Death Spiral (2 page)

Two

When I arrive at Aunt T's place, a squat brick bungalow stubbornly planted between a pair of Dutch Colonials, I climb the steps to the front porch and wave at old Mrs. Dunnings who's out for a stroll with her lap dog, Rosy, a mutant creature that resembles an overgrown ferret. It's become a game of mine, a hobby, a suburban pastime to kill boredom and loneliness, to see if I can get Mrs. Dunnings to smile at me—or at least just say hi. As usual, Mrs. Dunnings ignores me. She calls to Rosy and shoots me the kind of look reserved for drug addicts or gangbangers or teenagers.

“Okay then, see you later. Have a nice day!” I call, prolonging my frivolous attempt at entertainment, and then turn back to the house.

It's then I see a faded paper, torn from a notebook, taped to the door. As I get closer, I see it's addressed to me. I snatch up the page and go into the house, straight to my room, where I drop onto my bed and unfold the note. My mouth goes dry when I see who it's from: Melinda Rivera, Mom's old junkie friend. I read the messy scrawl.

Faith

I need to talk to you. It's about your mom. It's urgent. Come see me 2750 N 5th past the liquor store. Apartment 2E.

Melinda

I crack my knuckles one at a time, starting with my right thumb—a nervous habit Anj says is going to give me premature arthritis. I haven't seen Melinda in what, five months? Not since she crashed at our place, stole two months' of waitress tips Mom had stashed in her underwear drawer, and vanished. I doubt she's tracking me down to apologize and pay me back. Maybe Melinda knows something. Yeah, right, I think, sliding the lighter from my pocket. More likely she's full of shit and wants money.

Great. Just what I need. Now that Melinda knows where I live, she'll be like a male dog that's found a bitch in heat. She'll stalk the place and never leave me alone. And it's not just cash she'll want. It's food, a place to crash. Aunt T will freak if some mangy stray starts showing up around here, begging for scraps.

I run my thumb over the lighter's wheel and inhale the familiar metallic smell of brass and petroleum as I reread the note. Maybe I can call Melinda and make up something to keep her away. (Contagious disease outbreak! We've been quarantined!) But there's no phone number, just an address for some dump in a part of North Philly full of abandoned rowhouses and shattered bottles of booze littering the sidewalks. Mom dragged me to those neighborhoods when she was desperate enough to go cruising for a fix. After she died, I swore I'd never go back.

I get up and flip on the light, hoping to chase away the nervous ache rooting in my gut, but my thoughts drag me into a dark tunnel. The brightest bulb couldn't illuminate what might be hiding in the gutters there. I don't know what to do with myself, so I plop onto my bed, fiddle with the lighter, and stare at the poster tacked to my wall, three guys wearing too much bling. Some hip-hop band I never heard of. Someone must've told Aunt T teenagers were into this stuff. I should get up and turn on the TV or raid the fridge or call Anj. But I just sit there, staring at the poster, listening to the clicking sound of the lighter over and over until there's a knock on my door.

“I'm home,” Aunt T calls. “Can I come in?”

“One sec!” I shove the note under my pillow and grab a book. It's better for everyone if Aunt T doesn't know about Melinda. She has enough to deal with as it is, like pillaging her bank account to afford upkeep on her dead sister's teenage daughter when she was supposed to be saving up to buy a new car. How long can our cozy cohabitation last before she gets sick of dealing with another of her sister's messes and sends me packing? And then what? I lie back on my bed and pretend to be reading. “Come in!”

Aunt T walks into my room and sits at my desk. The stale smell of cigarette smoke mixed with overly sweet perfume clings to her clothes. She kicks off her clogs and massages her ankles, swollen from a long day on her feet as floor manager at the Sunrise Senior Living community. Her gold bangles jingle softly as they slide up her arm.

“Look what I found when I was cleaning out my desk at work today,” she says. I sit up, and she hands me a small photograph.

I fight back tears as I study the image. Blond curls. Skin so pale you could trace the blue veins lining her temples. She's smiling and young, healthy and beautiful. Standing on a beach somewhere, toes buried in the sand, waving at the camera.

Mom hated having her picture taken. Except for the black-and-white strip taken of us in the photo booth at the mall, I hardly have any photos of her, but it's my mother, all right. It's her eyes, lit pale blue like a cloudless summer sky. Even at the end when she got those terrible scabs and lost all that weight, those eyes could pierce the night.

One thing I can say for certain—I did not inherit my mother's looks. Compared to her blue eyes and pale skin, I'm dark and loamy, built of earth. My eyes are the color of mud. My chestnut hair hangs limp and straight around my shoulders. And then there's my skin: I'm too brown to be white and too white to be brown. Sometimes I like to think I have Indian blood, that my father was Mayan or Cherokee. Iroquois, maybe. I can believe whatever I want since I never met him and I never want to.

Daddy dearest. Sperm donor, more like it. Married mom, knocked her up, then ditched. End of story. Not even a card or a note on my birthday. I gave up asking Mom about him around third grade because whenever I brought up the idea of a flesh-and-blood father, she'd get that faraway look, then go silent and reach for the bottle. Still, I've never stopped wondering if she exchanged her maiden name, Archer, for his name, Flores, because she loved the prick, or because she wanted to shed her identity and become someone new. I guess I'll never know.

I glance again at Mom's image. This time it's not sadness I feel, but anger. Fine by me. I'll take anger over sadness any day. Sadness is like when you're a kid and you think you can dig a hole to China, but once you start to dig you realize there's no end to the hole. It just goes deeper and deeper.

I hand back the picture.

Aunt T coaxes a blond wisp back into the mess of curls pinned to the top of her head and sighs. “Before things went bad.”

Things going bad
is my aunt's euphemism for
before your mother became a heroin addict.

I turn to the bling trio and ball my hands into fists. “It's hard to remember how she looked before all those nasty scabs and that wheezing cough,” I say, as if it's Aunt T's fault I can't remember. “She weighed what, like ninety pounds at the end?”

Aunt T scoffs. “Heroin will make you sick.”

“But what if she didn't die of an overdose?” I turn back to Aunt T, desperate for her to at least admit to the possibility that Mom didn't fry her own brains, take her life, and leave me behind.

Aunt T lets the foot she'd been kneading drop to the floor and looks at me with weary green eyes. “We just saw the official death certificate two days ago. It said the cause of death was a heroin overdose, right?”

My heart squeezes, but I harden my face to stone and stare at the wall. “Yeah, well it's not like they do some detailed medical investigation on a person like her. Someone with a police record. Track marks on her arms. The cops couldn't give a shit.” I close my eyes and remember that night. The sheet draped over Mom's body when the paramedic took her away. Some lower officer from the police station yawning as he wrote out his report. He already had his story. Nothing I could say would change his mind about the circumstances of her death. To the cops, my mother was just another dead junkie. I open my eyes again. “So what if there was something else?”

“They tested her blood and found morphine,” she reminds me. “Not to mention the heroin in the bathroom. I know you think she was clean, but heroin addicts relapse. You know how she was.”

I feel my aunt's tired frustration with my persistence, but I swallow back the lump in my throat and push on. “There might've been heroin, but there weren't any needles or spoons or any of that crap at home. She was acting totally normal. She wasn't getting high anymore.”

An image breaks into my thoughts and I stop talking. I don't want to think about him, but just like every time he crashes my mental party, there he is, lurking in my mind's eye—the guy who came to our apartment the afternoon of Mom's death. I try to boot him from my thoughts, but the words he told her whisper in my ear:
You have a debt to pay.
What debt was he talking about? Was it about the heroin in the bathroom? I've seen my share of drug dealers, and I have to admit, this guy had the strung-out-emaciated-dealer vibe going. So does that mean Aunt T's right, and Mom was still using?

I force away this line of reasoning and keep talking. “She'd even started with her foreign stamps again. She'd just gotten one of the Eiffel Tower. She thought maybe we could go to Paris. She never thought about the future when she was getting high.”

Aunt T's face clouds over. She crosses her foot back into her lap and starts kneading again, harder this time. “I understand that you don't want her death to have been her fault, but she died of an overdose. Don't go looking for problems when there aren't any.”

“She was clean,” I snap, but stop when I hear my voice. For an instant I wonder if it's Aunt T I'm trying to convince or myself. “It was something else that killed her. She didn't die a junkie.” I flop onto my back and start flicking the lighter again.

Aunt T doesn't get all social worker and try and make me talk. She gets up to leave but hesitates at the door. “You can't bring her back, Faith, no matter how much you want to. Maybe it's time to let go of this and move forward.”

Without another word, she slips out of my room.

I stare out the window into the fading light of the stark November sky, thinking sometimes you can't move forward until you look back.

Time to hunt down Melinda and see what she wants.

Three

I have no idea how long I've been lying down when I notice a brown bird on a branch of the oak outside my window. Its feathers are fluffed, its head drawn into its breast. It looks cold. Lonely.

The bird brings me right back to her. Watching birds was one of Mom's favorite things to do when she wasn't high. A week before she died we were sitting in the kitchen of our rental on a corner of West Philly ranked number eight in the
Philadelphia Weekly
's list of top-ten recreational drug spots in the city. We were gazing out the window past the loading platform of the Stop and Go at this one tree, a scraggly something-or-other struggling against the concrete and gas fumes to survive where Mom had managed to hang a bird feeder.

I was about to get up and dress for school when a flash of brilliant white caught my attention. There, perched on the feeder, was a bird the size of a robin. It was shaped like a robin, but instead of the usual robin colors, the bird was all white with pink eyes. Mom was looking at the bird too. Her eyes were teary. “An angel,” she whispered.

Mom believed the bird was her guardian angel. That it would watch over her and carry her soul to heaven someday when she went. She was into stuff like that. Signs. Angels. That's why she named me Faith, I guess.

I didn't believe it. To hell with Faith. I Googled the white-feather, pink-eye bird when I got to school. I found out the bird had an albino mutation and that's all. No sign. No angel. Just a rare mistake of genetics. Mom wouldn't listen. In her mind the bird was an angel and that's all there was to it.

I blink away tears. Screw her birds and her angels. Screw her for giving me hope, for getting off junk only to refuse to see a doctor when she got sick. Screw her for dying and leaving this mess about what happened to her. Couldn't she at least have given me that—a normal, straightforward death, so I could have closure and move on?

I won't cry.

For sixteen years my life has been a matter of basic biology—adapt or die. Only the fittest survive.

The smell of curry lures me from my despair. While Mom was lucky if she didn't burn microwave popcorn, Aunt T can whip up a double-layer chocolate fudge birthday cake with her eyes closed. The cupboards, countertops, and fridge in Aunt T's place are an around-the-world culinary exploration for anyone brave enough to actually try something called wattle seed or fennel pollen or jicama root. I let my nose lead me from my room, down the hall, and toward the kitchen where Aunt T is standing at the stove in her stocking feet, working a frying pan with one hand, holding a glass of red wine in the other. Her boyfriend, Sam, still in work boots and Carhartts, stands beside her.

I stop by the door and study the domestic scene the way an anthropologist might study a foreign culture. The way he slips his arms around her waist and kisses the back of her neck. The way she slides out of his embrace with a girlish laugh and flits to the pantry. Like an anthropologist, I'm an outsider. This is a private ritual. I don't belong with this tribe.

I'm about to retreat to the refuge of my room when I hear Aunt T say something that keeps me rooted to the spot. I step into the shadow of the antique armoire where we keep Mom's ashes and listen.

“I tried to talk to her about her mother again,” she says in a voice that carries all the ten-million things wrong with getting stuck with the job of child-rearing when the closest thing to a kid she's ever had was a cat.

“And?”

“And nothing. It's obvious how much she's hurting, but she won't talk about her feelings. The only thing she'll say about her mother is that she didn't die of an overdose.”

“Give her time,” Sam says. Like his personality, his tone is gentle. Not exactly what you'd expect from a firefighter who looks like he could bench a small car.

“She'll be eighteen in no time. And then she can do what she wants. How much time do I have? I'm not her parent.”

“Why can't you be? Make it legal.”

Aunt T lowers her voice and says something I can't hear. What did Sam mean, “Make it legal?” Is he suggesting Aunt T should adopt me? For a split second I hallucinate over what it would mean for Aunt T to become my parent and to have a permanent place to call home. No more eviction notices. No more fleeing the landlord in the middle of the night, our few possessions stuffed into the trunk of some friend's car. No more cold nights and broken promises. I shake away the feeling almost as quickly as I allowed it in. Why would Aunt T burden herself with such a thing?

I press my lips together and jam my hands in my pockets. What difference does a stupid legal document make anyway? Once I'm eighteen, there's nothing holding me down. No reason to stick around here.

I start across the carpet toward my room. I've hardly taken two steps when I trip over Felix, a portly tabby with double cataracts and limited hearing. Felix makes his irritation known with a loud and somewhat terrifying hiss. My cover is blown. Aunt T and Sam step into the hall, and Sam flips on the light.

“Hey, Rock Star!” he says, using the nickname he coined the first time we met when he said I looked like Patti Smith from back in the day. “What's up?”

“Hey,” I mumble. “I was just—”

“Dinner's almost ready,” he interrupts, preserving my pride. We all know I was eavesdropping.

“I made curry,” Aunt T adds, a hopeful expression on her face. “Your favorite.”

“Yeah, I know.” My stomach rumbles with the rich smell of spices simmering on the stove, but I remind myself of my outsider status and ignore my hunger. “Thanks anyway, but I'm going out. I'm meeting someone.” I sweep my hair out of my eyes and flash a smile I hope passes for genuine.

“Is someone picking you up?” Aunt T asks, exchanging glances with Sam.

“Nah, I'm walking.”

Aunt T opens her mouth to speak. I wait for her to call my bluff and insist I stay. “It's awfully cold,” she says instead. “Why don't you let me drop you off? Better yet, I'll go with you and you can drive. You need those practice hours if you're going to apply for your license.”

“Come on, I'm a city girl. I'm just going a few blocks. I'm used to walking. All that driving makes you soft.” I laugh, hoping to depolarize the tension with light-hearted wit, but if laughter were food, mine would be filled with artificial ingredients. Nobody shares the chuckle.

Aunt T sighs. “Okay, if you say so.” She moves to hug me, but my body tenses and she drops her arms.

I busy my hands with the lighter and look at my feet, wanting more than anything to feel my aunt's arms around me, but the barren wasteland Mom's death left inside of me is a roadside warning:
Caution! Unmarked obstacle ahead! Proceed at your own risk!
So instead of the hug, I say a quick good-bye, grab my coat, and dash out the door before I can change my mind.

I race down the steps two at a time and cross a patch of dormant grass to the driveway. It's freezing out, so I go for the shortcut, weaving through the backyards of the big houses on Orchard Street to get to Darby. I burrow into my leather jacket and shiver as I walk, wishing Mom and Aunt T could've picked a nice warm place like Florida to live instead of the glacial northeast. I mean living in hell would be better than this. At least it's warm there.

Once on the main drag, I pass the fast-food taco chain, then the fast-food chicken chain, the fast-food burger chain, and the other fast-food burger chain—greasy, while-you-wait, and cheap—the kinds of places Mom and I ate most meals. A feeling of loneliness and anger weighs me down as I think how Mom and I will never again sit in her car, me scarfing down bean-and-cheese-filled tortillas or greasy chicken nuggets, her drinking black coffee and ranting against the system, or telling me about some exotic place she'd take me someday. I didn't care that deep down I knew those dreams would never come true, because in those moments she wasn't drunk. She wasn't high or with some guy she'd met at a bar. In those moments she was mine.

I scurry past all the fast-food places, unable to face the memories, and instead go into the Wawa mini-mart to search for something to eat that's in an actual food group. I settle on a hotdog cooked in a bun. I'm slathering on the ketchup, wondering if ketchup counts as a vegetable, when someone taps my shoulder.

I turn and there he is, New Boy. He's holding an energy drink in one hand, his skateboard in the other.

“What's up?” he asks, grinning.

I shrug. “Nothing.”

“Got the munchies?” He points his drink at my hotdog. “Good choice. Did you know Reagan wanted to classify ketchup as a vegetable so schools could serve it to poor kids instead of real vegetables?”

“Reagan?” I snort. “You weren't even alive when he was president.”

He drops his skateboard and tugs at his jeans, which have sagged below his bony hips, so I can't help but notice the narrow blue band of his boxers.

“Yeah, well how about this—did you know that ketchup comes from a Chinese word that means brine of pickled fish?”

I bite off a piece of hotdog. “What, are you some kind of ketchup expert?”

“Nah, I just like random facts. Did you know that the first known contraceptive was crocodile dung?”

“Gross. You're making that up.”

“No way. It's true. Or how about this: Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both people are blood donors.”

I fold my arms across my chest. “Wow, you're right. You are random.”

“So, what's your name? You do have a name, right?” he asks, stepping onto the skateboard and rocking from wheel to wheel. “Because before when I asked, all I got was the finger and only some sick parent would name their kid F-you.”

“Faith,” I say, laughing. “Even
my
mom wasn't
that
sick.”

“Wasn't? Like she's not around anymore, or she wasn't that sick when you were born?”

This kid is sharp. Doesn't miss a thing. It doesn't hurt that he's slamming down an energy drink, and he's probably all hopped up on sugar and caffeine.

“First one. As in not around anymore. As in dead.”

For the first time since I met Jeffrey or Jim, or whatever he's called, he looks serious, genuinely serious. I guess kids with dead mothers can really have an effect on a person.

“I didn't know, sorry,” he says.

“You don't have to be sorry, and I don't want to talk about it. What's your name, anyway? I was so busy hating you before, I blocked it out.”

“Jesse,” he says, reaching out for a handshake. The gesture is cool in an old-fashioned, formal sort of way, and I offer my hand. “Just like Jesse James, the badass outlaw,” he explains, pumping my hand until I think it's going to fall off. “Only my last name's Schneider, and I'm not such a badass.”

“So Jesse Schneider, the not-such-a-badass, I'm guessing you're not from around here.”

“Nope. Grew up in Philly.”

An argument breaks out at the checkout counter. I turn to see a girl who looks about thirteen trying to convince the pimply faced boy at the register to let her buy beer. She flashes some plastic card in his face, and he tells her his three-year-old niece could make a better fake ID and threatens to call the police.

I throw my last bite of hotdog into the trash and roll my eyes. “Underage drinking, our local entertainment—that and watching the grass grow.”

He laughs.

“No, really. I'm serious. If you like historical and quaint, then live it up. Otherwise you have no idea how boring life out here in suburbia is. I mean we're just half an hour from Philly, but we might as well be on another planet. ”

“Well then you just have to make your own fun.” Jesse kicks off and skates up the aisle, belting out the lyrics to “We Built This City” by Starship.

Although my fondness for eighties music isn't something I readily admit, I love this song. It was number three on the top-ten playlist Mom and I used to rock out to when she was feeling silly. Jesse screeches to a halt an inch from my nose, and I realize I've been singing along under my breath.

I cough into my fist and look down.

Jesse doesn't seem to notice my embarrassment. He hops off his skateboard and slides into the plastic booth by the coffee maker and stale donuts.

I slide into the booth across from him, beneath an obnoxiously bright strip of overhead light that showcases every blackhead and blemish a girl might be trying to hide, thank you very much.

“So how did you end up in Haverford?” I ask, trying to discreetly cover the zit on my left cheek.

“It was Doc's idea,” he says, pulling out a bag of peanuts from his pocket and offering me a handful.

“Doc?”

“Yeah, my dad, Doc squared actually. MD, PhD. Knows everything there is to know, serious overachiever.” Jesse starts drumming the table. His fingers are long and I notice his nails are trimmed to a manicured perfection—funny, given his torn jeans and hair that appears to have been styled with a butcher knife.

“Doc decided the city wasn't good for me,” Jesse continues, bringing the finger tapping to an abrupt halt and leaning forward on his elbows. “I knew all the spots in Philly, man. That's the thing, the city—it's alive. People are making art, music, love—you name it, it's happening. So I stopped going to school. The real education's on the streets. You ever spend much time downtown?”

“No,” I lie. I've spent lots of time in seedy downtown places with Mom. Places kids aren't allowed. Somehow she'd always know someone who'd watch me. Someone who'd cover for her. But I don't know Jesse enough to tell him this stuff. And besides, I'm guessing there's another downtown he's talking about. Places with signs above the doors and daylight coming in through windows.

“Well, I'll take you. Show you some places you won't forget.” Jesse's face goes pink when he says this and he stuffs a handful of peanuts into his mouth.