“Language, Dahlia,” the woman said. She looked me up and down, her eyes catching on the knife. “Surely you weren’t raised that way.”
“You’d know for sure,” I said. “If you’d stayed around to do the job yourself.”
4
The woman on my bed turned her attention back to the dogs, who were willing enough.
She was a page ripped out of a women’s magazine—those stuffed-in perfume sample ones? Shesmelledrich, and she was draped in layers of softness: red cashmere sweater, flowing green scarf. Gold glowed at her ears, wrist, left ring finger. A big designer bag sat at her side, with some seasonal red wrapping paper peeking out. Her hair was an effortful near-blond, straight from a blowout.
It was a good disguise. The white snowflake dots on the wrapping paper swam before my eyes as I recognized her anyway.
“Aren’t you surprised to see me?” my mother asked.
“I assumed the next time I heard from you, Marisa, someone would be calling to ask me to claim your drug-ravaged corpse. Did you break in? Despite appearances, not much changed?”
She looked away. “The door was open.”
“Yeah, ripped off its hinges,” I said. “Did you do that?”
“It wasopen,” she said.
Could the wind have done that? I reached automatically for my back pocket, my cell, but of course it wasn’t there. My ancient phonewas a brick at the bottom of my makeup case until I begged, borrowed, or stole a charger that worked for it.
I made a move to the door. “I have to get Alex to fix the door before rats get in,” I said.
I didn’tsayshe was one of the rats.
“Oh,Alex,” she said.
“Don’t,” I said.
She had let me down my entire life. That was the beginning of every story like mine, someone who should have been the adult letting down a kid who relied on them. Or maybe the story started even earlier. Someone who should never have had a kid in the first place is forced to carry that weight around like a cheap suitcase banging against their shins.
I was the suitcase.
Everything about me that was broken, I could trace back to her. She’d had me too early, too stupid, too self-involved. Didn’t have the right help or intentions orsenseto stay away from the pharmaceuticals, and then she discovered what I can only assume was heroin or oxy, and things went fast from there. We’d bounced between friends with extra bedrooms or fold-out couches, then run out of friends, I guess, because I remembered a few nights in shelters, first with other women and kids, and then in places kids shouldn’t be. We’d spent at least one night in a car. Whose car? No idea.
And then Alex was there, Chicago meatpacker DNA, a guy who had already beat an addiction, someone willing to help.
Okay, fine. You ready? My deal.
Alex? Alex is myguardian.
That’s the old word for it, the court-filings word, althoughofficiallyhe had only served as my guardian for a short time, as a conduit from a mother hitting rock bottom to the vibrant foster care system of Cook County.
So, no, not my dad. Not any kind of boyfriend, though the guys down at the pub had always looked to see what Alex thought of Joeyputting his arm around me. Just a friend of Marisa’s, probably from the drug scene, who had already tackled his demons. A guy who, if he’d been born thirty years later, would have had his autism spectrum disorder mapped precisely, but instead was the strong and silent type.
In contrast, I was the small and feral type. I had lived my short life almost entirely out of view of authorities, cameras, safety precautions, vaccines, or nutrients, and marched into Alex’s life with a little pink cast on my left arm. I’d told the people at the hospital I’d fallen, and I still remembered the “oh boy” sidelong looks, the clipboards pulled out. Only six years old, but old for my age, having already learned a lot about trust, and who deserved it.
But Alex took me in anyway. The brief stay I’d had with him was an in-between space, out of the haphazard existence I’d scraped out with Marisa and a future I didn’t yet know was coming, the precariousness of being the foster kid, always a stranger in a strange land and always dreading the day another clipboard would say it was time for a new placement. Another garbage bag with my things in it.
At Alex’s bungalow, a few blocks from the bar, there had been a little blue room he’d called mine. Even as I spent the rest of my childhood wearing out the goodwill of a series of other people’s families, it was Alex who represented the most direct line to a real home. To my mother, I suppose, but then just to himself. He got visitation, so throughout my childhood, we spent occasional Sundays together, not having to talk all that much. I’d come to the pub and sweep the floors, I’d make myself useful. I would invent ways to be near him, even running away to the pub once. Which had immediately earned me another unsuspecting home, where more perfectly okay people didn’t know what to make of me.
I was almost eighteen, aging out of the system, barely scraping out a high school diploma. Alex attended the ceremony, my audience of one, a necktie nearly strangling him. Again, he offered me the little blue room.
No bio dad had ever stepped forward to change my trajectory, and Marisa, as far as I knew, had never got herself clean.
Which meant that, yes, when I passed bundles of old clothes in street corners and tucked into doorways, I had always stopped to look closer. But I hadn’t been holding out hope. I moved on. And Ikeptmoving. I stayed with Alex at the bungalow only until I could find a job—a series of jobs—and roommates to split rent. A series of roommates. A boyfriend or two. Isn’t that what life was? Making your own mistakes?
