The Dark Lake (2 page)

"How did your therapy session go?"

"Fine.”

"I talked to a woman today who said she might be willing to hire you to work at her husband's store. You just need to go down there and fill out an application."

"Tell me about it later. I have a heat headache now. I think I actually might have heatstroke. I feel sick to my stomach and that's one of the symptoms of it. I need to go lie down.”

I went into the living room and flipped on the TV. I was too hot and too dizzy to do anything else today but vegetate in front of old 1950
s sitcoms. They made me feel like nothing had changed a bit. I lay there smoking cigarettes until six o'clock when my mom came in and told me dinner was ready. I didn't feel like getting up and going in there to eat. Why did she always insist on telling me that? She knew I hated to sit in there with her. And Dad never ever came home for dinner, so it was just her sitting there alone, not some family fantasy like she had about it. It depressed me to think about eating at the dinner table with my mom and dad even if he were there. It made it seem as if time were standing still.

"Just bring it in here," I yelled.

"Get it yourself," from the kitchen.

"I'll miss the show!"

Silence.

"Mom!"

Nothing.

I wasn't that hungry anyway.

I felt those burning fields of rage began to rise up in me again. She didn't even respond!

But I didn't act on it.

I really was getting better.

I viscerally detested it when she talked to me in that indifferent "get it yourself" voice. I hated it. She had done this to me before, many times, said something in that indifferent tone.
One time I lit the house on fire, calm as you please
. Just walked over to the stove and set the hot pad on it, the orange and blue one that one of my great-aunts had crocheted. I'd been seeing that hot pad since before I could even reach the stove. Then I lit it on fire and never saw it again. It burnt up in the immediate flame that shot thick and high to the air vent above it.

“Why did you light the house on fire, Jane?”
Was that Miriam asking me that, or was it the police?
I kept my eyes closed. If I looked up, I would know it was Miriam and not the two tall officers in blue that had stood over me that night.

“Why are policemen always so big? Oh, don't answer that
; ha, ha, how dumb can a question be?”

“Don’t evade my question.”

It was the night before the first day of school—my junior year.

"That's when she really stopped caring."

"People do give up, Jane." Miriam's voice had a tone of exasperation.

"She never cared. There was something I needed, a notebook or some books, something for school the next day, something for the first day of school. You know," my voice started to quiver, "
mothers are supposed to care about the first day of school. But she just said 'I don't care what you do'.”

"But you threatened her, remember?"

"Yeah. I threatened her with not going to school."

"She must have been so tired of your manipulations. She really should have gone to a tough
-love program a long time before. But she didn't have the heart to throw you out."

"Why should she have thrown her own daughter out? Wait a minute. Don't answer that. I already know. I remember how I was. I remember.”

“What were you like, Jane?”

***

"I don't know why I lit the fire, officer. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"Your parents said you were laughing and laughing about it."

"That's right." I look up into his ice-cold, blue eyes and uniform.

He stands there a moment. We stare at each other in silence.

"But you're not laughing now."

"That's right."

"Why not?"

"It's not funny anymore.”

He leaves my room, and I overhear him tell my parents—in the gold living room—that I am perfectly sane. My mom is so relieved to hear this, even proud, she seems.

I go to sleep on my little cot that I'd requested in what used to be the guest room.
No, I don't want a bed,
I had told them years ago. I wanted a cot, so it could be just like on TV, like on
M.A.S.H.
You know, the show?

I sleep that night, and get up and go to school.

***

"I don't remember if I did go to school the next day, but whenever it was I did go back to school, that's where all the fun was, Miriam. I'll probably never have so much fun again in my life," I told her.

"What was so fun, Jane?"

"Well, I'll tell you. I think it all culminated in perhaps the funnest night of my life at the party in Dave Mason's basement. In fact, I think all of us would agree that was the funnest night of our lives."

Of anyone's life really. For how could anyone have had more fun than we did that night in Dave Mason's basement?

How many of us were there? I don't remember. Of course, as with any super
-fun night, you should not be able to remember the whole thing. That's part of the point isn't it? So drunk I can't remember?

Wild howling, mad laughter
, and the pounding of Dave’s gigantic speakers. You can see them pounding. And even over the loudness, even if you cup your hands over your ears to protect them, you can still hear Gay shouting out obscene alternatives to the lyrics from the kitchen. And the pot pipe passes round and around. And the room begins to spin. And Siegfried, whom we all called Ziggy, leans back in the big black recliner and grins, watching Dave, who has passed out facedown in the cat litter. Dave crawls away a few minutes later to vomit in the corner.

I stumble through the bodies back upstairs to the kitchen, where Krishna laughs her echoing, drunken laugh and sways back and forth, knocking first into me
, and then knocking over the bottles of booze by the sink. Gay, and Krishna's brother, and a few nameless faces are making a strange movie in front of the refrigerator.

Someone with dark hair stood with his back to me holding the camera, and Gay is bent over the floor laughing her hideous
, drunken, hyena laugh. I stand there a moment with my head cocked at a sharp angle, trying to make sense of it. She has a fork in her right hand, one hand on the counter; three onlookers and Krishna's brother stand there behind her. She keeps putting the fork behind her and pulling it back up again in rhythmic motion, in sync with the sheer, evil sound of her hyena giggle.

My question, "Is that a real camera?" is followed by only dim
, delirious howls. Staggering through the hall, which keeps changing shape as I try hard not to spill an overfull glass of … what was it they said was in it again? Who poured it? Back down in the basement that collapsed pile of giggling from the beanbag chair in the middle of the room turns out to be Krishna. “How did she get down here? I thought she was upstairs.”

"What's so funny?” I sway and nearly fall on her.

"Over there." She points, so high pitched and contagious that I too become an incoherent giggler even before I turn my head to see Dave crawling away from the litter box a few feet to throw up from the stench.

***

"Can we get back to what we're here to talk about?" Miriam snatched me out from the past again.

Why did she keep doing that? How could she not want to hear about these parties? I heard myself saying.

"Because it's no longer important. Only one of those parties matters."

"Oh that one," I sighed. "Why are you dragging that up now? Why? It's been twenty years."

"No, you see, the real question is why are
you
dragging it up now? We are just beginning to get somewhere in our sessions and I think you agree with me."

"I brought this on myself didn't I
?" I smiled. "If I hadn't had that dream …"

"Talk about the dream."

“Of course. What else do I do but dream that damn dream? I wish I could stop. I fell asleep watching TV on the couch and woke up soaking wet with sweat at three o'clock in the morning. The whole house was dark, you know, like it used to be. It's creepy in that house with my parents asleep. It's as if nobody lives there."

I shivered at the thought.

Climb the red-carpeted stairs.

I imagined sleeping again in the little room that I slept in when I was really little, and it gave me the creeps. And it had been such a long time ago that I had abandoned the guest room I slept in as a teen, on the uncomfortable cot. We bought a comfortable bed from Mrs. Barnard next door. Actually, we bought it from her son after she died. Well, actually, not from her son, but from the auction her estate had.
Her son had long hair like a witch and lived with her even till he was forty or fifty years old, and when she died he lived on the streets.

It used to bother me to sleep in Mrs. Barnard's old bed. Sometimes it still did
—like last night. Lying there on the open sheets stifling from the heat and the sweat, which had been water in my dream.

Open windows didn't seem to help, as there was no breeze. I finally got up because I couldn't stand it anymore and went into the room next door, the one I slept in as a child of six
, and pulled the fan out of the window. There was my dad sleeping on my old single bed. Did anyone in this house ever sleep in their own rooms? Oh yeah, my mom did. I guess she was the only one.

But of course when I lie back down again I couldn't even close my eyes, let alone relax and go to sleep. The water, Krishna's screaming
—the cold air blasting in my face and me not even feeling it.

"One thing I don't understand or remember is my window," I said to Miriam. I stared down. My leg had begun to shake uncontrollably
. "It's no use …"

"We'll stop for today
; just think about it when you can. Don't make yourself worse thinking about it, though. We don't need you ending up back in the hospital again."

Ten minutes to three. I sat in my car finishing my cigarette. My stomach churned and my head throbbed, but I couldn't very well get out of work or go home early on my first day, now, could I? So I was just going to have to grin and bear it. I had already been through the two weeks of training and been paid so I'd had money to buy my own cigarettes, junk food if I needed it, and my own coffee, and boy had I ever used it. I put some in savings too, like I usually did. It never even occurred to me to offer some to my parents, but I know if I had, my dad would have refused the money anyway, saying I needed it more.

I'd always been pretty good about putting money in savings. I sat in the car until the last minute in my pink
, polyester nurse's aide uniform. The only thing different about me, I thought as I checked my reflection in the car mirror, is the crease in my brow line from worry and thinking too much, (it figures) and my fine, thin, blonde hair had become even more fine and thin, to the point where I—and hopefully only I—could notice the scalp underneath.

But there was that one spectacular time, I reminisced as I put my pink lipstick on, that my savings went puff in a cloud, literally.
I laughed aloud at the memory.

"It was just a good thing cocaine
wasn't so readily available back then," I had told everyone at a meeting recently, "because that stuff is soooo addicting."

And it was.

I had saved over three hundred dollars by that time.

***

"You bet I'm gonna try it."

I had said this aloud when asked, back then, if I wanted to try cocaine.

Ziggy said it was the one drug he would never do.

"Because," he explained, sitting back in the green faded
Easy Boy up in his apartment above his parents' house, eyes in a half-closed smile, "I'm afraid it will be too good."

"How can anything be too good?"

Well now I know.

But I didn’t know then, not sitting there in Krishna's boyfriend's room, the third, or maybe the fourth guy she had gone through in the time I'd known her, like so many tissues. Like all her discarded boys, he remained willing to do whatever it took to be near her. This time he’d perhaps had dealer motives though. He’d found cocaine and he had offered it to all three of us as samples, so we would come back
for more. And we did of course.

I knew it was very expensive. Everyone knew that. It was the high-class drug we'd all been waiting for. It made everything so great, the sky, the trees, the air, the music. All the music began to sound so good, I mean so very, very good, like, like nothing we’d
ever heard before, like sirens.

"I love this song, now we have to smoke another joint." Krishna and I said it at once and then, startled, looked at each other and laughed.

And he'd sent us each home with our own tiny little baggy full of white powder—not too much, just enough so that we would all be back the next morning with the sun to buy more.