by Dan Chaon
The first time she had tried to kill herself, she had intuited that there was no escape. She had seen, with sudden clarity, that her life was a series of boxes, a maze that she would run and run through and never find an exit, and she had thought, almost peacefully, I don’t want it. I don’t want my life.
The first time she had tried to kill herself she was twenty-two years old. She had been living with Gary for over a year, and Jonah was eleven months, asleep in his crib. She sat in the bathroom, seeing things very clearly. She saw the long, impossible tangle of her life spread out before her, the stretch of meaningless decades that led to her death, however old she would be, and she rejected it. The edges of her life became clear to her. She saw that it was a tunnel she would have to walk through. There were no crossroads, no turns she could make that would change things, and she sat there on the toilet, naked, writing carefully, in very small, beautiful letters, in a notebook, the water for her bath running very hot. She wrote a note for Gary, apologizing, and then another note for Jonah, telling him that she loved him, that she would always love him, etcetera. It was very poetic, and she cried for a while, silently, so Gary wouldn’t hear her. He was watching TV, dozing in his reclining chair, as she pressed the razor blade to her wrist. She could see the blue veins, embedded, marbled under the surface of her skin, but they seemed very far down. She pressed the razor and it cut a little, drawing blood, and then she pressed harder. Blood began to trickle down her palm, and she submerged her arm in the warm water. That was okay, but then to cut the other wrist was harder. Her wounded hand felt weak when she raised it out of the water, and blood trickled down her fingers, spattering the floor. She sawed feebly at her other wrist, and though she broke the skin she didn’t seem to be capable of cutting through to the vein. Blood ran down her left hand, eddying through the water of the bath, smearing her palms and forearms and the razor itself. She was weeping distractedly, with frustration.
She couldn’t do it. She remembers Gary startling up out of his easy chair, his gaping face as she’d stumbled out of the bathroom door into the hallway, naked, her hands raised above her head, blood running down her biceps and into her underarm. Blood everywhere. “Help me,” she’d gasped, in her weakness. “I don’t want to. I changed my mind.” It could have been almost comic, she thought. The stupefied look on his face, her own ridiculous, childish cowardice. And then there had been the ambulance, the hospital.
——
There is so much to regret in this. In this memory, in this failure. She has tried very hard not to think of it, but the truth is that the wish to be dead hasn’t left her, it has only become more distant and unattainable. She feels it move again, very slow, inside her, as she sits there in the kitchen with Jonah and his swollen face. She lifts her cigarette from the ashtray and it trembles as she tries to put it to her mouth, as if it is afraid of her.
And then, from the living room, a woman’s voice speaks. “There are a lot of trees out there,” the woman says, her voice uninflected, matter-of-fact. Her mother’s voice, she thinks.
It is not the first time she has imagined hearing her mother’s voice, but it has never been so clear, so real. She actually gets up and goes to the edge of the living room, half expecting to see, what? A ghost?
But there is nothing. Just the sad living room, with its sofa facing away from the window, toward the television. The lamp. The silent television itself. The end table piled with library books she hasn’t been able to read—the words reconfiguring themselves into gibberish after a few paragraphs. No one is there, though she can feel something watching, listening.
She knows she has heard her mother’s voice.
Her mother had been a young woman when she died, Nora realized now. Only thirty-six—a car accident, they said. But she comprehends her mother’s message clearly. Out on the edge of the sandhills there were very few trees, but somehow her mother had managed to send a car directly into one, going perhaps seventy or eighty miles an hour. Her father said that she’d lost control of the car. Maybe she’d gotten distracted, or swerved to miss a dog. But Nora understands what her mother’s message means. What she has always known in her heart.
There are a lot of trees out there, her mother had said, encouragingly.
——
This is perhaps the last thing she remembers clearly about her days in Chicago. That morning after she’d hit Jonah, that morning when her mother spoke to her. Years later, she will try to piece together what had happened to her—the entire month of August 1974 will have vanished, she won’t know where. Once, she will even recklessly try to call Gary Gray, to ask him about it. What happened? But by that time, Gary will no longer be living in Chicago, and when she dials their old number an elderly woman will answer, who has never heard of Gary.
All that will be left to her will be the small fragments of images—a nest of wet, dappled lights, honking at her like cars; small objects—silverware, pencils, cigarettes—that leap away from her like tiny animals when she tries to touch them; that heavy shape, something inanimate like a desk or a couch, moving slowly in the dark house, the long, wet, dragging sound it made.
She will wake in a hospital in South Dakota, in Yankton. The South Dakota Human Services Center, it is called now, though she knew from childhood what it meant when people said someone got “shipped off to Yankton.” The old Victorian building had once been known as the Dakota Hospital for the Insane, and that will be where she will reappear, as if materializing out of a mist. She will learn that this place is where her father had put her, when Gary Gray had given up on her and called him.
At last, on a day in late November, he will come to fetch her. To take her “home,” back to the house she’d left years ago. She will forever after remember him standing there, his pale blue eyes deep with sorrow, holding Jonah by the hand.
“Come stay at home for a while, babygirl,” he says softly, and she knows, looking at the two of them, her father and her child, that she will never get away. She will never, ever leave Little Bow again.
20
October 20, 1996
Here is the drug education class, week six: a junior high classroom, ten people, adults, slumped uncomfortably into desks that feel too small, the blackboard still chalked with Friday’s seventh-grade social studies homework assignment. It’s nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. Outdoors is a gray half-light that could be dawn or dusk, punctuated by a distracting wind that sends leaves and bits of paper into whirlwinds in the brick corners of the buildings, a dull wheeze of debris.
They sit as far apart from one another as possible. Eight men, two women, spread out in the room like dots on a map, with no roads in between. Troy bends his head, tracing his fingers along the words that some bored teenager had carved into the worn wood of the desktop—Mr. Strunk Eats Own Bugers—and it is followed by a series of hashmarks, apparently counting each time this act was witnessed. In the front of the room a plump man in a polo shirt and pleated slacks is talking about how he nearly lost his life due to cocaine addiction. He is wearing loafers with little tassels on them, and no socks. Troy runs his fingernail along the furrows of letters until his cuticles ache.
At least there is no one here he knows. That would be terrible—to have to sit here with one of his former customers, thinking that this was someone he had aided and abetted down their trail of addiction, someone he had wronged. But this ragged group isn’t the kind of client pool that he drew from—they are much worse off than anyone he ever dealt with, and he is glad that he can slip into anonymity while he sits here. Just another sad victim of a disease, as they learn over and over. Drug addiction is a disease. An illness, a mental illness, that they are battling together.
He knows what they are talking about, of course. He has seen movies that portray the pain of withdrawal—heroin junkies strapped to beds and howling, alcoholics twitching with delirium seizures, speed freaks skeletal and soaked in their own sweat. He remembers how bad Bruce and Michelle had gotten, in those last years befo
re they were arrested—dilated eyes, restless pacing, sudden outbursts of irritation, the expensive stereo equipment and coin collector morsels bought on a whim and then sold, abruptly. He remembers the hard time Carla had when she was pregnant with Loomis, how she had given up everything—all but the occasional beers or joint—and how quickly, after Loomis was born, she’d gone back to partying. It was as if those nine months of semi-sobriety had frightened her, as if she’d realized with a shock that she’d almost lost her true love. She returned to drinking and smoking pot, to weekend indulgence in crank or cocaine, with a ferocity that had at first excited him in its recklessness. She was so certain they could happily raise a child and still have a “good time,” and Loomis himself had been so easy and undemanding—passing from person to person at a party, sleeping peacefully through loud music and laughter, as subdued as they were on hungover mornings—that at first he hadn’t worried. She was so much fun, so sexy, that it wasn’t until much later that he realized how much further into things she was than he. It wasn’t until the very end that he found out that she was now more than occasionally smoking crack, that she was sleeping with some guy, an acquaintance of theirs, who ran a meth lab up in Barrytown.
He thinks of this again, as the plump former cokehead pauses, with a hitch in his voice. “I destroyed my life,” the cokehead says, and Troy frowns. He had discovered, in those last years with Carla, that he didn’t really have the stamina for addiction, and he is aware now, sitting here in the drug education class, that he has never personally been desperate for a fix in the way these people must be. It makes him feel like a fraud to be among them. When the speaker talks about “drug pushers,” about “enablers,” he lowers his head, blushing.
His is a different sort of addiction. Despite his self-justifications, despite the fact that his customers always seemed like normal people, he can’t help but think that he also played on their vulnerabilities. He hadn’t liked getting high half as much as he’d liked helping people to get high; he liked watching other people get out of control, and he’d liked this about Carla especially—he remembers betting people that she could drink them under the table, he remembers helping her score a hit of this or that drug that she wanted to try, he remembers those brief moments when an uncertainty would darken her expression and he would smile and shrug. Why not? Go for it. And he feels again that he deserves every bad thing that has happened to him.
Standing in the parking lot of the school, as they all drift to their cars after class, this thought lingers with him. Drug Pusher, he thinks, as he settles into the seat of his drug-money Corvette. He tries to reassure himself—he never hurt anyone, he thinks, but now a small wedge of doubt filters in, and he prods it. In the distance, beyond the bleachers of the football field, a motorcycle is buzzing along the street, and he wonders if this might be Ray, riding along on Troy’s old motorcycle. “You might as well take it,” Troy had told him, after he was arrested. “Get some use out of it. I won’t be doing any biking for a while.” He listens to the toothy, metallic buzz disappearing into the windy corridor of house-lined blocks, and then he puts his key into the ignition.
The last time he’d talked to Ray had been in early September. Ray had come by the house, fairly stoned, and he’d just let himself in, as he was used to doing. Troy was sitting in the living room, playing Tetris on an old Nintendo system that he’d plugged into the TV, when he’d heard Ray’s voice from the darkened kitchen. “Troy!”—whispering loudly—“Hey, man! It’s me!” And Troy came into the kitchen to find Ray bent over the sink, drinking water from the faucet.
“What are you doing?” Troy said, and Ray lifted his head from the stream of the tap.
“I’m thirsty,” Ray said. He stood up, wobbling a little, leaning against the counter for balance, and his eyes crinkled into a cheerful, half-moon squint. “Hey,” he said, affectionately.
“Hey,” Troy said, and he cleared his throat, watching as Ray fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out a joint.
“Don’t light that,” Troy said.
Ray hesitated, as if Troy were joking. Then he seemed to understand. “Oh shit!” he grinned. “I almost forgot. I’m like in the police zone here.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “Do they have, like, cameras in here?”
“No,” Troy said, and didn’t smile. He folded his arms over his chest. No one would know Ray was here, probably—Ray wasn’t under surveillance—but it still made him nervous. “So,” he said, a bit stiffly. “What’s up?”
“Aw, man,” Ray said. “I just came by to visit, that’s all. You look like shit.” Troy was standing there in his boxer shorts, and Ray took a moment to appraise him, his eyes tracing grimly down as if to confirm his judgment, and at last resting on the parole anklet. He grimaced, as if looking at a deformity. “Oh, man,” he said, softly. “This is horrible. They’ve got a machine attached to you, dude.”
“Yeah,” Troy said. “I know.”
“Oh, man,” Ray said. “Jesus Christ,” and when he lifted his head his eyes had grown heavy and moist. “Troy,” he said. “Can I give you a hug?”
Troy shrugged, then stood there, a bit rigid, as Ray wrapped his lanky, bench-pressed arms around his shoulders, squeezing tight. “I know I shouldn’t be here,” Ray said. “But I miss you. I miss you a lot, man.
“You’ve been on my mind a lot lately, you know?” Ray said. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. You, like, raised me. After Dad went to jail and Mom married Merit, there wasn’t anyone in the world I could count on except you.” He stepped back, putting his fingertips to his eyes, rubbing them hard. “Jesus,” he said. “This sucks! I can’t believe it. I mean, you’re like my best friend, man, and now . . . I mean, it’s going to be years before we can party together again.” And then he stood there for a moment, regaining himself. “I hate this government,” he said. “This is like Nazi Germany. That they can put . . . some kind of dog collar on a human being!”
They stared at each other for a moment, and finally, Troy shrugged, uncertainly.
“It’s not that bad,” he said, at last. “It’s not a big deal.”
Ray looked at him doubtfully and shook his head, backing against the edge of the sink. His face pinched earnestly, and Troy found himself thinking of Ray as a child—Ray, the toddler he’d once baby-sat for, all those years ago, in Bruce and Michelle’s trailer. He thought of that hopeful, yearning, worshipful gaze as Troy had read him a story. Goodnight, Moon.
“Look,” Troy said. “It’s not the end of the world. Maybe it’s time for me to . . . I don’t know. Move in a different direction.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ray said. He hung his head for a time, in the way people do when they come to the end of a prayer, or a confession.
“I had another reason for coming here,” he said. He lifted his eyes to Troy’s face, and then carefully drew out a roll of paper money from his pocket. “I’ve been making a lot,” he said. “I know that you think that the stripping stuff is ridiculous, but I’ve been making a lot of money. And . . .”
He paused for a moment, trying to find a man-to-man expression. “Actually, I actually have to tell you. I guess you probably figured that I took the money and . . . the rest of the shit . . . when the cops showed up. Me and Mike Hawk. We, like, jumped the fence, and ran out into the hills. Jesus! I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my entire life. And then, you know, we had all these great drugs . . .”
“Let’s not talk about that,” Troy said, and his heart sank suddenly in a flutter of paranoia, as if the monitor on his anklet might be recording something. “Let’s just drop the subject.”
“Okay,” Ray said, but he didn’t seem to really understand. “Troy—man!” he said. “I’m not trying to fuck with you, but you have no idea how good this stuff is. It’s amazing. I mean, I have to confess to you that I’ve just been selling it a little at a time, and kind of mixing it with some of the cheaper stuff that I can get from the connections that I have—and I’m being tota
lly careful! But what I wanted to say was that I want to cut you in on it, because you know, it’s really yours.”
Troy didn’t say anything for a long time. It was so obviously stupid that it seemed like a cruel joke, but Ray seemed unaware. He just stood there, cautiously offering Troy a wad of folded-over bills, and Troy had to resist the urge to slap the money out of Ray’s hands. He imagined some melodramatic gesture, in a moment of adrenaline—snatching the money from Ray’s hand and burning it, or stuffing it down the garbage disposal. But instead the two of them merely stood there facing each other.
“Ray,” Troy said at last, “are you out of your mind? I’m on parole, man. I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to keep my kid. And you want to give me a down payment on some weed that you stole from me?”
“I didn’t steal it!” Ray exclaimed. “I was doing you a favor! I mean, that’s what I meant to do!”
“Well,” Troy said, his voice rising sharply. “Do me another favor, and don’t try to give me drug money. What are you thinking? Do you want us both to go to prison?” He stood there, red in the face, his teeth set, his muscles tightening. “Are you some kind of idiot?” he said.
Ray stared at him, wide-eyed, and then, abruptly, without warning, tears began leaking down his face. He closed one hand over the wad of money, and put the palm of the other over his face.
“I’m sorry,” Ray said, and Troy felt himself shrinking, his arms folded, his hands tightening on the flesh of his upper arms. He was the one who should be sorry. You, like, raised me, Troy thought, flinching under the weight of Ray’s sad eyes. They both stood there, looking at the floor. “I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I’m really sorry.”
