Don't Fail Me Now(3)
Allen Buckner Devereaux Jr. and Polly Devereaux. These two have been AWOL since 1994 and 2000, respectively. They just peaced out. I have no idea if the elder ABD is still alive. Last my mom can recall, Polly moved someplace in the Midwest when Buck decided to go through with the wedding. Apparently she’d been trying to convince Buck to go with her, even saying she’d buy him a new car if he walked away from us, but Buck was young and in love, and besides, he was obsessed with “Goldie,” the rusty, Band Aid–colored 1973 Datsun station wagon he’d inherited from his deadbeat dad. Incidentally, Polly never met me, but we still drive Goldie. In fact, she’s sitting outside right now in the Baltimore Police Department parking lot after having been routinely searched for narcotics. It’s like that “Circle of Life” song from The Lion King, only way more depressing.
“Shut uuuuupppp,” Cass groans, and for a split second I think I must be so fried that I’m saying all this out loud. But then one arm slips down from her face and dangles over the side of the bench, and I can see she’s still out cold. Must be dreaming. Something’s been bothering her for weeks, and I don’t think it has anything to do with Mom’s relapse. But every time I’ve tried to ask her about it, she shuts down. She was always a shy kid—neighbors used to joke they couldn’t tell what she looked like since she was permanently plastered to the backs of Mom’s knees—but now that she’s thirteen, her natural quietness has turned into something more troubling. She’s grown cold, even to me. Looking at her face these days, which is still the spitting image of Mom’s, and cruelly beautiful despite the onset of puberty, is like watching a storm roll in from a distance while the sun still shines on you, wondering what it’s like on the other side.
Cassidy Devereaux. Cass doesn’t have a middle name, presumably because all hope had been abandoned by the time she came along when I was four. Mom and Buck were okay for a while, but after Mom’s parents died, I think they realized how screwed they were, with a toddler, an old house to maintain, and only one (unreliable) source of income. According to Aunt Sam, that’s when the dealing started in earnest. I’m not sure how much I should believe of what she tells me, since she’s always resented the fact that Grandma and Grandpa left the house to their younger, helpless, irresponsible child when Sam had been busting her ass to put herself through nursing school plus managed to avoid a teen pregnancy. But Mom never had a real job until Buck left, so I have to wonder how they made ends meet for so long. And every time I smell pot in the parking lot at school, or on the late-night customers at the Taco Bell where I work, it’s immediately comforting. I guess it must smell like home.
Cass wasn’t an accident like me, but she didn’t help to save a marriage that was already falling apart. My earliest memories are a collage of conflicting arguments: driving around with my parents singing along to the radio and dancing in their seats at red lights; watching TV with Buck while Mom cries loudly in an adjacent room; licking an ice cream cone at a petting zoo while Mom and Buck giggle and kiss above me; getting tugged in and out of my car seat while they scream at each other. They must have been on one of their highs when they decided to have my sister, not knowing she would come six weeks early on the day after Christmas, stretching their bare-bones insurance to its limit with a stay in the NICU, and sick again by the time she was five months old, underweight and shaking all the time, requiring daily insulin injections that would eventually put them in a debt they would never recover from.
Oh, shit, her insulin. I reach across Denny and pinch Cass’s skinny calf through her jeans. “Cass,” I say. “Cass, wake up. You need your shot.”
She starts and squints at me, sleepy and confused, then looks around and slowly drags herself to a sitting position. Without a word, she unzips the front pocket of her backpack and takes out a Ziploc baggie full of needles and little glass bottles as well as a small foil pack of Wheat Thins. She rips open the crackers with her teeth and pops one into her mouth, then starts to roll up her shirt; Cass is so wiry that her stomach is the only place with enough padding so the shots don’t hurt.
“Hey,” cries Tight Hair, leaping to her feet. “Stop right there.” She turns and yells, “Backup!” and the two arresting officers, one young and barrel-chested, one graying with a potbelly that thunders ahead of him by a good twelve inches, come running down the hall with their hands on their guns. Denny’s hand on my waist turns into a viselike claw.
“She’s got needles,” Tight Hair says. Cass’s mahogany eyes grow wide and scared.
“It’s insulin,” I snap, knowing I should watch my tone but unable to mask my anger. Protecting Cass has been my job since she was born. “She’s diabetic.”
“Lemme see,” the young cop says, softening his stance. Cass hands him the baggie, and he examines the contents for a long moment. “You got a prescription?” he asks.
With trembling hands, Cass reaches into her backpack again and produces a silver MedicAlert bracelet engraved with her name and condition. She hasn’t worn it since she was eight, but at Mom’s insistence she always keeps it in her bag. This realization sends even sharper stabs of anger shooting through my veins. Mom was doing so much better. This wasn’t supposed to happen again. She swore it wouldn’t.
“Okay,” the cop says to Cass, attempting a goofy “oops, my bad!” smile. “But you can’t do that out here. Come with me, and I’ll take you to the ladies’ room.”