The Ninth Step (4 page)

“What?” Helen asked.

The bartender just kept giving her the look.

“What? It couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, the place is still standing, right?”

The stare was all she got in return.

“Chuck, c’mon. Was it really that bad? I’m what? Five-five, a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet? Seriously, how bad could it have been?”

Chuck wasn’t going to give in.

“Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. All right? I’m sorry. Honestly. I’m sorry.” Helen touched the bartender’s arm and gave him her brightest smile.

“Last chance,” the man said, and set her up.

He was one of those waiters who made a show out of not writing down orders but relying solely on memory. Edgar found such waitstaff worrisome, but he put it out of his mind and answered the question Judy had asked him moments before.

“Maybe it’s because I got picked on a lot at that age,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess he just, I don’t know.”

“Reminds you of yourself?”

“Minus the Goth hair, yes, I guess he does.”

“I know somebody else who’s going to remind you of yourself.”

“Future tense?”

Judy nodded.

“Are you kidding? No, of course you’re not kidding.”

Judy giggled so loud some of the other diners turned to look.

“I’m sure the fertility treatments finally worked. The odds were in our favor. I know it’s been years, but statistically the numbers expanded expo—”

“Statistically, Edgar, you knocked me up. And it was about damn time.”

Helen squinted through the haze at the man at the end of the bar. Smoking cigarettes was prohibited, but Smitty’s used a smoke machine on the tiny dance floor. Helen figured the propylene glycol fog was probably as carcinogenic as tobacco smoke, but right now she really didn’t care. It was eighties night at Smitty’s, and Culture Club was singing about karma and its chameleon-like qualities.

All was forgiven and bartender Chuck was treating her right: No sooner did she make one Absolut with a lemon zest disappear than he replaced it with a fresh one. She was drinking too fast and knew she’d better slow down. It was early yet, and it had been a long week.

The man sitting at the end of the bar had jet-black hair,
slicked back with some kind of greasy pomade. Mr. Slick-Back sported the hollow-eyed gauntness of a chronic alcoholic, and Helen saw in his eyes what she saw in her own when she woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror. She was drawn to him. They had been playing the game of averted glances for some time now. He was what this Helen wanted. The other Helen, the one who coasted through her day with just enough blood alcohol to keep from getting sick, just enough to keep the schizonucleosis at bay, that Helen would have been repulsed by this greasy caricature. But the secret Helen, the one she kept hidden from the rest of the world, the one who came out only when the booze was flowing freely, this Helen saw her brother and her lover.

The man finally approached her. Maybe he recognized her too.

“May I?”

Helen nodded at the vacant stool.

“My name is Cornell Smith and—”

“Let’s not do names.”

“I can play that game.”

Let’s not do names?
Helen thought as she slid off her stool.
Oh yeah, I’ve got a load on.

“Let’s just dance.”

Cornell followed Helen onto the dance floor, watching the way her rear bounced ever so nicely. “God damn,” he said.

And they danced.

If her eyes hadn’t been glazed over, her makeup smeared, and her hair tangled, the attractive intelligent woman who had entered the bar a few hours ago might still be recognizable as Helen Patrice, but Helen Patrice was gone, and had been since her fifth drink.

The raunchy opening guitar licks of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” rumbled through the speakers. The heavy electronic drumbeat kicked in, fueling Helen’s alcohol-soaked mind. She and Mr. Slick-Back played tandem air guitar, thrusting and gyrating, crowding the other dancers off the cramped dance space.

The shoulder strap of Helen’s camisole top slipped down her shoulder, low enough to expose her breast. She had taken off her
bra thirty minutes ago in the ladies’ room and shoved it in the garbage bin.

Helen covered herself and readjusted the shoulder strap. Mr. Slick-Back reached out and flicked the strap back off her shoulder, exposing her breast once again. Most of the patrons had stopped whatever they were doing and watched. Helen was unaware, but Mr. Slick-Back was playing it up for the onlookers. He leaned in and playfully bit the top of Helen’s exposed breast. She cried out in surprise.

From behind the bar, Chuck watched the spectacle and shook his head. He reached under the counter and grabbed the Louisville Slugger stashed there. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He hoped the threat of it would be enough.

A ghost haunting familiar ground, Edgar’s white Toyota Camry cruised the scenic coastal highway. The headlights shone in the dark.

In the car, Judy nibbled on Edgar’s ear, and he squirmed with feigned annoyance. Judy kept it up, and Edgar glanced at the time on the dashboard.

“Hold on.”

Edgar pulled up the web browser on his cell phone. He logged into his eBay account and navigated to the auction page. There were ninety seconds of bidding left. He took the time to scroll through the photos and item details one last time. It was exquisite. Truly a one-of-a-kind puzzle box. And all those handmade miniatures.

“Eyes on the road, please.”

“I’m watching.”

“Just let me do it for you. I’m capable.”

Of course Judy was capable, but Edgar had the art of the sniper bid down to a science. It had to be timed just right. And a delay had to be factored in when doing it on a cell hookup. Even if it was a nanosecond. He refreshed the page. Still no bids. The starting bid was $350.00, a bit of an expenditure, but a unique box like this one was easily worth thousands. In the listing title, the seller had misspelled Japanese as
Jappanese
, so a lot of people (other collectors with deeper pockets who quite often outbid Edgar and whom he thought of as his “online nemeses”) would miss the listing entirely. Edgar maintained listing alerts for keywords like
puzle
and
Japenese
. Sometimes diligence paid off. He felt a stab of excitement; he just might get it at the ridiculously low opening bid.

“You’re drifting.”

Edgar looked up and corrected the car back to the right of the yellow lines.

He cued up his maximum bid, his finger poised over the “confirm bid” button, gauging for the exact right moment.

The headlights of a passing car momentarily illuminated the interior, making it harder to see the screen.

“Edgar!”

Lights filled the car again. Too bright this time, not passing, but filling the car. Too bright. Edgar looked forward, swerving. Too bright. Too late.

The bay doors of the emergency room slammed open as paramedics burst in with a loaded gurney.

Judy Woolrich’s body was motionless. Her hair was blackly matted with coagulated blood.

Right behind her, on a second gurney, Edgar was wheeled in. He was very much awake and aware of what was going on, but the paramedics had placed a head stabilization device around his upper body. He could not sit up. He was like a bug on its back. His glasses had been lost in the wreck, and his pale eyes looked alien without them.

Edgar was placed in a treatment room by himself. In the adjoining room, a team of medical personnel worked on his wife. He could hear urgent orders shouted. He could see moving
shadows cast through the observation window, but he could not raise himself to see what was happening. He heard the sound of a defibrillation machine cycling up to full charge, and the doctor calmly saying, “Clear.” This procedure was repeated several times until there was only the monotonous electronic hum of a flatline.

Early sunlight streamed across Helen’s closed eyes. The two cats, Molly and Agnes, whom Helen had dubbed “The Yellow and Black Attack” because of their coloring, crisscrossed over her sleeping form, anxious for her to wake up and feed them. For some reason, their owner had failed to keep to the appointed feeding schedule, but even the cats remembered that this had happened before and were not too terribly anxious. This morning, the main source of Molly’s and Agnes’s anxiety was the Great Dane that had invaded their home and now rested with its head on their owner’s pillow.

Mitzi whined and licked Helen’s face, saturating it. Helen’s breath caught and her bloodshot eyes opened. And the anxiety hit her just that quick. Full-blown panic; her mind raced, the
very organs of her body cried out with energy-draining pain. A deep cough racked her chest. It felt like lung tissue had ripped. She remembered the fog machine. Who knew what all chemicals they used in those things? Far worse than secondhand smoke. Small-cell carcinoma. Stage four. Mesothelioma. Emphysema. Black lung. Neurotoxins attacking her synapses. Subtle but permanent brain damage. Cumulative.

No furniture appeared to be chewed on, and there weren’t any immediately evident piles of poop, so letting the dog roam free didn’t appear to have been too big of an error in judgment. She must have let her into the house when she came in through the garage last night. She let Mitzi out into the fenced backyard, then stumbled into the kitchen, flipped on the television (she needed other voices to compete with the ugly ones in her head), and put coffee on to brew. She opened the refrigerator and grabbed a liter bottle of water. She drank it down and tossed the empty in the trash.

Helen let Mitzi back in, thanking God that Pumpkin Head had at least done a good job housetraining her, then made her way to the bathroom and sat for a long time until she finally urinated. She looked at her output, a dark malodorous yellow, before flushing it away. She was dehydrated. But that was normal. The water would be working its way though her body momentarily. Followed soon after by the cure. Helen stood staring at the commode for no real reason, and once the reservoir tank had refilled itself, the water cut off and she could once again hear the bright cheery voices of the morning news anchors nattering on in the kitchen. Helen glanced at herself in the mirror, not
wanting to see her own hollow eyes, but her breast hurt and she needed to look. She lifted her T-shirt and saw a bite mark. She felt shame. Teeth marks on her breast. Disturbing, indeed, but she had awoken to worse. She could almost remember. Something about dancing. Something about that damn fog machine. Mr. Slick-Back. She remembered him. But enough with the reminiscing. Her entire body hurt. It ached. Not wanting to, Helen disrobed completely and examined herself.

The self-inspection did not reveal additional damage. Externally, Helen was still quite attractive—her breasts sagged only a little; her ass, while bigger than in the past, had not succumbed to gravity and was plump in a pleasingly feminine way; and the broken capillaries that formed a haphazard Etch A Sketch across her nose and cheeks were easily concealed with modest amounts of makeup. The shell, the façade, was fine. Unfortunately, she was rotting from the inside out. Like the shiny apple that concealed the corruption of the worm deep inside. It occurred to her hungover mind that she was the perfect hybrid of Doctor Dolittle and Dorian Gray.

Her body emitted certain odors at inopportune times. On occasion, her liver was swollen and tender when palpated, but this faded and flared seemingly without relation to her current intake. She sometimes spit up a thin, watery, bile-like liquid streaked with blood. The blood was particularly worrisome, and she attributed it to either a stomach ulcer or an inflamed esophagus—both conditions attributable to chronic alcohol abuse. She knew that it was not uncommon for profound alcoholics to die of esophageal hemorrhage, and she thought of this
whenever she spit up the smeary red liquid. Her legs were often sore and stiff. It was hard to even cross them at times. She suspected it was incipient nerve damage. The beginnings of alcoholic neuropathy.

Quitting, however, was not an option. It was not even a remote thought. A cloud on the horizon. She would live or die on her own terms. Why torture yourself with an unwinnable internal struggle? She didn’t necessarily
embrace
who she was, but she certainly accepted it. Sometimes, in the right frame of mind (drunk), she even took pride in it. In fact, Helen had her own personal version of the old U.S. Army recruitment slogan: she drank more before nine a.m. than most people drank all day. Speaking of which, her hands were starting to twitch. Tremor. She needed the cure.

Molly and Agnes, tails like masts, zigged and zagged across the kitchen floor when they heard her popping the metal food cans open. Helen looked at Mitzi. “Will Nine Lives work for you?”

The morning news rattled on. Video footage of a smashed white Toyota Camry being hooked up to a tow truck caught her attention. “—did not survive the accident. Police are asking that anyone with knowledge of the hit-and-run collision to contact them.”

A piece of last night flashed through Helen’s mind. Just a shard of memory. Of laughter. Laughter cut short as oncoming headlights filled her world.

Like a woman who has heard a prowler in her empty home, Helen made her way down the hall to her garage. Halfway
down the hall, her breathing grew labored. She found it hard to catch her breath. Soon she was hyperventilating, drawing the ragged breaths of a sprinter. And with each step, with each hoarse intake of air, a broken image from the previous night emerged from her eclipsed memory. Lights. Faces. Cigarettes. Broken glass. Blood.

She rested her hand on the knob of the door that opened to the garage. After a while, she turned it.

She found the thing that she did not want to find. The front end of her red Honda Insight was accordioned, smashed in. The windshield was cracked over the driver’s side.