Imperfect Birds (26 page)

“I’m sorry I tricked you into coming,” Rae said in front of everyone, and even though Elizabeth was now glad she had come, she stayed silent. “And I’m sorry I had to get out so early. I felt like an armadillo on a grill.”

It was a lovely afternoon in the sun, eating beans and corn tortillas Bonnie had brought, talking about the experience, laughing, shaking their heads, swearing they’d stay in touch.

On the way home, Elizabeth slept all the way south to Sea Ranch.

When she woke up, she looked over at Rae in the driver’s seat for a long time. “What,” Rae said finally.

“I felt something today. A speck of something, way deep down inside me, at the bottom of the well. It wasn’t God. I don’t believe in God. But it was not me.”

Rae drove along, considering this. “ ‘Not Me’ is a good name for God.”

“Thank you. As long as you understand that it’s lowercase.”

“Some people call God Howard, as in ‘Howard be thy name.’ Or Andy, as in ‘And he walks with me, and he talks to me.’ Was it anything you could ever turn to in prayer?”

“You’re suggesting I turn to an entity called ‘not me,’ lowercase, for answers, and comfort?”

“What does it matter? If prayer works, does it even matter if there’s a god or not?”

“What if I prayed for knowledge, and it turned out Rosie’s using a shitload of drugs?”

“Then you’ll know one thing that’s true. But to find that out, all you need to do is buy fancier drug tests and test her more often, no matter if she has tantrums.”

Elizabeth mulled this over. “That’s what James says. So maybe I’ll do it.”

When they approached the mall off 101 in Novato, Elizabeth told Rae to pull onto the exit. More accurate urine tests would make James happy. And as long as she was going to tell him how she had betrayed him, she might as well do something to please him, too. Rae pulled into the parking lot outside Target.

Inside, they searched the aisles until Rae finally found the drug tests in the back.

Elizabeth reached for three boxes. They were expensive. Turning toward the checkout lines at the front of the store, she grabbed Rae by the shoulder. “Rosie is going to go ballistic.”

“Better furious than dead or brain-damaged. It’s not your problem. Your problem is to find out what is true and to do the right thing.”

As they walked past the endless shelves of shit for sale, the smell of disinfectant stuck to Elizabeth’s nostrils. “I’m sweating like a pig, Rae. I wish we’d had this discussion at the river, on sacred ground.”

Rae pulled her to a stop. She mopped Elizabeth’s forehead with her sleeve. “There’s only sacred ground. The only holy place is where we are.” Elizabeth stared up at the store’s fluorescent lights. All she knew after what they’d been through today was that she was going to tell James the truth, tonight, and test Rosie for all kinds of drugs, in the morning.

She put her fingers to her throat to feel her weak, rapid pulse, and put her boxes on the counter. Her shoulders sagged. Behind her, Rae pushed her nose into the space between Elizabeth’s shoulder blades, like a big dog. Usually under the stark fluorescent lights of stores, Elizabeth felt like a rump roast on display at Safeway, but she was not thinking about that now. She was thinking of how Rosie used to be, before whatever it was had gotten her: the siege, the possession, whatever you wanted to call it. She listened to the buzz that the lights above her were making, to let people know that the bulb was about to go out, a soft, not unpleasant buzz, tissue paper on a comb.

R
osie rarely used cocaine, because she hated to spend so much of her money at once—sixty bucks or so in one night—when it took so long to earn. When you got blow free, there was nothing better. It didn’t show up in your urine for long, which was good since her mother was now on a testing jag, giving Rosie OTC piss tests every few days. She had been in Elizabeth’s bathroom one day recently, using the tub for a bubble bath, when she’d seen all the new urine tests under the sink. The new batch of kits tested for THC, opiates, methamphetamines, E. She hated that Elizabeth had become so distrustful. That was no way to live. What her mother did not appreciate was how much stuff Rosie had weaned herself off by the end of her sophomore year, like cocaine, which she had been doing many weekends. When she first got close to Jody and Alice, they were doing blow all the time. But it had been easy to stop in the spring, and the only reason she had gotten into it the other night was that Jody had run off to be with Claude in San Diego, and she and Alice had felt genuinely heartbroken.

Jody was really gone; it hadn’t just been the speed talking, after all. She had called two days ago, to say she was staying with a girl from rehab in San Diego, near the base where Claude was stationed. The girl had stayed clean, and Jody had to if she wanted to crash there for a while. She got to see Claude breifly every day, and go out with him on weekends. They went to motels for their dates. There was nothing her parents could do about it, either, because she was eighteen: she was free.

Rosie was still dozing at noon, the last Saturday before school started. She lay in her messy bed with Rascal asleep beside her and daydreamed of school and of Robert. Every so often James poked his head in and called her a sleepyhead, told her to get up, make her bed, seize the day. She was seizing the day her way—a made bed meant you were in
their
world. All kids wanted to dive into bed and be lying down safely, especially until about noon. When you were standing up, you were so vulnerable. Lying there, floating on the surface of the bed, like a cushioned pond, you didn’t know where it would float you, but surrounded by a hundred images and scribbles, you knew it would be somewhere lovely, a portal to take you someplace more real than the jail of your parents’ home and school.

She rolled over and fished a miniature Snickers bar out of a plastic Halloween sack from her night table. The OTC tests didn’t scare her: she had it all worked out. She could test positive for weed for a while without it being a problem, since it lingered in your system for a month or more, even if you had stopped using, which Rosie insisted she had on the day after she’d gotten busted. Then, in two weeks, she could use bleach to mask the THC. Her mother had tested her before she did the cocaine, and it would be out of her system before she got tested again. She didn’t ever use opiates or meth, so that wasn’t an issue. She hadn’t done Ecstasy in weeks. There’d been so much speed in the E lately, but someone said it wasn’t meth or dexedrine, so she didn’t have to worry about her mother knowing about it from the urine tests.

Whatever it was, Rosie hadn’t liked the jangly nervousness it produced. She turned on her side. Rascal complained. That speed was the kind that made you want hard-core rave music in the party house, unlike pure E, which made you want trance music and was so lovely. The bad speed could make you think too much. Then you had to make sure Alice was right there to be with you. Then it would be like, “I’m so happy right now with Alice,” passing a pacifier back and forth till it was in shreds. You’d laugh, but then ten minutes later, you’d be like, “Now I don’t want to share this feeling with people,” so you’d wander off to be by yourself in some quieter space. Then in ten minutes, the speed would make you go, “I’m superlonely right now, no one is talking to me,” and you’d wander off to another room to look for people. But even with a bunch of people, a certain song could play and you’d turn around and see all these happy people, dancing and taking care of each other, and you’d think, “Aren’t
I
supposed to be happy?” Then maybe a few minutes later, you would be happier than you’d ever been before.

She was going to chill, take a break from the E till some good stuff came through town. Where everyone wanted to give to each other, do PLUR—peace, love, unity, respect—share ChapStick and gum, pacifiers, massages. Sometimes when she was peaking, she would feel her eyes roll back in her head and she’d get afraid that something bad might happen—but then people would steady her, and she’d be dancing again. She’d get a mix of butterflies and wanting to puke, but this was just all part of what they called coming up, part of the E coming on, the elevator going too fast; and then she’d get really cold and know she was getting high, about to be in bliss.

Rosie got up and went into her parents’ bathroom. She found a bottle of eardrops on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet, rinsed out the bottle and dropper a few times, then went to the laundry room and filled the bottle with bleach. She heard James talking to himself as she passed his study. He must be on the final draft of a story. He always read late drafts out loud. No one in her family had gotten an earache in ages, plus this was past its expiration date. Her parents should try to stay on top of stuff like that. Like, what if she really had an earache, and there was only this expired shit? It was typical. She screwed the dropper in tightly, and returned the bottle to the shelves. This time when she passed the study, she went in.

James looked over his shoulder at her. When he smiled, the terrible crow’s-feet around his eyes grew deeper. He looked so much older lately. He should take better care of himself. “Hey, Buckerina,” he said. “Want to read my story?” She shook her head, wandering over to the far wall. His work embarrassed her, but she loved it in here. It was like an older-guy version of her room, words and images all over the walls, like decoupage without the varnish. Bits of paper with things jotted on them, stuff he was working on, quotations, photos, art.

“Whatcha workin’ on?” she asked, to be polite.

Something about the Parkade, he said, but not to worry, she wasn’t in it. There was a beautiful line of Rilke’s on the wall that she’d read before: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

“Where’s Mama?”

“At a meeting, then a hike and a rally with Rae. Sure you don’t want to read my piece?”

“Later,” she said, although his asking was supposed to be an honor; he usually asked just her mother. His pieces were direct and ordinary, like journals, which she liked about them; they were dry and wistful like Salinger, but maybe not with that same genius. He could be snarky and judgmental about everything and everyone, like she and Alice and Jody often were, but his stories always stopped on a dime, ended all wrapped up too neatly, like packages, which was not at all like real life. He was trying to get on her good side by letting her seem to be of service to him. She knew all of his moves. It smelled of paper and books and pencils in here, like you’d expect of a writer’s study. But also honey candles from France that he splurged on—how could you not love a guy who burned lightly scented candles, who loved and offered up the fragrance of honey and beeswax? And she did love him, she always had, in all the years since he’d become a part of her family. He went back to the pages he held in his hand, and she ran across the other quotations on the wall until she got to the scrap of paper in Thelonious Monk’s own reproduced handwriting, “Make the drummer sound good.” She was going to do just that, make both her parents sound good by doing well. She’d stick to beer and a little weed for a few months, until her first-semester grades were in and she was home free. Maybe an occasional hit of Alice’s Adderall. She studied the back of James’s head, how gray he was getting, the widening bald spot, the turkey-skin neck. When he dropped his head onto his chest to think, the baggy skin on the back of his neck looked less wrinkled, more like it used to. He peered at her over his shoulders, his reading glasses at the end of his nose. “Go make yourself some breakfast.” She hated how strict he had gotten, and how he always thought he was right, but he was great, too, if you thought about it: hip, hardworking, and steady. She and her mom were lucky to have him. He was their drummer.

E
lizabeth was sitting in a noon meeting, drinking bad coffee and eating an Oreo. She had deliberately plopped down next to a grumpy old man from San Francisco, because she didn’t want the happy alkies to foist themselves on her. It was good to be here, away from James and Rosie for a while, out of the fray. She was glad that Jody was gone. She hoped she would find her way, but Jody and Alice were such a part of Rosie’s recent frightening behavior; maybe now there would be less temptation.