Faithful

by Alice Hoffman

  “Mrs. Harrington,” Shelby calls. “Hi.”

  It takes a while for Mrs. Harrington to recognize the odd person approaching her. When she does she visibly relaxes. “Oh, Shelby, it’s you.”

  “Yeah, it’s me.” Shelby walks alongside Mrs. Harrington. “You help out with Helene, right?”

  “There’s a whole bunch of us who are regulars. She’s a darling girl.” Mrs. Harrington has her keys in her hands. Shelby doesn’t tell this nice woman that Helene always hated Kelsey Harrington. She’d thought Kelsey was a snob.

  “Does she ever come to consciousness?” Shelby’s voice sounds shaky and thin. Mrs. Harrington throws her a look, clearly confused. “Helene,” Shelby says. “Does she ever say something or dictate something? Like a postcard?”

  “Shelby.” Mrs. Harrington reaches for her hand, but Shelby backs away before she can touch her. “No, honey.” Mrs. Harrington shakes her head sadly. “She never does anything like that.”

  Shelby has secretly been harboring the hope that Helene has been pretending, that she isn’t really brain-injured and in fact rises from her bed each night to walk through her house, pilfering snacks from the cupboards, watching TV, gazing into the mirror as she brushes her long hair.

  “That doesn’t mean there aren’t miracles,” Mrs. Harrington says.

  “Yeah. I’ll bet.” Shelby runs off without another word. She must seem crazy to ask if a person who has no brain activity could be writing postcards.

  Shelby calls Ben Mink to ask that he meet her in the park. Her hope that Helene will come back has faded into ash. Helene is gone. Shelby’s old life is gone with her. Shelby is so jittery she can barely sit still. She despises winter and herself. All she wants to do is get stoned and check out, and Ben can provide her with her ticket to do so. Or so she thinks.

  “No weed,” he says sadly. “There’s some FBI activity in the Bahamas. Dealers are getting busted and it’s filtering up to the States. My go-to guys in Huntington and in Northport both got busted. Call me back at the end of the week.”

  “How can you be out?” Shelby is beside herself. “I depend on you.”

  “Yeah, right.” He actually laughs. He thinks she’s kidding.

  “You’re my go-to guy,” she insists. “I need you.”

  “That’s a mistake, Shelby,” Ben says. “I let people down.”

  “Don’t make me sit through reality,” Shelby moans. The tremor in her hand is already worsening. “I don’t know if I can do it. People with their petty desires and their TV shows. Everyone wants to be famous.”

  She was famous for a while, at least in the local Pennysaver and in Newsday. There was even an article in The New York Times about teenagers and car accidents and she was referred to twice. They got it wrong, as usual, and printed that she was currently under psychiatric care, when she was already out of the nuthouse, ensconced in her parents’ basement.

  “Lie down and close your eyes,” Ben suggests. “Breathe deep. Imagine you’re in Bali. Or on a beach in the Hamptons. Life’s easier to get through that way.”

  “I would never be in the Hamptons.” Shelby paces the basement. There are mice down here, but she knows they’re afraid of her. She once stumbled upon three baby mice that froze until she hid behind the stairs, giving them the courage to run away. She happens to catch sight of herself in an old stand-up mirror. She has to get rid of that thing. Frankly, she’s completely shocked by her own appearance. She looks like the kind of girl people back away from on the street, someone who begs for spare change while she curses the world.

  “Do I seem different to you than I did in high school?” she asks.

  “Sure,” Ben says. “You’re bald.”

  “I mean in some definitive way, asshole.”

  “That’s definitive. Bald makes a statement. You’re completely different.”

  “No I’m not.” Shelby has a crack in her voice. “That would mean I’m subhuman.”

  “No. You’re like the weird fucked-up sister of yourself, Shelby. Whereas I’m just an extension of my loser self that anyone could have foreseen. I have followed the path set out before me. You veered.”

  He means crashed and she knows it, so she hangs up on him. All he is to her is a drug dealer, anyway. He’s become less geeky and is now good-looking, in a rangy, off-center way, better than anyone would have guessed back in high school. He’s handsome, really, but so what? She doesn’t care about his philosophy. Without getting stoned, it’s harder to sleep fourteen hours at a time. She can feel something coursing through her. She sneaks upstairs to look through her parents’ medicine cabinet. Ativan. That might work. She hadn’t realized her mother was anxious enough to need a prescription like that. There’s also tramadol, which she was given at the hospital. It’s a muscle relaxer that they added to her Valium and lithium. She grabs that as well.

  Shelby’s father is sitting in the living room. She usually manages to avoid him. Lately he has kind of a looming presence. Dan Richmond used to be a man who could charm a roomful of people at a party, but he’s changed. Now he goes to work at the men’s shop he inherited from his father and he comes home at six. That’s his life. He watches a lot of TV and doesn’t talk much.

  “What are you doing here?” he says when he sees his daughter. If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to remember the last time she’s come upstairs.

  “I came to get some milk,” she tells him. That sounds all-American. She goes to the fridge. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Nowhere,” Dan says.

  Shelby pours herself a glass of milk. She notices her dad is watching the same show she always tunes in to, so she sits down on the couch.

  “That guy’s crap,” she says of the contestant she despises. He sings country-western sometimes, and eighties rock sometimes. He has no center, as far as Shelby is concerned.

  “Yeah, well, he’s there in Hollywood and you’re here.”

  “I don’t want to be in Hollywood,” Shelby is quick to respond. She tries to sound casual, but her father’s remark stings. It’s just another way of saying she’s a nothing. As if she didn’t know that.

  They watch together for a while. Shelby is tapping her foot the way she did when she was upset before the hospital, and her father is trying his best not to mention it or even notice it. Thump against the floor. Against the couch. Like she’s wound up.

  “I’ll bet she went over to the Boyds’,” Shelby finally says. “Didn’t she? I told her it was stupid and vile and disgusting. I told her not to go.”

  “Maybe there’s some truth in what people say. It doesn’t hurt to see.”

  “Don’t make me vomit.”

  “You’d have to be alive to do that. Living the way you do isn’t being alive.”

  Shelby stares at her father. He looks older. He’s a big, unhappy man who clearly wishes he were elsewhere.

  “If I wanted to be dead, I would be,” Shelby informs him.

  “That’s comforting,” her dad says.

  “It is to me,” Shelby says.

  She goes back to the basement. She takes two Ativan, then slips on her coat and goes out through the cellar door. She sits down on the picnic table, even though it’s cold outside. The air is like crystals; it hurts just to breathe.

  Her mother’s car pulls up and parks. The headlights turn everything yellow, but when they’re cut off the night becomes pitch. All the same, Sue spies her daughter perched on the picnic table. She heads across the yard. “It’s freezing,” Sue says.

  “I’m counting stars. That should keep me busy.”

  Sue and Shelby lie down on the wooden table. They both look up.

  “It’s not the way you think it is,” Sue says. “It’s peaceful over at the Boyds’. She’s peaceful. She means something to the people who come to see her, Shelby.” No one could count all the stars. There are far too many. What’s above
them is endless. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  Shelby makes a sound that she hadn’t expected to be a sob. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore.

  “I think I lost my soul,” she says.

  “That can’t happen,” Sue tells her.

  “You have no idea what can happen, Mom.”

  Shelby takes out a cigarette and some matches. She used to be so against smoking she would go up to complete strangers to ask if they knew what they were doing to their lungs when they lit up. She was so sure of how to set the world right.

  Now she goes back into the basement and phones Ben Mink. She tries not to think of her mother all alone in the backyard, counting stars. Sometime after the accident, her parents stopped talking to each other unless they needed to discuss a household chore or a doctor’s appointment. It’s true, tragedy can bring you closer or drive you apart.

  “I’m desperate,” Shelby tells Ben. “Beam me out of here.”

  He says he’s managed to score some pot from a guy he used to know in school. He’ll meet her on Main Street at nine. His parents live a few blocks from town. He rents an apartment with a bunch of guys, but he also spends nights at his parents’. They always give him a good meal and ask what he plans to do with his life. If he eats and shrugs it’s all pretty painless.

  Shelby hates to leave the house, but she pulls on extra socks and her old boots, then gloves and a hat. The TV is still on; the blue light from the window falls across the lawn and out into the road. Ice. Crystals. Trees without leaves. Real things. Shelby walks toward Main Street. Every­thing is closed except the pizza place, where a few high school kids are hanging out. Shelby wraps her scarf around her head, then loops it around her neck and keeps going. She can hear herself breathing because the inhalations are sharp, sob-like things. She can hardly catch her breath. All that smoking and the cold air and how fast she walked here. It all adds up. It makes her want to cry.

  Ben Mink is standing outside the Book Revue, a regular meeting place for them. He spent a lot of time in the science fiction section in high school. He read entire books while crouched down on the floor. Now he has his hands in his pockets; he’s freezing. When Shelby arrives he peers into her cloaked face. Hat, scarf, big eyes, bald. She looks like an orphan in a comic book.

  “Damn it’s cold,” he says. “That is you in there, right?”

  “Who else would meet you, Ben? As I recall, you don’t have any friends. Oh, the guy you got the pot from.”

  “He’s more of an enemy,” Ben says. “You’re my friend.”

  “Yeah, right.” Shelby gets her money from stealing from her parents; very grown-up to paw around in her mother’s purse and her father’s wallet. She is well aware that they pretend not to know. Shelby gives Ben the cash, and he hands her a plastic baggie that she slips into her pocket. “Okay,” Shelby says. “We’re friends.”

  “I’ve brought something else for you.” Ben presents her with a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. “This will blow you away,” he says. “Some guy is covered with living tattoos. Each one tells a story.”

  “You don’t have to give me anything.” All the same, Shelby takes the book.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not going to be around much longer,” Ben says.

  “Really? Leaping from a bridge?”

  “Don’t laugh when I tell you. Promise?”

  Their breath comes out like clouds. They’re the only ones on the street. Ben is wearing old Doc Martens boots that crunch into the snow when they start to walk. The crunch echoes up and sounds like steel.

  “I’ve been taking classes at Empire State College. It’s independent study. An accelerated program. I started classes when I was in high school.”

  “A program for what?” It’s so cold that Shelby thinks her fingers inside her gloves are turning blue. Maybe they’ll turn to sugar candy and break off and there’ll be a fairy-tale ending when one taste of her sugar-stick fingers will cure Helene.

  Ben shrugs, somewhat embarrassed to have succeeded at something. “I have a BS in science.”

  “What does that stand for? Bullshit?”

  “I didn’t mention it, because I wasn’t sure I would graduate. But I did and now I’ve decided to go to pharmacy school. I’ve already been accepted. I got a four thirty on the PCAT admission test.” Shelby doubles over with laughter at this news. Ben grins as he watches her. She looks so pretty when she laughs. “So I’m smart,” he says. “So what?”

  “It’s a perfect career path for you,” Shelby says. “Considering your interests.”

  “Seriously, pharmacists can make a hundred grand a year.”

  “Oh, yeah, what are you going to do with all that money? Buy drugs?”

  “Weren’t you in the Straight and Narrow Club at school?”

  The antidrug contingent that put up posters in the hallways and made a vow not to use drugs. She was so narrow-minded back then. If she met herself then the way she is now, she would have crossed over to the other side of the street to avoid such a creep.

  “Fuck you,” Shelby says. She can’t stand the other her, the girl who thought she would always be one of the fortunate ones: good grades, good looks, good future.

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad way. I just like you better now. That’s all.”

  Shelby glances at him through the slit between her scarf and her hat.

  “Where do you think your soul goes when you lose it?” she asks him. He’s been to college after all, maybe he’s smart enough to know the answer.

  “Around the corner and down the street.”

  They both laugh. They are at that very moment turning the corner and going down the street. There’s nothing there.

  “I told you it was gone,” Shelby says.

  “Let’s go find it,” Ben suggests.

  “Yeah, right.”

  They stop long enough for Ben to take a joint from his pocket. Shelby holds her hands around it so the match won’t blow out.

  “Let’s just walk by her house,” Ben says.

  “That’s it? Just pass by it? Not stop or anything?”

  Ben offers her a hit. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  They head toward the Boyds’ house. It’s easy really. Shelby has been here a thousand times before. She remembers a time when Ben said something to her in high school and she pretended not to hear and walked right by. She’s curious about what he said and questions him. He probably thought she was an uptight snob, and she probably was. Ben swears he doesn’t remember, but there’s a smirk on his face. He remembers all right. He’d said, Do you know where the music room is? His mother had insisted he take saxophone lessons. He’d actually wanted to say, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks if I can kiss you.

  “You didn’t like me in high school,” Shelby says.

  “Well, I didn’t like anyone, so don’t think you were special.”

  They laugh again and lean closer for warmth.

  “You were popular and you followed the rules. I always hated those girls,” Ben tells her.

  “Right. You liked the ugly, unpopular ones.”

  “I liked the smart ones. I just didn’t know you were one of them. You kind of hid it.”

  Shelby thinks that over. She’s shivering as they approach Helene’s. There’s no one at the Boyds’, no lines in the driveway, no miracle seekers, just a darkened house with peeling paint. The bushes all look black. Sparrows rustle in the leaves, but everything else is silent.

  “Come on,” Ben says. He grabs Shelby by the sleeve and they wheel across the yard.

  “Hey,” Shelby says. “Wait a minute.” They’re headed toward Helene’s window. “I thought we were just passing by.”

  “This is her room,” Ben says. “I’ve been here before. I was kind of a Peeping Tom in high school.”

  “Are you kidding?” Shelby is
shocked. “That is so vile. No wonder I never spoke to you.”

  “I only saw her naked once.”

  Shelby glares at him. “Only once? Like that’s nothing? Once is a violation. You really were a creep.”

  There’s a rattle somewhere, a garbage can perhaps, but unsettling. Ben and Shelby crouch down beside the house so no one will see them. But there’s no one around. A cat crossing the street. The sparrows in the bushes. Ben is shaking under his puffy jacket. He’s had a guilty conscience all this time, and he didn’t even know how bad he felt until he makes his confession. He’d been a pervert and now he has a pervert’s remorse.

  “I was only a kid,” he says.

  He sounds like he’s going to crack and get all emotional, something Shelby can’t stand. “Pull yourself together,” she tells him. “So you spied on her. You were probably too young to know it was wrong.”

  “I was crazy about her.”

  “Helene?” Again, Shelby is stunned.

  “Nuts, huh?”

  They start laughing, muffled, choked giggles.

  “Insane,” Shelby agrees.

  “Did I ever have a chance?”

  “Never. Not in a million years. She was in love with that guy Chris. Truthfully, Ben? It would have never been you.”

  It’s kind of a relief for Ben to hear this, as if a cord binding him to his past has been cut. He feels oddly grateful. He doesn’t have to be loyal to Helene.

  “Do you want to look?” he asks.

  They’re leaning into each other, but they can’t feel one another. Coats. Gloves. Protection from the elements.

  “You,” Shelby says.

  So Ben steps onto a ledge Shelby hadn’t known was there. It’s part of a window well cover that allows him to step up, then haul himself upward so he can look into Helene’s window. Clearly he’s done this before. Shelby stays where she is, knees pulled to her chest, head spinning, her hands covering her eyes. She thinks about the anonymous postcards that she keeps in her childhood jewelry box. Every day she waits even though sometimes there are months in between their arrivals. When she sees one in the mailbox she feels a thrumming inside her. She’s always excited to read them, no matter the message. Be something, with a hive of bees made of gold ink and a girl who’s been stung running into a dark wood. Feel something. A heart held in the palm of a hand. Inside the heart are words written in red ink: Faith, sorrow, shame, hope. Someone is watching over her. Someone knows what she needs.