You Take It From Here

by Pamela Ribon

  When Tucker called I let it go to voice mail.

  “By now you probably know she called when you were here, and that I deleted any proof of that. For what it’s worth, I was trying to protect you. Let you be sick in peace. You were a mess, Danielle, and she would’ve only made you feel guilty and—you know, forget it. I’m sorry I messed with your personal property, but I’m not sorry about what I did. The way you tore out of my place the other morning because of her only shows I did the right thing. I know she’s there with you, probably saying worse stuff about me, so I won’t wait for you to call back.”

  On the drive to a coffee shop the next day, Smidge listed the things she wanted to do during her week in Los Angeles, including eating cheeseburgers and putting her feet in the ocean. Suddenly she squirmed away from me, rolling down her window in horror. “You stink!” she shouted.

  Michelle, the acquaintance who’d survived cancer, the one with the polite daughter, had Facebook-messaged me with a few suggestions on how to make Smidge feel better without having to involve doctors.

  I know it seems hokey, she’d written. But aromatherapy really helped on days when I hurt. Good smells, like lemon and eucalyptus, make the brain feel better. They have healing properties. Maybe we just like lemons, and eucalyptus smells like a spa, I don’t know. Regardless, it did help. And acupuncture was nothing short of an atheist’s miracle for me. Please don’t make me explain unblocking energy flow.

  “You don’t like it?” I asked Smidge. “It’s lemon and eucalyptus oil.” I showed her the small tinctures of essential oils and hydrosols I’d brought along in my purse. “They’re for you. They’re supposed to help make you feel better.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, waving at her nose. “You smell like an old lady’s crotch.”

  “Well, take the lavender water, at the very least. It’s supposed to be soothing.”

  “Meaning it’ll shut me up?”

  “No, Smidge. Only a bullet could do that.”

  She kissed the back of my hand for that one. But getting her to try acupuncture was a complete disaster.

  “I’ve scheduled a sort-of massage for you.”

  She spotted my verbal gymnastics immediately. “Define ‘sort of.’”

  “It’s a California thing, Smidge. Just give it a try. Lots of people out here like it.”

  She gave a quick clap. “Is it tiny ladies walking on my back? Because you know how much I love that. Can you get me one of those massages again?”

  “Wouldn’t that hurt your tumor?”

  She looked disappointed. “Maybe. You take the fun out of everything.”

  I couldn’t pretend everything was normal and fun; that we were just hanging out in my city like a couple of pals. It seemed like too big of a lie.

  “It’s acupuncture. People say that can help.”

  “Nice try,” she said, lowering her sunglasses. “I told you I was done with needles. Even the weird ones. No more poking!”

  But I had to do something. Smidge was starting to require much more sleep each day. I was so used to her constant whirlwind that to see her, head cocked back, mouth open, almost drooling on one of my throw pillows, felt like my Smidge had been secretly switched at the airport. They gave me one that was low on batteries.

  At moments when she did seem more like herself, she’d be chattering full force, sticking her fingers in every pair of cement hands in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, when she’d suddenly deflate, a wave of exhaustion leaving her crumbled. “But I wanted my picture taken with the fake Johnny Depp pirate,” she said wearily, pouting as I helped her back to my car, referring to the handful of celebrity impersonators who gathered in front of the cemented tributes. Jack Sparrow had flirted with Smidge as she’d passed him earlier, something about her “booty.”

  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” I promised.

  But the next day she’d moved on to a new desire, one she told me over her morning five-shot espresso. “I want you to score me some pot.”

  Your mother and I weren’t really all that into drugs. I know that sounds like something parents say when they’re trying to cover up huge swaths of stoner years, but this is the truth. We’d both tried pot in college, and your mom did acid once at a Lollapalooza concert. Although I’m pretty sure she was sold a fake and was acting to save face, as everybody else I knew who bought tabs off that guy said they were bogus. (Why is it we only use words like bogus when talking about people who sold drugs back in college?)

  Because we were in California, one could acquire it legally, but the problem was, I couldn’t. I didn’t have a prescription. Luckily, almost every other person I knew did.

  I picked my friend Mia because while she got high all the time, I can’t recall ever seeing her stoned. I chose a pot person like I was choosing a wine connoisseur—someone who knew what she was talking about, but was discreet.

  Mia was also one of the few people I knew who wouldn’t want us to smoke it with her after she bought it. I learned that inconvenient rule the last time I thought about buying marijuana. Smidge would never agree to such a stoner tax; she would balk at the idea of hanging out in a stranger’s living room for hours. Not that I have any desire to get high and then wait out having to go home. I’d never stop being paranoid.

  The one time I did get high before going to a movie, I was convinced everybody in the theater—and even the people in the film itself—knew I was high. I was sure the police were on their way to arrest me. I fled to a Pinkberry, ordered “all the toppings without the fake yogurt crap,” and ate candy, fruit, and nuts until I no longer felt like I was being persecuted by the fuzz. After that experience, I try to put myself under house arrest if I’m going to smoke.

  Mia’s wrists were loaded with bangles. Leather bracelets twisted halfway up her arms. She jingled and clanked as she drove her Prius down Sunset Boulevard. She wore purple sunglasses that hid half of her face. Her dark, glossy hair was tied in a knot above her right shoulder. One spaghetti strap of her tank dangled in a lazy, sexy way, highlighting the white line that cut across her deep, soft tan. Her lips were pink and glossy, the only hint of a cosmetic. She was all summer on top but winter below; a battered pair of Uggs adorned her feet. This was standard outfit for a girl in Los Angeles running errands in late autumn weather. You can determine the season only by thickness of her scarf. Mia’s was thin, made of T-shirt material.

  She pulled into a strip-mall parking lot. Surrounding us were a 7-Eleven, a nail salon, a dry cleaner, a Thai delivery place, and a nondescript storefront I knew was the dispensary because of the seemingly ubiquitous sign of a green cross on a white background.

  “Okay, you two,” she said after she’d parked. “I need to know what you want.”

  “Duh!” shouted Smidge, clapping her hands together like someone had just brought out a birthday cake for a two-year-old. “We want pot. The weed. Drugs, please.”

  Mia nodded, unfazed. “I meant how much.”

  “Oh, I should give you money,” I stammered, digging into my purse. This whole thing, as legal as it was, still felt shady. I guess because what we were doing wasn’t legal. We were in a parking lot handing over cash so that someone would buy us drugs. I was already getting paranoid, antsy to get this over with.

  “Do you want me to buy stuff for you guys to eat, to smoke, to drink?” Mia asked.

  “Yep,” said Smidge. “All of it.”

  “We don’t need to smoke anything,” I said, handing over eighty dollars. “Is this enough?”

  She smirked. “God, I hope so.”

  “And buy some for yourself, too.”

  “Thanks, Danielle. I was going to do that, anyway. Now I don’t have to steal it from you.”

  “Hey, what do you have?” Smidge tapped Mia on the bare shoulder with a sudden interest.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you have that makes you need pot?”

  “Uh, a job I don’t like? Debt?” Mia looked at me, confused.


  “Smidge, it’s not polite to ask people their medical history.”

  “Oh,” Mia said, nodding. “I have anxiety. That’s how I got the card. So much anxiety.”

  Smidge looked at her hands. It wasn’t often you would catch her in a moment of naïveté. When it happened it felt like a glitch in her whole system. “I’m like country came to town,” she mumbled.

  Mia ducked out of the car, telling us to wait. She disappeared into the dark building, sliding between heavy curtains that hung just inside the door.

  Smidge spritzed lavender water on her wrists and inhaled. “You were right. This stuff smells good and makes me feel better.” She opened her door to let the sun shine on her face. “All this stuff makes me feel better. Why doesn’t everyone live in California?”

  “Maybe you should shut that,” I said, concerned.

  “Why?”

  “A police car has pulled into the parking lot.”

  Smidge leaned forward, her face going pale. “Oh, my God. It just hit me, what we’re doing. And now the cops are here. Danielle! What are we doing? We’re criminals!”

  I thought she was teasing at first, but she seemed actually scared. “I don’t know,” I said. “Calm down. It’ll be fine.”

  “But what if the cops ask Mia who she’s buying the drugs for? What if she tells them the truth? Do we go to jail for that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we should get out of this car!”

  I looked around. “And go where? That Thai food joint?”

  “Don’t say joint! Oh, my God! I can’t wait here! I ain’t no sitting duck!”

  Smidge shot out of the backseat like a bullet. She wiggle-stepped over to the 7-Eleven, half hurrying, half trying to look nonchalant. She even mimed tipping a hat toward the officer, who was taking a break, leaning against his car.

  I couldn’t just leave Mia’s car. If she came back and both of us were gone, she might drive away. I certainly would’ve, if the people I had just bought drugs for skipped out when a cop parked next to my Prius.

  Ten minutes later Mia still hadn’t appeared and the police officer hadn’t budged. Smidge came wandering back, sucking an enormous Slurpee. She knocked on my window. Smidge lowered her voice, trying to sound official. “Ma’am, can I ask you why you’re sitting in this parking lot?”

  “Get in the car and shut up.”

  As Smidge slid back into her seat, Mia opened her door and dropped into the car before lowering a paper bag into my lap. It was heavier than I expected and I heard glass bottles clank against each other.

  “It’s okay that there’s a cop right there?” I asked.

  Mia laughed. “Is that why you two look like you just pissed your pants?”

  Smidge looked over her shoulder out the back window. “Drive!” she shouted. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

  Mia slowly backed up. “You are a trip,” she said. “I think this is going to be actually medicinal for you.”

  “In many ways,” I said, leaning back into my seat, relieved to be done with our dangerous errand.

  But once we were sitting on the floor of my living room, redfaced and breathless from laughter, eating cheeseburgers while ordering a large pizza, I was grateful we’d made the journey.

  “I have never been this happy in my entire life!” Smidge shouted over the phone to the pizza deliveryman. “You are bringing a pizza and therefore I may just kiss you. Consider yourself warned, pizza man!”

  As she searched my pantry for Doritos, she wondered, “Why haven’t we been stoners our entire lives? This is my one regret. I should’ve felt like this more often in life. I haven’t been in this much not pain in a very long time. Everything just feels so good, so good, soooo gooooood!”

  “When did they say the pizza would get here?” I asked. “I’m still hungry.”

  “They said it will be here any minute,” Smidge replied, standing on her bare tiptoes to nudge a box of Raisin Bran from the high shelf. Reading the side of the box, she asked, “How much fiber is a bad idea for one night?”

  My head felt fuzzy, but in a good way, like it was formulating something important. “That’s not true, is it? That the pizza will be here any minute.”

  Smidge was counting on her fingers. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it can’t be here now, so there’s one minute that can’t count as ‘any,’ because it’s not here. Also, it can’t have been here the last minute.”

  “Oh, you’re saying if ‘any’ refers to the concept of ‘any’—”

  “Which means all things, right?”

  Smidge was getting it. Her eyes lit up as she rubbed her nose excitedly. “Right. You’re right! The pizza won’t be here ‘any’ minute. Because the pizza will not arrive during the French Revolution.”

  I raised one finger. “Our pizza will not be here when the Beatles sing on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

  “Our pizza will not arrive that time Marty McFly went back to 1955.”

  “Smidgey, that’s fictional.”

  “Even better! All fictional minutes should count in the concept of ‘any’!”

  “Genius.”

  “I know. We totally wasted our lives not being genius potheads. Dans, I love you the mostest. Thanks for letting me be a druggie.”

  That night she taught me how to snap a bottlecap across the room. She French-braided my hair. We had a slumber party that ended with us falling asleep in front of the television about six minutes into The Legend of Billie Jean.

  I love this memory of your mom because it wasn’t often she’d allow herself to be truly free. That night she couldn’t have cared less what anybody thought about her, including when she actually tongue-kissed that pizza deliveryman. Your mother would kill me if she knew I told you this story, but there it is. I think of it every time I want to imagine her giddy and satiated, and truly at her silliest. When she just loved me and loved being together. No agenda. No judgment. It had only the parts of her that made up the best of who she was.

  I often think of that night for another reason. It was the last time I ever let myself believe she would find a way to live forever.

  TWENTY-THREE

  We’d reached one of the six days of the year when it rains in Los Angeles. There was a late-October storm that would be gone within an hour or two, but would tangle traffic for the rest of the day. This was, of course, exactly when Smidge and I were headed to the beach. Consequently, we’d been stuck in traffic on the highway for more than an hour before she broke what I sensed was a thoughtful silence.

  “Do you remember that idiot cat you had with the missing eye?” she asked. “In that apartment before I met Henry, the place we left because of the termites and Bucktooth Betty with the tap shoes?”

  “Sprockets,” I said.

  Sprockets wasn’t a very smart kitty. He had depth perception problems because of his eye, and he seemed to be in a constant battle with what his whiskers were telling him about his world compared to what he could see out of half of his head. Consequently, Sprockets often would get lost in a corner, standing still, staring at the wall until someone came over to turn him around. Sprockets almost drowned in the toilet one night. He burned his tail on a candle. Sprockets was a bit of a sad case.

  “You hated that cat,” I said.

  “I did not. Please don’t confuse apathy with hatred. But you loved Sprockets. I guess because he was so pathetic.”

  I got a little misty at the memory of his lopsided, orange face, how his weird eye socket made it seem he was an abandoned stuffed toy. “He was a little pathetic,” I admitted. “He was sweet, though. He liked to sleep on my feet.”

  Smidge took a sip from her coffee. It was after three and she was still drinking hot coffee. I don’t know how she could do it; I would have been up all night. “What happened to Sprockets?” she asked me.

  I had to put him down. She knew this. “What is your point?”

  “You found him under
the building. You knew he’d been hit by a car and had dragged himself under there. What did you do?”

  “I accused Bucktooth Betty of running him over because she always drove so fast in the parking lot.”

  “And then you wrapped him in your flannel and you took him to the vet, where you had him put down.”

  I swallowed the lump rising in my throat as I tried to focus on the personalized license plate of the car in front of me.

  Up until the moment Sprockets’ body went limp, I’d never seen anything die. It wasn’t peaceful to me. It was awful. It felt like someone had robbed my cat of its very catness, as I stood by, helpless to stop it.

  The license plate read: SUPRSTR8. I couldn’t tell if it stood for Super Star 8 or Super Straight.

  “I’m no different than Sprockets,” Smidge said.

  Maybe Soup or Street?

  “My grampa went down the long way,” she continued. “He wasn’t that old, but he was really sick. He spent years withering away, and I had to watch it. The Lizard would take me over there and I’d have to sit with him in his hospital while he stayed hooked up to machines. He went away piece by piece. Sometimes he’d lose a memory; sometimes he lost control of his bowels. Sometimes the Lizard had to feed him.”

  “When was this?”

  “I was eight. That man had fought wars and won medals and now we had to take a break during Christmas so my grandmother and my father could tag-team changing his diaper. He didn’t die until I was almost Jenny’s age. One day he told me about the cyanide capsule they made him carry on his uniform during the war, in case he was ever captured. Told me he’d been dreaming about cyanide pills for months. You know what he said to me then? Well, he thought I was Ginger Rogers so he said, ‘Never let them do this to you, Ginger. Find the way out.’”

  I gave her a couple of seconds before I made my point. “Smidge, that was an old man, and he lived a full life. I bet your grandfather wouldn’t want you to do what you’re doing. He’d say maybe stop focusing on whether or not I’m wearing the right nail polish, and look into seeing if taking some fish oil and niacin pills might keep you around for another year or two.”