Mourning Becomes Cassandra (17 page)

“By yourself? Did you get a promotion?”

Nadina snorted. “Nah, we just had a lot of dogs today.”

She led me into the separate, glassed-off grooming center and pointed proudly at an immaculate Cocker Spaniel. All the dogs began barking their heads off when we walked in, and I watched bemused as Nadina went from cage to cage, murmuring to each one with a tranquilizing effect.

“Nadina, you are amazing!” I marveled. “First Benny, now this. You really ought to think about becoming a veterinarian.”

Her eyes lit up briefly, before doubt shadowed them. “Man, Cass, I don’t even know if I’m gonna make it through high school. But, hey, being a vet would give me all kinds of access to drugs. Did you know lots of dog drugs and people drugs are basically the same, only the dog drugs are cheaper because they don’t have to get FDA approval?”

I frowned at her. “That knowledge will come in handy when you’re stricken with heartworm. What a criminal mind you have! Besides, if you get through high school and college and veterinary school, it’ll be because you managed to kick the drugs and alcohol.”

She rolled her eyes. “You sound like all my teachers and counselors now. Look, I told you I don’t hardly use now, and if my friends and I want to get stoned on a weekend or go to a party when there’s nothing else going on, it doesn’t hurt anyone. I’m going to school, right?” When I didn’t answer, she groaned, “God, Cass, haven’t you ever even been drunk or anything? Your idea of fun is going to church and working on that dumb
Star Wars
book.” She opened the Cocker Spaniel’s cage and plopped him on the stainless steel grooming table so that she could clean out his crate.

“I have too been drunk before—a few times,” I objected.

It was true, but I hadn’t thought about it in at least a decade. When Troy and I graduated high school, I insisted we head off to college unencumbered. He wanted to stay together, but I wanted to break up. While the hiatus didn’t last long—we were back together by Thanksgiving—the few months apart were more than long enough for me to get into trouble. “I got drunk in college,” I said, “because that’s what everyone did freshman year in the dorms, and I wanted to fit in and try it out, so I got drunk.”

“See?” said Nadina, slinging the dog waste in the trash can. “Sometimes you just need stuff to relax. Even smart people in college. That’s all I’m doing, relaxing and having a little fun with my friends. I mostly stay away from the heavy shit now, even when Mike and his friends do it—”

“I didn’t think getting drunk was fun or relaxing!” I interrupted. “I would wake up smelling like barf or with my shirt on backwards, feeling totally used and trashy the next day. I could hardly look at anyone because I had fuzzy memories of acting like an idiot. Not to mention making out with guys my sober self wouldn’t even consider. If it was fun at the time, it didn’t seem worth it later. After a few nights like that I kept it to one drink per party, and I found different friends who wanted something else out of life. Don’t you want something else out of life?”

“Like what?”

“Like—like purpose and meaning,” I floundered. “Like becoming the person you were created to be.”

“What?” Nadina looked stumped. “I don’t know! I haven’t thought about it,” she said defensively. “What’s wrong with my life and my friends?”

“I just wonder if your friends always want what’s best for you. Like, do you have any friends who don’t use?” When she didn’t answer, I ventured, “Do you and Sonya use together?”

Scowling, Nadina began brushing the Cocker Spaniel so hard that he whimpered a little. “Sonya says she’s gonna do what the counselors say and go to rehab. We didn’t do anything together—we just got hammered a few times at her house with her brother. Just beer and stuff from her parents’ liquor cabinet. What all teenagers do.”

“So if Sonya goes to rehab and decides she’s going to be sober, how are you going to help her?”

Nadina exhaled loudly, suddenly angry. “I don’t know, Cass! Why are you riding me today? Just keep out of my fucking business, okay? I already have enough people trying to tell me what to do!”

So much for my Trust-Building training. I obviously needed remedial lessons, and in the meantime, my blood pressure was rising. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Nadina. I’m just asking you questions because I don’t understand why you would—”

“You don’t know anything about my life,” she exploded, setting some of the caged dogs whining. “You think because you’re my ‘mentor’ and spend a little time with me you can start judging me and my friends? You think you know what my life is like? You think ʼcause you went to your fancy college and live in your fancy house and have all those goody-goody friends that you’re better than me?”

“Better than you?” I echoed, keeping my voice as steady as I could. We had learned in our last mentor training that addict behavior could involve irrational aggression, lying, and fighting, but it was still hard to let it roll off me when Nadina was so in-my-face with it. I held up my hands to interrupt: “Just hang on right there, Nadina—where do you get off thinking that about me?”

She responded by slamming her own hands down on the grooming table. I don’t know if she even heard me. “You think you have better friends and a better life?” she shrieked. “Just because you don’t use? You use, Cass. You just call it different things. Mike says—Mike says—your church and all your do-good stuff is just a—a crutch to make you feel better about yourself. He says you’re just a lonely, sorry-ass person with a dead husband and a dead kid!”

Any well-trained mentor detachment I had cultivated to this point fell away from me sharply. Aggression, fine. Irrationality, fine. But this was below the belt. She was panting now, and I was panting, and we faced each other across the shiny grooming table like enemies. The dog between us whimpered nervously, but neither of us bothered to comfort it. I could feel rage and pain clawing their way from my stomach to my throat, and I wanted to lash out at her. Stupid girl! Stupid, vicious, hurtful, ungrateful girl! Feeling that old tightening in my chest, I gripped the table to stay upright. Count, Cass. Count to twenty. Make that fifty.

When I finally managed to speak, my voice was shaking. “Yes, Nadina, Mike’s right. I am a lonely, sorry-ass person with a dead husband and a dead kid, and I am no better than you or anyone else on this planet, and I’m worse than some. All of us need a little help to get through life: I know it, and you know it, and Mike knows it, and God knows it. Everyone’s got a crutch, but some of the things we use for crutches are God-given gifts, and other things are just going to break off in our hands and make us hurt worse than ever. The drugs don’t love you. The alcohol doesn’t love you.” I wanted to say that I was pretty sure Mike didn’t love her either, but my courage and my anger failed me there. I felt my shoulders sag as the emotion drained, and I just felt defeated. “I’d better go.”

Nadina was still glaring at me, but suddenly her eyes were welling up. “So that’s it? I pissed you off and now you’re not going to hang out with me anymore?”

“What?”

She hammered on the table with her fist and the dog yelped and peed. “You heard me! I pissed you off, and now you’re not going to be my mentor?”

“God almighty, Nadina—you want me to be?” I demanded, perplexed.

Some of her tears overflowed, and she dashed them away angrily. “I’m not going to see you anymore, am I?”

She was incomprehensible. After turning on me like a wild animal and laying me open, she tells me that, actually, she’d like to keep me? Shaking my head, I put a tentative hand on her arm, which she instantly flung away. “If you want to see me, you’ll see me.” What did she want? What did I want? With an effort, I added, “And, Nadina, I apologize. I didn’t mean to come across like I was judging you and your friends. I—I don’t know you very well yet, and I certainly don’t know your friends, and trust takes a long time to earn. I meant it out of concern. I’m sorry.”

To my alarm, her face crumpled, and she started crying in earnest, burying her face in the fur of the now-truly-anxious Cocker Spaniel. I tried to pat her shoulder. “Shhhhh. Nadina, it’s okay. For Pete’s sake, you’ll mess up your nice grooming job. Put the dog back and clean up the pee and calm down. I think your manager’s coming over.”

“That bitch?” Nadina screeched, hiccupping. She thrust the dog back in its cage and wiped her face quickly on a towel, seconds before a tall, wizened woman with huge glasses and long red fingernails let herself into the grooming center. “BLAISE,” the nametag on her chest proclaimed: “I’m here to help.”

“Nadina?” she asked, in the grainy voice of a seasoned smoker. “Everything okay here?” Her eyes took the scene in, from Nadina’s puffy red eyes to my frazzled expression to the pee on the grooming table, and she added, “Everything okay, ma’am? That your dog?” Indicating the Cocker Spaniel.

I shook my head. “Oh, no. I’m just a friend of Nadina’s. I popped in to say hello, and she wanted to show me what a great job she did on that little fellow. I’ll be going now.”

When I revealed my non-customer status, the manager put her hands on her hips and turned on Nadina. “You know we’re not supposed to let folks wander around the grooming center, and I thought I had you sweeping up that spilled cat litter on 7. You better clean this up and get back out there.”

Considering how Nadina had just torn me to pieces, I didn’t have much hope she’d spare Blaise, but I shook my head warningly behind her manager’s back.

“All right. Sorry, Blaise,” Nadina muttered gruffly to the floor. “See you later, Cass.” I followed Blaise out of the grooming center, relieved to be rescued from my emotional evisceration.

Though I took some time walking around the mall to decompress, it was hard to throw off a general feeling of lowness. Nadina’s boyfriend had a point, though I hated to admit it, since I liked him sight-unseen as little as he liked me: I had volunteered to be a mentor partly to feel better about myself, by trying not to think about myself. Instead I seemed to be thinking about myself more and more, especially when the person I thought I was “helping” seemed so alert to my shortcomings. Was I any help to Nadina? This was the first time I tried to weigh in on her choices; prior to this I only listened and asked questions. But I must have done it badly, to get her so angry and defensive. And if it came down to my opinions or Mike’s, it looked like she was going to go with Mike. And why not? Who was I to her, but some woman she hung out with, once or twice a week for a couple months?

Not only was I hurt by Nadina and feeling blue, but I was mad at God again, to tell the truth. After all, wasn’t it his fault I was a “lonely, sorry-ass person, with a dead husband and a dead kid”? And then, when I try to obey him and get over myself and help someone, that someone, instead of being grateful, sticks a knife in me? I was being melodramatic, I supposed. And being angry that Nadina wasn’t grateful just went to show that I was in it for myself, after all. Case closed.

Having worked myself into an even more anxious state, I decided I would email Mark Henneman before I went to bed that night. Let him know of our disastrous conversation and see what he thought I should do, if anything. He had said early on that we were there to love and encourage—and love didn’t sit around letting someone destroy herself, I knew that in my heart of hearts. How could I let Nadina hurt herself without trying to intervene?

I was in such a dither that I didn’t notice the time passing until it was already past six. Grabbing some random bar of scented soap and lotion for Phyl, I returned home to find all our guests already there and Joanie shooting me questioning looks.

The evening passed in a blur; unlike the Apostle Paul, I was present in body, though absent in spirit. Phyl had dutifully invited Wayne—who, truth be told, did not make much of a first impression in my present state of mind—along with her sister and some of her close friends. Roy was gone to Atlanta on a training trip, having started Monday at Cingular, but Daniel showed up triply buffered against any lingering adoration on Phyl’s part: Wyatt and Delia Collins came, Daniel’s odious friend Tom who had hit on Phyl long ago and was now officially divorced, and a new girlfriend whose name I can’t remember, and since she didn’t even last the typical two-to-three-weeks, I didn’t have a chance to learn it.

For some reason, I found Tom next to me much of the evening. I hadn’t even been watching to see if he’d already tried his luck with Phyl’s other friends or sister, but given my distraction, I rather appreciated his indefatigable willingness to talk about himself. I had only to ask a question now and then and nod and say “oh!” and “hmm…” at the right moments, and he was content to take it from there, while I returned to composing my mental email to Mark Henneman or thought of things I should have said to Nadina. Or things I could say, should we ever speak again. In any case, Tom must have mistaken my preoccupation for fascination because, when Joanie sent me to poke around in the pantry for birthday candles, I was startled to find him following me.

“That’s great that you love backpacking,” he said, leaning an arm nonchalantly on the cereal shelf and blocking my exit out. Backpacking? Me? I thought we’d been talking about him—and the last I recalled, hearing about his recent promotion. I must have really been blanking out. “Maybe you and I should do a little overnight hike on the Peninsula,” he suggested.

I suppose some women would have found Tom attractive. He was wiry and athletic, with skin that was unnaturally tanned for late October in the Northwest. Could he possibly go to a tanning place? Whatever the source, it made his teeth seem particularly white and his eyes quite blue. Clutching the little pack of twisty birthday candles I took a step back from those teeth. “Backpacking? It’s practically November,” I said nervously.

“What’s a little rain or even snow, if you’ve got a nice little campfire and a cozy tent?”

“Did—did your wife like to go backpacking too?”

He looked bewildered. “My ex? What does she have to do with this?” With a wave of his hand he consigned his wife to oblivion and took another step toward me. I could smell the appletini on his breath. “I thought we were really hitting it off tonight, Cass. I know I’m a little out of practice, but I’m trying to ask you out.” Out of practice indeed, when I knew very well I’d seen him tailing Phyl at our first open house! And could he honestly not tell my mind had been a million miles away during his virtual monologues? I’d have to tell James that I really was quite impressive in the acting department, after all.