by Mann, Marni
Dad handed the folder to me and closed Michael's door. I was alone in the hallway. My body felt like it was on fire, and the extinguisher it needed was tucked inside my purse. It would take me at least fifteen minutes to get back to the hotel. I didn't want to wait. I wanted to inject it now.
There was a rooftop gym with a bathroom in Michael's building. I remembered seeing it when he gave Eric and me a tour the first time we visited. I figured as long as the bathroom door locked, I'd be set.
I took the elevator to the top floor. The gym was empty, and the handle on the bathroom door had a lock. I dumped my purse on the floor and made a pile of everything I needed to cook up. The needle slid into my vein, and the chamber emptied into my bloodstream. It took only seconds before the fire was out.
A loud noise woke me up. It was a ringing sound echoing off the walls of the bathroom. It took a minute to realize it was my cell phone, and by the time I answered, the call had gone to voicemail. There was a list on the screen that showed at least ten missed calls, all from Renee.
I called her back as soon as I got outside Michael's building, and she answered before I even heard the phone ring. “Nicole, I don't know what the hell to do.”
It sounded like she'd been running. She couldn't catch her breath and I heard her lungs wheeze.
“What's up?” I asked.
“We have a big fucking problem.”
Had Abdul come into our room and found our heroin? Did Mark fire her?
“It's Eric, he's blue,” she said. “His fucking lips are blue.”
I felt everything stop. My heart wasn't beating. My muscles had stiffened and my legs halted. “What are you doing? Call 9-1-1,” I said.
“I… I can't. There's drugs and shit all over the room.”
“Who the fuck cares, call them right now.”
“I can't,” she said.
“Then I'm calling them.”
“You want to get blamed for this? We're talking jail.”
I was trying to piece together how we'd get blamed and if we'd go to jail, and none of it was making any sense. My brain was all mushy. But I couldn't lose Eric. Not like this.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The ride home took forever. I wanted to grab the conductor by the throat and threaten his life if he didn't get the train moving faster. It seemed like we were stopping every ten seconds to let people on or off. And then some asshole would stick their hand in the door right when it was about to close, causing another delay. I'd been guilty of doing the same thing in the past, and people would yell at me like I was screaming at them now. But today I really had somewhere to be. Eric's lips were blue.
I scrolled through my call log, and twenty-two minutes had passed from when Renee's first call came in. It used to take me twenty-two minutes to drive from my parents' house to the University of Maine. The morning after the rape, it took twenty-two minutes for the doctor to tell me the results of the tests. Time was a fucked up thing.
Before I hung up with Renee, I told her to stash the dope and call 9-1-1. She said she would. But did she? I didn't know if I believed anything she said. There was so much she hid from us. She wouldn't talk about her parents or her childhood or the reason she moved to Boston. Besides the rape—that was the one topic off limits—she knew everything about me.
Our relationship with her was one sided. Eric and I talked and she listened. The only time she had anything to say was when she didn't agree with something, like how I was smoking too many cigarettes out of our shared pack or if I wasted money taking the train when I should have been walking. She was our smack sidekick and our connection to Que. But did she have our backs? I didn't know. We'd never been in a position where we had to find out.
It hit me again—the reason I was rushing home. When I was on dope, my brain didn't loop around in circles, it was more like a maze. One minute I'd be thinking about Renee and our friendship, and then other memories would pop in like Mark and Que and college. I'd get in so deep, it was hard to remember my original thought, which was getting back to the hotel to help Eric. Renee said his lips were blue, but she was high, so maybe they were more like a dark red. Even if they were blue, Eric was going to be fine. Renee would get him on his feet and walk him around the room to get his blood pumping again. And then this awful day would be behind us.
I saw the ambulance from the sidewalk. That was a good sign, I thought. It was parked in the front of the hotel and the door to reception was propped open with a brick. Crowds of people had gathered by the ambulance. I pushed my way through them and looked inside. The ambulance was empty.
In the hallway on my way to our room, I bumped into Abdul. “Renee wanted me to hold this.”
He was holding my backpack. Without opening it, I already knew what was inside. She had packed it full with all the drugs and paraphernalia, so the police wouldn't find anything if they searched our room.
“Put it in your office, I'll get it later,” I said and jogged towards our room.
Renee was sitting on her bed, and there was a police officer standing next to her taking notes.
I couldn't see Eric. There was a paramedic blocking the entrance to the bathroom, and I tried slipping past him, but he stopped me and told me to take a seat on the other bed.
My whole body was shaking. I'd never even been pulled over for speeding. The last time I had spoken to a cop was at the hospital when they needed my statement about the rape.
“What's your name?” the officer asked.
I didn't know my rights. Did I have to answer? I looked at Renee for help, but she was staring at the floor. Why wouldn't she look at me?
“Nicole,” I said.
“Nicole what?” the cop asked.
“Does it matter?”
“If you live in this room it does.”
I decided to be straight with him. “Brown, Nicole Brown.”
He asked more questions like my age, place of employment, and my relation to Eric. I answered him honestly, but I wouldn't make eye contact. I was high and I didn't know if he could tell.
“Did Eric—”
The paramedics were wheeling Eric out of the bathroom on a stretcher. There was a blanket covering his body, but I was too far away to see if it was covering his face too.
I stood up to follow them outside, and the cop said, “Sit back down, I'm not finished questioning you.”
“I have to be with Eric.”
“You can stop by the morgue when we're done.”
The morgue? His lips were blue, but that didn't mean he was dead. When I went swimming in Moosehead Lake in the summer, my lips turned blue too. The pig didn't know what he was talking about.
“You meant the hospital, right?”
He started to answer, but Renee stopped him by putting her finger in the air. Her arm went around my shoulder and she sat next to me on my bed.
“Eric's dead,” she said.
Her words were so final. The paramedics hadn't saved him? His lips were blue, but that didn't mean he was fucking dead.
“I don't believe you, no, I have to see him, I have—”
“Sit back down,” the cop said. “You can see him when I'm done with you.”
Questions poured from his mouth—where had I been at the time of Eric's overdose, did I know he was a heroin addict, was I one too?
I remembered seeing a movie with a little boy and a little girl. The details were vague, but I think they were running through fields of grass and the little girl said, “Dear God, make me a bird. So I could fly far. Far far away from here.”
I wanted to stick a needle in my vein and turn into a bird.
The cop had said overdose. What the hell did that mean? Eric had overdosed on the same smack that was running through my veins. I was too fucked up to hear Renee's phone calls, and I was nodding while Eric's lips were turning blue. He'd taken too much.
Eric was dead.
Renee was a selfish bitch. Couldn't she have called 9-1-1 sooner? The drugs in our room didn't matter. Neith
er did jail or probation or whatever our punishment was.
I had needed that shot in the bathroom after seeing the way my parents looked at me. But she didn't have an excuse for not watching Eric and making sure he was okay.
I was done with her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Renee and I gave our statements to the police. We answered all their questions about Eric, where he worked, his boss' name, the hours he worked, and his parents' phone number in Bangor. They asked us over and over if we knew about his heroin addiction and flipped the questions to try and trick us. But our answers didn't change. We didn't know Eric did heroin, we'd never seen him use and no, we definitely weren't addicts too.
The cops searched our room, and the only drugs they found was the packet of dope Eric had left in the bathroom. The cause of death was obvious, the needle was still in his arm when the paramedics arrived. They couldn't arrest us, so they took our cell phone numbers for follow-up questions and left the hotel.
“You think they'll do an autopsy?” I asked Renee when everyone cleared out.
“Probably, and the toxicology report will show how much dope he had in him.”
“How long does all that take?”
“Depends, a month, maybe.”
I'd be able to hold my parents off until the toxicology report. But Bangor was a tiny city, and news of an overdose would spread like herpes back home. Not to mention Eric's story would be printed in the Bangor Daily News. Once my parents heard the truth, I didn't know if they'd still believe my lies.
Abdul came barging into our room. “I treat you like my own child and you bring drugs into my house.”
Was he fucking serious? The hotel was like a crack house, drug deals going on in the hallways and broken pipes and empty bags in almost all the rooms I cleaned. He rented rooms out by the hour and I was the bad one?
“We didn't bring shit into your house,” Renee shouted. She bolted from the bed and ripped the backpack out of Abdul's hands. “Eric fucking did.”
His face turned red and his teeth went into an underbite. “Get out, one hour, you get out.” He slammed the door behind him.
Renee dumped the backpack onto the bed and handed me a clean needle and one of the packets of dope. “Screw that sandbox, let's get our fix in before we leave.”
Damn, I wanted to get high.
We had nowhere to go. We had seven dollars left after the bundle Renee had bought that morning. And even though I was mad at her for letting Eric die, I couldn't leave her. I needed her paycheck and tips to buy heroin.
There was only one place left to go. The park.
I filled my backpack with a few of Eric's sweatshirts, and we found a bench in the park to sit on. I wanted to lie back and enjoy the quietness that was finally in my head, but I couldn't. There was something I still had to do. I picked up my phone and dialed.
Eric's mom answered the phone.
“It's Nicole,” I said.
“Hi sweetheart, how's everything? Eric tells me you both are doing so well.”
“I have something I need to tell you.”
It was hard to talk because my mouth was so dry. A milkshake would be good. A thick chocolate shake to coat my throat and satisfy my sugar craving.
“What is it, honey?” she asked.
“Eric had an accident.”
“What's the matter? Is he there? Let me talk to him.”
“He's dead.”
First there was swearing, one curse after another, and they came so fast it was like she had Tourette's. Then came the sobs. Her words slurred together and she wasn't making any sense. She even puked at one point because I heard her heave. I rested the phone on my chest, she was being too loud and I needed both hands to scratch. The dope was making my arms and legs itch so badly.
“Who's this?” Eric's dad asked.
“It's Nicole.”
“What the hell did you say to my wife?”
“I told her Eric's dead.”
The phone went silent. And then I heard a deep groan like a bullfrog would make. “How… how did it happen?”
“I thought you should hear it from me,” I said. “You know, before the cops called you.”
“How the fuck did it happen?”
“The police said he overdosed.”
He started to cry.
“I'm sorry,” I said. I didn't know if he was still on the phone or if it had dropped from his hands because I could hear both of them now.
“My son did drugs?” he asked.
“I guess so.”
“You guess so? And you didn't try to get him help?
“I didn't know.”
“That's bullshit, he was your best friend and you—”
“I have to go,” I said and hung up.
I put the phone back in my purse and gave into the nod. It was a pretty dream too, full of birds and helicopters.
That was the first night I ever slept outside. I'd camped a lot when I was younger, but I had a tent and sleeping bag. This was Renee and me on a bench in the cold April air. We didn't have a fire to keep us warm or s'mores. We wrapped ourselves in Eric's sweaters and kept our bodies fed with heroin. The sky was full of stars, and the trees whistled as the wind blew past their leaves. The twinkling lights from the surrounding buildings were beautiful.
Renee's shoulder was my pillow, and a squirrel was eating an acorn not too far from my feet. The park was so comfortable. I didn't have to clean hotel rooms anymore to pay my rent. Renee's job at the bar would supply us with plenty of dope, and with Eric gone, we'd have even more to shoot. Eric had watched over me, but so far, I was doing fine on my own, and Renee wasn't going anywhere without me. I had everything I needed. And what I didn't have, like a bed or clean towels or TV, I could easily do without.
After we did our morning shot in a McDonald's bathroom, I called an old friend from Bangor. Tim was a real Dead Head, long beard, lots of tie-dye and always smelled like patchouli. He was a drummer in a few local bands and heard all the gossip. I told him about Eric, and he didn't sound surprised, but that was the pot talking. Tim had one tone and that was stoned. I asked him to keep his ears open for any news on Eric's funeral, and he promised to call when he heard something.
Renee called Mark an hour before her shift started. She told him she couldn't come in because she'd been throwing up all morning. She wasn't lying either, she'd puked all over the bench and we had to find somewhere else to sit. I asked if she was coming down with the flu, and she said she must have eaten something bad. We hadn't eaten since Eric died, so I didn't know what she was talking about. Mark told her to feel better and he'd see her tomorrow.
Since Renee wasn't going into work, we'd have to find another way to make money. She was pretty good at stealing, and there were pawnshops on every corner that bought almost anything you had to sell. And if I had to give a blowjob to get my fix in, I'd do that too.
She'd been trying Que since we woke up, but he hadn't answered. Que had this thing about calling before you went to his house. I guess he didn't want more than one deal going on at the same time. The shitty thing was he didn't always answer. Sometimes Renee would try him for hours before she got through. She didn't leave a message or send him a text. When it came to dealers, you just didn't do that.
We were pretty sick too. Our last shot had been about fifteen hours ago, and I'd barfed up the milkshake and fries I ate for dinner. This was the first time I'd been dope sick. I couldn't stop shaking, my muscles ached, and I had the sweats and chills.
I'd been telling her all day that waiting for Que was a waste of time because we didn't even have enough money for a dime bag. What we needed was to leave the park and stand by a store and panhandle, then go to Roxbury and buy some dope from a pusher on the street. She kept telling me to lay off, that Que would help us out once she got in touch with him, and he'd also let us stay at his house. I didn't know why she was so sure Que would hook us up, but I was too sick to keep arguing.
It was after midnight when Que
finally answered and told us to come over. When we got there, he and his brother Raul were smoking a blunt and listening to music in the living room. Renee sat next to Que on the couch and they started whispering. Raul patted the cushion beside him, and I took a seat along with the blunt he passed me. The weed was settling my stomach, but later when it wore off, I was going to be sick again. Heroin was the only thing that would make me right. Renee really needed to hurry this shit up.
I handed her the blunt and she hit it hard, blowing out a cloud of smoke. Before she took her second hit, she told the guys about Eric. The brothers said something in Spanish I couldn't understand.
“You'll hook us up, won't you?” Renee asked and she whispered something else in Que's ear. I thought she nibbled on his lobe too.
“Real good, boo,” Que said.
They took us upstairs and Que cooked up four bags for Renee and me to split. I could taste the heroin before it was even in my body, and my mouth watered for its flavor. We sat on the floor and used our own rigs, tying off with our belts while the brothers watched from the bed. Once we were done, Que turned on his stereo, and Renee stood and moved to the center of the room. She started to dance, swinging her hips back and forth in a rhythm only a stripper would know. She teased, slowly lifting her shirt and unbuttoning her pants to flash different parts of her body until she was fully undressed. And when she touched herself, she moaned. I had never seen her naked before.
Que called her over, and she straddled his legs, humping his crotch. When they started kissing, Raul got off the bed and scooped me into his arms. I felt like a baby against his broad chest and thick neck. Besides Eric and that brief episode with Mark, I hadn't been this close to a man in a while. I studied the side of his face, the golden brown color of his skin, the stubble on his jaw line, and the teardrop tattoo under his eye. He had that masculine smell, musky deodorant and spicy cologne. Those scents used to make me horny, but since I'd been with heroin, nothing turned me on. Smack gave me a feeling no man ever could, a total fulfillment in all my senses. A man could give me an orgasm, but dope gave me a hundred at once.
