So I had a car. I had Annie’s invitation, and my freedom. Means, motive, and opportunity, as they say on CSI. Nothing holding me back now but sheer terror. It’s hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down. I said this to the counselor I still saw every week, Dr. Andresen, that was part of the house arrangement along with water and utilities. As far from Miss Barks as they get. Older lady, gray sweaters buttoned to the top, black clog shoes, professional and educated and decently paid I assume. She was from Denmark, first name of Milka, and for all that, a very likable human. She’d talked me through a boatload of crap, and honestly it was less distracting to do this with a counselor that you couldn’t remotely imagine doing anything else with. Dr. Andresen weighed in on the side of me going to Lee County. Or at least examining my fears. I asked her, what part of obliterate do you not understand?
She gave me the assignment of writing a story, in which Demon goes to Lee County and sees friends who support his sobriety. What I turned in: “On a planet that exists only in Dr. Andresen’s mind, a good time was had by all, and nobody got shitfaced.” She gave me her tiny lopsided smile, being used to my attitude on assignments. Didn’t stop her from giving them to me. Practically from our first meeting, she’d been after me to write a recovery journal. I told her I don’t write, I draw. She said this would be for myself only. I could share it, but only if I chose to do so. The idea being to get clarity and process some of my traumas. On that particular ball of yarn I didn’t know where to start. She suggested pinpointing where my struggles had started with substance abuse, abandonment, and so forth. She said many people find this is a helpful tool for reclaiming their narratives, and in fact wasn’t this what I was doing with my comics?
Whatever. I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.
63
In December Annie emailed to tell me the baby was skewed in some fashion and she might have to schedule the delivery soon. I needed to get my carcass over there pronto. I called her and said to forget about my nonsense, just worry about the baby.
“We’re not worried,” she said. “He’s just defying the rules, trying to come into the world back-asswards. Whose child do you think this is?”
She sounded so much like herself, I couldn’t picture the watermelon aspects. The baby of her and Mr. Armstrong would be a knockout, no way around it. Hardheaded, great beauty, high-octane fuel for the Lee County gossip engines. “Please come,” she said. “I’ve started my leave already, but I’m too fat to sit at my loom, and I don’t feel like cooking because eating one saltine gives me heartburn. I’m just wallowing around here like a landlocked walrus.”
She needed distraction. She wanted to see drawings. Weirdly, I wanted to see the walrus version of Annie. I said I’d think about it overnight. Before we hung up, she mentioned the high school was having a big thing on Friday to honor Coach Winfield. Not just football players, this was the town. Coach had retired after the scandal to get his life together, and the guy they hired to replace him steered the Generals to something previously unimaginable: a 4–6 losing season.
“Winfield is a damn fallen hero,” she said. “I think they’re having this blowout for him because burning the new coach at the stake would be illegal.”
She said she understood if I had hard feelings against Winfield. I’m sure June would second that. Undue pressures and pharmaceutical missteps, not deniable. But she never saw me sleeping behind dumpsters, looking for something steadier than the DSS greatest-hits box set. Coach took me in. I blamed Watts for the worst of what happened. For the best of it, I needed to lay eyes on Coach and tell him it mattered.
If I went, I might also run into Angus. She’d gone back after graduation to take care of some of Coach’s loose ends, but was pretty clear on this being just a stopover. Bigger fish to fry, no doubt. I didn’t email her. I told almost nobody, since my friends were all dead now or waiting on deck for their turn. Just Annie. And June, that would kill me if I was in town and didn’t see her. I told Dr. Andresen I was going for it, and she did the rare thing of smiling with her whole mouth. “I think you are unlikely to obliterate,” she said. And I said, You watch.