One of Us (32 page)

She wanted it to be right, to be perfect. She wanted it to be the way it should be. Of what was going through Ray's mind she had absolutely no idea.

Because one afternoon she was waiting for him, standing by the stream. He was much later than usual, which was driving her crazy because she'd decided that today might be the day for something new to happen. She heard a rustle in the bushes behind her, a particular kind of sound she'd half thought she'd heard before on some of the times they'd kissed.

She turned quickly, and saw her mom, tall and thin.

"Just thought I'd tell you it's over, sweetie," her mother said with that look of spiteful glee in her face. "Why swop spit with a stick insect when there's a real woman who'll suck your dick?"

AND THEN THIS, much faster, as if none of it really mattered and it had already been consigned to flames:

LAURA TOLD HER FATHER, but he didn't believe her. In her heart she knew it was true, because Ray never came down to the stream again. But the real proof didn't come until afterward. Afterward was when her father got killed in a car crash, and her mom and Ray stopped hiding what they were doing. Laura knew they couldn't have killed her father, because they were sitting on the porch drinking beer together when it happened, and also because it would have been just too National Enquirer. She didn't figure out until later that her father's car might not have been heading for the bridge support by accident, that he might have believed his daughter after all and made his own decision about how to deal with what she'd told him.

After a while Ray moved in; not long after that, her mother announced that they were moving down into LA. Ray had decided that Monica was right, that he should start doing something about his career. People generally decided that Monica was right about things: It made life a lot easier. Ray tried to talk to Laura, and was back to asking about how she was doing in school, but Laura never answered anymore.

Laura wasn't doing so well in school anymore either, and had by then screwed half the guys in her class.

Two days before the moving vans came, Laura bought a train ticket with money she'd saved or stolen from dates. She turned up on the doorstep of her dad's sister in Seattle, a woman who hated Monica with a passion. Ray came looking for her, but Aunt Ashley bawled him out in the yard of the house and he went away. He didn't try again, and her mother couldn't have cared less. Laura hadn't worked out.

Then there was just ten years of living. She got jobs, moved around, tried different parts of the country, discovered they were all the same. After a couple of years she dropped the pretense of being stupid and got better jobs, for what little difference that made. In bad jobs you served people shit at lunchtime; in good jobs you learned to eat shit all day long. She bought nice clothes and went out a lot, and developed a brittle-bright sense of humor to hide behind. She learned how to do the things that men wanted her to do, and she fell in love and got raped and got hit.

Some times were a little better than others, but mainly it was just a blur, like watching the world from the window of a train that is going too fast in the wrong direction. She got in the habit of taking a drink early in the day, never noticing that it didn't achieve anything except making her want another. Sometimes when she was really drunk she'd tear up her clothes, because she knew why her bosses liked her to wear them. You won't see this written in any management consultant's report, or hear it in a corporate slogan, but the truth of the matter is this: Clients like dealing with girls who dress up nice and look like they might be fun to fuck. Other times she'd wear her clothes with style and with only a little fear in her smile, trying to find a little pride in herself that wasn't merely the flip side of a yearning hatred. But it wasn't very long before she really couldn't tell the difference.

She wore out her friends. She wore out herself. She did everything with the power turned up as high as it would go, and had no way of recharging her soul. She drank more, spent afternoons in a prickly haze of incomprehension and evenings in lonely fury. She kept her secrets.

She started having those nights.

The ones that go on and on and on, the nights where you go out with friends and drink too much, and after a while all their faces begin to look the same. You listen and nod, and smile uncertainly, but everybody's talking a book code based on some volume you've never read. You come wheeling back out of the John mid-evening, nose clicking from the first line of the second gram, and all the lights behind the bar sparkly and bright—and you look around all the tables and you can't figure out which you came from, which people are supposed to matter to you. Then someone calls your name and you go sit with them again, trying to listen to what they're saying: But all you can really hear is the voice in your head telling you that you need another drink. So you order before you finish the one you've got, just in case, and nobody says anything, but you know what they're thinking and you decide that you don't care. The party breaks up at midnight, but that's too early for you. By then the shouting inside your head is so loud, you can barely hear yourself say good-bye. You get home somehow, via dangerous episodes in bars and alleys that you'll never remember, and then the real fun begins.

Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.

Then later, sprawled in underwear, your clothes all around you covered in spilled alcohol and cigarette ash: But that doesn't matter because by that time of the night you believe you're never going to wear them again. The little chatterer in your head is constant now, snarling like a wolf in a trap, but neither it nor your own voice seems able to say anything that makes sense. Day will never come, or if it does it can only be darker than this night you sit shivering in.

Experimentally you prod your stomach with a fork, hard enough to draw blood. But that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so you scratch your legs with your nails.

And then sit crying, looking at your scored thighs, remembering the way they used to be. Young skin, unblemished, part of a girl. Now, like your tits and your ass and your mouth, just places you can't understand anymore. Your body has become the road too-often traveled, and it leads nowhere you want to be. No longer is it your place in the world, but just an adjunct of other people's lives and the parking lot of their desires. You're trapped in limited and dark loops of thought that go around and around and get smaller and smaller until they're so tight they cut off the supply of reality to your mind.

Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.

When Laura first realized her father had committed suicide, she felt a guilt so intense, it was like someone had torn out her heart. It was too much to bear, and she turned the guilt to hatred, despising his weakness, the selfishness that had left her to face things alone. The final stage was pretending that he had done something heroic, started a family tradition.

So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried quite hard enough, because some part of her was still alive. She didn't want to throw the machine away. She just wanted to start again. All the pills and the razor blades got her was waking up in hospitals surrounded by people who didn't care. They did the first time, but compassion has to be given freely. Once you start demanding it, the well dries up pretty fast. The luckiest of us have only a few people who will keep on trying even after it's obvious that their love will not work as a spell. Laura didn't have anyone at all.

A year ago, after her third attempt to kill herself, Laura tried to straighten out. Suicide wasn't working out as an option. It was embarrassing, it was stupid, and it hurt. She started giving up smoking at regular intervals, fixing on that first because everybody knows smoking's bad. This is a time for scapegoats, and smoking's in pole position. Never mind that what we eat and drink does as much damage, and that our cars pump shit into the atmosphere that just isn't going to go away. We like our burgers and beers and automobiles, so let's pick on something else. Let's ban smoking in public places and planes and bars, and then the whole world will become perfect and sunny and bright: Let's blame our problems for our unhappiness, so we don't have to face it ourselves. When people make a horror film these days, it's not the promiscuous kids who die first—it's the ones with the pack of Marlboros in their pocket.

She stopped letting people screw her unless she had no choice, tried to make do without that validation: But someone who only wants to laugh at jokes you don't care about is never going to be enough to distract you for long. She struggled with the drinking, too, sometimes winning, sometimes not. Not drinking is hard; it's very, very hard. People who've never tried not drinking have no idea just how hard not drinking can be. Some days you succeed, win a white-knuckled battle against yourself. On others you don't: It's those days that feel like the victory. Fuck it, a voice says. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it all. You've no idea whose voice it is anymore, but it seems to speak sense and truth. The problem is that alcohol lies: It's happy to be your drinking buddy, but it will never be your friend. Alcohol suckers you in, makes you feel better for a while, like the acquaintance who doesn't want you to give up smoking because then he'll be left alone with his bad habits. Its voice talks fun, and release, and you trust it even though you know it will go silent abruptly, as it always does, and that it won't have anything helpful to say when the terror kicks in and you stand alone on a cold planet spinning through empty space.

None of it helped. Whenever she tried to see a future, her mind insisted on slipping backward, to the original fracture. Depression isn't merely a dirty window on the world. It's a place where all windows are shuttered, and all you can see and believe in is what has already been. Death is like love, and when it is your own self that is dying, you yearn for magic once more. You cling to events, on erasures that might make everything all right again. When everybody else has failed, you have to be your own witch and cast your own spells. Once a month you push away the memory of your mother, in that second before she tells you she's sleeping with Ray.

It doesn't work. It doesn't help.

What do you do then?

You realize it was never words that made the difference, not your mother's or anyone else's. It was a fact. It was a man whose presence in your life has inverted to become a black hole around which you orbit helplessly. However much you try to blank him out, the years do not help to break the hold. It's not love, or hatred, merely a psychological binary star.

His existence has tainted your life. It may not even be his fault, but something has to give for the circling to end.

I FELT A TUGGING, something trying not to be taken from me.

A grinding sound, like a failed mechanism.

A momentary glimpse of something like a corridor, everything so white, you could barely see it; a hospital the size of infinity, fresh-minted every second as something new was locked behind a door. The banging of countless fists, the flapping wings of moments of time pinned to the wall so they cannot fly away.

Then I could see again.

I was in the airplane. The flight attendant was still talking to the couple a few rows in front, and I could hear what she was saying. The cabin looked normal; I heard the reassuring rumble of air passing over and under the wings, and the sound of someone pouring a mixer into a plastic glass behind me.

The seat next to me was empty except for three guns, a watch, and a ring, which lay where they had fallen. The ring was Helena's wedding band. It hadn't been on her hand—I know, I'd looked—but she must have had it on her somewhere. I picked it up. As I sat there with it in my hand, mind stalled, I heard the voice of a flight attendant at my shoulder.

"Would those be your weapons, sir?" she said.

The cops were waiting for me when we landed at LAX. Two uniforms fetched me off the plane, marching me past the other passengers. Another followed behind, carrying all the guns. The attendant who'd given us the peanuts averted her eyes, wondering what kind of psycho we'd had in our midst.

Nobody seemed to notice anything unusual. Nobody was checking his or her watch and realizing that it was ten minutes off local time. When they did, they'd all be dispersed into a hundred hotels and homes, and no one would think anything of it.

Nobody noticed that the flight landed with one less passenger than when it started.

I didn't ask the cops any questions. They wouldn't have answered, and there was nothing I needed to know. I was driven to the Hollywood precinct, where the cops didn't even bother to book me. Straight down the hall, and into the same room as before.

They locked the door and I sat and waited.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"We have a deal, Travis."

"Which you broke by leaving the state and then getting caught on a plane with enough armor to start a war. What was going through your head? You really needed four guns? You got that many hands?"

"I told you. They weren't all mine."

"Hap, don't start with the abduction shit again—"

"You don't believe Helena was with me?"

"Not for a minute." Travis leaned back in his chair, stared at me across the table. "I don't believe you'd work with her again after what she did to you."

"So who do you think knocked Romer out when he followed you to Venice?"