Blues for Zoey (2 page)

4

The
First Time I Saw Her,
Part 2

“I found this in one of the pockets.”

Out of her purse
, Becky took a photograph. It was
of me and Dad. We were standing
on the courts at DeWinter Hills
, the park in Rosemount where we
used to play. He had a basketball under
one arm and there was a nasty sweat stain spreadin
g down the front of his shirt. H
is other arm slung down over my shoulders. In
the picture, I was six or seven, back when Dad
could still outmaneuver me, back when it was just the th
ree of us: Dad, Mom, and me. Nomi would
n't have been born yet.

I slipped the photograph back where I knew B
ecky had found it, in the jacket's inside pocket. Meanwhile,
Becky gazed up at the ceiling.

“How's your mom?” she asked.

“Pretty good,” I lied.

“So … ” Her eyes wafted down to me in little increments. “You still saving up?”

“I'll have enough by the end of summer.”

“Cool. I'm glad.”

Was she really? When Becky dumped me, chief
among her reasons was the fact that I was too cheap, too obsessed with saving cash. She whined that we never
did
anything, partly because I wasn'
t prepared to shell out and partly because I worked every day at the Sit 'n' Spin. S
he had a point. Anyway, my cash was destined for a higher purpose.

Becky glanced up at the ceiling again. “Have you told her yet?”

“Nope.”

“But she'll do the treatment, right? Like, if you have the money?”

“Maybe. She still thinks I'm saving for college. As if they'd let me in anywhere
.”

From downstairs, I heard the jingle of Mr. Rodolfo's keys. As operator and
sole proprietor of the Sit 'n' Spin Laundromat, he kept an office d
own there. I was never allowed inside.

After we closed on Saturday nights, it was down in the basement where he hosted poker games with a bunch of Evandale regulars.

Mr. Rodolfo is a big guy. As he came up the steps, every one of them creaked. He wasn'
t exactly fat, just thick—thick arms, thick legs, thick neck. He looked like those old wrestlers you see in pictures from the fifties, chubby but solid guys, big kettledrums with arms and legs.

“Becky!”
he shouted, flashing me a dirty grin. “If only I were young again.”

“If only,” I said.

“Becky,
Becky, Becky!” Mr. Rodolfo slapped the glass
of the dry-cleaning booth as he repeated her name. “We haven't seen you in
aaaaages
.
You're making your boyfriend here lonely!”

Boyfriend
. I
winced. (I hadn't gotten around to telling Mr.
Rodolfo Becky had dumped me. I had the imp
ression that, a bit like Becky's father, he might be disappointed.) Becky, meanwhile, wasn't impressed.
Her eyes tossed a drawerful of knives at me and then whipped a few at Mr. Rodolfo.

“Ex
cuse me?”
she asked.

“Don't worry.” Mr. Rodolfo started straightening the little one-dollar boxes of detergent on the shelf behind the counte
r. “This way, your beau here can concentrate on his job, instead of—well, you know, getting all
dist
racted
with you around.”

The knives were g
rowing in size and sharpness. They were n
ow more like a set of katana. “Um,
Kaz
? I think maybe you have something to explain to—”

But she never
finished. She never got her chance to spill
the beans, because that was when the Girl with the Dreads walked past the window.

5

The Precise
Words That Went through
My Head
When She Walked Past

Holy shit, it's Jesus of Evandale.

6

What My Boss
Would Think If
Jesus Was a Skinn
y, Goth-slash-Rastafarian White Girl Wh
o Came with
the Craziest Cross in
the World

You can't blame me for thinking what I thought. If you
'd seen her that morning, you would have thought the same thing.

Because of the cross.

Don't get me
wrong. It wasn't like a
regular
c
ross. Not like a church cross. This was something
welded together from the guts of a giant robot, and the welder was obviously a lunatic, probably living in a shack on the edge of a burning forest.
It was that sort of cross.

There was sheet metal, driftwood, plumbing pipes, rusty cutlery, crappy toys, and bamboo shafts, all hitched together into something that resembled a gigantic crucifix. M
ore junk dangled from the crossbar: chains, cogs, copper wire, knife blades, forks with their tines
curled into hooks. There were
bones
, too. All pocked and yell
ow, like rotten teeth.

The girl's face was in shadow. All I saw were flashes of pale skin under a
thick curtain of dreadlocks. They were mostly bleach-blonde,
but with a few strands dyed the colors
of grape juice and bubble gum. Her jean shorts hung low on her hips, exposing a thin strip of skin between a rainbow belt and the bottom of a black
T-shirt that fell off one shoulder, exposing the
strap of a pink leopard-print bra (though I'm
fairly certain there's no such thing as a pink leopard).

If right at that moment you had told me this person—this goth-rock Jesus fr
eak, half Bob Marley, half Kewpie doll—would spin my life upside down in a matter of weeks, I would have laughed. At
the time, however, nobody let out so
much as a giggle. Becky was so disgusted by the girl's appearance she forgot all about telling Mr. Rodolfo she had dumped me.

“What a
freak
,” she said.

My boss agreed. “She tries coming in he
re with that thing,” he said to me, “you don't let her. Understand?”

I nodded in silence.

“
Bad for business.” He turned back to the
boxes of Tide, sprucing them into rows for the gazillionth time. “Soon as someone like that walks in, you'r
e losing money.”

Maybe so, but for some reason, I
was curious. Maybe it was her legs, straining under the w
eight of the cross. In my head, I still saw the streaks of lean muscle flashing up and down her thighs with each ste
p. I went to the window, trying to get a look at her again, but she was gone.

“Get back here,” Mr. Rodolfo said. “
You're not finished folding. Leaving a pile like this out on the counter—
no way
. Bad for business.”

Before I went back to folding, we all heard the pitter-pounding of tiny feet. They were coming down the back stairs. They were
never
supposed to come down the back stairs.

It was Nomi.

7

B-L-O-O-D

My sister burst in through the back door.

“Use the front!” I shouted at her. “You
know
that!”

It was a rule in our house, mostly directed at Nomi:
whene
ver you go down to Kaz's wo
rk, don't go down the back way
. The p
roblem was the rear stairs off our kitchen spat
you straight into the alley behind the laundromat. Drivers were always speeding through there to avoid the lights at Steinway and
Emerson. (And yes, it meant the three of
us—Mom, Nomi, and me—lived directly above my work.)

“I'm sorry,” Nomi whimpered, “but … ”

“Forget about that,” I said, sensing something was wrong. “What happened?”

“It's Mom.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Becky covering her mouth. Only three people outside our family knew about M
om's illness: Calen, Mr. Rodolfo, and Becky. Calen knew because I
had known him forever; Mr. R
odolfo knew because we needed to borrow his car whenever Mom went up to Olsten for her therapy; Becky knew because I was dumb
enough to tell her when she agreed to ha
ve sex with me. (Afterward, I made her p
romise she'd never tell anyone or
else I'd start a rumor that she gave
me chlamydia. She pointed out that, if I did, then everyone would think I had chlamydia too.
I told her yeah, that's how
badly I wanted her to keep it to herself.)

I didn't tell people because that's what Mom wanted. She was extremely self-conscious about her illness. She doesn't like anyone knowing about it. Probably because of how weird and rare it is.

“Tell me what happened,” I said to Nomi.

“Mom told me she was taking a nap! She said that's all it was! Just a nap! But then, I couldn't wake her up, so … so I … ”

“Take a deep breath.”

My sister tried. She opened her mouth but as soon as she inhaled, she started crying.
“I tried to pull her out of bed! I just wanted
to wake her up, that's all! But
she was right on the edge and then I pulled too hard and she hit her head and there's … there
's … Kaz, I'm sorry!
There's blood!
”

I had to steady myself. I have this problem with blood.
H
emophobia
, they call it. It means the runny red stuff that keeps us alive is basically my
kryptonite. When I see blood, I pass out. The sudden image
in my head—Mom's pale face and a red stain soaking into the carpet—made the world turn gr
ay. I shut my eyes tight. I flexed my stomach muscles. I clenched my jaw. (Sometimes that helps.)

When I opened my eyes, Mr. Rodolfo had his phone out, looking annoyed—p
robably with my lack of action.

“I'll call the ambulance,” he said.

8

The Swelling of
Sleep

You've heard of appendicitis, right?
That
itis
part means to get larger, to swell. My mother has something else entirely
.
Somnitis
. It's a rare neurological disease named after Somnus, the Roman god of sleep.

If appendicitis means the swelling of the appendix, I'm sure you can see what somnitis is. It means sometimes my mom doesn't wake up. For days. She can have an attack anytime. One moment she's wide awake, and the next—
zzzzzzzzz
…

For days
.

It's so rare, most people have never heard of it.
Not even doctors. Which is why there aren't
many working on a cure. There are quacks out there who
'd like to sell you crystals or incense or some treatment that includes stabbing you with needles, but none of it works. In those cases, the only people getting well are the “practitioners
.”

I've read everything about her illness (and I do mean
everything
; there isn't much out there). I've learned that throughout her life, Mom's attacks will get longer and longer. One day, maybe when she's old or maybe tomorrow, she'll fall asleep and never wake up.

9

O
n Googling

When your mom has somnitis, you can't help but google. A lot.

(Is it just
me, or does the word
google
, when used
as a verb, sound like slang for masturbation? Example:
I'll bet Topher Briggs googles himself, like, ten
times a day. See what I mean? This is
not to say that there's anything wrong
with googling yourself. To quote Mr. Dearborn,
my extremely fired health class teacher: “Boys, it's perfectly natural. Ev
erybody does it.”) So like I said, I google a
lot. (Please note that I'm now using
google
in the
classical
sense—i.e., searching the Internet.) You can
't help but type things like, “What is the
cure for somnitis?” The first thing you get is pages
and pages of bullshit sites trying to convince you
to do more yoga, or get hypnotized, or
rub eucalyptus cream on your earlobes. Mom tried
all of these, by the way. None of
it worked. All it did was teach me my mom
's a sucker for miracle cures. It's
hard to blame her. She's the one
who's sick. When something terrible is happening to you, I guess
you're willing to try anything.

Which is why it was so
crazy she wouldn't try the S
leep Clinic at the Mars-Bowen Health Sciences Complex in New York City. It's the only Google hit that actually seemed legit. One of the founders is a neurologist who specializes in sleep disor
ders. These are
actual
doctors. They do
actual
resea
rch. Using
actual
science.

On their site, they have a
list of everything they have treated, f
rom snoring to insomnia. And guess what? Scroll all the way down to the very bottom and you'll find eight beautiful little letters you won't find anywhe
re else: s-o-m-n-i-t-i-s.

But there's a catch. Mars-Bowen is one of those all-inclusive private
health complexes. You can only book yourself into the place if you
're a member, and membership will cost you. $12,000. Up front.

So now you know what I was saving up for.