The Way We Bared Our Souls (3 page)

And last spring Ellen had discovered heavy-duty pain-killers. Serious stuff, like Oxy and Percocet. So I was definitely worried about the road Ellen was on. But—and I hated to say it, because lord knows I’d had my own mood swings lately—she’d also been acting like a real bitch. After she wrecked her brand-new car last April driving to school on a handful of Xanax washed down with lite beer, we all rallied around her. Even though Mrs. Davis told us it was “only a fender bender” (false) and that they “had enough flowers already, mostly from the capitol building” (brag), we visited Ellen in the hospital anyway. But she was a nightmare patient, cursing us out right and left. She wouldn’t even accept Juanita’s get-well flower bouquet, saying that the smell of roses “made her want to vom.” It got so bad one day that we decided we wouldn’t come back to visit; we clearly weren’t helping her and were maybe only making things worse. Ellen had been drifting further and further from us ever since.

Now she seemed to be on something far worse than pills. She’d lost a bunch of weight, for one. Her jeans sagged off her hips, and she’d already been pretty thin to begin with (her mom basically stocked the fridge only with flavored seltzers and imitation eggs). For two, her skin, which had always been clear and sun-kissed, was now ghost-white and splotchy. Her bleached blond hair was all over the place, and she had a wild look in her eyes that scared me. She seemed to be staring right through us.

“No one has your backpack, crazy,” Alex said.

Ellen whirled around to face Alex. Her forehead had broken out in a sweat, and various stains showed on her baby blue tank top.

“Then where. The eff.
Is
it?” Ellen said.

“Probably where you saw it last, chica,” said Juanita’s sometimes boyfriend Luis LeBlanc, who was approaching from a nearby picnic table. Ellen responded by grabbing Luis’s baseball cap and tossing it into the fountain like a Frisbee.

“Damn, girl,” he said. “Chill.” For a second it looked as if Ellen was going to retrieve the hat, but then I realized she was just leaning over the Agua wall to scoop up the coins at the bottom of the fountain. When she was satisfied with her handful of nickels and pennies, she held them aloft.

“Hey,” I said automatically, “those are someone’s wishes.”

“Yeah?” Ellen said. “Well, I wish you’d all just disappear.” She hurled a couple of pennies across the courtyard, pocketed the rest of the coins, and stormed back into the school. I was stunned. Luis muttered some profanity and made his way back to his table, shaking the water from his cap.

“What the hell was that?” I said.

“Meth,” whispered Alex.

At first I thought she was joking. Then I saw her exchange a grave look with Juanita that indicated she wasn’t.

“You’re serious?” I said. Sharp-as-a-tack Ellen, who starred in the fifth grade play, won the middle school science fair three years in a row, and had scored practically all the goals on our childhood soccer team, was on
meth
? What was a sixteen-year-old girl, by all accounts clever and accomplished, doing on such a savage drug?

“Unfortunately,” said Juanita. “I got it on good authority. Granted, my brother can be kind of a dick, but he’s not a liar, and he knows a lot of people. Last night he told me that his friend Angelina accidentally walked in on her using in the bathroom of Stoops. Caught her in the act.”

“She’s sure?” I said.

Juanita nodded soberly. “No wiggle room.”

“I only just heard about it this morning,” said Alex. “But it seems so obvious now. You should have seen her last night at the party, Lo. She was totally tweaking.”

I could barely process this. “I know that she hasn’t been handling her alcohol lately—”

“No shit,” said Alex. “She can’t go out without getting totally obliterated.”

“And she’s been downing all those pills. But . . . Jesus. Meth? Really?”

“Really,” said Juanita. “Apparently that complete ass she’s been hooking up with—Mike what’s-his-face—gave her her first hit.” Boyfriends were supposed to introduce you to cool new bands and video games and car mechanics and stuff. Not meth.

“I feel like we need to do something,” said Alex.

Of
course
we needed to do something. But clearly we were out of our league. Sure, we weren’t innocent to the fact that kids our age dabbled in drugs. But that mostly stopped at smoking pot and snorting Adderall occasionally. Crystal meth was way out of the range of substances that could optimistically be called “recreational.” People didn’t do meth in moderation. They did it until it destroyed them.

Just then, a shot of pain bullied its way through my head, making me feel like my skull was clenching up and trying to squeeze my brain out of my eye sockets. I reeled backward into the fountain wall and put my head between my knees.

“Lo?” Alex said, as if through water. Electrified water. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just. . . .” Tears came into my eyes, summoned both by pain and by my frustration that I was alone with this secret. “Period cramps,” I said. “They’re really bad this month.”

“Awww,” Juanita said, putting her arm around me.

“Um, I know I just got to school,” I said, “but do you guys mind covering for me? I think I have to ditch.”

“No problem,” Alex said.

“Then I guess this is where we part,” said Juanita, making a teardrop with her manicured fingernail. “Until later,
señorita
,
mi corazon
.” Heart,
corazon
. Brain,
cerebro
. I knew a woefully small number of words in Spanish, but I liked to use them in conversation because they always struck me as jauntier than English. I made a mental note to memorize all my body parts in Spanish. Then maybe I’d look upon them more cheerfully if they began to fail, one by one.

Shut up, Lo.
Quit with the self-pity.
Bienvenido
.
Buenas tardes
.
Mucho gusto encantada
.

“Feel better, babe,” said Alex. “A heating pad and some ibuprofen always help me.”

“Thanks, guys,” I said, making my way toward the courtyard exit. “You’re the best.”

“I know!” said Alex. “Finally somebody gets it!”

“Don’t forget chocolate and mafia movies!” shouted Juanita at my back. “I swear on my heart that
The Godfather
trilogy healed my eczema!”

I smiled back at her through the pain.

• • •

From school I drove straight to the pharmacy. Fernando’s Pharmacy, in the boonies of Santa Fe, where I could be anonymous. I didn’t risk running into anyone from Santa Fe High there, and the pharmacist never batted an eye when I picked up my arsenal of drugs from behind as well as over the counter. While Alex and Juanita shelled out for new clothes and pedicures every week, I bought ibuprofen, fish oil, super B-complex vitamins, and protein bars with my parents’ credit card—all staples of my morose survival diet.

As I barreled down the freeway past outlier shopping malls, used-car lots, and Mexican buffets, I tried to get out of my own head. I thought about Ellen. I was furious at myself for being oblivious to her downward spiral. The meth explained so much about her recent behavior. But I couldn’t get over how . . .
serious
it was
.
And way too much for me to handle, especially when I wasn’t doing so well myself. But Ellen was tough and distinct and endearingly obscene. She was my friend. I couldn’t allow her to fall apart.

ARMED WITH OTC PAINKILLERS AND
a red basket’s worth of obscure supplements big enough for a horse to choke on, I started out for home.

The route back from the pharmacy ran along the perimeter of a semi-wooded park that Dad called the “Tinderbox.” For years he’d been trying to get the Forest Service to do a controlled burn of the sage and thick underbrush, to no avail. Now we were in the midst of one of the worst droughts our region had ever experienced, and it was way too late and too dangerous to think of burning anything on purpose. The last monsoon season hadn’t provided us with a thorough soak, and Dad worried that the arid aspens in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains would go up in flames. I envisioned a single match obliterating every tree from here to the Pacific Ocean.

But I didn’t see any fires that day as I drove and washed down my brain-boosting vitamins with a sports drink. Nor did I see smoke when I scanned the scraggly, desiccated treetops.

I did, however, see a large mammal dash in front of my car, leaving me only milliseconds to avoid hitting it by swerving into the opposite lane.

Orange pills flew all over the passenger-side floor, where they were swallowed by coffee cups and candy wrappers. “Cheese and toast,” I blurted, then almost laughed when I realized that I’d instinctively used my mother’s version of “profanity.”

TranquiLo. Focus. Collect yourself and your medicine.

I pulled over and looked in the rearview mirror. Standing just where my car had passed, so close that it could probably sniff my wall of bumper stickers (
one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, I
'
VE LOST MY TRAILER.
horn broken, watch for finger.
), was a coyote.

I’m not scared of coyotes. Unless you’re an escaped housecat or an infant abandoned on a picnic blanket, you have no cause to fear them. Coyotes are everywhere in New Mexico, including downtown Santa Fe, where they frequently wander past tourists in the midst of dream-catcher-buying frenzies. Still, it’s not like I would ever try to hand-feed Milk-Bones to one. Being prolific doesn’t exactly make them docile. You just have to be sensible enough to stay out of their way.

Or not.

I stepped out of my car. The coyote didn’t flee, nor did it freeze with fear. It just gazed at me steadily, reflectively, somehow demanding my full attention in return. Its eyes seemed to issue a gentle challenge:
Come here,
they said.
Let me see who you are and what you’re about. Let’s get in each other’s faces and make sure we’re both fully alive.

Was I losing my mind? Hallucinating? My nerves were already frazzled by . . . the obvious. And the not so obvious. You start the morning with a visit to the neurologist and you never know what’s going to happen. I felt raw, unmoored, as if I could burst into tears at any moment. And I had never been a crier.

I inched around the car, my legs shaky from the near-accident and not, I told myself, from the Maybe Sclerosis. I crept toward the coyote and was about to say something pretty nutty considering the context, something along the lines of “Here, pup. Do you need a friend?” when another unexpected body appeared through the trees, this one human. I felt an electric shock plunge down my right leg like a live wire and exit via my boot. I hated it when that happened.

The man jogged casually toward me, indicating with a wave that everything was okay—stellar even. Though I’m understandably wary whenever strange men appear out of nowhere and make a beeline for me, his smile immediately put me at ease—as much as I ever felt at ease in my own skin those days. The expression on his face was . . . transcendent.

His silky dark hair hinted at Native American blood, but I couldn’t determine his ancestry for sure. He wore his hair almost to his shoulders, with one funky ponytail on top of his head that resembled the crested plumage of a bird. He looked like a refugee from a local college—the kind of school that taught classes like “Personal Communication in a Machine Age” or “Feminist Puppetry in Elementary Education.” Whether he’d be an older student or a young professor, I couldn’t be sure exactly.

“I see you found Dakota,” he said in a throaty, harmonious voice that either indicated depth of life experience or decades of smoking. I suspected it was the former. “Or she found you.”

“This coyote belongs to you?” I said, feeling shy all of a sudden.

“Well, not exactly. This coyote belongs to me as much as she belongs to you, and as much as you belong to that thirsty tree over there. Today Dakota just happens to be walking in my world. Better than me walking in her world, I suppose. Otherwise I’d be biting the heads off chickens.” He chuckled.

Biting the heads off chickens? Who was this guy, a voodoo priest? After a long pause, he must have registered the confusion in my face. “She likes to join me on my . . . outings,” he went on. “We enjoy each other’s company, is all. We’re connected.”

I’d never been allowed to have a
real
pet because Mom was allergic to dander. But I sort of knew what this guy was getting at—every morning I brightened when I saw the lizard I called Seymour strut across my bedroom window screen in search of flies. And then there was our backyard population of chickens, a bonanza of feathery heads I was in charge of naming and feeding. Few sunrise pleasures could compete with letting Pollo Hermano eat grain from my hand.

I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I felt calm around this guy. I used to think I could read energy fields, the colors and auras that surrounded people. It was probably something that my old friend Kaya had suggested once, or maybe it was something I read about in a book a long time ago, but every now and then I still thought I saw lights around certain people. Or, if the person was really special, I heard music. And this man radiated a sort of soundtrack. Like, a violin concerto wrapped in a sixties rock show.

“I’m Jay,” he said, pausing the music but not the spell he’d cast on me.

“I’m Consuelo,” I said, suddenly dizzy. “Lo.” I stepped back and braced myself against the hood of my station wagon so I wouldn’t faint. Jay looked concerned but didn’t move.

“I don’t know if you saw,” I said, “but I almost hit . . . Dakota on the road just now. It was a really close call, actually. Kind of rattled me.” I felt like I was snitching on his animal buddy, but I needed Jay to know how close Dakota had come to dying. So he could maybe protect her in the future.

“Sorry about that,” Jay said, throwing me another charismatic smile. “Dakota isn’t great at formal introductions. She must have been pretty desperate to meet you.”

I liked the notion of a creature being so eager to make my acquaintance that she would hurl herself in front of my car. As long as there were no casualties, of course.

Dakota trotted up to us and presented her head to my hand. I hesitated. Dad always taught me that if a wild animal acts too friendly or fearless toward humans, it might have rabies.

“She seems to like you,” Jay said. “She wants to smell you and size you up.”

“As long as she doesn’t want to know what I taste like,” I said. I imagined that, right now, licking me would be like licking a tablet of Advil.

I felt the hot breath exhaling from the coyote’s nostrils, giving the tips of my fingers individual steam baths. Jay smiled down at her as a new mother might smile down at her newborn. I lightly ruffled the bristly hair between Dakota’s black-striped ears. I relaxed again.

“Why did the coyote cross the road?” Jay said, chuckling to himself as if he were about to unleash the king of corny dad jokes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “To get flattened by a used station wagon with a million ironic bumper stickers?”

Jay smiled. “To make a new friend. You should feel special. I had to woo old Dakota for weeks before she’d approach me, and she was just living in the cave next door.”

“You live in a cave?” I said.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Not the last time I checked. Wait, are you Batman?” I was joking, but Jay would actually make a pretty good superhero. He seemed intensely moral, and he had an awesome sidekick. Why not?

“Not that I’m aware of,” Jay said, “but I
have
been inhaling a lot of bat guano lately. Of course, if that’s how superheroes got made, comic books would be a lot less popular.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like Superman stepped in a radioactive cow pie and that’s how he got his X-ray vision. I think most teenage boys would pass.”

“How about you?” Jay said.

“Me?”

“What’s your superpower, Consuelo?”

Well, let’s see. I could dance alone in my room “Maniac”-style to the same song a hundred times in a row. Or at least I could last spring. I wondered if that still counted.

Suddenly, Dakota gave a sustained cry, shrill as chalkboard fingernails. I jerked my hand away. She barked gruffly and backed away from me.

“What happened?” I said, trembling with self-doubt. I thought Dakota liked me. “Did I do something wrong?”

Dakota growled and lowered herself into a menacing crouch. Was she getting ready to attack? Jay shook his head casually, as if to indicate,
What can you do? Coyotes will be coyotes.
Then he looked down at me, and his face went grim.

“What happened to your blood, dear?” he said.

“What . . . what do you mean?” I said. Could he actually see that I was suffering?

“You’re unwell,” he said. “You’re . . . afflicted. Is it your blood, sweetheart?”

“My blood? Of course not,” I said. But for some reason I felt Jay wasn’t going to let me beat around the bush. The morning’s doctor appointment came flooding back to me. For the first time, to the first person outside my family, I needed to confess what was going on with me. I felt that perhaps the secret of my Might-be-Sickness would be safe with him.

“It’s my brain,” I said.

It was actually a relief to unload.

“Yes,” Jay said, considering me, all of me, every neuron. “I see that now. I can see how your energy is tainted.” Dakota whimpered and looked inquisitively at Jay, as if she thought I was contagious and meant to suggest that they should both remove themselves from my presence, on the double. Then Jay laid his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t shy away as I usually did when strangers touched me. “You’re in pain,” he said.

I nodded. My pain had never felt so immeasurable.

“Pain is a funny thing,” Jay said. “It can control your entire environment. It can turn the sun to the moon. It can make the blue sky black.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. Even though it sounded melodramatic, lately it was like my entire world was filtered through pain goggles. The world just looked different to me now. Somehow . . . faded. Like all the colors had been put through the wash too many times.

A bolt of nerve lightning shot down my leg, and I grimaced.

“I’m sorry that you’re suffering,” Jay said with deep compassion.

I felt validated that Jay had grasped what I was going through in a heartbeat, there with the hot canine breath on my hand. He saw my pain, but he didn’t try to identify it to show me how smart he was or to make me feel uncomfortable. He simply acknowledged it while reserving all judgment. I somehow felt secure there in the little triangle we made of strange Tinderbox hippie and moody coyote. I felt that I could stand there forever and be healed.

“You know, dear,” Jay said, “your essential well-being is much deeper than the burden your body carries. You do not have to be tyrannized by your disease.”

I smiled. That sounded reassuring. But I wasn’t sure it was true.

“Do you believe in souls?” he said.

I looked intently into his eyes and saw something radiant there. Something almost . . . nuclear. Which wouldn’t exactly be surprising considering the proximity of Los Alamos. Who knows what’s in our water supply? “Unknown environmental insults” are another possible cause of MS.

“Of course,” I said. I’d always assumed that souls were the deepest, most profound part of us, the core part that couldn’t be undone or dissolved. My soul was what fueled my need to hula-hoop for hours or to hug my parents or to leave a nice note in someone’s locker. A soul wasn’t necessarily divine, though at times I’d felt it stir when Mom dragged me to St. Francis for Sunday Mass. It responded to the candles and the stained glass and the low hum of love that filled the cathedral. But that all sounded too cheesy to discuss with my friends.

“Good,” Jay said. “Then you’ll believe me when I tell you that yours is in jeopardy.”

“What?” That was a bold statement. “How do you figure?”

Jay smiled in his saintly way.

“Something is ailing you,” he said. “Something is targeting your body, and you’re letting it penetrate your soul, little by little. You need to stop it in its destructive path before it’s too late. Build a line of defense around your soul so it will stay intact, no matter what threatens it.”

But I might be diagnosed with a disease that was attacking my body on multiple fronts. How could I be expected not to think about that, worry about that, obsess about that? How could I prevent it from getting to me? But, in a way, what he said felt . . . true.

“It’s changing me,” I said, on the verge of breaking down and burying my face in the coyote’s fur. “I feel it. I experience things . . . differently now. There’s, like, a dark shine on everything. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to get better.”

“Your soul knows how to get better, if you would only listen to it.”

I wondered what that involved. Tarot card readings and séances, like Kaya and I used to do during our “mystical” phase? Bible study? Stream-of-consciousness journaling? I was at a total loss. And then the pain picked that exact moment to return with a vengeance. I cradled my arm in front of my chest as if it were a baby. A baby that was being poked with a thousand sharp needles.

“I . . . don’t know how,” I said, and began crying, stupidly. Maybe that could be my superpower: filling up infinite empty bottles with tears. This was all too much. The pain, the coyote, this mysterious man, the way the near-accident had made me put the brakes not just on my car but on my whole life.