Now she did none of that.
Instead, she had a sip of vodka. Then she took a Xanax and washed it down with more vodka. On the screen, the brown-haired little girl danced and jumped. Alyson did not know if she was watching her daughter’s recital or one of her own.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Rain and Bug and stopped at the mailbox. There was the usual half ton of bills, two magazines—Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone—something that made Rain stand there frowning at what lay under the mail. She took it out and turned it over in her fingers.
It was a pocket watch. Small and delicate, with a long silver chain and a clear crystal cover over a yellow face set with Roman numerals. The hands were stopped at three minutes to twelve, and there was no second hand. Rain turned it over and saw that there was a slot for a windup key on the back. Rain searched the mailbox for a key, but there wasn’t one.
“What the hell?” she said, trying to understand how it got there. Joplin wouldn’t have left it. He didn’t have a key to her mailbox. The watch was pretty, though, and it felt good in her hand.
Bug stood on her hind legs to sniff the dangling chain. She barked happily at it.
“Weird,” said Rain. She stuffed it into her pocket, closed and locked her mailbox, and climbed the stairs with her tail-waggy little dog.
The dog stopped wagging as they approached their apartment door. Rain felt a chill race up her spine as she thought of what had happened that morning. She stood outside for almost two minutes, dredging up the nerve. It had been a long, bad day, and she felt empty of courage.
Bug did not scratch at the door the way she usually did when they got home. She wasn’t eager to get inside, either. Great.
Finally, Rain took a steadying breath and unlocked the door.
The first thing she did once they were inside was go straight to the kitchen and grab the biggest knife in the rack. It was a bread knife with a fat blade and a sturdy black plastic handle. Bug scuttled behind her as Rain crept toward the bathroom, steeled herself, and pushed the door open with her foot, the knife raised to strike.
There was no one inside.
The Van Gogh shower curtain hung there, pretty and unmoving, but the memories of that morning came back at her with such reality that she began to sweat inside her damp clothing. She tightened her grip on the knife, reached out a quivering hand to take hold of the curtain, and then whipped it back. She totally forgot that it was held up with duct tape and did not slide along the bar. Instead, the plastic tore from the remaining rings and the bar itself popped out of the socket. The released tension flung it at her, and Rain fell back against the edge of the doorframe with the bar and the curtain hitting her in the face. She fell with a bone-jarring jolt, lost the knife, and sprawled on her back halfway into the bedroom.
The tub was empty.
Of course it was empty. No strangers. No mad rapists. No junkies breaking in to steal her stuff. No Doctor Nine. No anything. Because of course there was nothing. It was all in her head. That’s what she told herself. Which is a good thing to say when you’re fighting fears, but a bad, bad thought to be alone with.
It’s all in your head.
She dared herself to say the rest of it. The parasite in her head accepted that challenge. It’s all in your head because you’re crazy, it told her. You cooked your brain with drugs, and now you are nothing but damaged goods, sweetheart.
You’re nothing but damage.
You’re nothing.
Bug cringed and whimpered by the open bathroom door and then suddenly peed all over the floor. Rain kicked free of the curtain, shoved the bar away, covered her face with her hands, and completely lost it as the whole day smashed down on her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Rain clawed the pieces of herself together, she cleaned up the dog pee, then went into the kitchen and counted the cans of dog food. On her last trip to the market five days ago, she’d bought fourteen large cans, one for each day. She gave Bug half a can in the morning and the rest at night. She counted the remaining cans and did the math. The can for Friday was not there. It should be, but it wasn’t. Like the day, the can was missing, too. When she checked her birth control pills, the Friday dose was likewise gone.
How did that make sense?
Either she was awake on Friday and took her pill, fed the dog, and did the other Friday things, or she didn’t. If she did, why couldn’t she remember any of it? If she didn’t, then …
There was really nowhere to go with that. If she had slept all the way through Friday, then wouldn’t Bug have peed and pooped on the floor? She checked everywhere, but there was nothing except what she’d just cleaned up in the bathroom.
A faint tremble began deep inside her. It had nothing to do with how cold the room was. Bug, sensitive to her mood, whined softly and leaned against her. She picked the tiny dog up and cuddled her. “Mommy’s not crazy,” she promised, knowing it was a lie. Bug, true and perfect as ever, wagged her crooked tail.
Rain kissed Bug and fed her, then bundled up in what she thought of as her “slob” clothes and went out in a hunt for food. She wore old dance tights, a hoodie she’d borrowed from Joplin and never returned, no makeup, and a scarf that was about a mile long. Protected against the rain and guys cruising for easy meat, she ran out into the night.
As she passed her mailbox on the way out, Rain remembered the little windup pocket watch, but she’d left it upstairs. How the heck did it get in there with her mail? Tomorrow was Sunday, so she’d have to wait until Monday to ambush the letter carrier. Seemed so weird to leave it without some kind of note.
“Add that to the day,” she said to the empty foyer as she went out.
She spent money she couldn’t afford to order Chinese takeout. The restaurant charged too much for delivery and there would be a tip, so she always got it herself. She called Joplin to see if he wanted to come over and help her eat it, and maybe help her piece together what was happening—the glasses, the kid, the old lady, the lost day—but her call went straight to his voice mail. She hung up without leaving a message.
On the way back, she stopped outside a dance studio and looked through the window at the little girls doing ballet, wishing she could shed her skin and let the little girl inside go running and leaping to join them. They were all smiling, happy in their exertions, joyful in the mechanics of their routine. Rain ached to dance, to have the freedom to try it again. She even went inside and stood in the waiting area to watch.
Watching was nice.
For a while.
There were always memories lurking beneath the surface. Her own and ones that she had borrowed from her mother. Alyson Creighton-Thomas used to dance, too. Mom had been really good at it, a rising star. Once upon a time her mother had been a candidate for “featured dancer” in the New York City Ballet. That was a lifelong dream and every indication was that it would happen, and from there maybe even prima ballerina. Friends of her mother often said that she had the talent, the determination, the beauty. She had everything.
Except that at nineteen, Mom had gotten pregnant. Just like Rain, there had been one overly energetic sperm that had fought its way across the no-man’s-land of regular birth control pills. A sperm that had beaten all the odds, found the egg, created magic. And if it had been only a baby, Mom might have taken a year off and then worked like a demon to get back in shape and back onto the stage. Other dancers had done that. However, her mother had been in labor for more than twenty hours when the doctors discovered that the baby’s oxygen supply had been disrupted by a prolapsed cord. They did a C-section, and even though the family could afford the best doctors—always the best for the Creighten and Thomas families—things went south. Mom’s femur was fractured. Not common, but not an unknown thing, either. The damage was severe, requiring surgeries, pins. And then a staph infection swept in and brought sepsis with it. More treatment and another surgery.
Even nineteen-year-old dancers rarely make it all the way back from that. Rai
n’s mother did not. She could walk, but there was a limp. On damp days, she had to use a cane or not go out in public. She stayed home on rainy nights. She could still dance, but only at weddings, and always with care. Ballet was out of the question.
That had been how Rain came into the world, like a driver of an out-of-control car smashing into innocent pedestrians. Her mother had lost her one chance. Rain and her father—because of his energetic sperm—thereafter shared the roles of the villain in an ongoing drama.
The twist was that her mother had enrolled Rain in dance classes nearly as soon as she could walk, and then became the worst possible stereotype of a domineering, hypercompetitive stage mother: bullying teachers, sneering at other children, waging war with other mothers. Somehow, though, it hadn’t spoiled the dance experience for Rain. All she ever wanted to do was dance, and if Mom made that possible, that was fine. From about age eight onward, Rain understood, though, that her mother was trying to live vicariously through her. Whatever. That didn’t matter much to Rain until her own pregnancy and her own delivery-room disasters.
After that? Without dance to bond them, they might as well have been strangers who barely noticed each other on the street. The level of warmth was about the same. Maybe a little less.
She gazed with longing at the dancers.
The instructor gave her a quick but guarded smile, clearly not recognizing her as a parent of any of the kids and not sure if she was a perspective student. Rain shook her head to indicate that she just wanted to watch. The instructor nodded, but there was a look of doubt on the woman’s face. That happened a lot when people looked at Rain. They knew there was something wrong with her, something off. It was a bit of the Other that Rain knew always lived inside her.
When the woman wasn’t looking, Rain stole three dance magazines from the table, shoved them into the bag with the Chinese food, and left. She had a stack of them in her closet, and she could kill an entire evening looking at the pictures and remembering the feel of the lifts, the leaps, the turns and twists and …
“God,” she said, catching sight of herself in a store window. “You’re so pathetic.”
Bug greeted her with more enthusiasm than Rain felt she deserved—dogs were great for that. She checked the bathroom and under the bed. Nothing.
Then Rain realized that her ringer was off and she’d missed two texts. One text was from a collection agency—why on earth did they think she would respond to a text after all the calls she’d dodged?—and the other was from Joplin, who said he was going to be staying at his sister’s place in the Village overnight and would call her tomorrow.
Rain looked at Bug. “Men suck, don’t they?”
Bug gave her an enthusiastic wag. Rain gave her a cookie.
Rain wrapped herself in two quilts and binge-watched old episodes of Dancing with the Stars while she ate the Chinese food. Bug crawled under the blankets and kept Rain’s feet warm. Rain ate everything she bought and felt fat and bloated and disgusting. But happy, too. And satisfied in a twisted way that she understood but had never been able to explain to her shrink. She knew that other women would get it, even women who weren’t like her.
The bathroom door was closed. She got up three times and went in to check it. She took the knife with her. Bug did not accompany her. Each time, the bathroom was empty, and each time, that wasn’t a comfort. She retreated to her nest of blankets, pressed her feet against Bug, and started another episode.
When her phone rang, she shrieked like a startled seagull. Bug leaped up and her muffled barks were loud, even under the covers. The ring seemed incredibly, weirdly strident, and for a moment Rain was afraid to look at the screen display, knowing that it would be him.
It wasn’t. Nor was it Joplin. Instead of a name on the screen there was an icon of a yo-yo spinning on its string. Rain punched the button and lifted the phone to her ear.
“Yes?”
“Hey, girl,” said the caller.
Rain closed her eyes and exhaled with relief. “Hey, Yo-Yo.”
Yolanda Jablonski—Yo-Yo to everyone since she was in third grade—said, “You okay?”
“Huh? Sure, I guess. Why?”
Yo-Yo popped chewing gum. “You like totally blew us off yesterday.”
Yesterday.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Rain said quickly. She had promised to meet Yo-Yo and go to the NA meeting Friday evening, then go to the diner afterward. However, that—like everything belonging to Friday—had been blanked from her life. “Everything got messed up.”
There was a pause. “When you say ‘messed up’…,” said Yo-Yo slowly.
Here it goes, thought Rain.
“No,” said Rain quickly. “It’s not that. I didn’t use.”
“Girl, you’d better not be lying to me.”
“I’m not.” As she spoke, she broke open the fortune cookie that had come with the food. The little slip of paper read: Life’s too short to spend so much of it on your knees.
Yo-Yo said, “Look, I just left the late meeting. Not at the church—the place near me. I got a text from the gang and the Bobs said they’re heading over to the diner and want me to meet them. I said I’d call you. Why don’t you come with? We can get pancakes. You cannot say no to pancakes. That’s not allowed.”
“I…”
“Hot maple syrup and way too much butter.”
“Yo-Yo, I—”
“C’mon, Rain,” said Yo-Yo, “just do it, okay?”
“I just ate. I’m stuffed.”
“Stress eating has no calories. Fifteen minutes,” said Yo-Yo. “I’ll meet you outside your place.”
The line went dead.
Rain set the phone down and looked around her apartment. It was ugly and small and cold, but it was her place. Until that morning, it had been her safe place. She cut a look in the direction of the bathroom.
Had been.
Then she remembered the little watch and went looking for it, found it on the floor by the hamper. It was such a delicate thing. There was no way to wind it, and she wondered if the keyhole on the back was used for that purpose. No key, though.
“That’s about right,” she said and put the watch on the bedside table. She put on fresh clothes—jeans, a royal-blue hoodie, and sneakers—and grabbed her everyday purse. It was big enough for her to put the knife, wrapped in a dish towel, inside with the handle up so she could grab it.
For what? asked her inner parasite, mocking her. Stay home. If you go out with your friends, you’ll tell.
“Shut up,” she said out loud.
He’ll hurt you if you tell.
Rain did not answer, aloud or in her thoughts. Instead, she picked up the big bread knife, shook her head, and slid it back into its place in the butcher-block holder. Too big.
She took a steak knife with her instead and went out into the night to meet her friend.
INTERLUDE TWO
NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS MEETING
St. Jude’s Catholic Church
Thirteen Months Ago
“There’s more to the story, though,” said Rain. She paused to take a breath, aware of how this was making her feel. Sharing was supposed to be a liberating experience, but her whole body felt tight and sore, and there was a fluttering inside her chest. “I’ve never really shared this part of it. Not in any of the meetings I’ve been to.”
Some of the people in the audience perked up, interested now.
“You see,” said Rain, “it was never an easy pregnancy. I mean … the baby was always healthy, but I wasn’t. I got sick early on and had all kinds of problems. Infections, colds, circulation issues. Couple of times I blacked out and fell, tore some muscles. There was some internal bleeding. I kept getting dehydrated. Stabbing pains in my uterus, and all the other stuff. My blood pressure kept going up, too, and I had all sorts of heart problems. Arrhythmia and palpitations. Then I was diagnosed with preeclampsia. It was a mess. I was a mess. They kept telling me that I was young and strong and that the baby and
I would get through it okay. My parents have money, and they made sure I saw all the best doctors.”
The room was very quiet, but it felt too hot. Rain used her sleeve to wipe sweat from her eyes.
“Then my water broke. I panicked. Not because I was afraid of the process of giving birth but because I thought I’d do it wrong. That I’d somehow fail at something as natural as this.”
The women in the room were staring at her, and Rain thought she could tell which of them were mothers and which weren’t. There was a different energy in them, a different light in their eyes. Not necessarily a love light. It was more like the campfire glow of veterans from the same war. After all, everyone here was an addict, and their life choices had to have stained the lives of their kids. Had to.
Rain cleared her throat. “And I was afraid of what was going to happen after I gave birth. I was there to deliver the baby and then give it up for adoption. They hadn’t even told me the sex, though I always knew—somehow knew—that he was a boy. A little boy. Noah’s little boy. My little boy.”
Dylan. She whispered it inside her head. Sweet little Dylan.
“I’d signed the papers,” she said softly. “Taken the pre-birth counseling. I knew my parents would never want or love the baby. They are not … warm people. I’d been a disappointment to them long before I ever became a teen pregnancy statistic. Long before I ever began using.” She shrugged and tried to play it as no big thing, but some of the older women in the audience gave her looks of disapproval. As if to say, Own it.
“I did not have the courage or the optimism to fight to keep my baby,” she said, and saw some nods from the ones who understood. “I want to apologize to my baby, and I wanted witnesses to that. I needed people to understand that I was doing what I thought was right. That it wasn’t me betraying my baby. That … I … I … oh, God…”