Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  Outside, people are shopping. I can’t tell him what prompted me, started the whole thing unraveling. I was born with a hole in my heart, that’s what the boy told me when he brought back the crack. Who wasn’t? My mother killed herself when I was just three years old. Never knew who she was.

  I can’t talk about my baby. But my baby talks to me. I can’t understand it. It’s too subtle for me. I only understand the kick of cocaine, never feel the baby move until my body forces it out. I’m afraid of the baby, what Victor and I could create together. They can put you away for that. Put you away for making a baby no one can understand. Little broken pieces of DNA, little broken baby teeth. Chicken wire wound around a baby’s bed.

  Afraid to look in the toilet. Afraid to open the door. I’m an eyeball on the floor, scanning the crack of the door. Looking for footsteps, patterns of darkness. Afraid to look in the toilet.

  I imagine my mouth opening, a grave. ‘Sleeping pills,’ I say. Raspy, horror voice. My mouth is full of dirt and bones, soft baby ducks.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Joel asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, though I want to say nothingness. Hollowness. How it feels. That place always stays in you, becomes a center. You have to build around it.

  ‘I like your place,’ he offers. Doesn’t really want to ask me questions about my thinking. He wants to be something other than what his card announced. But now I wish I’d paid him for the hour, could talk or not. Cannot talk about the baby I couldn’t name.

  ‘Do you work at South Wing?’ I ask him.

  ‘No. I have a private practice here in town.’

  ‘I do casework here, never formally studied psychology. But I’d like to.’ Formally study anything; not always have to rely on empathy, on my experience.

  ‘You should. It’s a satisfying field. I’ll bet you’d be good at it. Casework is good experience.’ He puts the cup and saucer down, puts his hands on his thighs. ‘Do I get the tour?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I stand up. ‘Of course.’ I walk him through the place; it’s not much to see. But he takes an interest in everything. He’s surprisingly forthcoming. ‘It’s very nice here,’ he says, as though expecting something else. ‘How did you find this place?’

  ‘Driving,’ I say. ‘I was just driving and decided to see what was down this road.’ The simple questions throw me off. Do other people just drive down roads out of curiosity? Of course they do. Nothing unusual about that.

  ‘It’s odd that there’s no granary out here.’

  ‘There’s one further out, but no, it’s not attached. Someone wanted to live alone, until they didn’t. They hung out a sign and just vacated it.’ I open the door to the bedroom and notice the curtains blowing.

  ‘It’s freezing in here.’ I wander around the bed and notice small bits of glass on the rug and near the baseboard. The window is smashed, all the glass removed. I reel back from it, turn up all the lights.

  ‘Jesus, what happened?’Joel asks.

  ‘Someone must have tried to break in,’ I say, looking uneasily at everything in the room, as though everything had somehow become more tangible and weighted. I notice then the water on the floor near the dresser. Snow tracked in on someone’s boots. Victor’s boots. ‘Someone was here. Someone was inside.’ I announce loudly: ‘I need to check the place. I’ve got to make sure nobody’s inside.’

  Joel’s expression is frozen. He’s not protective – a bad trait in shrinks. Caseworkers too. He’ll need to be told what to do. I feel strangely certain Victor’s gone, was interrupted. Nothing seems out of order, except for the window.

  I reach under the mattress and quietly take the knife into my hand. Joel appears ready to bolt, but actually walks to the bedroom closet and quickly opens the door. Nothing. He doesn’t comment on the knife in my hand, but seems more confident knowing I have it. I’m glad I can bring him assurance. I wonder if somewhere I hadn’t been planning for this all along, just as Hannah had hoped. Or perhaps my desire to make Joel believe this attack was random and impersonal outweighs my own fear. In either case, he nods silently, ready to take this on. I wonder how I would handle this if he weren’t here. I feel suddenly immobilized by the thought of what might have prompted Victor’s return. The cold takes on a human presence in the room, and I need to get out of here.

  We go into the bathroom. We open all the closets, unlikely to accommodate him because of the shelving. I turn on all the lights as we go.

  After we check the last closet near the front door, I tell him I want to go back to the bedroom, to cover the window. I won’t stay here.

  ‘I guess this is the danger of living so far out of town,’ he offers. He tries to smile, but I can see he’s worn from the experience, the anxiety of girding himself for an intruder behind every closet door. I stop trying to shield him, think it’s best he accepts that this is just how it is with me. I don’t even wonder anymore what it’s like to live without these little broken pieces of your life constantly puncturing the surface.

  ‘I need to use something solid over the window, a piece of wood or something.’

  He wanders over to the door of the bedroom, looks inside. I look around. I don’t have anything to cover the hole. He walks further into the room and calls out, ‘There’s practically no glass in here.’

  He’s a detective now. Detective and shrink. I remember myself telling the cop, nothing so unusual. He was asking about my father, and I was already telling him about my life. I decide to remove a cabinet door from the kitchen, nail it over the window. Stuff the hole with blankets and nail the cabinet door over the window.

  He walks into the kitchen while I’m busy unscrewing the door. I find myself completely focused on the task at hand, ruthlessly efficient, as though this were a way of finally eradicating the problem, simple as laying out mousetraps. The absurdity isn’t lost on me; the cottage seems like it were shrinking behind me, tiny, uninhabitable. The space is alive: violated, unprotected, nothing to fight with but tiny, broken teeth.

  I can’t tell Victor about the baby. Can’t think about it. The blond boy left the hotel room. Maybe he thinks I’m dead. Or maybe he left to cop more dope. I lay on the bed, face down. I need help. I close my eyes and see the needle plunged into the wall, hanging there. The door doesn’t lock. I imagine someone walking in and plunging a knife between my shoulder blades. I lie there, not moving. I can’t stay here, though. Can’t stay in the room with it. What we created together – this life; I can’t tell him what I’ve done. I can’t tell him it wasn’t an accident.

  Joel takes the cabinet door from me, the hammer and a box of long nails. I grab a woolen blanket from the hall closet, holes in it. I fold it over, hand it to him. ‘Do you want to nail this up first? Maybe it will help insulate it a little.’ Something strange in my voice, as though I were taking care of a dying child. Not Joel, but my life here. I’ll have to renounce it, do what’s necessary to leave it.

  ‘Sure.’ He takes it from me. ‘You’re handling this very calmly,’ he says. I wonder what he means. I’m asking him to seal this off. Seal this off from me. I don’t want to come here again. I can’t explain this to him.

  ‘I just want to get out of here. I can’t stay here.’

  I pull the clothes I’d packed for Miami out of the bags and exchange them for heavier clothes. I throw some underwear, a sweater, a couple of pairs of pants into them. Take the bag with the cigar box and May’s blanket with me, put them by the front door. I gather a few toys for King as well. I hear Joel hammering in the bedroom. I try not to think of anything, just listen to the sound of the nails being hammered in.

  I go to the back door to let King in, and stand there calling to him. I note the large flashlight hanging by the door, but it’s well illuminated outside. Usually King responds right away, but I hear him crying in a way I’m unfamiliar with. I call out to Joel, simultaneously running out over the yard to find King. I see him there at the center of the pond, unable to keep his balance, slipping wounded on the ice.
Joel is carrying the flashlight when he emerges behind me, and the moment he shines it over the ice I can make out the circles of blood where King has tried to collect himself.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I whisper, moving instinctively out over the pond where he continues to fall, terrified and exhausted. I can see how badly his paw is bleeding. The fur around his paw is dense and gluey, the blood collecting in it like a brush. I try to gather him up, but he’s too heavy to carry. I slide backward on the ice, landing with the full, fighting weight of him on my chest. Joel arrives before I think to cry out, and the two of us attempt to hold him up.

  ‘It’s just his paw,’ he says, closing in on it with the light. ‘But it’s pretty badly cut. We’ll need an animal hospital.’ He makes the blood circles on the ice seem less grisly, and I recognize that they’re unreadable to him, neither a threat nor a prophecy.

  We arrange ourselves to hold King up and glide him lightly along the surface of the pond, human crutches. Joel hands me the flashlight and carries him over the yard.

  I notice, sweeping the flashlight under some of the trees, a garbage bag dropped beneath one. I quickly make my way over to it, noting it’s torn at the bottom, a large piece of glass emerging from it. I open it up and see a puzzle of glass inside. What was he trying to do? Was he just trying to give himself some time to go unnoticed? Maybe he’d been back more than once while I was gone. A few feet away I can make out the pattern of footsteps and car wheels, traces of his presence that I won’t have to erase. Winter will.

  The first two days are beautiful. An injection, a soft bed, only a few quiet interruptions, the nurse checking my pressure. There’s no pressure, I mumble. I hear the light padding of people on the ward going to the smoking room. Specters in white gowns. ‘Just rest,’ a young nurse says, putting her hand on my forehead. I see the plunger of a syringe in her pocket, look closely at her tender expression. ‘You must be an angel,’ I say. She swabs my arm, gently introduces the point.

  I’m able to replay the events that came before, put them together without too much recognition. I can pad around my own life, specter in a gown, watching it from a doorway I don’t cross.

  I walk into the manager’s office at my job. It was the first time in over a week. I didn’t call in sick, couldn’t explain. Didn’t have the time. I slip into work through the back door; go straight into his office.

  I’m trying not to nod, but I can tell I’m missing pieces of the dialogue. I don’t care. Two supervisors and the office manager sit at the table. I think: Now we’ve come full circle. But there’s no tape recorder on the table. There’s no interview; no questions need to be asked.

  ‘We’re going to have to let you go,’ one of them says.

  ‘I know,’ I answer. ‘I’m not doing too well, am I?’ I laugh but with embarrassment. I don’t think it’s funny. Nights have become days. I’m tired, dead tired of it all.

  ‘We think you need help.’ I look up. Another voice. Why are they all unrecognizable to me? ‘We won’t file your termination papers so you can use your health benefits to get yourself into a rehab program. St Mary’s has a very good reputation.’

  Of course I know this. I refer my clients there. I know what’s available.

  ‘We suggest you do this, Carrie. But we need your assurance.’

  The big boss adds, ‘You need to do this today. Otherwise we’ll just sign the termination papers now.’

  I agree to it. You don’t fight very hard when you’re high. Even the thought of getting clean doesn’t scare you. Everything is insulated, muffled. I’m told I can make my arrangements from my desk. I’m my own last case.

  The woman at St Mary’s wants the facts. ‘What drugs?’ she asks.

  ‘Heroin,’ I whisper.

  ‘Speak up,’ she says. Leslie watches me discreetly from her desk.

  ‘Heroin,’ I repeat. I can see the word run up my co-workers’ backs, a spidery knot that presses them forward over their paperwork. I can only imagine their relief; they’d been so stuffed with lies. ‘I’m just resting my eyes,’ I’d say. Family crisis, flu, cancer. I’m surprised I didn’t call in dead.

  The woman on the phone pronounces it heron. ‘You can come in this afternoon,’ she says. ‘Bring your insurance card, your ID.’

  I call Victor to tell him I’m in a program. I call from a phone at St Mary’s, waiting for someone to bring down my admission papers. Let them take the notes for a while.

  ‘You lost your job?’ he asks.

  Can’t tell him about the baby.

  ‘I can get another job. I just have to get clean.’ I try to make it sound like it’s not for me, but for us. I’ve killed us.

  ‘Where the hell were you the last four nights?’

  ‘I’ve been here. They wouldn’t let me call,’ I lie. I’m thinking: Is the blond boy dead yet? Did his heart give out? He’s a baby or an angel, something you can’t protect.

  I can tell he’s unsure whether or not to believe me, but he goes along with it, finally saying, ‘I’m going to quit too. I’m going to be a really good father to our kid, you watch.’ And then I hear what I’ve never heard from him, his crying. It makes me sick, physically sick to hear him. There’s no suspicion in his tears, just some unfounded hope that the baby will change him, has already changed me. I tell him I have to go, hang up the phone and stare at it as though I were waiting for a dealer to call.

  By the third day I’m off all their medications. They rouse me from sleep. ‘It’s time for breakfast,’ a new nurse says. ‘You have to eat with the others. The schedule is posted in the hall.’

  I start to ready myself, approaching the mirror with some fear; I’d convinced myself I could go on not looking, and no one else would look either. Breakfast could be judgment, though. Frowned on by the circus of the sick. Another nurse leans her head in the room. ‘It’s time. You’ve got to be out of your room now.’

  All of us wear our gowns, except the outpatients. They seem advanced, a higher form of life, full of energy and an intimidating mirth. They perform a number of tasks. One monitors the coffee; one organizes chairs, turning them from the television set to the breakfast tables; one helps an old lady sit down beside me. Her gown is wide open at the back, and her crepe-like skin is mottled and scarred. They should have a hall of fame for the really old ones. How do they wake up each day under the crippling weight of impossible needs, impossible odds?

  I’m not hungry, can’t eat under these lights. I ask a nurse where the phone is. She casts a withering look at me. ‘There are no phone calls for the first week,’ she says. This is the part of the job she likes. ‘This is your time to concentrate on you.’ The only comfort I have is knowing that the lie I told Victor – that I couldn’t make calls – has its basis in truth.

  Over the next days, I watch the others settle into their incarceration, grateful for food and quiet. Their faces bloom; the contours fill out in front of me. Even the old lady’s lines fill out. She eats from my tray. I remain unshakably sullen, adjusting the slice of orange peel in my mouth, interested in nothing else on my tray. Thoughts of Victor – of returning to him – ruin whatever semblance of order the place attempts to instill in our disordered lives. There are meetings and education seminars; everything is mandatory. Even our attitudes should be open and sunny. My counselor frowns over the desk.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re running back to, Carrie,’ he says exasperatedly. ‘You need to cut your ties. If you go back to your old associations you’ll go right back to using. I guarantee it.’

  I know these things. I say these things to my clients. Does it sound this hollow?

  I’m nursing this alien, larval sense of self. It won’t come out under the scrutiny of these counselors. It has no trust and no defenses. It’s full of guilt for wanting to exist at all. It isn’t sure it wants to exist, will probably never want to exist. I sit in a chair, watching others take shape.

  After a week, I walk to the phone on the first floor. ‘Get me out of here,’ I say. ‘I
’ll wait downstairs.’

  Joel removes a piece of glass from King’s paw and places it on the living room table. The wound is small, but it gushes disproportionately. ‘It must be an artery,’ he says. He calls the twenty-four-hour veterinary hospital while I tie a kitchen towel around the cut. We can bring him right in. I’ll have to ride with King, holding him as best I can on my lap. He seems to panic less when I hold him, especially now that the wound is tied off with cloth.

  Joel helps me settle King onto the blanket I’ve used to cover the backseat; I slide in beside the dog, pulling most of his body onto my lap. I ask Joel to take my suitcases, the things I’ve set beside the door, and put them in the trunk. We pull out of the drive, leaving the house with all the lights on, a sentinel with a shattered eye.

  ‘How is he?’Joel asks over his shoulder.

  ‘Quieted down,’ I say, stroking him and thinking: He’s quiet for me. I look out the window when I hear what sounds like stones on the roof of the car. Hail. Its battering becomes a regular rhythm on the roof and windshield. I look at the glowing meters on Joel’s dashboard, the blood on the sleeve of his shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. Then, with an intensity that seems inappropriate, embarrassing even, I’m crying, gasping for breath, my nose bubbling with clear snot. The hammering doesn’t let up; it’s like tiny fists beating at the car. I know why Victor’s come and what he found no trace of. The little fists pound away at us.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Joel answers. ‘I’m just glad I’m here to help.’

  I still have the hospital ID bracelet on my wrist when Victor and Bobby pick me up. They make me sit in the backseat. Bobby hands me an army knife to cut myself free. I throw the bracelet out the window.

  I figure Victor’s brought Bobby along because he has drugs. I’m right about that, but there’s more in their alliance. Before they pull the drugs from the glove compartment, Victor advises me they can take me back to the hospital, that I should think about this.