I can’t deal with that higher power shit. I never could. You know that.
Gradually we stopped hearing about her. I don’t think Mom ever got over it. She had other friends afterward but none that she loved like she loved Roxanne. Love like the love she had for us—the biggest and strongest love she could feel, still easily blown over by her selfishness or addiction or whatever it was that kept her from being able to be . . . I don’t know . . . different.
All her real friends cleaned up and disappeared, and she replaced them with disposable friends who were mostly there to listen to her complain about Dad, other men, or work, or to party with her. I wanted Mom to be like Roxanne. Or Roxanne to be our mom. She was evidence that a person could change. I think she wanted to help, and maybe she tried. But Mom was our link to her and that link got broken, and there was nothing we could do about that.
Stuff happens to most people. One thing going wrong, I mean. One family member missing a chance to help. One who cuts you off. One person with her own shit to deal with.
One of those things isn’t enough to send you falling through the cracks.
But all of them together, they accumulate. An abandoned mother here. A missing uncle there. A disappearing father two generations back. A friendship broken by fear or mistrust or addiction. Genes that make you vulnerable to certain problems. Two children who weren’t loved right meeting up when they’re not really adults yet and having two more children who aren’t loved right.
It adds up. It all adds up.
16.
THE CLOCK on the bedside table said 3:17 when I woke with an ache that proved me wrong in thinking my stomach could handle anything. I got up to use the bathroom; then I couldn’t fall back to sleep. Dixie was curled in a ball facing me.
“Dixie?” I whispered. She didn’t move.
Quietly, I slipped into the bathroom again, taking the backpack with me.
Only seven thousand, I told myself, counting out a combination of hundreds and fifties and twenties. It wasn’t a lot. A small safety net. I wrapped that amount in a hotel washcloth, then splashed water on my face. I got a glass off the sink and filled it to take back to bed with me. I put the washcloth under my pillow and then returned the backpack to where it had been.
Lying down only made my aching stomach feel heavier, so I sat in the armchair by the window and looked out over the lights and the water, sipping from my glass.
I sat there long enough to watch the slow brightening of dawn, a reverse fade from black to dark blue to purple and deep gray. It was pretty, but I wanted it to stop. With it came reality, an end to room service and movies and bubble baths and not having to think about what would come next.
Dixie made a waking-up noise, something between a sigh and a groan. I turned to see her rolling over toward the window, her eyes open. “Why are you awake?” she whimpered.
“My stomach. I needed to sit up.”
She gathered a pillow against her body and spooned it. “S’pretty,” she said, half into the pillow.
“I wish we lived near the water.”
“We do.”
“I mean, I wish we lived where we could see the water.” Life would feel more open, I imagined. You’d never have to feel trapped, with all of that water and sky.
We watched the sky fade into lighter and lighter gray. A ferry made its way out onto the Sound.
“Maybe we could move,” Dixie said. “I mean, like maybe me and you and Mom could find a new place, a better place. . . .” She shifted her blankets and pillows around and closed her eyes, dreamy. “She needs to get a job she can do during the day. Like in an office. Something that pays more, where she could come home at normal times.”
I watched her face, how young and I guess innocent it looked. She might be carrying around some piece of plastic saying she was nineteen. She might know how to check into a hotel and keep us from getting ripped off. She might have boyfriends and go to clubs and never have to eat lunch alone. But there was so much she still hadn’t learned—or at least stuff she hadn’t let herself know. That’s what I mean by innocent, thinking Mom could—would—get a good-paying, normal-hours job.
I could have asked: Why are we here, Dixie? Remember what Mom was doing when we last saw her? That was part of my purpose, wasn’t it, to give her the eyes to see the truth? But maybe it was okay to be innocent like that, maybe it was good. Just because I couldn’t be like that didn’t make it a bad way to be.
“Do you want to call down for coffee or something?” I asked her.
She scooted over on the bed so she could reach the room phone, dragging her blankets with her. After she ordered coffee and hot chocolate and some food, I said we should check her phone.
“I don’t want to hear them,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”
“We have to know. Then we can decide what to do.”
She propped herself up with a pillow. “What we do is hang around until checkout, go home, put the money back and pretend we don’t know anything about it. Like we said.”
“Dixie . . .” I started.
“What?”
It wasn’t the right time. If she got mad at me now, she could still call Dad, ruin things for me. “Don’t you want to know how much trouble we’re going to be in? To prepare?”
“Fine.” She got her phone off the bedside table and turned it on.
We waited what seemed like forever for it to come on and find a signal. Then it buzzed. Dixie showed me the screen. There was a text from Dad.
mom says you’re at some sleepover. call when you get this
“He went back to the apartment?” I said. Or maybe called her. Either way, Mom was clear enough to talk to him and tell him where we supposedly were. But maybe he hadn’t been there, physically, to check under the bed. . . .
“There’s a voice mail from him, too,” Dixie said.
“Put it on speaker.”
She pushed the blanket off her shoulders. “Why? I don’t even want to hear it.”
I ran my fingers over the fabric of the armchair. I could have been so far away by now. Instead I was maybe three miles from home, because I didn’t leave her.
“I mean, what difference does it make?” she asked. “It’s over, Gem. We have to go home.”
I looked at the phone in her hands as if Dad could reach through it and take everything away from me. “Can he track us with that?”
She looked at me; I couldn’t read her expression. Afraid of Dad, or frustrated with me, or only tired. “I don’t know.”
A loud knock in the door made us both jump. Then a woman’s voice on the other side of it said, “Room service.”
Dixie held down the power button to turn the phone off, and I got up. I checked through the peephole that it really was room service, then stood back while the woman, not much older than us, wheeled in a little cart. She turned the cart into a table and uncovered a basket of croissants and rolls and pastries next to our pot of coffee and mugs of hot chocolate.