The Bitch Posse (26 page)

She hops out of the truck and leaves me alone for a minute, and funny, the tears have all sighed themselves out of me. I feel like an empty bottle. Why the fuck did Sam do that? What did I do? What did I say that was wrong?

Amy swings open the restroom door across the street.

No way can I go home after this. Marian is more fucked up than ever these days. Coke always made her paranoid and angry, but now that she’s shooting it it’s a harder high, harder for her to come down from without the shakes. Even buckets of pot don’t help her. We’re at a stage now where she’s either begging me to do coke with her or screaming at me and pulling down all the window shades and locking and bolting the door in the middle of the afternoon, on our little street. If she was beating me up or raping me, I could report her to Child Protective Services or whatever it’s called, but what do I do about a cocaine habit when I can hardly function without drugs myself? And anyway, if I reported Marian, I’d lose her entirely, and then I’d have no one.

Amy returns with paper towels and a tube of makeup. “No purse, I figured you’d want this. Palmed it on my way out.”

She’s so smart, and her thoughtfulness touches me. “Thanks, Aim.”

She washes my face with the towels, slow, even strokes. “Now, that looks a lot better.”

I look in the mirror, and she’s right. The blood’s all come from one wound about a half an inch long near the bridge of my nose. She hands me the makeup tube, and I squirt some out and fix myself up. Not bad, not bad at all. “I’m fine now. What about you? Are you way hungover or what?”

“It was strange.” A worried expression crosses her face. “I was having all this fun, and then several hours are just blank. I have no idea how I got to Sam’s—I don’t remember anything beyond Kent taking away the second orange juice.”

Oh, here it comes. “I was pretty sure you wouldn’t remember all of it.”

“All of what? Fuck, Cherry, what did I do?”

Should I tell her? Ah, we’re about nothing if not honesty. I draw in a long breath. “You grabbed Sam’s crotch. The n he pulled your jacket over his lap and I’m not sure what happened, but he let you do it. That’s why I was pissed off at him, and that’s where our fight started.”

Her expression’s gone from worry to panic, and she says, “Oh, jeez, Cherry, God, I’m sorry.”

“You had nothing to do with it. It’s okay.”

“It’s scary to be so fucked up you can’t remember things.” She lowers her voice. “It’s not like us getting high together, that’s like social. You just smoke a certain amount and then you don’t feel like smoking anymore. Getting high’s like having a few beers . . . ”

And Amy never has just “a few beers,” she usually has half a bottle of vodka, but I won’t mention that for now. “You don’t have to justify getting stoned to me.”

“. . . but the Xanax, I do this alone and I do more and more each time. I’m only supposed to take them once or twice a day, but I take five, six at a time. Once I took ten—they make me feel so happy and relaxed. It’s better than drinking, it’s—”

Shit shit shit. “So take the bottle and flush them all down the toilet.”

“Then I’ll start cutting again. I’m sure I will.”

“Isn’t there something else you can take? Tell your shrink they’re not working?”

“So she can give me something stronger?” Tears roll down her cheeks. “What’s that going to do? Please don’t tell anyone, Cherry. It’s embarrassing. Old ladies get hooked on prescription drugs. Anyway, I don’t think I’m really hooked. Just forget what I told you, forget the whole thing. I’ll stop doing it. I will.”

But it’s stuck in my mind now, and I wonder if I wrote her shrink a letter telling her I’m worried, would the shrink blab to the Linnets
that Amy and I are still seeing each other? “Amy, if you can’t give them up totally, at least promise me you’ll stop drinking with them. I read your script bottle when you were passed out. You can die from doing what you did. Just don’t do it anymore, Aim.”

“I feel dumber than Rennie,” Amy says. “I could’ve told her months ago that Schafer was nothing but trouble.” Funny isn’t it, we can see each other’s problems so clearly. But she can’t see herself jumping off the cliff.

Maybe I’m jumping off cliffs too. Guess I wouldn’t know. One thing’s for sure. I will never, never, never see Sam Sterling again. Unless he calls and offers me a big-ass apology, which he won’t.

Fuck. I’m so sickeningly weak and disgusting.

I glance at Amy’s hollow, tired eyes, and my heart aches with love for her. We both just need to escape. “Let’s go to the Porter Place. I’m not going home.”

The Porter Place is an abandoned farm on Route 12. The farmhouse burned down long ago, but the barn’s still there, weathered red, with a hayloft, and a giant swing hanging from the ceiling. Kids have parties there and stuff. Once in a while kids will go there to have sex if they don’t have anywhere else to go. But no one’s ever there during the day, and it’s the perfect place to hang. “Too bad Rennie’s not here,” says Amy. “Did she go home last night?”

I nod. “Wish I could call her, but her dad and Kelly are sharp. They’d know right away it was me, or you. Anyway, she’s probably busy banging Rob Schafer today. His wife’s out of town at an attorneys’ convention.”

Amy rolls her eyes. “I don’t think she can do that yet, she must be blowing him instead.”

Ugh, that’s nothing I want to picture.

“I thought after the clinic it’d fall apart on its own.”

I thought so too. Rennie’s eyes are so sad and hollow and she’s still kind of distant when she talks, like half her head is somewhere else. I
want my friend back. I want Rob Schafer to give me my best friend back.

“Let’s just us go then,” says Amy. “I wish we had some stuff to get messed up with.”

And I reach into my pocket and slide out a blunt that I snagged off Sam’s dresser last night. I normally don’t steal drugs from my boyfriend, but I refuse to take the risk of buying myself, and besides, I’m flat broke. I just popped it into my pocket. “Courtesy of Sam Sterling.” I laugh. “He owes me that at least.”

“You are ballsy, sister. Let’s save it till we get there. Oh, you’re so great!”

I start the truck again, and we head for freedom.

May 2003
Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan

Amy flings a sweater into her suitcase. This is the worst packing job she’s ever done. The suitcase is a mess of jeans and flannel shirts that are the uniform of the Soo but won’t look right wherever she’s going. She’s thrown in her hiking boots and sunscreen and shampoo and a couple of chick-lit novels she ordered from Amazon a few weeks back, the second Bridget Jones, which she hasn’t yet stumbled through, something else with a woman with bright red lips and a great big beautiful martini on the cover. Lately she’s found it hard to pay attention to these kinds of books; she guesses they’re just an escape like so much else in her life. Some things she’s taken along for no reason, chunky jewelry she never wears, her collection of smooth rocks from the beaches of Lake Superior. All swirls in a massive pool in the bottom of her suitcase, a pool that beckons,
Drown yourself, Amy, in the sea of your life.
She slides in her laptop, too, and rumples some clothes around it.

At the very top of all her stuff she places the Bitch Goddess Note-book.

Scotty’s in full support of her decision. It’s no surprise to him; she thinks he’s seen it coming. He didn’t want to be here for the packing and the actual leaving, and she supposes that once she gets to wherever she’s going she’ll give him a call and find out if the house has sold. They’ll go through the paperwork of the divorce very peaceably; she doesn’t hate him and doesn’t want to hurt him. She just needs to make a shift in her life, and she knows he does too. When she told him, he looked a little sad but resigned and said simply “I’m so sorry, Amy, I wish . . . ” At that moment he probably figured nothing he could say would change her mind and he interrupted himself. “I understand. I hope we can do this with a minimum of conflict.”

It was at that instant that her heart split in two. She wanted to sink into his arms and have him comfort her, run his hands over her hair like he used to do, way back in college when she felt sad. But this is the one thing they can’t comfort each other about. They’ve both taken so many steps back they can never be that close again. Divorce, even a peaceful one like hers and Scotty’s, is a lonely endeavor.

She zips the suitcase and glances in the mirror. There’s a crease in her forehead that wasn’t there before Lucky, the wrinkles around her eyes are etched deep, and heavy lines frame her mouth. Dark circles shadow her eyes. Scotty’s face, too, is lately so much furrowed with worry and regret he looks much older than thirty-five. Streaks of gray are even appearing near his temples. She feels an affection for him like she did for the page of a picture book she had when she was little, something she’s outgrown but she knows is still beautiful. When she feels best about it, she thinks that maybe this new start for him will show him a doorway to happiness. They’ll never find it with each other, but as their wounds heal perhaps they’ll each find someone, be able to put the puzzle pieces of their lives together in a different way.

When she feels worst about it, Scotty’s affair smacks her in the face, and she aches to tear his heart out and stomp on it, and she wonders if it wasn’t something she did, or didn’t do.

And that’s when anger boils up in her and threatens to overflow into a great big old crying jag, but she can’t afford that, not now, so she gulps and pinches her cheeks, desperately, until she feels cold and hard and indifferent again, and that’s the only way to feel, anyway.

Now there’s nothing left to do except grab the keys to the 4Runner, which Scotty said was hers to take. But a pang of guilt winds through her, and she stops at the chalkboard they used to use for copying out Neruda poems to each other, scrawling “ScottyandAmy,” drawing little hearts and birds.

Dear Scotty,

I’m sorry it all ended this way. “Puedo escribit los versos más tristes esta noche. Tonight I can write the saddest lines.” I don’t think I have to tell you where that’s from. Please know I want only the best for you. I did love you, more than you’ll ever know.

Amy

If she didn’t feel so old, she’d sob like a baby. She touches the locket around her neck. It clicks against the cross she tried to give back to Catey, and annoyance flashes through her. Prayer doesn’t work, see, Catey?

Sorry, that number is no longer in service.

But Catey’s such a sweetheart Amy’d never question her. She only said thank you and kept the chain around her neck. Catey insisted several times that Amy write to her when she gets to wherever she’s going, call, even, while she’s on the road. Inside the locket curls a swatch of Lucky’s chocolate brown hair, woven together with some of Callie’s that Amy’s kept in her dresser drawer since she was a teenager. Scotty
keeps his in a leather box on his bureau. She supposes they’ll both hold on to those things forever, they’re just not things you ever get rid of. So no matter where they are they’ll be linked by these few strands of hair.

Amy knows she’s thinking too much. When she gets this way she usually opens up some vodka, but she can’t today, she has a long, long drive in front of her. She walks past the liquor cabinet and out the front door one last time, closes it one last time. The For Sale sign swings in the Soo spring breeze, and amazingly, a monarch butterfly dances around it, a flame burning like a miracle into a time and place too early and chilly to contain it. She’ll hate to leave this lovely town teetering on the edge of Canada, this simple place without illusions, the river, the locks, the rocks from the beaches, the granite, the white quartz, even the ugly awkward roller coaster of the International Bridge. Amy’s own Sault Sainte Marie, the place no one knows about, her refuge.

She’ll miss it.

And though she knows it’s best, she’ll miss Scotty too, more than any of the rest of it; and now she’s getting maudlin again.

She hurls the suitcase into the back of the 4Runner and gets in and starts up the engine. As she shifts into reverse, she throws in a Siouxsie & the Banshees CD that Scotty always hated because she can’t bear to listen to anything they listened to together. “Peek-A-Boo” shrieks through the speakers so loud that her ears tingle, and she lets the music stab into her, nothing means anything at all.

She tears out of the driveway with a recklessness that surprises her, and she doesn’t know where she’ll end up, but it won’t be here.

Hours later she finds herself on Highway 80 west, that great stretch of asphalt that bisects the country. She’s curled her way through Michigan and down toward Toledo, where she picked up 80. At that point she didn’t need her map anymore and she unrolled the window, flung it
outside, and laughed as it whipped behind her in the rearview to land on the side of the highway.

Now evening’s fallen and she’s heading through Illinois of all god-forsaken places. The state makes her paranoid, the flatness that goes on forever, the dizzying cornfields that stretch on and on, the way you can see the horizon miles away and it all looks just the same as what you left. She rolls down the windows for a moment, but it’s ugly and humid and the air is barely breathable, thick, wet. These are the days she hated in Holland, and she must get out of here, quickly.