June waved the two of us up front, got in the back seat with Emmy, and rolled her up in all the blankets. Everett drove too fast, yelling “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I don’t know where I’m going.”
“My God. Those babies,” June said. “What if one of them is hers?” And then in another minute, “What am I thinking? She’s only been gone six months.”
“We can call Georgia DSS,” I said. All of us pretty far out of our minds.
Everett found his way onto a city freeway and pulled over. June gave him her map to figure out how to get back to I-75, then got out, opened the back, and fetched her medical bag. We sat on the shoulder with cars whizzing past, rattling us, while June crouched over Emmy in the back seat, listening to her heart, feeling her bones and organs. Emmy’s hair was cut weirdly short in a scary way, with parts of it missing. Her eyes were open now, jumping around at all of us, but she didn’t talk. Maybe in her opinion we were a dream. I took off my zipper hoodie and gave it to June to put on her. Then she wrapped Emmy up again and said, “Let’s go home.”
Too much adrenaline will age you before your time. I’ve heard that said. What I know for sure is, it will push you too fast through your day. I was into the sweats and beyond before we got out of Georgia. I had to ask Everett to pull over to save June’s white leather seats. She made me get in the back, gave me a 7 Up and a pill to chew to settle my stomach, that she said would make me sleepy. Nothing for the shakes and sweats. She put a blanket around me and laid me on the dogpile so Emmy and I were dominoed onto June, our little back-seat rehab ward. June sat up straight with this look on her face like she wants to kill us both, but she’s not going to let us die.
Everett was free at last to control the radio, and for a long time nobody said a word. I drifted in and out. Then somewhere around the Tennessee line, June started talking. Low, quiet. I was going to have my own child to think about, soon. She said she’d had this same talk with my mom before I was born. They were friends. I never knew that. June was the reason the Peggots took her into their trailer. They actually lived there together for a short while, before June moved away with Emmy and I got born. June had known my dad, too. She said you couldn’t know one without the other, those two were joined at the hip. I asked what he was like. She said exactly like me. In looks, word, and deed. A beautiful man with too much heart for the raw deal he got.
That didn’t sound like me. So probably none of it was true. I asked her how he died.
She frowned at me. “Are you testing me? Or do you really not know?”
I was too far gone to fake anything. I told her I knew it was on the Fourth of July, at Devil’s Bathtub, and that was all. June told me he drowned or broke his neck. Probably both at once, because he dived from up high on the bank. I asked her why did it happen. She said there was talk that he was drunk or showing off, but Mom swore it was her fault, he was in so much hurry to get to her. She’d gone in the water without knowing it was deep. Mom couldn’t swim.
June was in a place I’d never seen her go. Relieved, wrecked, talkative. Telling me things nobody else ever had. She said every time she saw me, it made her wish she’d tried harder with Mom, back in the time they were friends. But after the accident and everything, seeing my dad killed, Mom never wanted fully to be in the world. June said it was different for me, I had so many good reasons. She looked at me hard, like trying to read something written inside my skull. “Think of that baby coming. I know how hard it is, but you’ll get clean.”
I had my doubts on what June knew. But I was polite enough not to say: Get back to me after you’ve done time with your racking bones in your sweat-swamped sheets, crying for the lights to go out on your whole damn being.
June kept talking. As far as what lay up the road for me and Emmy, she knew some things I didn’t, and that part killed her, she said. She felt cruel every time she set somebody up with the methadone clinic in Knoxville. Martha being not the only one, far from it. She had patients getting up at three a.m. to get down there and back before work, with their kids in the car. No closer options. But something new was coming out, that she hoped she could prescribe right out of her clinic. A lot of paperwork involved. Suboxone. A word none of us knew yet.
The first thing we had to do, she said, was quit thinking this mess was our fault. “They did this to you,” she kept repeating, like that was our key to salvation. Like there was even a door.
We got back after dark. Emmy had come around some by then, drinking a Coke, saying not much. June got some promises out of me before turning me loose. But I was so far gone by that point. I’m not proud of it. I had some stuff in the glove box of the Impala, and for the last many hours had been thinking of nothing else. Sitting in June’s driveway, I did an 80 before I drove home to Dori.