"I feel like I'm fourteen," Veronica said. "All these emotional roller coasters. I can't keep up."
"You want my advice, don't even try. Let it happen. And if you get in trouble, you can call me." It sounded like they were finished, but Croyd hesitated, like there was something else he had to say. "There's nothing else happened, right? I mean, no… no symptoms."
He was talking about that whole Typhoid Croyd business. She shook her head. "No. No sudden ace powers, no flippers on the ends of my legs. I don't think it did anything to me at all."
"It's just-I feel responsible, that's all."
"Don't worry about it."
He walked her to the door and she hugged him tight, despite the peculiar acid smell of his feathers. His hands rested flat against her back. "I have to be careful," he said.
"If I bend my fingers too much, these claws come out." He showed her the claws. There was a light of pleasure in his eyes when he looked at them.
"So long, Croyd," she said. "Thanks for everything."
She got to Hannah's office just before four. "I'm late," she said.
Hannah held the door for her. "It doesn't matter. There's nobody else scheduled for this afternoon." Then she said, "I'm glad you came."
Veronica was giddy from cocaine and nerves and couldn't sit down. Hannah took her usual position, in the chair across the table from the couch.
"How's the methadone working out?" Hannah asked. "Fine," Veronica said. "It's great." She walked behind the couch, turned around, leaned into the back of it. "No, it's not great. It's not enough. I still want to get high. I need it."
"Why?"
"Why? What a stupid fucking question. Because I like to feel good. Because when you're high, you don't care about wading through all the world's shit-"
"What shit?" Hannah said. "What shit are you living in that you didn't put yourself into? You've got everything backward. You think you can control your drug habit and you can't control your life. It's the other way around, you just don't know it. You have no control over heroin. It owns you. They call it horse, but it's really riding you. That's step one of what they call the Twelve-Step Plan. You have to admit you are powerless to control your addiction. And then, later on, you can learn to take responsibility for the rest of your life. As in 'the ability to respond.' Not blame, not control, but responsibility. Something you can live with."
Veronica shook her head. "That's all easy for you to say. But I don't have any kind of life. My mother is a washed-up whore who's pimping me now. I never knew who my father was, and I don't think my mother did either. I got no brothers or sisters to turn to. I learned all that shit Fortunato taught us, but it's not a college diploma. It's not going to get me _a soft job someplace. Look at the odds. I'm going to end up like the kids I went to school with. Fat and old, either divorced or married to a husband that beats me up on weekends." It was hard to believe. She'd actually talked herself right out of her cocaine high.
"So what is it you want?"
"Escape. I want a good-looking man with a fast car and a lot of money to come and take me away someplace."
"And then what?"
"Then we live happily ever after."
"That's bullshit, Veronica. You know better than that. If all you want is some man, you could have had plenty. What's the difference whether you're dependent on a drug or dependent on a man? There isn't any, and you know it." Veronica thought of Jerry, who would take her away if she would only let him. "Why do you care what happens to me?"
Hannah walked over to the window and looked out at the street. "When you walked in here I saw myself, six years ago. There's a fire in you. A heat. Sexual, emotional, spiritual. It's been too much for you, all your life. You had to use heroin to keep it from eating you up." She turned and looked Veronica in the eyes. "I want that fire. I want all you have. The two of us, together, burning until we burn each other up."
Veronica could not get her breath. She stood up, feeling the fabric of her sweater move against her tight, aching nipples. She walked to the door and locked it. The pressure of her jeans between her legs was maddening. She kicked off her shoes and pulled the sweater over her head.
"Show me," she said.
At fifteen she'd been in love with an eighteen-yearold pachuco, had fucked him at every possible opportunity, in the backseat of his car, in the park, once in the stairwell of her high school. It was always quick and brutal, and afterward she went home to her empty room.
There she could think about the boy and make herself come with her fingers, the way she could never come when he was inside her.
Since then she'd had sex with hundreds of men. None of them had made her come either, not even Fortunato, and as for love, she'd convinced herself it was just another he.
Hannah changed all of that. They made love five or six times a day. It was all so equal. For everything of Hannah's there was something of Veronica's. Afterward they slept in each other's arms. Under Hannah's gentle hands and tongue, Veronica found a responsiveness she didn't think was possible, not for anyone.
"Women don't come from having men inside them," Hannah told her. "I've read in books that we're supposed to, I've heard there are women who do. But I've never talked to one of them. Every woman I've ever talked to needs something more."
"More," Veronica said. "I want more."
She only left Hannah's apartment long enough to score her daily methadone. She wore Hannah's clothes, when she bothered to wear clothes at all. She did what Croyd had told her to. She stopped fighting and immersed herself in sensation: the smell and feel and taste of Hannah's body, the exotic foods and teas that Hannah prepared for her, the long nights of physical and emotional intimacy where nothing was forbidden.
Almost nothing, anyway. Veronica found herself talking for hours about her childhood, the terrors of Catholic school, the tangled genealogy of her aunts and uncles and cousins, the hypocrisy of Catholic sexuality in which teenaged girls routinely gave blow jobs but recoiled in horror from the thought of losing their sacred virginity.
It was Hannah that held back. She talked about her childhood, her ex-husband, her parents. She was an imaginative and enthusiastic lover, afraid of nothing. She had Veronica reading about addiction and feminism and Marxism and vegetarianism and everything else that was a part of her life. But she never explained the transition, the years between her drunken marriage and her sober counseling job.
There were hints. She had been part of some kind of radical feminist group. She never mentioned the name. "They believed in a lot of things I wasn't comfortable with," was all she would say.
"What sort of things?"
"Things that might appeal to somebody who was still full of anger and bitterness. Things you have to outgrow if you're going to get anywhere."
Veronica assumed she was talking about violence. Bombing or assassination or something else illegal. And because Hannah didn't want to talk about it, Veronica left it alone.
Veronica was the first to say "I love you."
It was dawn. They lay side by side, their hands between each other's legs, lips just touching. The pleasure was so strong that the words came out without her quite meaning them to. Hannah held her tightly and said, "It scares me when you say that. People use the word 'love' on each other like a weapon. I don't want that to happen to us."
"I love you anyway. Whatever you say. Whether you like it or not."
Hannah pulled far enough away to look into her eyes. "I love you, too."
"I want to kick the methadone. I want to get clean."
"Okay."
"I mean now. Starting today."
"It'll be ugly. I can get you drugs to help, but it's going to tear you apart. Are you sure you're ready for that?"