Skin Privilege (13 page)

After watching his sister take her last breath, Hank had taken the newborn Lena and Sibyl from the hospital because he would not leave his own flesh and blood to be raised by the state. Woefully unprepared that first night, he had improvised cribs by lining two dresser drawers with sheets and pillows, nestling his young charges in for the night as he went around his house and systematically destroyed any traces of alcohol.

He often claimed that night was his ‘turning point,’ that looking down and seeing those two helpless baby girls tucked into his sock drawers, knowing that he was the only thing standing between them and the hairy-chinned woman from children’s social services, had given him the strength to turn his back on an old friend.

This was the history Lena had been told. These were the lies she had been spoon-fed all of her life. She could remember rainy afternoons with Sibyl, playing games with Hank’s stories. They acted out the tragedy of their parents’ short lives, always taking turns being Angela, the best, the kindest, one. Oh, how their parents loved each other. Oh, how they would have loved to hold their twin daughters in their arms. Things would have been different, so very, very different, had they lived.

Or would they?

Hank often claimed that he gave up his addictions the night that he brought his nieces home from the hospital, but Lena had lived through it. She knew the truth. Eight years passed before he really gave it all up. Eight years of weeklong benders and parties that lasted for days and the police sniffing around, and lies… nothing but lies.

She had lived in this house, seen it with her own eyes: all those years and yet she had never suspected that a drug addict would tell her anything but the truth about her own mother and father. Why would he lie about what had happened? What did he have to gain by all those lies?

Lena dried her hair with a towel as she sat on the edge of her bed. She had changed into one of Hank’s old dress shirts so that she could get in the shower with him and scrape off some of his filth. He was so thin that she could feel his bones through the rubber kitchen gloves she wore to clean him. What looked like rope burns circled his wrists and ankles, but she knew he had probably caused the damage himself, picking the skin with his fingernails, peeling it away like an orange.

Meth mites. Speed bumps. Crank bugs. There were all kinds of names for the phenomenon that caused meth users to pick, scrape, and dig at their own skin. As part of the police outreach program, Jeffrey taught a drug course at the high school twice a year. Lena could clearly remember the first time she’d been forced to tag along. She’d felt her heart race as she’d heard Jeffrey talk about the chemistry behind the sickness, give an explanation for the self-mutilation she’d seen.

Meth causes the body temperature to rise, which in turn causes the skin to sweat. When the sweat evaporates, it removes the protective oil coating the dermis. This process irritates the nerve endings and makes the addict feel as if something is crawling under his skin. He will do anything to stop the sensation, use any instrument he can find to relieve his suffering.

Lena had once watched Hank take an ice pick to his arm, scratching it repeatedly back and forth until the skin split open like a sack of sugar. Just now, she had seen the scar in the bathroom, the thick rope of flesh that had been sewn back together. There were so many marks on his body, so many painful reminders of what he had been willing to do to himself just to get high.

And still, in all those years, Hank had never, ever been this bad.

Why? Why had he gone back to that life after fighting so hard to leave it? What had made Hank embrace the very thing he despised? There had to be a reason. There had to be a trigger that made him take that first shot.

Was it the drug dealer? Was Hank buying drugs from the man who had killed Lena ‘s mother?

Lena finished drying her hair. She sat up, looking at herself in the mirror over the dresser. Dark curls sprung around her head, water still dripping at the nape. How could she be back in this place again? How could she be back in this room, on this bed, drying her hair after yet again hosing off caked shit from her uncle’s emaciated body?

She was an adult now. She had a job, her own home. She wasn’t under Hank’s thumb anymore, dependent upon him for anything.

So, why was she still here?

‘Lee?’ Hank stood in the doorway, tattered robe wrapped around his body.

Her voice was trapped somewhere in her throat, but she managed, ‘I can’t talk to you right now.’

He obviously didn’t care. ‘I want you to go home. Just forget what I said. Just go home and get on with your life.’

‘Did that man shoot my father?’

Hank looked over her shoulder. Lena knew there was a Rick Springfield poster behind her, a remnant from her teenage years.

‘Tell me the truth,’ she insisted. ‘Tell me how they really died.’

‘Your father was shot. You know that, Lee. I showed you the newspaper article. You and your sister both.’

She remembered this, but how could she trust him? How could she even trust her own memory after all this time?

She asked, ‘What about my mother? You said he killed my mother.’

His throat worked as he swallowed. ‘Losing your daddy killed her, is what I meant.’ He scratched his neck, his chin. ‘It wasn’t the man you saw what shot him, but people like him. Bad people you need to stay away from.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said, never more sure of anything in her life.

He started picking at a sore by his ear. She knew he would start twitching soon, needing the drug.

‘When did it start?’ she asked. ‘When did you get hooked again?’

‘It don’t matter.’

‘Then tell me why,’ she said, aware that she was almost begging. ‘Why would you go back to this, Hank? You worked so hard to-‘

‘It don’t matter.’

‘You’re an old man,’ she told him. ‘You won’t be able to fight it this time. You might as well go ahead and pick out a coffin.’

‘Just put me in a hole,’ he said. ‘That’s where I belong.’

‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?’

‘You’re supposed to leave,’ he shot back, sounding for a moment like the old Hank again, the one who laid down the rules, said my way or the highway.

‘I’m not going until you tell me the truth,’ Lena told him. ‘I won’t leave until you tell me why you’re doing this to yourself.’

‘Go back to Grant. Go back to your job and your friends and just forget me.’

She stood from the bed, gripping the towel in her hand. ‘I mean it, Hank. I won’t leave here until you tell me the truth.’

He couldn’t look at her. Finally, he said, ‘There ain’t no truth to tell. Your mama and daddy died. There’s nothing you can do to change that.’

‘I deserve to know what happened.’

He pressed his lips together, shaking his head as he turned to leave. Lena grabbed his arm to stop him. ‘Tell me what happened to my mother. Tell me who killed her.’

I killed her!’ he yelled, trying to pull away. ‘You wanna know who killed your mama? Me. It was
me!
Now go on home and let the dead stay buried.’

She felt his skin slide under her fingers, knew that she was pressing a broken needle deeper into his flesh. She tried to let go but he clamped his hand over hers, held her in place.

Tears wet his eyes and his expression softened, as if for just a moment he could see past his need. ‘You and your sister were the light of my life. Don’t ever forget that.’

Lena jerked her hand away. There was a tiny sliver of dried blood just below his jugular where he must have taken a hit while she was drying her hair.

She cleared her throat, tried to speak past the lump that had formed there. ‘If you puncture an artery-‘

‘Yeah.’ He seemed resigned.

‘Your neck will swell up,’ she continued. ‘You’ll suffocate.’

‘Go home, Lee.’

‘Hank-‘

‘I know what will happen,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want you to be here when it does.’

In the twenty years since Lena had last set foot in the Elawah County Library, the only thing that had changed was the addition of a lone computer desk crammed up against the back wall between romance and general fiction. Even the lame Halloween decorations looked the same: the purple papier-mache skeletons with their orange top hats, the black cats with glittery tails, the cauldrons of witches’ brew. The only thing missing was the plastic pumpkin filled with candy corn that usually sat on the information desk. Lena guessed from the current clientele that the librarian didn’t feel they were worth treating. The woman seemed to spend most of her time riding up and down in the freight elevator with her rolling cart and a sour expression that was scarier than any Halloween costume.

Sibyl had spent hours in the library when they were kids. She had been the good student, the one who whiled away her time catching up on homework or reading the latest science magazines Miss Nancy, the former librarian, ordered in Braille especially for her. Lena was the one who moped around, complaining under her breath, until Hank finally picked them up to go home. He used the library as a babysitting facility, making the girls stay there until he could get away from the bar and take them home.

Now, Lena regretted her youthful insolence, her lack of interest in how the library worked. Even blind, Sibyl would have been able to figure out the microfiche machine. Lena couldn’t manage to thread the damn thing. She’d scrolled out two rolls of filmed newspaper archives like a kitten with toilet paper by the time the librarian came up from the basement again. Her look of perpetual disapproval went up a notch when she spotted Lena.

‘Lemme have that before you break it,’ the woman ordered, snatching the film away from Lena. With her gaudy jewelry, loud voice, and bad attitude, she was certainly no Miss Nancy. From the smell of her – a sickly sweet perfume which did little to mask the stench of cigarettes – Lena guessed the woman was spending her time down in the basement smoking and hiding from the kids.

That was another thing that had not changed -downstairs was strictly off-limits to patrons. The library building had originally been the town’s city hall until the government outgrew it. Built in the 1950s, the structure had all the modern touches, from a sunken concrete seating area you could smack your head open on to a bomb shelter in the basement. Lena had sneaked down there once and been very disappointed to find old voting registers and property deeds instead of the pornographic books and dead bodies that rumors suggested might be hidden in the library’s bowels. The only things that pointed to the windowless room’s former identity were a couple of metal bunk beds crammed into the corner and floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with cans of water and Dinty Moore beef stew.

Lena imagined the whole place reeked of unfiltered Camels now, courtesy of the bitchiest librarian to walk the face of the earth.

‘I don’t know why you want this,’ the woman snapped, holding up the microfiche. ‘Do you even know what you’re looking for?’

‘I want a particular date,’ Lena told her, trying to sound patient. ‘July 16, 1970.’

‘Whatever,’ the woman mumbled in a way that made Lena think she hadn’t been listening. She seemed more intent on rolling the films back tight enough to fit into their canisters. The key to the elevator was on a springy chain around her wrist and it kept hitting the metal tabletop with annoying, regular clinks.

Lena sat back, giving the librarian more room, trying not to let her impatience show. She finally stood up to avoid a jutting elbow and let the woman have her seat. When Lena was a kid, libraries were silent places – Miss Nancy had made sure of that. She had something she called her ‘six-inch voice,’ which meant you spoke low enough so that only someone six inches away could hear you. There was no running or roughhousing allowed on Miss Nancy’s watch, and she certainly would not have cursed like a sailor as she struggled to thread the microfiche machine.

There was a group of teenagers behind Lena. They were sitting at a table, books splayed out in front of them, but she hadn’t seen one of them doing anything but giggling since she’d walked through the front door. One of the girls saw her and quickly looked down at the book in her hands, but Lena ‘s eye had caught something else.

The library was small, with about sixteen rows of shelves evenly spaced down the center. Lena walked past each row, trying to find the slender figure she’d seen lurking behind the table of kids.

She found Charlotte Warren in the children’s section. Obviously, Charlotte hadn’t wanted to be seen. She had her nose tucked into a copy of
Pippi Longstocking
when Lena said, ‘Hey.’

‘Oh, Lee,’ Charlotte said, her voice going up in mock surprise, as if she hadn’t been the one who called Lena on the phone and told her to come down and check on Hank.

Lena told her, ‘I found Hank.’

Charlotte shelved the book, taking her time, lining up the spine with the neighboring paperbacks. With her mousy blonde hair and soft voice, Charlotte Warren had been destined from childhood to fill the role of stereotypical American mother, relying on Oprah and Martha Stewart to validate her existence.

Lena asked, ‘How long has he been like that?’

‘I guess about a month now.’

‘He’s been hitting it pretty hard.’

‘That’s why I called.’

‘Who’s selling to him?’

‘Oh.’ Charlotte looked away, pushing her thick glasses back in place. ‘I don’t know anything about that, Lee. I just saw him one day and he didn’t look good and I thought that you’d want to know.’

‘I don’t know what I can do,’ Lena admitted. ‘He’s hell-bent on killing himself.’

‘He’s been real depressed since Sibyl…’ Charlotte didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew what she meant. She fidgeted with a gold cross she wore on a chain around her neck. ‘I wanted to come to her funeral, but the kids were in school, and I just…’ She let her voice trail off again. ‘You still a cop?’

‘Yeah,’ Lena answered. ‘You still a teacher?’

Charlotte ‘s smile wavered. ‘Going on my sixteenth year.’

‘That’s good.’ Lena tried to think of something else to say. ‘Sibyl loved teaching.’