Beyond the Pale Motel

by Francesca Lia Block

  “Are you fucked-up?” she shouted.

  I backed away. I’m fucked-up. How did I get fucked-up? I needed to sit down, but where was the couch? I recognized that I was in my house, but why was that wall there? Where was the front door?

  I found a couch and sat. Was it my couch? I was sinking into it as if I weighed three hundred pounds. Where were my shoes? Why was everyone in so much pain? Pain was everywhere in the world. It never stopped.

  Toddrick was sitting next to me, asking if I was okay. I wanted to tell them to take me to the hospital but I couldn’t make my mouth form words.

  “Did you take something?” they said.

  I shook my head no. It took all the strength I had. I wanted water but I didn’t know how to ask for it.

  “Did someone give you something? What did you eat?”

  I thought for a long, long time. I’d cooked all day. Cooked, cooked, cooked. I hadn’t eaten. Anything. Except. The cookie. I tried to tell Toddrick. Or Ricktodd? But I couldn’t speak. There was dry cake-mix powder in the pockets of my cheeks. Or something.

  Someone was sitting next to me but I couldn’t turn my head to look. Then the person leaned forward. It was Deirdre. Her face was too big. Her lips were like fruit hanging off a tree. She said, “You’re high. Just go with it. It can be awesome. Really. You’ll look back at this and be like, ‘I want to do that again.’”

  I tried to tell her that I was an addict and I couldn’t get high. How many years had I been sober? I tried to count them but I kept getting confused and starting over again. Where was Bree? I wanted someone to get her for me.

  Then she was yelling, “I can’t believe she would do that. She just went and blew eleven fucking years? What the fuck.” Her face loomed out of the darkness at me, raging.

  She was talking about me. I was “she.” But it wasn’t my fault. I had to explain.

  “You need to lie down,” someone said. It was Kendra.

  I tried to ask her about Stu. Had she really given him my address? It didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t speak. She smelled like raw honey and her hands were soft. There wasn’t pain hiding in her bones or hanging off her shoulders like a coat. Tenderness. Happiness. She helped me up and walked me to my bedroom. I wondered if she would stay and lie with me. Once she had put her hands between my legs. But that had hurt, too. And it wasn’t sex. I wanted my mommy.

  I wanted Shana.

  I wanted Scott.

  I wanted Cyan—no, I mean Dash. No, Cyan.

  No. The person I really, really wanted was Bree.

  But Bree, too, was more gone than I knew.

  * * *

  In the morning she came into the room like the sun, hurting my eyes. Her hair was back in a high, tight ponytail and she had fresh makeup on her face. “You look like shit,” she shouted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, cowering.

  “I’ve been up all night cleaning the mess.” Her eyes flared like gas flames.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “There were cookies with something in them.”

  “What cookies? You ate cookies?” If her eyes could make a sound, they would have shrieked like sirens. She pulled her hair out of the ponytail, smoothed it, put the ponytail holder back in again. There was a red mark on her wrist where the ponytail band had recently been.

  “I think Stu brought them,” I said. Each word was like spitting a cotton ball out of my overstuffed mouth. “There was a plate with foil.”

  “If Stu did that, don’t you think someone else would have gotten high? And I didn’t see any cookies anyway.”

  “They were there!”

  Bree ignored me and surveyed the room. “The house looks great,” she said. “I was up all night.” Her voice was shrill.

  I got out of bed and followed her into the kitchen, shuffling my heavy animal feet. There were trash bags lined up neatly by the door, and the floor had been mopped clean. The only thing she hadn’t done was touch the bottles of rum and wine. They stood on the table fermenting. I picked one up to pour it into the sink.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Bree snapped. “You’re still high. You’ll make a mess.”

  “I’m sure this was kind of triggering,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  Bree’s mom was a complete mess, addicted to the pain pills she took after her many plastic surgeries. So, growing up, Bree kept the house clean and herself looking perfect. She learned how to do hair and makeup, take photos and arrange flowers; she designed and made her clothes. That had been the way she dealt with things. And then she started to drink and use as a way to deal with things, but she still always managed to have a clean house and great hair, makeup, and clothes.

  “You must be angry. But I didn’t know…”

  “I’m not angry,” Bree said. “Don’t tell me what I feel, Catt.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Just get back to bed. You’ll break something.”

  “I’m going to take a shower.” But I just stood there. I felt like I should eat, but the thought of the leftover lasagna and soggy salad Bree had wrapped in plastic and put in the fridge made me sick, and there wasn’t much else. I got some water, but Bree seemed to want me out of the kitchen as soon as possible. The hell out. Of my kitchen.

  “You’ll probably have some flashbacks for a few days,” she said as I slippered my way to my room, head hanging. “You’ll lose things, forget things and shit. Good luck at work Tuesday.”

  Bree left a few hours later, after she had done the laundry and scrubbed the bathroom with bleach. I kept telling her I was okay and she should go rest but she ignored me. “Go lie down,” Bree kept saying. “You are so still high.”

  * * *

  I hated Sunday nights. Even though I didn’t work Mondays, Sunday nights were this blackness encroaching, spreading inside of me. Maybe it was left over from being in school. That night was worse. I was thirty-seven, alone, still fucked-up. I had lost my sobriety. My eleven years. Lost, like a child who had been abducted, taken from me. I would have to start all over again. But how could I start over?

  Bree wouldn’t listen to my explanation if I had even been able to articulate what had happened—what I thought had happened. She didn’t pick up anyway so I texted her, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t know what else to say. I called Shana but she didn’t answer. Wondered (paranoid-ly?) if Bree and her had decided to avoid me together. I thought of calling Dash and decided not to. I could not call Cyan. I knew I’d never call Dean again. Dean, saying all that shit about me being his. If he had come you wouldn’t have eaten that cookie. No, that wasn’t true. The getting high was my fault. And maybe Stu’s if he’d brought those cookies. Who else would have brought them? There wasnt anyone I could talk to about it. I didn’t want to bother Scott. Finally I settled on Jarell. I don’t know why. Maybe because he wasn’t my best friend, my sponsor, my ex, my ex’s brother. (I’m just passing through. Cyan, Cyan. Who once told me, “Your face is so full of love.”) But Jarell had never pretended to care. Yet, maybe he did in some way. Just about me as a person, a friend? Could that be? I convinced myself, yes, a little, and hit the contact.

  He didn’t answer.

  I texted him.

  He texted back, I’m at a family function. Can’t speak now. Everything okay?

  I couldn’t help it; I called again. What an asshole I was being. Jarell answered.

  When I heard his voice, I started to cry. Yes, for real. He asked what was wrong. I heard people in the background. I apologized. I told him that I’d had a party and something happened.

  He said, “What happened?” His voice was deep and muscular and soft.

  I told him that someone gave me cookies and I ate one and got wasted.

  Jarell said, “You scared me there. That’s all it was? I thought you were going to say someone took advantage of you. And I’d have to beat the shit out of them.”

  This made me cry more.

  Jarell said, “See, this is what I’m talking about. Wi
th your godson. How are you going to teach him to live in this world if you cry like this at everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But my best friend, she’s so angry.”

  “Listen, I gotta go. Someday you’ll look back at this and it won’t seem so bad,” he said. Before he hung up.

  I had made a mistake about Jarell. Booty call or not, at least he had cared about Skylar. At least Jarell had wanted to see me again. I was the one who had said no. And now there was nothing between us except this humiliating phone call.

  There was a text from Bree: Stop saying you are sorry. You don’t have to tell me you are sorry anymore. How about saying thank you for helping me? For staying up all night cleaning my house and making sure I was okay? I can’t be there for you anymore. I can’t trust you with my son. I won’t see you at work on Tuesday. Shana got me a job at this salon her friend just opened.

  Sunday night wasn’t all that bad. Compared to this, I’d have welcomed an eternity of Sunday nights. Now I know better, I guess.

  * * *

  Shana went with me to a meeting Monday morning. She told me to share, but I could not bring myself to say the words out loud: “I went out. I lost eleven years.” Even if it had been unintentional, I didn’t know if anyone would believe me.

  After, at Planet Pie, Shana said that Bree had come over on Sunday “completely freaked-out,” and that Shana thought it best for Bree and me not to be in touch for awhile.

  I stared into my coffee cup. “But I didn’t know.” I looked up at Shana, sitting across the linoleum-topped table. She was tan from a weekend in Palm Springs, and Bree had given her a Brazilian blowout so her hair, straightened, reached her waist. My voice was rising up like bile in my throat. “I didn’t know!”

  “It’s not just what happened at the party, Catt. Your behavior’s been erratic and she’s not strong enough to handle it. She loves you too much to have to watch you going through this.”

  Loves me too much? I wanted to scream at Shana, scream at Bree. Instead I swallowed it like a pill. But the pill stuck in my throat. And I needed Jack to wash it down.

  * * *

  When I went into the salon Tuesday, Bree really wasn’t there. Kendra hugged me and asked if I was okay.

  I said, “Why’d you give Stu my address?”

  “Shit. I’m sorry. He told me you invited him and he misplaced the e-mail. I wondered why you would have invited him. He said he wanted to apologize for being an asshole.”

  I looked up Stu’s number and called him. Surprisingly he answered.

  “This is Catt,” I said.

  “Hey, Catt.”

  “Did you bring cookies to my party?” I asked.

  “Uh, no. Why?”

  “Someone brought weed Monster cookies. THC. Whatever. I’m sober,” I said. “I was.”

  “Oh, man, that sucks.”

  “It doesn’t suck. It’s fucking serious. Why did you lie to Kendra about me inviting you? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Man,” he said. “Get some help, will you?” And hung up.

  #11

  There was a pall. It was the first time I understood the word. A pall over everything. They were all standing around—Rick and Todd and even Big Bob, who never stops moving, who never just stands there. They were speaking quietly and the music was playing as usual, but very, very softly so you could hardly hear. Some stupid pop ditty, the kind you can’t get out of your head; you might even wake in the middle of the night singing it in your sleep. Something about how someone doesn’t understand how shining and special you are, and that you are going to go dance in a club and wave your hands in the air and have a “drank” and show everyone the truth! I was thinking that I liked nineties music so much more. And then I saw Scott’s photo on the counter.

  It didn’t make sense. I like Scott’s face. I just looked at it, in the photo, smiling.

  The quiet seemed to get quieter. A vein twitched in Bob’s neck. Rick stepped closer. I didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me.

  “What?” I said anyway.

  “Catt, Scott died,” Rick said. His voice had slowed way down and it sounded too deep.

  I stepped back. I moved away from them. I had to be away from them. I tried to walk to the door to leave, and then I circled back and kept walking around and around.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I just saw him. He had the flu.”

  “Early this morning. He called an ambulance and he died at the hospital,” someone said.

  I think it was Rick but I couldn’t tell. They were all mumbling. Todd had his hands folded in front of him as if he were trying to keep them from running away.

  “He called an ambulance? What was wrong? He didn’t call me. I was going to bring him dinner tonight.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I walked back to the door so that the bell chimed a warning, and then back to them. “What happened? He had the flu,” I said. I might have been screaming.

  Todd took my hand and walked me outside, past Scott, smiling in the picture. In the cruel sunlight Todd was pale under his spray tan. There were some palm trees. They were too tall and ragged. I wanted to climb up and trim them properly.

  “He had leukemia,” Todd said.

  “What?” I said. “He wasn’t feeling well. He had a flu.”

  Todd tried to touch me and I had to keep myself from hitting him. I backed away. He said my name. He had bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept.

  “When did you find out?”

  “They called us at two in the morning. It was too late.”

  “They called you. They didn’t call me.” I said it as if it were just a bunch of words that didn’t mean anything. That didn’t mean Scott is dead, he had leukemia, he didn’t let me know, he didn’t call me to take him to the hospital, he didn’t have them call me, they called Todd and Rick, he died alone.

  “It was too late. He could hardly get to the hospital. Everything had shut down.”

  I walked back inside the gym as if I would find him there with his hands in his pockets, laughing at himself. Rick said, “Catt?”

  “Scott had leukemia,” I said.

  Rick said, “Nobody knew except his mom. He found out a year ago but he didn’t want to tell anyone. He didn’t want to upset us and he refused treatment.”

  I looked at Scott’s smiling picture. Someone had downloaded it from his Facebook profile. It was an old picture because more recently he had been looking a little thinner—peaked—and he didn’t like having his picture taken. He said his immune system was down a bit. He had had the flu. I was going to bring him food. I was going to make it and bring it over to his house. I had taken the picture at a Dodger game we’d gone to with Skylar, Bree, some guy she was dating, and Rick and Todd. Scott looked tan, muscular, wearing a Dodger cap, the field bathed in purple summer-evening light behind him. His jawline was defined. He had a nice jaw. He wasn’t smiling too widely, hiding his teeth, though he had good teeth. But at that moment I couldn’t remember his teeth.

  That day Scott and I hung out at his place after everyone else had left. Dash had a band rehearsal and I didn’t feel like being alone. We were sitting on the couch, wearing socks, watching TV, and eating Chinese food out of cartons that we handed back and forth.

  “See?” he’d said, gesturing around the tiny apartment, which was bigger than the studio he’d moved into. (To die, I realized.) “If you’d married me, you could have had all this.” He was smiling but only with the edges of his mouth.

  I put my hand on his chest without thinking about it. “I could have had this,” I said.

  “You have that anyway. You always will.”

  Not anymore.

  What Scott had was leukemia and he hadn’t told me. It made me feel that I didn’t know anything about him; he was someone gone whom I had never known. Underneath the photo it said, Our Friend Scott Steadman: In Loving Memory.

  I went back outside again. I couldn’t stop moving around, up and down
the street in front of Body Farm. No one followed me this time. I took out my cell phone and called Bree. She didn’t answer. She never did. Even then.

  * * *

  My mom died of cancer, too, but at that point we were estranged. I heard from a family friend that she died alone in a hospice.

  Sometimes I remembered how, when we lived in the apartment in North Hollywood, after my dad left, my mom would call me into her bed, saying she was afraid to sleep alone. There might be murderers out there, she had said. Serial killers like Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who broke through windows and raped and murdered women when I was a little girl. Her pale skin was clammy and her breath stank of alcohol.

  Sometimes I would imagine her dying, then. How I would have to hold her hand until her heart stopped beating, how I would have to change her clothes when it did, what her corpse would feel like in my arms. I had never held a corpse in my arms, but I would have held Scott. I would have undressed him and put him in fresh clothes. I would have combed his hair. I would have kissed his mouth. I would have slept next to him all night until they made me let them take him away.

  That night I got his mother’s number from Rick, who had Scott’s cell phone. I was surprised when she answered.

  “This is Scott’s friend, Catt,” I said. “We spoke on the phone before.”

  “Hello, Catt.” Her voice was strained and hoarse but she wasn’t sobbing. That Midwestern stoicism always amazed me.

  “I loved him so much,” I said. “Once he told me that the way I was with my friend’s son reminded him of how you were with him as a kid. It was such a high compliment.”

  She thanked me.

  I wanted to ask more about the illness and why he kept it a secret, why he refused to treat it, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. If she cried, I was afraid I’d start sobbing.

  “I’m so, so sorry.” I stopped to swallow back the lump congealing in my throat. “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”