Pain & Wastings (7 page)

“Hissy fit,” he reports when he sees me. “Sorry to wake you.”

Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I shuffle
toward her room. “What's going on, Kelly?” I stay in the hallway as she launches a high-heeled missile at me.

“Detox, that's what!” She scoops the contents of her makeup drawer into a ratty travel case.

“Where you will not need your makeup,” Marshall says. “Nor will it be allowed.”

She drops everything to lock a furious glare on him. “
What
?”

He repeats himself. She does not break her stare. He says it again, this time in pig Latin, which just infuriates her more.

“You're making fun of me!”

“They're coming for you in fifteen minutes, princess,” Marshall says as she throws a tampon at him. “Thank you.” He picks it up and pockets it. “How ever did you know it was my time of the month?”

“Because you're being such a bitch,” she says to him as she marches to the door and pulls me into her room. “God!” She slams it in his face. “What an asshole.”

Boys are not allowed in her and Nikki's room. I wait for the knock on the door, the order to get out, but either Marshall can't be bothered
to enforce the rule right this second, or he's not too worried about what we can get up to in fifteen minutes.

Kelly plops herself down on the mess that is her bed. With a sigh, she upends the makeup case and runs her hands over the compacts and tubes and sticks. She picks up a plum-colored gloss and calmly dabs it on.

“What'd you get up to yesterday?” she asks with a smack of her lips.

“After you went off with those four creepy men, you mean?” I back up to the wall and snug myself against it. I've never set foot in here before, so I'm not sure what to do with myself. Nikki's side of the room is, not surprisingly, flying the Goth national colors of black and more black, but Kelly's side is overwhelmingly
girly
. Peach curtains, a white trundle bed, a flowery scarf draped over her bedside lamp. And it smells like her, of perfume and lingering cigarettes. Sweet and smoky.

“We hung out. I went to their hotel room.” She drops the gloss and picks up a tube of mascara. “Jacuzzi tub. Room service. Very swank.”

“How much did they pay you?”

She looks up from the little mirror she's using, the mascara wand poised at her lashes. “None of your business.”

Except for her teeth, she is so achingly beautiful, I just want to lock her in this room forever, or at least until she realizes how uncool it is to be a sixteen-year-old meth addict who turns tricks to fund her habit.

“Detox will be really good for you,” I say.

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“Enough.” I went with my mom to a First Nations detox center on an island off the north coast when I was five. We took a floatplane, and then a boat took us the rest of the way. We were there for a month. My mom slept in the bottom bunk, and I got the top. Every morning I joined the other children for lessons in the little schoolroom, and in the afternoon we played games. I doubted the concrete block Kelly was heading to was anything like that.

“Come here,” Kelly says.

“Why?”

She caps the mascara and tosses it aside. “Just get over here.”

I take a step forward.

She's staring at me, waiting for me to come closer. “Oh, never mind.”

I'm thinking I'm off the hook, but then she launches herself off the bed and grabs me. She spins us around and shoves me onto the bed and straddles me. With her arms above my head, she leans in and kisses me. Grape lip-gloss and peppermint gum and the hint of her last cigarette. That's all I taste, not the rot of her teeth, which I was afraid of, to be honest. Her lips are soft, slightly sticky from the gloss, and her tongue is determined. She parts my lips with hers and wiggles her hips.

“Kelly—” I groan as she moves one hand to my waist. “I don't think we—”

“Come on,” she murmurs in my ear. “You're dying to.”

A honk sounds from out in front of the house. Footsteps on the stairs. Marshall's voice in the hall. A knock on the door. “Your chariot awaits, princess.”

Kelly kisses me again, hard. “Thanks, Marsh,” she says to the door.

I am lying on the bed, unable to move, while she throws the last few things into her pack. All of
a sudden she's in a much better mood. I, however, have been paralyzed. I can't see myself leaving this spot until she is able to resume her position and continue where we left off.

“Tell him to wait five minutes,” I plead when it's clear she's about to leave. “Come on, Kelly. Tell them you're not dressed.”

Backpack over one shoulder, she climbs on me again, but only long enough to squeeze me through my jeans and give me a French kiss for the road.

“I'll be back,” she whispers in my ear. “They're going to fix my teeth while I'm in there. That's reason enough to go.” She climbs off and straightens her skirt. “I was going to run away, but I figure I might as well get them fixed.”

And then she is gone.

Chandra picks me up at five thirty to drive me to the station one last time.

“Enjoying it so far?” she asks.

I don't want to get into it, so I nod.

But she persists. “What do you like the best?”

“Hmm.” I hold my hands out, comparing invisible weights. “Either the stench of piss and vomit or the constant reminder of my dead mother. Not sure. It's a toss-up.”

Chandra doesn't rise to the bait. She lets
out a prim little sigh and signals to turn onto Cordova.

“Do I have to go to school tomorrow?” I ask her as I get out of the car, my paper-bag lunch in one hand, backpack in the other, like she's my mother dropping me off at a sleepover.

“Of course not,” she says. “You'll have to get some sleep.”

“That's right.” My mood brightens. “Yes, I'll be
far
too tired to go to school tomorrow. Must recover from grueling nightshift.”

“Captain will expect you on Friday. He'll want your essay.”

“Essay?”

“Yes, essay.” Another stuck-up little sigh. She is not in a good mood today. “The one you were clearly told that Captain wanted to see at the end of your block of shifts. Five hundred words.”

“On what?”

“What do you think?” A bigger sigh now. “Ethan, I'd hoped this experience might help you deal with certain aspects of your life story.”

“Here we go.” I back away from the car.

“Was I wrong?” She stretches across the front seat to talk out the open door at me. “I meant
well. I thought you might benefit from a chance to revisit the area, but safely this time, grown up enough to put things into perspective instead of always having them as the larger-than-life demons they've been for you.”

“It was all better left forgotten.” I suddenly feel like I'm the adult and Chandra is the one in trouble. If I was a different kid I might think to write her up about this stupid stunt. This is the kind of thing social workers actually get in trouble for.
A poor decision, which forced me to relive deeply traumatizing aspects of my difficult childhood
...That sort of thing.

“We'll talk.” She says this more softly. “Tomorrow, after you've slept. Okay?”

I shrug.

“Just get through tonight, okay?” She flutters something at me. “Here.”

“What's that?”

“You might want it. You might not.”

It's a sticky note with an address written on it. Reading the numbers sends a chill down my spine. I feel the grilled cheese sandwich Marshall made me eat before I left threaten to resurface. I look up from the paper. Chandra has gotten out
of her car and is standing beside me, reaching to take it back. “It's a mistake. Sorry. Bad idea. I honestly thought maybe enough time had passed. I was wrong. I apologize.”

“You go to school for this?” I shove the paper in my pocket. “So I could go to university for four years and get a degree like you and be some kid's social worker forever and then turn around and dig a big knife into his back? That's in your job description?”

“I said I was sorry. Look, if you want to cancel today, I'd understand. We'll call it even.”

“Go home, Chandra.” I back away, daring her to follow. She doesn't, and for that I am proud of her. “Go home to your husband and daughter and have supper and give her a bath and put her to bed. Maybe you could tell her a bedtime story. Maybe the one about the little boy stuck in an apartment with his dead mother for a week. It has a happy ending, or so they claim.”

I turn and bang on the locked door of the station. John opens it. He frowns when he sees me. I'm guessing I look kind of grim.

“Are you all right?”

“Let's just get this over with, okay?”

“Sure.” He half smiles and opens the door wider. “That's what we all say on our last nightshift. Come on in.”

Now that it's my last shift, I'm finally getting used to the paramedic thing. Get the call, find the address, lights and sirens on the way there, or not, depending on the emergency. Find the patient, ask the questions, load them up. Go. And in there somewhere, there might be a splint to put on, medicine to deliver, even cpr to do, but every call uses the same pattern. I could actually see Kelly being good at this. As much as her life seems to be chaotic, she likes structure. And along with the structure, there is the freedom of the job. Just you and your partner running the show, unless you have some kid riding along with a great big chip on his shoulder, like me.

I'm leaning against the wall in a fusty hallway of yet another three-story walk-up rooming house, holding on to the chair cot, waiting to be called in to set it up. It's a contraption to carry people downstairs when there's no elevator or it's busted or the stretcher doesn't fit in the puny elevator there is.

Holly comes out. “Only wants John to touch him. Fine by me.”

She looks at the wall. “That thing's filthy. I wouldn't lean against it if I were you.”

Instead of engaging in her attempts at casual conversation—which I've been ignoring since the shift started—I pull the sticky note out of my pocket and stick it to her name badge. After a pause, she plucks it off and stares at it.

“I know the address,” she says. “We go there all the time.”

“Did you go there ten years ago?” I don't look at her when I ask it because I'm not sure I want to know. But I can't go on like this, the tension pulling so tight that I'm considering various means of killing myself just to make it ease.

“Sure,” she says. She lights a cigarette. I've never seen her do that before, light one during a call. Usually she waits and sneaks one behind the hospital with the other paramedic smokers. She takes a long drag off it and then nods. “I've been working down here for fourteen years.”

All of a sudden it becomes easier just to ask it than to hold it in anymore. “Is that how you knew my mom?”

“Nope.”

This startles me. I had already decided that must be how she knew my mom.

“Then how?”

“Narcotics Anonymous.” A tap of the ash.

“Oh.” I don't know what to say. I was so sure she had something to do with what happened. I try to rearrange my anger into something less loaded.

“That's where I met her first. You were just a baby. She was trying to get you back from the courts, and going to NA was one of the things they wanted her to do.”

“You were in NA?”

“Still am.” A big grin. “Seventeen years clean.”

John calls for us from inside the guy's room. Holly stubs out her cigarette.

“Did you know her when...I mean, just before?”

“I hadn't seen her in a while,” she says softly and takes a step inside the room. “Later, okay?”

At first I thought she was asleep, and then I thought she'd overdosed. I knew about that. She'd done it before. But this time was different. The man had finished, zipped up his pants and had a drink of water she offered him in the coffee mug with her real name on it. Christina. They murmured back and forth for a bit, and then their voices got louder and he told her she wasn't worth a penny let alone the price she was asking. And then he hit her, and she fell and he kept on hitting her. I was in the closet by the
front door where she tucked me when she had no other option but to bring them home. I heard him punching her. She made little “ooph, ooph” sounds. She didn't scream, not once. Sometimes I think it's because she didn't want me to be afraid. Maybe she thought he would leave, and I would run into the hall and scream for help. Like the other times we needed help. When he was finished with her, he opened the closet, almost like an afterthought, and found me there.

He took a stick of gum from his pocket and offered it to me. He held his fingers to his lips and said, “Shhhh.” And then he climbed out the window and left by the fire escape. I sat beside my mother in the bathroom, her head bloody, one hand reaching for the shower stall, like all she wanted was to rinse him off.

I go through the rest of that night in a haze. We are out until 5:00 AM, dealing with assaults and sick people, little old ladies with chest pain, an old man who passed out during an all-night game of mah jong in a storefront in Chinatown.

“Any pain?” Holly asks, pointing to various places. Head, heart, gut. “
Tong ma
?”

I want to answer in his place. Yes, pain. I have pain in all those places. Head, heart. Gut. I want to ask her more about my mother, but our night is so busy that we don't get a chance to eat, let alone sit for a minute and talk about my mother. I want to hear what she has to say now, and now that I am willing to hear it, we can't get a second of quiet.

We go back to the station at 5:00 AM, only to be called out again ten minutes later for a car accident at Main and Hastings.