Gravity

by Liz Crowe

  Kayla leaned into him. He put an arm around her, feeling her tense the second he touched her. “Thanks. Now, if we sneak out, I think we can…”

  He dropped his arm and turned her so they were facing each other. She was so hopeful, so damn beautiful it was painful to disappoint her. “Kayla. We can’t just take her. They’d find us and we’d be in a shit load of trouble. You know that. I know that. Let’s hand her over and then we’ll—”

  “No!” She pulled away, glaring at him. “You don’t know shit, Brock Fitzgerald. I don’t care if you are an addict. You were a fucking rich boy junkie. Your mommy and daddy took care of you all the way through. You have no fucking idea what it’s like to be in the God damned system. And she’s already been through so much…”

  “Kayla…I’m…”

  “You’ll never understand. She’ll get shuttled around, probably abused…”

  Brock realized that a couple of new people had joined the group down the hall. Two women in cheap suits, holding file folders and wearing fake-sympathetic expressions. For a moment, he pitied them and their horrific job. He held up a hand, keeping them all at bay for a few more minutes.

  “We can’t just take her. You know that. Kayla, look at me.”

  She shook her head, keeping her face pressed into the child’s shoulder as she backed up until she hit the wall between a pair of elevator doors. He walked up to her, as if approaching a rabid animal trapped under a porch. She clutched the child closer, shaking her head, tears streaming down her face. But when he tugged the girl, she let her go. As if resigned to her fate, the girl remained silent, even as she reached for Kayla before giving up and shoving her thumb back in her mouth.

  “It will be all right,” he assured everyone, including himself. “I’ll talk to them. See if they’ll consider us…uh…me or you…for temporary placement.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she spat out, swiping at her eyes. “That’ll never fucking happen.”

  He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Because she was right.

  “It’s fine. I don’t care. Take her.”

  He handed the child off to the suited ladies, who scurried away, avoiding any further scenes. All the residual adrenaline he’d been floating on for the last few minutes flew out of him, leaving him depleted and weak, wanting a drink and a hit. He sighed and turned to Kayla, hoping they might salvage something, a friendship maybe, based on this shared fucked up experience.

  She’d slid to the floor and now sat, elbows on her knees, staring into the air in front of her. He dropped down next to her, unsure what to do or say. “You’re right, you know,” he managed, leaning forward, parroting her stance. “About me being the rich asshole-type of junkie.”

  “I know that,” she said, her voice devoid of any affect whatsoever. “That kid doesn’t have a fucking chance. You know that, right? She’s doomed. Just like I was.”

  “Well, maybe not.”

  She scoffed and rose, leaving him down on the filthy floor, staring up at her. “Thanks for the ride,” she said, keeping her voice light.

  “Wait, hang on. Let’s go…eat something.”

  “Not hungry.” She was already striding toward the exit door.

  He sat for a solid five minutes after she’d stomped out, watching the hospital’s ER staff close in around the space she’d just vacated. Making it seem as if she’d never existed.

  Chapter Eleven

  The darkness had been closing in ever since she realized she had to be the one to take the damn kid to the hospital. She’d fought it as long and as hard as she could. Using the child as a barrier against it, of course. Praying that it would see how good she was, how responsible she was being.

  But once the tiny, smelly, human shield had been ripped from her arms, the darkness had descended, chuckling under its breath, whispering her name. She couldn’t even remember what she’d said to Brock before walking away from him. As she stumbled out into the warm evening air, mumbling apologies to all the people she kept running into in her near-blind clumsiness, the sensation of wanting to leap out of her skin and hide under the nearest rock had never been sharper.

  By the time she realized that she had no car here, that they’d gone to that stupid fucking meeting in Brock’s car, then to this god-forsaken hospital, she also realized that plenty of alarmed civilians were eyeballing her. And no wonder. She must’ve looked like she was coming down off a bad trip—wild hair, sweaty, pale, mumbling about a nonexistent car.

  With a hard wrench to her psyche, she forced herself to stand up straight, pull her damp hair into a half-normal ponytail and to take deep breaths. After a few seconds, she believed all the gawkers had moved on, headed toward the hospital intent on their own individual traumas. Leaning on the nearest car hood, she watched for a few minutes, reminding herself that nothing had changed. She had a job. A place to live. A start on a real life—one that included an actual family in the form of her brother and his daughter.

  Nothing had changed.

  But for that poor kid. That hungry, dehydrated, stinky little kid, made an orphan in front of her damn eyes, thanks to the junk her mother had shoved into her arm, or up her nose. The same junk that she, Kayla, craved right now so hard it created physical pain between her temples, tightness in her chest, shivers all through her body.

  “Oh fuck,” she muttered as she squatted in front of the car, trying to catch her breath. “Fuck…fuck…” She pressed her hands into her eye sockets and dropped to her butt. Her ears were ringing so loud she couldn’t hear the traffic from the nearby interstate.

  She didn’t even like kids. What was her flipping problem, anyway? Jesus. The stupid mother had killed herself in front of her own child, sure. And the little girl was already malnourished and filthy. God only knew what conditions she’d been living in, and for how long. And she was also skittish around men—even one as kid-friendly as Brock Fitzgerald.

  The tiny pebbles and other crap on the asphalt parking lot cut into her knees and palms but she couldn’t feel it. Because that was what she needed—to feel something. Anything. She had to do something to release the pressure building under her skin, stretching it so tight she felt like an over-inflated balloon.

  With a loud gasp that startled an older couple on their way into the emergency room entrance, she lurched to her feet and started walking. This was the shit-hole hospital in the shit-hole end of town not very far at all from her shit-hole dump of a flop house. Why not walk there?

  Why not indeed?

  She pulled out her phone and plugged in the address, noting that she would do well to consider her brother’s offer to replace the thing—the long-cracked screen was beginning to flicker almost non-stop. But she hated the concept of taking anything from him, no matter he could afford to buy her six phones, two cars, and a house, if she’d let him.

  It was almost dark by the time she shoved open the sticky front door of what was an abandoned warehouse partitioned into tiny, non-conforming living spaces. A giant firetrap was what it was, but they had strict rules about open flames—candles or anything else. Most people adhered to it—although she’d smelled her fair share of weed and cigarettes.

  Her living space was on the fourth floor, in the corner, with an actual window and as she made her slow way there, all she could envision was the pain. And how she’d inflict it.

  “Try this,” one man had advised, when he’d finished with her and she’d been curled into a ball in the corner of the hotel room. “It’ll help.”

  She’d looked up at him through her stringy hair, confused by the pill bottle with the blank label.

  “Go on,” he’d said, swiping his sweaty face with one hand and shaking the bottle with the other. “Jesus.” She hadn’t moved so he’d tossed at her head.

  The first round, pearl-like pill she’d swallowed had made her throw up within the hour. But before that, the pain had indeed subsided. So she’d taken another one, with a few bites of stale cereal, and it had stayed down. She’d kept the bottle
hidden from her stepfather for a month, but when she’d run out, her body had gone into a terrifying free-fall, which had scared him so he’d left her alone for a while as she’d sweated and shivered and puked her way through her first unwelcome detox at the tender age of sixteen.

  By the time he’d decided she was well enough to resume making money for him, her intense need for more magic pills had forced her out of her shocked stupor and she’d formulated her escape plan.

  She shoved the door to her space open and fell onto her mattress, sweaty and shivery, as if she were coming down from a bad high. But she wasn’t. She hadn’t used in almost six years. But God help her, it was as if she’d only just had her last hit. As if the past five-plus years being clean hadn’t even happened. It was so damned unfair.

  Her gut cramped. She groaned and curled into a ball. The skin-tightening sensation got worse, making her afraid that if she moved too much, her epidermis would crack and split, exposing everything in her to the outside air.

  She felt along the space between her mattress and the prefab wall while keeping her eyes tight shut, willing away the onrushing, various unhealthy urges. When her fingertips touched the tiny plastic baggie, she counted to ten, then twenty, before tugging it free. Hot tears rolled down the sides of her face as she lay back and studied the contents of the bag.

  A small box of blades, some not-too-clean bandages, a half-empty tube of antibiotic ointment—expired, she noted. She was still trembling but no longer crying as she dumped everything onto the threadbare sheet. The thin slice of cold metal felt good between her thumb and finger. So good, she held on to it a while—how long she had no concept but for the loud entry of her fellow halfway-house inmates.

  The urge to cut had come upon her during the last part of her stay at the rehab camp. Once she had been assured that her body was not her own. It never would be. She’d come to view it from a distance—a coping mechanism, one of the chattering group leaders had called it once. She didn’t even like to touch her own skin after a while, which had led to brutal episodes wrestling her into a shower as she’d kicked and screamed and flailed so hard she’d managed to blacken her stepfather’s eye once.

  Once.

  As an adult in the stupid detox camp, trading blow jobs and quickies behind the garden shed to get the short relief of a cheap cig or spliff, that sensation had come roaring back, leading to an adjustment to her meds, leaving her loopy and woozy twenty-four-seven. Once she’d started holding the new drugs under her tongue and spitting them out, she was ready for all the assholes who’d come at her, thinking they could take yet more advantage of her.

  She sighed, shoving all the memories of all the men and all the times she’d been used without her permission out of her head. She had control now. The razor blade flashed in the moonlight from her window as she rolled it between her knuckles, pondering its potential, how much she wanted it, how the pain of cuts on her arms must be how some people felt about sex. How normal people felt about sex—as a release, a pleasure, even enjoyable.

  “Fuck that,” she spat out, sitting up and yanking off her shirt and dingy bra. Her skin pebbled and her nipples hardened but she didn’t look at them. They weren’t hers after all. Not them. Not her mouth or her hands. Most especially not what she had between her legs. None of it belonged to her. It never had.

  But the razor—it was hers and hers alone. The odd sensation running down her spine was just the precursor to the pleasure. The only pleasure she had ever found in her own body and she had one of the assholes at the camp to thank.

  “Here,” he’d said, handing her the first tiny plastic box full of relief. “Go on. Try it. You might like it.”

  She had liked it. A lot. So much that she’d ended up in the infirmary with nasty infections in both her arms and put into solitary for a month. A month she’d spent throwing her thin frame against the four walls, seeking something resembling sensation, even if it came in the form of pain and bruises.

  She’d figured out that she’d never get out of there unless she stopped acting like a total whack job. And after two weeks of eating, drinking water, and not saying much, she’d been released back into the general population of losers. And she’d learned to treat each cut with antibiotic ointment and cover them with the bandages she’d snag from the infirmary.

  She hadn’t cut herself in months, however. She’d even admit to forgetting the need, what with exhausting herself working the bar almost every day or night. And with the effort to show a normal face to Trent and Taylor. They’d never love her the way they claimed to if they knew all her awful, disgusting truths.

  With a cry of pleasure a few people inhabiting the cubicles around her took for sexual, she pressed the blade into the scar tissue on her left biceps. The blood bubbled then flowed and her cry turned to a low, satisfied moan as she sat watching it, using the razor again, and again, too much, she knew, but she was simply unable to stop herself.

  The pressure under her skin diminished by the blood-letting. And it felt so good, like the sweetest release. Too late, she realized there was too much blood. She was slipping around in it on the cheap linoleum. But when she tried to get up to find a towel, her vision went wonky, making her curse and fall sideways, face down on her mattress.

  Her last thought was of Brock, of his face when she’d walked away from him in the crappy hospital. Of how handsome he was, and how stupid she was to think she might be normal, for him.

  Chapter Twelve

  Brock sat in his new office chewing the end of a pencil and pondering the computer screen in front of him. He’d only managed an hour or so of sleep the night before and his mind felt as if it were covered by a heavy blanket. Austin had given him the new space, with a nameplate on the door and everything as CEO of the Fitzgerald Charitable Fund. More make-work, he realized, but at least he had a bit of autonomy.

  He’d already lined up a couple of interns, eager poli-sci and sociology majors with mad internet skills from the local university. They were tapping away in the adjacent room, setting up their website and establishing a social media presence. The chair he’d liberated from the office furniture cemetery squeaked as he rotated, unable to settle or focus and not just for lack of sleep.

  “Hey,” a voice called from the half-open door, startling him out of his semi-trance. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Kayla today, have you?”

  He blinked and sipped his coffee gone long cold, trying to figure out who was talking to him. When Melody materialized, he put her together with the words and stood up fast, worry hitting his brain and snapping it out of its fugue. “No. I don’t… I don’t even know her phone number. Why?”

  Melody crossed her arms and frowned. “I don’t know. Thought you might.”

  He rolled his eyes and turned away from her, not wanting her to see how his face had flushed. “Junkies don’t just know each other’s info automatically, you know. I mean, we are a club unto ourselves and all but…”

  “Spare me.” Her voice was sharp.

  “Sorry. But no, I haven’t. And I’ll repeat my original question. Why?” The memory of her angry, hurt expression filled his mind but he repressed it with a firm mental shove.

  “She was supposed to open the bar today.” Melody glanced at her watch. “But when I got here, the kitchen staff said no one had shown up at all.” She sighed and slumped against the door frame. “Shit. I hope she’s all right. I mean…you know.”

  “Yeah.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and scrolled around, wondering if he’d somehow managed to capture Trent’s number at some point. Which he hadn’t. He tossed the device down on his desk and rubbed his face, trying to wake himself all the way up. “We had a sort of bad time, yesterday I mean.”

  “Oh?” Her dark eyebrows raised. He could sense her protective hackles rising.

  He held up a hand. “Hold on. Stop jumping to all the shitty conclusions I see floating around behind your eyes.”

  Her frown deepened. “Just tell me what happened.�
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  He sighed and shoved his hand down in his pockets, wondering where in the world he should start.

  “Start at the beginning, Fitzgerald. Then I gotta call her brother and tell him. Make it fast.” She snapped her fingers in his face.

  He told her everything—from Kayla’s rough start, needing a midday group meeting fix, all the way through to the be-suited bureaucrats wrenching the crying child out of her arms.

  Melody’s eyes were brimming with tears when he finished.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rough. “I shouldn’t have… I don’t know…shit.”

  “You did fine.” She put her hand on his arm. “You did the only things you could in such a crappy situation. I have to call Trent now. We need to check on her.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He watched, helpless while Melody relayed the story to Kayla’s brother in a condensed form and they agreed to meet at the halfway house where Kayla lived. “I want to come with you,” he said, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair.

  She gave him the better part of a hairy eyeball for a few seconds then shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. But don’t expect a happy greeting from her brother. He is royally pissed and is going to blame you, even though that’s wrong.”

  “Eh. I’m used to taking the blame for random shit. I want to see for myself she’s all right.”

  The drive through the industrial area between the brewery and where Kayla lived was made in total silence but for the computerized instructions from the SUV’s navigation program. When she pulled up in front of an abandoned warehouse and stopped, they both peered up at the rattletrap building in wonder. “This can’t be it,” he said.

  “It is, though.” She pointed to the address on the navigation screen. “Let’s go.” She turned off the ignition at the same time as a classic Jeep screeched into the lot next to them and Trent jumped out, glowering at him before giving Melody a quick kiss and mumbling something to her in Spanish.