Sketchy (4 page)

“Out here—look out the window. I’m up in the tree.”

My mom turns toward the window.

I wave.

“Beatrice Francesca Washington! What are you doing up there? You haven’t been up there in years. Don’t you think you’re a little old to be climbing a tree?”

“How old do people get before they stop climbing trees?”

“Don’t sass me, Bea.”

“You want to join me, Mom?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I don’t know… is there anything you want to talk about?”

“No. Why?”

“No reason.”

“Bea, you’re acting odd. Are you having a cigarette? Is that what you’re doing? You know I don’t like that habit you picked up at rehab. Come down here
right now
!”

I spit on my fingers and put out my cigarette, stick the butt in the pack. My thoughts have drifted back to the sketch of Marcus.
I have to go see him, have to find out why he’s on that girl Willa’s mind.

“Hey, Mom, would you mind if I hit a meeting after dinner? I feel like I need to,” I lie.

There’s no way Mom will say no to that request.

H
e lives in a frat house on the University of Michigan campus with a bunch of Wolverine jocks. Marcus himself is not a jock—far from it—but he supplies them (and others) with a steady flow of stimulants, downers—whatever they need to keep up with their classes and the dreaded stopwatch. He helps anorexic sorority chicks with unwanted weight gain; athletes with home runs and touchdowns; and the run-of-the-mill drug addicts with their addictions.

My parents think I’m at a meeting, so I have an hour and a half before I have to be home, before they wig out.

I pull up to the dark brick fraternity house, and as usual, a rowdy party is in full swing.

Breathe… just breathe, Bea.

I step out of my car. Someone stumbles off the front porch; a couple is having audible sex in the second-floor Juliet balcony. I know the setting well, too well—and I know where to go,
where to find Marcus. I was a regular fixture here for a while.

Marcus, ironically, is a bookish type and a boyfriend my parents approved of—even though he was two years older than me and my drug dealer. They didn’t know that side of Marcus, and he’s brilliant at winning people over. He said “thank you” and “please,” put his napkin on his lap, and held the door open for my mom. He’s a charmer and comes from a proper Jewish family in Philadelphia. His family believes in him, believes that he is pursuing a career in premed pharmaceuticals. And that is exactly what Marcus does. Provide pharmaceuticals.

No one would ever suspect the nice Jewish boy from Philadelphia of being a campus drug dealer. Never.

I wind my way up the crowded, dark wooden staircase and juke the jocks. My ass is pinched by a drunken douche bag. He recognizes me but has a hard time getting his wet, sloppy mouth and brain around my name, as simple as it is. And if he did talk to me? His paranoid, skinny girlfriend would most certainly throw him over the top of the oak banister. Three floors down.
Splat.

I continue up toward the attic. A steep, narrow staircase leads me to the dreaded dormered door. It’s hobbitlike, silent, and serene.

I know the knock. Once. Wait. Kick low. Wait. And cough twice.

My stomach starts warming up like coils in a toaster oven, and a surge of electrified heat crawls through my body.

A craving is what it is.

My mind tells me to turn away now and run—run fast and high-jump over the flights of stairs, over all the slop and muck that I’ve avoided for three months now.

But my body battles my mind. My palms itch, my mouth is dry, and I want relief, I
need
relief, and I know that two inches of an oak door separate
me
from
it
.

And that door opens.

“Bea!” Marcus smiles and takes me in his arms. He buries his face in my hair and whispers, his mouth brushing the lobe of my ear, “I knew you’d be back, my little bumble Bea.” He kisses my neck. “You smell the same… like honey.”

I start to melt.

He takes a step back and gestures for me to enter his room. “Come on in.”

I do, and he closes the door.

A Bach concerto plays through high-end Bose speakers. Textbooks cover his desk, lit by an amber-glassed library lamp. Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
sits open on his bed.

Marcus looks deep into my eyes. “How are you? I tried calling you, over and over—you never answered.”

“Yeah, they took my phone away, my parents. Cut me off from all my friends and from you. I ended up in rehab for three months. Did you know that, Marcus?”

He strokes my cheek with his callous-free palm and nods. “I did. Oh, babe. I’m so sorry. You need anything… to take the edge off?”

“No, no, Marcus, I didn’t come for that.” I pull away. “But I’ll take a bottle of water, if you have one.”

“Sure, of course.” He pulls one out of a minifridge.

Whistler, a gray Maine coon cat the size of a medium-sized dog, comes running over, purring—twisting around my legs.

“Whistler.” I bend down, drop my purse to the floor, and pick up my furry friend. “How have you been?” I scratch under his chin.

Marcus unlocks a tall antique cabinet. I know the cabinet well, and I know what’s in it. He pushes aside a few leather-bound books, peruses the stash, and takes out a plastic bottle filled with tiny pink pills.

“Marcus, no. Please, I didn’t come for that. I told you. Please.”

He doesn’t seem to hear me, removes Whistler from my arms, placing him on his bed, and takes my sweaty hand in his, dropping two pills onto my palm.

“You’ll feel better, I promise.” He lifts my chin with his hand. “I’m so happy you’re here, Bea.”

And I am suddenly there. Back. Back in the dark alleys of my life…

It was last April, right after my seventeenth birthday, and I was running with Marcus in the Arboretum, hand in hand through a field of hip-high alfalfa and rye grass. We were
high out of our minds, giggling and leaping over downed hickory trees, somersaulting on the grass until we found a hidden gully at the base of a wooden bridge that arched over a trickling spring.

“Heaven!” Marcus sang out. “This is it… we found heaven!”

He pulled me down on the grass and rolled over on top of me. “You’re so beautiful, Bea. Your hair, oh your hair.” He studied it, seemed mesmerized by it. “And your body, your skin—so beautiful, like a frothy caramel cappuccino.” He kissed my neck. His tongue flickered in my ear. “So sweet,” he purred, kissing my lips. His hands moved under my cropped madras top, and he caressed my bare belly. He fingered the hand-painted ivy on the thighs of my jeans, and slowly, ever so slowly, started unzipping them.

“Marcus, we should stop—”

But he covered my mouth with his hand and quoted Jack Kerouac: “‘A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.’”

I dissolved into the words even though I had no idea what they meant. We were oblivious of time, oblivious of the sudden rainstorm. And, with our sweaty bodies entwined, we fell into a deep, thick-as-molasses sleep.

“Help. Help me,” I heard. “Help, please…”

A voice. A weak, tortured voice breaking through the
heavy fog in my head. A voice of a girl. “Could it be me?” I asked myself in my stupor. “Am I calling for help? Why would I be calling for help?”

I rolled over to my side and tried to make out where the voice was coming from.

“Marcus, I think someone needs help,” I slurred. But I didn’t see him, couldn’t find him. He wasn’t by me anymore. “Marcus? Marcus, where are you?”

I heard faint, hoarse coughs, a slight moan, I thought, over beyond the bridge, down toward the orchid conservatory, and I tried to crawl, in slow motion, it seemed, to the voice. I managed to drag my heavy-limbed, hallucinating body two feet, then fell back into the damp, sleepy grass, and the voice stopped—dead.

I awoke at dusk with my phone ringing. Unread text messages buzzed, disturbing the peaceful surroundings. Sirens wailed in the not-so-far distance.

“Turn that thing off.” Marcus was back, lying next to me.

My phone buzzed again. “Shit. What’s going on, anyway?”

I squinted my eyes and read the text from my mom.

“Marcus. Marcus, wake up.” I shook him. I shook him hard.

“Easy, easy. What’s going on?” he grumbled.

“Someone was killed here today—here at the Arb. A girl.”

And I remembered. Her voice rushed back to me, her pleading words. “I heard her cry for help. I thought I was dreaming. And I couldn’t find you, Marcus.”

“Shit. Are the cops here?”

“I could have helped her. She was alive. She was. She can’t be dead. I heard her.”

“You were hallucinating—tripping on the ’shrooms, Bea.”

“You think that was it? You heard things, too? Voices?”

“We gotta get out of here, fast.”

We scrambled, throwing on our wet clothes as we heard approaching walkie-talkie voices and dogs panting and barking.

“Shit. Run,” Marcus ordered.

“But we didn’t do anything.”

“I’m holding, Bea! I have a drop scheduled today.”

We sprinted through the knee-high alfalfa grass again, but this time it was wet and muddy, and I tripped over rotten, felled trees. Burrs tangled in my hair.

We stopped at a two-lane road, saw police cars approaching. Marcus pushed me down into a ditch of wet leaves and mud, and I fell on a jagged rock. My jeans ripped, and I scraped my knee, drawing blood.

“Bea, come on, get up!” Marcus pulled me across the road and onto a side street to his parked car. I brushed the dirt off my top and torn jeans and dabbed a used tissue on my bleeding knee.

Marcus started his car and sped off.

I read every report of her rape and murder in the days and weeks that followed. Her name was Veronica, and she was an eighteen-year-old senior at a high school in Ypsilanti. Her arms and legs were tied. She was blindfolded, and wet leaves covered her face. A black garbage bag was wrapped around her legs. The only thing exposed was her bruised and battered torso. They said she was strangled after she was beaten and raped. And they had no leads, no answers—nothing.

I never came forward, never had the guts to tell anyone that I thought I was there when she was still alive, still fighting for her life—that I thought I had heard her—and if I did, if it was her voice, I could have saved her. But I was too messed up to help. And too ashamed to admit it. So I got messed up even more after that.

But her voice, calling for help, never left me. No drug, nothing I took, could erase it from my head.

And now he may have struck again, with Willa.

I look at Marcus, present time, hand him back the pills, throw my shoulders back, and sip the water. “No thanks, Marcus. I can’t.”

“Okay. I won’t force you.” He drops them into a tiny envelope and backs away, trips on my purse, swears, and places my bag on his desk.

“Marcus, the reason I came here was to ask you about a girl named Willa… Willa Pressman.”

He swings around, facing me. “Why?”

“Do you… know her?”