Disconnected (3 page)

“Epic,” she said, and shook her head. In high school, she’d played quarters on Ping-Pong tables in basements while parents watched
The X-Files
upstairs. She’d get one of her cross-country teammates, who had an obliging older brother, to buy her a bottle of peach schnapps, and she’d mix it with orange juice, thinking she was sophisticated because she preferred that to beer. Once, during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, a boy named John Mackey had gotten so frustrated trying to unhook her bra that he’d yanked the hooks right off. She’d laughed. They both had. It had been funny. More than that, it had been safe, because someone was on the outside of the door to call “Time!” and more someones were waiting there to laugh at their flushed faces. Torn clothes were a joke; the idea of a guy getting rough, using force, actually hurting a girl he knew, that was a joke, too.

She slipped out the door and went to a crowded Starbucks, where she lingered by the pickup counter until there were four drinks piled up and nobody paying much attention. Then she helped herself to the tallest one and calmly walked out the door to wait for the train that would take her home. She was thinking of her mother. “I don’t know what to do for you anymore!” her mom had cried. This had been on Family Day, two rehabs ago, the place in California. “It’s like you’re drowning, and I keep throwing you life preservers, and you keep not grabbing them, and Shannie, I can’t . . .” Shannon had wanted to tell her she was sorry, but then her mother, still crying, had said, “You were so
talented
!” and Shannon felt such deep shame, such embarrassment that all of her early promise had bled out without netting her a book deal or a contract with a good magazine or even a real job, that she’d said “Fuck you” instead of “I’m sorry” and stormed out of the room where the families had gathered. She had slammed the door behind her, but not fast enough to shut out the sound of one of the counselors saying, “That’s her disease talking. That’s not your daughter.”

***

Instead of waiting for the train, Shannon walked home from the meeting, trying to tire herself out, but that night she couldn’t sleep. Big surprise. “You’ve messed up your body’s natural sleep cycle, taking all that heroin,” they’d told her. So when would she sleep again? Would it be weeks, months, years? Nobody knew, or at least nobody wanted to tell her.

She tried every meditation technique she’d learned, controlling her breathing, flexing and relaxing all her muscles. It wasn’t until she reached for a pen, thinking she’d start the journal they’d all told her to keep, that she saw her phone’s message light blinking.

There was one new message. Shannon could taste copper in her mouth as the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clicked, and there was another picture.

This time she saw a man and a girl sitting shoulder to shoulder on a couch. The man wore an untucked plaid shirt and jeans. His thick legs were spread wide, and his body was angled toward his couch-mate. Underneath the brim of his baseball cap, he was grinning. One of his arms was around the girl’s shoulders. He was using his free hand to squeeze her breast.

As for the girl, she looked young and either very drunk or ill. Her eyes were half open, unfocused. Her mouth hung slack, and her head tilted forward, chin almost touching her chest, as if she were a baby who’d fallen asleep in a stroller. The skin of her face and throat was pasty, and she appeared entirely unaware that the guy sitting beside her was pawing at her. She didn’t look as though she was aware of anything.

You know where that is
, said the voice in her mind.

I do not
, said Shannon. She lay back on her bed. She tried to close her eyes. She thought,
Why does this have to be my job? Haven’t I been through enough?
She made herself breathe, inhaling to the count of five, exhaling over the same count, until she’d lulled herself into sleep, or something close.

***

After the party was the after-party. This meant smoking meth off squares of burnt tinfoil in someone’s grotty apartment, where the only furniture was milk crates and two splintered wooden chairs. She had been sick before the night had even started. It had been twelve hours since she’d shot her last four bags, certain that Mickey was going to bring her more, only Mickey had shown up without her two hundred dollars and with some long story about how his connection had never showed.

“I need something,” Shannon had said, hating the words as they came out of her mouth, hating herself for letting it get this far again. She’d promised that she’d keep it under control, just on weekends, and if not just weekends, then just night, but of course life had happened, and three weeks later she was right back where she’d started. Mickey had given her a bottle of brandy and she’d clutched it close, like a baby, choking down burning sips and hoping it would be enough to stop the sweating and the shaking, the way her legs wanted to kick and her organs felt unmoored, as if they were all sloshing around inside her, waiting to come streaming out of her mouth or points south.

The booze hadn’t helped and the meth hadn’t, either. She’d endured the agony for as long as she could before gripping Mickey’s hand with one of her sweat-slimy paws and saying, “You’ve got to get me something.”

They’d piled into someone’s Citicar, and there was rap music on the stereo, four people crammed into the tiny backseat. She’d huddled close to Mickey, shivering and ill, and they’d driven for almost an hour, finally ending up in front of an abandoned rowhouse at the end of a burnt-out block.

Shannon remembered an upside-down Big Wheel on the porch and two aluminum-tube lawn chairs with sagging nylon straps. In the kitchen, all of the appliances had been yanked out of the walls, leaving stained squares and rectangles to indicate their locations. “This way,” said Mickey, leading her down a steep flight of stairs, down to a basement that smelled like rotting potatoes and stale sweat and the chemical reek of crack. She’d been half sitting, half lying on a couch that smelled like mold and mothballs when she’d first noticed the noise, a faint scratching sound. “Mickey?” she’d whispered, but Mickey wasn’t there, he was on another couch all the way across the room with three other guys, laughing about something. Shannon had pushed herself to her feet and had started across the room, toward the scratching sound, when suddenly there was an arm around her waist, the moist warmth of a guy’s horrible breath blooming against her neck and ear. “Not there, baby, that’s not for you.” Like a good girl, she’d let him lead her away from the wall, and he’d found her pills and she’d paid for them on her back, eyes squeezed shut, tears running into the cups of her ears and turning the scratching into an underwater rumor, faint and far away.

***

In her little room, in her sheetless, blanketless futon, Shannon sat upright, gasping. “No,” she said. “No.” Her phone light was blinking, blinking, and she knew what it would say. She threw the phone across the room and groaned out loud, burying her face in her hands. She thought,
Take this cup from my lips
. She thought,
I was only there once and I was sick. I’ll probably never be able to remember where it is.
She thought,
Probably she’s dead already.

But you couldn’t run forever. They had told her that in rehab, too. Eventually you had to stop running, and even the worst failures, the true fuckups and wastes of space, had to try to fix what they had broken. You had to turn and see what you had done. You had to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself. You had to write it all down and confess the nature of your wrongdoings to yourself and to the God of your understanding and to someone else, and then you had to make amends.

“Okay, fine,” said Shannon. Her eyes felt wide and starey. Underneath them, her cheeks were slick. She rubbed at the tears, pushed her feet into her cheap sneakers, and then went and retrieved the phone, holding it gently in her hand, forcing herself to think.

She could go to the cops . . . except what would she tell them? She had a few texts that wouldn’t strike them as alarming, a picture that showed nothing more than a boy and a girl, both upright and clothed.
Maybe he’s her boyfriend
, she heard an imaginary police officer say. She could tell them that the texts and pictures reminded her of a house where she’d been, and how there’d been a scratching sound, maybe nothing more than a mouse behind the wall, but maybe something bigger . . . except that would prompt all kinds of questions about exactly what she, Shannon Elizabeth Wills, had been doing in the house and why she hadn’t said anything to anyone at the time and why she was only now, eight weeks later, coming forward.
Rehab, huh? Not working yet?
They’d ask their fake-casual questions, taking in her scrawny limbs and messed-up face, roll their eyes over her head if she tried to tell them about her dream—the men in masks, the hands on her ankles.

The phone buzzed in her hand. Feeling like she was in a dream, underwater, Shannon picked it up and clicked “Read text” and stared at the screen as the words she’d known were coming appeared one letter at a time.

HELP ME.

Then, as she watched, the screen filled with the words until the picture was obliterated.
HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME.

She hit buttons at random until the words went away. Then she called Devonté.

He sounded groggy—but, thank God, not angry—when he picked up. “H’lo? Shannon?”

“I need you to take me somewhere in Crown Heights.”

His voice was dry. “I assume that this is urgent?”

She gave him the address of the diner on the corner of Henry and DeGraw. “I can get you something . . .”

“Ah, I’m not hungry. I’ll meet you there.”

She ended the call and raced outside, even though there was no way he could be there yet. Shivering, she waited on the fluorescent-lit sidewalk outside of Mr. Park’s shop, pacing back and forth and wishing she had money for a cup of hot cocoa and a sweet roll. When Devonté’s little blue Zipcar pulled up to the curb, she was in the passenger’s seat almost before he’d stopped, slapping the phone into his hand like a nurse handing over some necessary instrument to a doctor in the midst of a delicate surgery.

He flicked through the pictures, frowning. Over his shoulder, Shannon read the next round of texts.

WTF did u do 2 hr?

N0thing. She wuz fine when i left.

shes not fine now

that wasnt me.

If u took pics delete them. meet back here have 2 figure out what 2 do

Devonté shook his head and scrolled back to the first picture, the pills in the kitchen. “So you know where this is?”

Her voice was dry and rattly, a dead leaf blowing down a sidewalk. “It’s in Crown Heights.”

“But you don’t know where the house is? Or what street it’s on, or anything?”

“I’ll find it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” The last word came out half an octave higher than the preceding two. A chill worked its way up her body, shaking her shoulders. She didn’t want to go back there, but what choice did she have? Nobody had come to save her, not that night, not the night on her futon, the night she’d gone to the hospital, but that didn’t absolve her of her own responsibilities. “Come on,” she said, and Devonté started to drive. Shannon shut her eyes, leaning her forehead against the cool window glass. When she opened them, the message light was flaring again.

think she’s dead

“No,” she moaned as Devonté squinted at the GPS, driving along Eastern Parkway, leading them deeper into a neighborhood of boarded-up storefronts, Chinese restaurants with plastic signs, OTB parlors and shabby churches and burnt-out, windowless shells of houses. Pairs of sneakers dangled from the powerlines; a torn garbage bag leaked paper plates and chicken bones onto the street.

“What now?” he asked.

She knew the answer. Most addicts had what a career counselor might call a
limited skill set
, but finding the party was generally part of it. Find the party, you’d find booze and blow and pills and powder, or at least someone who knew how to get them. A pretty girl or even just a thin one (and all addicts ended up thin eventually) could always find the party.

Shannon directed Devonté to a convenience store. Inside, there was a trio of giggly girls in denim jackets and high-heeled boots standing in line, sipping from sixty-four-ounce cups of Mountain Dew, ordering Salem Lights. “Hey,” said Shannon, reaching out to tap the shoulder of a girl wearing sparkly red devil horns. The girls ignored her, turning their backs, marching out the door on a slipstream of perfume. She followed, thinking she’d get their attention once they were outside.

“Girlie.” The voice sounded like concrete being churned in a broken mixer. She looked down. The bum leaning against the side of the cinder-block wall wore a dirt-stiffened sweatshirt with a dark red stain down the front. His pants were held up with a bungee cord. Reddened toes poked through slits he’d carved into a pair of too-small sneakers. He leaned against the wall of the convenience store and grinned a smile that revealed three teeth. “No offense, girlie, but I think maybe you’re up past your bedtime.”

“Please.” The word came out as a croak. “Do you know where there’s a party? There’s something I have to do there.”

Beneath the thickets of his eyebrows, the bum’s eyes rolled. “Oh, I know all about that.” He worked himself slowly from sitting to standing, then reached into his pocket. “Here.” He gave her a pamphlet printed on flimsy green paper.
The Promises,
read the words on top.
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.

“See, doesn’t that sound nice? A new freedom and a new happiness?” He sounded, Shannon thought, like a parent trying to coax a child into taking a bite of some new vegetable.