“I’m so sorry.” I’m so stupid! Why did I think I could trust her.
“Oh, you’re getting the Shelby back. Silas’ cousin-in-law will see to that.”
“How? Technically, it is her car. She can do whatever she wants with it.” Even ride around in it with a degenerate, unfeeling swine.
“Technically, it’s Johnny Allman’s car.”
“Johnny Allman? The guy from Bootleg. The one you went to see in concert.” How could he possibly be tied to my mother’s—my father’s—Shelby?
“They went in together on the car when they were bandmates. Johnny’s name is on the title. I saw it in the glove box the day I was working on it.” Ace shrugs. “Maybe he was the only one of age when they bought it.”
“That makes it stolen? People drive other people’s vehicles all the time. It’s hardly illegal, right. I mean, if Johnny Allman was concerned about his car, he would’ve come back for it long before now.”
“Johnny will vouch for it.”
“Why? You know him that well?”
“He’s your…ah. How do I say this.”
“He’s my what. Godfather? Uncle?” From the bootleg album insert, he and my father could pass as brothers. “But if I had an uncle, wouldn’t I know by now.” Enisi would’ve told me. Then again, I just became acquainted with her a month ago.
“He’s not your uncle or your godfather.” Ace groans and growls, the solitary moon capturing his gaze. And why did he emphasize god? “He’ll vouch for it, okay. And he’ll sign the title over to you. You’re getting the Shelby back. And if anyone in this godforsaken county is lucky, Billy Don will go to jail.”
Again with god. Finally! After years of defending this place, convincing himself and anyone who would listen that Poke County’s just as good as any other place, Appalachia’s proudest son is seeing her for what she is: godforsaken.
“Johnny will sign the title over to me? And what about my mother?” Will she be an accomplice? Incarcerated like Grandpa!
“What about your mother. She should be so concerned about you! Bringing that bottom feeder around here. I don’t care what happens to either of them, so long as Billy Don is nowhere near you.” His fists bind with the thought, knuckles cracking beneath the pressure.
A shiver creeps up my spine, every hair on the back of my neck at attention. How is Destiny supposed to carry and love a child conceived through what I am pretty sure was rape. With Grandpa and Enisi gone, what’s to stop my mother from bringing Billy Don around, bringing anyone around.
I can’t stay here. I have to get out of here. Even if it takes my college stash to do it.
Shelby bolts from the step and into the house.
Faster than I can catch up to her, “No, no, no!” I hear her cry.
Following her voice through the kitchen or the living room—hard to tell with a sink and a couch in such a cramped space—it calls me to her bedroom. It’s even smaller. And it’s ransacked.
Dresser drawers pulled out, disheveled clothes spill over the sides. The mattress and bedding are catawampus atop the box spring. An Old Kentucky smoking tobacco tin and a shoe box lie open and empty among scattered books in the middle of the floor.
Her shins aligned with the single bed, like a forklift she shoves her forearms between the mattress and the box spring, flipping the mattress up against the wall. Scanning the plane of the box spring, is there supposed to be something there other than cloth covering the frame?
“It’s gone,” she whispers before darting to the dresser.
“What’s gone?”
Her hands grasp an old-school tube sock with green rings around the top. Pulling it up her arm the way she would her leg, she grabs the seam and turns it inside out.
“Gone,” her voice starts to rise. Dropping to her knees, she one by one inspects, then slings the tobacco tin, the shoe box, and book after book. “Gone. Gone. Gone!”
“What is gone?” I drop to my knees in front of her.
“My college stash. My savings.” Her bottom lip quivers. “Tip money that I schlepped greasy Hot Browns for. That I ran to and from work to earn. That I mopped and wiped and washed tables and counters and toilets for!”
A mattress, a tin, a shoe box, and books—that’s her bank? That greasy motherfucker took her tip money. “How much?” Fifty bucks? Five hundred bucks?
“Five…thousand…dollars.” She nearly convulses with each word.
Five thousand dollars! Who keeps that much money lying around the house!
From her knees to her stomach, like a caterpillar her muscles move in an undulating wave until she wedges herself beneath the bed, pulling from it a tennis ball. Her finger puncturing through a hidden cut in the neon yellow hide, she hooks a wad of bills from its guts.
“Count,” she gasps, sliding the stash in my direction.
From caterpillar to lizard, she crawls along the floor until she hits her mark. A loose floorboard, she pries it up and pulls a Folgers coffee can from somewhere below, adding its folded green contents to my pile.
Then like a monkey, she climbs and slinks about the raided room—from the battery compartment of a CD player to the pull-down hinge of a smoke detector, from the door of a cuckoo clock to the middle of a pull-apart curtain rod—dumping wads of ones wrapped around larger bills onto my pile. Wads of bills that still reek of turkey and bacon.
“Count,” she says again, breathless, pushing half of the bills in my direction and counting half of the pile herself.
Time has never been so agonizing. It’s like an accident you see coming. Brain, body, nerves heightened and functioning at peak capacity, the internal race to correct the situation makes everything appear to be moving in slow motion. Until you’re hit with the force that you can’t buy enough time to correct the situation. Only then does it feel like the blink of an eye.
“Fifteen hundred,” I say.
“Fifteen hundred,” she says. “Count again!”
More time torments. In slow motion, our thumbs and forefingers massage each bill, taking care that they don’t stick. Until once again we are met with the abrupt force—the fact.
“Fifteen hundred,” I repeat, willing her total to increase.
She shakes her head. Still the same.
“Count again?”
“I know how to count. You know how to count. Three thousand isn’t ever going to add up to five thousand.” Her eyes aimlessly search the room, as lost in it as I am.
“Do you have any other hiding places. Somewhere you forgot?”
“Money, money, money. It’s a plague,” Shelby begins through a fixed stare, much like a stage actress giving a monologue. “There is never enough of it. College won’t take me without it. Are the poor just screwed for life? Then there is my mother.” If her bedroom were a stage, this is where the lights would drop. “She doesn’t inconvenience herself with money. Because, apparently, everybody else’s belongs to her.”
The forklift returns. Shelby’s arms scooping and slinging the bills at the frayed gray wall of her room. A game of $3000 Pickup in any other circumstance would be a lot more fun than cards.
“Mr. Jackson wouldn’t take twenty dollars of his own daughter’s money. I wish I could say the same about my mother.” Her trembling lips suck in tears that must taste like a bad marriage between madness and sadness.
“The police will recover it. When they find them in the Shelby.” If Maisy and that motherfucker haven’t blown it all.
“Maybe.” She thrusts her fists into the floorboard, pushing herself upright. “But it won’t erase the fact that she took it from me in the first place.”
“Shelby, control it,” I warn, recognizing the wild look in her eyes, as cuckoo as that damn clock.
“Sure,” she says, plucking from the top of the dresser a framed picture of her mother, her father, and her. In the picture, she can’t be much older than six. Holding an oversized stuffed animal, maybe the kind you win from a booth at the fair, her smiling parents hold her.
She lobs the frame up into the air. On its way down, she spikes it like a volleyball. It lands on a rumpled sweatshirt, refusing to crack. This sets off her clock. Her foot, like the door the cuckoo hides behind, juts forward, pinning the frame against the bottom dresser drawer, with glass finally splintering.
Then with both arms she sweeps toward the wall at max velocity anything that remains atop the dresser. That’s not enough. The dresser must go too. A regular Leaning Tower of Pisa, it falters at its wobbly joints under the pressure of her shoving and shaking.
A wreck waiting to happen, I should stop her, although I wouldn’t want to be stopped. Let her get it out of her system. Be here for her when there’s nothing left to break.
As if the dresser is a football sled, she gets low and uses her shoulder to send it up and over. The clack of wood hitting wood stuns me momentarily. Amazingly the decrepit dresser doesn’t splinter the way the picture frame did.
What I fail to notice and react to in time is her overshooting the push, tripping on the empty shoe box and scattered books on the way down to the floor.
The dresser unable to give anymore, her shoulder gives instead.
Fuck! I should’ve stopped her.
Pain worse than my mother stealing from me surges through my shoulder. Shirt clinging to the abrupt sweat beading on the skin beneath, nothing has ever burned so sharply. I think I’m gonna pass out. In Ace’s Jeep, I do.
On an ER gurney in the hospital where Wren works, I come to and panic.
“No. You can’t put that in my arm.” I clutch it to my abdomen and away from the nurse who preps a needle. “I don’t want any drugs!” What if I like it the way my mother does.
“Can’t they just pop it back into place?” Ace asks what I am thinking. That’s what they do in the books I’ve read. “That’s what they do at the fights,” he says to Wren who pushes her way through the curtain of the crowded bay.
“Just give me a minute with her,” Wren takes over, imploring of the nurses and technicians who move swiftly about, preparing for the acute treatment the doctor ordered. They agree, fleeing the room as quickly as they stormed in.
“Popping shoulders back into place is as antiquated as fighting, son. It could damage her nerves, muscles, or blood vessels. I believe those are vital to any runner.” Wren tries to reason, but it is only a stark reminder of what I have done.
The state meet next weekend—how will I place, let alone compete with this shoulder.
“Shelby, I know you’re scared. It’s completely understandable,” Wren acknowledges my mother’s history with addiction. “There is a time and place for everything. You are in the right place. And this is the appropriate time for medication.”
Funny how it’s medication—pointedly not a drug—when it suits them. “But this is the place where my mother’s addiction began. You said so yourself. That night in the NICU.”
“Yes, that was her journey. It doesn’t have to be yours. You are aware. Ace is here. I am here. I am happy to advocate for you. This is your treatment. You should have a say in it. They can do the traction without medication if you can tolerate it.” She doubts that I can.
I doubt that I can. The slightest touch, the slightest movement—the thought of either makes me feel like I could pass out again.
“What will they give me? What will it do to me?” Anxiety—free of touch or movement—sends another wave of stabbing pain through my shoulder with the labor of breathing.
“It will be a cocktail of sorts…pain-relieving, muscle-relaxing, and sedating.”
“Three drugs?” I start to cry. Drugs are all around me—at home, with peers, throughout the hollow. Yet I have avoided taking even one. Now I am supposed to consent to three at one time.
“Just one injection. The entire process will take about as long as donating blood,” Wren compares it to something I can grasp. “One poke in the arm…that’s all you’ll feel. Only nothing comes out and just a little goes in. It wouldn’t even fill up a shot glass. It’ll take the edge off, allowing traction to reduce the dislocation. They—we—will be with you the entire time, even monitoring you until the medication wears off.”
“And once it wears off, it’s gone…from my body and my brain?” My brain—I cry some more. I read that addiction starts in the brain. Please don’t let me have my mother’s brain.
“Yes, within four to six hours the effects will be gone,” Wren assures. “No more drugs. We can be very clear in telling them that you do not want to be offered narcotics for pain upon discharge. There will be pain for a bit, maybe weeks, while you’re healing. But you can manage that with ice and over-the-counter pain relievers, nothing that has a high risk for dependence.”
“Stay with me,” I whisper, gripping Ace’s hand already in mine.
He squeezes it, reassuringly, then glances at Wren. “You’re sure about this?”
“It would be unbearable without it.”
I don’t feel the poke, preoccupied with feeling what comes after. It’s cold, the cocktail entering my vein. It crawls up my arm. Not the way a spider would, but inside the way liquid is sucked up a straw—slow and siphoning.
Until my vein delivers it to my heart. Quick, jolting, stunning—like a punch, I swear my heart feels the hit. Rhythmless for a few beats, it compensates with a gallop, finally full of oxygenated blood from its gas exchange with my lungs.
I have never been more aware of my invisible circulatory system. Arteries carrying that medicated blood away from my heart and to my tissues, organs, limbs, and brain—the effects of it shroud me. Until I feel as intangible as my circulatory system.
I am neither happy nor sad, sensible nor mad, hot nor cold. Am I even here? People move and talk around me. It is all a flash. No thought is constant or complete. They drift through me, beyond me maybe, hazy and passive.
The only thing I feel is nothing.
Facedown on the gurney with no recollection of how I got here, my arm hangs to the floor at a perpendicular angle with two bags of IV fluids hanging from my wrist. “Traction,” they call it. The weight is supposed to relax the muscle spasms caused by the dislocation, allowing the ball to ease back into the socket.
This is what it feels like to be on drugs. The thought moves heavily through my anesthetized mind.
“You stayed,” I hear a voice like my own say to Ace.
He sits folded over in a chair, face level with mine and mere inches away.
My eyes fall closed. He’s gone.
“Your breath is awful,” I hear that same voice—honest and ungracious, too out of it to be embarrassed—say to a nurse, who had to have eaten an onion for dinner, when she kneels beside me to assess my pain.
What pain?
“You’re such a good mom.” There it is again. That voice releases through lips that drool and eyes that flow tears as uninhibited as the statement, when Wren runs her hand across my forehead and coaxes my eyes open, assessing my consciousness.
I try—I really do—to keep my eyes open, to look at her, to give her something. But the shutters close, taking me with them into the desensitized abyss.
“Just leave me alone,” the ungracious brat returns when the other nurse comes to release my wrist of the hanging IV bags.
In the next murky breath, when Ace offers to help, that voice flip-flops emotion again. “I love you.”
Apparently I feel more than nothing.
Mom and I stand in the hallway just outside Shelby’s bay. The curtain parted, I keep her in sight. If she wakes, I want to be the first person she sees. I want her to know that she can depend on me. I stayed.
“I hate to leave before she wakes up.” Mom eyes her watch. “But they’ve covered for me in NICU for two hours already, and I know they’re swamped.”
“I got it from here.”
“Traction went well. Her vitals look great. She needs the rest. And you do too, bub.” She puts her hand over my heart and pats it.
I grasp her hand, holding it there. “Thank you.�
� I don’t know what we would’ve done without her. What Shelby would’ve done without her guidance. Probably signed herself out, dislocated shoulder and all, and made me take her to Enisi’s for voodoo healing.
“I wish there would’ve been a different way.” A flash of doubt emerges in Mom’s pale blue eyes, reliving Shelby’s distress with the medications—drugs. “But it’s okay. She is going to be okay. They were used appropriately. They got the job done. They’ll soon be out of her system.”
Is she convincing me or herself?
“Stay with her. Rest with her. The ER’s swamped too. They’ll probably discharge her soon. No driving back to Poke County. You stay at our place tonight, tomorrow, for as long as you need to.”
“It’s not that far. We’ll be fine.” She knows I’m no fan of staying over at her—van den Berg’s—high-rise. Luxurious and convenient? More like caged and uncomfortable. It happens once a year at Christmas. She knows this.
“It’s not for you. It’s for Shelby.” Her brows upraise, the left one disappearing beneath curls and waves that have naturally parted there from the first memory I have of her. “Once the medication wears off, her shoulder is gonna be super sensitive. An hour and a half in your Jeep is only going to make it insufferable.”
Well played, Mom.
“Besides, Steph isn’t home.” She half smiles. Half knowing this will increase my comfort and half wishing I could find a way to be at ease around him.
But I’m already half irritated with the pet name. “Steph” almost makes him sound relatable. “Stephan.” His name is Stef-hahn, the “n” nearly and annoyingly silent.
“He’s away at a conference.” She pulls from her scrubs pocket a silver Saint Agatha key ring. The patron saint of nurses, it was last year’s stocking stuffer from me. “Take the Subaru. It rides easier than the Jeep, and it has its own space at the apartment garage. I can trust you, alone, overnight, riiight.” She holds my hands, the key ring between them, her eyes holding mine for a promise.
“Yeees, Mom,” I answer, more irritation surfacing.
Just Shelby Page 18
