Anamnesis: A Novel (5 page)

I unzipped the new sleeping bag and felt around
inside. I taught Skid this trick a while ago. If you didn’t keep everything
valuable on yourself, you had to hide it well.

My hand hit a snag in the fabric. I
reached into the fluff and pulled out a tiny plastic baggie. There was one pill
in it. It had no markings. A half blue, half white capsule. I didn’t recognize
it.

“He was going to talk to the outreach lady
today.”

Standing outside the tent was a teenage
girl, her arms were wrapped around herself in a tight hug. Her hair was a shade
darker of brown than her skin. She was dressed warmly in a clean jacket and
jeans. I’d say she was out of place, but she stood unafraid like she belonged
there.

“Ruby?”

She nodded. “You’re E?”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah. What are you
doing here?”

Ruby bent down and entered the tent,
sitting cross-legged beside me. “Yesterday I snuck him into my house so he
could take a shower. I trimmed his hair. He was going to talk to her this
afternoon about getting straightened out. Foster parents caught him, laid into
me. Don’t want to be there right now. Don’t want to be anywhere right now.”

“Do you know what happened? These people
are being assholes and—”

She pointed to the baggie still in my
hands. “Last night, after they kicked him out, I met him here. His friend Cody
got some of that new stuff, but wouldn’t say where. He wanted Skid to take some
with him and go mess around. It’s supposed to make you forget everything while
you’re on it. He thought it would be fun. I told them it was stupid, that’s not
even what it’s meant for.”

“Did Skid take any?” I asked.

“You’re holding it, so of course not,”
Ruby snapped. In that moment I saw her. Too mature for her age because of the
life she’d been through. Too used to people thinking she was a kid. “But Cody
did. He did some crank, too. Was on a binge. Skid was worried about him. He
said he was going to stay with him until he came down.”

I choked back an unexpected sob. “He was a
good kid. He’d do something like that.”

It wasn’t fair. Day to day, I could numb
myself to this life. I floated just above reality, and if I didn’t look down it
wasn’t there. But when shit like this happened, I plunged back in. All the
regrets, the wishes, flooded me.

Ruby reached out and squeezed my shoulder
before letting her hand drop beside her. A car passed by, the headlights
illuminating the tent. I noticed a wet shine on her cheeks. Her thick fringe of
eyelashes were heavy with tears. “Yeah, he was. I stayed with him the whole
night. I didn’t want him to be alone. When Cody came down he went crazy. At
first we thought he was kidding, playing up on it, but he was really confused.
He got physical. Pushed Skid.”

“I know,” I stopped her. “I know the
rest.”

We sat in silence. Finally, Ruby spoke.
“Skid looked up to you. You meant a lot to him. I thought you deserved to know
how it went down. Been waiting for you to show up so I could tell you.”

Skid wanted to get out. He could’ve, too.
He was so close. Now he was dead. Dead because of the little pill in my hand
, because of his
attempt at doing something right.

“It just shows, you do the right thing and
life fucks you over. Do the wrong thing and you’re fucked, too.” I shoved the
pill in my pocket. “So why bother?”

Ruby climbed out of the tent. Before she
left, she bent down and looked me in the eyes. “Everyone has to live and die
for something. You can decide what that something is. Life doesn’t decide for
you.”

Waiting outside of
my apartment was the last person I expected to see. Trisha wore neon green
fishnets and shiny black boots that went up to her knees, with heels tall
enough to impale a person with. She had a frumpy brown jacket on, which I
guessed covered her costume. In a place like Seattle, she could pass for
eccentric. I knew better.

“I called you. Twice.”

“I know. I ignored you. Twice. What are
you doing here?” I asked as I moved past her to unlock the door. With Skid’s
death fresh on my mind, I didn’t want to deal with her. “We’re done.”

“You really don’t have any balls, do you?
Donnie says jump, you ask how high. Fuck, E, he didn’t even know we were
together.”

Here we go. Trisha and I weren’t a good
combination. We both hated ourselves and wanted to fix each other as a means of
fixing our own problems. Everything we hated about each other was just a mirror
of ourselves.

It was a toxic relationship. Fucking self-help
books taught me that much.

The second I got in I made my way into the
kitchen and flicked on the stove light. Just enough light to operate the coffee
machine. I placed a new filter in, fresh coffee grounds, and let it brew. The
scent made my mouth water. The promise of caffeine and warmth made me giddy
with anticipation.

Trisha followed. She hated the way my apartment
looked. Even back when we were fucking, she’d rarely do it here. I saw the look
of disdain on her face even then. What was it with women and hating my living
circumstances? What the hell did they want from me?

She plopped down on the easy chair and
motioned to the papers I hadn’t cleaned up. “What the hell is all this shit?”

“Nothing.” The mere thought of explaining
Olivia Holloway to Trisha exhausted me.

“Fine. Whatever.”

Trisha ran her tongue over her teeth and
shrugged. Her regular haughty sneer melted into something sweeter. Since I knew
her, I’d call it conniving.

“I know things haven’t been good between
us.”

I folded my arms across my chest and
leaned against the kitchen counter. “They’ve been fine. I ended it
months
ago.
I thought we were good.”

Her expression faltered. She picked at her
fishnets, staring at them intently.

Trisha was Donovan’s girl. Sort of. Like
many of the girls he claimed for himself, she didn’t start off bad. Sure, she
was stripping. But honest to God, that was to help pay for nursing school. She
had fantastic grades and was hoping to work in oncology. Her grandmother and
mother died from cancer, which is what inspired her to do it.

I knew all that because when Donovan’s
family took over the strip club she worked at, I talked to her. After her shift
we’d get burgers at Dick’s. If I was dealing around the club, we’d hang out on
her breaks. One thing led to another and there was sex. Lots of it, everywhere,
anytime. Sex, fucking, and even lovemaking. She was the first girl in years
that took me away from myself. Sometimes I felt a glimmer of happiness. Real,
pure happiness.

I loved everything about her. How she
liked one scoop of raspberry sorbet and one of chocolate chip mint from Molly
Moon’s, how she seemed to know the words of every song we heard on the radio.
The sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks that got darker in the
summer. The little things she noticed when we walked through Pike Place Market
observing the tourists.

Then Donovan started taking an interest in
her. He got her into partying, and partying with Donovan meant a lot of
drinking, ecstasy, and coke. Trisha did it because she would lose her job if
she refused. The money was good and she needed it. Six months later she dropped
out of nursing school. The club started having girls turn tricks for extra cash,
and Trisha had a habit of her own to keep up.

When Donovan started screwing her, I broke
it off. Not just because Donovan would’ve had me trounced if I showed interest
in one of his girls, but because Trisha had changed. She was hardened now. When
I looked at her I saw the fried brain of someone who does too much blow and
hits the bottle no matter what time of day it is. She was like me, like
everyone else in my world. That’s not what I wanted. I didn’t deserve it, but I
wanted something better. Something that gave me a taste of normal life.

“Listen, I’m here to fix us. We haven’t talked
in a while. I miss that,” Trisha finally said. She crossed her legs, revealing
a long expanse of thigh. Her skin was unseasonably dark from hours in the
tanning bed.

“You can’t be here. This,” I pointed
between her and me, “can’t happen. If Donovan knew about us he’d cut me off.
He’d cut you off. If he was in a bad mood, he’d kill us. You know that, right?”

Trisha unzipped and opened her coat. She wore
a lime green corset that made her small chest look twice as big. A square of
green satin covered her crotch. I couldn’t help but stare, feeling warmth
spreading in my body.

The coffee machine pinged. I forced myself
to look away from her to rinse a mug and poured myself a cup. Then another and
another until I felt the caffeine surging in my body. I didn’t offer her one.
This was my sacred liquid.

She’d been quiet the whole time, sitting
on the easy chair wearing next to nothing. I didn’t want her, but I wanted
someone
.
Companionship. The feeling of someone’s body against mine. I remembered what
her skin felt like under my lips, or how devious it made me to pull her silky
hair from the high ponytail she typically wore it in. That’s the Trisha I
wanted again.

There was a shuffling and
thud thud
thud
as her heels dug into the ground when she walked. She’d dropped the
coat entirely and put herself in front of me. This close I smelled cigarettes.
Her pupils were dilated. I wondered what she was on.

“E, remember when things were good with
us?” She reached out and ran her finger down my cheek. It dropped down my chest
to the waistband of my jeans. “I want that again. Don’t you?”

Fuck I did. If sleeping with her meant I
had a chance of forgetting about Skid and Olivia Holloway and the pink dress
girl for just a few moments, I was in.

I grabbed her and pulled her against me,
my mouth against hers. Her tongue tasted ashy, her lips bubblegum flavored. The
fishnet was rough underneath my fingertips as I ran my hands down her hips. She
tugged at the laces in front of her corset and loosened it. I pulled it over
her head and threw it on the ground. Her pale skin was indented and red where
the corset dug into her flesh.

Trisha grabbed my hand and led me to my
bed. The union was rough and clumsy. Nothing like what it was when we were
first together. She felt stiff and cold now. All the moans and whispers were
practiced.

But they worked. I let my mind go blank
with her and even after we finished, naked and breathless, I had a minute of
peace. She lit a cigarette for herself, then offered me one. The best part of
sex was the cigarette after.

Then she was up. Trisha pulled her clothes
on with lightning speed. Not that I wanted to cuddle, but it seemed abrupt.

“Leaving?”

“Gotta go to work. Bus this time of day
will take a while to get north.”

“Oh.” I dragged on the cigarette. “Okay.”

She grabbed her coat from the easy chair
and zipped it to her chin, then sat next to me. “I miss you, E. You’re the best
thing I have in this world.”

My heart fluttered. I didn’t hear things
like that very often. I searched for any maliciousness but found none. Trisha
smiled and kissed my cheek. “See you around.”

The second she left the apartment, the air
got heavy and reality whooshed in. With no more distractions, that
godforsaken
black void was screaming at me and I
couldn’t ignore it any longer. It wasn’t just watching from the dark recesses
of my mind anymore. Whatever destroyed my life was back somehow. It was in the
streets of Seattle.

I was hesitant to make the connection with
pink dress. Then when Donovan all but told me about it, when Olivia Holloway
walked through my door, it was hard to ignore. And I’d gotten really fucking
good at ignoring it. Now it was right in front of me.

And yet it was hard to take that first
step. That’s why I hadn’t spent hundreds of hours trying to find out who I was;
I was afraid of what I’d find.

Things happened to me over the course of
four years that I had no recollection of, but had scars to prove it. Burns,
cuts, stitches. The topography of my body showed experimentation or torture.  I
didn’t have any memories or pain to associate with them. Someone put them on
me. Someone who didn’t think of me as another human being, who thought of me as
a lab rat. Part of me didn’t want to know why they’d done it or what they’d
found out, because there was no way their discovery gave meaning to my
suffering. I wanted answers, but there wasn’t an answer that would make me feel
better. That would make my life whole again. This was speculation, but to find
an answer would mean facing the truth of that idea one way or another.

My life was shattered into tiny pieces
that would never fit back together. I couldn’t do anything with myself unless I
was on an upper or a downer. Even the very blog I wrote that brought Olivia to
me was done on cocaine. Rantings of a person desperate for validation and
comfort. Desperate to know they weren’t alone. Angry that they were.

So I didn’t look.

Ruby’s words stuck with me.
Life
doesn’t decide for you
. Skid, a teenager with the world working against
him, chose to stand for something. We all dreamed of a second chance, but where
we went wrong was assuming it would fall in our laps. We bitched and moaned
about how hard we have it but we don’t actually do anything to change it.

The dredges of grainy coffee in my last
mug had gone cold. I started a new pot and sat down in the easy chair to let
the new feeling of resolution sink in. I wanted to find out what happened to
me. I’d always wanted to deep down but never had the will to do it. I wanted to
be the person Skid thought I was, who
he
was. Now that answers were
closer than they’d ever been before, I couldn’t look away. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t
going to give up my second chance when Skid lost his.

My coffee finished. I poured a mug with a
nip of whiskey and retrieved everything Olivia Holloway brought me, then spread
it across the card table. I read her accounts. Read my own blog—poorly written
bullshit, most of it, but some of it good—and let the reality sink in.

It was time to face the monster in my
closet.