Keep Her Safe(8)

If she’s smoking, then she’s alive. Though the air is thick enough to choke the life out of a person. “Why didn’t you turn on the air-conditioning?” I scold, stepping into the stuffy, dark interior. It’s 95 degrees out, thanks to this spring heat wave.

“It’s broken,” comes the languid response.

“It can’t be. I just bought it!” Marching over to the window, I adjust the dials and check the plug, then smack it for good measure. But she’s right; it has stopped working. And that delivery guy from Aunt Chilada’s whom I bought it off promised it was in mint condition! “Ugh!” I kick the front door wide open.

Mom squints against the sunlight. She’s exactly where I left her this morning on the couch. Only then she was snoring softly, and now her eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, and she’s sliding her hand out from beneath the cushions, where she stuck her needle and spoon. As if she can hide them from me.

I used to go searching for her stashes, back when it was vodka and weed and prescription painkillers. Back when I believed I could stop her from using. It’s surprising how many places there are to hide drugs in this nine-hundred-square-foot tin box. But I’d find them and then I’d flush them down the drain or the toilet, because if she couldn’t afford to buy more, then she wouldn’t be able to use, right?

I learned the hard way that she’s too far gone to go without. She’ll just find other ways to pay.

So I started leaving cash in a kitchen drawer. Not a lot, but enough. We don’t talk about it. I leave it there, and when I come home it’s gone and she’s high. But I didn’t have extra cash to leave this week because I had to buy this shitty air-conditioning unit that doesn’t work.

My stomach curls at the thought of what she must have done for today’s hit.

“If that mangy dog shows up . . .” Mom grumbles, unmoving.

“Cyclops doesn’t want to be here.” Neither do I. But I’m trapped. In this trailer, in this park.

In this life.

The only reason I haven’t walked out that door and not looked back is because she’ll be on the street or in the morgue within a week if I abandon her.

I struggle to quell my resentment as I set my purse on the dining table and unwrap the taquitos. “Here. Eat. They’re chicken.” Ernie, my manager at QuikTrip, lets staff take the ones that have sat under the warmer for too long to sell.

“Already did.” She waves the food away, her eyes glued on the old tube TV in the corner and one of her daytime soaps. I’ll bet she couldn’t tell me what the show is called. And she’s lying about eating. She lives off of melted cheese sandwiches and, when she does remember to eat, I come home to a counter of bread crumbs and torn-apart slices of bread, and a fire-conducive layer of processed cheese in the toaster oven. Today, the countertop is exactly as I left it after cleaning up last night.

Mom has always been thin but she’s a waif now, her dependence on hard drugs gripping her, leeching away fat and muscle, leaving nothing but sallow skin and bones, stringy mud-colored hair, and hollow cheeks where a striking face once resided.

I’m not going to fight with her about eating though, because you can’t reason with a heroin addict and that’s what my mother has become.

“I’m gonna get some sleep. Don’t burn the place down,” I say between mouthfuls, moving toward my bedroom. At least there’s a fan in there, and I know enough to tuck towels under the door to keep the stench of smoke from overwhelming me.

“Jackie Marshall’s dead.”

That stops me in my tracks. “What?” I would have thought she’d lead with that news.

Mom uses her hand to mimic a gun and points her index finger at her temple. “She put a bullet in her own head. So they say, anyway.”

Jackie Marshall. My father’s old police partner and one of his best friends. The woman who turned her back on us when we needed her. The woman my mother is convinced had something to do with framing him almost fourteen years ago.

Apparently I knew her, back when we lived in Austin, in a nice bungalow with a picket fence surrounding it. In a past life. That life ended when I was six, and I don’t remember much from it. Shadows of faces, glimmers of smiles. The echo of a child’s giggle as a man tossed her in the air, before that man stopped coming home.

That old life paved the way for my new one, where I remember a lot of hurt, a lot of tears. And a lot of hatred toward the Austin Police Department and a woman named Jackie Marshall.

“Where did you hear that?” We’re in Tucson, two sprawling states over, and we severed ties when we left, even changing our surname to Richards, my mother’s maiden name.

“It’s all over the news.” She struggles to hold her phone out for me.

My mother let go of reality a long time ago, and yet Texas still has a bitter hold on her. She couldn’t tell you who the governor of Arizona is, but she trolls the Texas news pages like a conspiracy theorist during her lucid moments, keeping tabs for the sake of keeping tabs. Since she stumbled on the news story that Jackie Marshall had been named chief of the Austin Police Department two years ago, that vicious obsession has grown.

So has her drug addiction.

I’m surprised she’s kept up with her scrutiny lately, given how bad she’s getting.

“Austin’s Top Cop Commits Suicide.” I scan the news article from this morning, cringing at the gruesome details. Mom prefers the tabloid newspapers to the reputable ones. She says there’s less political bullshit and riskier truth. They also care little for people’s privacy, it would seem. “Her son found her.” Noah Marshall. Mom says I knew him, too. I vaguely remember a boy, not that I’d be able to pick him out of a lineup.