Random Acts of Trust (6 page)

The anger had, the resentment, too. It was what had happened when I went home and saw Dad that made me never contact with her again. It had absolutely nothing to do with her—that was the kicker. It was my own shame. All me. Knowing her, she assumed that it was all about her, and bridging that was like asking me to go to the moon on a pogo stick.

Joe rounded the corner, naked, ass muscles rippling as I caught him out of the corner of my eye before I could quickly turn away and close my lids, wincing. “Jesus, Ross, do you have to parade that shit around?”

“Sorry.” I could tell from his tone of voice that he wasn’t. “We just need some food.”

I could hear the refrigerator door open. He grabbed something, slammed it shut, and padded away. And then, the unmistakable sound of a can of whipped cream being discharged. “I’ll get a yeast infection if you put it
there!
” I heard Darla say.

My stomach tightened and I cringed.

“How about there?” I heard one of the guys say.
Sshfft!

“
Oh
, that’s nice,” she moaned.

I walked to the window and stared out over the rooftops. Joe and Trevor had a fourth floor apartment in one of those brick blocks that littered Allston, where all the students were crammed in. God, I needed my own place. I reached in my back pocket for that card Liam had given me last night, pulled it out. Entertainment, huh?

I found my smartphone—even when you’re stone cold broke, you’ve got $35 a month for a basic plan—and dialed the number. I got a machine, some woman, so I left a message just saying that Liam had given me her number, and that I was interested in applying for the job. Entertainment... probably some DJ thing, or helping set up and break down for a crew, whatever. I didn’t care. I needed money.

I wasn’t exactly a trust fund kid. Dad had cut me off in more ways than just financial the day I lost that debate to Amy. I’d moved out and pinged between Trevor and Joe’s houses. Both had been nice enough—or, at least, their parents had been nice enough—to let me live out my senior year. My school district never knew. My dad apparently covered up the fact that I didn’t live at home. Couldn’t have the flock thinking that there was something wrong with their shepherd, right?

“You are a bull!” Darla shouted.

I looked at the counter, reached in my front pocket; three bucks and a debit card for an account with $17 left in it. We wouldn’t get paid for last night’s gig for at least a month. Fuck! I grabbed some earbuds, shoved the cord into my phone and found whatever the first song was on my playlist. The combination of Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Nickelback could kill anything, could override whatever tortured fun was taking place in the other room. All I could do this morning was scrub that pan, make my eggs, and wait.

Amy

The thing about living in the city is that everything is
right there
. You can walk out of your front door and hop on the T to some other part of the city or across the river to Cambridge. You can walk a block and hit three different restaurants of three different ethnicities. Fifteen different buskers playing eleven different instruments can give you music free—of course, they’d love it if you throw them some sort of recompense for their effort and I tried, until I finally figured out that I wasn’t able to help everybody.

That was a major revelation for me—not the busker part. The idea that you can’t help everybody.

This morning I was avoiding my mom’s early morning call—ever since I moved out she made it a point to call at least once a day and text a couple times. Nothing had changed. Everything was about my nineteen year old brother. Evan this and Evan that and Evan.
Evan. Evan. Evan
.

Evan was the golden boy—and had been for years—except, how many golden boys are on their second year of detox? This was our family secret. You see, Mom was the high school guidance counselor and having a son with an addiction problem was something that she just didn’t want to admit. Of course, having him show up at school drunk his senior year made it really hard to remain Cleopatra—the Queen of Denial.

I’d known since he was eleven or twelve when he’d find older eighth and ninth graders to supply him with beer from their older brothers and sisters. He’d even tried me but there was no way—I was the good little girl. I didn’t
do
that. And besides, who would I go to? I didn’t even know who the drug dealers were at school or who could hook you up with a six pack of beer.

That was a world I had no interest in. My nose was in a book, on the Internet doing research, and involved in academic pursuits. That’s where I excelled—that’s where I was Mrs. Smithson’s daughter. The good little girl. Maybe I ruined it for Evan—I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly going to let myself be wracked with guilt over that considering the fact that he was first caught drunk when he was twelve and ever since then, for the past six years, two out of three sentences that came out of my mom’s mouth involved the word
Evan.

It had become a form of profanity to me.

The day that I graduated from high school, Evan got shitfaced and threw up all over my cake that was set up for my graduation party. “Thank God,” my mom said, “he hadn’t done it in public.” And we were able to clean up the mess and quickly buy a new one. But you don’t forget the sight, or smell, of
that.

When I graduated college in May, Mom was prepared—she basically tomato staked him and made sure he couldn’t cause a scene. I appreciated that, but again, that meant that Evan got Mom. Evan always got Mom. Evan could suck the energy out of a nuclear reactor.

Right now, though, he was in detox—due to get out any day. And that was when Mom’s delusion would start all over again.

“Oh, this time Evan’s gonna make it,” she would say. “This time I
know
he’s gonna kick it, honey. Oh, sorry, I’m not sure we can afford to pay for—(
whatever new thing I’d requested)—
because we have to handle Evan’s bills.”

Private drug rehab
is what she meant.

I may sound bitter and I’ll own that—I
am
bitter—but when you’ve been going through this for six years and you’ve watched people you love being manipulated and lied to and, worse, watch them
want
to be manipulated and lied to because they can’t accept the truth...what are you supposed to do, other than become bitter? How can anyone with a modicum of reason and logic watch it all play out, month in and month out, year in and year out, and not get so twisted and angry inside that all you want to do one morning is avoid your own phone and go out for a cup of coffee?

Here I was.

Except, the other problem with living in the city is that everything is so damn expensive. So, as much as I wanted to get that double soy latte at my favorite coffee shop, I had to walk past it carrying a bullet thermos, one given to me last Christmas with a perplexed look on my mother’s face telling me she’d gotten it for me and it had been on my list. This made me happy—a full thermos of coffee that I’d made at home, a beautiful, sun-filled day in Boston, and an entire series of hours of freedom.

In some ways I lived this dual life right now, getting ready for grad school to start. I had scored an awesome apartment on the Fenway for dirt cheap. It might be the size of a postage stamp, but it worked and I didn’t have to have a roommate. The building had this strange series of little apartments at the corner of two wings of the building. If you can imagine, there was this column rising up eight floors that’s basically a triangle, and somehow legally the landlord managed to carve out a 180-something square foot apartment for me. For me, and seven other people who lived in the other apartments similar to mine in the building.

My bathroom was such that you couldn’t sit on the toilet without your knees going into the shower. The kitchen was a mini fridge, a microwave, a sink, and a two burner stove. My mattress, well...I ended up having to get a futon because you couldn’t open the front door all the way and have the mattress on the floor. I have to roll it up in order to get in and out of my apartment. But you know what? It’s mine, it’s cheap, and did I mention it’s
mine
? No roommates. I can walk anywhere I want in Boston. I don’t need a car; I don’t even need a bike. It’s perfect.

Mine.

Walking through the Longwood Medical Center, past hospitals and Starbucks, and Wheelock College, I looked at the old buildings juxtaposed with the shiny Cancer Center. I watch people walk past me, some of them in medical attire, some of them in scrubs, plenty of them homeless, and of course, the ubiquitous college students.

I’m one of them, right? I look at the crowd and realize that nobody’s the same. I can compartmentalize and categorize in my head: medical, medical, college, college, patient, college, college, medical. And that’s the easy way to go through life, right?

What does someone think when they look at me? I’m curvy. I walk with purpose. I have long, brown hair that sways behind me, slapping up against my back. I have wide, friendly eyes, but I hide them behind sunglasses most of the time, because men tend to make eye contact with me and then leer. I carry a book, a tablet—
something
all the time so that I can read and immerse myself in a world that has nothing to do with anyone else.

In fact, for the longest time I judged myself by what I didn’t have. I didn’t have popularity. I didn’t have a size zero waist. I didn’t have the latest clothes. I didn’t have parents who sent me to Vail for winter break, and to St. Martin’s for spring break.
I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t
.

Part of this whole integration thing is figuring out that if you spend your life judging yourself by what you
don’t
have, then pretty quickly you start to feel empty. It’s so much better to think of yourself in terms of what you do have. Today, I have some good books on my tablet, I have money in my pocket, I have a good coffee shop nearby, I have time, free time to explore, to read, to revel, and to ruminate.

That feels rich to me.

Boston Common was my target today. I loved to watch the swan boats. I hadn’t ridden them in years; tickets were only a couple dollars, but it was more fun to watch other people enjoy them for the first time. I found a park bench right across from the loading area and I just watched people, mostly families with small kids in strollers coming in, but occasionally a group of tourists speaking animatedly in another language. They would get on the boats, which looked like something out of the 1950’s—old and quiet and staid in a way that was calming. It was soothing, in fact, to imagine being out there in this machine that was built at a time when a weekend meant spending it floating on a lake.

The coffee was great. The weather was perfect and I felt my shoulders relax, my mind let go of the dreaded anticipation of that phone call from my mother and, just as I was able to stop looping this thought about Sam, about Mom, about Evan, and about my own inability to stop obsessing about things, I heard two distinct, familiar voices behind me.

Sam

Walking through Boston Common was awesome, especially on mornings after we’d had a gig. It made the music life feel more real. Raw. Like I had this secret life that the other people walking past me through the gardens, down the asphalt paths that bisected the grass at angles, didn’t have.

I could be up until four in the morning, strung out and blissed out, weak-armed and high on the beats themselves, and then wake up, at eleven or noon, with a pounding headache, in need of caffeine. A quick cup and then a walk, the blinding sun adding to my energy, always did it for me. Joe, for some reason, wanted to come with me this morning.

The guy certainly had changed since our geeky high school years. He’d been this sort of rude, rough edged debate geek who had morphed in college into something uptight but alright. Joe was that guy in a group who would moralize and tell everybody why they shouldn’t do something, and then, behind your back, do something even worse. The guy was slippery—he never got caught. But damn if he didn’t worry so much about his mom and dad, and what they thought.

I had the luxury of not giving a shit about my parents anymore. Dad had made sure that had happened. In fact, I didn’t really have any contact with them. Mom would try—she still had my phone number. I’d give her five or ten minutes but as long as she was still with Dad she was part of the enmeshed world. If you are married to an alcoholic, and you have kids with that alcoholic, and you let that alcoholic warp the kids, then you’re complicit too.

She wouldn’t see it. She
couldn’t
. And I had spent four years on campus going to the Al-Anon meetings, slowly unraveling the shit Dad had put us all through and finally figuring out why I was so angry at Mom. It’s easy—it’s always easy to be angry at the most rational person, right? They’re the one who is supposed to save you from the mess. Except, Mom expected everyone to rally around the least reasonable guy in the household and to tap dance around the fact that she was enabling him. So, this whole thing Joe had about sucking up to his parents—I didn’t get it. Then again, I didn’t have to get it.