Cracked (3 page)

I scanned the crowd in line at Air Canada, looking for Darren. Darren had paid for my ticket, and he was supposed to meet me here. I didn’t have the confirmation number, but he had assured me on the phone that we were booked on the 5:15 flight to LAX, California.

I’d like to say that as soon as I’d gotten Fred’s message that Ginger had died, I’d pulled myself together and gotten on the phone with my brothers, trying to arrange a flight. I’d like to be able to say that.

Instead, I’d unplugged my phone, taken a huge hit, and spent the next eight or ten hours with Gene, sitting on my battered green couch. Anyone who tells you that drugs don’t help make pain easier to bear is telling only a half truth. When you’re high, the pain is a part of you, but bearable. It’s when you come down that it gets you, and the pain hits you a millionfold. And therein, as they say, lies the rub.

Gene watched over me, his eyes red from sadness for me and two or three days without sleep, and listened to me talk about Ginger. What a great mother she was. How, being fraternal twins, we looked so different, yet still like sisters. How beautiful Ginger was, how everything that was awkward and uncomfortable about me was somehow effortless and gentle on her. How she had gotten her period a year before I did and when I finally got mine at fifteen and Mom wouldn’t let me wear tampons because she thought it would mean I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore, Ginger had given me a big box of Tampax and told me to hide them under my bed. She had even, God help her, locked the two of us in the bathroom and showed me the right way to put one in. And made it funny. By the time it was done, we were both laughing so hard that Dad started banging on the door wanting to know what all the commotion was about in there.

The heartbreak when we were eighteen and Ginger decided to go off to Bennington to study French literature.

French literature. That was Ginger. Loved what she loved, and wouldn’t be talked out of anything because it might be impractical. When I finally enrolled in college in Toronto, I went from travel and tourism to culinary arts (big mistake – I was asked to leave after I started my second fire in one of the college kitchens), and finally settled into a diploma program in something they called Health and Wellness.

The irony is not lost on me.

Whenever Ginger came to visit me we wouldn’t stop talking. We would sit up late into the night while she told me about boys – she and her high-school sweetheart Fred had taken a year’s break from each other, and I was a single girl around town – and her classes, and what it was like in Vermont. I would make her laugh, talking about how I felt like I was stuck in one perpetual Phys. Ed. class.

I would just sit on my bed and watch her cleaning her face with Nivea, a ritual that she performed every night of her life. She had never put on so much as a swipe of mascara, not even years later at her own quirky wedding at Cape Cod, when she and Fred had exchanged vows in front of our two families and a half dozen friends. It was a cold day in October, they were both barefoot, and the breakers were so loud that none of us could hear a word that the justice of the peace was saying. Still, it was the most beautiful wedding I have ever attended, and I wasn’t the only one crying. And crying is something I was never in the habit of doing. Not then, anyway.

She and Fred were the happiest couple in the world. They had started dating when they both worked at McDonald’s at sixteen. I had opted to work in Dad’s dry cleaners, but Ginger went for the glamour of the golden arches. Fred and Ginger: it had to be destined, right? Fred was no trip to Hollywood, as my mother, bless her, was fond of saying: he had never grown into the Dumbo ears that protruded from his gigantic head, and the man seemed to have been born without shoulders. But he was funny, smart, kind, a whiz with computers and business later on, as well as being a great fan of early twentieth-century Irish poetry. I always thought Fred was a prize – I think, looking back, that he was my first crush. Even though we were the same age, he treated me with the affection one would reserve for a beloved family dog. And I was always just as loyal as one.

Ginger was what I had always wished I could have been, but have always known deep in my soul that I couldn’t. I didn’t have her charisma, her loving openness with everyone, even strangers in the grocery store. Her infinite capacity for nurturing.

She was the best of us, and now she was dead.

And in his hysterical voicemail to me, Fred had said it was by her own hand.

* * *

I got to the front of the line at the Air Canada check-in counter, and slapped my passport down on the counter. Thank God it was still valid. I hadn’t used it in two years, but before that, with Jack, I had travelled all over the world. I had more stamps in there than all of the Jolie-Pitts combined.

“I’m on the 5:15 to Orange County,” I said, not returning the ticket agent’s perky smile. “I don’t have the confirmation number. My brother has it, but he’s not here yet.”

The agent slid my passport off the counter and looked at the picture, looked at me.

“You’ve certainly changed,” she said. I’ll say. My passport showed a woman with long blonde hair and thirty extra healthy pounds on my 5’10” frame.

“Plastic surgery, Lisa,” I said, glancing at her nametag. I met her eyes with a level gaze. She smiled uncertainly, then dropped her eyes. She was clicking away at her terminal. “Aisle seat, please, Lisa, if possible. And please seat my brother, Darren Cleary, next to me.” I was trying to sound normal and control the shaking that was starting to take over my limbs. Sometimes after a long enough bender and not enough sleep or food, I could resemble someone with a neurological disorder. I had managed a bit of sleep, so I should be okay without a hit for a while, but I was days past any food other than saltines.

And my twin sister had committed suicide. Ginger was dead. I knew I couldn’t think about it now. If I thought about it now, I would sink down to the floor and might not be able to get up again. And this, I had to do. I fantasized about running out the door, into a taxi and back home. Calling D-Man and hitting the pipe until my heart exploded. What did it matter? Ginger was dead. I somehow used every reserve of strength left in me to stay standing. To not flake out on Darren and leave him to deal with Fred and the boys – oh God, the boys – alone. Not to mention Skipper and Laurence and the horrors of funeral planning.

I closed my eyes, and willed myself to be still, and to not vomit.

Lisa the Ticket Agent clicked away further without acknowledging me. She probably had dealt with enough wise-ass freaks today. She was in her forties, tanned to a nice leathery quality, and looked as tired as I felt.

“Sorry if I was rude,” I said to her. “I’m going down to California for my sister’s funeral. I’m a little…”

I stopped when Lisa the Ticket Agent quickly glanced up at me. Something in her eyes made mine start to water.

“Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to my sister. She’s my best friend.” She leaned across the counter and patted my hand. “I’m sorry for your loss, Danielle.”

Danielle. The only person who had ever, and I mean ever, called me that was my mother, and she was dead too. Three years ago, she and Dad, driving back from their yearly Florida jaunt, killed by a drunk driver on the I-95.

“Danny,” I said, wetness leaking slowly onto my pale cheeks now. “Everybody calls me Danny.”

“Well, Danny,” she said as brightly as she was able, faced with a scrawny junkie with a bad dye job crying in front of her, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Coach is overbooked, so I’m going to bump you and Darren Cleary into first-class. Is that alright?”

I loved Lisa.

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said softly. Lisa nodded and whipped my suitcase onto the conveyor belt behind her and handed me my boarding pass. She pointed out the gate and boarding time, half an hour from now. Where was Darren?

“You have a good flight now, Danny,” she said. I glanced at her and tried to smile but I think it came out all crooked. I was about to walk away from the counter when a glance at Lisa’s face stopped me.

“Danny,” she said, in a quieter, different voice than she had used before, “I just had a flash of something. Do you know what I mean?” She was looking intently at me.

“A hot flash?” I asked, confused, and then blushed, because I didn’t want to insinuate that she was menopausal. Lisa looked like she cared about her looks. Women who spend that much time in tanning beds don’t usually want to be mistaken for anything past thirty-five, even if their skin resembles an alligator handbag.

“Your sister. She didn’t die naturally, Danny,” she said. She was whispering, and the look on her face made the hair on my forearms stand straight up.

“No, they’re saying she committed suicide,” I said, locked onto Lisa’s face. Somewhere in my brain I couldn’t believe I was telling a stranger that my sister had offed herself.

“I don’t think she did, Danny,” Lisa continued. “I don’t think so.” She turned away from me for a minute and called out to another agent. “Kimberly, I’m going on break right now, okay?” I stood with my feet glued to the floor, sweating and shivering at once. Lisa looked back at me with her normal face and a hard, shaky tone in her voice.

“You be careful down there, Danny, okay? You be real careful.” And with that, Lisa walked quickly behind the agents to her right and into a room behind counters, snapping the door sharply behind her.

I believe in psychic phenomena about as much as I believe in the Easter Bunny. But I shivered, and I wasn’t sure it was just from the lack of sleep, food, and crack leaving my body.

I took my suitcase and walked away.

Now I just had to get through security with a balloon filled with two grams of powdered cocaine and half an eightball of crack stuck as far up my vagina as I could get it. With a length of kitchen string tied around the balloon for easy retrieval in a public bathroom. The coke was to keep me awake and going and get me through times when I had to be on, and in extremis, I could do a fairly decent job of cooking it into something resembling crack. Crack, because, crack.

My lack of paranoia served me well. I smiled and sailed through security and customs in Toronto with a smile on my face and narcotics in my cooch.

* * *

Darren was waiting for me at the gate. He pulled me into him and hugged me tightly, not letting go even after I tried to pull away. What started with a sad fraternal embrace ended with us wrestling, me trying to get away from him as he held my head in a vice grip against his chest and sang “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Daddy’s going to buy you a mockingbird” loudly, until I was laughing so hard I started to hiccup. A family affliction. Nobody could make me laugh like Darren could. All the other passengers at the gate were watching, some with confusion, most with amusement. At nearly thirty, Darren looked a bit like a younger Brad Pitt. And unfortunately, he knew it.

Handsome, is what I’m trying to say. Even I, his sister, could see it, and I liked to tease him about how long he spent on his hair in the morning, and ask him how the boys in the gay bars were liking him now that he was getting so long in the tooth. Stuff like that. My brother was uber-straight, and a slut to boot.

“You smell like weed,” I whispered. This was Darren’s only vice. He didn’t smoke cigarettes, and wasn’t much of a drinker. It was weird that we were related, when you think about it.

“That would be because I just smoked some, Danny Banany,” he stage-whispered back.

“Here? In the airport?” Even I wasn’t that dumb.

“Duh. In the car, shit-for-brains.” We parked on chairs and he put his arm around me, and I leaned into him gratefully.

“Since when do you have a car? Why didn’t I get a ride then, ingrate?”

“Wasn’t my car, baby. Got a lift from an admirer of the female persuasion.” I rolled my eyes at him.

In first class we got the kind of service that I had become distinctly unused to in the past two years of sitting around my smoky apartment, smoking crack. Darren told the flight attendant to “keep the wine flowing” as though he was Dean Martin on the way to Vegas, and the food was better than I had any right to expect. As I shovelled some kind of beef stew into my face, I caught Darren grinning at me.

“The fuck is your problem,” I said, and stuck my tongue out, showing him my half-chewed food. He laughed. Sometimes the old jokes are the best jokes.

“Nice to see you eat,” he said.

“Happens all the time,” I answered, swigging a glass of red wine.

“Bullshit,” he answered. “How long since you used?”

I paused. “Twenty-two hours,” I answered. I looked at his watch. “And about twenty minutes.” Food had made me feel better. Wine had made me feel better. And with crack, if you end a long bender and get some of your basic human needs fulfilled – sleep, food, hydration – you can go a while without using again and feeling too awful. Despite what you see in the media, crack isn’t like heroin. Most of us don’t need it every day. Unless, that is, we’re already on a bender, in which case stopping seems like the impossible dream. And I had already decided to get through the flight clean. I wasn’t so far gone enough that I didn’t realize that I needed to eat and achieve some semblance of normalcy before I faced Fred and the boys.

“Can’t score down there, you know,” he said quietly.

We’ll see, I thought. “Wasn’t planning on it,” I said. What I had wouldn’t last long, but long enough to score.

Harness the energy that we put into getting our drugs, and you could end world hunger.

Darren raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

“Don’t judge me, Darren.” I felt my face flush with wine and the beginnings of anger. Addicts and their high horses.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Beanpole,” he said, patted my knee, and promptly fell fast asleep. I gazed at him. It was so simple for him. But then again, I thought things had always seemed pretty simple for Ginger. And look how she ended up.

I put my fork down and laid my head on Darren’s shoulder. I wasn’t going to tell him what Lisa the Ticket Agent had said. No point in freaking him out.