The Bitch Posse (15 page)

The worst is that we’re not to see each other anymore.

Ever?

Amy’s thinking the same thing. “I don’t have any other friends, Mom and Dad. I don’t hang out with Pammie and them anymore, you know that. I—”

“Well, you’ll just have to mend things, now, won’t you?” says Mrs. Linnet.

And I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad. Amy’s burned bridges with the
popular girls from now till kingdom come. They’ll never be friends again. Rennie could hang out with the drama kids again, maybe. The honor society smarty types don’t like her anymore, they’re afraid of her. They probably blackballed her at one of the meetings Rennie doesn’t go to.

Me? I can take care of myself.

Fuck all that. No one breaks up the Bitch Posse, that’s all there is to it. But dealing with the adults these days is only possible through resignation, and that’s what I do. “We know you’re concerned about our futures. I guess it’s the end of a friendship, but we understand, it’s all for the best.” And I put my head in my hands like I’m crying, but really what I do is give my two Bitch Posse girls my best Cherry-wink. Hell
yes
we’ll see each other. Lying we’re good at, we’ll find a way.

April, 2003
Chippewa County
War Memorial Hospital

Amy stares into the isolette, her gaze trailing along the loops of tubes and cords attaching her daughter to the machines that are keeping her alive. Lucky’s been in the hospital for almost eight weeks now. Amy’s pumped breast milk religiously, has spent endless hours in the NICU doing “kangaroo care.” Those she considers the most precious moments of her life, pressing Lucky’s warm little body to her bare chest, Amy’s fingers spinning among the wires that hook her daughter up to the cardiac monitor. Very premature babies often still have the lanugo hair covering them, and Lucky’s no exception, but lately a tiny swirl of black down’s been growing on her head and she’s even gained a little weight. Amy ran her fingers through that swirl endlessly it seemed. There’s never been a better feeling than her daughter’s hair brushing against her fingertips.

Twelve days ago, though, Lucky’s breathing became compromised
and they put her back on the ventilator. No more kangaroo care, not until she’s stable on room air again. When Amy heard that, she felt her heart would break. No more pressing her daughter to her chest and feeling their hearts beating together, the wonder of Lucky’s vertebrae pressing against her fingers, her tiny arms. “Soon,” she says aloud now, staring at her sleeping daughter. “Soon, Lucky.”

That question her mother asked so long ago Amy can now answer:
Yes, I do know what it feels like, Mom. I do.

But mostly she pushes away thoughts of her parents, because she has to concentrate on Lucky and not let herself get upset.

Of course, her life’s been spun out of control. Her mornings are spent at the hospital, her lunches in the hospital cafeteria, her afternoons with Catey and her kids just to get her mind off things. Then it’s back to see Lucky before dinner, and the dinners are the worst because that’s when she sees Scotty.

This shit makes Baghdad look appealing. Most of the time she escapes dinner by staring at the war, or the pieces of it that are safe for ordinary people like Amy to see. To her it’s as meaningless as one of those pep rallies where she used to do cartwheels and show off her legs beneath her little cheerleading skirt. The whole thing seems to call for a Holland High cheer:
Pass it catch it score for six, do it, Americans, that’s it!
The playing cards emblazoned with Saddam Hussein’s cohorts remind her of Alice in Wonderland. Someone somewhere is painting white roses red, and she wonders if it isn’t really the president and all his advisers who are just a pack of cards. The Americans, the good guys, captured the Queen of Diamonds a few days ago.
Take the ball, down that court, shoot for two and raise the score!

Last night, the president asked the nation to pray for the troops and the rebuilding ahead.

Sorry, that number is no longer in service.

Right in the middle of the war on TV, Amy glanced at Scotty and laughed.

He didn’t laugh back.

She just poured another drink and switched the station to
Friends.
Yeah, this whole thing has tried their relationship, severely, and Scotty’s never admitted where he was the night of Lucky’s birth, even though Amy sees the truth in his eyes. He’s done nothing but deny, and it makes her lose respect for him. If he’d just admit he had an affair and say he was sorry, that’d be it. But instead he debases himself and her by saying,
The roads, Amy, it was the roads. . . .

The watch, her birthday present to him, still sits wrapped in the bedroom closet. She’s sick of all her things; none of them seem to matter now that Lucky’s in such trouble. She should rent a barge, load it up, and drop all her stuff into Lake Superior. Drown all that crap—the 4Runner, the Ethan Allen bedroom suite, the Martha Stewart copper cookware—in that most amazing lake, whose waves chop and roll with more power than even God can explain. Dump it, along with all that garbage that’s loading down drawers in her kitchen. Her Parmesan grater, her julienne slicer. Her slotted fish turner and her butter curler. Her cocoa shaker, biscuit server, and spoon-type tea infuser. Top of the line from WMF Germany, 150 years of Old World craftsmanship, why should she settle for less?

What the hell, it’s just a bunch of metal and plastic. It’s not real.

Not like a baby, for example.

Nothing’s real anymore.

Yeah, she’ll drown all that useful useless shit.

Sink it.

Kill it.

When the white-crested waves crash over her clot of possessions, her heart attack waiting to happen, Amy will tremble at the terrible beauty of Lake Superior, thirty million times more amazing than anything a catalog copywriter could ever describe.

She’ll keep the crib, though.

She needs that.

That fucking watch for her oh-so-fucking husband? She’ll bury that in a watery grave too. That she can do without a barge, she’ll just wing it into the water tomorrow.

Catey scraped the clock cake into the garbage while Amy was in the hospital recovering. Cleaned the whole kitchen. Dear God, blood must’ve been dripped over everything.

Blood. Dripped over everything.

Amy’s stomach twists. The knife of her past scratches away chips of mortar, and they fall to the earth like flaming meteors.

Build it back up, one brick at a time. She sucks in fresh sterile air. Don’t drown in the past, the present’s bad enough.

Who cares how much it’s costing to keep Lucky alive? It’s just money, numbers, abstract things. You can’t order a baby from a catalog. There’s no free shipping or money-back guarantee. No exchanges or in-store merchandise credit if it didn’t turn out just how you’d planned.

Nothing matters more than Luck.

Amy bends down so the isolette is at eye level, sinks to her knees. She’s so often like this here at the NICU. The nurses have all been incredible, but the news hasn’t been good. Two days after they put her back on the ventilator, Lucky needed an emergency heart operation, and they sawed her open. Amy gazes through the clear plastic, eyes burning as she follows the line of stitches zipping up her daughter’s chest, such great big scars on such a little baby, just now barely three pounds. Lucky, the name Amy whispered out soon after her birth, the name that sealed her daughter’s fate, she hoped. Anyway, it’s crossed her mind a few times since then that it’s a crazy name, that middle school girls will pick on her daughter, and then the idea pops up that perhaps it won’t matter, perhaps Lucky won’t . . .

And that’s the thought she has to squash down like a ball of paper into a wastebasket. If she thinks that way, it’ll affect Lucky somehow.

Scotty’s at work, trying to be normal, he says, but he seems to sink
himself in deeper and deeper these days. In her heart she has to believe the doctors, what they said, that Lucky has a chance if she makes it through the surgery. So now they’re waiting, hoping there’ll be no more bad news. They also brought up that there’d been (just as with Callie) so little oxygen at Lucky’s birth that the chances of severe mental retardation were very high. Funny, she feels, not close to her parents exactly, but a touch of empathy for them, even though she hasn’t spoken to either of them in years. Dad’s in Arizona, Mom’s in Montana, they split up soon after graduation and Callie’s death. Why they ever felt they had to keep up a charade of a marriage for Amy, she’ll never know. She sent them each a card to let them know she was pregnant, a cute little card with a horsie on it with a pink ribbon (Scotty hadn’t caught that hint, or ignored it on purpose). She supposes eventually they’ll write her and ask about the baby, but they don’t know that Lucky was born already, that she’s here in the hospital. What’s the point in telling them, really? Knowing Dad, he’ll say something helpful like
Weren’t drinking during pregnancy, were you?
And Mom, well, she used to try to talk to Mom on the phone, during those first years in Ann Arbor. Amy would have to repeat major news on several separate occasions, had to tell her three times she was engaged before the information sank into Mom’s memory. When she and Scotty moved to the Soo, Amy deliberately requested an unlisted number, so now all they have for her is an address, not the house number of Amy’s refuge at the ends of the earth, but a simple P.O. box she got just for this purpose.

She blinks out some tears, knowing that she and Scotty may well just be spinning this situation out as far as possible without allowing it to reach its natural conclusion. Twenty years ago, ten even, they wouldn’t have been able to save Lucky at all. And really, it’s all they can do now to keep her breathing. Her daughter’s little chest rises and falls, the tiniest preemie diaper wrapped around her. Her eyes are closed and puffy, and the scars down her chest are purplish and raised
like rows of tilled earth. Lucky, little Lucky’s breathing away, and she’s a fighter, or is she? Lucky’s been so listless in the last few days.

When Scotty gets home, they’ll eat Chinese takeout from the Great Wall for the one millionth time since Lucky’s birth because Amy hasn’t pulled a pan from the cupboard since that horrible night in the kitchen. Amy’ll open up the vodka and pour it with orange juice and stare at the war on television, not talking, just drinking and staring and drinking and staring, until the feelings are numbed and blotted out. That’s what she’ll do, that’s just what she’ll do, and not think about Lucky until tomorrow, not face the decision she knows is probably coming, not watch Scotty’s face with the furrow that’s suddenly appeared in his forehead, the slip of hair that clings to his neck, that curl she used to lace her fingers through as she pulled him toward her. She can’t look at him that way anymore, can’t even bear to make small talk anymore.

Judy, the nurse with the cute little pigtail, touches her on the side of her arm. “Please go home, sweetie,” she whispers. “Get a decent night’s rest for once.”

Amy tries to smile, makes a grateful mutter, and packs up to go. She glances over her shoulder to see Lucky one last time, the little creature attached to the ventilator, the IV drip, the cardiac monitor, still breathing inside her clear plastic box.

On the drive home, everything’s still all frozen over. The hell with stopping for Chinese as usual, it takes too fucking long and she’s not hungry anyway. She just wants to drink. There’s some tortilla chips and salsa and that’s all she wants. Scotty can fucking fend for himself, God knows she had to back in March. Why walk through blistering wind when she doesn’t have to? Why go and order his fucking emperor chicken and kung pao shrimp? It’s not for her. She never eats much but the rice, so what’s the point?

Up here it’s a winter wasteland, and glancing down she notices the salt’s stained her black coat. As she pulls up to the house, there’s another car backing out. It jerks out of the driveway, roars down the street, and disappears.

“Oh!” That’s what she gets for coming home a little early, is it?

She tears down the plowed path in her boots, and she’s for sure going to give him hell, because it’s
her car,
she knows it. She’ll make the biggest scene, make him pay for lying. She might even smash a few things and then get good and drunk and stony cold silent, and maybe, just maybe, just maybe, she’ll hurt him too.