She meant the tampons and shampoo and everything. When she turned to climb back through, I figured that was it, our moment together was over. But she glanced over her shoulder and said, “Come on.”
We crept down the hall. The bathroom light was on, the door ajar. We waited a second to make sure Mom wasn’t in there; then I went in, knelt on the floor, and opened the cabinet under the sink, pulling out the boxes of pads and tampons, and the shampoo with its matching conditioner that had the words “Hydration Balance Shine” lettered onto the bottles. A jar of hair cream Dixie had gotten, the serum I was going to try. The razors. Dixie found a plastic bag to put it all into.
Back out in the hall, I couldn’t help but notice how quiet it was. Dixie felt it, too. She handed me the bag of our stuff and went to Mom’s door, nudging it open.
“Dixie,” I whispered. “Let’s just go to bed.”
Mom lay on the bed in her clothes, blankets half pulled over her, and from the position she was in you could tell something wasn’t right. Her body was too loose. Dixie went farther in. “Mom?”
“She said she wanted to disappear.”
Dixie knew what that meant as well as I did. But she still kept walking. I stood frozen in the doorway.
“I just want to make sure she’s breathing and everything,” she said.
I watched as she tried to get some response out of Mom. For years it had always been me trying to wake Mom while Dixie hung back. I watched as if watching myself, trying to remember the girl I’d been, the girls we both were, how small we must have been, and how scared.
Now, Mom mumbled something unintelligible, waved one of her arms as if shooing Dixie away. “What did you take, Mom?” Dixie asked. “Mom?”
I took a step closer.
“She’s breathing okay,” Dixie said to me. “Come help me look around.”
I finally went in. The room smelled stale and was colder than ours. Mom had her window open about an inch. We silently searched, moving aside clothes and jewelry and makeup. We opened drawers and all the little decorative boxes Mom kept on her dresser and bedside tables. Dixie found it on the bookcase by the window—the chalky residue of something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Probably oxy. Maybe mixed with something else.”
She kept searching. She reached her hand under the mattress and felt around until she pulled out a handful of tiny plastic bags. “These are old ones, empty.”
“How do you know what it was?”
After a pause Dixie said, “Because I got it for her. At school.”
She pulled the blankets up around Mom’s shoulders, then walked out. I followed, not as shocked as I probably should have been. Nothing about our family surprised me, I realized. It was following exactly the path it had been on for a long time.
When we got to our room, Dixie sat on her bed. “She’ll be okay. I get her stuff sometimes. Don’t yell at me, Gem.”
“I wasn’t going to.” I flipped on the overhead light. One of the two bulbs flickered, then died. “She hasn’t been in there that long. It works that fast?”
“If you snort it. And maybe she was already on something when she got home from work. I didn’t think—”
“I don’t care,” I said. And I didn’t. I didn’t care.
Our room looked dingy and sad in the low light, more so than usual. And it smelled a little bit like smoke. I smelled like smoke, too—smoke and sweat. It was only a few hours before dawn, then school. “I’m taking a shower.”
“Now?” Dixie asked.
“Yeah.” I carried the plastic bag of our stuff into the bathroom.
The new shampoo smelled like coconut. I used it all over my body. I shaved my legs with a fresh razor. I massaged the conditioner into my hair and stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out, then sat on the closed toilet in the steam for a long time, working the serum through my split ends, my arms heavy, full of little pebbles.
Dixie was on her bed, on her back, her arm crossed over her face. “I’m awake,” she said without moving. There were more tissues piled up and tears in her voice when she said, “I checked on Mom again. She’s the same.”
“I don’t care,” I repeated. I let my towel drop to the floor and dressed for school, limbs heavy, moving in slow motion. “You’re the one who’s worried. Or do you feel guilty?”
She sat up, and her face was puffy from crying but also glowing, like crying made her even more herself, her eyes brighter, her lips redder. “She made it sound like no big deal, Gem. She said her shoulder hurt from carrying trays of drinks and whatever, and she just didn’t have time to go to the doctor, and she knew there was all kinds of stuff to get at school. She didn’t beg or anything. She didn’t seem like . . . you know, desperate. She seemed—”
“I said I don’t care.”
She fell back over onto her side. “Dad was such a dick to me.”
“Not just to you.” I got down on the floor with the bag of shampoo and stuff. “I’m hiding this under the bed.” There was room for it in the box with the cartons of Haciendas. I reached under to drag it out, and the tips of my fingers felt something else there. I couldn’t quite reach it, so I lay down on the floor to get more of my arm under, and pulled it out.
It took me just a second to recognize the brown backpack Dad had been carrying around.
Feeling suddenly sharp and awake, I looked at Dixie. “Did you put this under my bed?”
She rolled over to the edge of the bed to see. “No.”
“Did you see him put it there?”
“No!” She sat up, indignant.
“Well, when did he, if you didn’t know? Did he come in here when I was doing the dishes?”
“I don’t know, Gem. I guess he could have?”
I looked at the worn brown canvas, imagining Dad in our room, rushing around looking for a place to stash the bag. Mom’s words repeated in my head: He’s into something, I guarantee it. Drugs, probably. It would make sense, that his big plan for success had been to bring in a stash from the border and sell it in Seattle. Just another unsurprising development in the mess that was our lives. I reached for the zipper.
Dixie was up and grabbed the backpack away. “Wait. I should call Dad. Let me call him.”
For a second I doubted her claim that she didn’t know any more about it than I did, especially having just found out she’d been getting pills for Mom. Maybe Dad was going to get her to deal at school, maybe that’s what he meant when he’d said how important it was for him to be able to trust her. Would he do that? Yes, I thought. He would.
I watched her face and she didn’t avoid my eyes, which made me think she really didn’t know. “We’re opening it first,” I said. “And if it’s drugs, we’re calling the police. Then you can call him all you want.”
“The police, Gem? With Mom like she is right now? I could get in real trouble if they found out what I did.”
I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble, not that kind of trouble. “I just want Dad to go away,” I said.
That wasn’t it exactly. I wanted my father. But I wanted him to be a different person than he was.