“Hué. It’s a city in Vietnam. I was stationed around there for a while. So, yeah, my mother, who died when I was a kid, and my buddy Carl Johansen, who died when I was over there, they’re walking up this street looking for me. And I can see them because I’m in this, like, empty storefront with windows that stretch the entire block. And I’m running right alongside them yelling, ‘Hey, it’s me! It’s me!’ But they can’t hear me. I start banging on the windows and they still can’t hear me. Then I reach the end of the building. And I can’t get out. My mother and Carl just keep walking and calling my name until I can’t see them anymore. And then, after a while, I can’t hear them anymore. So, so I turn around in this empty store, and there’s a table with my lighter and my spoon and my powder on it. The syringe is brass-plated. Really comfy-looking chair for me to sit in. So I do. And I, ya know, get my works in order and shoot up. I won’t lie — it felt fucking great.”
People shift in their chairs. He can feel Doug R. watching him carefully, wondering if he made a mistake asking Bobby to share.
“I think,” Bobby says, “that Carl was in my dream because, for a long time, I used the war as an excuse to shoot up. ‘I saw this terrible thing, I saw that terrible thing, so I got lost.’ But war didn’t make me lost. I came back without a scratch. But I did get lost over there. Because I was like a child again. I knew nothing, not even the language. I didn’t know their gods, I didn’t know their customs, what was the right or wrong way to behave. I was just a twenty-two-year-old with a gun.” He looks out at the group, can’t tell from their eyes or their body language if he’s going on too long, if he’s connecting with any of them. But he plows forward, stumbling into each sentence like a toddler learning to walk. “This city here, it’s kinda gray all the time. You know?” He looks up at the ceiling. “Right now the sun shines during the day, but it’s pretty gray seven months out of the year. Or maybe, I dunno, it was just gray in my house growing up. I think of my house after my mother died — maybe even when she was still alive — and it just feels like everything was the color of the sidewalk, even the air.
“But in-country? Vietnam?” He looks around the circle. “You’ve never seen the color green until you’ve seen Vietnam. I’ve been trying to describe it for years and just fucking failing — the rice paddies in the morning with the mist coming off them and the blood-orange sky at night and birds flying low over the deltas and, I dunno, it looks like a place gods would choose to go on vacation. Filled with wonder. But that beauty got all tangled up with death, and fucked up my head once I realized that I was death, walking around with my big gun. I was the one killing all the beauty.” He notices he’s involuntarily hung his head and corrects it. Looks them all in the eyes. “But when I shot up, that went away, and all I could feel was the wonder. When I shot up, it felt like, like...” He fixes on the face of the blond woman, sees something in her eyes that feels desperate and hopeful at the same time. “Like all that beauty spread through my veins. It found a home in my body. And I was perfect. I was whole.”
The blond woman blinks. A single tear falls from her eye and breaks as it crests her cheekbone into three tinier tears that feel, for Bobby, like a trio of sacred C-words — communion, consecration, consummation.
The woman looks away, but Bobby can feel the eyes of the rest of the room on him. He shrugs, suddenly embarrassed to have gone on for so long.
Doug R. says, “Thanks for sharing.”
There’s a smattering of polite golf claps.
The angry-looking guy in the business suit says with precise enunciation, “I am a heroin addict because God, if not dead, is certainly on sabbatical.”
Bobby can feel everyone trying not to groan.
On the front steps, as Bobby’s leaving, the blond woman comes down the steps alongside him. She says, “Do people in there know you’re a cop?”
He considers her, realizes there’s something vaguely familiar about her. “It’s not something I advertise.”
“You arrested me once. Two years ago.”
Shit. This is exactly why Bobby doesn’t admit his profession in the meetings.
“I’ve never forgotten you,” she says. “The hard face but the kind voice.” She lights a cigarette and stares through the smoke at him when she exhales. “Were you using then?”
“Two years ago?” He nods. “That would have been right before I kicked it.”
“So, you were using, but you were busting addicts like me.”
Bobby tries not to hide from his ugly truths anymore. “Yes.”
Everyone else has gone to their cars. It’s just the two of them in front of the church. A slight breeze slides through the trees and fingers the strands of their hair. In the distance, they can hear the traffic on the southeast expressway — a quick horn beep, the rattle-and-thump of truck tires.
She smiles. It’s warm and sudden. “You arrested me, but you never charged me.”
“No?”
She shakes her head. “You put me in a car and drove me toward the station house. But then you asked me who I used to be before I got hooked on junk, and I told you I was a functioning druggie, thank you very much. Had a good job as a—”
“Social worker.” He smiles, remembering. “Your hair was different.”
“It’s naturally kind of a mousy brown, so I color it now. Got a perm.”
“It’s becoming,” he says, and immediately wants to shoot himself in the fucking head. Becoming? Where the fuck did that come from?
“You drove me to a clinic on Huntington Avenue,” she says. “You remember?”
“A bit.”
“You walked me in and said, ‘You can still go back to who you really are.’”
“Did it take?”
“Not for another six months. But I’ve been clean for four hundred and eighty-one days now.”
“Good for you.”
“It’s still scary. Is it scary for you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
She holds out her hand. “Carmen.”
“You don’t look like a Carmen.”
“I know. But my mom was into opera.”
Bobby smiles like he knows what the connection between the two things could be. He shakes her hand. “Michael. But everyone calls me Bobby.”
“For God’s sakes, why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Could you tell me on the walk to my car? I’m several blocks away, and it’s a little dicey around here.”
“Sure.”
They turn up the sidewalk together.
It’s a soft summer night that smells of imminent rain. Bobby walks Carmen toward her car. He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.
14
The phone rings and rings. Mary Pat stares at it, no idea how long she’s been sitting on the couch in the living room, no idea how long that phone’s been ringing. It stops. And then, a minute later, it starts again. Stops after nine rings. A minute of silence. Maybe more. Maybe five minutes. And then the phone ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. It’s halfway through the fourth ring when Mary Pat gently removes the cord at the back.
It must be Meadow Lane. She’s supposed to be at work right now. That realization almost breaks through the numbness that has defined her since she opened the bag Marty Butler gave her. But the numbness is still too strong. It’s head-to-toe Novocain. It’s numbness with weight — there’s nothing gentle or calming about it. It clamps down on her skin, blood, brain, and nerve endings. Like a hand gripping the back of her neck and pressing her face against the ground because it fears what will happen should she ever get to her feet.