She had started to listen for the steps, the fifteen steps of the staircase that split the middle of the big house and led up to the door of the pill guy. Late at night she listened and counted as they went up and counted as they went down. Rickety, horror-story-sounding steps and she created a phrase to match the fifteen steps, five words she whispered to herself in the dark, a word for each step, repeated three times. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs.
Then she began to peek through the blinds and out at the street to see what they looked like. There was the Hispanic girl with the eagle or hawk or something with fabulous wings tattooed on her calf. The handful of young black guys in muscle shirts and sweatpants who looked fast and strong. The high school boys who arrived in an SUV that was worth a small house. The usual ragtag and wornout stragglers who ambled to the house from all sidewalk directions at any time of day or night.
During the day it wasn’t difficult. She worked and then changed diapers or took Annalee for a walk or fed her or rocked them both to sleep. It was during the night after Annalee had woken her and Maben had given her a bottle and gotten her back to sleep that she imagined going up the steps herself and knocking on the door and getting a little something. Just a little something.
Stay way the hell over there. Back up. Keep going.
So then she began to watch for him and that became more difficult because she never saw him. Never caught him coming or going, only heard the muffled sound of his voice when someone was at his door and he became this strange, faceless thing that lived up the stairs and provided the magic beans.
Twice, both times in the middle of the night after Annalee was back asleep after a bottle, she had gone up. But both times she had won. Stopping at the door and her knuckles bending in preparation for a knock but she never raised her hand. The tension falling from her bent fingers. The voice inside backing her away and telling her you will not become what he wants you to become. She moved back down talking in rhythm with her steps. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. Don’t go up the stairs. The second time she returned she closed her door and leaned against it and she was breathing hard as if she had been running from the bad guys and had slipped inside only an instant before they got her. She caught her breath and went to the bathroom and looked at herself and it was unfamiliar—health. They were eating. Didn’t matter what or how much but they were eating. They were sleeping. She had stopped smoking two months before the baby was born and hadn’t started back but for one at lunch and one at night. No beer. Beer had always led to nastier and happier things.
There is not one damn reason to go up there, she had said and pointed at herself in the mirror as if to add and I fucking mean it.
Several nights later he knocked on her door. She opened it and he was holding a small Ziploc bag containing a handful of pills. Some blue and some white. He held the bag out to her and said welcome to the neighborhood. He was wiry with deepset eyes and the distant look of the sleepless. He wore faded jeans and was barefoot and his blond hair was cut tight on his head. He held his mouth halfopen and his teeth were badly stained from cigarettes.
“I don’t want them,” she had said and she closed the door. She waited and listened for him to walk away and then the Ziploc bag slid under the door.
“Then throw them away. I don’t give a shit what you do with them,” he said and then he was gone.
Maben heard voices outside in the parking lot. Gruff voices and a couple of gruff laughs and then nothing. She slid her back along the wall and lay down on the floor with her arm folded under her head and she started to cry quietly. As she cried she could see the Ziploc bag sliding under the door. She could see the bad habits not listening to her demands to stay away. Not staying way the hell over there but inching closer and closer until they were right there with her and the child. The summer faded away and in early October the weather turned damp and cool and Annalee coughed and coughed and wouldn’t sleep and her fever went up and down and because she had kept the Ziploc bag underneath the kitchen sink and not thrown it away, taking it out and opening the bag and sticking her fingers into it and raising them to her mouth was an easy thing to do. And by Christmas she was no longer paying the rent and by February she and Annalee were locked out of the apartment and that was where the clarity of what she remembered from the last four years ended. The fog settled in.
Maben sat up and wiped her eyes. She got off the floor and walked across the room and sat down again in the chair. She pulled back the curtain wide enough to see from one side of the parking lot to the other. Dawn was coming in a few hours and she knew that with the first light the world would begin to spin faster.
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