She was asleep on the couch, on her back, with one hand on the floor like a storybook girl trailing fingers in the water from her boat. Jip on her stomach, beady-eyed watchman. He growled as I shook her gently. “Baby, I’m going to get you something. Did you eat today at all?”
She rolled over on her side without opening her eyes.
“I need you to wake up. Sit up, okay? We have to talk.”
Where to go, if I left, I had no idea. No place seemed possible. Maybe it would only be for a little while. I pushed Jip off her belly and helped her sit up. She blinked, focusing her eyes.
“What do you feel like eating?”
She put her hand on her stomach, shook her head. I said she had to eat. Her eyes opened wider, like my being there was dawning on her a step at a time. Then she looked at me like I was going to hurt her, and I felt like a terrible person. “Baby, baby,” I said, stroking her hair. It had grown out every which way, finally her true color of blond. I said I loved her and would never, ever want to hurt her. And she said, The thing is, Demon. I’m pregnant.
53
I thought of it every minute of every day. This would get us clean. Now Dori had reason. It’s simple, I said, think of the baby. It was not simple. Dori had never troubled to hide any part of her using. To her mind, it was all about love: sucking an oxy to crush and split exactly in half with me. Saving every patch she shot, for me to lick the leftovers. Now she got wily on me, only ever shooting up after I’d left the house. Sweet thing, that was Dori trying to be good. I might have been doing some version of the same.
Stupid is all the word I’ve had to cover much of my time on God’s grass. But it’s not stupid that makes a bird fly, or a grasshopper rub its knees together and sing. It’s nature. A junkie catches his flight. That sugar on your brain cells sucks away any other purpose. You can think you’re in charge. Walk around thinking this for hours at a time, or a day, till the clock winds down and the human person you were gets yanked out through whatever hole the devil can find. Learn your lesson, get your feet up under you. You will be knocked down again.
For Dori’s sake, I went to talk to June. I knew she needed to be seen to. They have things they do for the pregnant now, heartbeat and such. Vitamins, I remembered Mom getting those. And just by the way, maybe also some help getting her off the junk.
What I didn’t expect was to find June so pumped up on her own news, she wasn’t all that excited over mine. Martha had a bead on Emmy’s whereabouts in Atlanta. June actually had a street address, and was going down there. Some hellhole, no doubt. She was peeling potatoes while she told me all this, long slips of skin flying fast into the sink. The people I know are seldom idle with their hands. Men smoke or fix things, usually both at once. I once watched a man take down a dead poplar from the top down, working high in its limbs with a chain saw in one hand and a Camel in the other. Women fix a kid’s hair or wipe a nose or sew on a button or peel potatoes. And smoke, though not June of course. I sat on a stool at her kitchen counter, wishing I could draw her hands. I asked, “What makes you think she wants to come home?”
No answer for half a potato. Brown and white peels mounding in the sink. And then: “Emmy is in no position right now to know what she wants.”
“People get tired of hearing that,” I said. “She’s eighteen.”
June’s eyes flared, but she kept peeling, talking without looking up. “These aren’t adult choices we’re talking about. She’s stuck down there with no means, getting used by terrible people keeping her strung out, whatever, raped. There’s parts I can’t even think about.”
“Embarrassed,” I said. “There’s that part. She’d sooner die than have you know.”
June’s hands went still. “You need to come with us.”
I almost laughed, for how doable it all seemed to June Peggot. Like she’s Lara Croft, and we’re going to go raid the tomb. I said no, I couldn’t leave Dori for that long.
She narrowed her eyes at me, still working away, the slip-slip of the peeler sounding mad now. “Listen to yourself. Dori’s a grown woman, soon to be a mother. What do you think she’ll do if you leave her unsupervised, wet the bed? Burn down the house?”
I didn’t want to admit that both were possible. I had other excuses, my job at the store, a strip I had to finish by Saturday. June said she was going on Sunday. Slip-slip-slip. I told her these were scary people, and she should go with somebody that packs heat, like Juicy Wills.