by Nancy Rue
“How’s it going?”
Oh—bad question.
“Do you have a minute?”
Allison. Just ask.
“Have y’all seen Geneveve?”
The bigger one of the pair jerked her chin. “Geneveve who?”
I had no idea. “You have more than one Geneveve around here?” I said.
The smaller girl grunted. It sounded like it may have been a laugh at one time, when she remembered how. She closed off when the other woman cut her with a look. To me, the bigger woman said, “Who wants to know?”
“Someone with a message for her,” I said. At least I remembered one of the lines I’d practiced. Even though at close range both of them looked like a healthy breeze would knock them over, my heart was slamming in my chest.
The woman pointed a finger toward the next block. I could almost see the bones in it trembling beneath the brittle skin. “She down there. In ’at bar.”
I followed her point. “The Magic Moment?” I said.
“Mmm-hmmm. She in trouble?”
I was surprised by the question, for some reason. Of course, all of this was a surprise to me. Like the birthday party you didn’t want.
“No,” I said. “I just have some information for her.”
“She down there.” This time she didn’t seem to be able to point. How did these women come up with the energy to do what they did when they had to do it? Old Ed was in better shape than they were.
The woman poked her smaller friend and the two drifted toward the tattoo place. I started up my bike, then just sat there.
If Geneveve was inside the bar, that would necessitate my going in too. Maybe I could bribe somebody to go in and fetch her for me. Everybody I saw looked like they had their price.
With that as my only plan, I drove down the block and across the street and parked in front of the Magic Moment. The only thing magical about it was that it was still standing. Duct tape held one whole corner of the front window together, and the doorsill sagged like a fat man’s belt. There weren’t as many customers hanging out in the doorway as at the other bars, although I couldn’t understand how anybody lasted long inside. Even from the curb I could smell the saturation of stale beer and cigarettes.
Someone tapped my shoulder. I gasped and waited to die.
“She ain’t gon’ come out anytime soon,” a barely audible voice rasped just outside my helmet.
I turned to see the bigger of the two woman sidling herself onto the rear fender of my Harley.
“How long do you think it’ll be?” I said, as if it had even occurred to me to just wait for Geneveve out here.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much it worth to you.”
So I’d been right. I dug into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out a roll of bills—a twenty disguising a dozen ones. I’d seen that done on Burn Notice.
She reached for it, but I stuffed it inside my jacket, near my now soon-to-be-imploding heart. “When you bring her out,” I said.
She didn’t have to be told twice but inserted herself unnoticed between two inebriated bookends at the door and disappeared inside. I refused to think about what she was going to do with the $32. Did that even buy enough dope for a fix anymore? I’d lost touch with the drug world after I quit working at the rehab center in Orange County in ’91. Back then the fifty bucks our graduates were given when they left the place was plenty to get them right back in before the week was out.
“You got you a Haawwwg, Mama?”
I jerked my head away from the doorway. A group had arranged themselves in front of me on the street. There were only four guys, but it might as well have been a mob. They would have blended with the inky blackness of the place if not for the paltry neon Coors Light sign in the Magic Moment’s window and the gold teeth every one of them seemed to possess. I should have such a dental plan.
The one who’d spoken—the only one who appeared coherent enough—approached me, leading with his pelvis.
“You come down here to give me a ride, Mama? Pretty Ma-ma?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t take passengers.”
How lame was that? It was the best I could come up with under extreme distress. The only thing keeping me there was the fact that I was frozen to the seat. With sweat gushing down the back of my neck.
“Come on, now. Every other mama down here for hire. But ain’t one of ’em got what you got.”
He stroked his hand across the fender, and I was close to throwing up on him when the now familiar female voice said, “Go on now—she ain’t got nothin’ for you.”
My woman shooed them off with her hand, to which they responded with comments that rapidly escalated in crudeness. I zeroed in on the figure behind her and gasped before I could stop myself.
She was little more than a fragile collection of bones clothed in sallow-brown flesh. Her eyes would have engulfed her tiny face if they hadn’t been sunken into her skull. How could she be a prostitute? If anyone touched her, she would surely crush like onionskin between their fingertips.
Please, God, tell me this isn’t her.
“You got my money?”
The other woman, who now looked hearty in comparison, was close enough for her sour smell to nearly knock me over. She talked tightly between her few teeth that meth hadn’t eaten away, her back to the gold-toothed crew who were now watching from the corner with feigned disinterest.
I put my hand over my jacket pocket and nodded at the tiny figure behind her.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Geneveve,” she said, in a whisper that wouldn’t have blown out a match.
“What’s your daddy’s name?”
“Edwin Sanborn.”
“You gon’ give me my money, or do I got to turn them dudes on you?”
I pulled out the wad and slipped it to the other woman without taking my eyes off Geneveve. The woman skittered away like a rabid squirrel, leaving me alone on West King Street with old Ed’s daughter.
“My daddy sick?” she said.
I was surprised she’d been able to figure that much out, but I just nodded. “He wants to see you.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“He’s dying,” I said. “And he asked for you.”
I expected her to ask who I was, but she seemed to be accustomed to strangers bringing her bad news. Either that, or she was too strung out to care.
“Why can’t you?” I said.
“I got no way to get there.”
“I’ll take you,” I said.
Dear God, had I just said, “I’ll take you?” Or was that God himself talking?
She shook her head, but the sunken eyes were swimming. “I can’t let him see me like this.”
“He doesn’t have to. I’ll get you cleaned up.”
There was no use fighting it. It was just coming out of my mouth. And the Gold Tooth Crew was once again sauntering across the street toward us.
“Get on,” I said. “We have to hurry.”
It took another frantic nod of my helmet to get her to climb onto the seat behind me. What Milestone was this, “carrying a passenger”? Hank would pull my certificate. Bonner would have a seizure.
It couldn’t matter, because I barely got the bike in first before the Gold Teeth were in range. I took the corner of Davis and West King at a hard lean and hauled us away from them. This wouldn’t count as carrying a passenger anyway. I wouldn’t have known the wisp of a woman was even behind me if not for the arms wrapped around my waist, clinging like a koala bear. Both of us were shaking.
Prayers were never prayed so hard as those that came out of me before we got to Palm Row. I didn’t drive the Classic like I stole her. I drove her like I had ten Na
zis and a pack of dogs chasing me. I gave God the credit for getting us there, where I half-carried Geneveve into the house. She probably had no idea that I was barely remaining vertical myself.
Inside, under the kitchen lights, I decided “I’ll clean you up” was going to entail more than a toothbrush and a change of clothes. Her eyes were caked with something hard and crusty, and her hair hung in locks that were more than dreadful. I got her upstairs and ran a bath and suggested she get in while I rifled through my closet for something that wouldn’t swallow her. I located a knit tunic I’d bought in a moment of optimism several diets ago and knocked on the bathroom door.
“I’ll hang this on the doorknob out here for when you’re ready,” I said. “I’m going down to make you some food.”
Silence.
“Geneveve?”
When there was still no answer, I clawed past a vision of her drowned in three inches of water, threw open the door, and found her curled up on the rug, half-naked and shivering.
“I couldn’t get in,” she said.
“Okay.”
I toyed with the idea of a quick sponge bath, but it wouldn’t make a dent in the odor that oozed from her. I’d smelled swamps I could tolerate better.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll just lift you in, clothes and all. Those are going in the wash anyway.”
On second thought they were going in the trash, but first things first. I picked her up and set her in the water, which seemed to perk her up enough to peel off the tank top and the dental floss she was calling underwear. I didn’t let her see me holding them with thumb and index finger as I carried them away.
When I returned, she was holding onto the side of the tub, lips trembling.
“I can’t sit up,” she said.
If she didn’t sit up, she was going to drown. I could do nothing else but hold her with one hand and bathe her with the other, all the while praying that the van would start, because there was no way I was putting her back on my motorcycle. Naked, her emaciation was even more shocking. I should be taking her to a hospital.
Once she was dressed—looking like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes—I brought a turkey sandwich and hot cup of coffee with cream upstairs to her. The little she ate of it was enough to enable her to stand up. And to start crying, in hard, tearless sobs.
“What?” I said. “We’ll get there in time. I think he’ll wait for you.”
Her eyes bulged only slightly from their sunken sockets. “I’m scared.”
“Scared?” I said. “Geneveve, you were just in a bar where people get stabbed monthly. That is scary. This—is your father.”
“He so disappointed in the way I turned out. I let him down so many times.”
“You’ve got one more chance not to,” I said. “And this is the most important one of all.” I spoke with more conviction than I felt.
She let me guide her back to the garage, but she was still shaking her head when I hoisted her into the van.
“I know about dads and disappointment,” I said.
She looked at me hopefully, but I couldn’t say anything more to reassure her. Her father wanted a reason to believe in her. That I didn’t know about fathers.
Although the front door of the convalescent center was still unlocked when we got there, it was long past visiting hours and the hall lights had been dimmed. Fortunately there was no one at the nurses’ station, so I smuggled Geneveve into her father’s room and closed the door behind us. Her lips were so dry with terror that I could hear them sticking together. I had to push her to the bed, afraid at every step that I’d break one of her brittle bones.
Ed appeared to be in a twilight sleep. His eyelids were thin as tissue under the ghostly recessed light above his bed, and I could almost see his life ebbing away beneath them. The monitor was still beeping, though, faintly but steadily. I didn’t realize until then that I’d basically been holding my breath ever since I picked Geneveve up from the street.
She leaned into me and quivered, every breath she took rattling in her throat. I took her hand and placed it over Ed’s swollen one. His eyes fluttered open.
“Geneveve?” he said. “Genny Girl—that you?”
“I’m here, Daddy,” she said.
He turned his head toward her, and his eyes glowed back from the edge of wherever he’d been headed.
“I knew you’d be comin’.” he said.
“’Course, Daddy.”
She talked so low that if he could hear her, I’d be surprised. But, then, he didn’t seem to need to. As he pulled her hand to his face and sighed into it, I faded to the wall.
“You all right, Baby?” he said.
“I’m so good, Daddy.”
“You ain’t usin’?”
I held my breath, but she said the right words.
“No, I’m clean.”
“And?” He garbled a name.
“Yeah, him, too. It’s okay, Daddy.”
“All right then. All right.”
His eyes closed.
“Daddy?” Geneveve clawed at the bedclothes. “Daddy?”
“He’s still with us, Geneveve,” I said. “See—the monitor? He’s just sleeping.”
The door flew open, and a wide man with a mullet filled the room.
“Excuse me—what’s the deal here?” he said.
“She needed to see her father,” I said.
“You can’t just come in here without—”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’re going.”
Geneveve was already on the verge of coming completely apart, and I knew a sharp word from him at this point could cut her right open. I uncurled her fingers from the sheet and tugged her toward the door.
“He’s stable right now,” the nurse said, in a gentler voice. “Bring her back in the morning, and she can stay with him as long as she wants.”
Although it irritated me, I couldn’t blame him for talking about Geneveve like she wasn’t in the room. She was so eerily quiet now, she was almost invisible.
She stayed that way until I started up the van.
“Where can I take you?” I said.
“It don’t matter,” she said. “Just back to the—”
“Y’know what?” I said. “You’ve just had a pretty rough couple of hours. Maybe you need some—time off.”
My foot was once again halfway down my throat, but she just stared straight through the windshield as if everything she was able to feel had just been spent.
“Let me take you home,” I said.
She shook her head. Another faux pas on my part. She probably didn’t want me to see where she lived.
“All right, let’s do this. I’ll pay for a night at a hotel—just so you can get some rest. Tomorrow could be a rough day. You need someplace quiet—I know I do when I’m stressed out.”
I let that peter out as she continued to shake her head. When she didn’t stop, I realized it wasn’t me she was saying no to.
There were several fairly inexpensive motels on Route 1 that never showed up in the crime news. I pulled into a Knight’s Inn and turned to her.
“This look okay to you?”
She nodded, but I was sure she wasn’t even seeing it.
When I’d seen her into a room on the second floor, away from the noise of the highway, I stood with my hand on the door knob while she perched like a frightened bird on the edge of the bed.
“Get some sleep,” I said. “They’ve got a free breakfast here, so have something to eat in the morning … okay?”
She nodded again.
“Good night, then,” I said. “I’ll be praying for you and your dad.”
She didn’t answer. Her silence followed me all the way home, where I perched on the edge of my own bed an
d wondered if any of it had made any difference at all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I didn’t turn my cell phone back on until seven the next morning, when I’d finally given up trying to sleep. I’d been awake since three, reliving my Sunday from The Twilight Zone. When I did check my calls, there was one from Bonner, which I skipped, and one from Lonnie telling me I had a group of fifth graders at ten o’clock—from “SBA.” That was Lonnie-code for Spoiled Brat Academy. I was grateful for the distraction. Spoiled Brats I could do. Visions of Geneveve and Ed and the Gold Tooth Crew—not so much.
As I was going out the kitchen door, I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine, which I forgot to check most of the time; I should probably get rid of the landline anyway.
I poked the button and was greeted with a cobweb of a voice.
“Allison? This is Miz Vernell. Your next-door neighbor.”
Yes. For the last forty years.
“I don’t like to complain….”
What was she talking about? That was her career.
“But that … motorbike you’re driving … it’s too loud. Surely you can find a way to quiet it down when you drive it here on our street.”
There was a pause as if she’d forgotten she was talking to a recording and expected me to answer.
“Thank you for taking care of that,” she said. Another expectant pause. “Well … good-bye.”
I pushed the delete button. Yeah, I definitely needed to get rid of the landline.
The morning I stepped out into was Florida September at its finest. No wind. Minimal humidity. Sun softly dissolving the fog and leaving a sky of seamless blue. It was perfect for a bike ride, but since I didn’t know where the mute button was, I opted for the van. Normally I would have walked on such a day, but I had a detour I wanted to make before I went to the stables.
Because despite my leaning toward forgetting yesterday and everything in it, my brain wouldn’t leave it alone. Maybe if I just went by the Knight’s Inn and made sure Geneveve had made it through the night, I could put it all out of my mind. Ed had gotten to see her. That was plenty on my part, right?
When I pulled around to the back of the hotel, the door to Geneveve’s room was wide open, and the maid’s cart was parked outside. Geneveve must be having breakfast while her room was being made up. Odd, though, that they’d clean it before she checked out.
