Released (Caged #3)(71)

In some ways, withdrawal from nicotine had been worse than heroin. It wasn’t that the feelings were any worse—I didn’t get physically sick, but I was moodier than Tria and spent a lot of time just standing outside on the porch to keep myself from running out on her. I couldn’t stay inside, or I’d start screaming at her. If I started screaming, she would start crying, and I would feel like a total *.

I hadn’t actually told her I quit. I wanted to make sure I really could do it first.

Walking up the stairs was equally eerie, both because of where I was going and the familiarity of heading toward the old apartment door and knowing I wouldn’t be going inside. If I did, Tria wouldn’t be there, feet tucked under her butt on the couch and smiling up at me with her schoolwork all splayed out on the coffee table.

Everything seemed so simple then.

Now there was an impending baby, and since Tria had passed the most dangerous stages of pregnancy as far as I could determine, I found myself mostly concerned with what the heck I was going to do with a kid. Erin told me to start making a list of things my parents did right so we could talk about how I could foster the same things within my own child.

I reached the top of the flight of stairs and stared at the hallway full of trash bags.

The social worker—Samantha—was already inside, filling a huge trashcan with papers and the empty cigarette packs from the walls.

“The landlord said all the furniture belonged here,” Samantha said. “He wants everything else out, I guess. There’s no will and no relatives. I didn’t know if there was anything you wanted, but feel free. Whatever isn’t trash is going to Goodwill.”

I nodded and then made my way to the kitchen to start removing all the food that was left and putting it into boxes. We could take it to the free store down the street. There was another box for things that were worth donating—mostly clothing—but it was only about half full. Among the piles, I found two of my shirts, a belt I remembered owning, and my favorite boots.

I thought I had lost them, but apparently, my neighbor was hoarding them.

Samantha was digging through some papers, and I looked over her shoulder a couple of times. I had hoped maybe I would find something that would tell me more about her—where she came from or how she ended up where she did, but there didn’t seem to be anything. The only thing that even remotely connected her to another person at all was the little photo on a table next to her bed.

It was the one she had been holding on the fire escape—the picture of her mother. At least, I was pretty sure it was. I picked up the picture and asked Samantha what I should do with it.

“She didn’t have any relatives,” Samantha said. “It will probably just get thrown away.”

“Fuck that,” I muttered and then looked back to her. “So I can keep it?”

“Sure,” she shrugged.

I didn’t know why it was important, or what I was going to do with it, but throwing away the one thing Krazy Katie seemed to care about other than the cigarettes didn’t seem right at all. With the picture shoved into my back pocket, I went back into her bedroom to keep plugging away at all the crap in there.

Shaking my head at the mess, I dug back in the closet and into another pile of clothes. The dress Tria had worn to Ryan’s wedding was there, too. So was one of her economics books and a pile of mechanical pencils I was pretty sure belonged to her.

In the back of Krazy Katie’s closet was another big pile of clothes. I started hauling them all out by the armload—dropping shoes all over the place in the process. When I got to the bottom of the pile, something blue caught my eye.

What the hell…?

In the back of the closet, underneath the pile of clothes, was the little blue bookshelf I had made for Tria all those months ago. I shoved a couple of shoes off of it and then hauled it out into the middle of the bedroom. It was no doubt the one I had made, just a little more beat up than it was originally. There was a slight chunk out of the left corner and a few black lines down the back of it, which made me wonder if it had been thrown into the dumpster or something.

I tried to picture Krazy Katie climbing around in the trash to haul it out, and though I found the mental image comical, I also found it completely plausible.

Swallowing past a lump in my throat, I carried the little shelf out of the bedroom and put it by the door.

“No furniture,” Samantha said.

“This one doesn’t belong to the landlord,” I told her. “I made it.”

She gave me a strange look but didn’t press the issue. I hauled the damn thing back to the house on the bus along with the other things that had belonged to either me or Tria. The act got me a lot of dirty looks, but I ignored them.

Once I got everything into the house, I wasn’t sure what to do with the bookcase. Our bedroom was full of furniture already, and the baby’s room didn’t make sense—she wasn’t going to be reading for a while. The living room was small and there wasn’t really a good place for it. I put it down next to the television, but it didn’t really fit there.

By the time Tria got home, I had given up trying to find a place for it, and it was back next to the TV again. I had flopped down on the couch with a beer in my hand and my feet up on the coffee table.

Tria sighed as she came in, dropped her book bag near the door, and reached behind her to rub at the small of her back.