First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  “Please go to them, Mom. You have to use all the services you can get, right? Take what you can.” That was what she had always told me to do with my own life: get whatever I could from anyone, everyone.

  “If you went with me, it would be easier,” she wheedled, but I had a once-a-week limit with her. Too much more, and I got sucked into her chaos. I had learned the hard way that I had to have serious boundaries with my mom.

  “I can’t go with you,” I explained. “I have to work, remember? Last week, I got a new client in Grosse Pointe. Here’s where they live.” I slid my phone across the table to show her some pictures of the Tollman house, and she oohed and aahed for a while about how fancy it was.

  “So empty,” she said admiringly, smearing the glass with grease from her chili fries as she swiped from beautiful room to beautiful room. “It’s like no one even lives there!”

  Whereas, her own apartment looked like it was inhabited by squirrels saving for the winter, even after I had cleaned it that morning. “I know, right?” I agreed. “But look at this.” I showed her pictures of Mrs. Tollman’s hoarder room, and my mom’s eyes lit up.

  “She’s hiding it! She just shoves it all in there, packing it away. The lying bitch!” she crowed in a very loud voice, and everyone else in the restaurant stared.

  “Exactly,” I murmured, trying to clue her in to quiet down. If I said it outright, her feelings would be hurt and she’d probably get louder.

  “What else do you know about them?” she asked, only slightly more calmly.

  I told her about Mr. Tollman’s affair, their house on the beautiful island called Grand Cayman, the roll of money under their son Wilder’s bed, how much they had spent to re-do their kitchen. I left out Leighton’s pot, because it was never a good idea to discuss drugs around my mom.

  “Everybody’s got something,” she said with satisfaction. “We all have something to hide.”

  Sometimes my mom was right on. I let my hand stray to my necklace and press against the slight bump it made under my shirt. “I have to go. I’m meeting Kash later.” I was really going to see Rella, but my mom hated her, so I didn’t say that.

  “Oh, Kash is so handsome,” my mom gushed. “When are you bringing him over to meet me?” She had seen pictures of him, but I had never even considered introducing the two of them.

  “Soon,” I said, and that was enough to make her nod and forget about it for now. She put on lipstick as I put down cash for our lunch and we walked out of the restaurant together. A light rain had started to fall and my mom went faster, not wanting it to mess up her hair.

  “Slow down, ok?” I asked. “I’m a little…” I was still walking like a robot, stiff and sore.

  “You’re young, Izzie!” Jade laughed and grabbed my arm to pull me. I gasped and tried to jerk away.

  But my mom held onto my wrist and used her other hand to tug my sweatshirt sleeve. She stuck out her bottom lip thoughtfully when she saw the purple and blue bruise on my forearm.

  “Kash?” she asked me, and nodded sympathetically.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, sighing.

  “They’re all the same,” she said, but she held my arm a lot more gently and we walked, not ran, back to my car.

  ∞

  Rory

  It had been a bad idea to come tonight, but I had gone along with it anyway. I had wanted to know where I stood, and now it was crystal clear.

  “Jesus Fuck,” I muttered, and tried to stand up straight, but I couldn’t stop the moan that came up from my gut, and I slumped back over, leaning against the stained wall. It seemed like they hadn’t missed one single inch of me.

  But I hadn’t fought back, not even when they gave me the opportunity. “Let’s see what you learned in prison,” my old friend Janko had baited me. He had gotten arrested when I had but with a better lawyer, he had gotten off, and he’d spent the years when I was in prison moving up the ladder. Our former friendship didn’t mean much next to the power he now had, not when I’d told him that I wasn’t going to go back to working for him, to doing the same shit that had gotten me locked up.

  Janko smiled at me before his fist met my chin. “You took our product, Rory. All that nice cocaine. Almost nine years, but here you are again, and I didn’t even have to come looking. That would have been worse for you,” he’d confided. “But if you won’t work it off, then you still owe. Now you owe me.”

  I had rubbed my face, cracking the bone in my jaw before I tried to speak. “You know that I’ll be good for everything,” I answered. “You know me.”

  “Sure. I know you didn’t used to be afraid to fight. Come on,” he’d urged me. He pointed at his own cheek. “Right there.”

  Except that he had three guys behind him with their hands on their guns. They would have dropped me before my fist made contact. Just to be safe, he’d then tied my hands behind my back, and I’d been pretty sure he was going to kill me.

  Janko had been the one guy who I thought might give me a chance, and he had, in his way: he hadn’t immediately shot me in the abandoned, burned-out house they’d dragged me to off Young Street, and he was giving me time to make the money to pay him back for the missing drugs. He and his new associates had beaten the living crap out me, yes, but I was still alive. Alive and awake enough to understand that I had to get out of here, now.

  The question was who I had left. Who was I going to call to come pick my ass up? I thought of my brother, who would have made the 250-mile trip in an hour or two if he knew how bad things were for me. But I wasn’t going to call my brother. Instead, I pressed one hand over my stomach and made my blurry vision focus on the little screen of the cheap phone I’d bought. I dialed the number and listened to it ring. And ring, and ring. I slid farther down the wall, closer to the sticky floor I had just managed to pull myself up from.

  “Hello?” the voice finally answered on the other end.

  I couldn’t help the sigh when I heard her voice.

  “Mom? Jade?” she asked, her tone getting urgent.

  I shook my head at the phone and it hurt, making me sigh again. “Isobel,” I said, and tried to regroup.

  “Who is this?” she demanded. “Is this—Rory?”

  “It’s me,” I confirmed. I leaned on the wall and tried to stay upright. “I need your help. Can you come pick me up?”

  “Why are you talking like that?” she asked me. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I said, but I coughed, and flames of agony went through my ribs where they’d kicked me. “I’m fine. Sorry to call you so late. Can you come get me?” I repeated.

  “If this is Rory, what was the address of the building where we met?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Twelve-fifty,” I said, and started to cough again before I could get out the name of the street.

  There was a big pause and I wasn’t sure if I had blacked out for a second or two. But then I heard her voice. “Where are you?” she asked, still suspicious. I told her, and there was another long silence. It wasn’t somewhere she should be driving by herself, alone, and especially at this hour of the night.

  “Why are you calling me?” Isobel asked. “How do you even have my number?”

  “I called because I thought you might come,” I admitted. “I need someone and I remembered you.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  She wasn’t going to do it. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll figure out something else.” I was damned if there was anyone who I thought might come for me, and the thought of that mixed with the mess that was my body and face made me actually moan out loud like a baby.

  “I’m coming,” she said suddenly. “Wait for me and I’ll be there.”

  I was pretty sure I believed her.

  I managed to get myself to the corner to watch for her little car. I had seen her in it, driving carefully and parking it precisely in front of her apartment building. She took care of it, kept it clean, even though the tires looked worn and one of the windows had cardb
oard and plastic and tape instead of glass. I watched for headlights coming through the rain but the road was empty.

  I closed my eyes for a moment but the next time I opened them, I was down on the ground. What the hell had happened? I shook my head, trying to think, and the sudden jolt of pain from the movement made me jerk and remember. And at the same time, I saw a red car crawling slowly up the street, pausing in front each of the houses like the driver was looking for something. Or someone. The car came to a stop at the corner and I lurched to my feet and stumbled to it, slipping and slamming into the passenger door as it started to pull away. I heard a scream echo inside it and the car swerved violently onto the wrong side of the road, and then screeched to a stop.

  I followed and pounded on the glass. “Isobel!” I yelled. “It’s me. Open up.” Her white face appeared in the window and she unlocked the door for me. I dropped into the seat, dripping with rainwater and panting, making the car creak and the dip heavily to the right. “Go. Go!” I told her.

  It jumped to a start and the tires squealed on the wet pavement. “What are you doing, running around in the dark? Why did you jump out at me like that?” she yelled, squeezing the life out of the steering wheel. “Put on your seatbelt!”

  The car creaked again as I shifted around, as if it was going to break under my weight like her chair had. “You drive a tin can,” I growled. Damn, it hurt to talk. Everything hurt.

  “Well, next time, call your friend with the Rolls to come get your butt from some deserted house in the middle of the night!” she retorted, then practically plastered herself against the door, as far away as she could get from me in this tin can car. Like I was in a position to hurt her at this moment, or like I ever would.

  We hit a pothole and I heard the undercarriage scrape the asphalt, and at the same time, I groaned with the pain of it. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, a lot more quietly. “What happened tonight?” The car skidded as we slowed for a yellow light.

  “Don’t stop,” I said. Isobel glanced briefly over at me and then pushed down on the accelerator, and we shot through the intersection. She leaned over the wheel, big eyes on the road but looking over at me every few seconds. I pressed harder on my stomach as I spoke. “I saw some people I used to know. It didn’t go well.”

  “What does that mean? Is your face swollen? Were you fighting?”

  “No, I wasn’t fighting.” I moved my hand away from my stomach to check on it just as we passed a bright marquee, and Isobel saw. She swerved again, this time into the center lane and almost into oncoming traffic on Gratiot.

  “Shit!” she yelled. “What happened? What happened to you?”

  “Isobel!” I reached and grabbed the wheel to straighten it, and I groaned again and got a little dizzy. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  We came to another intersection and this time she stopped, unable to drive through the line of cars perpendicular to us. She turned to stare at me in the darkness of the car. “Are you all right?”

  I pressed down over my stomach, as much to hide it from her eyes as to staunch the bleeding. “I got stabbed. It’s fine.”

  “You got stabbed and it’s fine?” Her voice rose shrilly.

  “Green light.” I gestured with my chin to the road and she pressed on the gas and picked up the pace, driving as fast as she could. Back toward her apartment, I gathered, and she seemed to come to that realization at about the same time.

  “What am I doing?” she asked. “Where am I going? We need to go to the hospital!” She yanked us into the right lane to turn.

  “No, I said I’m fine.” I reached again, more carefully this time, to flick the turn signal lever so that it stopped clicking. “I don’t need to go to the hospital. Keep driving to your building and I’ll deal with things there.” I was so grateful to be out of the rain, to be in her shitty, weak little car. I was so grateful that she had come when no one else was going to. I put my hand briefly on her leg, wanting to tell her that. “I appreciate this,” was all I could think to say.

  She nodded slightly, still gripping the wheel and leaning tensely over it. “Is it…deep?”

  “No. Just bloody. Sorry about your car.”

  “It’s ok,” she said immediately. “Who—who stabbed you? The people you used to know?”

  I wasn’t going to answer that. Her little car strained under the speed and the extra weight on my side and skidded on the wet road. We stopped near her building and she carefully parked, and then I tried to pull myself out.

  “Hold on! I’ll help you.” The headlights illuminated her as she ran around the hood to reach me, and then she tried to help pull me out of the car, bracing her feet like she would be able to lift me. I grunted as I stood and the pain made me dizzy. I fell forward a little onto Isobel, and she put her arms around me. I felt her folding beneath my weight.

  “Rory? Rory, I don’t think I can hold you!” she gasped. “Don’t fall, I can’t lift you!”

  After a moment, I pulled myself together and straightened back up. “I’m fine,” I told her again, but my voice sounded hoarse. “Let’s go in.” She moved around to my side and I put my arm around her shoulders, mostly to assure myself that she was there.

  We walked slower than we had with her friend Rella and I breathed in sharply at every step, trying to keep myself from falling on her again, and trying not to pass out. There were only four stairs up to the front door but we barely mounted them. I could barely keep myself on my feet by the time we got to the top.

  “The elevator’s still out. We can go into Rella’s place,” Isobel whispered. She pulled her keys out of her purse to let us in. “We have to be quiet because she’s asleep in the bedroom. Let me get some towels,” she told me as she walked me over to the stiff, fancy little couch. I wavered as she covered the cushions and told me to sit. I did, inching my way back and holding in the groans as I reclined and rested my head on the hard arm. I closed my eyes and swallowed it all down. Then I reached and yanked my shirt over my head as fast as I could, and it made me dizzy again.

  “Rory?” Isobel knelt next to the couch and looked at me in the faint light of an old floor lamp.

  “Hey.” I touched her cheek with my finger. “Are you all right?”

  “You’re seriously asking me that?”

  But she looked like she might faint. Her eyes went over my chest and stomach and face, at the wound and the scrapes, at the swollen red marks that meant bruises were coming. “Who did this to you?” she whispered.

  I stayed as still as I could so I wouldn’t scare her. “The people I met up with weren’t very happy with me.”

  “Why? What did you do?”

  I shook my head a little. “I guess enough to deserve this.” She swallowed loudly and then took a cloth and started wiping around the jagged gash across the skin of my stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I’m sorry, I know I’m hurting you.”

  “It’s ok,” I told her, my teeth clenched. I appreciated her doing it, I appreciated all of it.

  “How many guys?” she asked me, and I shrugged.

  “A few.”

  “Are those people going to keep coming after you?” She looked anxiously into my face.

  Yes, and if I didn’t pay them for the drugs I’d taken so many years ago, they wouldn’t leave me alive. “It’s all right,” I told her. “I’m going to get this under control. I’m not going to call you again to get me.”

  She shook her head. “Why don’t you leave? Get out of here!”

  Yeah, well, I could understand why she might want that. Not many women were interested in a bloody, battered ex-con on their couch in the middle of the night. I grabbed the back of the cushion to try to pull myself up.

  “No, I don’t mean now!” Isobel put her hand on my chest to hold me down, her small, warm palm pressing against me. “I meant, why don’t you go home, up north with your family? Leave Detroit?”

  “I have to take care of some things before I do.” This was
n’t something I could run away from and I couldn’t hang it over my family, either.

  Isobel shook her head again, almost angry as she stared at the bruises forming on my stomach. She started to get up, to pull away, so I put my palm over hers to hold it against my skin. Both of our hands were smeared red with my blood. “It’s because of the drugs,” I explained. “What I had in the bag that I gave you. It wasn’t mine. I took it, but it wasn’t mine.” I remembered how I had been thinking back then, or really, how I hadn’t. All that had mattered to me was the next high and how I was going to get it. So yeah, I had taken all that coke.

  “The cocaine. The stuff I sold and…lost. You owe people for that? They’re coming after you for the money?”

  I nodded. “But I’ll take care of it,” I repeated, and then I squeezed her fingers, as gently as I could. “Thank you. Thank you for this,” I told her.

  She jerked her hand away from mine. “Yeah, well, don’t expect it again. If you’re going to be a—if you’re getting back into what you were doing before, then I won’t be around you.” She taped a bandage over my wound and her fingers trembled as she smoothed the adhesive.

  “Sure. That makes sense.” I flexed the hand that had been holding hers, remembering the feeling of it. “Like I said, I won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Good.” She stood and wobbled and I reached out to catch her, but she stepped away from my grasp. “I’m sorry about it, about losing the drugs. But it’s not my fault!”

  Her voice had gone up and I flicked my eyes toward the bedroom where her friend Rella was sleeping. “I know that. I’m not blaming you.”

  “Good,” she repeated. “I was really young. That was really dangerous to give me that bag, you know? You gave me cocaine! And those guns were loaded.”

  Of course they had been. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have given you a bag of illegal shit. I’m sorry about that.”

  Isobel nodded. “Yeah.” She took another step, away from me, and then she disappeared into the kitchen.

  So that was that. I’d give myself another minute to lie here on this small, uncomfortable couch, and then I’d go. Just another minute so that I didn’t feel quite so dizzy, just a moment more.