Authors: Lila Veen
“It’s always helpful when people
actually say how they know people,” Justin says. “But he chose to omit that
important piece of information.”
I shrug. “Perhaps he was making
sure Jack is really dead. I’m guessing Jack owed him some money. Do loan
sharks actually exist?” No one laughs at my pathetic attempt at humor. Maybe
because they don’t think I’m joking. The guy was seriously unreal, like a
character from some police drama show. “Are we really going to this burial?” I
ask. “I have to work tonight.”
“I don’t care,” Devin says. “I’ve
said my goodbyes. I’m done.” I realize that his eyes are puffy. He was
actually crying over our piece of shit father. I’m disgusted and uncomfortable
by this but don’t say anything.
“Why don’t we go get some food?”
Justin suggests. “I haven’t seen you two in so long. It’d be nice to catch
up.” I realize that I’m suddenly ravenous and likely drowning my internal organs
in alcohol. Then I remember that my vomit is just behind the bushes, and my
stomach gurgles at the thought. We all agree to go get pizza at Pisano’s,
which is a south side institution that serves amazing cracker thin crust pizza
with amazing Italian sausage, or “eye-talian” if you’re from the neighborhood.
I eat far too much bread before our pizza arrives and pick at a small square
while Justin and Devin catch up on what they’ve been up to lately. The
conversation revolves mostly around art and photography and local gallery
exhibits and I’m slightly bored but intrigued as to what kind of art Justin
does. He sees that I am not involved in the conversation and graciously
changes the subject. He mentions how his mother is still living in the same
house he grew up in around Elm Forest.
“Does she still cook pounds of food
all at once?” I ask him. Justin looks impressed.
“She does,” he told me. “You have
a good memory.”
“You can’t forget your mom’s
cooking,” Devin agrees. “I miss those huge meals where I felt like I had to
roll home.”
“You two should come by for dinner
sometime,” Justin tells us. “Mom would love to see you both. I’ve got to go
after this and help her out with some things around the house but I’ll ask her
about a date that would work. She can make her famous Bolognese sauce.”
“Okay,” I tell him. We get the
bill and Justin doesn’t let us pay. I get the impression he is far more
financially stable than we are, which is likely why Devin and I don’t do much
protesting. When he leaves I tell Devin “I should probably get back too. I
have to work.”
“That was nice to see Justin,” he
says. I agree with him. “I know how much you hate to be reminded of the past,
Jenna,” Devin begins to say. My heart thumps and I can feel it in my temples.
“When I think about what I remember from that time I get freaked out. I was
there, Jenna, same as you, and even though I didn’t go through what you did, I
saw enough.”
“Devin, don’t,” I plead. I don’t
want to cry. He stops me.
“No, hear me out, Jenna. I’ve
never told you this but I still see a therapist, and it’s helped me with all of
this shit. Maybe you could see her too?”
I’ve had enough. I feel the words
brimming to the surface and I can no longer swallow them and sit quietly. “Fuck
you Devin,” I say. “I can’t fucking believe you are comparing what you saw to
what I went through. This isn’t just some shit in my head I can talk through
and move on from. Dad fucked me up beyond repair. He let men fuck me, Devin,
before I even knew what fucking meant. That isn’t just some shit I can talk
through with a therapist, its part of me. You hate Kate? Guess what? She was
there for me through all of it. She is the only one in the world who
experienced what I experienced. You think that listening to your sister
screaming through a paper thin wall is the same thing as getting fucked at
eight years old? Do you think watching it happen is just like having it happen
to you? Fuck you.” I stand up and snatch my purse off the back of my chair. I
walk away, leaving Devin sitting alone at the table with the most hurt
expression on his face.
I feel terrible about how I just
bitched out Devin when he seemed already pretty upset and ultimately I just
feel terrible about how fucked up my life is. I’m walking down 95
th
Street and fumbling in my purse for a cigarette and sobbing. It’s hot and
awful outside, and I pass people on the street but I don’t really give a shit
how I look. It feels like the worst day of my life but I know I’ve had it way
worse than today actually is.
The train ride is blurry, but
somehow I find myself back at my apartment and getting ready to go dance. I
shower and dress and put on makeup like a robot in a trance. Work is the only
thing I’ve looked forward to all day long and I end up showing up forty minutes
early and sit at the bar and let Carlos pour me drinks and talk to Alicia for a
bit.
“So there was a sexy mafia guy at
your dad’s funeral?” she says. “What was that all about? How old was your
dad?”
“Fifty two,” I tell her, “And as
for the mafia dude, I have no idea,” I reply. I’m drinking straight vodka
tonight. I decide after a day of being drunk on Jameson I should switch to
clear. I can’t really put a finger on my logic, but it seems crisper and less
dirty than the whiskey. “He was just there, he gave his condolences, and then
he left.”
“What was his name?” she asks me.
“What did he look like? Was he single?”
“Dirk?” I say. “Dave Carroll?
Christ, Alicia, I don’t know.”
“Drake Carroll,” Carlos pipes in
from behind the bar, refreshing my glass. “He’s involved in Chicago politics
or something. His brother is running for something political down in
Washington, I think. His father was a state senator back in the day.”
“How do you know all of this?” I
ask him. “I barely know who the vice president is.”
Carlos smirks. “Well, I do more
besides run this bar. Sometimes I read the newspaper. You should try it
sometime.”
Alicia rolls her eyes. “I swear,
Carlos hasn’t even heard of the Internet. Who reads a newspaper?”
Carlos ignores her and goes back to
wiping down glasses. It’s that weird time before the club opens where it’s
empty but DJ Long is spinning haphazardly so chunks of music flip around and we
rotate between speaking normally and shouting. It looks dirty in the
pre-evening light, but today is so marred that I can’t imagine anything looks
particularly good right now from my perspective. At least I’m somewhere I feel
safe.
Alicia and I finish a bottle
between us. I’d like to think we split it but I know I drank more than my
half, and she doesn’t say anything. She knows enough of my problems to piece
together that alcoholism just comes with the territory. Or maybe she feels
guilty that we don’t really have health insurance but we do get paid under the
table. I pick my battles and so does she. I get sufficiently drunk enough to
feel like I’ve fast forwarded to being in my cage. The music is an eerie
jungle beat that makes the bars vibrate in my hands. The automatic lights are
swirling pink, green, gold, red and they make my head spin. My hair is down
and falling around my back, which is cold and wet. I can’t tell if there’s
been a drink poured on me from above or if I’m sweating in air conditioning.
People become a blur in Appleseed
and every now and then I notice something stand out in the crowd. Red shirt.
Blue hair. 400 pounds. Once I saw a gun tucked into some guy’s belt and
flagged down Carlos to point him out. I got a nice bonus that day. No one
wants weapons in the club or you might get the wrong publicity. Normally
people ignore the atmosphere after they take it in for the first few minutes of
being on the dance floor after they’ve had a few drinks in them. Tonight I
feel like someone is watching me and I’m distracted, but I can’t stop. The
only way I can stop and have a look is to grab onto one of the top bars and
hang upside down and glance around, but I’m drunk and attempting it makes me
dizzy, so I continue to sway and dance.
I start at 11:00 pm and dance until
2:00 am with a break around 1:00 am. It’s a long time, and sometimes I’m
clever and put an audio book on my iPhone and listen to it by duct taping the
iPhone to the back of my bra and wiring the headphones through my hair. I
didn’t do that tonight and of course I regret it after an hour, as my mind is
wandering and thinking about Jack and Devin and attempting to remember
something happy about Justin.
Kate sits at the bar, watching me.
She is wearing the gold counterpart to my silver bikini which complements her
amber hair. “There was this one time when you were riding your bike home from
school in the second grade and fell and skinned your knee pretty hard. Devin
was ahead of you riding with friends of his and didn’t want to stay behind and
wait for his little sister. You sat on the sidewalk and cried for an hour and
Justin was the one friend of Devin’s who rode back because he didn’t know where
you were and carried you home.”
“Before you were here,” I say. It’s
a sweet memory. “What else?”
“Not all memories are good,” Kate
tells me. “I can’t tell you everything without talking about anything bad.”
“I don’t give a shit tonight,” I
reply. “Today was all bad and I’m alive. Maybe I can live with knowing it
all.”
“Not all of it,” she says. “Even I
don’t remember all of it.”
“Who were they?” I ask her. “How
many?”
“I don’t know who they were,” she
says. “Maybe six or seven…maybe ten or fifteen. They were just older men who
wanted a taste of something young and sweet, and Jack sold it to them for a
price. You probably paid the biggest price.”
“What did I do?” I ask her. Kate
rolls her eyes.
“You’ve talked about it before,”
she says. “Remember years of therapy? Talking about it then did nothing for
you. Why relive it?”
“Because I think I’m ready to
remember and get over it.” She shakes her head.
“Bullshit,” she says. “It will
make you crazy. I mean crazier.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I tell
her. “I think it will help. And that scares the shit out of you. If I’m
better then you’ll be gone.”
She smiles at me sadly. “I’m
already gone.”
I don’t understand, but that’s
okay, maybe I don’t want to. Suddenly things are slowing down, which they do
later in the evening. People are tired and the music gets slower and lower to
match their pace. I’m done for the night and Kate isn’t there. I want out of
this cage, and I want to shower and sleep until the next time I absolutely have
to leave the house. In the locker room I say goodnight to another girl named
Sarah and slip on a white shift dress over a pair of blue lace panties and no
bra. It’s too hot for a bra. I think about how four bottles of whiskey would
be a great way to spend tonight and tomorrow, and I can just go home and lay in
bed naked and not move.
I’m walking out onto Rush Street and
I hear him. “Hello Jenna,” he says. His voice is warm, dark honey. I whirl
around and he’s standing against the wall. He looks more casual. He’s lost
the suit and exchanged it for tight black jeans and a black shirt that shows
off his very defined chest.
“You’re that guy from this
morning,” I say. “Drake?” He nods and stands watching me while I light my
cigarette. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” he says. He
makes me self-conscious and I wish I’d worn a bra because I can feel my nipples
getting hard, even though it feels like Dante’s eighteenth level of hell
outside. “This is your place of…business, right? I came to pay you a less
than social call.”
I shake my head, trying to clear
the vodka fog. “Are you fucking stalking me or something?”
He smiles and takes my cigarette
out of my mouth and steps on it to put it out. “Somewhat,” he replies, making
my heart beat fast. “I have some business to discuss with you regarding your
father.”
We are at a bar. It’s one of those
5:00 am dive bars where the lights are dark and considering the crowd and the
level of hygiene, it’s for the best. Drake is drinking a beer and I have a
Scotch, neat. He asks me if I’m hungry but I’m really not. I had hoped that
all of the Jack business was over and I could move on with the rest of my life
but my lack of intuition never ceases to amaze me.
“Jack hired me a few months before
he died to manage his estate and draw up a will,” Drake is saying. “I think he
knew he was going to die.” He shrugs. “Some people just do.”
“He drank himself to death,” I say,
taking a long, ironic sip of Scotch. “It was bound to happen. Some of us wish
it had happened a long time ago.” Perhaps before I was ever born, I think and
shudder slightly.
“I think it was intentional,” Drake
says. “But regardless, Jack did have $50,000 and his house, which he’s divided
equally between you and Devin.”
My heart stops cold in my chest and
I feel my throat closing up. My fingertips go up to my temples in an attempt
to not pass out from Drake’s words. Where the fuck did Jack even obtain that
kind of money? I think about this and realize Jack had probably been involved
in more horrible things than I ever could have imagined. As much as I could
use a permanent home and a chunk of change, it doesn’t feel good to me. “I
don’t want Jack’s drug money,” I say. “Won’t some loan shark or the police
just come around seize it from Devin or me if we claim it?”