“Please, c’mon. Please. I can help you but you have to help me. I get it, okay? It’s the hardest thing in the world, the asking. I’ve never asked for help. Ever. So I understand how hard it is. I get it, I do. You don’t want to ask for help. I don’t want to ask for help. But this is my life — keeping people safe on my bridge. Let me do my job. Right now. I’m begging, okay? Help me. Please.”
“I have to go now.” She put her hands down. Her long fingers on the girder, feeling the grit like I felt it but finding no comfort in the roughness, none.
Oh God. I swung my arm out, pivoted as fast as I could, the dirt and chipped paint ripping the skin on my fingers that still held on while my other hand shot toward her, reaching through nothing. But I was too far away, six feet was too far, she hadn’t let me get any closer, not even an inch, and it was like she didn’t have any last words — I have to go now — because they were gone as soon as they were spoken, erased by the wind, and the final thing she did was look up before she pushed herself off the bridge.
Her dress blurred yellow through the air. She fell so fast. Five feet, ten — then the rope snapped taught and her body jerked. The shoe that she’d dangled was flung off, and fell graceful and red through the wind.
I watched it fall, and fall, and hit the water.
The Wishing Well
by Kim Addonizio
Pill Hill
There are no magic walnuts in this story, or wise flounders who speak in rhyme.
Or princes hacking their way through brambles for princesses who shit roses.
None of that here.
All of these people are doomed — they just don’t know it yet.
They’re all jittering and talking and jonesing in the Kaiser Dependency Recovery Center.
They’re keeping their fate at bay, just barely, maybe thinking they’re getting a handle on their lives. They hold out a little hope.
I don’t belong anywhere near them.
We sit in a circle talking about our week and one guy says, “I know I’m going to start using when I start hating people, judging people on the bus,” and the woman next to him says, “What do you do when you start to get critical, then?” and the guy — he’s a meth head — leans back in his chair, crosses his arms, and answers, “Just say to yourself, Who the hell am I?”
Exactly.
My friend Elena has two subjects of conversation: her family and the lottery. The problem and the solution.
Elena never has money for cigarettes because her monthly check goes to stuff she can’t buy with food stamps, to PG&E, and to the corner liquor store for SuperLottoPlus tickets.
Elena is my next-door neighbor. I’m here at Kaiser to keep her company. She’s recovering, and I don’t intend to.
I believe that alcohol and drugs are a life choice, not a sickness.
A sickness is when you love someone you shouldn’t. There is no recovery.
Elena’s granddaughter Darnique lives across town in East Oakland with her shit-for-brains father, Elena’s son Anton.
Anton makes movies, which means he illegally downloads and sells them.
Anton also sells drugs, which means people come and go from his place at all hours.
He puts Darnique’s glue and colored markers and construction paper on a high shelf so she can’t get to them when he’s not around.
Among other, worse things.
I feel bad for Darnique because she’s another doomed soul who doesn’t know it.
Or maybe she does.
During the break, Elena smokes my cigarettes. “Last week Darnique be talkin’ about people who kill themselves from stress. Why she askin’ about that?” Elena says. “She only ten years old. I tell her, Uh-uh, girl, you gonna live a long time. Those people that kill themselves, they just got nobody to talk to.”
There is a gun in this story, so probably you know what that means.
Elena doesn’t know shit. I like her.
“So, what’s your story?” a guy at the Kingfish asks when I’m about six beers in.
“Just a girl having a drink,” I say.
Though “girl” at forty-five is kind of a stretch.
“Feel my ears,” he says.
He’s clearly looking for something, rather than someone. We both know what it is.
“Like stones,” I say, touching them.
“I used to wrestle. It smashes the cartilage.”
The Kingfish is close enough to walk home from, which makes up for it not serving hard liquor. Plus, there’s fresh popcorn and a shuffleboard table. The guy and I slide a few pucks down the table, and then we walk to my place, and soon we’re naked on my living room rug and he shows me some wrestling moves.
My house is a little 1920s bungalow on a quiet street, a few blocks off Telegraph Avenue.
Usually quiet, anyway. Every so often someone runs through the backyard. Once I opened my back door and two cops were there, looking for a gun someone dropped.
Mostly older black folks live here. There’s a white lesbian couple that keeps chickens. There’s also an old Polish guy in a wheelchair who owns three houses on the block. One he lives in, and the other two look condemned.
“What’s your story,” the wrestler says again, when we’re sitting on the front porch afterward.
Not like he really wants to know.
I tell him anyway.
I tell him my parents died a few years ago in a car crash and left me some money, enough for a down payment on this house and something left over.
I tell him about Nick taking out a whopping loan on our equity line of credit at the bank — I put him on the mortgage as a tenant-in-common — without bothering to mention it. I tell him how I kicked Nick out when I found out, and how much I hate him. I keep saying his name: Nick, Nick, Nick.
Fucking Nick.
Right now all the houses on the street are dark and somehow seem smaller, like they shrink a little when the light goes out, and I imagine that everyone else is asleep and not having bad dreams.
“I guess I should go,” the wrestler says.
I find the dropped gun the next day, in the potted bamboo on the deck, and I keep it.
Nick and I were together ten years, which means things were both good and bad. When I think about him, I think about us having sex.
And sometimes him standing at the stove cooking.
But mostly the sex.
Everyone you love leaves a hole in you.
A blast crater.
Soon there aren’t any more flowers or birds and the rivers dry up.
The wrestler’s been gone about ten minutes when a car pulls up next door and cuts its lights. I pull back a little, into the shadowed part of the porch where the streetlamp doesn’t reach.
The back door of the car opens.
Someone gets pushed out.
There’s a little chiming sound from the wind chimes.
There’s a motorcycle backfiring on the freeway two blocks away.
I’ve never seen a dead person. I’ve seen birds lying stiff under a tree, or next to a window they slammed into. Once I saw a half-eaten deer in the Oakland Hills. I watched my cat be put to sleep. They looked like nothing — a rock, a fence post, a throw rug.
This looks like shit-for-brains Anton.
He’s lying on the curb where they pushed him out.
The car drives off without turning on its lights. It passes the house where the Polish man lives. It passes the house where the old woman sits on her porch all day, her hands folded in her lap. I follow the car until I can’t see it anymore and have to imagine where it goes.