The Likely World Read online

  But she’s not talking to me, is looking past me, over my shoulder. “You,” she calls into the dark parking lot. “You. You junkie. Get away from there.”

  Now, I turn. The parking lot behind me is bathed in the headlights of a parked SUV. Someone lurches through plumes of exhaust toward another car. My car. It is still running. The figure moves with the spastic, disoriented energy of a user. Juni. I wheel, and catch my foot and trip, falling hard: chin to pavement, skull rattled. From my stunned position, I force myself up. My car door hangs open, the interior shadowed. I cannot locate the figure.

  The old woman points. “You damn junkie. You want me to call cops?”

  Then, there he is, by the door of a parked SUV, clutching a bundle. He tosses it inside. No cry. I lurch toward him. He slams the door and then, in the sudden flash of his headlights, my car is illuminated. I see Juni, still resting on the plastic seat, snoring and drooling, utterly undisturbed. It’s only the diaper bag, the stupid diaper bag he’s taken. My heart is in pieces. What have I done? What had I almost done?

  The world wants to take her from me, this I know. Juni is nothing I’ve earned and no one I deserve. I’ve done the worst thing a mother can do to her child, and done it again and again. Someone will take her from me. Maybe someone should. I wrap my baby up in my arms, breathe in the milky funk of her smell. Never, I tell her. Never again.

  The old woman staring down at me. “You people,” she says. “You think can fool me. But I know fiend when I see fiend. I don’t trust for a minute.”

  Come on. Someone is tugging at her from behind, the figure unidentifiable, a nurse or a son, a husband or an aide. Someone is at the old woman’s shoulder. Come watch your show, the voice urges. She gives me a last glare, then nods and allows herself to be drawn back into the warm light of her apartment.

  For a moment, the person remains in the doorway, a vague shadow. “Call Emily,” I think I hear, but I don’t trust me for a minute, either. And then the door closes.

  Juni coughs in my arms, the cool air and the wake of panic. It’s not the details I’m missing. It’s the very heart. I hold her, gently, delicately, afraid, and then I begin to rock her, my grip tightening until she is secure in my arms. Her breathing eases, a warm patch spreading from where her mouth rests against my shirt. This is my daughter, I think. This is where I am.

  I have not used, but how close I am, still and always. How close and easy is a return. I wrestle my phone from my pocket, balancing my stirring child as I do. Fucking call. Fucking call. Fucking call. Fucking call.

  “Mellie,” says Emily, my first and only sponsor, the woman who got me sober when nothing else would. She swallows exhaustion from her voice. “Where are you? Are you at a bar?”

  Silence fills the phone line and Emily waits.

  “I hate it here,” I say, meaning a thousand other things, a thousand heres I hate.

  “Great,” says Emily. The bedclothes shift as she hoists herself up, the moisture of her mouth as she ungums her lips from sleep. “Oh, kid. You’re doing so great. Now tell me where you are.”

  The light in the window in front of me blinks out. I hold the phone between my chin and my shoulder as I nestle Juni back into the seat.

  “I’m just getting home,” I slide in on the driver’s side, shift, give the car a little gas. It rolls wetly from the parking lot. Juni, covered in applesauce, spoon lost in the seat cushions, releases a few gasping coughs. Emily delivers her platitudes, her one day at a times and her easy does its. The morning isn’t far. Newspaper trucks rumble past me in the darkness and when I reach my street, I’ve made my first month clean.

  Two

  Brookline & The Fenway

  1988

  Since General Hospital has been preempted for coverage of Hurricane Gladys, Nancy and I decide to go to the crack house. We’re taking the T. Out the window of our train, the sky looks weird and orange. Even though she has her license, Nancy is currently grounded for stealing a one-hitter from George’s Folly. Grounding: whatever. We’re sixteen. Nancy wouldn’t put up with that shit, but then her folks removed the distributor cap from her Ford Escort to enforce the punishment. So, we’re stuck with mass transit, heading to the crack house to meet Judah and Paul.

  Three years ago, Nancy and Paul Greene, and Judah, the crack guy, we were all at Hebrew camp together—flag circle, flashlight wars and a Star of David on the outhouse doors. The following fall, Nancy and I started seventh grade together at the White School. We had the Jew thing behind us, plus we were the only two girls not to get picked up by housekeepers. Nancy’s parents are geneticists and foreign so even though they are rich, they believe having a babysitter is a kind of spoiling. My mom is just too broke to pay someone to look after me. So, camp, and alone in the afternoons and General Hospital, me and Nancy ended up best friends. Even after she got kicked out and went back to Brookline, we kept hanging on Thursdays to watch soaps and argue about is Blackie cuter or is Frisco. The rest of the week, I’m building up my transcript with debate or yearbook, and Nancy is building up her tolerance, drinking and getting high with Paul Greene. Paul knows the tow truck guys, and they know Judah and that is how Nancy and I are cool to go to the crack house.

  It might not even be crack, though. It might be something else he smokes.

  “Actual crack?” I ask. “Like actual rock in actual pipe?”

  Neither of us has personally talked to Judah since the days in Bunk שש, but he has supposedly turned beautiful, and Nancy thinks the four of us will wax nostalgic about blue team in color wars, and somehow this ancient connection is going to help her get him into bed. It’s a bad plan, at least my part. Even back at camp, Judah wasn’t the kind of boy I talked to ever. He was a junior counselor, A, and B, his dad was a movie producer and had made some film called Mack the Knife. Meanwhile, I still slept with a unicorn pillow, and if I forgot my house key, I sometimes peed my pants before my mom came home. A baby.

  To be factual, I still don’t know a lot of boys. White School is all girls, and when I hang out with Nancy, it’s just us. Nancy, the rest of the time, makes a point of boys. If a boy dropped out of the high school to get his tow truck license, or if he graduated and will buy gin for you, or will let you shoplift during his shift at Store 24, Nancy knows how to know him. Sometimes, at night, when we’re supposed to be sleeping over, she’ll take out the Escort and we’ll do circuits of all the boys she knows. We drive by the pizza place, the gas station, the Section 8 housing units. Nancy has taken it upon herself to educate me.

  “The thing you need to understand,” Nancy tells me, “is that, for boys sex is an accomplishment, something that makes them better, and for girls, it’s usually like an un-complishment.”

  I pay attention. Last weekend, after she and I had gone to bed, Paul Greene climbed in her window. He had been purposefully locked out of his dad’s house, and it was one of those late spring nights that dip to the lower forties. He’d been on the street corner, pacing and smoking and waiting for his dad to relent, but he ran out of cigarettes, and so he’d come to Nancy’s. His fingers were white with cold, scraped from hauling himself across the asphalt shingles of the porch roof.

  Nancy could never be into someone like Paul, but sometimes when she gets bored, they’ll fool around. With them, it’s different; no one accomplishes anything or loses anything, because they don’t have intercourse, and because Paul goes down on her the same amount she goes down on him. Plus, it’s normal, in that they laugh at each other and complain about how each other taste—it’s mostly a joke. Still: Nancy had held his hands, puckered with chill, in hers until they warmed. It reminded me in some weird way of the night when I first met Paul, when we’d been in seventh grade. It reminded me that boys I knew used to be kids.

  Now, Nancy and I get off the train and cross the bridge that separates Brookline from Mission Hill. If you’re driving, there’s this one part of the Jamaicaway that goes suddenly up, just before you get to the medical area, but if you go to the righ
t instead, you’re on an access road that hooks around into the parking lot of the Village Fens Apartments.

  My mom and I have lived in a lot of shitty places, so I’m not freaked out by how some people live. About half the units are occupied, cars in the parking spaces with Dukakis stickers, junk on the porches. No one has mown the lawns even though it’s June, and grass sprouts from the pavement cracks. There’s a weird burning odor in the air. We find the unit, but no one answers.

  Around back, there’s a patio and a sliding glass door. Nancy jumps the wrought-iron railing and presses her face to the glass. I peer past the mushroom curtains and see a thin woman in a blue bathrobe surrounded by stacks of padded mailers and cardboard boxes. She is watching the hurricane on TV.

  “OK, Nancy? I think we should go,” I say. “I seriously think we should leave.”

  Nancy shakes her head at me. “Can you please just for once not be a total freak?” Between us is the history of too-scary houses where we trick-or-treated, of girls who trash-talked us and grown-up men who leered when we were still twelve and skinny, is the history of Nancy holding ground and me running away. I follow Nancy; I try not to be a total freak.

  Nancy taps on the glass, and the woman turns and squints. She shakes her head, harried, then mouths something obviously not-nice before she returns to her TV show.

  “Crap.”

  “Could it maybe be a different one? They all look the same.”

  Nancy shakes her head. “That’s the mom. She’s, whatever, unhinged. Not in a like supervisory role.”

  Back around the side, Nancy tries the bulkhead. It opens easily and we descend into semidarkness. It’s four o’clock on a school day, and we are walking into the crack house. The burning odor intensifies. A shirtless, barefoot man in a surgical mask and a pair of ripped blue jeans appears at the bottom of the stairs. His head is shaven and there’s the partial script of a tattoo on his arm, vain or pain. He’s very tall, and blond by his eyebrows. I have the junior-counselor feeling, which I now call the crack feeling. I don’t see Paul.

  “Hey.” He yanks off the mask and smiles. “Little Nancy. Hey. What are you doing here? Come on in.”

  She clomps down the stairs to him, and he slings his naked arm around her and lifts her in a hug. I remain on the top stair, watching. It’s not my feeling that he’s handsome, but I am crap at telling, am always liking the one ugly guy in the band. Nancy says it’s a self-esteem thing, that I don’t think I’m good enough for the hot one even in imagination land, so I pick the keyboardist with the stupid jaw or the retarded hairstyle. Nancy goes for the blond front man. She’s muscles and Mohawk, lead guitar and vocals. Judah is just her type.

  The crack house basement is unfinished, but there are carpet samples on the floor, a trash-picked sofa and an electric bass in one corner. Steam filters around the edges of the curtain which divides the room, as if laundry is being boiled beyond.

  “You remember my friend Mellie, right?” asks Nancy. “Come in, Mellie. Sit.”

  Judah’s face does not like light up with recognition and since I see that Nancy’s doing fine without it, I choose not to remind him of our athletic shorts days in back in Bunk שש.

  “What’s up?” I say, but of course it comes out all nervous-robot, like what is up.

  Judah takes in my big black glasses and my Billy Bragg t-shirt and gives me the nod, then he pulls Nancy onto the sofa beside him, and he is done thinking about me.

  The real truth of us isn’t self-esteem. It’s that Nancy has boobs, and I’m flat-chested. It’s been that way since we met at the age of twelve and this one fact might explain all the differences between us. Boobs seem like some token she’s earned which entitles her to other desirable things, to Judah-aged men and getting high and parents who don’t care if she stays out. I think of birthrights, of Jacob and Esau, and I wonder if the treasures of her life are things I could somehow steal. But at the moment I’m the weird friend with the probably bad breath, hanging in the doorway of the crack house. I come inside.

  “Paul’s not here?” I take a seat in a tatty butterfly chair.

  “Paul who? The twat Paul, or the other one?”

  Nancy laughs, and taps a Prince out of her soft pack. “Paul Greene,” she says.

  Twat, I think, sounds like twit and means vagina and is a worse insult on a boy that than on a girl. Girl, it just means extra bitchy. Boy, though—I think of Paul’s cold hands steepled between Nancy’s and I fiddle with the strap of my book bag and try to keep my face normal.

  Nancy fixes her cigarette between her lips, then offers one to Judah.

  “What is this brand?”

  “They’re on two-for-ones. Some new Congress thing where they have to redesign all the packages not to appeal to kids. They’re pretty gross, though.”

  He inhales. I should say, Nancy’s theoretically here to buy dope, but it’s not like there aren’t dealers at the high school, and I’m guessing Judah knows that the weed is an excuse.

  “You guys gonna hang? I’m good until Andi. Or do you have to jet right away?”

  “That depends,” says Nancy. “I’ve been rolling shake since Memorial Day.”

  A timer goes off. “Hang on,” Judah says. He hands Nancy his private stash and retreats to the secret drug land behind the curtain. Behind him I see a row of what look like plastic spoons hanging from a clip wire, their mouth ends covered in some kind of crust. To me, it’s weird that no one is worried about the police.

  “Because it’s legal,” says Nancy. “You can buy it in a head shop. Over the counter.”

  “I thought it was crack.”

  “That’s a joke. Mostly. Probably.”

  Nancy begins pinching, separating the flower from the stem, the leaf. Even I know it’s the good stuff, hairy buds which look more Muppet than plant. The organic smell of it escapes into the room. I glance at the ceiling. I can hear the faint noise of the television, and a thumping noise, like someone is pacing back and forth on a game leg.

  “You’re going to light up?”

  “The mom’s so out of it.” She licks the rolling paper. “Four courses of electroshock on top of unspeakable personal tragedy. She does not give a shit about are we smoking weed in the basement. It’s the kid who freaks out if like one whiff escapes, and she’s still in school.”

  “Andi?” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Nancy. “That’s why Judah’s always here. Which is gross, because wake up, she’s like fourteen. That’s seven years difference between them.”

  It is like this with Nancy, like watching General Hospital only once a week. Not much happens in between Thursdays, but you always feel like you’ve missed some of the flavor, one or two longing gazes that carry the show for the next month, and so the logic of Nancy’s stories dangle without ending.

  “She’s his—girlfriend?”

  “Right? No. Obviously not. It’s like they can’t sleep together because blah, blah, blah, but the attraction is undeniable, blah, blah,” Nancy drags on her cigarette. “So he comes here just to cook, but then things transpire. Everyone says she’s so hot. Listen to me on this: girls have the reputation for it, but it’s boys who really get delusional about a tragic story. Also, redheads. Andi’s not objectively that cute, but people always think redheads are prettier than they actually are because they’re a rarity. The deal with her and Judah is a heartbreak, sure, but nothing anyone needs to slit a wrist over.”

  Behind the curtain, there is the sound of running water, glassware being knocked together, the whistle of gas escaping a valve.

  Judah emerges in a wash of lemon steam, carrying Nancy’s baggie and a cup holding four plastic spoons. Like the ones attached to the clip wire beyond the curtain, their mouth ends are coated in some substance, then covered in plastic wrap. Nancy brandishes the two flawless joints she’s rolled and Judah taps her arm, and then somehow they’ve negotiated it so she’s sitting on his lap, his arm threaded over her. She holds the tip of the joint in her mouth then flicks h
er lighter and inhales.

  So much for Andi, is what I think, which demonstrates my being a total retard.

  “You want?” Judah says, holding in the smoke and handing me the joint.

  I shake my head, and Nancy leans back across him and pinches the tip.

  “Mellie’s going to be a politician,” she says. “She’s keeping an eye on her future career.”

  Judah, stoned, snorts. “What a joke. Think about our parents. Who, who’s forty, has never smoked weed?” He and Nancy pause, rest the joint on the ashtray, and lock lips and then separate. Nancy takes the joint and Judah continues.

  “Seriously? You live through the sixties and the seventies and you never smoked out?”

  “It’s a different standard,” I say.

  I know I seem like a complete hoser, not smoking, what Nancy said about politics, but I’m serious about my life. I was in New Hampshire for the presidential primaries; I knocked on 473 doors for Gary Hart. Politics, for me, isn’t like wanting to be a ballerina. I’m going to Harvard, and then getting a congressional internship, and then I’ll do grad work at the Kennedy School. I want to be a Speaker of the House. I’m going to wait until Tip O’Neill retires and then I’m going to run for his seat. Ballerina, incidentally, is what Nancy still wants to be. A couple of nights ago, she spent an hour on the phone, crying about her chest, about having too big tits now to play Clara in The Nutcracker. Sometimes I think this is why she wants me to smoke pot, so both our dreams will be screwed.

  In my peripheral vision, I can see how things are progressing. The kissing is done. Nancy rests her non joint hand on Judah’s genitals and is pumping his pelvis area through his pants.