Naked Addiction

by Caitlin Rother

  When the door opened, Norman lurched forward, almost falling into a woman in the foyer he presumed was Clover’s mother.

  “Sorry, I was trying to see if anyone was home,” he sputtered.

  The woman did not look pleased as she stood with her arms crossed. “Well, as you can see, here I am. And who are you? I hope you aren’t selling the Sun-Dispatch. It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  Norman tried to ignore the jab and pressed on. “As a matter of fact, I’m Norman Klein, a reporter with the Sun-Dispatch. We talked on the phone yesterday. Remember?”

  Her face softened a bit, but not much. “Sure, I do.” Then she smiled mischievously. “Maybe you can move on to a better paper once you get some more experience.”

  Norman didn’t quite know how to respond to that. “Is Clover home?”

  “No, she isn’t.”

  “Any idea when you expect her?”

  The woman shook her head. “No, not a clue. She’s old enough to take care of herself. “

  “Do you mind if I wait inside for her, Mrs. Stratton? It’s awfully hot out here.”

  The woman, her hair in a neat chignon at the nape of her neck, looked up at the tallest eucalyptus tree in the front yard and watched a flock of starlings fly out of it. “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. I’ve got to go out in a few minutes, and I’m not going to let a strange young man camp out in my living room.” She stepped backwards and started to close the door.

  “Well, I’ll wait in my car then,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Stratton.”

  This wasn’t going as well as he’d envisioned, but he wasn’t going to give up. “Wait,” he called while the door was still open a crack. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “No,” she said, her voice creeping around the door. “I’m already late for a lunch date. Sorry.”

  With that, the door thudded shut.

  “No, you’re not,” Norman whispered, slapping his notebook against his hand.

  He could smell Rosemary Stratton’s rose perfume all the way to the oleander bushes. He sat in his car with the door open, hoping the breeze would cool the black vinyl interior.

  About forty-five minutes later, Mrs. Stratton came out of the house in a short tennis skirt, exposing jiggly legs that would be better off in pants, and climbed into the Lamborghini. She peeled out of the horseshoe driveway and took off down the street with a roar. Norman wondered if the woman’s heart was like the door to the house, shiny and cold with a core that would shatter on impact. Norman hoped it wasn’t genetic.

  Feeling his legs getting stiff, he got out of the car and strolled down the sidewalk a ways. He was about a block from Clover’s house when he saw Detective Goode’s van pull into her driveway. Norman hid behind a eucalyptus tree as he watched the detective walk purposefully to the door and ring the bell.

  Goode shifted his weight from side to side, waiting for someone to answer. He, too, tried to peer through the opaque window, but gave up after a few minutes, got back into his van, and left in a huff.

  Some of us have more patience and fortitude than others, Norman thought, as he stood knee-deep in ivy.

  After waiting a few minutes to be sure Goode wasn’t coming back, Norman climbed back into his car and flipped on the radio.

  Half an hour later, he saw a twenty-something blond woman drive up in a little red Mercedes convertible. Clover, he presumed. She got out of the car, carrying several shopping bags with looped handles, then tripped and spilled one bag’s contents on her way up the front walk. She bent over and picked up what looked like red lingerie, mumbling something he couldn’t hear. He felt a sneeze coming on, and before he could do anything to squelch it, he let one out. Clover spun around, but he pulled his head in quickly, hoping she didn’t see him. After giving her a few minutes to put down the bags inside, maybe get a diet soda, he slunk out of his hiding place.

  Norman tamed his hair with the plastic comb-brush that folded up into his back pocket, wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, and strolled up to the house, whistling, as if it were no big deal. But inside, his stomach was churning. He pushed his index finger squarely into the gold doorbell button.

  The dog yapped again as the chimes echoed throughout the foyer. Only this time, no one came to the door. “C’mon, I know you’re in there,” he whispered.

  Norman wondered if Clover was swimming in a pool in the backyard and couldn’t hear him. He sat on the front step, feeling frustrated and glum. He was not going to get this close only to come back with nothing. He decided to wait a while, then try again. He was so close to glory he could smell it.

  Chapter 46

  Clover

  Clover Ziegler thought she heard someone sneeze as she was coming up the walk, and once she was in her bedroom, she could’ve sworn she heard something rustling around in the front yard. But when she looked down from her second-story window, all she could see were her mother’s rose bushes, pristine as usual. Clover was relieved that the gardener had finally cut back the eucalyptus trees. She’d asked her mother to have that done a couple of weeks earlier, after the voices started again. She didn’t explain why.

  Lately, it had been hard to sleep over the din of the leaves scratching against the windowpane. The voices in the wind mocked the way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, and the pooch in her belly that stuck out even in a tight skirt. They’d been at it again the night before.

  “You might as well stop trying to get Seth back,” a high-pitched woman’s voice whined. “He doesn’t want a crazy girl with cellulite on the back of her thighs.”

  “Stop it!” she said.

  Clover took the pillow and put it over her face, hoping that muffling her own breathing would squelch the sounds. But it didn’t work. Sometimes she heard her mother’s voice or a twisted version of her own, like a record playing too fast or too slow. The voices said horrible things to her, told her what a bad and worthless person she was, that she couldn’t do anything right.

  It was all true, what they said. She skimmed her index finger over the scars on her wrists. The redness had paled to a dark pink. She remembered slicing into the bluish-white skin years earlier and watching her crimson inner-self flow into the bath water. She’d hoped the bloodletting would ease the pain and dispel the confusion that fogged up her head. But instead, she woke up in the hospital, with her wrists bandaged and an overwhelming sense of disappointment and failure.

  Clover jumped up from the bed and opened the window. Maybe some fresh air would help clear out the static. She took a deep breath and smelled the jasmine, comingled with the oleander and the roses. The scent was so sweet and so pure that her eyes brimmed with tears. She breathed in, deeper this time, yearning to cleanse some of the dirtiness she felt inside. She wished she could be as good as that smell.

  She’d never really found a way to be happy, at least not since she was a little girl when she played with dolls and had them talk to each other in different voices. But ever since she was in junior high school, the voices seemed so much more real to her, as if they came from somewhere outside herself.

  Clover would never forget the parent-teacher conference at Muirlands Middle School, where, for the first time, the voices started causing her real problems. With a smile frozen on her lips, the principal talked to Clover’s parents about her as if she weren’t sitting right there, listening.

  “It’s not that she’s stupid,” Mrs. Quincy said. “Quite the opposite. She has a rather high IQ. It’s more that she has no concentration and she talks to herself, which distracts the other students. But the most serious problem is that she fights with her classmates, even the boys. I think you should send her to that residential school in Santa Barbara we talked about the last time. We just can’t deal with her here anymore.”

  Her parents took the principal’s advice without asking Clover for her input. She was almost relieved, really. They’d think she was crazy if she told them who she was talking to.

 
Once she got to the new school, the staff there didn’t know what to do with her either, so they experimented with different drugs. But regardless of their shape or pastel hue, the pills shut off the vibrancy of the sounds and colors around her, and filled her mind with gray. She was better able to do her schoolwork, which pleased her parents, but the pills never made Clover happy. So one day she tucked them under her tongue and spat them out when the nurse wasn’t looking.

  She hated the doctors, too. All they cared about was declaring some new diagnosis. But they were never really sure what was wrong because she didn’t respond well to any particular medication. How could she if she never took any of it consistently? Besides, Clover found a potion she liked better: A combination of Wild Turkey and marijuana. She smoked it with some of the other students and, for the first time in her life, she felt like she fit in.

  Then things started going bad. The kids stopped inviting her to their little get-togethers. They gave her strange looks and said she was weird. Then, one Friday night when she was feeling edgy, she knocked on the door of a boy down the hall. But the boy closed the door in her face and laughed. She felt that familiar rage rise up inside her and banged on the door until he opened up, then pummeled him with her fists until his face was bloody.

  She broke his nose, but didn’t do him any permanent damage. They placed her on the locked ward for two weeks so they could monitor her medications more closely. She finally decided to give in and take the stupid pills every day so she could graduate and get out of there.

  She did all right for a few years after graduation, taking a few classes at the community college. But she eventually tired of the grayness again and stopped taking the pills. Cocaine helped her feel more like herself and enjoy the world. The sky was so blue it made her feel clean. The oranges and pinks of the setting sun were so painfully beautiful they made her cry. That’s how she got the idea for the bloodletting and ended up in another hospital, this one specifically for psychiatric patients.

  The doctors told her to stay away from cocaine. They also sent her to Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the hospital. But she didn’t relate to the people there. They didn’t know what it was like to be her. There was only one person she liked, a gay orderly named Fred, whom she affectionately called “Better Dead Than Fred.”

  “It’ll fry your brain, honey, bring on a psychotic episode faster than you can say ‘Pass me another line,’” he told her. He gave her a book to read, which she kept next to her bed, called Postcards From The Edge, by Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars actress, about her time in rehab. Carrie was bipolar.

  Clover could still conjure up the sterile smells of that hospital. She preferred to smell the jasmine, even if it meant living with her mother and stepfather, Steven. She wondered where her mother was. It was already three o’clock. Steven was the one who’d heard about the new beauty school in Bird Rock and thought it would be good for Clover. He put her mother in charge of monitoring Clover’s intake of medication, entrusting her to pass out pills from one of those little plastic organizers with a slot for each day. But Clover had gone back to her old ways when she felt Seth pulling away from her. She was sure it because she was becoming dull and boring. So she put the pills under her tongue, swallowed the orange juice, then spat them out when her mother wasn’t looking. Rosemary never knew the difference. Clover enjoyed feeling like herself again, even if the voices had come back. Trouble was, they were often louder, angrier, and more frightening than ever before.

  Just then, the doorbell chimed downstairs, and Pepe, her mother’s terrier, went crazy. She could hear him barking and clawing at the door with his nails. She was in no mood to talk to anyone, so she didn’t go downstairs. She wanted to escape the voices, but she didn’t know how. Peeling off her jeans and blouse, she dropped her bra on the bedroom floor, and got in bed. She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t relax.

  Seth smiled at her from the pewter frame on her bedside table.

  “I love you so much,” she said, stroking his face through the glass.

  All she’d wanted was for him to feel the same way about her. Was that too much to ask? She couldn’t believe that Seth didn’t love her a little during those nights they spent tumbling over the sheepskin rug on his living room floor. Or when they made love on the red, cold, and slippery satin sheets that soothed her sunburn and made her feel like she was on a Hollywood movie set.

  Seth helped act out her fantasies. He let her be in charge, get on top of him, and tease him. He told her how soft her skin was, how much he loved her legs wrapped around him, that kissing her was like being on vacation from the rest of his life. He talked sexy to her while they were making love, touching a place in her that one else had. He made her feel wanted in a way she never had before. But then he used his possession of that special place inside her to take advantage, to get her to do what he wanted. He used it to hurt her.

  She clutched the baby blue blanket she’d had since her seventh birthday, the one her mother gave her when the emotional troubles started coming on.

  “This blanket will protect you from the monsters,” Rosemary said. “At night, it will take you flying over magic kingdoms with gold temples and neon flowers. And when you take a nap in the afternoon, it will skim over fields of yellow daffodils, red tulips, and four-leaf clovers. That’s why we named you Clover, sweetie, because we knew you’d be lucky in life.”

  Of course, the blanket never took her anywhere and it never protected her from anything. It grew thin, worn, and knotty with little balls she would pull off when she had to grasp onto something, so she wouldn’t go over the edge.

  Seth used to tell her he liked that about her. “Clover,” he’d say, “you’re so on the edge. You’re different from any girl I’ve ever met. We have this, I don’t know, special chemistry.”

  But there had been no more teetering on the edge for the past couple of weeks. She’d finally fallen into that lonely, dark vortex and couldn’t find her way out.

  She pulled the covers more snugly around her neck. The thought that she shouldn’t do any coke only made her want it more. She had to think. But she was so tired. Going shopping hadn’t helped at all. She’d spread her new clothes over the bedspread so she could look at them, but she didn’t feel like hanging them up. They could just lie there for all she cared. No one slept on that side of the bed anyway.

  Clover sat up abruptly, reached for her purse and retrieved her little glass vial. Dumping a pile of coke onto the hand-held mirror she kept in her nightstand, she drew the white powder into a thick arc and inhaled a noseful through a rolled-up dollar bill. That comforting rush surged through her body. She wanted the high to last forever.

  But as usual, it wasn’t long before the high faded and she started plummeting down. She went over to the shelf where she kept her collection of figurines from The Simpsons cartoon and picked up the Bart and Marge dolls. Marge was quieter than usual and her plastic face showed only a blank expression. Clover tried to find some life in Marge’s eyes.

  “Oh, now you have nothing to say,” she said.

  Clover threw the dolls against the wall. “No one understands!” she yelled. One of the figurines chipped a small piece of paint from the wall before landing with a dull thump on the carpet, but she still didn’t feel any better. So she picked up the dolls, opened the window, and threw them into her mother’s vermilion rose bushes.

  Clover slammed the window shut and just stood there, staring down at those roses again as images from the past few days swirled through her mind: arguing with Sharona about her afternoon tryst with Seth, then driving around La Jolla with a tuft of red hair on the passenger seat, but not remembering how it got there. Climbing into bed, sleeping fitfully, then waking up the next day to read in the paper that Sharona had been murdered. Running into the bathroom and throwing up.

  Clover pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt and walked as fast as she could down the stairs, trying to leave the voices and the images behind. She paced around the living room and
felt a pull toward her stepfather’s study, which he called the Head Room. Steven owned two collections—guns and stuffed animal heads—which were displayed on two walls, facing each other.

  Some of the guns were bulky and black with polished wooden handles. One was light and thin as a pen, like a spy would use. Her stepfather had warned her many times that no matter what the size or shape, these guns were designed to kill, through and through. One afternoon, while her mother was baking chocolate chip cookies, he taught her how to hold a hunting rifle. He took great delight in describing how bullets could enter human skin, how they’d dance around inside, tearing through tissue like a wooden spoon mixing cookie dough, ripping through bones as if they were walnuts.

  Clover gazed at her reflection in the glass display case. The rifles cut across her face like the stripes of a wild animal. Steven was right about one thing: Guns were definitely one way to solve problems. Her eyes looked back at her, black and ghoulish, as if she’d already left her body. Her head started to throb. Jakira, the head of a tiger Steven pretended he’d killed, was looking at her with that condescending way he had.

  “Oh, get over yourself,” Clover told him.

  She had to get out of the house.

  Maybe if I walk along the cliffs over Black’s Beach and watch the hang gliders I can find some peace.

  She opened the desk drawer where Stephen kept the keys to the gun cases, unlocked the latch, and took out a small revolver with a mother-of-pearl handle. She put it in her purse, hopped in her car, and headed for the beach. She didn’t notice Norman following her at a safe distance.