Are You Sitting Down? (16 page)

“No.”

“Did someone break in?”

Neither of us dared to go up the stairs to find out.
Soon, the cop emerged escorting a woman with her hands cuffed b
e
hind her back.

“Who is that?”
Travis asked.

“It’s Shelly.
Lind’s best friend,” I said.

“Why is she here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Murderer!”
s
he yelled at me as the cop put her in the back seat of his car.

Shelly had broken into my apartment to steal Lind’s purse.
It still contained around a dozen bottles of valium.
I don’t know if she wanted it for personal reasons or to make me look guilty
of being responsible for Lind’s death
.
Probably both.
We had arrived just in time to stop her.
The detective told me that if she had gotten away, the story I’d told him would have looked false and I would have been arrested.
Lind’s purse would have most likely disappeared, and I’d been sent to jail.

Lind had no family
, or
at least
no relatives who cared to
press charges against me.
A bag of cocaine found in Lind’s purse cleared me of
the responsibility of possession
for the drugs that killed her.
A receipt in her purse from a gas station near her apartment confirmed she’d bought the beer we drank that night.
The marijuana they found in my apartment was mine, but luckily we had not used it.

With nothing
firm
to charge me, the judge gave me a break.
The amount of drug paraphernalia
found in Shelly and Lind’s apartment was proof to the judge that Lind was ga
m
bling with her own life and it was only a matter of time before something like this would have happened.
My old
er
brother Martin
agreed to drive me
back to
Memphis
to
pick up my car a few days later.
Travis took off from work to st
ay in town and offer his support if I needed it.

“Hey, wasn’t this your girlfriend?”
A guy asked me one night at the bar.
He was holding up a newspaper with Lind’s death as the front page cover story.

After the cops let me go, I picked up a few shifts at Zero’s.
They didn’t want me to leave town for a few days, not even to go get my car.

“No, she wasn’t my girlfriend.” I said.
I was hoping to stay out of the public eye.

“Sure, she was.
You woke up next to her dead body, right?”
t
he guy continued to harass me.

“Hey, man, I don’t want to talk about it,” I said trying to keep things low.

“This guy sleeps with dead chicks,” he said, laughing with his buddies.

I refrained from jumping across the bar and hitting him.
Ignoring another guy’s taunts two nights later got a beer thrown in my face.
The manager of the bar suggested I take a few weeks off until things
calmed
down.
I was too afraid to drink or smoke anything, just knowing the cops would call me back in and bust me for something.
I was walking on egg shells, and not having a job to occupy my mind w
as going to
drive me i
n
sane.

Lind might have been dead, but her soul was not resting peacefully.
She haunted my dreams.
I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat on the floor.
I just couldn’t sleep in that bed where she had died.
After several sober and sleepless nights, I got a phone call from the detective.
I was all clear of any charges and anything to do with Lind
.
The case was closed as a
wrongful death.
Finally, I could go to
Memphis
and pick up my car.
I could have a drink, or two, or three and smoke a joint.

Instead of a bottle of vodka clearing my head, it made it worse.
I tried to go out to a bar, but everywhere I looked I saw Lind.
Every girl on the dance floor had her face.
The more I drank the more dead she looked, skin peeling and bugs craw
l
ing out of her mouth and eyes
as she called me a murderer
.
I bought a dime bag of coke from someone, hoping it would numb my brain.

A buddy of mine gave me two pills that I chased with a
few
shot
s
of tequila.
He said it would help me chill.
Instead, it sent the room spinning.
Now, Lind’s face was every face in the room, men and women.
I crashed to the floor a
s
several Linds hovered over me.
They were asking if I was alright, but all I heard was “Murderer!
Murderer! Murderer!” over and over again.

I woke up in the back of Martin’s car.
He and Travis were in the front seat.
I felt like I’d been asleep for days, but they told me only a few hours had passed.
Martin was taking
us
back to
Memphis
.
Travis was going to let me stay with him for a few days to
“
straighten my life out.
”

I d
id
n’t know how I was going to do that.
I didn’t have much of a life to figure out.
I was twenty-two years old and had probably killed enough brain cells from so much intoxication that I should probably be legally deemed a teenager all over again.
The only job I’d ever held was in a bar.
I’d worked as a bar back right out of high school, and as a waiter for a year, finally moving my way up to tending bar.
I wasn’
t like Martin or Travis.
They’d taken the
right
path and gone to college.
They’d settled down and got good paying jobs.
The pieces of my puzzle didn’t fit together like that.
Although I’d run away to his place just two weeks ago, unsure where to go actually, I didn’t want to spend days with my fag brother so he could r
e
mind me all the time about getting my shit together.
I’d heard enough of that from Mom over the past few years.

I should have gone to stay with Clare, but I agreed to Travis and Martin’s plan instead.
Besides, they had the keys to my car, and I’d need their help moving out of my apartment when I came back home.
As soon as I got back to
Ruby Dregs
, I was definitely going to find a new place to live.
There was no way I could stay in my old place after what had happened there with Lind.

It’
d
been six
weeks
since then.
No twelve-step pr
o
grams.
No Alcoholics Anonymous.
At Travis’s place, he didn’t preach to me one bit.
He even took me out to a night club after a few nights in
Memphis
.
He bought me a couple of drinks and drove
us
home
afterwards
.
After a week, he gave me my keys and told me to be safe driving home
; he was letting me go all on my own
.
He drove up a week later and he and Martin helped me move into an apartment across town.

I don’t know why none of them, not even Mom, said anything scolding
to
me since the phone call with Mom the day I ran away.
It’s as if they were finally treating me like an adult.
It almost worried me.
I expected the finger pointing and ranting from them, at least from Mom.

“Why is everyone pretending nothing happened?”
I asked out loud at the dinner table that night.
Mom had offered to fix a meal for us after a long day of moving my stuff.

“We’re not pretending,” Martin said.

“No one has said anything about all of this,” I said.

“What do you want us to say?”
Mom asked.

“I don’t know.
I’ve been building myself up for a long counseling session from all three of you, an hour of ‘I told you so,’ especially from you Mom.”

“We’re tired of all that,” Mom said.

“What?”

“Sebastian, we’ve wasted our breath trying to talk to you.
Telling you to stop drinking and stop running around with the wrong crowd has been a waste of time.
It’s time you took r
e
sponsibility for your own actions,” Mom said.

“I didn’t kill that girl.”

“
I
didn’t say you did.
But that girl was a drug addict you’d been dating for some time.
Both of you were drunk
and snif
f
ing cocaine.
I’m not saying it doesn’t matter that she died that night, but you were passed out on the floor.
You were pract
i
cally knocking on death’s door yourself.”

“I’m okay—
”

“You’re okay now, and I’m thankful for it.
But what about the next time?
You’re not a cat, Sebastian.
You don’t have nine lives, so I don’t know why you constantly toy with the one you do have.
As soon as the cops dismissed you from the charges, what did you do?
You went to a bar and right back to your old habits.”

“Okay, fine. Whatever.”

The slap across my cheek came from nowhere, a mot
h
erly reflex as if she were killing a fly in the kitchen in mid-air.
It stung my face and brought uncontrollable tears to my face.

“Whatever?
Is that how you feel about your life?
Wha
t
ever!
If that’s how you feel, then why in the hell do you sit here at my table and ask why we haven’t said anything?
You don’t listen to us,
so
we’re all tired of talking
!
”