The drive didn’t take long because Cain lived in a nearby area that had not been gentrified. She supposed there were too many undesirables around.
Including me.
CHAPTER
9
CAIN PARKED OUT FRONT AND ENTERED through the only door to her place after unlocking the rusted padlock. She relocked it on the other side because folks around here didn’t abide by the same laws most human beings did. She knew at some point the owners would kick her and the other residents out and turn this place into something that would make them real money. For now, it was just a series of makeshift pods separated by thin walls having been put up during its transition from commercial use to residential. In that way the place had been inexpensively reborn from the hulks of semi-attached dilapidated buildings, where the current residents were one step up from being homeless. But it was a damn important step, she knew. You could always take a home for granted, until you didn’t have one.
She had a roof, a bed, a toilet, a microwave, enough heat to get by, and windows and a floor fan in lieu of AC. She had a cell phone that she had “found” by stealing it, and WiFi that she had lifted from a nearby network after learning its password. There were rats all over, but they left her alone for the most part. The dump cost her four hundred a month in rent plus utilities, and that was a blessing to her because she couldn’t afford a penny more than that.
Her legal name for a long time now was Eloise Cain. Eloise had come from a book she had read as a child. She didn’t go by Rebecca Atkins anymore. Not since that night in Georgia. And she had had another name before that, but couldn’t remember what it was. How did I get so lucky to have all these names? she sometimes thought when she’d had too many beers or too much weed, or both. Most people only have the one.
And Cain? That just came from reading the Good Book. Desiree Atkins had said the scriptures were all she needed to know in the way of learning. That she had to repent her whole life for all the awful things she’d done and all the awful things she’d wanted to do. Well, she had certainly wanted to do awful things to Desiree, all right. But whatever she was willing to do paled in comparison to what the woman actually had done to Cain.
After escaping, Cain had basically lived at some of the best public libraries in the country for years. And it wasn’t necessarily about reading and learning, at least not at first. She had found, as a rule, that the more books you read, the longer they let you stay. And when it was freezing cold or mercilessly hot out, that was important. And if you read a lot of books, and even helped out, she had found that kindly librarians had often become informal teachers, helping her to read better and to write—and on top of that, they fed her, too. Because without something in the belly the mind didn’t work too good. Those years had constituted her formal instruction, for better or worse.
She really had no clear memory of anything prior to going to live with the Atkinses. Except for one thing.
But it was a big thing. A really big thing.
She dropped her duffel next to the mattress on the floor. A box next to the mattress represented her closet. She could have flicked on a light, but she preferred the dark. Counterintuitively, for her, things somehow seemed to have greater clarity in total darkness. The stark distractions of life were filtered out by it, allowing one to fully focus as though one’s life depended on it, which it often had for Cain.
She took a loose board out of the floor and opened the lid of the tin box she kept there. The money went in and the board went back. Also on the floor were stacks of books. All had been taken from libraries, some with permission, most without. But she had read them all, multiple times, so there was that. Books were meant to be read, not displayed on a shelf for decoration.
She sat on the mattress and rolled a joint. She lit it, sucked on it, drank in the smoke’s fumes, as the night deepened and the weed siphoned off some of her pain from the fight. Over the years she’d torn through all of the hard stuff: coke, crack, meth, heroin, synthetics, exotic street mixes. Then she’d almost died from an OxyContin pill laced with fentanyl. It had taken three pops of naloxone spray from an EMT to bring her back, or so she was told. After that, she’d walked away from it. It was a bitch to kick, but she’d kicked harder than that. The bottom line was nothing was going to control her ever again.