We didn’t check all the rooms, because the next one was where we found Emmy. She and another girl were passed out on a mattress, both half naked. I mean exactly half. Emmy had on a short skirt and snagged black tights and nothing at all on top, while the other girl had a blouse and jewelry, a shiny yellow jacket, and from there down just legs and pussy. Like they’d had to split one outfit, underwear and all. June still had her hand on her mouth and was looking at me, like I knew what the hell to do. Run, I thought. The room smelled ripe, like sex, and the sight of Emmy’s bruised face and pasty skin made me sick. I walked over and scooped her up, more heft to her than Dori but not by much, she was maybe ninety pounds. I’d once been a man to deadlift three times that, easy. The man I was now got us out of there before any eyes opened.
June waved the two of us up front, got in the back seat with Emmy, and rolled her up in all the blankets. Everett drove too fast, yelling “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I don’t know where I’m going.”
“My God. Those babies,” June said. “What if one of them is hers?” And then in another minute, “What am I thinking? She’s only been gone six months.”
“We can call Georgia DSS,” I said. All of us pretty far out of our minds.
Everett found his way onto a city freeway and pulled over. June gave him her map to figure out how to get back to I-75, then got out, opened the back, and fetched her medical bag. We sat on the shoulder with cars whizzing past, rattling us, while June crouched over Emmy in the back seat, listening to her heart, feeling her bones and organs. Emmy’s hair was cut weirdly short in a scary way, with parts of it missing. Her eyes were open now, jumping around at all of us, but she didn’t talk. Maybe in her opinion we were a dream. I took off my zipper hoodie and gave it to June to put on her. Then she wrapped Emmy up again and said, “Let’s go home.”
Too much adrenaline will age you before your time. I’ve heard that said. What I know for sure is, it will push you too fast through your day. I was into the sweats and beyond before we got out of Georgia. I had to ask Everett to pull over to save June’s white leather seats. She made me get in the back, gave me a 7 Up and a pill to chew to settle my stomach, that she said would make me sleepy. Nothing for the shakes and sweats. She put a blanket around me and laid me on the dogpile so Emmy and I were dominoed onto June, our little back-seat rehab ward. June sat up straight with this look on her face like she wants to kill us both, but she’s not going to let us die.
Everett was free at last to control the radio, and for a long time nobody said a word. I drifted in and out. Then somewhere around the Tennessee line, June started talking. Low, quiet. I was going to have my own child to think about, soon. She said she’d had this same talk with my mom before I was born. They were friends. I never knew that. June was the reason the Peggots took her into their trailer. They actually lived there together for a short while, before June moved away with Emmy and I got born. June had known my dad, too. She said you couldn’t know one without the other, those two were joined at the hip. I asked what he was like. She said exactly like me. In looks, word, and deed. A beautiful man with too much heart for the raw deal he got.
That didn’t sound like me. So probably none of it was true. I asked her how he died.
She frowned at me. “Are you testing me? Or do you really not know?”
I was too far gone to fake anything. I told her I knew it was on the Fourth of July, at Devil’s Bathtub, and that was all. June told me he drowned or broke his neck. Probably both at once, because he dived from up high on the bank. I asked her why did it happen. She said there was talk that he was drunk or showing off, but Mom swore it was her fault, he was in so much hurry to get to her. She’d gone in the water without knowing it was deep. Mom couldn’t swim.
June was in a place I’d never seen her go. Relieved, wrecked, talkative. Telling me things nobody else ever had. She said every time she saw me, it made her wish she’d tried harder with Mom, back in the time they were friends. But after the accident and everything, seeing my dad killed, Mom never wanted fully to be in the world. June said it was different for me, I had so many good reasons. She looked at me hard, like trying to read something written inside my skull. “Think of that baby coming. I know how hard it is, but you’ll get clean.”
I had my doubts on what June knew. But I was polite enough not to say: Get back to me after you’ve done time with your racking bones in your sweat-swamped sheets, crying for the lights to go out on your whole damn being.
June kept talking. As far as what lay up the road for me and Emmy, she knew some things I didn’t, and that part killed her, she said. She felt cruel every time she set somebody up with the methadone clinic in Knoxville. Martha being not the only one, far from it. She had patients getting up at three a.m. to get down there and back before work, with their kids in the car. No closer options. But something new was coming out, that she hoped she could prescribe right out of her clinic. A lot of paperwork involved. Suboxone. A word none of us knew yet.
The first thing we had to do, she said, was quit thinking this mess was our fault. “They did this to you,” she kept repeating, like that was our key to salvation. Like there was even a door.
We got back after dark. Emmy had come around some by then, drinking a Coke, saying not much. June got some promises out of
me before turning me loose. But I was so far gone by that point. I’m not proud of it. I had some stuff in the glove box of
the Impala, and for the last many hours had been thinking of nothing else. Sitting in June’s driveway, I did an 80 before
I drove home to Dori.
54
I was surprised to find her awake, sitting up on the couch in bloody pajamas, face in her hands, crying. Jip tearing around in circles like a wind-up toy, out of his mind on the scent of blood and his little mother in pieces. I don’t think Dori understood what was going on.
I got some wet towels to clean her up, and changed her out of the old striped pajama bottoms of Vester’s she always wore now. Got her in a clean T-shirt and panties. Held her, rocked her, asked what all she’d taken that day and if she’d eaten. She just kept asking where had I been. Why didn’t I come home, why didn’t I answer my phone? I wasn’t used to having that phone yet, and given what it cost, I was so scared of losing it, I mostly left it locked in the glove. That’s where it had spent the day, buzzing to the expired insurance papers and oxy stash.
I tried to calm her down, saying I loved her, I was sorry to get home so late, and heartbroken of course. The pregnancy had to be over, with that much blood. This clouded her up. She wasn’t crying over that, it seemed. Just so confused and ashamed of her mess. Maybe she’d forgotten. After I brought it up, a whole fresh storm blew in. She’d lost her baby.
She was begging to shoot a morphine patch, and I wouldn’t let her. That’s what it came down to, our love story. Dori trying to wiggle away from me to reach for her junk, me restraining her on the couch, my grip like handcuffs on her tiny wrist bones. More tears, more blaming. Daddy had never treated her so mean. I didn’t love her, I wouldn’t let her have what she needed. I felt like the villain of the world, but this was the truth, another fix could have been the end of Dori. I had no way to know how much she’d already taken. Her kit was all over the table, cotton balls, lighter and spoon, today’s or yesterday’s I couldn’t tell. I smelled the vinegar she used with the fentanyl. Her patches scared the hell out of me, with those layers where the pure drug has to pass through the jelly to get to your skin. Poke a needle in there, it’s a game of chance. At least five times already, I’d come home from Tommy’s to find Dori thrashing on that couch, her lungs sucking hard and her eyes rolled back in her head. One of those times, she was blue around the lips. My blue fairy. I never hated myself more than those nights I had to shake and slap her to get her back. Throw water on her, pack ice on her neck if we had it. Things I’d not known how to do for Mom. For days after every OD, Dori would lie around whimpering, saying everything in her whole body hurt. I told her that was from her muscles trying so hard to draw breath. But I never truly knew if it was that, or what I’d done.
Let’s just get through tonight, I kept telling her now, needing to relax my grip so it wouldn’t leave bruises. It took no more than a minute for the fight to drain out of her. I stroked her hair and kissed her, saying we were okay, mostly talking to myself, trying to blot out the days ahead. Now we had no baby coming. No reason. I tried to ask her how sure she’d been about the pregnant thing. If she’d taken one of those home tests, I didn’t see it, or buy it for her. Did we really lose something here, or did we never have it? She wouldn’t talk about it. Dori always was embarrassed of her lady business and kept it to herself, but living with a person, obviously you know the basics. Her monthlies were all over the place, sometimes gone a long while and then back with revenge, hurtful and bloody. I would have to accept this as one more thing I was never going to know. Did this baby join up with my little brother in the black hole of lost and nameless, or was he lucky enough to skip the draft pick altogether.
Dori was like Vester now, a person that wasn’t safe left alone. She’d stayed by his side for years, giving herself up totally, because in Dori’s book, that was love. And mine too. It hit me then, holding her while she fell asleep, how loving Dori had swallowed me alive, from day one. She just couldn’t see it. How I was her provider, facing down the world for our drugs and groceries, begging for further mercy at the co-op, where my job was on thin ice. Likewise our car, as precarious as everything else in our life. I carried a case of transmission fluid in the trunk that the Impala was knocking down like a wino. If I couldn’t get the ring job done and paid for, we’d have to wait for somebody to find us starved in our bed. Even Jip’s chow had run out. None of this would sway Dori. She would cry all day and sleep at night with the back of my shirt balled up tight in her hands. That sure I was going to leave her. Because everybody does.
Even after she fell asleep, I stayed with her on the couch a long time. But got more and more restless, feeling a near violent need to set things to rights. The soiled blankets, the kit, the plates on the floor with crumbs of her nothing meals. I made myself keep still as long as I could stand it, listening to her slow breathing. I watched brown beetles come out of the corners and move across the floor with their feelers twitching, hunting out their rewards.
Somewhere around two in the morning I carried her upstairs to bed. She weighed even less than the day before. She was turning into air.
I couldn’t get in bed with her. Even as tired and wrecked as I was, after such a day. She was curled up so small with her
knees pulled against her chest and her fists on her face like an unborn baby herself. I tucked blankets around her, then came
back downstairs and stripped the filthy mess of clothes and quilts off the couch and stuffed it all in the washer. I picked
up the dishes and put them in the sink. Came back to the naked couch and lay down and wished some flood would come and wash
out the dry, grainy sockets of my eyes. My only job and purpose now was to keep Dori alive, and I didn’t know how to do it.
55
June was sending Emmy away to some residence place that would get her clean. None of this quickie rehab business that Mom wore out like a doormat, nor even the upscale three weeks that Stoner paid for, prior to shaming her over it to the point of death. We’re talking possibly years of Emmy’s life, starting it all over from scratch. In Asheville. There is no such reboot camp around here. Lee County being a place where you keep on living the life you were assigned.
June called to let me know if I wanted to say goodbye, this would be the day. What kind of bucks is this gold-star cure going to cost, you wonder. But it’s rude to discuss money. I just asked the polite things like, Does this establishment have bars in the windows because you know Emmy’s going to try and bolt. June was pretty confident Emmy would stay put. The reason: Rose Dartell. She’d contacted Emmy, offering to relieve her of some body parts. Holy shit.
I said I’d come over after work. I was still unfired at the co-op, probably because any other kid they hired would be as strung out as I was. I’d drag my ass in late, Rita and Les would hit pause on their Medicare war to join forces in eye-rolling. You get used to a routine. I needed the job, and if I lost my line on cheap livestock syringes, I’d be in trouble at home.
It was late winter now, where sunset puts its claim on much of the day. I drove up towards June’s place, looking at pink sky through the black trees. June opened the door, looking worn out. “She’s upstairs packing, hon. Hang on, let me go see if she wants you to come up there.”
Emmy came downstairs with her coat on, wanting to go for a walk. We headed up to the ruined cabin. She pulled her hat on fast, but I saw attempts had been made to salvage the wreck. Some kind of pixie cut, spikes and wisps. It had been a few weeks since the rescue but she still looked too thin, too jumpy, old in a young body. Rode hard and put up wet, guys like to say. But in some other way, she was restored to full Emmy. She wanted a cigarette.
“She’ll know you smoked, if you go back in there smelling like a chimney.”
“She’s bigger on forgiveness than permission.”
“Fine then, let her blame me for corrupting you.” I produced what was required. Emmy leaned against a tree and inhaled so hard the flame from my lighter pulled into the paper and crackled. Breathed in, breathed out, eyes closed, God don’t I know it. That moment where nicotine has to stand in for all other things you’re dying for.
“Late in the day for that, don’t you think?”
For contributing to the delinquency, she meant. I wondered so many things: Was Fast Forward some kind of drug lord now, did he really just throw her away like trash. How does a person you’ve worshipped turn into a monster. And by the way Rose Dartell, what the fuck. None of this would Emmy want to talk about. We went into the skeleton cabin and sat on the log benches we’d dragged together as kids. She smoked and held her cigarette away from her, the way girls do to try and keep the smell out of their hair. Old habit. She put her face down on her knees for a while, then sat back up. “Demon, I’m scared to death.”
“Of what?” I thought she’d say Rose, but no. She was scared to go away. Afraid they would brainwash her in this place. Afraid nobody there would understand her, she said. What she really meant was, nobody would know what she’d always been: queen bee, Emmy Peggot.
“You’ll rock the house,” I said. “You will rule rehab.”
But I didn’t really know. Here, all we can ever be is everything we’ve been. I came from a junkie mom and foster care, briefly a star, to some degree famous because of all that. Quick to burn out, right on schedule. Emmy grew up in Knoxville and moved back here out of the blue, but she landed in Lee County High with the full pedigree. Daughter of Peggots, homecoming royalty. In Asheville she might just be a pale, conceited girl with an air of broken beauty.
I remembered to give her the snake bracelet. She cupped her hands and dropped it from one to the other, staring at it like lost treasure. “I wondered what happened to that.”
