“Freddie?”
“Yes?”
“Could I speak to my sister, please?”
“She’s resting,” Freddie said.
“Well... uh... could you get her, please? I’d like to talk to her.”
“Okay,” Freddie said.
He put the phone down, I heard it clattering on the table top or the counter or whatever. I heard voices, laughter, more voices. My mother looked at me again.
“He’s getting her,” I said.
“Where is she?”
“Resting.”
“What do you mean? You mean sleeping?”
“He said resting.”
“Who did?”
“Freddie.”
We kept waiting. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past nine. “Freddie?” I said into the phone, hoping he would hear my voice and pick up the receiver again. No one picked up. “Freddie!” I shouted into the phone. Nothing. No one. I whistled into the phone. I whistled louder. I could still hear voices and laughter in the background.
“Where is she?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know, Mom.”
She was already wearing a look I would come to know only too well in later years. A tight little mouth, a frown creasing her brow, puzzlement and suspicion in the green eyes, helplessness beginning to border on panic.
“Hello?”
“Annie?” I said.
Her voice sounded frail, distant, trancelike.
“Annie? Is that you?”
“Andy?”
“Yes, honey, what’s the matter?”
“Did Sven call yet?” she asked, and a chill went up my spine.
“What is it?” my mother asked.
“Annie,” I said, “where are you?”
In a voice that was lilting, almost sing-song, she said, “I don’t know, where am I? Has Sven called yet?”
“Annie, put Freddie on the line, okay?”
“Freddie?”
“The boy who took you to the party.”
“Freddie?”
“Freddie Cole. Please get him, Annie. And stay near the phone. Don’t go away, all right?”
“How can I get Freddie if I don’t leave the phone?” she asked, and began giggling.
“Just go get him, okay? Hurry, Annie!”
“Oh, okay,” she said in the same sing-song voice, and I heard the phone clattering down again.
“Andrew, what is it?” my mother said.
“I don’t know.”
“You were speaking to her, what do you mean you don’t...?”
“I’m trying to find out, Mom.”
“Where is she now?”
“She went to get him.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He’s not here yet, Mom.”
“Well, where is he? Why’d you let her get off the phone? What the hell is...?”
“Hello?”
“Freddie?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with my sister?”
“Nothing. Why? What’s wrong with her?”
“Is she drunk?”
“How do I know what she is?”
“Look, you son of a bitch...”
“Hey! Hey! Don’t you go...”
“Where are you? Where’s that party you’re at?”
“What is it?” my mother said.
“Just don’t go calling...”
“Give me the address there.”
“I don’t know the fucking address.”
“Get it! And fast!”
“What is it?” my mother said again.
In the taxi, I repeated every word of the conversation I’d had with Annie on the phone, and my mother kept saying over and over again, “It’s dope, they doped her.” I didn’t know if it was dope or not. I was seventeen and I had never so much as smoked a joint. I’m now thirty-six, and I admit to having smoked marijuana since, but only several times in my life, and then only because I didn’t want to seem like a spoil sport. When you’re in college, and everybody around you is smoking, you don’t want the girls to think you’re a wuss.
This was New Year’s Day, and there wasn’t any traffic at all in the streets. In fact, I think we were lucky even to find a cab. We made it down to Tenth Street in something like twelve minutes. The cabbie let us out in front of a brownstone in a row of similar buildings. I tipped him three dollars on an eight-dollar ride, and he wished us a happy new year and drove off. My mother looked suddenly old and frail. This was the second time I’d seen her look that way. The first was when Annie sold the band equipment and went flying off to Europe. In later years, this look would become commonplace. I realize now that Annie’s frequent disappearances made all of us look old before our time.
The guy who answered the door said he was Josh Levine. I figured him to be twenty-three or — four, a good-looking guy with curly black hair and brown eyes, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open, a red tie hanging loose on his chest. He said he was sorry for the way Freddie had behaved on the telephone, and he assured us that there was nothing to worry about, Annie had just consumed a little too much alcohol. “Consumed” was the exact word he used. (I later learned he had gone to Harvard. He told me that while we were waiting for the doctor.)
Freddie himself was nowhere in sight, God knew where the little prick had run off to. My mother looked around the place disapprovingly. There were ashtrays brimming with butts, many of which I recognized as roaches, and there was the sweetish smell of marijuana on the air — which I don’t think my mother detected as such — and there were girls and boys and women and men asleep on sofas or on strewn pillows all over the floor, and there were empty booze bottles and beer bottles, and a record player going with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” In the kitchen, a redheaded guy in his late forties, I guessed, was in very deep conversation with a girl who looked nineteen.
My sister was lying on her belly on a bed in a bedroom on the third floor of the building. She was still fully clothed, except for her shoes, but the back of her party dress was unzipped, and her bra clasp had been unfastened. I vowed at that moment that if I ever ran into Freddie Cole again, I would kill him. (I did, in fact, run into him five years later, at a singles bar in Brooklyn, when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-six. He was drunk, so I didn’t kill him.) I sat on the edge of the bed. My mother stood at the foot, shaking her head. Her face was deathly white, her green eyes glistening with anger. Downstairs, far away, another record dropped into place. Men at Work doing “Down Under.”
I shook my sister.
“Annie,” I said, “wake up.”
She rolled over. She tried to prop herself up. and then fell back against the pillow again.
“Annie,” I said, “wake up!”
She opened her eyes. Tried to focus. Recognized me. Smiled.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “Happy birthday.”
Dr. Aaron Tannenbaum had been our family doctor for as long as I could remember, but he wasn’t too tickled to be making a house call on New Year’s Day. He arrived at Josh Levine’s brownstone at a quarter to eleven that morning. Cleanly shaved, impeccably tailored, he looked as if he might be going to brunch in the Palm Court instead of paying a visit to a stranger’s apartment in the Village. Even the sight of two familiar faces — mine and my mother’s — did nothing to mollify him. He greeted my mother gruffly — “Happy new year, Helene” — and then without so much as a hello to me, even though he’d been treating me for acne for the past four years, he asked where Annie was.
We took him up to the third-floor bedroom.
Annie was still out. Dr. Tannenbaum asked me to leave the room. I waited in the hallway outside while he examined her. When he and my mother joined me some ten minutes later, he sighed heavily and said, “I don’t know what she’s ingested, but whatever it was, it was a massive dose. Get her out of here, take her home, and put her to bed.”