A Song in the Daylight (29 page)

“Girls-wise?”

“Mmm. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Simi was a junkie in the worst way. I mistook pinpoint pupils for doe eyes. She had been hoping I had the goods because she’d heard about my dad. She was thinking she’d sleep with me and I’d give her the H. I told her my dad didn’t deal blow to his son, how sick is that? And he was in prison besides. Hard to sell dope from prison. I thought that’d be the last I’d see of her, but no. She kept coming back.”

Larissa looked at his stomach, at his legs covered with a white sheet, at his lips. He had the goods. She tried not to quiver.

“Well, she continued with me like I was her methadone or something, but she was a real screwed-up girl, a nice girl, but so messed up, like…
messed
up.” Kai lifted his arms as if in surrender, and broke off. “She was a cotton shooter. You know what that is?”

Larissa shook her nervous head.

“That’s someone who’s so bad addicted that when they’re broke and can’t get the man, they shoot up the residue from the cotton used to filter the H. Pretty bad.” He clucked his tongue, but Larissa could tell from the way his bottomless eyes refused to look at her when he spoke, that this wasn’t a gossip story to him, this was the source of much of his solitary inwardness.

“I didn’t see her getting out of it,” Kai went on. “You know how sometimes you can tell if people can get out of shit? Like you sense in them a way out? Maybe a bit of strength, or a bit of hope for themselves, maybe a little upbringing, a little ambition, God maybe? Something. It doesn’t have to be much, but it has to be real. Well, Simi had none of that. Her home life was terrible. She was a high school drop-out, had no skills,
lived at home with her stepmom, and stole serious dough from her to score.”

“Where was her dad?”

“Out of Maui with another woman. Can you blame him?”

“I don’t know,” Larissa tersely replied. “I know nothing about him.”

“I wanted to stop seeing Simi, but she was so tightly wound, I didn’t think she’d take it well, and so we kept at it, me hoping she’d move on from me, find an actual balloon, um, a supplier,” Kai explained. “But she wasn’t moving on, floating, floating, promising me week after week when she was broke that she’d quit for good, and then we could have a normal relationship.”

“Were you…on it?”

“What are you worried about?” He peered into Larissa’s face, shaking his head. “Control over myself is my thing, my drug of choice. H wasn’t my scene,” Kai said. “You know what I believe, Larissa? Life is so fucking short, you never know when it’s going to end, and I didn’t want to spend a second of it in oblivion. Trouble was, Simi thought life was entirely
too
long and oblivion was exactly what she needed to make the hours run faster.” Kai paused. Larissa was still lying down, but he was now sitting up bowling pin straight against the headboard. He looked down into his palms. “You want to know how the hours of her life crawled to a stop?”

“She ODd?”

“She got pregnant.”

Larissa put her face into her hands. Why were young women so wantonly reckless with their lives and bodies? “While on heroin?”

“Yeah, apparently those two things are
not
mutually exclusive. Turns out heroin is not synonymous with contraception. Who knew? It may stop you from coming, but not from conceiving. So how do you think a seventeen-year-old girl
still living at home with no job, no education and a devastating King Kong-size monkey on her back would feel about this?”

“I can hardly guess,” said Larissa.

“Simi got it into her head that the baby was going to be her ticket out. Suddenly she got religion! Here was this baby from God, and now everything was going to be okay with her and consequently with us.”

Larissa sat up in a lotus position, her hands on his legs. “Were you okay with that?” She looked into his face searching for answers.

Kai shrugged inscrutably. “I wanted her to get better. She was a frail girl. And—you know, my mother had me at sixteen, had my sisters soon after. Many of my mother’s neighbors had their kids young. I didn’t have a problem with it.”

“But a baby for you at eighteen!” Larissa said, wistfully anxious.

“My dad wasn’t much of a dad. I wanted to do better. I thought I could do better.”

Did Kai have a baby waiting for him in Hawaii? That was coldly inconceivable. Rather, Larissa didn’t want it to be true.

“So I said to her that if she quit the H, I’d marry her.”

“You’d
what
?”

“Yeah. It was the right thing to do. I said I’d marry her. I’d graduated high school, I was working,
lots
of business for a stonemason with the luxury hotels and the condos springing up everywhere. I was making money. I said, why not? We’ll do it right, Simi.”

“You’re crazy.”

“That may be so, but she got pretty excited.”

“Kai, is Simi the girl who was in the motorcycle accident with you?”

He was utterly quiet for at least a minute. It seemed like he wasn’t even breathing, his chest not rising nor falling.

“Yes,” he finally said.

“Oh, Kai.”

“The accident didn’t happen when she was pregnant. It happened first night I met her. That’s how we found out she was a junkie. She went into mojo withdrawal at the hospital.”

“So you hooked up, went for a demon ride, and both nearly died?”

“Yes.”

Larissa herself fell silent. She became frightened—of him. Of the calm that hid life-threatening danger just below the surface.

“Anyway…” Kai made a rolling forward gesture with his hands, like he wanted to get on with it. His usual animation was nowhere to be seen. “You want to hear more?”

Larissa didn’t. She imagined no good endings. She nodded.

“Simi decided she would cold turkey it and get off H, but the doctor at the free clinic said never. You should’ve quit before you got pregnant, that’s how you do it. First quit, then get knocked up. Now it’s too late, you’re out of options. You quit now, the baby dies for certain. If you want this baby to have the remotest chance of living—and Simi desperately did—you have to continue the heroin, in the smallest dose you can manage without going through withdrawal, and we’ll do what we can to keep the baby inside the womb as long as possible. Heroin babies are usually preemies. If we can get to thirty weeks, thirty-two, we stand a good chance. Then you and the infant can go on methadone.”

Larissa was so silent, she could hear a boat rev its engine in the water, beyond the hum of the AC, through the closed windows. She could hear a woman calling down the hall, a siren wailing off in the distance. She could almost hear the hands of the clock. Thirty weeks of tick tock.

“Simi tried hard to eat, to sleep, to take her vitamins, to only shoot up when she absolutely needed the fix.”

“Where was she living at this time?”

“With me. We rented a one-bedroom. We weren’t strapped for cash. I kept bringing home the bacon and she kept buying heroin with it.” Kai broke off; Larissa could see how unwillingly he continued.

“I’d be happy if I never had to talk of this,” Kai said. “I don’t want to get it off my chest. This is not something I need to work through. It’s just the way it is. Nothing you can do. After she got hooked, nothing anyone could do.” He breathed in, his back in a straight line, nothing on his body moving. “Well, she managed real well, longer than anyone’d expected. She carried that baby nearly to full-term, and we all thought the worst was behind us. The baby was doing great, growing. They were going to induce at week thirty-six, just to be on the safe side. But then, during a routine check-up at thirty-five weeks the doctor couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. They did an ultrasound, and…” He opened his hands to the heavens. “That little baby had died. Simi had to give birth to it dead.” Kai did not look at Larissa. “I told you it was no good. Simi had to be sedated before she could be induced, she was that hysterical.”

“Oh, Kai.”

“We buried the baby right before Christmas, and then broke up a few months later in the spring. She said to me, you can still marry me, Kai, you know, and I just gave her my weekly pay. I said, an addict can’t live with a normal person, Simi, and she said, I can live with you, Kai, you’re not normal because you make me better, you make me calm because you’re calm yourself. You bring me peace. I said, yes, but you don’t bring
me
peace. I’m not strung out, I said. We can’t be in the same room together while you shoot up, busted up with grief over our baby. She said she understood. What she didn’t understand was that what happened wasn’t just against her, it was against me, too. She thought she was the only one suffering.
So…” He took another pained breath. “She moved back in with her stepmother. I continued to send her money. To see her. We stayed in touch. I wanted her to be okay.”

“I’m so sorry.” Poor Kai. Poor Simi. Much of Larissa’s sorrow was for the heroin-addled heroic mother who carried a baby to term because she thought it was going to save her. There was something visceral and paralyzing in the knots twisting shut Larissa’s own womb when she imagined addicted Simi from Hawaii, who loved Kai and wanted his baby even more than she wanted heroin. What Larissa felt for Kai at that moment was beyond primitive sadness. It was a burden of churning current, but heavy, like sand and cement in her gut.

“Was it a boy?” Why didn’t she want the answer to be yes?

“No, it was a girl. Simi named her Eve. Eve Passani.” Kai clicked his tongue together, tightened his grave and unhappy mouth. He was still looking down. “And not long after that, my dad died, just to, you know, complete the vortex of parental malfunction swirling around Maui at that time. Simi continued to be so depressed, on all kinds of meds, just totally unable to deal. She was taking anti-psychotics morning and night. The doctor would say, but Simi, if you keep taking Klonopin, you’ll never deal with it, and then when you go off the meds, two years from now, three years from now, it’ll be like it happened yesterday. And Simi said, who said I’m going off the meds? The doctor said, well, eventually you’ll have to go off. And she said, who said? The doctor looks at
me
, helplessly! I said, what the fuck are you looking at me for, man? Give me some of that, too. Who wants to deal with it?

“But you know, after months of this, I’d had enough. Simi wasn’t going to get better on my watch. I was fooling myself into thinking I could help her. When I got Dad’s bike, I left for good. Came here. Escape, man. Anything but stay and watch her destroy herself.”

“And Simi stayed with her stepmother?”

“Yes.”

Larissa didn’t speak.

Kai didn’t speak.

Larissa didn’t speak.

Kai didn’t speak.

“Did Simi die in April?” she whispered.

“She did.”

“Oh, Kai.”

“She was doomed, don’t you think? Doomed before I met her. I just didn’t know it. ‘Cause sometimes you don’t. You think you can play God, be the big man, help the poor, heal the afflicted. Like you’re Jesus or something. Well, it’s all bullshit. You can’t help anybody. She had become personal assistant to a moderately unknown rock star in Hawaii,” Kai said in a dull voice. “I think he supplied her with all kinds of shit. After a party one night she tried to drive home and crashed. And they tried to blame him! It’s his fault, her stepmother cried. He never should have given her the shit. But was it his fault? Was it mine for knocking her up? For giving her the money for the heroin? Who has the responsibility for their own life? You? Or everyone around you? Makes you feel pretty hopeless, though, all around. So.” He paused. “We buried her next to the baby. Same gravestone and everything. Simi and Eve.”

Larissa cried.

“No, no.” Kai got off the bed. He couldn’t even look at her. “I’m not the guy for that,” he said. “Seriously. You wanted me to tell you and I told you. But I can’t have this.” He waved in the general direction of her face. “It’s hard enough. I can’t deal with it.”

Larissa wiped her face. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.” He looked at his watch. “Have you seen the time?” It was nearly eight. “You better go, you have an hour’s drive.” He put on his clothes in six seconds.

It took her a little longer to wash off, to get dressed. She wanted to touch him but she could tell he didn’t want to be even secretly glanced at.

At the car he kissed her. “Except for that last bit, this was a pretty good day, wasn’t it?”

It was all she could do not to weep in front of him.

“So what do you think?” Kai asked forlornly. “You want to say goodbye? I’m tainted goods, aren’t I, Larissa?”

“Not quite,” she replied, pressing her body against him in a long embrace. “Not quite ready to part with you just yet.”

“Huh. Funny, that’s exactly what Simi said last time I saw her before she died.”

4
Family Fun in the Poconos

W
here were the bags from this all-day shopping trip? Where were the sandals, the dresses, the bathing suits? Something for Jared, maybe some red, white and blue boxers, a sundress for Emily? Makeup from Bloomingdale’s? Where were the things he sent her out to shop for? If she sent Jared to get milk and he came back without milk, what would she think? What will he think? Larissa was so filled to bursting with Kai that she returned home at nearly nine in the evening with no bags.

“Mom’s back!” Asher and Emily and Riot ran to her, the dog first. “What’d you get?” The house smelled of fish and of brownies.

“Nothing. Though not for lack of trying. How was your day?”

“Great! We went fishing,” said Asher. “You should see the size of the fish I caught, Mom.”

“It was a tadpole,” said Emily, pushing him out of the way.

“It was a bass, Mom.”

“Why don’t you just tell her you caught a dolphin if you’re going to make crap up?”

“Emily!”

“Sorry.”

Larissa put down her purse, took off her sandals. “Where’s your brother, your dad?”

“Brother is sleeping, finally, thank God,” replied Emily, rolling her eyes.

“Hey, look who’s finally home!” Jared came in from the den. In the background, she heard a ballgame. No wonder he didn’t come out to greet her right away. Game must be close. “How was your day?” He kissed her. “What’d you get?”