Another bag went down the chute.
I held the roll of garbage bags away from her, hoping to salvage what was left.
I can still see exactly how she looked, small and frail and afraid. The way she blinked with something like surprise as she looked around the kitchen, probably already regretting throwing the food away. Sometimes, when I remember it, I add a moment, in my imagination, where I step toward her and put my arms around her and tell her I’m sorry and I wish everything was different.
I didn’t do any of that, though. I stood still and mute while she bundled herself in her own arms, shivering from the draft the back door had let in, and said, “You have to understand, Gem. I used to love him so much. We were destiny, made for each other. I would have loved him forever. He fucked it up. I could have dealt with the drugs. Together we could have dealt with it. But he became this . . . liar. He wasn’t like that when I met him, he wasn’t.”
Her voice got quieter and her arms dropped.
“The women, Gem. I hope you never know what that feels like. It feels like shit,” she continued. “You wonder if anything was ever true. You wonder if you’re the stupidest woman who ever lived. It makes you crazy. It puts you on the floor tearing your hair out wondering if you could have done something. Like you’re the one who messed up when it’s them you should be blaming all along.”
I remembered how it was sometimes when we were little, before he left for good, Mom in bed for days, clean and sober but wrecked by a broken heart and cursing him.
And I understood being made to feel guilty for things that weren’t your fault.
“Now he’s going to come back?” She squatted down to pick up a bag of salad that had fallen to the floor. “He thinks walking in here like fucking Santa Claus with presents and toys is going to make me look bad and him look good?”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “It doesn’t make him look good.”
“Dixie believes in that shit, Gem. She believes him.”
“I don’t,” I assured her.
She continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “I can see in her face. She thinks he’s coming through.”
“He’s not.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the one who let him in today. You’re older, Gem. You were supposed to keep an eye out for her.”
My fault, was what she was saying.
She straightened her skirt and wiped her fingers under her eyes to clear the streaked mascara there. I followed her to the living room. She dug in her purse and came up with some money. “It’s only ten bucks. But it’s enough for lunch for both of you tomorrow, right?”
I nodded and took it. It wasn’t the time to say I’d gotten on the lunch program or explain again how Dixie always figured out her own way to pay for it.
“I can take care of you.” Tears had returned to her voice. She held on to my arm like she needed more than anything in the world for me to believe what she’d just said.
I didn’t, but I told her, “I know you can.”
This look crossed her face and then she wasn’t there. She’d gone somewhere else in her head. She let go of my arm and said, “I’m going to my room. I need to think. I need space. I need to . . . Just leave me alone in there. Okay? Let me disappear for a while.”
Let me disappear.
I knew what that meant.
I was tired and empty. Tired of trying to stop her from her bad decisions. Empty of any love, any sympathy. She’d basically announced to me that she was going to use, and I didn’t feel anything.
“Good night, Mom.”
She brushed past me and I watched her go to her room. She got smaller and smaller. She shrank to nothing.
9.
DIXIE WAS sitting up on her bed, her face illuminated by the light of her phone, which she held in one hand, like she was waiting for it to do something. Tissues were piled around her. I wished I could cry like that, let it all out anytime I needed to. I pictured my own tears, the ones that never came out, turning into little pebbles and piling up inside me. I pictured them filling my fingertips and feet and stomach, weighing me down.
I needed my Hacienda. I put on my jacket and felt for the pack, and slipped my feet into my shoes.
“Where are you going?” Dixie asked quietly, and put her phone facedown on the bed.
“Fire escape.”
She sniffled. “Can I come?” Her voice was small.
“There aren’t any lights in the alley.”
“So?”
“You used to be afraid of the dark.” Of the dark, of strange noises and shadows, of the hours we had alone together after school when Mom worked days and Dad was doing whatever and we were tired of the runaway game. That stuff scared me, too, but I pretended it didn’t, for her. I’d tell her: Draw a dinosaur for me. Draw a princess.
“Every kid is afraid of the dark,” she said.
“Maybe.”
We climbed out. The metal grating was wet from when it had rained earlier. I reached back into the window and pulled my blanket off the bed for us to sit on. I touched the cigarettes in my pocket and knew that if I smoked now, the secret of it, the privacy, would be gone forever. The trade-off seemed worth it to show Dixie that I wasn’t exactly what she thought I was. To be the big sister again.
I withdrew my hand from my pocket and held up the pack. “Want one?”
Her eyes widened.
“What?” I asked, pretending it was no big deal.
“To quote Mom,” she said, “‘are you shitting me?’”
I didn’t move, and a small eruption of laughter came out of Dixie before she put her hand over her mouth. I had to laugh, too. Her imitation of Mom was perfect, and I could imagine how strange me smoking looked to her. Then our hands shook with trying not to laugh too loud as we lit our cigarettes—that crazy kind of laughing that feels almost the same as crying.
From the way she inhaled I could tell it wasn’t her first; I wasn’t introducing her to anything.
“Mom threw away the food,” I told her after we’d each taken a couple of drags.
“What food?”
“The food.”
“Like, the leftovers? From dinner?”
I blew smoke into the air, watching it curl and wind through the fire-escape grating. She had such faith in Mom. “All of it, Dixie.”
I felt her letting it sink in.
“I tried to stop her.”
A man was looking through a Dumpster in our alley. We stayed quiet until he’d gone; then Dixie flicked her half-smoked cigarette off the fire escape like she’d done it a hundred times before. She shivered.
“Is she still up?” she asked.
“She went to her room.” I stubbed my own cigarette out. “She said to leave her alone.”
“I want to get the stuff out of the bathroom before she finds that, too.”