Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  “Every time you want to use, Hannah, you count your fingers—give thanks for every single day you’ve stayed clean. All right?”

  I nod. It means: Do anything but use. Literally count my fingers if I have to.

  “Day ten. You’re a fucking badass.”

  I smile. “I don’t feel like such a badass.”

  Jo slathers a bagel chip in cream cheese. “Remember: It’s progress, not perfection. You fuck up, you try better next time. Like you are now. On my last day ten—girl, I had a lot of day tens—but my last one was six years ago. I’m twenty-five now. Ancient, right? So I was nineteen on that day. And my sponsor was this old lady named Lulu and she smoked like a chimney and she was a heroin addict from the East Village. She died last year. Sober, just old. Anyway, she gave me this song. And now I give it to you.”

  “Do you still need it?”

  She wipes bagel chip off her jacket. “Not like I used to. That’s why I’m your sponsor. But I’ll always be in recovery. So will you—even if you’re sober for the rest of your life. And I hope you will be. But being ‘in’ recovery never goes away. It’s not a label, being an addict: It’s just reality. You’ve got an incurable disease that’s in remission. Understand?”

  I nod slowly. “I think so.”

  “You will always have to stay on your ass,” she says. “People talk about mindfulness. Shit, you don’t need to talk to monks about that—talk to addicts. We are experts on mindfulness.” She takes a swig of coffee. “We work the Steps. Every day. We count our fingers. If we don’t, we’re making snow angels in the Boston Public Garden.”

  In other words: Staying clean means we do right by the miracle.

  “Someone in rehab said there’s new studies being done—that you don’t have to be stone-cold sober to keep from going overboard,” I say. “There’s, like, medicine that makes you not want to drink, so you can drink, you just don’t want to. Stuff like that. It’s, like, European or something.”

  Jo nods. “It’s true that there’s actually not a lot of great data for the Steps—kind of a problem when everyone’s anonymous, right? And I won’t deny there could be all kinds of ways to stay clean that aren’t being explored. But the Steps worked for me. I’ve seen people do stuff like drink because pills are their problem. But the drinking usually leads back to the pills. We have this saying—fuck, we have a lot of sayings: One is too many and a thousand is never enough. That was true for me.” She sighs. “We’re all on our own journey, but my recommendation is to start with the Steps. Get clean. Get right with yourself and the people you love. Be okay being you without additives, know what I’m saying? Organic, free-range Hannah Winters.”

  I smile. “Sounds delicious.”

  “It is, man. Tastes better than the inside of a coffin, anyway.”

  I stir my soup. “So anything I say to you is … confidential?”

  Jo nods. “But I’ll keep it real with you: If you tell me you’re going to try to off yourself again, I’m gonna bring in whoever I need to, to keep you breathing.” She leans her arms on the table. “Your file said someone told your sister where to find you—I’m guessing she and I aren’t the only ones who want to keep you alive.”

  “My…” I can’t stop seeing the look on his face when I said that whatever we had, it was done now. “Drew.”

  “Your Drew?”

  “He was kind of my boyfriend.”

  “Was? Ah. The person you think you really love. But broke up with.”

  I shrug.

  “Does he use?” She must see my hesitation, because she twirls her finger around our booth. “Cone of silence, okay? I’m just trying to get the lay of the land here. I’m not a narc.”

  I take a sip of coffee. “He sold to me. At first. But then he was the one who … He tried to get me to quit. He doesn’t deal anymore. He doesn’t use. We only took pills together once, and I’ve never seen him high outside of that one time.”

  She blows out a long breath. “I think you know what I’m going to say.”

  “You don’t know him. He’s … doing right by the miracle.”

  I tell her everything. The whole story. Of me. Starting with Just Hannah. Ending with Mae spending two nights in the hospital before they transferred me to McLean. I tell her about Micah and Drew and the clinic. All of it.

  “So you didn’t break up with him because you don’t want to be with him, or because he was part of your drug life,” Jo says. “You broke up with him because you feel like you’re not good enough for him.”

  “I think I’m holding him back from getting on with his life after dealing. You know? Drew’s kind of weirdly straight-edge when it comes to pills and stuff, but I think … he’s addicted to me. A little. He wants to save me.”

  Jo crosses her arms. “I think he wants to save himself.”

  “Maybe.” I push the bowl of soup away. “Honestly, I mostly broke up with him for selfish reasons. I just can’t … I can’t disappoint one more person. And I think if he—when he realizes that I’m not going to suddenly be not fucked-up, then he’ll stop seeing me. Like I’d be invisible to him. That would—that would be so … It would shatter me, I think. And I’m scared of what I would do if I felt that way again.”

  The waitress comes by to refill our coffee, and Jo’s quiet until we’re alone again.

  “Codependence is a bitch,” she finally says. “I agree, he’s got shit to work on. And I think you two need to work on your shit separately. And maybe someday the stars will align. But your problem right now, Blue, isn’t whether or not to be with him. It’s that the only time you seem to feel okay with yourself is when you talk about how he sees you and how good it feels to have someone see who you are and still want you. That’s addiction talking. It’s the same as the pills. Get your hit of Drew, feel okay. No Drew? Not okay.” She leans forward. “You know you’re really working the Steps when you understand that no one can be your inner lighthouse. No person can get you safely to shore.” She points to her chest. “What you need—that light—it’s in here. It always has been.”

  I can’t help it: I roll my eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she says, laughing softly. “Self-love shit. I know. But it’s true. Other people, they come, they go. But watch me blow your mind right now: The only person you can guarantee will be there with you every step of the way until you die … is you.” She rests her hand on mine. “So doesn’t it make sense to be good to yourself?”

  I stare at her, and she grins. “Dude.” Jo spreads her arms. I notice a big lighthouse on her left forearm. “I think I just channeled my great-great-grandfather. He was a transcendentalist out in Concord, hung out with Thoreau and Emerson. That was deep, right?”

  I laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

  “Finish your soup while I tell you a story,” she says, pushing the bowl back toward me. “My favorite ever.”

  The matzo is tender, soft. The broth reminds me of all the chicken soups Mom ever made me when I was sick. I can still feel her with me. With her Little Girl Blue.

  “Okay, so I went to this weird but cool storytelling event in Brooklyn, and they were talking about these two old ladies. I guess their story was in the Times or something. They were best friends for a million years. Like, they were nurses or something in World War Two and, you know, gallivanted and shit. Lots of hot people in uniform—I don’t blame them. They weren’t even ladies, they were broads, you know? And they had the best names: Brownie and Mimi. I can’t remember who was who, so we’re just gonna say it was Mimi who did the interview with the Times. And she talked about how they maintained this friendship for decades. And then their husbands both died and these broads, who lived on opposite sides of the country and were, like, too old to travel or whatever, these gals would get on the horn and jabber every day. Talk about their health problems and the old days and curse and stuff. Super cool. Golden Girls. And then Mimi said one day she called, and Brownie didn’t answer.”

  “She died?”

  Jo nods. �
�Yeah. And they had video of Mimi, talking about that day—that moment when Brownie didn’t answer. And for a minute, you know, she looked a little lost. Her best friend dead, her husband. And you felt how fucking lonely and maybe terrifying it must be to be that old and have everyone dropping around you like flies and your whole life basically a memory, right? And everyone in the audience is about to start sobbing because, you know, it’s MimiandBrownie, the fabulous duo, and Brownie’s gone. But Mimi, she throws up her hands, legit cackles, and says—Hannah, she says: ‘C’est la goddamn vie.’”

  Jo finishes her coffee, sets it down. “That’s life. I’m here to tell you, my friend, that is how you find your serenity and don’t let anything fuck with it. Whatever happens, count your fingers, and no matter how bad it gets—”

  “C’est la goddamn vie,” I say.

  “Hell yeah. One life. Use it or lose it, know what I’m saying?”

  And for the first time since I lay down beneath the angel, I think: Maybe I can do this.

  38

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 25 December

  Earth Time (EST): 8:06

  Christmas morning.

  I wake up, rip it off like a Band-Aid.

  The first one without them.

  Gram and Papa’s backyard in Cape Cod is a sea of white, the rose garden hidden under a fresh layer of snow. Little red blooms peek out here and there—hearty roses that refuse to give in to winter.

  Some flowers find a way to survive no matter what.

  Pines surround the property, towering over the yard, watchful, with a bit of forest between us and the neighbors.

  I slide open the back door and step outside, careful to be extra quiet, since Nate is sprawled on the couch, sleeping. He’s wearing the flannel pajamas with space kittens on them I got him last Christmas.

  I can’t see the ocean from here, but I can smell salt. That’s about as close as I want to be to large bodies of water these days. Cold, damp air wraps around me, but I’ve bundled up. How many Christmas mornings did I spend out here with Mom, drinking her peppermint hot cocoa? No one else wanted to be in the cold, but I always did. With her.

  The hole I told River about, the feeling like I’m in a spaceship with a hole in it—it’s gotten bigger. Even though Nah is sober and might be okay, the hole keeps widening. I can feel it in my chest.

  The more I think about what Dad did to Mom, to us, the more it feels like general relativity has been disproven. Nothing is certain. You can’t count on anything. Not even physics.

  I don’t think the universe will ever make sense.

  I close my eyes and imagine palm trees and the sound of the waves, the cafe up the street playing way too much Bob Marley and Sublime. The smell of Mom’s garden—basil and oregano and the lemon tree, heavy with lemons for avgolemono.

  When I open my eyes, I see a flicker of movement to my left and my heart stops beating. My sister is lying in a pool of sunlight, eyes squeezed tight, her ear pressed against the flagstones.

  “Nah!”

  Her eyes pop open, but she doesn’t move.

  No. Not today. Not any more days. NO.

  I run, tripping over a stack of firewood as I rush past the covered patio furniture. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Those lines form between her eyebrows. “Nothing. I’m listening to the sound of the fire in the center of the globe.”

  Her pupils look normal. Color is good. No pills. Maybe she’s drunk.

  “I’m not using,” she says, rising onto her elbows. “I’m being the Hanged Man. Seeing the world from a different perspective. Yoko says, Listen to the sound of the fire burning in the center of the globe. So I’m listening.”

  Humans are very surprising. Unpredictable. We are all quantum beings.

  I really don’t know anything.

  Even though it’s impossible to hear the molten core in the center of Earth—at least from a patio in Cape Cod—I find myself saying, “Can I listen, too?”

  A smile I would classify as uncertain plays over her lips. “Really?”

  I nod.

  “Okay.”

  I lie down next to her, on my stomach. Even though it’s cold outside, the sun has warmed the stones, and my many layers keep me warm. I rest my cheek against the stone and look at her.

  “Now close your eyes,” she whispers.

  We listen.

  We wait.

  The sun lies over us like a blanket. Her breath is slow and even. The hole inside me gets a little smaller.

  We are eight years old again, waiting for Santa. Listening for sleigh bells. Believing in magic. Together.

  I press my ear against the stone. I hear Ben say, We’re living on a mystery.

  I crack open an eye just for a second. Nah’s are squeezed shut, her brow furrowed in concentration. She is listening hard. I close mine again, try to catch the sound of Earth’s center. I don’t hear whatever sound its heat is making, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe it’s the listening that counts.

  “I can’t hear anything,” Nah says.

  “That’s probably because Earth’s core is thousands of miles below us.”

  I don’t know how far. I wish I could ask Ben. I wonder if he has ever pressed his ear to the ground and tried to hear the fire burning in the center of the globe.

  I wish we were still together and I could kiss that ear. But it’s also very distracting—that ear. Him, all of him. I think I made the right choice. I hope I did.

  “I can hear the blood pumping in my veins,” Nah says. “It sounds like lava. Like in this video they showed in chem.” She laughs a little. “The one day I showed up this semester.”

  Nah is transferring to a special school in the new year, a sober high school full of people like her, all trying to get better.

  I listen to the blood pumping in my veins. “The center of Earth is mostly iron,” I say. “And seventy percent of the iron in the human body is found in our red blood cells—our muscles, too.”

  “You’re getting all Bill Nye the Science Guy on me,” she warns.

  I smile. Thorny rose.

  “Which means,” I continue, opening my eyes, “that the fire in the center of the globe probably sounds like us, like our blood. Liquid iron.”

  I raise my head, and she raises hers.

  “Yoko,” she breathes.

  “I don’t speak ‘weird.’”

  Nah pushes up to her elbows. “She’s trying to get us to see that it’s in us. The earth. The center. Dude. The fire in the center of the globe is burning inside us.”

  Oh, Ben would love that.

  But …

  “Or is it just a metal in the first transition series, atomic number twenty-six, symbol Fe for ferrum—”

  “I don’t speak ‘weird.’” She leans closer, presses her forehead against mine. “I’m pushing my weird thought into you so you can understand it.”

  I laugh, a giggle. I don’t think that sound has come out of me since August twenty-eighth.

  “Okay.” I lean into her. “I’m pushing my weird thought into you so you can understand it.”

  “Mae, you know I can’t do advanced calculus.”

  “Dad says two heads are better than one.”

  Nah smiles. “He was wrong about the most important things, but he was right about that.”

  A bit of sunlight hits the little diamond around her neck, and I think about Isaac Newton, bending white light through a prism, discovering that all the colors are inside the light, even if we can’t see them all the time. There’s so much that’s sitting right in front of us that we can’t see.

  I touch the tip of my finger to the diamond. “Do you miss him?”

  “So much,” she says.

  “Then why, Nah?”

  “He can’t be what fills me up, you know? I have to be okay with just me. I can’t think about boys right now. I need a break.”

  I nod. “Same. My meditation teacher talked about t
hat. The hungry ghosts I told you about. How we try to fill ourselves with other people, but it doesn’t help.”

  “Jo did, too. Ha! The sisterhood strikes again. She’s on this whole self-love kick. Her ancestor, like, chilled with Thoreau.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Crazy.”

  I like Jo. I got to meet her when she dropped Nah off after their first meeting, and she reminds me of River. She gives it to you straight.

  “Sit up,” Nah says. “I want to give you your Christmas present.”

  We sit up.

  “Should I go get yours? It’s under the tree.”

  I went out on a limb this year: Despite all better judgment, I went to Salem with Nate and bought Hannah many witchy supplies. It was embarrassing shelling out cold, hard cash for crystals, but I love my sister.

  “I can wait. This can’t.” She reaches into her coat pocket and hands me a piece of folded notebook paper. Her nails, like mine, are all different colors. We gave each other breakup nails, just like Mom did for me when Riley left.

  I raise an eyebrow. “Hannah. You shouldn’t have.”

  She laughs. “Shut up. Open it.”

  I unfold the paper. On it, in her messy handwriting, it says:

  3468 Beacon Street

  10:00 AM

  January 5

  I look up at her. “Um?”

  “I called Annapolis. Your interview is on the fifth. Don’t wear the pineapple thing.”

  I grip the paper. “Nah. I told you, I’m not—”

  “When I look up at the sky, I need to know someone I love is up there, looking down at me.” She puts her hands on my shoulders. “We’ll always be together, Buzz. Even if we’re a million miles apart—to infinity and beyond.”

  Her eyes are clear and shining. There is color in her cheeks. The fire in the center of the globe bursting through her. Through me.

  Is this really happening?

  Is it okay for me to go?

  “I don’t want you to be alone,” I say.

  “You giving up your dream for me fucks with my serenity.”

  The possibility of letting myself go to Annapolis unfurls inside me, a spiral galaxy of light and color.