​​​​Chapter Eight

Two years is not enough time to forget. There’s never enough time for that. But Natalie tucks her past into her purse each morning before scanning her badge and walking to her desk. She locks it up in the attached filing cabinet where she keeps her pens and sticky notes. She clocks in and puts on her headset and pretends she likes her manager, Herman, who smells slightly of tuna fish even first thing in the morning, and his boss, Tara McMahon who stands in her doorway and scans the collectors each time she’s itching to fire one. Natalie hasn’t been called in except for that one time. It’s a tiny prayer to no one when she can see Tara stalking her office through the window that faces the collection floor. It’s a sigh of relief when she closes the blinds.

Two years is also not enough time to forgive herself. She talks to so many people on the phone, and sometimes, she wonders what would happen if she stopped discussing their past due student loans and started talking about her dead husband instead. “He was a murderer and killed himself, but he gave our daughter a really cute stuffed dog, so it’s not all bad.” She laughs under her breath.

“Are you laughing?”

“No, sorry, just coughed for a second. Forgot to hit the cough button. I apologize. So how would you like to settle this amount today? We take credit cards and you can also send in a certified check by mail.” She catches Herman out of the corner of her eye who nods at her and moves on down the aisle.

Two years is also more than enough time to get demoted. In fact, Natalie somehow managed to beat that record and was demoted within the first six months of moving to White Smoke. Nobody told her how hard it would be to meet collection goals. She could never get the right number of people to pay up. She could never get the big cash settlements. She couldn’t even groom her team to be a cohesive working unit, and instead, was training a tiny island of misfit toys who seemed to hate each other. And so there was that one day when Tara called her in and chewed her up. Spit her out. And she landed back as a TL, this time for a manager named Herman Salinas who seemed like the type to keep a lock on his basement door.

Lunchtime rolls around, and she’s already exhausted by the manager call she had to take while Herman embarked on his daily fifteen-minute bathroom break.

“Heartbreak Herman killed his time this morning. Only thirteen minutes in the john. New record,” Mary says. In spite of herself, Natalie has made a friend, Mary Zinberg. Mary is all eye shadow and teased hair. Big words, big personality. But she also cuts her skin, the inside of her upper arm. Her husband doesn’t trust her and she hates being a mother to Rhonda, a former preemie who decided it just wasn’t her time to die. Rhonda’s spirit is all light, jammed-packed inside a six-year-old’s body. I can’t say the same for her mother. But Natalie likes her if only because Mary seems relatively normal at work and has a daughter the same age. Two years is plenty of time to find a good friend. Unfortunately, for Natalie, she’s dropped the ball.

“Hang out tonight?” Natalie nods. She wants to shake her head “no,” but she doesn’t like being alone. There’s a young man she refers to as a “creeper stoner” who lives with his grandfather across the hall and a Laotian family on her left that’s always screaming at each other. Her plan was to save up enough in two years to put a down payment on something or at least find a house to rent. But her demotion has set her back. A lot of things have set her back.

She goes back to work and hears sob story after sob story, and it all mixes up with her own emotions. She takes a smoke break–a bad habit she’s picked up from Mary–and stands alone in the rain because Mary’s break is after hers. There are a few employees huddled under the umbrellaed benches near the dumpster but she stays put inhaling and trying to remember what Mack’s face used to look like.

Five rolls around. There are no early shifts at Johnson Credit Collections, just the five and the six, so she’s stuck piling out with a herd of sheep, as she likes to think of them. She nods goodbyes and keeps her face flat. She gives Mary a half hug and tells her she’ll see her later on. In the Pinto, she finally opens her purse where she stores her past and takes out one of her tiny bottles of vodka.

In two years, a lot of things can change.

#

THEY ALL WANT HER TO come back home to Texarkana even though she convinces them she’s management, poised for a promotion. Her family doesn’t believe her. Fine, she thinks and takes a swig.

She’s on her way to Little Chicks to pick up Wren. She quickly downs the bottle and throws it into the glove compartment. At a red light, she one-eyes traffic as she reaches deeper in the compartment for gum and a bottle of cheap body spray. She chews and pollutes the air with fake flowers. The booze starts to kick in.

She blames Mack, of course. Why wouldn’t she? She was his sounding board, the person who dug him out of the deep. But he wouldn’t stop diving in, head first. She glances up at the rearview mirror, checks her mascara. One eye’s smudged, and she uses a shaky finger to fix it. She looks again and wishes mirrors didn’t exist.

She’s a little late again and the lady at the front desk gives her a terse smile because of it. She signs in and goes to look for Wren. She finds her seated near the backpacks while two other stragglers rake their fingers through a bin of plastic bricks.

“Hey, there.” Wren looks up, and her eyes are damp full moons. She begins to cry and Natalie hugs her, hoping she smells like anything but vodka. “What happened, baby?” Ms. Melanie edges in and introduces her entrance with sneakers against linoleum. Ms. Melanie is small, young, and blonde and far less nice than she looks.

“Kids being kids. It started on the van ride from school. One of the kids asked about her daddy. They started making fun of her. You know how these things go.”

“No, I don’t,” Natalie says, the vodka in her stomach making her brave. “Which kid?”

“Not sure. The driver wasn’t aware of what was going on.” How convenient, Natalie thinks. She starts to say so, but the fluorescent lights above starburst. She closes her eyes until the fireworks display calms down.

“Are you okay?” Ms. Melanie asks. Natalie shakes her head “yes,” stricken mute with fear. Get it together, Natalie.

“I’ll talk to Wren,” is all she can manage to say. Because in spite of her daughter’s pain, Little Chicks is the cheapest after school program in town. And also in spite of Wren’s pain, the world is cruel, and Natalie knows there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it.

#

THEY EAT. STORE BOUGHT macaroni and cheese and broccoli fresh from the microwave. They’ve already eaten the meat she’s bought with her food stamps. She watches Wren. Waits for her to say anything. But she eats her slow bites and doesn’t let on that she doesn’t have a father when all the other kids do.

After dinner is Wren’s bath. Natalie sits on the toilet, head in her hands, trying to figure out how to say something, anything about what happened, but she spirals down the dark tunnel in her head. It’s the most pronounced it’s ever been, and the demon on her shoulder bares his teeth at me. I could pluck him with two fingers or simply flick him against the ceiling, but I don’t. I let her have this moment.

“Can we talk about what happened?” Natalie asks in her best mom voice. She wipes at her face with a shaky hand and looks at Wren in the tub. She hasn’t changed out of her pantsuit she picked up free of charge from Women Who Work in exchange for sitting through a few seminars and one-on-ones. Her contact, Francesca, still calls her from time to time but Natalie has a knack for pretending the phone doesn’t exist. She sniffs at the second hand suit and feels like she’s brining in her own sweat.

“What happened?” Wren asks. But Natalie notes the edge.

“What your friend said. About Daddy.”

“She’s not my friend. She’s a stupid face.”

“We don’t say that.”

“Then tell her not to be mean.” Wren tucks her chin against her chest and stops playing in the bubbles. Natalie crawls her fingers through her daughter’s wet hair like a trembling spider.

#

SHE TUCKS WREN IN WITH Roy and plants a kiss on her forehead. She should have said more, maybe told her daughter how sorry she was and how unfair everything turned out to be. But all she can think about is the cold vodka in the freezer and the taste of forgetting.

When the doorbell rings, she finds Mary in her fluffy pink pajamas and bunny slippers. Only Mary would wear her pajamas outside, in the rain.

“Cats and dogs,” Mary says although it’s only a light drizzle. Natalie has already started the night off with a double shot which no longer has the same kick it used to. But she’s in a good mood because she has the whole night and the whole bottle. Just enough to forget how rough everything feels to the touch.

Mary cracks open her own pint of whiskey and finds a glass in one of the cabinets. Mary’s got it nice. Her husband’s still alive and she has her own curly headed six-year-old at home. The envy is so sharp beneath Natalie’s skin that she doesn’t even stop to think why Mary isn’t home with them.

“To us ladies. May we drink away the worry, slay away the men, and take any– and everything we want!” Mary drinks her glass dry, and Natalie tips back another double. I see the dark shadow at her shoulder, small but still there. It bares its teeth as I shine my light.

#

MARY IS TRANSFERRED to Natalie’s team. Over the past few weeks, Natalie has clocked in early and has been attentive to Herman’s every ask. She even declogged one of the toilets when he pawned the job off on her.

“I don’t get why this place doesn’t have a janitor.”

“Why pay a janitor when you can have an hourly slave do the job?” Mary inhales her Marlboro and puffs out a cloud with pursed lips. Natalie tries the same move, but she feels like she looks like a puffer fish.

“What’s happening on the stud front? And don’t say ‘I’m not ready.’ I’m not saying you have to settle down with someone. Just have a little fun. You’re twenty-eight for goodness sakes, Nat! You deserve to live a little.” Natalie almost chokes on another smoke cloud. She could very easily argue she’s lived a lifetime.

“I don’t know. The only places I go are here, Little Chicks, and the apartment.” She gazes out at the picnic tables crawling with JCC employees. “Slim pickings in my opinion.”

“Yeah, well, if I had your freedom, I’d be picking my way across the country, slim or not.”

“Mary, you barely make any sense.”

Mary smiles. “Girl, I haven’t made sense since the seventies.”

#

ONE NIGHT, MARY COMES over and takes out a little vial. “This. This will loosen you up.”

“I didn’t think I needed loosening.” They sit in Natalie’s tiny living room, feet curled up on the sofa. It’s still the same couch she used to sit on with Mack. She watches Mary dump a little straight on the coffee table with the broken leg. As she snorts a line, all Natalie can see is Nancy Reagan’s disappointed face.

“It’s the nineties,” Natalie says. “We should know better.”

“We should probably do a lot of things,” Mary says.

Mary nods at the powder she’s poured for Natalie. How nice it would be, she thinks, to inhale and let go. To forget the past ever existed and to not have to pay for her sins each excruciating minute.

She starts to dive forward when her eyes catch two naked feet pointing at her from the hallway.

“Mommy, I’m scared,” Wren says, but it’s Natalie’s heart that takes the beating.

#

“DOES GREG KNOW?” NATALIE asks. They’re at the mall sitting on a sticky bench while the girls waste quarters riding mechanical animals.

“Know what? Poor Greg barely knows what day it is,” Mary says. Her eyelids are a hot shade of pink, matching her cheeks and lips. Natalie is physically prettier, but there’s a small rope of doubt connecting her thoughts to the truth. Her tiny demon swings on it.

“About, you know. The drugs?” After Wren came in, Natalie asked Mary to leave. It was the panic in her chest that kicked her friend out of her apartment, not Natalie herself. She didn’t like the feel of it or the way Mary looked at her in her fluffy pajamas, carefully scooping the white powder back into its tiny vial. She didn’t like the accusing face Mary gave her, which is why Natalie asked her to meet at the mall.

“Oh, Natalie. You’re so adorable.” Mary carefully hides her bitterness, but the demon turns Natalie’s thoughts towards it. She feels ashamed of accusing her friend. “It’s just enough to loosen up a little. I’m not a drug addict or anything.” Natalie looks into her friend’s face, studies the rainbows painted on her eyelids. “And Greg?” Mary says, getting up to pry Rhonda off of a very purple Dino. “He thinks what I tell him to.”

#

MARY’S STANDOFFISH for a couple of days, to the point that Natalie eats in her car and people watches during lunch. She comes around eventually though, even chatting Natalie up at her desk before they clock in for the morning.

Natalie starts to notice things she doesn’t want to. Like how close Mary stands to Herman and how she’s no longer wearing her wedding ring on her left hand. When Natalie’s alone at night watching Johnny Carson, she takes big gulps of her vodka and tries to un-pluck the thoughts that won’t stop weaving together. Mary is hurting herself. And she’s going to hurt her family.

Natalie repeats it to herself like a mantra without ever looking in the mirror.

#

“WHY DID IT TAKE YOU so long to get back to me?” Rebecca is cry-talking, and it hurts Natalie’s ear. She’s been avoiding calling back her sister who left a dire “we need to talk” message on her answering machine a few days ago. She makes the call on her break at the pay phone near JCC’s front entrance.

“I didn’t, I mean–”

“He died, Natalie.”

“Who?” But she already knows.

“Dad.”

“But...how?”

“His heart. His heart gave out.” The foolishness of man perverteth his way: and his heart fretteth against the Lord, Natalie thinks. She’s still snatching at each word floating in front of her when Rebecca says, “So, can you make it?” Natalie’s spaced but she finally gets what Rebecca’s saying.

“Oh, when is it?”

“Tomorrow. 6 PM.”

“Rebecca, you know there’s no way–”

“Oh, I know. But I just wanted to hear you say it. I just wanted to hear you say you’re not going to Dad’s funeral because you’re too self-absorbed to call me back. Because you’re living your dream life in nowheresville Arkansas. Does it taste good, Natalie?”

“What? Does what taste good?” ...and his heart fretteth against the Lord.

“Swallowing your own B.S.” 

#

SHE DOESN’T TELL WREN about Abuelo. In fact, she doesn’t tell herself about her father’s death, opting to file it in the Z’s and throw away the key. She worries, though, that she’s mentioned her father to Mary before and that some sort of situation will arise where she’ll casually mention her father’s death and Mary will be disappointed Natalie never told her. Mary seems to be the core of Natalie’s thoughts lately, but Natalie’s too busy worrying about Mary to notice.

The demon follows her to work. It’s grown, and its stench suffocates the office. Natalie washes her thoughts away with big splashes of flowery body spray, but her co-workers can smell it on her. Something’s happening.

Mary tells her she has a hair appointment that evening. “Sometimes, I don’t get home until ten. The perm takes forever but Sadie likes to split a bottle of wine, and we shoot the breeze. I’m blessed to have a friend like her.” It snags at Natalie like it’s meant to. But the other side of her brain is consumed with the fact that Mary won’t be home after work.

They say their goodbyes, and Natalie’s heart overworks inside her chest. I sit next to her, and in the back sits a man that’s not a man, his body bathed in light. On the roof of her car is the demon, its nails tapping a noxious tune as we turn into traffic. Her hand goes for her bottle deep inside her purse. She drinks the small bottle like Alice does in Wonderland, but instead of shrinking like Alice, her body goes numb, except for her shaky hands. Like Alice, she drowns in her own tears.

“Mack!” she screams as she soars down the freeway. She’s free-associated Mack as the root of her problem, which means she’s digging up the wrong tree. The man that’s not a man puts his hand on her shoulder, and now it’s just tears she can barely see through–no more noise.

We turn into a neighborhood where a cluster of houses that all look alike sit on a cul-de-sac. This isn’t the first time Natalie’s been here. She looked up Mary’s address weeks ago, sometimes driving a sleeping Wren to Mary’s house. She has to drive slowly and sometimes with one eye, but I haven’t allowed her decisions to catch up with her just yet.

She pulls up tentatively, her front tire making friends with the curb. She wishes she had more vodka. She pumps more body spray and singes the inside of her mouth with peppermint. She’s going to be late picking up Wren, so she shoots more Binaca into her mouth to punish herself. After she’s brushed through her hair and smoothed Carmex over her lips, she gets out of the car and walks to the front door.

“Hello?” Greg Zinberg is as small as she imagined he’d be. Khaki pants and a brown sweater over his button down. He’s a beaten-down version of this morning’s Greg who keeps mantras in his back pocket in the hopes of conquering high school hormones and passive threats from the superintendent. “You need to take a hard line stance against the enemy, Greg. You go weak at the most inopportune times.” Have you been talking to my wife? ran through Greg’s head. And then the tired chuckle nobody else could hear.

“Hi. I’m...I’m Natalie.”

“Oh? Natalie? Oh, Mary’s friend.”

“Yes.” She wishes it were raining so he’d hurry her inside. But Greg doesn’t look like the type to hurry. He keeps the door tight against him, afraid to open his space to the outside.

“Mary’s not here right now.”

“I know. I’m actually here to talk to you.”

“Me?” Greg asks. He pales even though Natalie’s in no way threatening. But there is something palpable about her, me, and the man that’s not a man behind her on the right, the demon on her left. It’s fingering the collar of her shirt.

“It’s about Mary. I think she has a drug problem.” Natalie waits for it to register, but what she doesn’t understand is how tethered Greg is to the here and now. Nothing can change. Nothing can get any worse.

“You have the wrong person or you’re up to something. I need you to leave or I’ll call the cops.” Greg is having an out of body experience, and his fear propels the last line. Natalie recognizes the mistake she’s made, and the demon smiles even though it can hear the sizzle of its own skin. “And do yourself a favor, stop ruining your life. I know a drunk when I see one,” he says and softly closes the door in Natalie’s face.

#

THE DAY MARY CONFRONTS Natalie during first break is the day she’s promoted to TL. Herman claims the team is growing and there’s nothing wrong with needing two of them. Mary gloats about it and eagerly eats one of the breakfast donuts Herman brings in to celebrate. Natalie smiles even though she’s still nursing a terrible hangover. She tries her best to hit her call count so she doesn’t have to talk to Mary.

At break time, Mary nods her head at her, and Natalie follows her out into the front parking lot. There’s a terrible deadening she nurses in her belly as she trails Mary to her Taurus. Natalie gets into the passenger side. Inside, it smells like Aquanet.

“I’m so happy you got to meet my husband.” Natalie stares into the windshield, watches the Taiwanese man who owns the donut shop sweep near the front door.

“Look–”

“No. No, Natalie, you look.” And Natalie does. Today, Mary is wearing green across her lids and a very pale purple lip gloss. Her bangs are crimped and arc across her forehead. “I get that you’re jealous. I get that you want what I have, but if you ever step foot near my home again, I swear I will get a restraining order against you. And drugs? Seriously? What are we? In sixth grade? You couldn’t keep your mouth shut and just enjoy the moment, could you?” Mary snags hers fingers through her crunchy hair. “I get it now.”

Natalie’s chin presses towards her chest. “Get what?”

“Your life. Your husband. Why everything crashes down so hard around you. You’re a bulldozer, Natalie. You’re the kind of person that just shouldn’t be touched.” Mary gets out of the car. Natalie nods at the windshield as she watches her go back inside.

#

THERE WAS ONE PERFECT day with just the three of them. It was a long weekend–Memorial Day–so they decided to go to Galveston. The beach was crammed and they felt like sardines sitting on the shoreline, but happy sardines. Mack would run into the water with a screaming two-year-old Wren on his hip. Natalie sat in the sand, her toes digging into it to feel the coolness underneath. She was reading a book, and when she thinks of it, she keeps whispering to her dream self, “Look up. Look up.” And when she does, she sees her past, her present, her future. The two people who made anything worth anything. But then she looks down and starts reading again.

The hotel room, dinner on the beach, the way she felt in Mack’s arms once Wren was asleep. These are all there, too, surrounding her like a gull in her ear or the crash of ocean water against her shins. But the sharpest part is always the moment she looks up, and the sun has set them on fire.

She’s choking on memory and some of the vodka she’s swallowed. She’s graduated from the tiny bottles in her purse to putting some in a plastic water bottle she keeps in her car. She takes tentative sips during break time and lunch, not wanting to overdo it but wanting to do enough. She’s tired of Mary’s face. She’s tired of Mary’s spineless husband. She’s tired of feeling defeated.

She’s tired of herself.

Natalie blinks away the thought because she’s on her way to pick up Wren from Little Chicks. She’s scrounged together enough change for ingredients to bake cookies for the weekend. She just wants to be in her PJs with Wren. She wants to hug her and smell her hair. She wants to sit on the couch and close her eyes and remember what the ocean and laughter sound like.

But her thoughts butterfly away when the car in front of her slams on its breaks. She tests out hers in the Pinto, but it’s too slow on the uptake, and she ends up rear-ending the Bronco in front of her. Her head lurches forward and then hits hard against the headrest. She’s spinning through butterfly wings of thought until an officer pulls up and directs her to get out of the car. The EMT shows up, and as she’s inspected and handled like a broken vase, she thinks of that other moment, when her face was out of her book, and her husband, her daughter sat with her as the sun went down. And how it was a beautiful moment but also a little bit scary, the way the light could slowly sink away.

She takes a breathalyzer test. The cop won’t answer her when she asks about the Bronco owner who’s strapped down onto a gurney and maneuvered into the ambulance. She’s cuffed and watched by a pretty, younger officer while the other one searches her car and malls through her purse. She knows he won’t find any more bottles in there, but she’s surprised by what he does find. A tiny vial of coke.

Natalie starts to panic and screams that it isn’t hers. She shoulders off the younger cop and moves toward the other officer, but she’s told to stop and get on the ground. She’s forced there by a knee in the middle of her back, her cheek kissing gravel. Her mind is a movie screen and all she can see is Wren’s beautiful face.

Belly and breast against ground, I touch her hair, and I whisper comfort in her ear. But she drowns in the sound of ocean waves and the ghosts of those who can’t save her.