Long Bright River(50)

And so I watched as Kacey transitioned from despondent to depressed to tired to angry to, by my last visit, very tentatively optimistic. She looked determined. She knew she had work to do, and she wanted to do it.



* * *



—

At my home in Port Richmond, I was planning. I had weighed all my options carefully: the pros and cons of offering Kacey a place to live when she emerged. On this point, I vacillated wildly. I made capricious reversals, based largely on superstition, each time I visited her: I will offer her a place to stay if she’s found a sponsor; I won’t offer her a place to stay if she doesn’t spontaneously express her determination to attend meetings upon her release, without my asking.

Just in case, I told myself, I would ready the house for her arrival. And then I would wait and see.

There was a small concrete patio behind the house, cracked and parched and barren when I moved in. The year of Kacey’s incarceration, I restored it to glory. I built wooden planters and in them I grew herbs and tomatoes and peppers. I bought, secondhand, an outdoor dining set, and strung lights above it, and planted ivy that grew up the fence in the back.

That year, too, I made up the back bedroom in a way I knew would please Kacey. I painted the walls a soothing blue, Kacey’s favorite color, and bought a dark blue bedspread for the bed, and found a pretty vanity at a secondhand store, and adorned the walls with prints that were vaguely related to Kacey’s interest in the tarot. As a young teenager, she had acquired a deck and had taught herself to read them. The pictures I selected for that room included an image of the High Priestess—I was no doubt hoping, on some level, that the figure’s kind, determined gaze would remind Kacey of her own dignity and wisdom and self-worth—and one of the World, and the Sun, and the Moon. I never would have chosen these pictures for myself. I do not believe in the tarot, or in astrology, or in anything of that kind. But I imagined Kacey living in that room, and as I readied it I took a sort of secret delight in the thought of presenting it all to her.

On my last visit to Riverside, Kacey was peaceful and upbeat. She was happy to be leaving but appropriately apprehensive, I thought, and reflective about the trials she would face in the outside world. Of her own volition, she vowed to stay sober, to seek out daily meetings, to find a sponsor. To leave behind, for the time being, friends of hers who were still actively using.

I determined on that day to ask her formally if she would like to stay with me, following the end of her incarceration, and, happily, she agreed.



* * *



—

I cannot speak for my sister, but as for me: the months following her release were the best months of my life.

The two of us were adults, finally, out from under the wary gaze of Gee. And able, therefore, to do as we pleased. I was twenty-six, and Kacey was twenty-five. In my memories of this time, it is perpetually late spring, and the air is warm and damp, and we are in the first tentative days of venturing outside without our jackets. I cannot number the evenings Kacey and I spent on the back patio, dissecting our childhood, discussing our plans. She was doing well; she stayed sober; she didn’t even drink. She gained weight; she grew her hair long; on her face, old pockmarks disappeared; her complexion evened. The scars that marred the skin on her arms and neck, remnants of abscesses, lightened and faded. She found work at a nearby independent movie theater, and even started dating another ticket-taker there, a shy and somewhat awkward young man named Timothy Carey, who never went by Tim, and had no idea about Kacey’s past. (If he wants to know, said Kacey, he can ask me.) Her job at the theater suited us both: after I got off my shifts, I often went and found her there, and saw whatever film was playing at that time.

Sometimes, Simon joined me.

It was around this time that he and Kacey settled into an uneasy truce with one another.

They had little choice: it was my house, clearly, and I was the one paying the bills, and the two of them were my guests.

We had a couple of heart-to-hearts about it, Kacey and I.

—I don’t trust him, she said once, and I’ll never like him, but I can live with him.

Another time, she said, Mickey, you’re the best person I know. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.

And a third time: Mickey, I know you’re a grown-up. Just be careful.

She inquired, often, about why I never went to his place.

—His son drops by unannounced sometimes, I said. I think Simon just doesn’t want me to meet him until we’re engaged.

She looked at me sideways.

—Are you sure that’s it? she said.

But she never said any more than that. And I never answered.



* * *



—

Of course I sensed, even then, that Simon’s behavior was unusual. But I was so happy in this moment of my life, so blissful and so calm. Several times a week, Simon knocked at my door—usually unannounced—and entered the house, and took my face in his hands, and kissed it. And sometimes we would eat dinner, and sometimes we would go instead directly to the bedroom, where he would remove whatever I was wearing, which at first made me feel deeply exposed and then became exciting to me in a way I have never since experienced, my skin all alight with being looked at, my eyes on Simon’s eyes, imagining myself as he saw me. I thought of the young girl who spent so many hours daydreaming of being loved by someone, and I wished I could pay her a visit and tell her, Look, look, everything will be all right.