Up in Smoke

by Charlene Weir

  The wind was cold. It swept across her face and reached inside to tickle her lungs. She shivered and clamped her teeth to keep them from chattering. Work for Jack? She didn’t love him, that had died years ago. And she had no anger—that, too, had faded into the shadowy mists of the past. She did have some pitiful sad lingering strains of long ago love, but, in truth, she’d lived through far more disfiguring, destructive scars than any Jackson Garrett had inflicted.

  He reached down and took her hands from her pockets, held them in his. “Will you jump on this—it’s more a hay wagon than a bandwagon—and join Garrett For America?”

  “I don’t think so.” I won’t be around long enough to do you any good. She pulled her hands away and dredged up a smile. “Hey.” She tried for a light tone so he wouldn’t think she was just petulant. “What’s in it for me?”

  He grinned, same old grin. “Anything you want. Secretary of State?”

  Her return smile was involuntary. She took a step back, standing this close made her nervous. It was like standing beside a generator and feeling the hum of energy.

  “Let’s get inside,” he said. “It’s freezing.”

  The troopers followed at a discreet distance.

  “Wife, Governor.” Leon handed him a phone.

  “Hang on, Cass, let me just—” He took the phone. “Hello, Molly.”

  Even from where she stood, she could hear the angry snap on the other end. “Oh no,” Jack said. “Oh hell—well this thing just went on—no, no—I’m sorry—I got stuck—You know how it is—Tonight?” He put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Todd, were we supposed to meet with a Kansas City supporter tonight?”

  A low murmur of affirmative replied.

  “Well, God dammit, Todd, why didn’t you—Listen, Molly, here’s what—No—we’ll be right there—I know it’s late. Stay right where you are and—No, no. We’ll be there—I know that but—Molly?” He slammed down the phone. “Let’s go. Where’s the plane?”

  “Topeka.”

  “We’re there. Let’s get Molly and go on to Oklahoma City for that early morning meeting.”

  Papers got shoved in briefcases, jackets got pulled on. Jack picked out a sandwich and said to Cass, “We’ll talk more later. Todd! Where the hell is Todd?”

  “One step behind you, Governor.”

  “Yeah.” Leon had another phone to his ear. “Yep, yep, but Washington—they don’t want to commit themselves till they see what you can do. Don’t you worry. We’re doin’ great. They’re going to be poundin’ down our door.”

  “Let’s go, Leon,” Jack said. “Bernie!”

  “Right here, Governor.”

  “See that Cass gets taken care of.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  13

  Drugs, Cass thought, as she dragged herself into the house after Bernie brought her back from Jack’s farm. Wellbutrin. A handful. Bottle, make that a bottle of Wellbutrin. As she stuck the key in the lock, she heard the dog make its sing-songy whimpers of greeting and when she opened the door, the dog rushed to greet her. Monty the cat yelled abuse from the mantel.

  Right, life goes on. Kneeling, she hugged the dog who wriggled herself in a circle and slathered kisses on Cass’s face. Maybe Cass had been foolhardy to throw out all her chemical aids before she left Las Vegas. With dog and cat trailing, she went to the bathroom and checked the medicine cabinet, even though she knew it had nothing more lethal than a bottle of aspirin, and who could guess how old that was.

  The animals stared up at her. “Pretend, pretend, pretend,” she said. “Pretend everything’s all right.” A sob caught in her throat and she put her hands over her face. Drugs and relaxation exercises and talk talk talk. She’d grown sick to the bone of therapy talk, the visualizing, the journal writing. The talk of Survivor’s Guilt and every other emotion with Capital Letters. She was through with it. Denial was a perfectly good coping mechanism. Hundreds of people used it all the time. To hell with the Psychiatric Wisdom, you can’t run away from yourself.

  Who cares! Mind-numbing drugs, her entire being urged. It’s late, yes, but hospitals have emergency rooms. They have physicians who can write prescriptions. Antidepressants to relax. Sleeping pills to sleep. To let you lie down and close your eyes and …

  Stop it!

  Keep busy.

  Doing what? Her mind whimpered.

  The animals sat side by side in the doorway watching her. Feed the animals. Yes, right. She could feed Monty and the dog.

  Tail bristling with importance, Monty led the way to the kitchen. She opened the drawer to get the can opener and her eyes focused on the knife next to it. Ordinary, small paring knife. Black handle, bright blade. She held it up, turning it back and forth and the ceiling light glinted on the shiny surface. With a thumb, she tested the pointed end. Sharp. She could prick the vein pulsing in her wrist. Laying it flat across the old scars on her wrist, she pressed gently. It felt cool against her warm wrist. If she tilted it, the sharp end would be ready to cut. If she pushed down and drew it back and forth—

  The dog put its head against her hip and looked up at her, eyes worried.

  She threw the knife back and shoved the drawer shut, spooned out pet food and put the bowls in the expected places.

  The anniversary of the end of the world was coming. Five more days. October 31. Halloween. Trick or treat.

  That was some trick fate played on her. She was happy that day. It was a Friday. She’d been proud of herself. She’d just prosecuted a murder case and gotten a guilty verdict. Ted was home from Los Angeles where his firm had sent him to help with a high profile case of fraud. Laura was dancing with excitement because she was getting to wear her Tinker Bell costume. The three of them were on their way to see friends. Moms and kids were going out trick or treating, dads were staying home watching a football game. Laura never got any treats that Halloween, only a viciously cruel trick.

  A clown driving from a costume party, flying high on all the alcohol in his blood. Ted was killed instantly. Cass had no awareness of his last breath. Laura died in the hospital twelve hours later. The same hospital where Cass had been admitted for a crushed pelvis, broken left arm, concussion, and broken left collarbone.

  Laura’d been terrified. She cried out Mommy! Or at least, Cass thought she had. She must have because she heard the echo of that cry in her tortured dreams, beneath the rain just when it started to patter, beneath the call of a bird, faint and far away, and under the sound of violins. And she hadn’t answered.

  All those hours in intensive care. Had Laura been conscious any of that time? The physician said not, but Cass wasn’t sure she believed him. Images plagued her of a terrified Laura in the alien world of the hospital and in pain, waking and calling Mommy and getting no answer. What had Laura thought when Cass never answered?

  The doctors and nurses tended to Cass’s injuries, monitored her concussion, checked the progress of mending bones, and changed bandages on scrapes and cuts, but they didn’t notice the Black Dog of Depression crawling in.

  When Cass was released, the house mocked her. Everywhere she looked there’d be a reminder. One of Laura’s sneakers with the blinking flash on the side. So tiny. She was so little. So sweet. A towel of Ted’s flung over the shower stall the morning before he’d left. A tie pulled loose and flung over the back of a chair in the bedroom. She sat in one chair in the living room, a swivel chair she could turn to the wall, so she saw nothing but a white-painted surface. There she sat for hours at a time, unwashed, wearing an old stained robe, stringy hair unbrushed.

  A ghost self broke away and looked down on her with helpless dismay. It wrung its hands when friends came to pick her up for the double memorial service that should have occurred weeks earlier but was postponed until she was out of the hospital. Her ghost self noted the looks of horror on the friends’ faces, heard only as low-pitched twitter their murmurs of what to do, can’t go out like this. She felt nothing as she was manipulated like a store dummy into clothes. The memo
rial service was a blur. Brought home, helped into the house, cheery words masking looks of apprehension, and she was alone again.

  Silence. Time.

  Christmas came. Her ghost self pointed out the knives in the kitchen drawer, the bottles of drugs, of cleaning supplies, gauged the length of electrical cord and the drop off her deck, the gas connection of her clothes dryer.

  January came. Her ghost self started slipping its fingertips down her cheeks, clapping its hands, touching her shoulder. Like little fanged ants trying to rouse her.

  To get away from them, she left the house. She walked. Pulling on any odd garment that came to hand, she would go out. In the rain, getting soaked, her ghost self had to tell her she was cold. At the BART station, she stood on the platform and looked down at the tracks. Third rail, the lethal one. She watched the trains come in. Which one would she throw herself in front of? Sometimes she would just sit there all day.

  She had no feeling of hunger, but sometimes she ate. When his bowl had been empty for too long, Monty the cat yowled at her and she had just enough sense to dump in dry food. Her ghost self was appalled at her bedraggled appearance, unbathed and usually dressed in Ted’s old sweats. She took to carrying around his old backpack and like a bag lady picked up odd things that caught her eye, tabs from soft drink cans, small stones, or leaves. And newspapers. She stuffed them in the backpack and took them home to read, but when she got there, she simply stacked them up along the walls.

  Friends came. Her ghost self saw how they looked at her and the appalling condition of the house and then at each other. They wanted to take her to the supermarket, make an appointment with her doctor, clean up her house. When one of them offered to take Monty to the animal shelter, she stopped answering the door or the phone. Laura had loved Monty.

  If Cass slept at all, she slept in the doorway of Laura’s room, prepared to fight with fury anyone who might try to cross the threshold. The quiet house filled her with a dreadful anxiety. She would pace until she couldn’t breathe and then she’d race out the door. Once outside, she slowed to an apathetic shuffle, not caring where she went as long as she was moving. In her travels—and travel, she did, she must have walked twenty miles a day—she might stop at a convenience store and buy a carton of milk. She’d stick it in her backpack and find it days later, clotted and smelling.

  She barely noticed the weather and made no attempt to provide herself with a coat when it was cold or a hat when rain was soaking into her hair and staining her clothing. Her ghost self watched in helpless alarm. She stepped in front of a car. Brakes squealed and the driver cursed at her.

  Continuing to live without Ted and Laura was unthinkable. It was her neighbor who put an end to the down spiral. Concerned because he hadn’t seen her that day, he went in and found her bleeding her life away from deep cuts in her wrists.

  * * *

  Major depression. In some weird way, the diagnosis brought relief. A chemical imbalance in the brain. Triggered, perhaps, by the unbearable hand that Fate had dealt her. It didn’t mean she would always be a gibbering mass of smelly rags. It meant a crack had appeared in her brain, like a fault line with little branches running deep into her nervous system, from pressure so unbearable that madness was preferred.

  This time, in the hospital, she was in the psych ward. No sharp objects, no shoestrings, no buttons. She was aware of being watched, nurses always around, always careful never to leave a potential weapon. Meal trays came with plastic utensils and those were always made note of before the trays were taken away. Despite all the drugs—and she knew them only by color, a pink pill, a white one, a blue and white capsule—she had enough wits for another suicide try, a serious try. The same neighbor who had phoned 911 would continue taking care of Monty. She wanted to be dead.

  The only things she had to work with were what she had on. Hospital-issue short cotton gown and cotton pajama bottoms. She climbed up on the bed, tied one leg of the pajama bottoms to the grille over the window, tied the other leg around her neck, and stepped off the bed. She twisted in the air, first one way, then the other, slowly strangling.

  A nurse making rounds found her. Though she wasn’t aware of it, they did the whole emergency bit, CPR, crash cart, stat this and stat that. She was more interesting than television for a time. That was the end of it. After her third failed attempt at suicide, she gave up. Someone contacted Aunt Jean who came on the wind.

  Cass fell into the routines of the hospital, a routine of mindless, soothing sameness. She had no decisions to make. Swamped by drugs, she went where she was told, did what she was told, ate what was put in front of her. After a time, she found that in spite of herself, the pressure of bleak hopelessness in her mind lessened a tiny bit. She began to notice things other than her own miserableness, became aware of the other people on the ward and the nurses.

  Then one day the lunch tray included a cup of custard. She picked up the plastic spoon, dipped it in the smooth surface and tasted what was on the spoon. She hated custard. She put the spoon down and let the tray go back, custard uneaten.

  She had made a decision of her very own.

  On the day Aunt Jean left for home, she brought Cass a card. On the front was a gnarled and bent little creature with a tiny lantern. Under it read: The good news is, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Inside the card said: The bad news is, this is it. When Cass smiled, Aunt Jean hugged her and said, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Cass wasn’t back, of course. She’d never be back, not in the sense of being the same as she was before Ted and Laura were killed, but it was a small start and she began to break through the gray and let in a little color now and then. When she was released, she had gone home and collected Monty from the neighbor.

  The dog pressed against her leg. She gave it an absent pat and went into the living room to Aunt Jean’s desk. Opening the drawer made the bullets clink together. The old revolver had belonged to Ted’s father. Cass had hated it and several times told Ted to get rid of it. He always said he would; she was thankful now he never had.

  She swung out the cylinder and pushed in a bullet, hesitated, then pushed in a second.

  14

  Sunday was one of those freaky warm days that happen sometimes just when everybody’s all set for Fall. After the buckets of rain, the air was thick and wet, kinda’ like slimy bologna. Tony rubbed his face with the crook of his arm, shrugged off his fleece jacket and tied it around his waist. “Hey, Max, wait up!”

  He pushed his Razor scooter hard to catch up with his friend. “Why do we have to go way out to the county road?”

  “Because it’s the highest hill around.”

  “There’s plenty of closer hills.”

  “Scared?” Max spurted ahead, weaving his Razor in and out of parked cars along Main Street.

  Tony planted a foot on the sidewalk, gave a hefty push and rode the narrow scooter until it started to slow, then gave another push. At the intersection, he bounced off the curb and zipped into the street.

  Brakes squealed. “Hey, kid, you wanna’ live to grow up!”

  Max had them going straight through downtown, store windows all full of Halloween stuff. Once they got past all the stores and stuff, there was hardly any traffic. Max spun tight turns, deliberately slid on wet leaves in the gutters, and zigged and zagged back and forth across the street. Tony just kept slogging, wondering if it was worth it. They kept going, they crossed the bridge and kept going, hung a left on Garden Street and kept going, all the way out to the county road. What a mushbrain Max was. The road was pocked with potholes and every one filled with rain water.

  Noggin’s Hill was halfway to nowhere. Nobody ever said why it was called Noggin’s Hill. Tony thought he ought to ask his uncle Osey. Osey knew lots of weird things like that.

  “See?” Max said. “Isn’t this great?”

  “Yeah. Great.” Tony rode up beside Max and looked down. He never realized how really high Noggin’s Hill was.

  Max farted a
round trying to find the exact middle of the road, eyeing the downhill slope and scooting his Razor an inch this way, an inch that way.

  “You gonna ride or spend the rest of your life measurin’?”

  Max took off, yelling, “Geronimo!” The Razor flew, straight as an arrow downhill, through the hollow at the bottom and started up the other side.

  Max pulled his scooter off the road and shot his fist in the air. “Yeah! The Champ and Best There Is!” Shielding his eyes with one hand, he looked up at Tony. “Beat that!”

  Tony wheeled his Razor to the middle of the road and looked down the hill. Uh-huh. He realized what Max had been doing before. Stalling. Tony followed his example, moved a little to the right, a little to the left.

  “Come on!” Max yelled. “We don’t have all day.”

  Tony shoved off, put both feet on the four-inch wide scooter deck and sailed down the road. Yes! He’d get higher up the other side. Doing great! Oh no! Rock! He tried to swerve. The scooter took a right turn leap off the road, juddered over mud, rocks, and rotten green stuff. Momentum shot him over a rise and sent him crashing down the other side. He smashed into a blue Mustang, fell off and the Razor kept right on going and then toppled over in dead leaves.

  “Tony!”

  Max came skidding down the slope sideways on wet leaves and muddy gunk. “Wow, man! You all right?”

  Tony retrieved his scooter and examined it for damage.

  “Trying to kill yourself?” Max stepped back and looked at the car. He walked his Razor around it. “Hey, how come this car’s sitting here like this?”

  Tony swiped a sleeve across his nose and rubbed his elbow. “I think I broke my arm.”

  “Can you bend it?”

  Tony tried. “Yeah, but it hurts.”

  “If you can bend it, it’s fine. Don’t be such a baby. Boy, look what you did to this car.” Max rubbed a scratch on the shiny blue paint.

  “You retard. That was already there.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe you better get out of here before the owner comes back and wrings your neck.” Max looked around. “Where is the owner anyway?”