I tried calling Jake twice from the pay phone by the Charlie Brown Christmas tree that’d been erected in the lobby during my stay. It wasn’t real, but someone had hung a pine-scented car deodorizer on it, in addition to the Christmas ornaments from 1973. I ran out of quarters, and my phone was out of juice, but a transit pass came free with discharge. So I bussed home, very conscious of the other bus patrons’ stares. I walked from the bus stop up to my door, glad I hadn’t had to make a transfer, and knocked on my own door before unlocking it.
“Jake?”
I looked around my short entryway. It smelled like smoke—not cigarette, but something more vinegary and foul.
“Minnie?”
Her plaintive meow came from underneath the couch. Which I realized I could see quite clearly, because for some reason, my dining room set was gone. I stared at the dimples the table legs had left in the thin carpeting.
“Jake? Jake!”
“Hang on!” There was stomping in the bedroom, behind the closed door. Jake’s head peeked out furtively, like he thought it might be someone else to whom I’d given a key. Seeing me, he smiled. “Edie!”
“Who else would it be?”
“You’re all right! I was worried!”
Worried didn’t equal calling, apparently—my phone hadn’t had a single message before its batteries ran out. Or picking up his phone when I’d called him earlier, that either.
My brother engulfed me in his arms. He smelled like flop sweat and his week-old bristles were rough against my cheek, but his hug was a throwback to an earlier Jake, one I hadn’t seen in quite a while.
When he pulled back I caught his chin with my left hand. “How are you?” I asked, looking deep into his eyes for pupillary response.
“I’m— Stop that, Edie.”
“I’m just wondering—”
“I’m not high. Promise. And it’s not for lack of trying.”
“Um, yay?” I dropped my bag and went over to my couch. “Where’d my table go?”
“I was performing an experiment.”
“Which was?”
Jake began walking back and forth in my narrow living room. “For the past couple of weeks I’ve been having problems getting high.”
“And this is bad why?”
“Edie—just listen, okay?”
Pacing, he looked like the older brother I remembered, the one who was nervous before a calculus test or wanted advice on asking a girl out to the prom.
“I’ve tried everything. And I mean everything. Lots of it. And I just can’t get high. Not like I used to. I feel it for a bit, sure. But not for long enough to count.”
“How’s this tie into my table? And chairs?” I pointed at the place where they’d been.
“I needed to sell them to afford my final test.”
“What?” I stood up. “You sold them?”
“I pawned them. With the camera. You can get them back still.” He stopped at the outer parabola of his pacing arc and snorted. “They weren’t worth much.”
“Jake—you stole from me!”
“Pawned. Pawned. It’s different.”
“No it’s not!”
Jake grabbed my arms. On his whip-thin frame, I could see the exit and insertion sites for all of his muscles, the keloids beginning on his antecubital spaces from too many needlesticks. “Edie, I did two grams of heroin. I’m still alive. That much heroin would have killed a horse.”
And that’s why I worked at Y4. I wasn’t sure how the Shadows kept him clean, but when Jake treated his liver like a chemistry lab, I had no choice. If he’d really done as much heroin as he said he had—I shook myself free. “Or you bought shit drugs from a shit supplier and you’ve done too much long-term brain damage to know the difference.”
“Oh, I’d know. I’d know,” Jake said, mostly to himself.
“Jake, you stole from me.” I crossed my arms.
“But I’m like Superman!”
“Superman doesn’t shoot smack, Jake.”
“Edie, you just don’t get it—”
I sliced through the air with my newly scarred hand to cut off his protests. “What I get is that you stole from me.”
“Pawned. You can get them back next paycheck. Nurses make a ton.”
“Jake—” I pointed at my door with my left arm. My hand was shaking, either from disuse or anger.
“I’m going, I’m going. Let me get my things.” He turned and ran down the hallway.
“At least you still have things!” I shouted at him.
“I left you the couch!” he shouted back.
“Only because you couldn’t carry it yourself!”
He returned with a small backpack and my keys on a chain. “Your cat’s almost out of food. Your neighbor’s kid is creepy. And you have shitty taste in music.”
I snatched my keys from him. “Shut up.”
“No one listens to Merle Haggard anymore.”
“Get out, Jake.”
He mimed a salute in midair. “See you around, Sissy.”
I watched him walk out my door, and then followed to watch him leave from my doorway, his backpack on his back.
“Jake—Christmas?” I called after him.
“Yeah.” He waved a hand without turning around.
It was cold out this morning, tonight’d be freezing for sure. I hoped he made it to the shelter in time. I watched him till he turned at the end of my apartment complex’s parking lot, my healing hand throbbing in the cold.
First order of business was me and a long shower. I hadn’t let anyone give me a bed bath during my internment—it was humiliating enough to be in Y4 for my recuperation, bed baths from coworkers would have made it intolerable. Where were easily intimidated nursing school students when you needed them?
After that I changed the sheets on my bed and crawled into it. A shower, clean sheets, and a bed without side rails? This was high cotton. I fell asleep without a second thought.
When I woke it was dark. Just before nine P.M. with winter outside making it seem later, between the early sunsets and the omnipresent clouds. I could still remember the nearly full moon from the emergency drop-off zone—I might not see another until April or May. I lay back in my dark room, pulled the sheets high, and tried not to think about anything.
It was hard. For the first time in a long while, I felt rested. I’d kept night shift hours in the hospital, the company of my own coworkers far preferable to those on other shifts. It’d been easier to distract myself with people to talk to and TV to watch, under the comforting dullness that Percocet pulled up every four hours. Here at home, without drugs or distractions, it was hard to forget that I’d done at least three stupid and potentially horrible things: I’d accidentally killed a patient, I’d intentionally killed a vampire, and I might have set a monster loose on the world. Minnie emerged from wherever she’d been hiding, to stroke her head along my outstretched hand.
“I’m glad he listened to me about that at least, Minnie.” I knuckled the space between her ears. There was no way I was going to get any more sleep, not tonight.
I petted Minnie till she couldn’t stand it any longer and she squirmed out of reach. Then I sat up in bed and stared into my open closet, my shoes and clothing illuminated by the parking lot’s lamplight filtering in through my blinds. “I’m alive, I’m awake, and I’m not on call,” I announced to myself. “I should go out.”