She wasn't stupid. She'd keep the house clean and dress decent and pick up her aid checks. She didn't want to be a Skoag gropie in the streets. She'd sneak out by night, find Skoags standing outside the clubs listening to the music, and touch one. I knew it as plainly as if I'd seen it. That was what mattered to her, a press of Skoag flesh. She didn't care that if the aid worker caught her with slimy hands, they'd take Lisa and me to some Children's Home. I remembered what it was like. I could imagine Lisa there, her silent crying going ignored, growing up not able to tell anyone when someone was mean to her. They'd put her with the other ones they called «Special» in a big room with a lot of baby toys and ignore her. I'd never see her and she'd forget about me. I'd lose the only thing Lavender had left me. Because of Mom.
I watched Mom the next day, hoping I was wrong. But the signs were there, in the rhythmic way she swept the floor, her chin nodding to the unheard beat. She was groping Skoag slime. It was such a slutty thing to do. I had thought that her touching Lavender had been because they loved each other. Now she seemed like a whore to me, someone who'd touch any Skoag just to make music in her head. I hated her.
The next day I went out to the secondhand store. I bought Lisa a stroller, a playpen, and a piece of carpet to go in the bottom of it. And one of those suits with the feet and a hood. It took me two trips to get everything home.
When my Mom saw all the stuff, she tried to ask me where it had come from. But I just ignored her and her mashed potato voice. She grabbed hold of my arm and shook me. "Biw-wweee! Wherr aw thisss-tuff frum? Huh?" That's what she sounded like. I grabbed her hand off my arm and turned it over and pried her fingers open. The Skoag scars were shiny, and wet in the cracks. She jerked away from me.
"I don't have to tell you anything," I said as she held her hands to her chest. I didn't yell it. I just said it real clearly, making sure she could see my mouth move. I picked Lisa up and took her to the couch. I started playing pat-a-cake with her, ignoring Mom. After a while, Mom started going, "Huh. Huh-uh-uh! Huh!" She sat down and put her scarred hands over her scarred face and rocked. After a while I realized she was crying. I didn't go to her. I remembered DON'T DO DRUGS at school, and I knew it was true, that junkies don't have friends, don't love, don't care about anything but their next fix. No one can afford to love a junkie. So I did what the books said. I ignored her. And that was the day I was ten years old.
I took control of things. I found the sign language booklets that the aid lady had left, and I started making Lisa sign. Simple stuff at first. Hold up your arms to be picked up. Finger in the mouth for bottle. Nod your head for stereo turned on. It was harder for me than for Lisa. Because I knew what she wanted, but I couldn't give it to her until she signed, no matter how she cried. I'd make the sign and then I'd take her hands and make the sign. But after a while, I had to make her sign herself. She cried a lot. But finally, she started doing the simple signs. By the time she was two, we were on the ones in the pamphlet.
Things went okay for a while. Mom was careful about her habit. None of the aid ladies caught on to her. She was always home when they visited, and the place was tidy. Once, I came back from the store and found her giving Lisa a bath in the sink. But it was only because the aid lady was there. It was just a trick to have her hands busy, and if the aid lady saw the wetness in the cracks of her palms, she'd think it was bath water. Lisa was splashing water all over and smiling like it was normal for Mom to take care of her. I set the groceries on the table and said, "Hi Mom," like we were a happy little family. Mom kept on sponging Lisa, and finally the aid lady said she had to go, but she was glad that things were going better for us.
As soon as she left, I got a towel and took my Lisa and dried her carefully. Lisa kept signing for «cookie» while I was drying her and dressing her while she was kicking and wriggling. Mom gave her one and it wasn't until I got her shoes tied and set her on the floor that I realized what that meant. It made me madder than her using Lisa's bath to keep the aid lady from checking her hands. I found the sign booklets on her nightstand. I carried them out and slapped them down on the kitchen table. Mom was watching me.
"These are mine," I told her, making my lip movements plain. "Leave them alone."
"Bwee," she said pleadingly, and I could see how big and purple her tongue was getting inside her mouth. It made me feel sick and sad and sorry, for Lisa and myself, mostly. That big purple tongue was a withdrawal symptom for a Skoag gropie, it meant she'd been down for more than forty-eight hours. I thought about her washing Lisa, keeping her back to the aid lady. Hiding. She'd still been hiding from the aid lady, it was just a different way from the one I'd figured. She was still using us.
She wasn't getting her slime. I didn't know why, but I knew it was dangerous for us. She wouldn't be able to last. Before long, everyone would know. It hit me. I'd have to take care of it. One more thing for me to handle to keep Lisa safe. It made me angry and at the same time, hot and satisfied because I'd been right about her, she was just going to drag us in deeper and make it all harder. I'd been right to stop caring about her, because she was just going to hurt us if we let her be important to us.
Everything was getting harder. They'd tracked me down for school, and now I had to get there an hour earlier for remedial math. Which meant leaving Lisa with Mom for even longer. And Lisa was walking, so if you left the door open she'd head up the ramp and out onto the sidewalk. I'd sit in school and wonder if Mom had gone out to finger some Skoags and left the door open and Lisa had toddled out and been hit by a car. Or worse, just wandered off, and I'd go home and call her but she wouldn't be able to answer… My imagining made school hours torture.
I'd race home each day, and each day Lisa would be okay. Every few nights Mom would go out and I didn't know what to hope for. That she'd score some slime and come home hummy, but easy to spot as a gropie? That she wouldn't get any, but then she'd be trying to sign to Lisa and showing off her withdrawal? Maybe that she wouldn't hear a delivery van coming down the alleys?
It all came together one night when I went to get another envelope from the fat Skoag. The street lamp was glinting off his skin, and flashing off his voice membrane each time it swelled like a khaki neon light.
He was holding out the envelope in a plastic-mittened flipper, but I said, "I need a favor."
"No," he tooted. "No favors." He flapped the envelope at me frantically. He looked toward the alley mouth, but there was nothing there. I took a breath.
I said calmly, like I was sure of it, "You promised Lavender you'd look out for me and the Mom."
"Yes. I bring you the money, every time."
"Yeah. Well, that's good, but not enough. I need you to come to my house, twice a week, late at night."
"No." He said it fast, scared. Then, "Why?"
"Yes. You know why."
He rocked on his flippers like a zoo elephant. "I can't," he tootled mournfully. "Please. I can't. Take the money and go. Dangerous for me."
"Dangerous for me if you don't. And you promised Lavender."
"I… Please. Please. Once a week. Wednesday night, very late. Please."
He shoved the envelope into my hand. I watched him rock. If I demanded it, he'd come twice a week, but he'd hate me. Or he'd come once a week, and think I'd let him off easy. "Okay," I said, settling for the second one. I might need something else someday, and once a week would hold Mom together.
He came late Wednesday. It startled me awake, his flippering down the ramp and then slapping the door. Mom had stayed in, looking at her hands and sighing, and gone to bed around midnight. It was two A.M. when the fat Skoag showed. I'd gone to sleep, thinking he wasn't going to come. Odd. Just the sounds of him coming down the ramp, and me opening the door like I used to for Lavender made my heart pound. Like maybe I'd open the door and somehow it would be Lavender standing there, gently waving his flippers and waiting for me.
But it was only the fat Skoag. He was pressed into the darkest corner of the stairwell, staring up at the sidewalk. As soon as I opened the door, he scuttled in and pushed it shut.
"Quickly," he said, pulling off a plastic mitten. "Quickly, please, and then I will go."
"This way," I said, and led him into my mother's bedroom.
She wasn't asleep. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The bed, wedged in a corner of the small room, was a tousled wreck. Some movement of air as we came into the room turned her eyes to us. She stared at us, between dreaming and awake, and suddenly she sat up and screamed "Lavender!"
The word came out crisp and hard and real, like she used to talk. Then she saw it wasn't him and she broke. She made this horrible laughing-crying sound. The fat Skoag freaked when she screamed and waddled frantically for the door, but I was closer, and I slammed it and put my back to it. "No," I said, gripping the knob. "You don't leave until she's touched you."
His eye spots went flat and dead. He turned and slowly walked toward the bed. Her hysterics trailed away in broken sobs. I watched her face, her shock fading and being replaced by horror as the fat Skoag came closer. "No," she said, clearly, and then, "Nooh. Nooh." She backed up on the bed, pressing into the corner. "Noooh. Doanwanis. Goway. Bwee. Pease. Trynstob. No." But when the Skoag held his flipper out, she suddenly lunged across the bed and gripped it like a handful of free lottery tickets. She held on and her body jerked in little spasms, like the kid at school who had fits. Her eyes went back and she threw her head way back on her neck and her tongue came out. I felt sick and dirty, like I was watching her have sex with someone, or watching a doctor work on guts. But I couldn't look away. The Skoag stood there until her hands slid away. They were thick with his slime, and iridescent in the darkness. The stuff was thick, like the goop she used to rub on my chest when I was little and had a bad cold. She crumpled over onto her side. I pulled the blankets back up over her. As I let the Skoag out, I wondered why I had bothered to do that.
"Remember," I said, as he waddled up the ramp. "Next Wednesday. It's important. And you promised Lavender."
I was thinking that Wednesday was about right, because the aid lady always came on Thursdays or Fridays, and Mom would still look okay when she got here. The fat Skoag paused on the ramp.
"For Lavender," he said, like brass trumpets coming from a far hill. "Only for him would I do this thing. Only for him."
I knew then that the fat Skoag was close to hating me tonight, and that it didn't have to have been that way. If I hadn't demanded this, he might have become my friend. I watched the fat Skoag leave and felt pimpish and sly and small for trading on his loyalty to Lavender. But I had to, to keep Lisa safe. Sometimes the only thing I was sure of was that Lavender had entrusted Lisa to me. I went back to bed, curling up around Lisa. I fell asleep hoping that the things I did to protect her wouldn't stain her.
So that's how it went. The fat Skoag came once a week. Mom stayed slimed and happy. The aid lady never suspected a thing. I went to school enough to keep everyone happy, and took care of Lisa. Lisa grew. She turned into a little kid. On Saturdays we'd bus over to Gasworks Park. I'd push her on the swings or we'd watch the fancy kites people fly there. I kept her away from other kids, so she wouldn't be teased about being mute. When some Mommy would say hello to her, or say, "My, such.pretty hair," I'd step in and say, "She's real shy. And my Mom says don't talk to strangers." Then I'd take her away and buy her ice cream. No one expects kids to talk while they're eating.
She was three when the message came. The radio was always on for Lisa. Classical music made her close her eyes and sway, or suddenly shiver. Jazz made her hyperactive. If I wanted her to go to sleep, it was good old rock and roll. I should have heard about it. But I never listened to the news, or wasted food money on a newspaper. So I scowled at the check-out guy when he shoved a Seattle Times into my brown bag.
"I ain't paying for that," I told him.
"On the house, kid," he told me. "I figure you got a right to know, it being your Skoag and all."
He'd never talked about Lavender before that. He'd treated me decent while Lavender was alive, and he'd never given me a bad time about shopping there after Lavender died. Not like the laundromat where they threw me and our laundry out because they didn't want "Skoag slime clogging the drains." Anyway, he turned right away to the next customer so I knew he didn't want me to say anything. I headed home.
After I got dinner cooking, I unfolded the paper, wondering what I was supposed to look at. The headlines jumped at me. "SKOAG PLANET CONTACT CONFIRMED." I read slowly, trying to understand it. The story said the rumors were confirmed, without saying what they were. The big deal was the Skoags officially sending a message to Earth, planet to planet. The newspaper went on about the sending technology being based on stuff we knew but hadn't thought about using together, and stuff like that. I had to sort through the whole paper to find the last few lines. They scared the hell out of me. Sources wouldn't say what the message had been, but didn't deny it had to do with the ritual murder of a "highly-placed Skoag exile in Seattle."
I didn't know the microwave had buzzed until Mom set food in front of me. I looked up, arid Lisa had already finished eating. I hated it when Morn did stuff like that. Like she was pretending she was a good little mommy, taking care of her kids instead of a Skoag gropie who didn't give a damn. In the drug classes at school, they called that "ingratiating behavior" and said junkies and alkies used it to fool their families into thinking they were changing, especially if the families were close to sending them to a cure station. It didn't fool me. I crumpled up the paper and gave it to Lisa to play with, and ate dinner.
Two nights later, the man came. Maybe he thought no one would notice a grey government sedan pulled up in front of a slummy house at midnight. I heard someone nearly fall down the ramp, and when he knocked, I opened the door on its chain.
"Yeah," I said, but my stomach was shaking. Skoag slime dependency wasn't supposed to show up in pee tests. That's what all the kids said, and I'd always believed it was true, but what if they'd changed the test and knew from Mom's pee that she was a gropie? But I tried not to let any of that show on my face as I stared out the crack at the government man.
"I have to come in," he said, whispery. "I have to talk to your mother." "Too bad," I said, being tough. "She's deaf. You can write it down, or you can tell it to me, but you can't talk to her."
"I can sign," he said nervously, echoing with his fingers.
"She can't," I said, and started to close the door.
"Please," he said, not quite shoving his foot in the crack, but leaning on the door to keep it open. "It's about the dead Skoag. Lavender. And it's important, kid."