It’s a bad day in the kitchen: Riley has asked me something, and that something is floating in the air between us, becoming heavier and heavier by the second.
Riley is staring at me, waiting for me to answer his question.
Riley’s fingers are the color of watery coffee. How many cigarettes has it been today? Orders have been sent back: bagels are black on one side, the scrambled tofu is missing chives, home fries are brick-hard. Two plates broken, their jagged white edges kicked beneath a stainless steel prep table.
He says he needs this to get through the shift. He says the house has a black door and a blue pickup out front. The espresso machine is whining, puffs of steam clouding Linus’s face. Tanner is cleaning the tables out front. Julie’s in her office.
“You have a break.” He takes a drag on his cigarette. His eyes are tinged with red. This morning when I came to get him, he was already up, sitting on the couch, smoking, staring at nothing, a peculiar, plasticky smell tacked to his skin. “I’m not allowed to leave during work hours. House rules.” He tries to wink, but it looks more like something’s caught in his eye.
“Please.” A hoarse echo in his throat, just like Evan when he got needy. “Your shift’s almost over anyway. I’ll pay you.”
I remember Ellis, tugging on my arm, her face frantic with need. Please, she begged. Just tell my mom I’m in the bathroom if she calls. I told her I’m staying over. Please, Charlie. I just need to be with him. Help me, Charlie, please?
He reminds me of Evan, too, when he needed a fix, just something, he’d say, to stop the motherfucking abyss threatening to eat my fucking soul, and I would steel myself, and wash up in a bathroom somewhere, enough so my face wasn’t too dirty, and stand on a corner a few blocks from Mears Park in St. Paul just after dark, waiting for a man to show up, and to lead him to the park, where Evan and Dump would be waiting.
But Ellis needed that boy, and I needed her. And Evan had helped me, saved me, so I helped him. And now Riley is asking for help. And he said he’d pay me. I need that extra money.
Casper said it would be easy to fall back into old habits, old patterns. But Casper is busy now, a million miles away. The comforting beigeness of Creeley Center is a million miles away. I feel a million miles away.
A familiar numbness comes over me as I take off my apron and lay it over the dish rack. I don’t say anything to Riley. I hold out my hand for the money and close my fingers around it. It isn’t until I’ve slid the money into my pocket that I realize I’ve forgotten my lapis lazuli stone today. My fingers fish about for it for a minute, then give up.
Outside the café, the heat sizzles the dish steam from my skin. Riley didn’t notice me hiding the knife in my pocket.
—
The man who answers the door looks me up and down and then past me, to the street, like he wants to make sure I’m alone. He’s chewing on the cap of a pen. His teeth are yellow. The house stinks of canned cat food.
Evan and Dump taught me silence is the best weapon. People will trick you with words. They’ll twist what you say. They’ll make you think you need things you do not need. They’ll get you talking, which will relax you, and then they will attack.
The man falls back on the couch. I stay close to the door. Cats are everywhere: black-and-white, gray, tabby, milling around and mewling throatily. The coffee table in front of the man is littered with papers and cups, wrinkled magazines. “You Riley’s girl?” The pen in his mouth rolls wetly against his teeth.
“Cat got your tongue?” He points to the sea of fur moving on the raggedy carpet and laughs. “Huh, huh.” His smile dies when I stay silent.
He asks me what I’ve got.
I put the money on the table. Assess, Evan would say. Always assess before you progress. From the corner of my eye, I see a baseball bat leaning against the wall. I see dirty plates with dirty forks and knives balanced on top of the television. The television is an arm’s length away. My pocket is closer.
The man counts the money, reaches back, and raps against the wall six times.
“That’s a big-ass scar on your forehead.” He tosses the lighter back on the table, leans back into the couch as he exhales. The cigarette bobbles above his knee.
I keep my face blank. Talking is what gets you in trouble. It’s the way you get trapped.
A door opens down the hallway. A woman appears, sleepy-eyed, barefoot, her tank top sagging across her stomach. Her hair’s messy; long strands of dyed red and yellow hang in her face.
She, too, looks behind me, at the door, disappointed. The man on the couch appraises her. “Wendy, looks like your guitar guy sent a little friend instead. Should we trust her?”
Wendy drops a brown bag on the coffee table. She looks me up and down, a smile playing at her lips. “She looks harmless enough. I’m a friend of Riley’s, too,” she says to me coolly. “A very good friend.”
The man tells her to go, and I watch her swish back down the hall. The ash on his cigarette has grown. Slowly, he pushes the bag across the table with his bare toes, until it plops on the carpet. I pick it up, feeling the knife against my thigh as I bend.
“You want anything for yourself, you know where I am.”
I don’t answer, just turn and leave. I don’t stop or look back until I’m pushing through the screen door of True Grit.
Riley pulls me into the grill station, holds out his hands. He tucks the bag under his shirt. He whispers for me to cover the grill for him.
On his way to the bathroom, he motions to the refrigerator. When I open it, I see my thank-you: another bulky bag of food. I take it like a robot, no feeling, no expression, and wedge it all the way into the bottom of my backpack. Riley comes back more alert, licking his lips. He gives me a wink and goes right back to flipping potatoes on the grill.
I don’t know what to think of what I just did or why. I’ve blanked myself out, erased myself. I spend the rest of the shift in a haze.
In my room, I push my green chair against the door. I put the bag of food on the table. I slide the knife from my pocket. I don’t know how I forgot I had it.
And then just like that, all the numbness I had drops away and my heart starts beating like a crazy caged bird. Doing that for Riley, it felt good. It was wrong, but I did it, and it made me feel like I sometimes felt with Evan and Dump and what we would do: like, yes, it was bad, yes, it was wrong, but there was also an element of danger that was appealing. Like: how far could you take something before it snapped? Would you recognize the moment that something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong?
But I also realize that I’m getting really far down the ladder of Casper’s rules and all of a sudden I’m flooded with despair. I get up and pace around the room. I try the breathing exercises, but I just gasp, I can’t slow down. I’m too keyed up. Mikey said move forward and I went backward big-time and oh, fuck, here comes the tornado.
My tender kit is still wedged far back under the claw-foot tub, hidden inside Louisa’s suitcase. I don’t want that, I don’t. I run the blade of the knife lightly across my forearm, testing. My skin prickles and longing fills me up; my eyes grow wet.
I’m so close to feeling better, feeling release, right here, with this stubby little blade. But I turn my arms over, force myself to look at the rough red lines ridging my soft skin.
Anything but that.
I let the knife clatter into the sink. Now I’m kind of coming down. Now I don’t feel very good at all. Too close today, with Riley and that man. Too close to what I used to do, and part of me wanted to see what it would feel like again, but I also wanted to make Riley’s eyes stop blinking, wanted him to stop shaking, wanted to be a good egg, a keeper, just like with Louisa. Just like I’d do for Ellis.
And that one time, that one time when I didn’t help her, when she needed help the very most she’d ever needed it, I did not help her and I lost her.
The room is closing in on me. I yank open the door. I could go downstairs, have one of the men on the porch take my money to the liquor store. I’m just about to leave when the door across the hall opens and a small, dirty-faced woman comes out. I don’t know her name, she’s only been here a few days, but we’ve passed in the hall, with her pressing herself against the wall if I get too close. She talks to herself a lot in her room at night, a lot of muttering.
“Hey,” I say, before I chicken out. “You got anything to drink in there? I’ll pay you.” I pull out a five-dollar bill from my pocket.
Her little eyes are like raisins. She’s wearing a stained tank top. Faded tattoos stretch across her chest. Names, mostly, but I can’t make them out. She looks down at the money. My hand is shaking. When she reaches out to snatch the bill, I see her hand is shaking, too. She goes back into her room and slams the door.
When she comes out, she shoves a cheap bottle of wine, a screw-top, at me and then takes off down the hall. Her flip-flops thwack down the sixteen steps to the first floor.
I don’t even wait to eat something. I unscrew the cap and take long pulls until I start to gag a little, then I pour the rest down the sink before I drink any more. It hits me quickly, the dizziness, the warmth followed by the little feeling of elation in my stomach. It’s enough to tamp down my anxiety. I feel bad, but I made a choice. Cutting or drinking, and I chose drinking.
In the bag Riley gave me, I find a small burrito wrapped in foil. It’s stuffed with chicken, shredded cheese, chilies, and sour cream. A tiny mountain of crisp hash browns borders the burrito. They’re still warm, lovely and greasy on my tongue. I finish everything, even the wet bits that fall on my lap. I pull the white napkin out of the bag to wipe my face and a twenty-dollar bill falls out. I can only guess that it’s an extra thank-you from Riley.
I pick up the book I checked out of the library earlier in the week. Drawing is a state of being, I read. An interaction between eye, hand, model, memory, and perception. The representational method…
I sigh, closing the book and pushing it to the edge of the table. I think of the woman with the muraled house, her garden like a castle. Soon, Lacey in 3C will begin to cry in her room, like she does every night, a snuffling, hiccupping sound. Schoolteacher downstairs will watch reruns of The Price Is Right all night, the bells and whistles and audience chatter trickling up through the floorboards. The men on my floor will stagger down the hall to the shared bathroom, groan and piss.
I draw like a demon, but this time on the wall next to my bed, filling up all the emptiness that surrounds me, some kind of mural of my own to wrap me up and keep me safe, until the wine pushes me into sleep.
