Jesse’s experience is euphoric, textbook positive. Kristie’s brain goes somewhere dangerous. Whereas Jesse looks at the sand and sees each grain magnified into a diamond, she looks at the Atlantic Ocean and sees a massive tsunami heading toward them, ready to wipe out the entire city. She sees people on the water—people swept up from other parts of the world, who will all crash into Miami Beach at the same time. Babies without their mothers, little girls on bicycles. She screams and screams.
It is the worst experience of her life.
Jesse’s comedown is like dipping into a pool of warm water. Kristie’s is like riding on a plane careening down a runway right before it crashes into Terminal A. She lies down on the beach blanket and covers her head with her hands. When it’s over Jesse is standing over her with a joint.
“What happened?” she whispers. The tidal wave has receded.
“Just a bad trip, baby,” he says. “It happens. Smoke this. It’ll calm you down.”
Kristie shakes her head. She doesn’t want the joint. Enough. No more drugs, of any kind.
Jesse shrugs. “If you don’t want it, I’ll smoke it,” he says. “No big deal.”
She blinks again, and Jesse has moved to the harder stuff: cocaine, crystal meth.
The alcohol is where the danger is for her. Shots during a shift. Shift drinks after work, and barhopping after the shift drinks.They go to Repour Bar and Broken Shaker. They dance until dawn at Mango’s.
One year goes by this way, then two, five, seven... a blur. The constant sun darkens her skin. People ask her if she’s Cuban, or Puerto Rican, or Mexican. Yes, she says. Yes, yes, yes. All of the above. Whatever you want me to be. Yes.
Jesse gets written up in theMiami New Times,theMiami Herald,and a hot website called SocialMiami.com. He wins a mixologist competition at the Fontainebleau; contestants have to mix three traditional beverages, two cutting-edge drinks, and one cocktail of their own creation. She blinks, and Jesse is a celebrity!
She blinks again and sees Jesse kissing someone after his shift. She’s drunk, so she’s not sure if she made it up. She goes home and falls into bed: she has to work lunch that day. She’s at a different restaurant now, then another one: Il Pastaiolo, Safron Grill. Everyone moves around a lot down there.
Another time she is 100 percent certain Jesse smells like a perfume that’s not hers. He laughs it off. He’s around women all night long! He works with women behind the stick; women press themselves up against the bar when they’re ordering. Kristie knows how it is. It’s the business.You get it, right, baby?
Yes, she knows how it is. She gets it. Baby.
One day she wakes up and her head is foggy and there are cobwebs in her brain and her eyes are burning like she rubbed sand in them, and who knows, maybe shedidrub sand in them! She’s not sure. She doesn’t remember everything about the night before. Looking back, there’s a lot she doesn’t remember about a lot of nights, the one before that and the one before that and all of the others.
The sun is shining in the window beside her bed. It’s relentless, and she knows the sidewalks will already be baking, and once she leaves the air-conditioning the air will be so heavy it will feel likewalking through an endless sauna. There’s only one word she can find in her muddled brain. The word is:enough.She calls the Altoona number and she says, “Mama. I want to come home.”
“Come home, sweetheart,” says Sheila. “Please come home. I want you to meet somebody. I want you to meet Glenn.”
Back in Altoona Kristie gets back into the rhythms of a quiet life. She sleeps and wakes and eats and sleeps again. She gets jobs working lunch shifts and is home by four-thirty. She tries yoga and eating three meals a day instead of one, or none. She stops drinking and finds out what it’s like to wake with her mind clear, her nerves steady. What it’s like is, frankly, amazing.
She’s never seen Sheila as happy as she is with Glenn. Glenn is a golfer and he gets Sheila out on the green. They go on vacations: Cape Cod, Isle of Palms, Orlando. They grill steaks and sit on the deck of the house on West Chestnut, chatting with the neighbors.
Kristie begins counting the days of her sobriety. One, seventeen, thirty, thirty-five. She’s on day one hundred and sixty-two, just coming off a shift, when Glenn gets his first dizzy spell. She blinks, and he’s gone. Her mother is ravaged, heartbroken. So much happiness she had, but for such a short time. Kristie blinks again, and her mother is sick, then she’s gone too.
She blinks. She’s on the Greyhound, heading north.
Was she a good daughter? In the three years she lived at home, through Glenn’s illness and then through Sheila’s, yes. She was a good daughter then. Uncomplaining, hardworking. Nobody could have asked for better.
But she can’t ever forgive herself for how badly she wanted to leave once upon a time, and for how long she stayed gone once she left, and she can’t evereverforgive herself for how much, during those Twyla years, she wanted Sheila to divide herself into two and fill identical ice cream bowls and become Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose.
She looks down: the little girl is sitting next to her still. She hasher chin in her hand and she’s squinting out at the yard. The calculator is still up on her phone’s screen.
“What’s on your phone?” the little girls asks.
“Just some numbers,” says Kristie.
“Okay,” says the little girl equitably.
“Tatiana!” The voice is coming from inside the house. “Getinhererightnow.”
“You’d better go,” Kristie whispers. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Me too,” says Tatiana. She puts her chubby little hand on Kristie’s shoulder for balance as she gets up, and maybe Kristie is imagining it, but her hand lingers for several seconds, and it’s warm, and it feels like comfort, or maybe even absolution.
