You'd Be Home Now (33)

I wince. Nine times?

A young woman comes out of a door by the front desk. Her face looks pasty, like dough, like you could just press your fingers to her skin and shape it anyway you wanted. She’s thin and wearing flip-flops and jean shorts.

Purse-woman pushes herself off the wall. She gives the boy a hard look. “I’m working two jobs just to pay for this. I should be in Cancún. I should be drinking Bloody Marys with my girlfriends after work down at Jasper’s, but instead I’m here, every day, and I go home and have soup from a can, because that’s what I can afford now, and put my daughter to bed and hope that when I wake up, she’s still there. God’s just another addiction, son.”

The thin girl says, “Mom,” like she’s embarrassed.

The purse-woman says, “All right, Margaret, let’s go, then.”

I watch them squeeze their way to the door. What did her mom mean, that it’s only waiting until it’s over? I don’t ever want to feel that way about Joey. But this is his first time, not his ninth, and I want to make sure it’s his last, no matter what.

More people have come in and we are packed two and three deep.

The boy lets out a breath and says, “We are weak because we have holes in our souls and the drugs fill them. When we’re ready to let the Lord fill us, our holes go away.”

    I find it hard to look at his searching eyes, so I look down at the floor. Holes. Is that how Joey feels? Like he’s empty inside? Wrong, like he said in the car? I feel empty, too, and I took Vicodin after the accident, but I never took it all, or tried to steal it, to fill myself up, make myself feel better.

My face gets red. But I do…steal. And there’s Gage.

Maybe people just use different things to fill up the emptiness. Until it becomes less about feeling empty and more about feeding something else.

Joey comes over to me. “The meeting is starting. You’ll be okay?”

I nod. “Yeah. Sure.”

A man in a blue T-shirt comes out from behind the desk. He’s got a clipboard and pen. “Six p.m. support group, it’s time.” A bunch of people get up from the chairs and push away from the wall and Joey follows them through the door. The boy with the yellowy nails goes, too. I feel relieved when he walks away. Someone from the front desk calls out some names and the two people who were doubled over get up and go through a different door than Joey went through.

I think about where to sit, now that a lot of people are gone, but as soon as I move, more people flood in the door and jostle for the seats. I hang back. It seems like some of them probably need to sit down more than I do, even though my knee is throbbing after a full day of walking around school.

The security guard catches my eye. “It’s like this all the time, day in, day out.” He shakes his head. “Damn shame. Damn junkies.”

“They’re people,” I say. “With problems.”

He shrugs.

    I look at the door Joey went through, wonder what’s going on inside, what they talk about. How everyone is going to fill up their holes and with what. If my brother will find something else to fill himself up before it’s too late.



* * *



—

On the way home, Joey drives by Frost Bridge. From the window, I glimpse them. The people down there. Some people in town call them ghosties. I don’t know why people started calling them that. Maybe like they are ghosts of their former selves or something. There are even more of them now than when I drove by here with Maddie. And it isn’t just adults. There are kids, too, like our age. Some of the adults I can recognize, like Jim Tolford, who used to mow our lawn for years before we hired the man with the wide-brimmed hat, because Jim started showing up late, and then not at all, and finally was found one day on the Galt’s lawn, the mower running, his face in the grass. Then my mom hired the man with the wide-brimmed hat and we didn’t see Jim anymore.

There are tons of them, spread out on the rocky river beach. Blankets, tarps, backpacks. Grocery carts. Somebody’s made a small fire. Some of them seem shaky, like the people at the clinic.

“Joey.” I think of the boy with the yellowy nails. “Did you ever take Oxy?”

He’s quiet. “That’s a hell of a thing to ask me.”

“Sorry. I mean, I know…I know you were on heroin.”

It feels weird to even say that word in connection with Joey. Heroin. Maybe that’s what upsets my mom the most about what happened. That things like heroin happen to other types of people, not us.

    “I mean, at the party. I mean, I know now. I didn’t then. I just thought you were drunk. But that boy at outpatient, he was talking about Oxy. Did you do that, too?”

I think about that night.

Joey’s head rolls around the seat in the back of the car. His arms are splayed. Luther says, Your brother is messed up, Em. Daaaaammmnnn. Candy is crying, pinching Joey’s arm. He doesn’t wake up. He can’t be drunk because I know what that smells like, because of our dad. Candy says, We should go to the hospital, I think.

Candy is crying. Joey, wake up.

Luther says he has a stop to make, that Joey will be fine. We argue. The rain is coming down hard. Candy wants us to let her out.

Joey pulls over into the parking lot of Kingston Park. People are walking their dogs, sitting on benches, talking on phones. There are kids in the play area, hanging from monkey bars. The sun is almost down. The park will close soon.