Her sadness, when she let it show, usually struck me as wise and ancient, the sadness of an oracle, not hysterical and self-pitying and teenage, the way mine could be. But not that day.
That was the Oxy, though, wasn’t it? She climbed the pill up to some cushiony planet, far above the wreckage of life on earth, and maybe she felt for us and herself, watching from there, a height so great she could, perhaps, see the beginning and the end. But she was just so far away. Water sprang to her eyes, loosening her face, slumping her shoulders, before evaporating just about as soon as it arrived. “They’re going to arrest my dad.”
*
Why do I keep doing this? Making her out to be more than she was, grander, omniscient even, lovely and unreal. She could be such a bitch. She could sense what you hated about yourself, and if you pissed her off she’d throw it back at your face, she’d make sure you knew she thought it, too. Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get. I’m trying to hold palmfuls of sand but I squeeze harder, I tighten my fists, and the quicker it all escapes.
*
I have never taken Oxy. I tried Ecstasy a few more times in college, floating through the disco ball of Times Square, the whole world gone purple, purple faces on the subway, purple halal truck, purple plants growing around the base of purple trees, so high I could’ve sworn she was the very air I breathed. I snorted lines of cocaine off the back of a toilet in a bar in Bushwick, a glowstick around my neck, a pyramid of shot glasses on the table where some man I barely knew was waiting, all of them empty, most thanks to me. I spent two years stealing ADD medication from roommates, fooling psychiatrists into writing prescriptions for drugs that made me move so fast I had no memory. I wanted to know something about how she felt, about why that was the thing she kept going back to, more than me, more than Jimmy, more than Greg or Ryder or Sal. I had a hundred chances to stop her. More.
I replaced Silver Lake and one kind of cowardice with another kind. I nursed my screwed-up survivor’s guilt, let it take me over, but I never tried Oxy, not after watching how it scraped at her with its long fingernails, leaving nothing but a body. My freshman year of college, my boyfriend got a few pills, and when he showed them to me I slapped him so hard my hand stung. I never said why, and pretty soon after that he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore.
I was terrified. No matter how far I fell, something pulled me back to safety—school and its occasional fascinating gift, dopey, well-meaning men, and books, books, that’s where I found her most often, in the intimacies of characters, Ruth and Sylvie in a rowboat, Esperanza on Mango Street, Anna K., of course, right before she jumps.
*
I don’t want to tell the rest.
*
The social workers came that same evening, one fat lady, one thin, both with the same crunchy cap of curls, the same middle-aged sag to their cheeks. Older women were of two main varietals, to me. They either looked like my mom, or they looked like these women. I wondered if being married for a long time had something to do with it, if it aged you differently. Their bodies were used up, somehow, less theirs, their skin pawed over, worn out by men. Back then, I didn’t want to grow up to be my mom, but I didn’t want to grow up to be these women. Neither did Marlena.
They knocked. Sal was sleeping up in the loft, even though it was only a little past eight, that moment on every Michigan August evening when the sky goes violet for a second before sighing into blue, into the cooler night. Marlena was on the couch. I could practically see her consciousness hovering outside her body. In response to the knock, she turned her head, blinking once, twice, before mumbling, “Tell them to leave us alone.” Or maybe it was “Tell them nobody’s home.”
Jimmy still wasn’t back. Who knows where Mom was, maybe next door; we needed her, but we hadn’t asked for her help. That day was my and Marlena’s emergency, and we’d tackled it as a team, calming Sal, trying to warn her dad and Bolt, and, most important, coming up with a bunch of ironclad reasons why she never knew what was going on, why the meth had nothing to do with her. Trying to get the story straight.
Sal did not argue when we put him to bed ludicrously early. But who were we kidding? As soon as he was upstairs, Marlena conjured that big white bottle. I tried to take it away. I snatched the bottle and held it above my head, calling her a pill popper, telling her that now was not the time for getting high. “It’s exactly the time,” she said. “What better time is there?” She swiped it out of my hand and darted over to the sink, laughing, laughing, pretty as ever, nothing sick-looking or drug-addict-y about her, so I felt stupid for treating the pills like more than the joke she made them out to be. She washed down the pills, I didn’t see how many, with water straight from the tap as it overflowed the scummy pools collecting in weeks’ worth of used dishes. That was an hour earlier, longer, and Marlena was gone.
They stood under the busted overhead light, those ladies, and I saw that beyond them was a car with a cop in it, just standing by.
“You’ll have to come back later,” I said.
“We’re looking for Marlena Joyner and a little one, Salamander? You must be their friend, Catherine?”
“We’ve had a long day here. Please, maybe, let’s do this tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, but there is a minor here without an adult, and they can’t be here overnight.”
“He’s with us.”
“Are either of you eighteen?”
“Marlena’s birthday is next month.”
“Let us in, honey,” said the fatter lady, who was in charge. She wore a cardigan, though it was muggy outside. “My name’s Candice, and this is Josie. We’re just here to help. Nobody is in trouble, but you need to let us in. If you don’t, we’re going to have to get our friend Officer Dalkey involved.”
Marlena was visibly fucked up. I’d never seen her quite like this—out of it to the point of senselessness.