Before You Knew My Name (15)

If I leave again, would anyone miss me when I’m gone?





SIX

THIS STORY REALLY STARTS IN A SMALL TOWN, SIXTY-SOME miles west of Milwaukee. The first steps toward now, toward here, begin with the waving of a scrap of paper in my face.

‘Go on, Alice. You know you want to call him. Or’—Tammy pulls a face—‘you’re gonna have to work something else out quick. There’s no room up at the cabin and, besides, Dad’s …’

She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Tammy’s father is drying out. Again. Only this time, he says he has God on his side. Something about a new church by the frozen lake, and being reborn for Jesus, which means he’s ready to repair his relationship with his daughter, too, if she’ll come keep house with him. He wants her there before St Patrick’s Day, thinks she’ll help keep him steady, but he doesn’t know her new boyfriend, Rye, lives one town over from that church, peddling everything from oxy to heroin out of his basement.

Tammy thinks one man will make up for the other.

She is my best friend, but I wouldn’t go to the lake with her, even if I was invited. There is nothing good waiting for me in those cabins and churches, in the basements full of boys who will probably never leave the county, let alone the state, unless it’s to go to jail. It’s been nine months since Tammy and I graduated, a new year has turned over, and I am more certain than ever that small towns are not for me. I wasn’t conceived in one, and I sure as hell don’t want to die in one, either. What I need, then, is a job. The kind that pays well, or well enough, so that the distance between stuck and leaving is shortened, narrowed to an end point I can see.

If I was eighteen already, I could work clearing tables at Jimmy’s bar; Tammy’s cousin has always been nice to me, and the tips alone would buy me a ticket out of here. But my birthday is still four whole weeks away, which also means Gloria D, my guardian, still has signing rights to my bank account, and therefore to my freedom. A regular job just isn’t going to cut it.

‘I promised your mom I’d look after you until you’re eighteen,’ she used to say. But I think it’s more about the government cheques that will stop when I age out of the system.

I stare at the piece of paper in Tammy’s hand, the potential of it.

‘I don’t know, Tam …’

We’re sharing her lumpy double bed, tucked up inside another cold, grey-sky morning. Lying so close to my best friend, I can smell the remnants of last night’s Marlborough lights on her skin, mixed with years-old Chanel No. 5, a powdery scent so familiar I want to bury my face into her neck. Knowing she’ll be gone by tomorrow makes me want to cry. But crying won’t help my situation; feeling sorry for yourself gets you exactly nowhere.

Nowhere. I’m already in the middle of nowhere. Worse—I’m trapped within it. In this town where the sky pushes down on you. Air all heavy and close to your nose, as if the pollution from other, nicer towns has been diverted here, set down right over our heads. I’m not sure what my mother was thinking when she came back to her home state. Why she couldn’t just stay in New York City.

Tell me about where I was made.

I would ask her this all the time. I never tired of her stories about New York, loved learning that Manhattan was an island—‘Not all islands are tropical, Alice’—and knowing there was a place where you could catch trains at any hour, where restaurants never closed, and people from the movies walked right by you on the street. I thought it all sounded so romantic, even if I didn’t really understand what romantic meant back then, just liked the sound of the word, the click of it in my mouth.

From what I know, a man brought us back to the Midwest. Some guy and some promise, both of which ended up broken. My mother stayed because it was a thousand times cheaper than anywhere else, and there were other men and other promises waiting, but mostly, in those early years, it was just her and me, making a home wherever we found ourselves. To be honest, each time we packed up and moved, I mostly felt relief. Knowing another man had gone, and we’d be back to the two of us again. It was always better when it was just the two of us.

‘Why did she leave me here?’

‘What?’

Tammy is up on her elbow now, facing me.

‘Huh?’

‘You mumbled something, Alice. What did you say?’

I had not meant to ask that essential, unanswerable question out loud. This would break all the rules. There are some things you only speak of when you’ve had enough cheap booze to pretend you don’t know what you’re saying. When you’ve drunk so much alcohol you can no longer hide the fact you’re split down the middle with grief, still fresh with it. As if it all happened yesterday, not years ago, when you were only fourteen years old. In these moments, while your best friend holds your hair back, and you throw up weed and last night’s tin-can spirits, everything comes tumbling out. Words as violent as the bile burning your throat. How you wanted to die, too, on that kitchen floor, how you wanted to climb right into the fire as they closed those dark, heavy curtains around her coffin.

I was fourteen years old when my mother shot herself in the head. She pulled the trigger a half hour before I arrived home from school. Ensuring she would be well dead by the time I got home. How do you ever find the right words to question that?

If the pain slips out when you are drunk, you never reference it the next morning, never talk about it when you’re sober. Just the same way you never ask Tammy what she meant when she said she had uncles not monsters under her bed when she was growing up, and you know to pull her away when she attempts to stumble off with a pair of college footballers at those Friday night parties you gatecrash together. You take care of each other at night. And then you wave off that care in the morning. These are the rules you’ve got going, and this is how you both survive.