Memoirs Aren't Fairytales (24 page)

“Water's warm, come on,” he said.

He opened the plastic shower curtain, and I stepped in.

The tub began to fill because the drain was clogged with hair, and cockroaches floated around my feet.

There wasn't any shampoo, just a bar of green soap covered in a brownish film. Dustin told me not to use it. I wasn't going to anyway.

We kissed under the spray, and he slid his hands up and down the sides of my stomach and around my boobs.

“You're so beautiful,” he said and held my face.

My hands were on his stomach, touching the muscles that stuck out of his skin. I moved to his chest and then his arms.

His fingers went between my legs and poked inside me. I was high and not really horny, but his fingers felt smooth, and the water made me wet.

He was hard and I rubbed it, and tugged, and turned around so it pressed against my ass. I bent over, holding the edge of the tub. Black ants crawled near my hands, and I flipped my hair over my shoulder so they wouldn't crawl up to my head.

He gently slid in. I was loud, moaning and saying his name, and he pumped faster. But he never stopped caressing the sensitive skin on my butt, and he reached around to squeeze my nipples.

From his pounding, my hands slipped from the greasy edge, and he caught me before I fell in the bath of cockroaches. He picked me up and turned me around, wrapping my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, and we kissed. The muscles I'd touched just minutes before were holding all my weight as he stroked at the same time.

His body shook when he came. His arms tightened around me. I didn't come, but being so close to him was as good as coming.

“You want to get out of here?” he asked, brushing his lips over mine again.

The water had turned cold, but I wasn't.

I squeezed his neck so he wouldn't let me go. And he didn't. He stepped out of the shower and set me on the counter, standing in front of me with my legs and arms still around him.

“Baby,” he said, “we need to find some place to live.”

I knew where I wanted to live and that was by Claire. I missed her and hadn't talked to her since my last day at the hospital. Frankie would probably have a room we could rent, and Dustin had enough money for at least a week's stay.

“There's a hotel on—”

“Wherever you want,” he said. “I'll move anywhere with you.”

Since Richard didn't have any towels, Dustin dried me off with handfuls of toilet paper and helped me get dressed. He put my clothes on much slower than he'd taken them off. And when his clothes were back on too, we took the train to Massachusetts Avenue.

Frankie was sitting at the desk, and he eyed up Dustin when I asked if he had any rooms. He said he had one on the first floor. Dustin paid for a week, and Frankie held out his hand with the key. I went to grab it, and Frankie's fingers closed around mine.

“You're looking good,” he said.

I'd gained a few pounds in rehab since they fed me three meals a day.

Dustin leaned over the countertop and stopped only inches from Frankie's face. “Give her the key. Now.”

Frankie turned towards me and let go. “If you ever need Sunshine's discount, you just let me know,” he said.

I thanked him and we went to our room.

“Who's Sunshine and what's her discount?” Dustin asked. He was sitting on the bed, flipping through the TV stations.

He didn't know I was a hooker. He'd never asked how I'd made my dope money, but I figured he just assumed.

“Sunshine's my old roommate, she lives on the fourth floor.”

“She screw him for free rent?”

“Something like that.”

“Have you?”

“No,” I lied.

“She's a hooker, right?”

I nodded and asked how he knew. He told me all hookers named themselves Sunshine.

I always thought Sunshine was her real name. Even in the hospital, the nurses had called her Sunshine.

“So you were a hooker too?”

He was still looking at the TV and had settled on a movie. The scene was familiar, but I couldn't think what movie it was.

“I was,” I said.

His gaze shifted to me. “That's some nasty shit,” he said. “I don't want you ever doing it again, you hear me? I'll take care of you.”

He'd probably think carrying some John's baby for eleven weeks and causing my own abortion were nasty too. I guess I could never tell him, which also meant he couldn't find out about the deal I'd made with Richard.

I sat next to him on the bed and rested my head on his shoulder.

“You ever fuck Richard?” he asked.

I pulled back and looked him in the eyes. “No.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No, I swear, he's never touched me.”

“Good, because I'm not sharing any more women with him.”

I thought of Sierra and Erin, and the way they'd looked at Dustin.

“I don't want you going over to Richard's either. I'll get you plenty of dope, just stay away from his house.”

But I needed to go to Richard's one more time. Before Dustin and I had left his house, Richard cornered me in the hallway and told me he hadn't forgotten about our deal. I had to work something out with him, and make him promise to keep quiet.

Dustin left me the next morning to do a run, so I went upstairs to Sunshine's room. She answered the door wearing a long t-shirt.

“Can't say I'm surprised to see you,” she said.

I took a seat on the couch and she sat down next to me.

“Did you just get out?” she asked.

I told her about Dustin and how we'd stayed at Richard's the night we left rehab and checked into the hotel yesterday. Her back went straight when I said Richard's name like I'd pinched a nerve. I'd said his name so many times in the past, but maybe I'd just never noticed her reaction before.

There was a reason I'd come to her room before Claire's. Even if she didn't want to talk about it, I still had to ask. “What happened between you two?”

She went over to the bed and fumbled with her purse until she found her dope. “I told you, he beat—”

“No, why did he do it?”

“Shit, I don't work for free,” she said. “If he wanted a piece of me, he had to pay up, but he didn't like that answer.”

That was what had caused him to snap? She had said no to sex, and he beat and raped her? Damn, Sunshine didn't deserve that. Heather wasn't kidding when she said Richard had a bad temper.

“You watched me go to his house every day,” I said. “And never once did you warn me about what he did to you. How dare—”

“I'm a junkie, what do you want from me?”

“Richard could have beat the shit out of me too, and it would have been your fault,” I said.

“I'm sorry, but you would have done the same thing.”

She was probably right.

Before she stuck in the needle, I told her to stop going to Roxbury. I said if she gave her money to Dustin every morning, he'd get her dope from Richard.

And when she shot up, I left.

I knocked on Claire's door, and she opened it with a blank expression. Then her eyes squinted like she was trying to figure out who I was.

I waited a few seconds and said, “Claire, it's me.”

“Why aren't you in rehab?”

She stood in the middle of the doorway and didn't invite me in.

“I met someone and we left together. I want you to meet him, his name is Dustin, and—”

“You left after a week? For a boy?” she asked. “Are you sober?”

She knew the answer, so I didn't know why she asked.

“I was, I—”

“Then I don't have anything to say to you.”

She started to close the door, and I stuck my hand in the doorway. “Claire, I've missed you, that's why I came back to the hotel. I'm living downstairs with Dustin and…”

She looked at the floor.

“Claire?”

“You promised me,” she said. “Promised and promised that you were going to get sober.”

I had promised my parents and Michael too. And the baby.

“I love you, Nicole, like a daughter,” she said. “But I can only take so much.”

“Claire, wait.”

“You've broken my heart for the last time.” The door shut in my face.

Maybe I shouldn't have left rehab.

I went to my room and shot five bags. And four hours later, I shot six more.

I remembered Heather telling me that the squatters did most of their runs at night. So when Dustin left the next afternoon to go to Providence, I went to Richard's after dark. When I opened the front door, Shank was on the couch, sitting between Sierra and Erin.

“What's up, Nicole,” Shank said.

I'd been spotted. It was too late to back out.

The twins were dressed in bras and panties. They were touching themselves, squeezing their nipples, rubbing their crotches, and moaning. Shank's Mohawk swished from right to left like he was watching a tennis match.

“Have any of you seen Heather?” I asked.

One of the twins stopped pinching her nipple long enough to point to the back of the house, and I slipped into Richard's bedroom. Heather wasn't in there, which was good. I didn't want her to know about our deal either.

Richard was lying on the air mattress and through the white sheet, I could see he was naked. I stared at his lighter-shaped penis and the black bush around it. That was the dick that had raped Sunshine.

His hands moved to his dick and scratched. Those fingers, scarred and filthy, had beaten her.

“Coming to pay back your debt?” he asked. He sat up as if he was getting ready for something.

“Richard, we can't. I'm with Dustin now, and you're with Heather. You know it's not a good idea.”

His body didn't move, but his lips were almost pouting.

I told him I'd pay back the three hundred, plus another hundred for interest. I said I needed a couple weeks and then we'd be even, our old deal forgotten and to never be mentioned again, especially to Heather or Dustin.

He didn't say anything.

“Are we good?” I asked.

He nodded his head just as coke-head Cale came bolting into Richard's room. “We have a problem,” he said.

Richard shot out of bed and reached for his clothes.

“It's not the cops,” Cale said. “It's Heather, you need to see this.”

The three of us rushed down the hall to the far bedroom. We pushed through the doorway past Shank, Sierra, and Erin. Heather was sitting on a mattress with a knife in her hand, cutting all the skin off her arm. She was singing, “Bugs, bugs go away, come again another day.”

Blood was pouring out of her arm, chunks of skin lying on the bed. She was having a meth psychosis, and if we didn't get her to the hospital, she'd bleed to death.

“Someone call 9-1-1,” I said.

Everyone just stared, and Heather continued to cut and sing.

“Richard, do something,” I said.

Richard shook his head. “We've got to get her to the street, the cops can't come here,” he said.

He started barking orders. Sierra took away the knife, and Erin wrapped Heather's arm in a trash bag. Tiffany called 9-1-1 and reported Heather's location. Once everyone had an assignment, they all began to move. And when Shank and Cale carried Heather out the front door to leave her on the corner, I followed behind them and went to the train station.

When I got home, I buried myself in bed. Even after I shot up, I could see Heather holding that knife, gushing blood, and chopping her skin. She'd lost a lot of blood, and I didn't know if she even made it to the hospital. I called Mass General and asked if she was there. Without her last name, they said they wouldn't give me any information. I called Boston Medical and Brigham and Women's, but they wouldn't tell me anything either. I didn't have Richard's cell phone number, and I couldn't call Dustin and ask him for it.

At least since heroin didn't produce psychoses, it wasn't as scary as meth. But Eric's lips had turned blue, and he'd foamed at the mouth before he died. Sunshine was blue and foaming when Claire had found her, and I'd overdosed too. Maybe dope was just as scary.

I wasn't asleep for more than twenty minutes when I heard Dustin come home. The door slammed, the springs in the mattress squeaked, and then he was on top of me. With my eyes closed, I waited to feel his lips on my neck and his hands on my tits.

My eyes shot open when I felt his hands clamp my neck, his thumb pressing on my windpipe. His lips were pulled back over his teeth, and he was snarling like a pit bull.

I couldn't breathe.

“What the fuck did I tell you,” he shouted. “You fucking whore, why didn't you listen to me?”

I should have expected this. But with all the drama that happened at Richard's, I didn't think the squatters would even remember I was there. The twins. Those bitches wanted Dustin and ratted me out.

I reached for his hands and tried to pull them off my neck. “I'm sorry…”

His fist whipped across my face. My eye socket pounded with pain, and I let out a cry.

I tasted blood seeping down my nose and onto my lips.

His arm went back, preparing to swing again.

“I just wanted to say goodbye to Heather,” I said. “She's my friend and I knew I wouldn't see her again.”

“I would have taken you there. Why didn't you just ask me?”

“I…”

The snarl changed to a look of remorse. “Why did you make me hurt you?”

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

“I want to be with you forever,” he said. “But if Richard ever touched you, we'd be done, don't you get that?”

He threw the comforter off me. “I need to know you're mine.”

He yanked off his clothes and got between my legs. While he moved on top of me, he held my face. He wiped the blood from my nose and kissed the skin around my eye.

“All I've got is love for you,” he said quietly.

He moved in and out, and up and down.

“So much love,” he said, his voice deep.

His breathing turned heavy, and then his body went limp on top of mine.

In that moment, two things were decided. Once I gave Richard the money, I'd never lie to Dustin again. He loved me and wanted to protect me. I couldn't be mad at him for that. And I was going to be with him forever too.

Dustin was gone all the time doing runs. Sunshine was never home anymore since she'd met some guy and was at his place when she wasn't tricking. Claire wanted nothing to do with me, so I spent my days in our room with nothing but TV and heroin. And at night, I sat in the hallway outside Claire's room with my back against her door, talking out loud and hoping she was listening. I told her about Dustin, how much he loved me and took care of me. I talked about Heather and how she was admitted to the psych ward after the doctors repaired her arm. I told her I missed her. She never came out of her room, but I could hear her sniffling on the other side of the door. Just knowing she was there was enough. Sometimes I'd fall asleep there, and Dustin would carry me down to our room. He'd tell me I didn't need Claire, I had him, and I should leave her alone. But I couldn't. I'd never leave Claire.