“Nelly, it is a pleasure.” She squeezed my hand then hugged me until I almost couldn’t breathe. Her almond-shaped eyes and broad nose were like mine. In our baby pictures our cheeks and smiles are so similar, like twins people said as they flipped through the family album Mom kept on the coffee table. Her curly Afro bounced as her yellow heels clicked up the front steps. Aunt V didn’t look as pretty as the girl in the photos, though. She was pencil-thin with a trace of ash around her lips. I was dragging her bag up the stairs to my room when she asked me, “Where’s your mom?”
“In the kitchen.” I nodded my head toward the open door, and after I put her bag on the second twin bed in my room, I ran downstairs. Mom and Aunt V sat on the couch in the living room and I settled on the bottom step to listen.
“Thanks for letting me stay. I start work at the end of July so I should be able to get my own place by September.”
“I hope so, because Seth is not going to be happy if it’s longer than that, and you have to go to the meetings, Vanya. And no more secrets. Clear?”
“Crystal.” Aunt V’s voice was crisp and gravelly.
I thought they’d be happier to see each other, but they circled each other like kids on the playground before doing battle, only breaking the silence when Aunt V gave a tight little laugh. “Guess I’m the Queen of Secrets now, huh?” The Queen of Secrets — I liked the way it sounded: mysterious, dark.
“You don’t have to be,” my mom answered her. “Just know I love you, V, and that we want to help, really.”
“We? Seth too? That boy finally off his high horse?”
“Vanya, that’s not fair.”
“Well, he wasn’t fair, and he’s the guy who got his underage girlfriend drunk and knocked her up. Clear?”
“Crystal,” my mom said, and they burst out laughing. They talked for hours that night. I could hear their voices buzzing as I waited for Aunt V to come to bed.
Aunt V became my best friend that summer. We spent whole days doing everything and nothing. In July, we went to the beach and she taught me how to swim. She moved into her own place over on Kensington Street near the hospital in September, and that fall, we gobbled bunless hot dogs out of a thermos as we sat on the hood of Mom’s car, feeling the airplanes roaring above us as they soared to foreign places like Australia and Turkey.
She smoked long white cigarettes, and at Thanksgiving she and Mom giggled as I imitated her by puffing on a straw and teetering across the front room’s green carpet in her red pumps with heels as long as my pencils. Her chocolatey perfume tickled my nose when she whispered in my ear. Sometimes I’d catch her studying me as I watched TV or did homework, and it made my stomach wiggle.
She gave me a Polaroid camera that Christmas and the first picture I snapped was of her. I pinned it to the bulletin board in my room. She is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Her feet are bare, and her legs, which are spread wide in front of her, are swallowed by the red-and-green puddle of her full skirt. A little red ball hangs in the air in front of her face, and her hand is poised to sweep up a gleaming row of jacks on the floor. A half-full martini glass sits next to her and an imprint of her red lips decorates its rim. She is laughing.
You tried to stay clean. You snuck a few drinks at first, craved a hit, but then you started the job, and NA, and you stopped. Three months later you moved into your own place, reconnected with old friends, went back to church, and stayed clean until He came. He found you at the hospital where you worked and where you and Olivia had once sat in hard orange chairs waiting for your mommy to walk from behind the washed-out green curtain. You’d waited and waited, but she never came. You became a nurse because of that night, and you loved your job, but after a while the long hours and the dying exacted their toll, and you couldn’t breathe, felt like you were sinking, just like you had in those orange chairs the night your mom died. Some days you drank, and you craved a hit, just one hit. He followed you home from one of the NA meetings at the church where Olivia volunteered. You’d started going when It had called to you, when Its memory tickled your brain, and you tried to ignore It. He never said a word to you until the day he approached you at the bus stop.
“Hello,” he said. “We need to talk.”
You didn’t remember telling him anything about home. You’d stopped seeing him when you’d told him about the baby. He’d wanted you to get rid of it and keep tricking, and you thought about it, but much like Olivia all those years ago, you couldn’t do it.
“No,” you’d said, and he left you alone. That’s when you called O.
The bus eased to a stop, and you got on, leaving him standing there. Three days later, you spotted him outside the hospital, and a week after that he showed up as you got off the bus at O’s house, and your body went cold.
“What do you want?” you asked him.
“To talk about... about... you know.” His blue green eyes slipped to O’s house and you knew he knew, so you agreed to meet him at his hotel.
You met him the next night at the Pond Lily, because no one would know you there. You guzzled three martinis in the bar before heading to his room. He offered you a drink and you nodded. You sat at the scratched brown desk.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Better than some, not as well as others,” you responded, then sipped the glass of warm bourbon. “And you?”
He shrugged his thick shoulders, his hands hanging at his sides. He needed a shave and his breath stank.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Who?” you said, raising an eyebrow, gripping the glass.
“I know,” he said.
“Know what?” You thought of Nelly and your sister, even of Seth, despite him still acting funky whenever you visited.
You went to him and whispered in his ear, “She died.” You kissed him and he kissed back, and then you felt his warm fingers at your throat, squeezing.
“Liar.” He let go and you gasped for air, then sucked down the rest of the bourbon. You slipped your hand in your purse and felt it there, and you knew you would do it. You apologized to him in your head and kissed him before pulling him to the bed. You would do it.
When you woke up, he was still sleeping. You slipped on your clothes and wiped the glass, the desk, the bed frame. You pulled a syringe from your purse and filled it with the insulin you’d taken from the hospital. Forever and Always, you thought as you eased the liquid into him. You left and started again. One time, one hit, you told yourself as you left the Pond Lily. When you got home you bought a package from the boy on your front stoop.
That day melted into months, and now you were strung out again, about to lose your job again, the Queen of Secrets again. You sat on the toilet, your mouth dry, your palms sweaty, your head pounding as the blue line on the end of a white plastic stick stared at you, and you wondered if you could do this again. It was the same as before — the same guy, the same blurry emptiness like those impressionist paintings Nelly loved. You wanted to tell Olivia but couldn’t take Seth’s condemnation, not again, so you told your diary. You chronicled everything between its pages: every booze-soaked night, every baby that died in your arms, that night with him, your daughter and how you dreamed of her and you together knowing it could never be.