“Wait here.” He got out of the car and closed the door behind him.
I felt anxiety rise in my gut. This was not the place for a white kid from Wyoming. “No, Alex, I’m not—I’m not staying here. It’s not—it’s not safe.”
“Don’t be a pussy. If anyone bugs you, tell ’em you’re waiting for me. They know me here. Don’t get out, just hang. I’ll be right back.”
“What are you going to do?”
He shot me a disgusted look through the open window. “What the fuck you think I’m doing? Having tea with the queen? Buying drugs, you hick.” He smacked the door with his palm. “Just chill, bro. You’ll be fine.”
And so I sat, in a beat up old Monte Carlo, pot smoke curling up around me from the smoldering roach in the ashtray, on a side street in Detroit at 1:30 in the morning. The streetlights either didn’t work or flickered, lending an eerie stop-motion effect to the night. A red two-door classic Buick, long as a battleship and throbbing with bass, rolled past me. The windows were down, two shadowed faces peering at me with curious eyes. They slowed as they passed me, not even two feet away. My heart thudded in my chest, my pulse pounding and my stomach flopping. My eyes met those of the driver, and I held his gaze steadily. I didn’t nod and I didn’t look away. After an eternity, he lifted his chin at me and gunned the engine, vanishing around the corner.
I heard a gunshot somewhere in the distance. Sirens. Laughter from the house where Alex was buying drugs. Hard drugs, I realized. This was not the kind of house one went to with the intent of buying a bag of weed.
Another car passed, and this one didn’t stop or slow down, and they didn’t look at me. Fifteen minutes passed, and they felt like an hour. Eventually Alex came out, sidling slowly, a lazy grin on his face. He slid into the driver’s seat, fumbling at the keys, and then leaned his head back.
“You drive,” he said. “I’m blazed.”
“All right. Not sure where I’m going, though.” I got out and circled around while Alex slid over.
“No problem. I know where we are. I’m just too strung out to drive.”
“What kind of drugs?” The question slipped out. I couldn’t help it, and I was glad it had emerged.
“Does it matter? I ain’t offerin’ you any, that’s for fucking sure. You’re too nice for this shit.”
“It matters. What are you on?”
He snorted. “Dude, what planet you live on? What kind of drugs do you think I would buy from house like that, in that neighborhood? Don’t you ever watch Cops?”
“Crack?”
“Yes…sir.” He blew out a long breath. “You mad, bro?” He flopped his head to one side, grinning at me.
“Not mad. Worried, though.”
“Don’t be. It’s just a little, to take off the edge.”
“Edge of what?” I knew very little about Alex. Just that he had deep, dark waters inside him, and he did drugs to ease some pain I would never know, quiet voices I would never hear. For all that he was given to rambling and sharing awkward personal details, usually of his exploits with Amy, there were certain things he never discussed.
“Life, man. Just life.” He stared out of his window, watching the dark, dilapidated houses pass. Every once in a while he’d direct me to turn one way or another. “I grew up in this city, man. Never left, never will. Mom was born here, Dad was born here.”
“Yeah?” I sensed a confession coming.
“Yeah, man. I know her. Detroit, I mean. Her dark secrets. Things you can’t imagine. You don’t belong here. I do.” He peered sideways at me. “Just finish your schooling, man, and get out. Don’t get sucked into my world. Don’t smoke my pot. Don’t drink my beer. Don’t listen to my secrets. They’ll eat you up, man. They’ll pull you in.”
“Give me more credit than that, bro.” I recognized a street and turned onto it, cruising slowly. “What’s bugging you, man?”
Alex didn’t answer for almost half a mile. “I’m falling for Amy, dude. Remember the agreement I made with her? I can’t tell her. I don’t know how. I thought it was just fuckin’, but it’s more. I can’t tell her, because she don’t want that. She’s so goddamn cute, Cade. For real. You ain’t met her, but she is. The thing about writing a book? That shit drives me crazy, but I love it. I love teasing her about it. I want her to write it. I want her to be this amazing writer. And she will be. But if I tell her I accidentally fuckin’ fell in love with her, she’ll call it all off, and I’ll lose her. She don’t wanna be with no crackhead.” His words were slurred, sounding unlike himself, thick with the urban Detroit accent. “She knows exactly what I am, and she won’t want no part of it.”
“How do you know?”
“’Cause I asked her. If she ever thought there was more for her, for me. She laughed and said no. I was good in bed and fun to smoke down with, but she couldn’t be with me for real. It wouldn’t work, she said. She just smokes for fun. When she graduates, she’ll give it up and get a real job, a real life. It’s just a college phase, for her, she said. It ain’t that for me and she knows it. It’s life for me. This is all I’ll ever be.”
“It doesn’t have to be, Alex.” I turned again, bringing us around toward our apartment. “You’re a talented artist and damn good bass player. You could get bigger gigs if you tried. Find a better band.”
He flopped his head in a sloppy negative. “Nah. I’d lose my shit on the road. I’d be dead of an OD in a fuckin’ week. The groupies would be nice, though. I’ve always wanted to bang two chicks at once. Amy ain’t into that, though. I asked.”
“Dude, don’t scare me.” My heart was falling away, out of the bottom of my chest.
“I’m in deep, dude. I want her, bad. I’d go clean for her, if I thought that would make a difference. I’d try, at least. But she has ambitions. Teach, write. She wants to be a professor of literature. Write for fun. Ambitions like that don’t include a crackhead bass player.”
“You’re not really a crackhead, right? It’s just a little, you said.”
Alex laughed, leaning his head out the open window. “Dude. Get a clue. All addicts say shit like that. It’s how you know an addict.”
“Then why are you at CCS?”
“A desperate attempt to legitimize myself, I guess. Got a scholarship. Loans for being dirt-ass poor.” He leaned forward, peering at the ashtray. “Where’s that roach? I know had a roach.”
“Haven’t you gotten high enough for now?” I couldn’t help asking.
He shot me a look, one that spoke of depths of desperation I’d never realized existed within him. “Don’t. Do not get in between me and my buzz, bro. You’re my roommate. Not my friend. You don’t know jack shit about me.”
That hurt. I drove in silence. “So tell me,” I said, finally.
Alex found the roach, shut his window, cupped the butt-end of the joint between his lips, tilted his head to the side, and lit it, inhaling deeply. “Sorry, Cade. That was shitty. You know you’re my bro.” He blew out, opened the window again. “Not much to tell. Mom was an addict. Raised me and my little sister alone. Teen mom, no education. Same old story you hear all the time. Never knew my dad, had a parade of Mom’s boyfriends in and out of my house. Some nice, some…not. A few hit her, one hospitalized her. One raped my sister. That was during my gangbanger years, and he…well, let’s just say he regretted it not too long afterward. Pot, booze, crack, it was just life. The streets, gangs. Whatever. I graduated high school, barely, because Mom was unfortunate in her life and her choices, but she wasn’t stupid. Neither am I. Just…dumb. ’S a difference, I think. Mom raised us best she could with what she had. But…she was trapped, you know? Cause of me and Annie. So I learned to use art to deal. I think you know about that. I got out of gangs when I was sixteen. Turned to art, graduated. Eventually got a scholarship to CCS. Found music, and that helps. But there’s a part of me that’s just…dug down deep into the roots of what this city means to people like me. It’s a prison world, sometimes. Like in fuckin’, what w
as that movie? The Riddick movie. Shit, that’s what it was called. Riddick. A prison world. There’s beauty, here. Life. Love. But for some of us, it’s all we’ll ever know.”
He took a long drag, held it until I thought he would pass out, and then let it trickle from his nose. “You’re here, and you don’t belong.”
I had no response for any of that. I parked in the lot outside our apartment, and Alex lurched out of the car, inside, into his room, closed the door.
I thought about writing Ever, but I didn’t. I hadn’t gotten a letter from her in weeks. Maybe that was done.
And then, the next morning, there was a letter from her in the mail. Addressed from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
* * *
Caden,
It’s been a really long time. On both sides. Why? Are we not doing this anymore? Did I say something to upset you? Are you okay?
I broke up with Will. He was cheating on me. Living with someone else and fucking me on the side. Which is weird, because I thought it was the other way around, you know? That if he was getting some on the side, I was the main girl in his life, and the other girl was the one on the side. But…no. It didn’t work that way.
I miss your letters.
I miss you.
Draw me something? Please?
* * *
Yours, (am I, though? Am I anyone’s?)
Ever
* * *
I sat at the kitchen counter, staring at the letter, at the address. At the deep-seated pain between the lines of her letter, of her words, haunted sadness in the spaces of her words.
Yours, (Am I, though? Am I anyone’s?)
What a sad interjection. Tragic. And I understood it completely. The cry, the petition hidden in the soul, unscreamed, unuttered. The cold within and the numbness, going through the motions and using art to feel anything. I knew all this was true for her, even though she’d said none of it.
I drew. It was her style, abstract. Lines on paper, arcs and whorls and slicing and cutting and no design. Until…until the end, when I set the pencil down, the abstract lines on paper formed two words, buried within tangled barbed wires and thorny vines: NOT ALONE.
I sprayed it to set it, put it in my room and went to class, thought about her through art history and theory and calculus. I went home—still no Alex, no smoke, no music—and sat down to write.
* * *
Ever,
You are someone’s: Your own. Don’t belong to anyone but yourself. It’s the only way. Those are wise words from a fool who can’t use his own advice. I’m sorry about Will. I’m sorry he hurt you. He didn’t deserve you.
I’m trying to write, but my words have dried up. Sorry. Just…sorry. Paint. Paint me something.
* * *
Always yours,
Cade
* * *
And I sent it. Despite the contradiction. With the drawing, I sent it, and I went back to evening class and spent hours in the studio, trying my hand at acrylics, letting my head and my heart empty onto white space, knowing it would never fill the space in my soul where my mother and my father belong, knowing somehow, along the way, I’d been broken so I could never find peace or true friendship or love.
A week later, I found him.
Ever
* * *
I was more fucked up about Billy than I’d thought I’d be. Days at Eden’s turned into a month, and then I jerked myself out of it and had Dad sell my apartment. I moved out and got myself assigned to a double dorm room on campus. My roommate was as erratic in her hours as I was, so I never saw her.
I painted, and I refused to cry, refused to believe I was that hurt, that lonely. I threw myself into painting. Hours with the brush and canvas, until instructors and janitors had to kick me out. Until Eden had to remind me to eat. To sleep.
When I got Cade’s letter, I nearly did cry. When I saw his drawing, the rose thorns speaking to my loneliness, I did cry. Just a little. Two or three tears, sniffed away.
And then I painted. Something daring. Baring.
I painted myself. A self-portrait, in my studio. In my painting shirt, the top four buttons undone. Baring skin, baring cleavage. The shirt draped mid-thigh. A brush reaching for the viewer, the other hand freeing a button. Unclothing myself, one button at a time, while I painted myself, for him. I let it dry, packaged it in a wooden brace and wrapped it in thick plastic wrap and sent it to him still damp, unwilling to wait, to chicken out.
The title of the painting, written in black sharpie along the bottom of the frame: BEAUTIFUL?
A plea.
Three days later, he sent me an acrylic piece, and it took my breath away. It was part abstraction, part portrait. The edges were blurred colors, black near the top and along the left side, fading into yellow-orange glow on the right side and near the bottom edge. At the center was a pair of eyes, my eyes. Vivid, stunning, arresting. My cheekbones, lit by the yellowish glow from the right side of the piece. Candle light, I realized. And the blackness? Parts of it were matte black, parts were textured with strands of lighter shades. Hair? Yes, it was my hair, lost in the darkness.
The title: BEAUTIFUL.
Two days later, I got an overnight UPS package, thin, wide, and heavy. I brought it into my room, cut open the box with a steak knife, and pulled out a thick wooden frame, similar to that which I’d packaged Cade’s painting in, stuffed with packaging air bubbles. It was a mirror.
It was old, probably an antique, spotted and pitted. As I pulled it out, the reflection of the ceiling wavered and wiggled, and then I righted it so I could see my own reflection. And there, surrounding my face, was a web woven of Sharpie-inked words: lovely, talented, beautiful, needed, loved, smart, funny, kind, thoughtful, fascinating, dedicated, wondrous, wonderful…the list went on. The words were tangled, letters overlapping, the n’s in ‘funny’ used to create ‘needed’ and the ‘d’ in ‘needed’ used in ‘dedicated’ and so on, all the words intertwined like a briar or a spiderweb, all inscribed on the mirror to surround my features.
I held it together long enough to hang it in my room over my bureau. And then I sobbed. Just…bawled.
I was doubting everything about myself. My talent, my looks, my appeal to men. It seemed like everything about my life was a lie. If Billy could lie to me for so long, in such a huge capacity, and I was so gullible and stupid as to not even realize it, what did that say about me? If I wasn’t enough for him, who could I be enough for? What did this Kelly have that I didn’t? Was I really a cold, closed off bitch? Good only for sex on the weekends?
Did he close his eyes when we were together and picture Kelly, because he wished I was her but was too afraid of my delicacy to break up with me?
Was I delicate?
I didn’t know anything, anymore.
And this mirror…it didn’t magically restore my self-esteem, but it sure did help. Mainly because it proved, if nothing else, that Caden thought I was all of those things.
Why his thinking that about me, feeling that way about me, made me feel so much better, I didn’t dare examine too closely.
I stared at myself in the mirror, examined the pattern of his handwriting, wondering about Caden. About his feelings. About what would happen if I suddenly showed up at his door. Wondering if he still had feelings for me, like I did him, on some deeply buried level.
I was afraid. That was the raw reality.
Until this moment, I’d had other things to distract me. School, Eden’s drama, Billy. Now, Eden was living her own life, contained, seeming fairly happy as a single college girl. School wasn’t the same kind of distraction, not anymore. I painted, I studied art, some other necessary classes, but it wasn’t enough to distract me. And Billy was gone. Gone. And I was alone, and all I had were Caden’s letters, his words and the emotions written between the lines. He was all I really had, in some strange way. He was all that comforted me.
That wasn’t true. Eden was a constant comfort. She’d taken me in and let me wallow in my anger and
self-pity, and then she’d gently encouraged me to get out there and get over it. By gently encouraged, I mean she shoved me out of bed one morning and told me to quit docking around and feeling sorry for myself, that the Lord Captain Douche Commander Harper wasn’t worth my time or energy and I had to get over his sorry ass.
Which worked, to a degree. It got me off my ass and out into the world, got me painting and going to the gym to work off the gallons of ice cream I’d eaten while watching sappy romantic comedies and anything featuring Channing Tatum.
But Eden’s advice and tough love didn’t address the inner psychological damage Billy had done to me, which went deeper than I’d ever imagined. I’d never been truly in love with him, so how could his lie so badly shake the entire foundation of my life and my emotional sanity?
And why did Caden’s letters and his art and the precious gift of the mirror do so much to heal me?
And why was I so afraid of pursuing more with Caden? Why did I keep shying away from an IRL relationship with him?
The last two questions I had answers to, at least: because if I tried for something with Cade and it didn’t work, or he lied to me, or he let me down, if he failed to measure up, failed to be the magnificent specimen of manhood I’d built him up to be in my mind, I’d be devastated. Wrecked. And then I wouldn’t even have him to get me through my heartbreak.
And so I painted. All the hurt and the confusion and the darkness went onto canvas.
the scent of death
Caden
* * *
Dread. Fear. The scent of death. I knew these things. I knew them all too well. I stood outside Alex’s bedroom door, feeling them all rage through me. My knees shook, trembled like leaves in the wind. My fist was curled around the tarnished brass knob, paralyzed there, refusing to twist and push.
The Nice Boxset Page 48
