I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (12 page)

Speck adored me, and I could never forgive her for that. We were fucking in the basement one day, and she was saying all kinds of crazy stuff—how she would die for me, how she could touch my skin in the dark and instantly know it was me. She whispered my name in my ear, my full, loathsome name: “I love you, Mikhail Valerian Shubaly.”

I threw her off me. She drew a ragged breath, and before she could begin crying, I heard the sounds of Paul fucking my mother upstairs. I told Speck I never wanted her to touch me again. She left, and this time she didn't come back.

At the end of the summer, my mother got downsized. Such a despicable practice, both the bloodless elimination of jobs for corporate
profits and the act of concealing it in a meaningless word like “downsizing,” blunting the blade so it looks less dangerous. And hurts more. Was America bent on destroying us?

My mom and Paul made plans to abandon the United States for a caretaking gig in the Virgin Islands with Tashina in tow. My mom finally seemed to be coming around to a hard truth Tashina and I had accepted long ago: Fuck the world. In the eye. Straight to hell. Forever.

Tatyana had cruised efficiently through college, gotten her degree in electrical engineering, and moved to California, where she was pulling down big bucks doing some Internet thing I didn't understand. My father was barely a voice on the other end of the phone. Would I be okay left to my own devices with no adult supervision? Sure, Mom, what could go wrong?

I moved into a college slum blocks away from our old house with Sam Sacks, a movie geek from Boston who had befriended me—the helpless leading the hopeless. I quit my job moving furniture and quickly blew through the money I'd saved as my drinking ratcheted up, a reliable solace in the dark. I had to plead for my old job at IHOP. I made less money at the grill, but it was impossible to move furniture with a hangover.

I studied hard every day and slung pancakes all weekend: the good son. But I was isolated in a relentless circuit: rising, throwing up, going to class, drinking and studying till I passed out. More than once, I awoke in the night, crying hard enough to wake Sam in the other room. Part of me knew I was making progress toward my degree and my plan for revenge. The rest of me just wanted to set the entire thing on fire.

Riley called me drunk in the middle of the night. She had tracked me as I had tracked her in Great Barrington. She was unhappy, she missed me, she loved me. I sold my Bronco at a heartrending loss,
then convinced Sam we had to drive halfway to Washington to meet Riley and her roommate in Idaho.

Riley was more erratic than ever. Drunk, she was abusive and even dangerous. It didn't matter: we were in love. I finally had something of my own, our nation of two. Nothing else mattered.

At my mother's urging, I went to the Virgin Islands for the summer. Paul assured me there was work. There was no work. But the drinking age was eighteen, so I drank the local $2.19-a-bottle rum and obsessed over Riley, who was attending a dance program in Maryland. I wrote her letters daily, called her nightly with the calling card my father gave me to call him until he caught on and canceled it. One day, I drank a liter of rum, woke up in my own urine, and suffered some kind of weird nervous collapse, unable to make even the most trivial of decisions for several days. Finally, a menial construction gig came through, removing the internal plywood forms and cleaning newly poured concrete cisterns for a housing development. Brutal work, but I was no stranger to that.

Three weeks before we were to move to Denver so we could start our lives together, Riley erased herself from my life: letters returned, phone ringing and ringing. I attacked the labor at my job passionately, crawling out of cisterns drenched in sweat, coated head to toe in gray concrete dust, my hands torn and bloody, coughing up chunks of clay on my lunch break. After work, I helped Paul break rocks and dig fence-post holes on the property, anything to keep myself from thinking about what had happened, what lay ahead.

I landed in Denver in September, $1,000 in my pocket, unemployed, heartbroken, no place to stay.

Sam took me in. He met me at the airport and drove me back to his apartment, a beery second-story crash pad with a rotating cast of ne'er-do-wells, including Conor, a bartender who was more than happy to serve me despite my being six months shy of twenty-one, and Judah, the only guy I'd met outside Simon's Rock who
drank more than I did. The landlord on the first floor despised us. For a heartbroken twenty-year-old, it was a heaven, of sorts. I set about diligently drinking my way through the money I had saved.

I awoke one night, fully clothed, one shoe off, lying on my back in Judah's bed. The moon was shining through the window, and it was pleasantly cool. I was incredibly thirsty. It took me a minute to get my other shoe off and stand up. I was surprised when I stumbled on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water, because I felt totally sober. I drank two glasses of water and washed my face. I walked around the apartment, calling Sam's name a couple of times. No answer.

Sam's room was dark when I opened the door, so I turned the light on. His bed was empty, a yellow mattress with roses printed on it, a fuzzy blue blanket, a pillow waxy from his pomade, no sheets. I needed desperately to talk to Sam, or someone, anyone. I mixed myself a mug of rum on ice and went back into Judah's room to look at my pictures of Riley.

Riley had sent me two pictures of herself at Yellowstone before I left for St. John. In my favorite she was standing in front of Old Faithful as it was shooting off. One cloud in the brochure-blue sky, assorted tourists in the background. They struck me as unnaturally candid and corny, as if they weren't actual tourists but extras hired for a photo shoot. Some fluorescent letters were silk-screened onto the back of someone's T-shirt, and I could almost make out what they said. Maybe “I Blew My Top at Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Monument.” Or maybe “The Seven Stages of Tequila.” Or maybe “Mishka, You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake.”

Riley was standing in front, missing all the action by facing the camera. Hands on her waist, elbows out. One hip was thrust to the side, as if those hard hip bones had just sprung up under her skin overnight and she hadn't quite figured out how to wear them yet. There was a slit up one side of her cutoffs where the seam
had come unraveled and the white threads trickled down onto her pale, froggy legs. She was wearing a red-and-white-striped T-shirt. The material had been carefully stitched at the arms so that the stripes lined up with the rest of the shirt, encircling her forever, a perfect circuit, like Old Faithful erupting every seventy-some minutes, tourists returning year after year like sunburnt pilgrims. Riley's hair glowed red in the sun like heated metal. Was it hot on her head? Did red hair somehow react to the sun, as certain species of fish only breed under a full moon?

Her eyes were circumspect, one eyebrow slightly crooked from a childhood tumble off her bike. I squinted at the picture and turned it in the light, looking for a clue. Riley was smiling tentatively—great popsicle-red lips, but they were closed, no teeth. She looked tired. Had she been posing like that all day, all summer, all the time I had been gone, the real natural wonder at the national park? Maybe at the end of the season, the Yellowstone rangers took her cutoffs and T-shirt and put them in a pressurized chamber to prevent dry rot, then made her crawl into a tiny, Riley-shaped pit of murky sulfur water under the boardwalk. She would hibernate the entire winter, the volcanic chemicals keeping her fresh, keeping her hair incandescent for the next season's amateur photographers.

The second picture was darker. Riley wore a light-gray jacket, leaning on a weathered wood railing overlooking the silty, bubbling pool. Her stubbornly red hair seemed gray, limp, and defeated. The light in the picture was evening light—no, more mournful than just the end of a day; something bigger was coming to an end. Her lips were waning red, pressed into another tight, painful smile. What's the matter, Riley? If I were there, I'd kiss that close-lipped smile right off your face. Please, Riley, throw your head back, laugh, open mouth, teeth.

I felt something break loose inside me. I was coming unwound. I dug in my cardboard box of clothes for another bottle of rum. When I raked from the bottom up, I unearthed a gallon Ziploc bag
of seashells. I lifted the plastic bag out of the box and emptied it on the carpet in the moonlight.

The seashells were beautiful, of course, but also sinister. Loosely piled there, ridges gleaming between folds of shadow like wet human ears. I'd spent a whole afternoon walking around on the beach after a storm on St. John picking them up for Riley—tiny coiled snail shells, perfect miniature scallops, the pink, oval skeletons of black sea urchins. It all seemed so fucking useless now. I grabbed handfuls of them and threw them out Judah's open window.

I needed Sam now. I called information and got the number for the Taj Mahal, Conor's bar. Conor answered after about ten rings. He was slurring, and I could tell by his voice that he was surprised to hear from me. No, he said, Sam wasn't there; he had shown up to get me but left when Conor told him he'd already dumped me in a cab. Conor asked me if I got home okay, but I hung up.

I called my mom in the Virgin Islands even though I knew it was long distance, even though I knew she was on vacation with Paul somewhere. I figured I would get Tashina, and she could give me the number where they were. I let it ring and then hung up just before the answering machine could pick up. I tried again, hung up again.

The third time I called, somebody picked up. I said, “Hello?
Hello?
”

When I called back, it was busy. Tashina must have just knocked the phone off the hook. I realized it was two hours later there and a school night.

I cried for a little while. Then I decided to call Riley's mother. I knew Riley wasn't going to be there, but I just wanted to talk to somebody who knew her. I dialed the number by heart. Her mom picked up the phone. She sounded sleepy. She always did when I called her in the middle of the night.

I said, “Hello? Is this Sandy?”

She sighed. “Hi, Mishka.”

“I'm sorry for calling, Sandy. Did I wake you up?”

“No, no, no, I was just falling asleep.”

That's what people always say when you wake them up.

“I'm sorry, Sandy. I swear I won't call again. I just wanted to make sure Riley was alright.”

Of course she was alright. I knew because I'd had a panic attack one morning after a night of Riley dreams, and I'd called her house and grilled her little sister's babysitter.

“Oh, she's fine. She got accepted to the Washington, DC, ballet, and so she's out there. Do you want her number?”

“I know she doesn't want to talk to me.” My voice started to crack a little bit. “I just wanted to make sure that she was okay.”

“How long has it been since you talked to her?”

“About two months.”

“Oh, Mishka, I'm sorry. I can't make any excuses for her. When Riley doesn't know what to do, she doesn't do anything. She was trying to get in touch with you, I know, but she didn't know where you were.”