And It Harm None

by Isobel Bird

  “She looks kind of dirty,” said Annie, noting the girl’s not-very-clean jeans and the dingy T-shirt she wore beneath an old hooded sweatshirt.

  The girl walked up to Sasha and they talked for a moment. Then Sasha handed her the bag from the deli. The girl reached inside, pulled out one of the sandwiches, and began eating. She crammed the food into her mouth rapidly, letting pieces of it spill out onto the ground.

  “You’d think she’d never eaten before,” said Kate, watching her.

  Sasha was talking to the girl, who seemed more interested in what else the bag held than in talking back. They could see Sasha was getting frustrated. She was waving her hands in the air and gesturing pointedly. But the girl just unwrapped the second sandwich and started working on that. Finally, Sasha poked her in the shoulder.

  The girl stepped back and glared at Sasha. She said something the girls couldn’t hear. Then she stuck her hand in the pocket of the grungy jeans and pulled something out. She handed it to Sasha, who looked at it and put it into her own pocket.

  “That didn’t look like drugs,” remarked Annie.

  “And I don’t think most dealers would take sandwiches in payment anyway,” Cooper added.

  Sasha was talking again, but this time the girl turned and walked away from her. Sasha called out to her. “Hey,” she shouted, loud enough for her friends to hear. “I help you out and this is what I get? Fine. Next time you’re on your own.”

  The girl ignored her and kept going. Sasha stormed off as well, walking toward the girls’hiding place.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Cooper said. “If she sees us we’re in big trouble.”

  They turned and ran back the way they’d come. They moved quickly, needing to stay ahead of Sasha. By the time they made it back to the shopping area they were winded and sweating.

  “We don’t have time to eat these,” Cooper said, holding up her lunch bag. “We’ll have to toss them or she’ll know we were up to something.”

  “But I’m hungry,” Kate complained.

  Cooper snatched Kate’s bag and threw it, along with her own, into the nearest trash can. “I’ll buy you dinner after class,” she said. “Now, let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Cooper picked up the empty bottle and carried it into the kitchen, where she dropped it unceremoniously into the trash can, listening to it clatter against the other bottles already in there. She was tempted to take the bottles out and count them. When had she last emptied the trash? Thursday? There had been four bottles in there then. How many were there now? She stared at the trash can for a moment and then turned off the kitchen lights and walked out.

  It was Sunday morning. Her mother was in bed, sleeping or passed out, Cooper wasn’t sure which. Cooper had come home on Saturday night after a date with T.J. to find the living room a mess and her mother sitting in an armchair, staring angrily at the picture of herself, Cooper, and Mr. Rivers that sat on the mantelpiece. When Cooper had said hello, her mother had turned her haunted eyes to her daughter and said something Cooper couldn’t understand, but the meaning had been all too clear: her mother wasn’t happy to see her.

  Fighting her natural inclination to simply retreat to her room, Cooper had insisted on helping her mother stand up and walk upstairs to her bedroom. She’d gotten her mother into bed before shutting her bedroom door and going back downstairs to have a look around. The house had smelled to her like alcohol, anger, and fear. She’d wanted to open all of the windows and air it out, but finally she’d just gone to bed. She was exhausted after her long day, and she needed some rest.

  She’d slept badly, plagued by disturbing dreams in which she kept trying to locate a lost kitten that she could hear crying but that she could never find. She’d woken up at dawn feeling more tired and out of sorts than when she’d gone to bed, and finally she’d just gotten up. Now she was doing what she’d thought of doing the night before, cleaning the house.

  Despite the fact that it was freezing outside, Cooper had opened the windows in the living room, putting on an old, comfortable sweater to keep herself from getting chilled. She was actually enjoying the breeze that was sweeping through the room, ridding it of the unpleasant scent that had permeated it lately. It felt to Cooper like cleaning a big cage, a cage that had held a wounded and unhappy animal. Unfortunately, that animal was her mother, and she was going to have to do something about her.

  The question was: What? How could she possibly help someone who, in the grand scheme of things, was supposed to help her when she was in trouble? She didn’t know how to talk to her mother most of the time, let alone try to help her with something this serious. The truth was, Cooper was scared. Her mother had always been one of those people who had everything under control. Even though she and Cooper rarely agreed on anything, Cooper had always counted on her mother to be dependable, even in her stubbornness and intractability. But since she’d begun drinking, the old Janet Rivers had been replaced by an ugly version of herself, a version Cooper wanted to run away from, not help.

  She thought about calling her father again. He had tried to help once before. But he was part of the problem. Cooper’s mother had begun drinking because of the stress she felt about their divorce. Cooper knew that if her father tried to intervene again it would just make everything worse. She needed someone else. But who? Did she even know anyone who was stable and dependable anymore?

  A list of names rolled silently through her head: Sophia, Archer, Thea, Thatcher. They would all help her in a minute if she asked. But they were all part of her Wiccan life. Cooper knew that her involvement in witchcraft was not something her mother found at all reassuring. Asking her Wiccan friends to get involved would probably make everything worse. No, it would definitely make everything worse, she thought. She needed to look elsewhere.

  Another list of names came to her: Annie’s Aunt Sarah and Kate’s mother and father. They were all people Cooper admired. And again, she knew that any of them would probably be glad to help her out. But none of them seemed quite right. She needed someone who was kind but tough, who would listen but not be pushed around.

  Suddenly it came to her. Mrs. McAllister, T.J.’s mom. Mary McAllister was one of the most good-hearted people Cooper had ever met. Cooper also knew that Mrs. McAllister had had her own experiences with people who drank too much, having come from a family where alcohol was as common as water at the dinner table. T.J. had told Cooper some of the stories, and they’d made Cooper very sad. They’d also made her even more in awe of the way Mrs. McAllister seemed to welcome the world in with open arms, never judging and always ready to give a hug or a kind word. In some ways Cooper thought of Mrs. McAllister as another mother. She knew she could talk to her.

  She glanced at the clock. It was only seven, but she knew that T.J.’s mother would be up. She never slept past six, and by the time the rest of her sleepy family stumbled downstairs she had usually been busy for several hours.

  Cooper pulled a jacket on over her sweater, left the windows open so that the house could breathe, and went to her car. She drove to the McAllisters’ house and parked. Sure enough, the lights in the kitchen were on, shining through the gray February morning. Cooper felt better just looking at them.

  She got out and went to the front door. She didn’t want to knock, in case the McAllisters’ old Irish setter, Mac, decided it was one of his infrequent times to act like the guard dog he supposedly was and bark. But she also didn’t want to just walk in and potentially startle Mrs. McAllister.

  She walked around to the kitchen window and peered in. Just as she’d suspected, T.J.’s mom was in the kitchen. She was stirring something in a big mixing bowl, and she was talking to herself. She probably has the radio on, thought Cooper. Mrs. McAllister loved to listen to the radio, particularly the stations that played music by people like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. She had a pleasant voice—T.J. had inherited his singing talents from her—and Cooper liked listening to her. Now, though, she wished Mrs. McAllister
would stop singing and look her way.

  She tapped on the window gently. Mrs. McAllister looked around, but not out the window. Cooper knocked a little harder. This time T.J.’s mom did look out. Cooper saw her squinch up her eyes, trying to make out who was standing outside her kitchen window. Mrs. McAllister came closer. She’s not afraid of anything, Cooper thought. Anyone else, hearing someone tapping on their window in the early hours of a Sunday morning, would probably have reached for a shotgun or phoned the police. Mrs. McAllister, though, just looked until she realized who was out there.

  The kitchen door opened a moment later. “Get your butt in here,” said Mrs. McAllister. “It’s freezing.”

  Cooper went inside. Immediately she was engulfed in the warmth of the kitchen and the smell of blueberry muffins. Mrs. McAllister motioned for her to take off her coat. “Sit down,” she said.

  “Sorry about the Peeping Tom routine,” said Cooper. “I didn’t want Mac to sound the alarm.”

  “You needn’t have worried,” said Mrs. McAllister. “He’s asleep on T.J.’s bed. They’re both snoring like a couple of freight trains.”

  Cooper laughed. Already she felt better. The difference between her house and the McAllisters’ was amazing. Here she felt at home, as if she could be herself without worrying that someone was going to come along to make her feel bad. At home she was always on edge, waiting for something unpleasant to happen.

  Mrs. McAllister handed her a plate with a blueberry muffin on it. Cooper split open the muffin and watched steam emerge, carrying with it the sweet scent of the berries.

  “Coffee?” Mrs. McAllister asked. She was the only person Cooper had ever met who offered teenagers coffee. It always made Cooper feel very grown up for some reason, and even though she didn’t particularly like coffee, she always accepted.

  “Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Mrs. McAllister fetched two cups and filled them with coffee from the pot that was continuously brewing on the coffeemaker. Everyone in the McAllister house drank coffee, so the pot was constantly being refilled. Cooper had the vague suspicion that as babies the McAllister boys had all had coffee in their bottles, which would, she thought, explain why they were all just a little bit on the eccentric side. “It’s all that caffeine,” she sometimes said to T.J. when he was being particularly difficult. “It did something to your brain.”

  Mrs. McAllister set the cups on the table and pulled out a chair. She sat down, took a sip of coffee, and said, “I take it you’re not here to see my son.”

  “No,” said Cooper. “This is kind of about me.”

  Mrs. McAllister nodded but didn’t say anything. Cooper knew that she wouldn’t say anything. She would wait for Cooper to tell her what was on her mind. It was how she operated—maintaining a patient yet demanding silence that forced the other person to speak. It was a technique she’d perfected on her husband and her four sons. T.J.’d told Cooper that when they were little he and his brothers could never keep secrets from their mother. Whenever she suspected that information was being withheld, she would simply sit them down at the table and wait them out. Inevitably, and usually after a lot of squirming and fidgeting on his part, whichever boy was the subject of her unbearable silence would blurt out the truth, however embarrassing it was. “There,” she would always say, not rubbing her victory in but clearly enjoying her success, “was that so hard?”

  Cooper decided not to prolong the wait. “It’s my mother,” she said. “She’s drinking a lot, and I’m worried about her. I want to do something, but I don’t know what I can do. When I try to talk to her she just turns her back on me. My father can’t do anything because he’s part of the problem. I feel like I’m trapped in my own house. I’m afraid to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, and I have this constant ache in my stomach from worrying about it.”

  It was the longest speech Cooper had ever made to Mrs. McAllister. The more she talked, the more came out. It felt good to say the things she was saying, but it also made her very sad. It was as if getting the words out had unlocked a door to the place inside of her where she hid her feelings from everyone. There were a lot of them stored in there, like boxes piled one on top of another, and now their contents spilled out. She found herself holding back tears. And then she found that she couldn’t hold those back, either. She began to cry, and before she could stop herself she was sobbing quietly in Mrs. McAllister’s warm kitchen while from the radio came the sound of the Andrews Sisters singing “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”

  T.J.’s mother stood up and came to stand behind Cooper. She put her big, soft arms around Cooper’s neck and kissed her gently on the top of the head. “There,” she said, “was that so hard?”

  Cooper laughed in spite of herself. She put her hand on one of Mrs. McAllister’s and sat, just holding it while her tears subsided. She breathed deeply a few times, calming herself. “No,” she said when she could speak, although her voice trembled. “It wasn’t so hard.”

  Mrs. McAllister sat down again. She picked up her coffee cup, looked inside, and then got up and poured herself some more. She drank some, smiled, and then said, “It has nothing to do with you. You know that, right?”

  Cooper nodded. “I know,” she said. “That’s not the problem.”

  “Good,” said T.J.’s mother. “For a long time I thought my father’s drinking was my fault.” She paused. “Probably because he told me it was,” she added, laughing.

  Cooper laughed, too. She was amazed at how easily Mrs. McAllister could talk about what Cooper was sure must have been a very painful childhood. She knew from what T.J. had told her that Mrs. McAllister’s father had often beaten her and her siblings when he was in a drunken rage. Twice he had sent her to the hospital needing stitches, and her mother had taken her, telling the nurses that Mary had fallen down the stairs or had an accident with her bike and promising her some kind of present if she didn’t tell anyone the truth.

  “People drink because they don’t like who they are,” she said. “My father didn’t like the man he was. He thought the one he was when he was drunk was better. Stronger, maybe, or at least not so afraid. I don’t think he meant to hurt any of us. I don’t think he wanted to, deep down. He could be the kindest man you ever met,” she said, smiling faintly. “But not when he had been drinking.”

  “I’m not afraid of my mother or anything,” Cooper told her. “I mean, I don’t think she’ll do anything like what your father did.”

  “There are all kinds of hurt, honey,” Mrs. McAllister said quietly. “All kinds of hurt.”

  “I just don’t want her to do anything to herself,” Cooper continued. “How do I get her to stop?”

  “You don’t get her to stop,” Mrs. McAllister said. “She has to get herself to stop.”

  “Okay,” Cooper said. “So how do I get her to stop herself, then?”

  T.J.’s mother smiled. “You are a determined one,” she said. She took a piece of Cooper’s forgotten muffin and put it in her own mouth. She chewed quietly for a minute, then resumed speaking. “People stop drinking when they’re ready to stop,” she said. “Not before. My father didn’t stop drinking till the day he died, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he snuck a bottle into the casket with him. He never was ready to stop. Other people are luckier. They figure out that it’s not getting them anywhere and they decide to find another way to face whatever it is that’s eating at them. That’s what I did.”

  “You?” Cooper said, surprised. T.J. had never mentioned to her that his mother had ever had a problem with drinking.

  “Surprised?” asked Mrs. McAllister.

  Cooper nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, after your father and all—” She stopped, realizing that what she was about to say was probably out of line.

  “Seeing someone else fall down doesn’t always stop you from trying to do the same stupid thing they were doing,” Mrs. McAllister said. “See, I thought my father just couldn’t handle drinking. I thought I could.
But I was his daughter in more ways than one.”

  Cooper tried to imagine Mrs. McAllister drunk. She couldn’t even picture the smiling, loving woman sitting beside her ever having a problem with alcohol. She seemed so together, so solid. So does Mom sometimes, she thought suddenly.

  “After Dylan was born, I went into a depression,” Mrs. McAllister told her. “I thought I was probably going to be the worst mother that ever lived. Really, I think, I was afraid that I was going to become my mother. I’d never really faced how I felt about her all those years. Anyway, having a few drinks made things easier. And pretty soon a few drinks became a lot of drinks.” She nodded thoughtfully. “It doesn’t take a lot,” she told Cooper. “Everybody thinks it takes years and years, but it doesn’t.”

  Cooper thought about her own mother. Cooper had seen her drink before, but she’d never seen her drunk or even close to it. Now, though, Mrs. Rivers seemed constantly to have a drink in her hand and another one waiting for when she was through with the first. Had she become an alcoholic overnight? That was really hard to think about.

  “Why did you finally stop?” Cooper asked T.J’s mother. She knew it was probably a rude question, but she really wanted to know what had made Mrs. McAllister realize that she was hurting herself.

  “One afternoon I was giving Dylan a bath,” answered T.J.’s mother. “The water was too hot, but I didn’t realize it because I was a little numb at the time. He’d been crying a lot that day, and I’d had a few drinks to—as I told myself—take the edge off. When I put him in the water it burned him, not badly but enough to turn him red and make him cry. I thought I’d really hurt him, so I took him to the emergency room. When the doctor asked me what had happened, I told him that the baby-sitter was responsible, that she had carelessly allowed my baby to be put into water that was too hot.” She looked at Cooper. “When I heard myself say that, I heard my mother making up all of those excuses for what my father had done to us. I looked at Dylan, who was fine, and I wondered what the next excuse I’d have to make up might be. That was enough to stop me cold.”