Darling

I had this dream once. It was of Jasper, and his cigarettes, and the smell of lem on cupcakes with melting icing. He was reaching for me as I sunk away, grasping for something that got me higher than he did. I was in the bathtub of Maggie and Jon’s house when I woke up, there were smells of baking chicken wafting in from the kitchen, I could hear the plastic of toy cars crunching together as Parker played on the floor outside of the bathroom door, his elbow softly tapping the wood every once and a while like a little angel asking me to come alive. I sunk lower in the chilling water, my fingers grasping onto porcelain edges letting me draw myself deeper. Everyone always thought I would die from an overdose, but I always thought death by suicide was more likely. I startled at a knock on the door. Maggie peaked her head in, auburn hair wisping around her face, eyes wide and brown like the lord made her to stare into the soul of Bambi. I looked down at my sagging breasts, the fading tattoo of mountains on my wrist.

Maggie rolled up her sleeves and cut carefully through the water as she pulled the rubber plug, the drain gulping water like a mouth swallowing its tongue. My toes curled. Parker rolled over a Hot Wheels car and screeched like I wish I could. Maggie whispered over my head that dinner is almost ready darling, and that I will catch a cold if I stay in any longer. She cracked the door. I remembered when I ran a half marathon. When the fat hanging off my hips didn’t indent when I pressed, when I wasn’t so malleable. There was this one in April, I could feel hot urine run down my leg as I hit mile 11, my heart thumping straight into the sky as I dripped down onto the pavement below me, leaving a little bit behind with every drop. Jasper wasn’t waiting for me at the finish line, I knew he wouldn’t. I never told him I was running again, that detail seemed to get lodged in my throat every time we lay sweaty. I didn’t know how to tell him that the dripping of hot salty liquid down my thighs only counted if it was mine. It was just Maggie, belly full of Parker who was waiting for his name, water bottle in hand as if she could give me back what I had lost. There was something loose in the way she held me when I crossed under the banner, as if she thought I would crumble in like the fat on my hips if she pressed too hard. I sunk lower in the dying water, wondering if I could drown myself in only a few inches. I heard more screeching in the kitchen. All cries are proof of pursuit, some primal consequence of wanting more than cigarettes or cold water or chicken in the oven. I knew when Maggie picked up parker just like I knew when she called me on the phone, or reached between my shaking knees to pull the plug on the bathtub. The crying stopped.

Their dinner table was red, I always thought that was strange but Maggie found it at a Consignment shop when Parker was little enough to be strapped to her back, and sweet-talked the manager into delivering it for free. Jon placed a plate of chicken and butter beans in front of me, setting the gravy boat at the center of the table. I watched Maggie strap Parker into his high chair, placing small bits of food in front of him to play with. We all knew he was picky, Maggie would spend half an hour after dinner enticing him with pieces of chicken and a sippy cup of milk, but it was fun to pretend. Maybe one of these days he will start eating on his own, but I wasn’t holding my breath. Why would he? Maggie was always there. I rest ed my chin on my palms as my brother talked about his buddies at the accounting firm, about how one of their wives was asking for Maggie’s recipe for the cherry pie she brought to the last pot luck. I took a sip of water, wishing it was something stronger. I had lived here three months and still have yet to see anyone touch a drop of liquor, or see lips stained red with wine. I heard Maggie poured it down the drain while I was away, fingers clenching in determination that hulked over my own weakness, the overdose that sent me to a place where no one has anything left, where we were all asked to give up the only thing we really had. I only wished for more hardened elixirs on nights like these. The nights with accounting buddies and cherry pie and soft lights casting a shadow on the food Parker was smearing around. I checked my phone under the table, wishing to have a piece of something for myself, wishing for Jasper.

I met Jasper at a bar. He let me lean on him as we shouldered our weight onto the sticky wood in front of me. I asked him to order me a shot of whisky, my mouth watering in all the wrong ways. I had never liked Whisky much. Brown liquor seemed dirty to me, like if I let it slide down my throat it would turn my insides dark and I would rot from the inside out. I slammed back the shot. Mike, the burley old bartender leaned over to look me in the eye. He asked if I wanted another, I stared. He poured me a double, and that too was gone within minutes. Getting drunk like that had never held any sort of secret pleasure for me, it had no hidden talents of lure or false promises. Whiskey was the liquor for a girl wanting to curdle her insides until they sour.

And Jasper was there to witness my undoing, my reckless abandon of all security, all semblance of personal safety. I had just met him, and yet his willingness to cover my tab, to hold my hips lightly instead of the harsh press I was used to warmed me slightly, enough to take him home and let him use my body in the way only a Christian, Arizona boy would. As if I meant something to him and the broken promises he made to a God that never loved me anyway held a vow of something more. It was only until after that first time, as I lay there sweating and he rolled a joint of something that smelled unfamiliar, new, sweet, that I realized this would be my un doing. And so I let him come back, time after time, to let my body belong to him for a few minutes every weekend, if only to gain some amount of relief from the cold, and the lonely. If only to taste that sweet more that came after sex, the joints that turned to needles, running flowering heady heat through my veins. Longing festers and sits at the base of your skull and makes your head hang heavy, and when mine was pressed into a pillow as my hips were grasped from behind I let the tension in my neck go. Part of me wished I would be smothered, at least I wouldn’t die alone. And after the sweet smoke, the heated veins, I would run the ten miles home, letting myself feel the night love me like no one else could. Letting my chest tingle with feelings I thought were imagined, with feelings of being my own whole entire world.

There was always a part of me that wanted him gone. His sandy hair, tall thick stature, I knew I should want him but I never could. He was always warm which only made me seem more... so when he would finish, one of his hands pressed into the pillow and the other pushing my hips back into him I would pull away and ask for what I really wanted. My sex was growing cold by the second and his desire to touch me with hands that had been warmed by a mother’s homemade cookies made my skin crawl. He would hand me a black plastic bag as I wrapped myself in a blanket and run out the door. He knew that was what I came for. I told Maggie and Jon I was training for a half-marathon, that it was cooler at night, when every thing seemed still and I seemed even faster.

The night before my final overdose, I ran to Maggie and Jon’s house instead of my own. Sweat traced the edges of my scalp as I tapped on the door, asking to see parker, asking to hold something sweet in my arms, something that I could touch, even though I could feel everything. I remember her trying to wrestle the black bag from my fingertips, my skin pink from the hot summer air, fingers with a forgetfully tight grip. Their red table seem to ask me to lie on it, a colored warmth that was more comforting than what Jasper had provided. I remember hearing Jon’s whis pered tones as I lay my cheek against the table, Maggie’s soft hand resting on the back of my neck. I thought it would be nice to die here, nicer than underneath Jasper. Maybe they would let Parker climb over my body, finally giving it a use for someone other than myself.

I came out of my fog to Jon tapping his fingers impatiently on the table. I turned to him and smiled tightly, taking a careful bite of my chicken. He sighed, and asked me about that friend of yours from Rehab, you know, the one with the blue on the side of her head. He was talking about Cheryl, a recovering Heroin addict. He kept talking, something about how she had mentioned painting a picture of Maggie and Parker for him when they all came to pick me up in the maroon minivan with dog stickers on the back. I looked down at my plate, wishing for a cigarette, thinking of sitting on the back steps of the sterile building next to Cheryl, listening to her talk about all of her children, some whose names she couldn’t remember. Whenever she talked about heroin she always talked about Lucy, estimated to be around six years old by now. How she would pull baby Lucy into her arms, sweetness running through her veins, and dance around the kitchen. It felt like flying. She said the baby made her high, I always thought she was drug high because of the baby.

Cheryl was with me the first day I was allowed to go outside. When my face hit the air I gave in to the urge to kneel down and smell every flower I could reach. There is something delicious about never running out; of those buds, the soft petals flirting over your fingertips. They beg at you to come close, just once more, to breath in until your lungs are full of a smell that reminds you of something you can’t place. I was sick of rehab, or sick from rehab, I wasn’t sure. There was this girl who remind ed me of Maggie. I watched her hold her baby on family day, let small hands play with her sunflower-shaped stress ball. She had these sunken eyes that would halt and catch at every bright light. When she was high she would pretend the world was faerie land, would hoist her daughter onto her boney shoulders, feel the air like I felt the night, like love was finally within her grasp. She had other stories too, ones without coke, ones where she heated bottles of formula and shopped online for a baby carrier with better safety-features. I never thought drug addicts could be mothers like that. I thought that was only for people like Maggie, people who didn’t want so much.

When my brother married Maggie, I felt relieved that at least one of us had done something right. She wore peach roses around her face and glimmered like the plastic cheeks of a played-with barbie doll. I was a drunken bridesmaid, texting Jasper behind my bouquet—all dirty things. Thinks that never passed the lips of a sparkly doll. Things that Maggie would be taught by my brother, who grew up with a mind like mine, as she lay on cotton sheets somewhere beautiful. Somewhere she pasted a picture of on her wall in fourth grade, dreaming of the white horses and peach roses and pin-up dolls cloaked in white. There were no shots or dirty allies coated in the smell of sweetened white powder and exhaust fumes. I was with her when she bought her dress, still high but not sure from what. Her mother tried to stuff her full of tulle but she was beautiful on her own, simple in a white satin dress that skimmed her shoulders and made her look like a faerie, the ones the rest of us could only imagine. Her mother gave her a china teapot patterned with roses as a wedding present, the kind that you would see in Alice in Wonderland. I stood in the corner waiting for Jasper to sneak between the bushes of the outdoor reception. I bet she would use it for real life tea parties with her real-life friends, tea parties with actual tea, maybe Jasmine. She would invite me for sure, as she was raised right, and I would sneak a flask in my sleeve, twirling a spoon in my liquored tea until all I taste is ruin. I felt Jasper’s hands on my waist and I turn around, breath ing in the smell of smoke. He had swiped a lemon cupcake from the dessert table on his way in, and he presented it to me as if it were a vice, like the contents of the black bag, whisking a dollop of icing onto my nose. I let the tang of lemon drip down over my lips and onto my tongue, the sweetness rolling around my molars. This is what I was supposed to want, this sugared decadence. Jaspers pupils dilated as he asked me if I wanted to get out of here. I looked back at Maggie, at her satin dress, at the tea pot and lemon cupcakes, the scent floating after me as I followed Jasper out, sticking my hand in his back pocket, searching for some reprieve from the cold fingers of want that clawed at my hipbones and painted the world a jealous shade of green.

Jon stood to start clearing the table. I gazed blurrily around me, the food on my plate practically untouched, Maggie giving me a concerned smile from across the table. Parker gurgled happily when I turned to him, gravy smeared all over his mouth as little flecks of chicken dotted his shirt. Maggie reached for the bottom of her apron to clean him up. I wished she had left him, his eyes full of joy and a smug sort of control over his body. Us messy ones are never allowed to wear it on the outside. It made me think of the first day I was brought to stay at Maggie and Jon’s after rehab. Maggie was hosting the moms from Mommy and Me over for brunch, each of them coming with kitten heels and sweetheart necklines, toddlers settled easily over their hips. I watched from the cracked door of my bedroom as they drank mimosa’s and chewed quartered strawberries, the kids running around the living room in their own land of perfection, each with a belt or bow carefully tucking them in so they could run far and fast but not away from the momma that made them. I tried to pick out parker among the crowed. I watched as Maggie dressed him this morning. Watched as she ran a comb through his hair, tucked in a little yellow polo into khaki shorts, cinching the belt just tight enough below his toddler belly. I stood behind her, arms wrapped around my torso, not sure if I was craving a drugged high or the high you get from being someone’s whole entire world. And suddenly, I found Parker. He sat on the top of the couch, reaching for Maggie as she lifted him in her arms and nuzzled his nose. I crept silently to the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror and reaching for my hairbrush. I looked at myself crudely, at the wrinkles forming around my eyes, my sallow skin, cracked lips, and I shut my lids tightly, running the brush through my hair as slow as I could muster. And in the darkness, the clawing teeth at my scalp, I could almost pretend it was Maggie. That it was her hand touching the side of my head lightly, running the brush through the tangles until I was made brand new.

Maggie finished wiping Parker’s mouth and left to the kitchen to start on the dishes. I remained motionless in my chair, Jon reaching around me to collect my plate and utensils. We hadn’t spent any time alone since I came back from rehab, my chest ached as I drew my knees up and buried my face in my thighs. There was this one night when Jon came over without Maggie. I answered the door in underwear and broken leather boots, unlit cigarette resting in my fingers. It was before I got clean, before the bathtubs and chicken dinners and Parker. I sat on my porch swing next to my brother as he inhaled my smoke. This was when Jasper kept a toothbrush next to my Kitchen sink, when Jon and Maggie were seven months in and nine dates from a ring. When the sky still glowed when I looked at it, when all the world seemed to play around me like dancing toy cars and picked roses and tea pots hovering in the sky. When faerie land seemed not so far away, when I could run ten thousand miles and be fucked into oblivion and as if my body had never existed in the first place. When all the world was a single sensation. Jon looked at me as he spoke about Maggie, about how her mother kept bringing by casserole dishes of mashed potatoes. How he hates potato’s, how Maggie will place sprigs of parsley on them every night for dinner, at a table set with the candles I used to burn my fingertips as a child. About how every night he ate every bite, one after the other, until the plate was clean and Maggie smiled and promised to have her mother bring more tomorrow. About how he can’t anymore. The mashed potatoes, the candles, Maggie with her Bambi eyes and ruffled apron. He told me, as he took a drag of my cigarette, how he can’t. Not one more time. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t.