Are You Sitting Down? (14 page)

Her Christmas albums alone filled up two shelves of the built-in bookcases in her sewing room.
My ph
o
tos of me and Justin were all digital and stored on CDs or on the co
m
puter.
I wo
n
dered if my brothers and sisters kept albums or had other family
photo
traditions of their own.

Sitting on the floor by the tree, I was arranging the gifts I’d brought when Mother and Clare came down the stairs.
Mother headed toward the kitchen with Jake still in her arms.

“Do you want some coffee?
I’m going to make a cup for Clare,
” she
said.

“Sure.”

“Cream and sugar for you too?”

“Okay, just a little sugar,” I said standing
back
up.
I looked up to see Clare walking out the front door.
“Where is she g
o
ing?
Is everything alright?”

“I think she’s just tired.
She’s going out to her car to bring in her gifts.
You should go help her,” Mom said from the kitchen.

Since Mom was busy with Jake and making coffee, I decided to take this opportunity to ask Clare about the pill bo
t
tles I’d seen in her glove box.
Besides, I still had her
car
keys in my pocket.

Giving her keys back after I accidentally startled her, she popped the trunk and loaded my arms with gifts.
She was co
n
frontational about the pill bottles when I brought them up
, something about a substitution for happiness.
I tried not to sound like Mom when talking to Clare, but with her being our little sister I’m sure she felt like she had a houseful of parents sometimes.
She was closer to Sebastian than any of us, but only because they were closer in age.
I remember they shared clothes and accessories when they were both into the punk scene and wore black make-up and shirts stitched with safety pins.

With nothing to say to me, she just walked away and went back into the house like she always did when she was tired of listening.
Clare was unable to communicate with any of us very well except Sebastian, it seemed.
It would be useless to ask him to talk to her because he had the same issues with drugs, and rather than try to console her or find out what’s bothering her, he’d
probably
want to bum valium from her if he found out she had any.
Ever s
ince Jake was born, I was pretty sure she’d given up pot and cigarettes.
I don’t even think she drank anymore
, but the pills
worried me
.
 

Jake was the answer to our prayers that Mom would never get a phone call in the middle of the night telling her Clare was behind bars
—
or worse
—
dead.
She was still young and a bit immature, and still rolled her eyes at her older si
b
lings when they spoke to her, but Clare was a good mother.
She had a steady good-paying job, a nice downtown apartment, and she could afford Jake’s daycare on her own.

Back inside the house, Clare was sitting on the sofa with Jake and attempting to keep his hands off her coffee mug. The boxes she’d brought in lay beside her.
Mom was sitting opp
o
site her holding a mug for me.
I had the odd feeling I’d interrupted a hushed conversation between them.
Mom stood up and took a few boxes from me, placing them on the floor.
I sat the rest under the tree and took the hot coffee from her.

“Thank
s, Mom
,” I said, wrapping my bare hands around the coffee mug to warm them.

“Why don’t you sit down and visit with your sister?
I’m going to attend to some things in the kitchen,” Mom said.

I got up to arrange Clare’s gifts under the tree.
From the corner of my eye, I caught her rolling her eyes at me.
She bounced Jake on her knee, content with pretending I wasn’t in the room.
This awkward silence between us was typical.
We didn’t dislike each other.
She was the youngest, and she and Sebastian had been equally rebellious compared to us other kids.
I don’t think there was any resentment she housed pa
r
ticularly against me.

With Jake, she’d had to grow up fast and I think the transition from her teenage years into her twenties was still ta
k
ing place.
Although, before the age of sixteen she’d probably ill
e
gally done most of the things you are not supposed to do until you are twenty-one
.
Clare was still
poorly
clinging to the days of being daddy’s little girl.
The look on her face now was just a facade
she could almost keep
in a jewelry box
with her belon
g
ings.
We were quite accustomed to seeing it.

“She’ll grow out of it
. Sebastian did
,” Mom would say when we’d speak about Clare’s anger.

Sebastian was never really angry.
He was too strung out to hold defenses against anyone.
Although he was a loser in high school, he was quite popular as the class clown.
He flunked almost everything or was kicked out of class, but Mom made him finish.
He begged her to let him quit and get his
GED
, but she just knew he’d end up in a fast food joint flipping burgers.
After five years of high school, he ended up there anyway for a while.
Now, he was a bartender in some college pub.
Co
m
pletely emerged in the party lifestyle of never ending m
u
sic, drugs, beer, and girls, Sebastian wasn’t much different from Clare.
He just knew how to make
better with
the cards life had dealt him.

It’s not fair to say his life was supposed to turn out this way.
Sebastian could have straightened up and studied harder.
He could have
gone
to college and bec
a
me a doctor or lawyer, but Mom and Dad never pushed us to do anything we didn’t want to do.
They just wanted each of us to be happy, so I didn’t feel sorry for Sebastian.
He certainly didn’t feel sorry for himself
, and never asked for our sympathy
.
The cards he’d been dealt were the ones he was content with playing.

“So you have a really nice apartment in
Memphis
,” Clare said from behind me.

“Why are you asking?”

“I’m not asking.
Sebastian told me.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.
He said he had a really good time staying with you.”

“He told you about staying with me?”

“Yeah.
Why wouldn’t he?”

“He told me not to let anyone know he was there.”

“He went there to dry out.”

I didn’t know why Clare was bringing all of this up.
Seba
s
tian had either already told her everything, or she was fishing for information.
Sebastian got pretty messed up after losing a girlfriend back in the summer.
He called me in the early mor
n
ing one night and wanted to drive down right then to stay with me for a few days.
He needed to get away.
By the time the cops were looking for him, I had convinced him to at least call the police department and let them know where he was.
He had nothing to hide, but coming to
Memphis
definitely looked like he was trying to run away from what had happened.

“Clare, if you ever need a place to stay—”

“
I
don’t.”

“I’m just offering.”

“Thanks
,
but no thanks.”

“Clare, just listen to me.
I know you’ve never really had a chance to get away from this place, this town, and I know what that can be like.
If you ever need a break, just call me.
Jake can come
too
if you want.”

“It’s easy for you to run off to your skyscrapers at the end of the day.”

“It’d been harder to stay in this small town.
I don’t know how you do it.”

“This is home,” she said.

“And it will always be home to me too, but sooner or later the birds leave the nest.
You can’t sit there and tell me honestly that you are happy
still
living here
in Ruby Dregs
, can you?”

“Is everything okay in here?
Travis, why are you yel
l
ing?”
Mom asked, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize I was.”

I walked to the front door as if someone was knocking, or as if I was going to walk outside into the snow, anything to e
s
cape the tension I’d created.
Lucky for me, I noticed a small red car pulling up into the driveway.

“Whose red car?”
I asked out loud.

“Sebastian,” Mom and Clare said practically in unison.

Sebastian

Going to Mom’s for Christmas was a lot like detox.
I usually didn’t drink or smoke anything for two days before.
I also would wash whatever I planned to wear at least twice or ha
ve
it dry cleaned if I had the money.
I brushed my teeth for an hour the night before and that morning, and chewed half a pack of gum while driving there.

It was rare for me not to smell like booze or smoke, e
s
pecially since I worked in a bar.
My siblings were well aware of my addictions and weaknesses.
If one of them wasn’t stan
d
ing by at the hospital while my stomach was getting pumped, then they were visiting me in an actual detox facility.
I spent at least a week or two there during each year of high school.
I was pulled over for drunk driving before I was eighteen.
Mom and Dad left me in jail for the night, hoping it’d “scare some sense” into me.
I stayed sober for
only
about a week, but I did stay out from behind the wheel
long
after that.

Getting a job in a bar didn’t help.
Mom frowned at the idea and said I was putting the nails in my coffin, but at least I was earning a paycheck.
She no longer had to pay my rent or buy my groceries.
Kids always seem to gravitate toward whatever the
ir
parents fear the most, at least for a little while.
Once Clare got pregnant, the
ir
interventions
toward me
stopped.

I was the kid who was just trying to get by.
I had no plans for the future.
I lived for today and that was about it.
I would have dropped out of high school if Mom would have let me.
The words ‘when are you going to do something with your life’ stopped after Dad died.
We all learned that our time t
o
gether was precious, but for me it was just another excuse to drink.
The excuses came to a halt when I met Lind.

Although I had
no
children of my own, I knew what it must be like for a parent to lose a child to the poisons under the sink or the unlocked gun cabinet.
They are the news stories we take for granted when they happen to someone else, but also the blame that beats us up when the mistake
does
happen to us.
We shake our head in sorrow at the disturbing front page news, but have forgotten all about it by the time we are reading the fu
n
nies.
It feels a lot different when we become the headlines.

I’m not talking about my Dad.
He woke up and died in the middle of the night
from
a stroke.
Losing him was a diffe
r
ent kind of pain.
I still felt empty inside, but it was more like lo
s
ing a best friend.
With my sisters arms wrapped around my waist, or my own arms wrapped around my mother’s neck, I knew I wasn’t feeling this way alone.
In time
,
that pain healed
even though it might have left a scar on the inside.
The sic
k
ness I’m tal
k
ing about has never gone away.

I wonder sometimes if it’s the way Mom felt that night.
Dad probably shook her from her peaceful sleep to get her to call for an ambulance.
She probably bursts into tears, unaware of what she could possibly do to help him.
There was nothing to do.
She sat
o
n the floor
next to the bed
and held his hand, and he went.
A piece of her, deep inside somewhere where those feelings are kept, died with him.
That’s the ache I’m tal
k
ing about.
I just can’t kick it.

I first met Lind at work.
I was doing five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, at a bar called Zero’s over on the end of The Row.
That’s what we call
ed
the line of buildings across the street from the fraternity houses.
It
’s
an old shopping mall now home to mostly frat bars.
There
wa
s a gas station at one end and an all night diner on the other.
A coffee shop, a tex
t
book outlet, and a laundry mat br
o
k
e
up the neon bar signs.

Lind was short for Lindsey.
She was dancing with the wall on a slow Wednesday night
.
She played horrible 80
’
s m
u
sic on the jukebox most of the evening.
I would have threatened to unplug it on her but she fed my tip jar
three or four bucks for every beer she drank, and two hours into my shift she’d em
p
tied about six bottles.
Soon, we were the only two in the bar.
After wasting a few quarters between the video games and the pool table, she settled down on a bar stool to flirt with me.

“You got a girlfriend?”
she asked.

“Nope,” I said, wiping down the bar
, stocking the cooler,
and going through the typical routine of a bartender tr
y
ing to look busy
to
pass the time.
“What about you?”

“I don’t date girls,” she snickered.
It was a loud animal-like laugh through the nose.

“Got a boyfriend?”
I asked.
Drunken
bubbly sor
ori
ty
girl humor never fazed me.

“Nope.
Not anymore.
Tonight, I’m celebrating being single again.”

I refrained from asking any more questions.
It was the number one rule of bartending on a slow night.
Never open the door to confessional.
It could be hours before any one else walked in if at all, and I didn’t want to make the night go by any slower by having to listen to her cry and bitch about why her boyfriend
left her
.
Smashed
girls and sob stories don’t mix, and I found it highly unusual that she was out celebrating alone.
Usually there’s a flock of girls in here when a relatio
n
ship has called it quits.

Some regulars wandered in for a game of pool.
More guys came in to celebrate a basketball game victory, and some more from a study break. Lind lost herself in the crowd of jocks and frat guys, flirting with them all.
As my shift picked up, she fell out of sight and out of mind.
I assumed she’d left until one of the guys came up and told me some girl was passed out on the bathroom floor.

I got
him
to help me pick her up and put her in a booth.
Some guys, who had crowded around
to watch
, joked about taking advantage of her.
I was afraid
that someone
already had.
Her pants were unzipped.
She might have just fallen
off the toilet
, but I still feared the worst.
I called a
chick
bartender from the joint next door for advice.
She had coverage so she offered to come over and help.
She checked Lind’s pockets for an ID.
The address on her license was local.
We conte
m
plated calling her a cab.
Lind woke up just as we were looking through the nu
m
bers on her cell.
 

“Can we call you a cab?”
I asked.

She shook her head no.
“Call Shelly.
She’s my roo
m
mate.
She’ll come and get me.”

A few weeks later, Lind was in the bar again on my shift.
I was relieved to see Shelly with her.
Lind seemed much more reserved and together
this time
.
She sipped one beer for about an hour while sitting in the corner talking to Shelly.
I caught myself looking at her several times, unsure if it was the same reckless girl who’d been in here that night.
I spoke up when Shelly came to the bar to buy another round.

“How’s she doing?”

“Hey, thanks for calling me that night.
Lind doesn’t even remember.
That was a tough week for her.
Her boyfriend was killed in
Iraq
.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.
I hope she’s okay.”

Lind certainly wasn’t the first
inebriated
girl
I’d picked up off the floor at Zero’s
or at any of the other bars I’d worked at
, and a couple of them I’d put into cabs more than once.
They’d drowned their sorrows in cheap beer for flunking a test, cel
e
brated
a twenty-first
birthday, or finally graduated from college.
The difference between them and Lind was that most of the time, there was a friend here
for them
.

My only intervention was usually calling a cab, handing out bottled water, or making an ice pack.
The fact that Lind had been here alone that night
still
intrigued me.
Shelly was obviously a friend, but where was she that night when Lind needed her most?
Suddenly, Lind seemed more appealing.