkers. Look at the linen supply store, look at that boarded-up Shell station, you know these places. While you were fleeing a second relapse, your feet took you to Sisters of Mercy.
How curious.
The halfway house holds no happy memories for her. She passed her long days here reading Saint Augustine, dodging group meetings. It’s hardly come to mind since she left, and mostly she remembers the smell of untreated skin disease. The chapel seat she occupied, the pasty eggs, the sawdust biscuits. The near-perfect silence she kept, which no one seemed to notice. And yet apparently this loose-bricked church has quietly held its place in some dusty corner of her heart, and has now taken control of her feet. Why did it call her here?
Outside the front door is a small congregation of smokers—the methadone crowd, she remembers. They’d been using the real stuff off and on in the cage, just like she did, and now they’re jittering it out with the snake oil, too raw to sleep. Though never in this crowd herself, she had her own sleepless nights, and she used to watch the smokers from her dorm window. Counting the tiny lights and puffs to pass the time. Their minder this morning is a white woman, Sister Kimberly, and Kerasha is surprised to see her pull on her own cigarette. Good for you, she thinks, mixing in with the sinners. Then it occurs to her that any one of the sisters here could have once been a resident.
When Sister Kimberly flicks her spent cigarette into a shadow, Kerasha realizes that dawn is coming, and she hears a whisper from Sophocles: Whatever escapes the night, he says somewhere, the light of day will ravage. This is from one of the plays she read at her uncle’s house, she doesn’t remember which—any paragraph from one could have been sniped out and pasted into another; but the line has a special resonance now, and she takes it as a personal warning. Last night she miraculously carried her itch straight past the Moses Houses. Sunup imminent, reckoning overdue, it’s time to take shelter.
The front door to Sisters of Mercy has two locks, she remembers, only one of which is ever used. But this lock is an old Italian model, and she’ll need a drill to get through it. She’d have to wait out the smokers, but she can’t risk that, not with the Sophocles warning. Her hour of need is now.
Her spider instincts taking over, Kerasha drops the bucket she’s been carrying. Barely registers the tinkle of the needles inside.
Fence to ledge, ledge to gutter—which bends under her weight—roof to utility window, which no one ever thought to bar, and which is barely wide enough for her ass. Down on the chapel floor, here among the pews and stacked Bibles, Kerasha is hit by that old halfway smell. Here live the lost and the sick, here the surrendered and the broken.
My peeps.
Just outside the chapel is the corridor that
leads to the dormitory rooms. A mumbler brushes past her, materializing and then just as quickly dematerializing in the foul air. In theory this woman is here to transition, as the authorities call it, but what exactly is this woman transitioning to? It’s a sick joke, though the same could be said for a career thief who doubles as a legacy junkie.
The corridor silent, Kerasha quickly reaches the door to the cramped, slope-floored room she shared when she herself was transitioning here. She pauses. Her left hand feels empty. She looks at it and remembers the bucket she left behind.
The door to her old room is locked, per protocol—too many trysts and fights among the pilgrims, as Sister Xenia called them—but the lock doesn’t last. Who’s in my bed tonight, Kerasha wonders as she opens the door. Who’s the new me, and what’s she running from? Stepping lightly, she enters. Morning comes red through the barred, curtainless window. There are four twin beds, and the only empty one, she notices right away, is her own.
Was mine, she reminds herself. But then Saint Augustine whispers about God creating a new now, and Nicole tells her to trust her body, and at this moment—at this now—her body is sleepy.
The mattress has a dip on the left side, just where she left it. This dip reminds her of all that made her unhappy here. She closes her eyes, knowing she’ll be unhappy here again, and falls asleep tasting the breakfast they’ll serve: the pasty eggs, the sawdust biscuits. The coffee will be burnt, she knows, because nothing here comes with love.
You have to find that in yourself.
chapter 48
“Think about what you’re doing,” Dannie once told a player, consoling him after a production failed even by community theater standards. “You’re standing in borrowed clothes. You’re speaking made-up words in a made-up voice. So what if the theater is half empty. You’re dreaming the ridiculous dream. Every ticket stub is a blessing.”
Kerasha’s daily calls, mostly around five o’clock, are more than ticket stubs. They’re more than he got when she slept under his roof, and more than he’s getting from Henry. But it’s hard to bless every ticket stub when the truth is he’s alone again.
“Give them time,” he hears from Fat Boris, a frequent coffee buddy. “They’ll come back to you.”
“Your mouth to God’s ears.” He smiles as if he’s joking.
Every five o’clock Kerasha asks about food. “What are you eating?” “How did you make it?” “Which pan did you use for the sauce?” Apparently the food at the halfway house is cockroach paste, and so far each of his care packages has been returned to him. The sisters with their rules. “What’s on the stove?” she asks when she calls early. At first his answers are fabrications. His niece is in recovery, he’s learned, she doesn’t need to hear that he’s living on Guinness. But after just a week of bullshitting about mutton and potatoes, hake and chips, cabbage stew and a curried steak, he heads out to Katti the Fish Girl. Reinvests in his fridge and larder.
He schedules his days around the five o’clock calls. He puts her on speakerphone, sets the phone in the center of the table, and lets his mouth loose as he eats. It’s like they’re having dinner again. What he wouldn’t give for a speakerphone dinner with Henry.
“What’s on your plate?” becomes Kerasha’s leading question in their new routine.
His closing question hasn’t changed: “When are you coming home?”
“Not today,” she says. “I’m sorry, Uncle Shecky.” Once she tells him she’s “taking things one breath at a time.” He snorts, thinking this is a joke, that she must be mocking the twelve-steppers. But then she talks about someone named Nicole, and Shecky loses the thread.
“And how are the sisters,” he asks. “Still on and on with the Jesus?”
“They just want me to keep my options open,” she says. Her tone is surprisingly respectful.
The weekends are full workdays, but Tuesdays and Wednesdays are slow, and Shecky often has a cocktail with his backyard neighbor Lacey, who lately has been mistaking him for her long-dead brother-in-law. Her mind is clear about her estrangement from and resentment of her own children, though, and she becomes heated when he talks about Henry.
“Never calls? Come on.”
“Never.”
“Once a month?”
“He was here and then he wasn’t. And I’ve got friends who’ve seen him around,” he adds quickly, off her alarmed expression. “Nothing bad has happened to him—he’s not in a cast or anything.” The bad thing happened to me, Shecky adds in his head.
“He’s an ingrate, that’s the problem,” Lacey says, splashing wine as she refills their glasses. “You made a home for him. A life.” Shecky tries to wave this off, but Lacey can’t be stopped: “You taught him your trade, and you looked the other way when he brought around those trashy girls.” She sounds ten years younger today, and Shecky becomes uncomfortable with the effect her words are having on him. The pride and indignation they’re stirring up. “You gave him everything and now he’s run off. Listen to me, David: maybe it’s time to see that as a blessing.”
He gives her a warm two-handed handshake, wondering who David is, but seeing real heat and loyalty in Lacey’s watery eyes.
Errands. There’s no Impala these days, no Mustang, that whole watcher business gone and, weirdly, a little missed. In the evening he sinks into Kerasha’s armchair and sips Jameson and reads an investment magazine until he dozes. After the ten o’clock news, which for the third week running features nothing on the summer’s murders, he heads up the creaking stairs, pausing every few steps, listening, without realizing it, for footsteps, for a car, for some hint that one of the kids is coming home.
On his way to his bedroom he stops at Kerasha’s, which for years had been Henry’s. A dangerous detour, he knows, but he can’t help himself. On the wicker rocking chair that was Henry’s mother’s is the gray hooded sweatshirt Kerasha arrived in. The desk is carved inside out—Henry’s penknife graffiti, all mushroom clouds and broken-necked bunnies and crossed swords. On the bookshelf are slim poetry chapbooks, bookended by glow-in-the-dark skulls Shecky bought for Henry the exact day—of course this was how it played out—the kid declared Halloween “bullshit.” Shecky sits on the bed but feels like an intruder. In this room lives his hope that the kids really did have some kind of life in this house, that they knew family, with him and with each other, and that from time to time each of them must feel there’s something to come back for. Such a fragile hope, he might break it with a sigh. He closes the door gently behind him.
“Here’s the thing about those kids,” Lacey Atkinson had said. They were nearly at the bottom of the bottle by this point, and most of her anger had burned off. “You loved them enough to make a home for them. And you thought that was the hard part. But take it from this old lady. I had three little bastards who grew up to be three big bastards, and I’m telling you, that’s not the hard part.” And she fixed her watery eyes on him, and she leaned forward in her lawn chair, as if wanting to make sure she could see on his face that he was paying attention and would understand her. “Loving them here is nothing.”
The hard part, she doesn’t have to say, is loving them gone.
He shuts himself up in his room and, standing alone in the dark of his empty house, he throws up a prayer to whoever’s listening. Just now and then, he thinks, just now and then—please let them—
The phone.
Out the door, across the hall, down the stairs, into the dining room. And at last he gets the phone to his ear, and the silence just before the words is a beautiful terror.
“Henry?”
Only it’s Fat Boris, calling to ask if Shecky heard about Vasya.
Shecky catches his breath. “What happened to Vasya?”
“So they found him down by the subway track, in this fucking enclave?” Fat Boris says it like a question. “Someone handcuffed him to a pole. He broke his wrists, trying to pull out. But he didn’t get himself out, and it was five days before someone found him. And he was dehyd
rated like a fucking castaway. And his wrists were all cut up from the cuffs, you know. Infected and shit. So you know what they had to do? People talk about going hands-free, but this is too much.”
And when Shecky asks who did it, Fat Boris lets out a grunt that sounds like a laugh. “You think he’s talking about this? They’ve got him in a white room over at Bellevue. But the cop I spoke to said whoever did it? Not a trace. Absolute professional.”
chapter 49
Zera remains in her position at the precinct for less than a week after Nadina Villa Lobos is officially written off as an overdose, and her small part of the Human Trafficking Task Force is “consolidated” into oblivion. Zera’s application for a transfer is accepted with suspicious efficiency. As if someone has been looking out for it.
In the records department she’s given no long-term assignments, and her short-term projects take up only a few hours each workday. Day after day, she arrives minutes before her shift begins and clocks out seconds after it ends. The hours of her outside life are countless and quiet. She sleeps, or rather lies unmoving, on her bed, from sundown to sunup. No memories chase her. Her blood runs slow and cool.
And yet her lights are still on, and below this dark, gentle quiet, her soul is asking questions.
Is there another way to keep faith with Katja? Instead of going after the men, could she help the girls?
Zera was born of evil and had known evil all her life. She escaped evil, and then she turned herself around and faced it again. But this isn’t her whole story, she reminds herself now. However brutal her early days, however quiet and cool her blood runs now, she’s known kindness. Like that nonprofit that brought her out of Montenegro: maybe she owes them help, even more than she owes the Paradise men further revenge.
Late September she submits her resignation. There are exit interviews and paperwork, but there’s no discussion, official or even just conversational, of why she’s leaving the department. She empties her locker: change of clothes, bar of soap, toothbrush and toothpaste. A cracked Hello Kitty lapel pin. It’s a cool evening and there’s still some blue in the sky when she walks out of One Police Plaza for the last time. She has no badge now, no gun, uniform, or supervisor. She also has no schedule. Everywhere forgotten, nowhere expected, she has disappeared, in one sense, but to herself she has just arrived.