Crazy Love You (3 page)

“Maybe,” she said. She moved an errant strand of hair away from her eyes. “I don't know.”

“I'll wait.”

“I don't know,” she said again. And that time it sounded more like a no.

She was gone then, disappeared behind the playground gate. And I turned around, leaving quickly. I knew as I walked downtown that if she didn't come back at seven that night, I might not see her again.

•  •  •

“Why did you come back?” I would ask her much later.

“Because I felt sorry for you,” she said. She gave me a kind of sympathetic smile, a light touch to the face. “You looked like a person who needed something.”

“I was
needy
?
That's
why you came back—not because I was hot or charming or magnetic? Not because you wanted me?”

“No. Sorry.” Then that laugh, a little-girl giggle that always made me laugh, too.

“I
did
need something,” I said. I ran my hand along the swell of her naked hip. “I needed you. I needed this life.”

“Aw,” she said. “And I came back because you were sweet. I could see that you were really, really sweet.”

But
I
didn't make it back to the park that night at seven. Guess why.

Priss.

I'm not saying I didn't love my baby sister. I loved her as much as any ten-year-old
could
love a crying, clinging, alien little monkey who was always on
my mom
, who wouldn't let anyone sleep, and who drew all the attention formerly showered on
me
.

Let's face it; she was annoying. She stayed home while I had to go to school. Family members, neighbors, friends all dropped by with gifts for
the Baby
—and P.S.,
none
for me. The Baby slept in bed next to my mother, where I hadn't been welcome in years. Still there was something cute about little Ella—her little fingers that clung to mine, her gooey, toothless smile, that little leg-kicking thing that babies do. I liked looking at her—when she wasn't bawling.

She's your responsibility, too
, my mom told me.
She'll love you so much, adore you if you're nice to her.

What does “adore” mean?

It means she'll love you forever.

I liked the sound of that. But my mom and the Baby seemed like a closed circle, with eyes only for each other. My mom was always looking at her with this blissed-out smile, and the Baby was always looking for her, even when my dad or I was holding her. Even when my mom was hugging me, or reading to me, the Baby was right there. I knew it was wrong to be angry and jealous, so I kept it inside. But my dad saw it, thought it was funny, a reason to tease me.

“Now you know how
I
felt when
you
came along,” he said. “Sucks, doesn't it?”

It did suck. It really did. As a grown-up, I know that those feelings are normal. Every little kid with a new sibling has them. Plus, there was a big gap in our ages; I was way too used to being the center of my mom's universe. Ella was a “happy surprise,” my mother said. They'd tried for years to have another child and finally gave up.

And then we got our little miracle, later than expected but still wonderful! Right, Ian?

Yeah, right, Mom.

I had dark thoughts about my little sister, ill wishes that shame me even now. And I had them until I realized that Ella needed me.

I came home from school one midwinter day and the house was dark. My mom wasn't in the kitchen; there was nothing cooking on the stove. This was weird, because my mom was always in the kitchen, and all the lights were always on, and there was always music playing on the stereo. But all I could hear when I walked in was my sister crying. I followed the sound and found my way to her nursery. She was red-faced and writhing; her wet diaper had seeped through to the sheets beneath her.

When she saw me she gave a couple of hard sniffles, some ragged breaths, then stopped crying. I lowered the side of the crib the way my mom had showed me, and I lifted her out. She was maybe two months old.

“It's okay,” I told her. She was stinky, and I turned my face away from her. I laid her down on the changing table and unbuttoned her little onesie, took off her wet diaper.

“Ew, Ella,” I said. “Gross.”

She was watching me with her intense dark-eyed baby stare.

“I'll clean you up,” I told her. “Don't worry.”

I remember thinking that it wasn't as gross as I'd expected. I'd watched my mom change her a hundred times, so I kind of knew what to do. I held her legs and wiped her bottom, got a clean diaper from the drawer, and put it on her. I was just a kid; I'm sure I made a mess of it. But I was super proud of myself. Ella was kicking her legs and cooing by the time I was done. I picked her up and carried her to my parents' bedroom. My mom was just a lump underneath the covers.

“Mom,” I said.

“Get her away from me,” she said. The words were thick and flat, and I remember a kind of sickness in my belly at the sound of it. I had never heard her say anything like that before.

“She was wet,” I said.

“Take her downstairs,” she said. “I'm so tired. I haven't slept in days.”

I stood waiting. Who was this woman in the bed? Not my mom, not the baker of cookies, singer of songs, LEGO builder, crayon artist, cartoon watcher. She was some wraith, dark and shrunken in her bed.

“Go, Ian,” she said. “Please.”

So I took Ella and we went downstairs. I was way too young to be taking care of a two-month-old baby. But I knew enough to support the head, watch out for the soft spot. There was a bottle of formula in the fridge. I couldn't reach the microwave and I wasn't allowed to use the stove. So I ran it under warm water the way I'd seen my mom do, leaving poor Ella on the floor, where the cat sniffed at her and she made soft noises.

Then I picked her up and fed her. She drank that bottle as if she hadn't eaten all day, and maybe she hadn't. I called my neighbor after that, and said my mom wasn't feeling well. And then Mrs. Carter came over and I watched television, forgetting really everything that had passed that afternoon.

Kids don't think about anything but themselves most of the time—so I wasn't that concerned about why my mom was in bed and not taking care of Ella. But I do remember that I started to love my sister that day. And I knew that Mom was right; if I was nice to Ella, she'd adore me. She'd love me forever. Turns out we wouldn't have that long.

•  •  •

Honestly, I tried not to think about my sister much. Or my mother. I have been guilty of doing what it takes to bury most of my memories and feelings related to both of them. I'm not especially creative when it comes to that—from junk food to booze to drugs, there are few poisons with which I haven't experimented. I've found a million ways to keep the demons in a comfortable, quiet stupor, lazing around on my inner couches.

But I wasn't a
total
mess at the point of my life when I met Megan. I still drank too much—but what thirty-year-old single Manhattanite didn't? Maybe not everyone drinks until they black out, or wakes up with big black gaps in his memory of the evening before, nameless women in his bed, or finds himself in a stranger's apartment in the Bronx. But whatever. I wasn't doing drugs the way I used to with Priss—there weren't as many bar fights, disorderly conduct citations, etc. I wasn't as often finding myself in the company of questionable people, doing things I'd later regret. At least that's what I told myself at the time.

Looking back, though, I can see that I was either working, or drunk, or high or hung over most of the time and that kept most of my inner ugliness at bay. I wasn't doing much thinking about anything too deep. I was in a comfortable, if toxic, stasis. I might have stayed there forever. But Megan was about to shake things up big-time.

•  •  •

After talking to Megan in the park, I hustled back to my loft to take a shower and make myself pretty for my date. I was excited—giddy even. I felt a lightness that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. I was Tony in
West Side Story
: something was coming, something big. This was the moment on which my whole life would pivot and I could feel the electricity building. So it was something of a gut punch to find Priss sitting on the steps that led up to my apartment building.

“Hey, stranger,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. I tried to shoot her a smile, but it felt fake and I wondered if she could tell that I wasn't that happy to see her. “What's up?”

“It's been a while,” she said. She turned a strand of that wild red hair around her finger. There was no way to capture all those shades of color—white and copper and gold. I had never gotten it quite right, mainly because it always seemed to be changing.

“It has,” I said. I came to stand beneath her and she looked down at me, resting her hand on the metal railings. A woman walked by and glanced at us strangely.

“What are you looking at?” Priss called. She was like that, always causing trouble, reacting to the slightest thing. When I was with her, I tended to be the same way. I followed the woman with my eyes, embarrassed. But she just shuttled on down the street like a good New Yorker, never looked back.

I walked up the stairs and stood by the door. I pulled my phone from my pocket and looked at the time. It was almost five o'clock.

“Did you get your work done today?” she asked.

“Some,” I lied. I'd been drawing pictures of Megan all day. I had a deadline looming but it wasn't close enough to motivate me. I'm an eleventh-hour kind of guy; pressure is my friend.

She nodded, unconvinced. She knew me better than anyone did, better than I knew myself. And that wasn't always a good thing.

We stood there in a bit of a standoff. The sky was growing dark, and the black-gray gloaming seemed heavy with the portent of snow. The wind danced a plastic bodega bag down the street, it lofted and whispered and I found myself watching it. It was graceful, a twist of light and shadows, a spiral of ghostly movement. There is beauty in almost every ordinary thing. If Priss hadn't been there, I'd have pulled my camera from my pocket and chased it down the street, taking video. Then I'd have gone home and studied how it moved, how the light shifted and changed to communicate movement to my eye. I might have tried to sketch it into a few panels, tell a story about it. Who had been carrying it? What had it held? Why had it been discarded? Stories are everywhere if you're looking for them.

“Earth to Ian,” she said. Her tone had a sharp edge that made me jump a little. “Are we going in?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

I let us in and we walked down the long concrete-and-marble lobby, past the alcove of mailboxes, toward the hammered-metal elevator door. I stared at my lumpy and distorted reflection. All my giddiness had faded. The fatigue I always felt around Priss started to pull at my shoulders and the lids of my eyes. She ran a long slender hand through her hair, shaking it a little like a mane.

She was talking, but I wasn't listening. Instead, I was just watching the way her lips moved around her words, how the candy-pink flesh puckered. I was noticing how her tongue darted out to moisten her lips, how she thrust her right hip out and dug her hands into her pockets. I'd spent many years observing Priss and putting her on the page, but I still wasn't sure I had her. She defied capture like any wild thing.

Up in the loft, she disappeared into my bedroom and came back out with the treasure box. It was a small black suitcase on rollers where I kept my weed and all my sundry illegal paraphernalia. We started calling it the treasure box back in the days when I was high all the time—not just weed, but pills and occasionally blow. I stopped short of things like heroin and crack. But not Priss. She'd do anything.

“I don't want to get high,” I said. I made myself busy in the kitchen, taking dishes from the sink and putting them in the dishwasher when normally they would have just sat there until the maid came. “I have plans.”

I took a coconut water from the stupidly big Sub-Zero and focused on opening it and pouring the cloudy liquid into a glass.

I heard the hiss and snap of the lighter, the sharp intake of her breath. Then the scent of the weed hit me—sweet and sleepy, warm and earthy. I could imagine the green twisting line of smoke hooking me under the nose like a ghost finger and pulling me toward the couch.

“Oh, really,” said Priss. She locked me in that icy blue stare. “You have plans?”

That's the last thing I remember clearly. I vaguely recall sinking into the couch. Just one hit, I thought. It'll relax me. I won't be such a spaz when I meet up with Megan. It was that killer weed from Hawaii that my publicist had given me.
Don't smoke it if you have anything you want to do that day. It'll bake you completely
, she'd warned. I remember Priss, her breath on my neck, her hands down my pants.

Priss, come on. Don't do this to me.

And then, somehow, it was eleven o'clock. The apartment was completely dark except for the television, which was tuned to TCM and Grace Kelly was kissing Jimmy Stewart. And I awoke to the kind of wistfulness I always feel when watching old films, something about a lost beauty, a simplicity to story and character that was never coming back. And then it hit me that I'd stood Megan up, that Priss was gone. The joint had been smoked down to a roach, and it lay cold on the table, surrounded by ash.

“I screwed up. I am
really
sorry.”

Really. If I had a nickel for every time I'd said those words. But Megan didn't care what I had to say. She was pretending I was invisible. She didn't look at me as she walked by, big backpack slung over her shoulder, earbuds in, gaze to the sidewalk. It was my third day waiting outside the brownstone for her to get off work. I know: stalker. Finally, she turned around at the corner, stopping me in my tracks with a cold, angry stare.