A Permanent Member of the Family (14 page)

“It's okay, Stanley, you don't have to pretend. I know you didn't recognize me at first. And maybe still don't. I know you don't remember.”

“The truth is, I didn't want to remember. Me, I mean. Not you.”

“Why? You didn't do anything wrong. You almost did. But you didn't.”

“Maybe that's why. I didn't want to remember what I lost that night. And what I found. I wanted to forget that too.”

She gave a hard little laugh and stepped back. “I wish I believed it. What do you think you found and wanted to forget, Stanley? Not true love, that's for sure.”

“No. Something else.” He's about to tell her to forget it, whatever it was, it can't be described. Not by him, anyhow. But instead he hears himself say, “My heart got stung. I could feel it beating, and for the first time in years, maybe in my whole life, I knew I was alive.”

“And it scared you.”

“It's like, if you know you're alive, you know you're going to die.”

“So you decided to forget that you were alive.”

“Yes.”

“Which is like dying before your time.”

“Yes. It is.”

He remembers her standing beside the bed, half turned toward the door, ready to leave his room. He walked across to her and put his arms around her and kissed her gently on the lips. She kept her mouth closed, her lips tight, and after a few seconds shook free of his embrace.

He said, “I'm sorry.”

She said, “Don't be. You didn't do anything.”

He said, “That's why I'm sorry.”

“Goodbye, Stanley.”

He turned back to the darkened window and watched her reflection cross the room to the door, open it, and leave. The door closed slowly behind her.

She says, “Well, it's been good to see you again. You haven't changed, Stanley.”

He says, “Yes, I have.”

She says, “Goodbye, Stanley,” and makes her way back through the crowded ballroom toward the exit.

SEARCHING FOR VERONICA

This is what she told me. It came almost from nowhere. I happened to be sitting next to her at the bar in Gustav's, a German-style pub and grill in the Portland International Airport between Gates 7 and 9 on Concourse C. I was waiting out the night for a storm-delayed Minneapolis flight. I think she was already there when I came in, but maybe not. I remember the bar was otherwise empty. The local TV news and weather was on without the sound.

We hadn't even exchanged names when she started her story. I might have smiled and said hello or something bland to jumpstart a conversation and show her I wasn't going to hit on her, the way you do if you're a male traveler and you start talking to a woman in a bar. She was a worn-down fifty, a basically good-looking woman with a friendly smile and a lot of mileage who I figured was a waitress whose shift at one of the airport restaurants had just ended. Not a traveler. Turned out I was right and it was Wendy's. Anyhow, this is what she told me.

As if we're old friends she said, “Whenever the TV news runs a story about finding the body of some unidentified woman in the bushes by the river I wonder if the woman is my friend Veronica. And if I'm downtown I glance into alleys as I pass, hoping to see her alive. You probably think that's weird.”

I said no. But I did think it was weird. Not the content of what she told me, but the fact that she was telling it to a stranger. That and the way she told it.

She said to me, “Sometimes the next day I even take the bus to the city morgue and try to identify the body, since I can still picture Veronica's tattoos and piercings all these years later.”

I asked her who was Veronica.

She said, “It was the summer I turned thirty, a couple months after Carl walked out on us. Helene was seven going on eight.”

I said, “Helene is your daughter, then?”

She said, “Yeah. I was struggling just to survive and take care of her, so I swallowed hard and gave the back bedroom in our apartment, the room we'd been using for the cats, to this girl, to Veronica. She'd stayed over after my birthday party and was trying to cut loose of her idiot biker boyfriend and get off of drugs. The cats and their litter box we moved to the screened porch overlooking the back alley.”

She said, “I think Veronica and her boyfriend were into meth pretty heavy. Not just using, manufacturing in some trailer outside town, and selling, at least her boyfriend was. Rudy was his name, I can recall that even today, what, almost twenty years later, because when she talked that was what she talked about, Rudy Rudy Rudy. She drove me nuts with her fixation on this guy, who to me was just some piece-of-shit biker who liked to get high and boost his manhood by whacking his girlfriend on the head every few days to make her cry and say, ‘Stop, stop, please, Rudy, stop!' You know the type.”

I knew the type, I told her, but the woman kept talking as if I hadn't said anything. It was not exactly like she was alone, but more like I wasn't a real person sitting next to her at Gustav's bar. It was as if she was telling her story to a camera on a reality TV show and had already told a version of it many times. I didn't care, I was just killing time and trying not to let my flight delay get me down, and she had a friendly face and a nice whiskey-and-cigarette voice.

She said to me, “I had an okay job at a travel agency then. Portland was into connecting with the Orient and all these fast-tracked techno-yuppies were booking weekends in Tokyo and Hong Kong and writing it off their taxes, so even though I'd been slam-dumped by Carl, who'd ridden off into the Hawaiian sunset with his dental hygienist, I was doing fine, no food stamps, no handouts necessary, except I had to work nine to five six days a week and needed somebody to take care of Helene after she got home from school. Which is where Veronica comes in.”

I didn't say anything and looked off at the TV, checking the weather. The midwestern storms were moving east. She took a sip of her drink and plunged ahead. Her timing was pretty good, I noticed.

She said, “Veronica was a tall girl, taller than me anyhow, with a bunch of piercings on her face and elsewhere that I could guess but didn't want to know about and homemade tats pretty much everywhere you looked and so skinny you could see her spine through her T-shirt like she had an eating disorder, anorexia or bulimia, one of those, only it was probably from the meth and whatever other chemicals she was putting into her body then, because later I found out she definitely had a healthy appetite. I wasn't that much older than Veronica—she was nineteen or early twenties, I think, so okay, a decade—but right away I felt motherly toward her. Maybe because of Helene, who I was afraid would turn out like Veronica if she didn't have me as a mother.

“She showed up following the shadow of Rudy, who came to the party with the three biker brothers from downstairs who came because you couldn't throw even a small party in that building without those guys sniffing at the door, six-pack in hand. None of my female friends, especially the single ones, objected because the brothers were young and very good looking and lifted weights and you could hook up with one of them if you wanted. We did that sort of thing back then. We were still young. We called them Huey, Dewey and Louie. I can't remember their real names now. They had jobs and were basically harmless although not too bright and were always holding good weed. But they sometimes brought along a wacko friend or two like Rudy who were into chemicals or crack or both and on the edge of freaking which made everybody nervous. The next day one of the brothers would come upstairs and apologize, which I didn't mind at all, especially after Carl left.

“Anyhow, Veronica wasn't in danger of freaking. She was just sad looking with big dark circles under her eyes like she hadn't slept in a week, chopped-off dyed black hair that needed a good shampoo, little flat-chested nipples poking the front of her dirty T-shirt and jeans all torn on purpose below the crotch and at the knees like it's a fashion statement.”

I downed the last of my drink and ordered refills for both of us. “It's a good story you're telling,” I said to the woman, and we clinked glasses.

She said, “Yeah, well, Veronica's dead now. Or at least I'm pretty sure she's dead. But maybe not. It was twenty years ago. Back then I figured if somebody doesn't take care of her fast she isn't going to last the summer. I mean, she thought Rudy was taking care of her. It was the early nineties, remember. All over the country teenage kids were checking out or being kicked out and nobody knew how to stop it. People weren't experimenting with drugs like in the sixties anymore, they were dosing themselves with drugs. It wasn't about fun anymore. Those kids, the ones who survived the nineties, they're parents themselves now with kids of their own, some with grandkids, so what does that tell us? All they know about reality is what their parents found time to teach them. And what did we know?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Not much that was good. That was when county sheriffs and federal prosecutors were busting day-care centers and kindergartens for child sex abuse and weird satanic rituals and making kiddie porn. Remember?”

I told her I thought that was in the eighties.

She said, “It was in the nineties, too. You didn't know what to believe. People were confused. I was glad Helene was still a little girl, even though it kind of fucked up my downtime, if you know what I mean. Because she was so dependent and all.”

I said I knew what she meant. “I helped raise four kids of my own,” I told her. “All adults now.”

She said to me, “Anyhow, Rudy flipped out at my birthday party and started throwing my set of good wedding present steak knives one by one at the door that led from the kitchen into the living room, and when I bitched at him he puts down the remaining three or four steak knives and pulls out this big sheath knife he's wearing on his belt and throws it so hard it penetrates six inches right through the door. Everybody goes silent. Helene hides behind my skirt and starts to cry.

“Fortunately, Huey, Dewey and Louie muscled Rudy and his bowie knife out of the apartment, leaving Veronica nodding out on the couch, missing the whole show, although it was probably one she'd seen many times before. Afterward, scared that Rudy might come back alone, everyone split. So now it's just me, Helene and Veronica alone in the apartment. Happy fucking birthday. We never even got to the cake part.

“I double-locked the door, threw a blanket over Veronica, put Helene to bed and went to bed myself, but Helene was still scared and wanted to sleep in my bed with me, so I let her. Rudy didn't come back to get Veronica for three days, like he'd forgotten where he left her. But by then I'd gotten into her head a little, or maybe she arrived that night already primed to dump Rudy and kick drugs and only needed a little reinforcement from a third party, so to speak, like from a role model, an older independent woman able to take care of herself and her seven-year-old child.”

“Like you,” I said. “You and Helene.”

“Yeah, like me. Me and Helene. The back bedroom already had a mattress on the floor and I put Carl's old sleeping bag and a lamp back there and hung a sheet over the window for privacy. I gave her some of my old T-shirts and jeans which were way short in the legs but she said she liked the pedal pusher look. Once she got rested she was real polite. Just not talkative.

“Veronica didn't appear to own anything and didn't have any money. She was like a child in certain ways. I had to buy her a toothbrush and let her borrow my shampoo and personal hygiene items and told her to eat whatever she wanted from the fridge and cupboards, which I sort of regretted once she got going because she was like a dog that's lived on the streets all her life and thinks she's never going to get another decent meal. By Sunday, not two days in, I had to restock practically everything, even the little boxed juices and Cheetos I kept for Helene's TV snacks.

“At breakfast the Monday after the party, we had our little talk. I asked Veronica if she'd walk Helene to school because I was supposed to get to the agency early to start learning a new computer program for booking airfares. Computers were just entering the travel industry then and everybody was scared of them, especially me because in school I was always lousy at math. Mainly I have people skills.

“Veronica goes, ‘Sure, whatever,' which was sort of her default answer to any question put to her, but she said it so nicely and with a smile that you didn't mind.

“I told her, ‘Here's the deal. You need a place to get your shit together. And I need a babysitter.' My old babysitter had just quit to work for this recently divorced female professor at Reed College who'd offered her twice what I could pay. I had permission to bring Helene to the office on Saturdays, so if Veronica could walk Helene home from school every weekday and stay with her till I got out of work, she could keep the back room. Plus I'd pay her five bucks an hour for babysitting twenty hours a week, which came to a hundred bucks a week. It was a stretch, but I had a little saved and a raise coming once I learned the new computer program.

“‘But no Rudy,' I told her. ‘And no drugs. Except maybe if you want to burn a little weed with me in the evenings. That's up to you.' I knew I shouldn't be smoking in the apartment with her trying to quit using, but I needed my weed. In those days after Carl left I didn't want to give up my few remaining pleasures, and weed was definitely one. Still is.

“She seemed excited and said, ‘No problem!' Helene was happy with the deal too. Veronica was like her new best friend and playmate. All weekend when Veronica wasn't asleep in her room she was stretched out beside Helene on the living room floor watching Helene's favorite TV shows with her, even the cartoons, and talking about them with her like she and Helene were kids the same age. Maybe that's another reason why I keep looking for her all these years later.”

“Could be,” I said. “Makes sense.”

She went on with her story as if I hadn't said anything. “With me, though, she talked almost not at all, even when I asked about Rudy, if she had been living with him for long and so forth. Instead of words she answered with a humming sound, which I took to be a yes. When I asked where she was from originally she said, ‘Here,' which I took to mean Portland. When I asked if her parents were still alive she nodded yes and said her mother was alive but she wasn't sure about her father and crinkled her brow like it was painful to think about them, so I decided not to push it. I figured she was another of those throwaway kids who cross their mother or father or stepfather somehow and get tossed out or walk out and live on their own from about the age of thirteen or fourteen. Who knew what she'd done to survive? All she had to trade on was her body and her youth, and with the piercings and tattoos, not to mention the drugs, she'd done a lot to destroy her body, and the passage of time was doing the same to her youth, the way it does to everyone's. Pretty soon she wouldn't have anything to trade on, except loyalty to assholes like Rudy.”

I told the woman that I could dig it, as I had someone like that in my own family. I didn't say whether it was someone like the parents who tossed their child out or like the daughter who walked out on them, but in fact it was both.

She said, “So okay, then you can imagine how I felt when I got home from work that evening and the first thing Helene tells me is that the man who threw the knife at the door was here. ‘But he's gone now,' she says. ‘Veronica told him to fuck off.'

“I said that's great but she shouldn't say fuck. The kitchen was all neat and clean, spotless actually, much cleaner than when I do it, dishes washed and everything put away. I went into the living room and it was the same there. She'd even folded my laundry and stacked it neatly on my bed. She was in Helene's room putting away Helene's dozen Barbies and all their flimsy wardrobes and accessories.