The Art of Adapting

by Cassandra Dunn

  “Healing is like that,” Becca said. “You’re right where you need to be: unformed and full of promise. It’s a process of undoing the very things that have been binding you together your whole existence.”

  “And then what?” Lana finished blotting her eyes and kept driving.

  “You ask for better. You make manifestation lists. You give yourself permission to have everything you need. And just hope to hell that in the end all of that work will be worth it.”

  “Is this from your meditation crap?” Lana asked.

  “It is.”

  Lana turned around in another cul-de-sac and sighed. “Can I have a copy?”

  “I’ll send it as soon as we find Matt,” Becca said. “So, let’s try to think like Matt.” She was silent for a moment. “Never mind. Doesn’t he have any friends you can check with?”

  Lana hooked a left and sped out of the familiar development, squealing her tires and causing an old man to stop trimming his roses long enough to glare at her. Matt didn’t really have anyone that Lana would call a friend. But she suddenly had an idea of where he might be.

  “I’ll call you back,” she told Becca.

  Lana pulled up outside Spike’s apartment complex. There was no sign of Matt, but why would there be? He knew better than to return here. The doctor, the social worker, and Lana herself had all made certain Matt understood that the only way he’d get better, the only way his liver counts would return to normal, was to avoid Spike and all of his drugs.

  She knocked on Spike’s door but got no answer. She didn’t have a number for Spike. She didn’t even know his real name. It was probably Charles or Henry or Lawrence, something befitting his banished-rich-kid status. She knocked again, louder.

  “Spike?” she yelled at the door. The apartment complex was vast and boring, beige blocky structures loaded with college kids—Spike’s clients, living all around him. Along the walkways were bicycles and skateboards and empty five-gallon jugs of drinking water waiting for pickup. One of them was half full of murky water and had a goldfish swimming in the muck. Lana shook her head. These were UCSD kids. Supposedly smart ones.

  She pounded the door a final time and it opened a crack, revealing one of Spike’s green eyes, red-rimmed and clearly under the influence of something. A stale and rank aroma wafted out of the apartment. Spike was small, thin, pale, and jumpy. Your stereotypical strung-out-looking drug addict. He was in his twenties but he looked about forty. A man-child in a child-sized body. Everything about him emanated lost soul. Spike wasn’t angry, never seemed violent, he was just Spike. At another point in her life, he might’ve become one of Lana’s pet projects. He needed someone to care about him, that was clear.

  “Yeah?” Spike said. He’d met Lana before, but she didn’t expect him to remember her. He was either high or sleeping each time she’d stopped by to pick up Matt for one of their occasional lunches.

  “I’m Matt’s sister, Lana. Do you know where he is?”

  “I know who you are, sister,” Spike said. He smiled, revealing a gap where he was missing a molar. Spike shuffled and a metal baseball bat clattered to the floor next to him. He swept it aside with his foot. The top of his white sock was stained with something red. Lana hoped it was ketchup. It seemed likely. Fast-food bags littered the room. According to Matt, Spike had flunked out of college and was cut off by his well-to-do parents after a stint in rehab didn’t take. She wasn’t sure how he and Matt had met up. She’d been busy trying to resurrect her slipping marriage at the time. Clearly she should’ve been paying more attention to Matt back then. She was trying to make it up to him now. She just needed a little more time. Please, she prayed to whoever might care, let him be okay. Give me more time.

  Lana looked around for witnesses, but it was before noon on a Saturday in a college town, and everyone was still sleeping off the night before. She saw a form on the couch behind Spike. In the darkness she could just make out a dark blue sock hanging precariously off one foot. She pointed toward the form.

  “Is that him?” she asked.

  Spike smiled, braced the door with his bony shoulder. “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lana said sweetly. “A call to the police, maybe?” Maybe it was time to stop being so nice to people. It never got her anywhere. She brought up Nick’s number on her phone, poised to call.

  Spike frowned and opened the door. “You don’t play fair,” he said.

  Matt was passed out on the couch. On the coffee table in front of him was a bong, a small glass pipe, a tinfoil package of Lana-didn’t-even-want-to-know-what, an open orange pill bottle, a half-empty bottle of tequila, and a box of Pop-Tarts. There were food containers and discarded clothes everywhere. She stepped inside and was hit with the smell of urine.

  “He pissed himself,” Spike said. He dropped into the nearest chair and propped his feet up on the table. “You going to clean it up?”

  Lana made her way to Matt and felt his cheek, his chest, his neck. He was warm, breathing, his pulse thumping steadily in his throat beneath her two fingers. He looked so young, with his rosy cheeks and blond curls. So helpless. She sighed and fought back tears. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She was still holding her phone. She looked at the screen, debating. How much could she trust Nick? He was as by-the-book as they came. Spike was watching her closely.

  “Careful, sister,” he said. “This doesn’t look good for him.”

  A seething rage filled her up. Who the hell was this little shit, to do this to her brother? And now threatening her? She palmed her phone and hesitated. He was right. It was clear that Spike was breaking an assortment of laws, but Matt was still finishing off his DUI suspension. And he’d only been out of the hospital for two months since his overdose. That social worker had wanted to put him in a state facility. What kind of ammunition would this give her? Lana battled a sense of powerlessness. Matt deserved better. She switched her phone to video and lowered her hand, pretending to be done with it.

  “What exactly did you do to him?” she asked. He had Pop-Tart crumbs all over his chest and Lana dusted him off.

  “Gave him my special Matt-sleeping cocktail. Don’t worry. He didn’t OD this time.” Spike laughed as if it were all a great joke, the destruction of Matt’s psyche and liver and everything that was good and pure about him. Lana turned her phone to get a good shot of Spike, a wide pan of the drug-paraphernalia-strewn table and surrounding space. She tried to avoid getting any part of Matt’s body. She lifted her phone and quickly emailed the video to herself.

  “Hey, now,” Spike said. He scrambled toward her but stumbled over his own heaps of crap and couldn’t get to her in time. The phone whooshed that the message had been sent.

  She held up her phone. “My insurance policy. You want me to be the only one who has that video, you never see him or interact with him again. You hear me?” She had no idea if the police would care, but she was banking on the hope that Spike didn’t want to find out.

  Spike shook his head, fell back into his chair, and rubbed his bristly head. “You can’t save him, you know. He’s a goner. Just like me.”

  Lana dropped the phone into her purse. “Help me get him into my car,” she said. “And give me a blanket or a towel to put under him. I need to get him to the hospital.”

  “He doesn’t need any hospital, sister. He took one tiny sleeping pill, that’s it. He didn’t have enough cash for more and charity’s not my thing.”

  Spike didn’t move. Lana had sixty dollars on her. She hoped it was enough to buy five minutes of Spike’s time and one dingy towel. She held it up. He eyed the cash, then shrugged. “I’ll get a bedsheet.”

  With Spike’s help she got Matt into the car. She turned and glared at Spike, wanting to say something hurtful and frightening, but out in the bright sunlight of the day Spike had lost his smugness and swagger. He was nervous and exposed, glancing around him. He was small and worn, a shell of anxiety and fear. He reminded Lana of her mother in th
ose hard months after losing Stephen. Gloria had developed that same wounded look, that same forlorn weight about her. She’d become a black hole of emotion, sucking joy from the air around her, swallowing it, and leaving only emptiness behind. Lana wondered what the source of Spike’s pain was, what he was trying to numb.

  “You aren’t a goner,” she said. “Neither of you are. Please get some help before it’s too late.”

  Spike laughed in her face, but it was forced, betrayed by his wounded eyes. She could see that in choosing to be kind instead of cruel, she’d managed to hit him in an even deeper, softer place.

  Once at home, she had the issue of how to get Matt out of the car and into bed. Or into a much-needed bath and then bed. She checked his breathing and pulse again. Both were within normal range. She was grateful she’d had enough CPR training to know this. She called his name and shook him, and he was able to open his eyes and glare at her before turning away, but she couldn’t get him conscious enough to get him on his feet. He’d have to sleep it off in the car. She was staring at him when her phone rang. For once, she had it on her. It was Nick.

  10

  * * *

  Matt

  Matt had worn the wrong shoes for an 11.3-mile walk to Spike’s apartment. He realized that now. The problem was that he hated tennis shoes. The laces never stayed tied. It seemed so easy for others, but laces always gave him trouble. He wore his favorite slip-on loafers, but they weren’t comfortable enough for miles and miles of walking. He had a blister on the back of his left heel. He should’ve worn his boots.

  He also brought along a jacket because it was cold in the night when he left Lana’s house, but then it got warmer, and he didn’t feel like carrying it. He considered leaving it, maybe hiding it in a bush somewhere so he could fetch it on his return, but the best hiding places were all damp with dew or shot through with spiderwebs and he liked his fleece cobalt-blue jacket and didn’t want it ruined. But he was confused now. He didn’t seem to have his jacket anymore. Where had it gone? Lana was calling his name from somewhere very far away, and he tried to open his eyes, not to answer her, but to look for the jacket, his favorite one ever, only his eyes refused to open. They were glued shut. Had Spike glued them shut?

  Matt wondered if he’d made a bad decision, walking to Spike’s apartment. He realized now that he could have just called Spike from Lana’s house. He could have asked Spike to drive over in Matt’s car, the car that Spike had demanded as payment for the ant and roach cleanup from all the beer cans Matt forgot to recycle, to drop off something to help Matt sleep. That was all Matt wanted. Sleep. If he’d stayed at Lana’s he would’ve had his favorite breakfast, not Spike’s Pop-Tarts. The Pop-Tarts didn’t feel right in his stomach. But he probably would not have slept. He’d been having one of those nights. One of the ones when the melatonin had only worked for two hours, and the blackout curtains and the noise machine and the warm milk and the weighted blanket did nothing to help.

  He’d forgotten to bring his cell phone with him on his walk, or he could’ve called Spike before he got the blisters. Matt wasn’t good at remembering about phones. He hated talking on the phone.

  Google Maps said it would take Matt three hours and forty-five minutes to walk to Spike’s. It took more than four hours because his feet started to hurt. He could’ve taken a bus, if he knew the routes. He could’ve asked someone about the bus, because there were people outside their houses doing yard work and fetching newspapers, but making conversation with people was exhausting for Matt. He decided he’d rather walk, blisters and all.

  There were some things he missed about living with Spike, but some things he didn’t miss. Spike didn’t try to have conversations with Matt, which was good, but sometimes he yelled at Matt, which made Matt feel anxious and restless, like he might do something bad if the feeling kept building inside him. But then Spike had the pills and pot to make the anxious feelings less overwhelming.

  Matt had woken up at one a.m., but waited almost three hours before he set out to walk to Spike’s for the pills to help him go back to sleep. He was nervous at first, because Lana had told him that he needed to stop his neighborhood walks in the middle of the night because her neighbors were the type of people who might call the police if they saw a man wandering around at that hour. But nobody was awake and no police came. And then by five a.m. there were a couple of joggers in the neighborhood. That made him feel better. Not that Matt looked like a jogger. But he figured it was less suspicious to be out among the joggers. Matt didn’t want to talk to the police ever again. Except maybe Nick Parker. If he was going to teach Matt to hit a baseball. Matt didn’t even like baseball, but Nick Parker had liked Lana and wanted Matt to like him and they both seemed to think that Nick teaching Matt to hit a baseball would make Lana happy. Then Lana met Graham and broke up with Nick and Matt forgot about baseball until he saw Nick again.

  After walking for several hours Matt had to sit down and take off his shoes. He found two blisters, a big one and a little one, side by side on the back of his left heel. There was an old newspaper in the gutter and Matt tore a piece off, folded it carefully, and slid it over the blisters, under his sock. He tried walking in a circle to test it out. It didn’t help. It still hurt to walk. He sat down again on the curb. A cat wandered up to him, tail raised, eyes wide, ears forward, asking for attention. Matt wasn’t a cat person. Especially not outdoor cats. He liked birds. Songbirds. The seemingly cute pet cats were killing off the local songbird population. People didn’t seem to care what their cat was doing when it was running free outside their house. But Matt cared.

  The cat was small and looked jet-black, but when the sunlight hit its fur in just the right way Matt could see that it was actually a striped cat, it just had black stripes against black fur. Matt figured the cat would be soft and feel good against his hand. But he also figured it had eaten more than its fair share of songbirds. He wadded up the paper from his shoe and threw it at the cat, but missed. The cat pounced on the wad of paper and batted it playfully, pretending to be cute and harmless instead of the bird-killer it really was.

  “Murderer,” Matt said. The cat swatted the paper wad and skittered sideways, dancing up high on its toes for a sneak attack on the little ball. Matt couldn’t help but smile, but he still refused to like the cat. He took his shoes off. He couldn’t decide whether it was better to walk the rest of the way barefoot or in socks. The socks would offer a little protection from germs or any sharp objects on the ground, but then he’d ruin his socks.

  “Can I help you?” a man’s voice asked. Matt turned and saw a balding man in a T-shirt, boxers, and a bathrobe, his big belly straining to be free from both the shirt and the robe, on the doorstep of the house behind him. He was holding a newspaper and eyeing Matt suspiciously.

  “Is this your cat?” Matt asked.

  “Yes, that there’s Bucky. He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a murderer,” Matt said. “He’s killing birds and you need to stop him.”

  The man swatted the newspaper across his palm. “Why don’t you move it along there, buddy? Find somewhere else to sit.”

  So Matt walked on in his socks, carrying his shoes, and hating Bucky the bird-murderer and his owner who didn’t care. Matt had ruined his favorite dark blue socks and his only feet by the time he finally made it to his old apartment. He was hungry and thirsty and hurting and exhausted enough to sleep, probably without Spike’s pills, but he was ready to lie down and sleep for a long time, so he still wanted the pills. He knocked on his old door, what was now Spike’s door, and it felt funny not to just walk into his own home. Except that it wasn’t his home anymore. He waited. It was probably only eight in the morning. Spike would still be sleeping. Matt pulled out his wallet and removed a twenty-dollar bill. It was all he had. He pounded on the door until it flew open. Spike’s bloodshot eyes and a metal baseball bat greeted him. Matt held up the money.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said. “And I’m hungry
and thirsty.”

  “Holy fuck, Matt,” Spike said. He set the bat down and rubbed his red face. Spike had terrible acne. He saw the money and grabbed it. “Come on in and let’s fix you up.”

  The last thing Matt remembered was Spike handing him the Pop-Tarts and sleeping pill. And then this. Matt was lying in his bed, tucked under his blue weighted blanket in his room at Lana’s house. His head felt cottony and he was desperately thirsty. He could hear voices. Lana and the kids, he decided. But something wasn’t right about the kid voices. The pitch was all wrong. There was only a male voice, and it wasn’t Byron’s. It had a gravelly quality to it that meant it wasn’t Graham’s, either. Graham had a nasally voice. Matt pulled himself out of bed. He had no clothes on. Matt never slept without clothes on. He got dressed and tried to remember how he got to his bed, but couldn’t. He didn’t know what time it was, but it felt late. He opened his door and there was Nick Parker, drinking coffee in the kitchen. It was Nick Parker but not the same Nick Parker, because this Nick Parker wasn’t in uniform.

  “You’re up,” Nick said.

  Lana jumped up from the kitchen table and came at Matt to hug him. She barely got her arms around him, her forearms grazing his shoulders, sending a ripple of pain down his arms and back, before Matt’s body flinched and buckled in response. Matt pushed her away as he backed up, warding off her painful touch, nearly falling backward as he tripped over his own feet. Lana almost fell, too. He was worried she’d land on him. Nick came at him, whether to help him or hurt him he wasn’t sure.

  “No!” Lana said. She held out her hand and Nick stopped moving. “Sorry, Matt. Reflex. I didn’t even think about it. I shouldn’t have touched you. I’m just so relieved. Are you okay?”