Love is the Drug Page 4

  It aches to hear his voice, even in her head. She shivers and grabs the card for the flowers, reads the note in one quick rip of the Band-Aid.

  For my Beautiful Girl. Get better soon, Emily. — Paul

  She presses the back of her fist to her mouth to hold back a cry. He was taking her somewhere. Something to do with Roosevelt, but then she hit her head. And after … what happened after?

  Her memory feels like a bruise, painful to the lightest touch. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Keep yourself safe, Bird.

  Safe from what? Safe, how? Had she said that or had Coffee? But how could he have, running hopelessly down the driveway after Paul’s car — too, too late?

  The nurse comes back with a cup of water and a choked smile. “There’s someone here to see you, honey, like I said. Now if you’re too tired, just let me know —”

  But before she can finish, Roosevelt comes through the open door. He’s holding a box of artisanal chocolates and puts them on the bedside table with an apologetic smile. He’s different than she remembers from the party — bags under his eyes a little more pronounced, his demeanor subtly more aggressive.

  “This won’t take very long, Cynthia,” he says. “I’m sure Emily will be fine.”

  Bird feels as if she might faint when she looks at him, so she fixes her gaze firmly on the nurse and takes the cup. She drinks slowly, gathering her courage against the onslaught of formless dread.

  “Will you stay?” she asks the nurse when the water is gone. She feels a little better, but not much.

  The woman looks nervously between Roosevelt and Bird, but Roosevelt shakes his head in a firm negation.

  “I’ll be right outside, Emily,” she says finally. “Just holler if you need anything.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be worried about,” Roosevelt says, getting up to shut the door. The click resonates within her like a firecracker burst. “I just need to talk to you about a few things. A lot has happened since your accident. I wouldn’t want you to get confused about anything. Especially with your parents …”

  Her paper cup clatters to the floor, spilling its last few drops on the scuffed rose-colored linoleum. “What’s happened to them?”

  “They’re safe,” he says. “And doing important work. I can’t tell you where, Emily, but I’m sure you’re used to that.” He pulls up a chair and straddles it backward, trying to look casual and reassuring. But something in his face makes her think he knows it isn’t convincing. She dislikes Roosevelt, distrusts his expensive-casual clothes and carefully bland features. He’s like the worst of the Devonshire girls, a garish shellac of approximated sincerity masking a face whose hints reveal only bare cruelty.

  “Can I talk to them?” Conversations with her parents are always strained, especially over the phone, but she wants to make sure they’re (she makes herself think the word) alive.

  Roosevelt nods slowly, though his eyes say no. “We’ll see. The phone lines have been pretty busy this last week, given, well, why don’t I start at the beginning?”

  The bite of her untrimmed nails against her palms feels like a kiss. She never knew fear could be like this, a gripping, needle-fingered horror that strangles even her thoughts. She never knew you could want to cry from it, or hide from it — as if she would flee her goddamn skin if she could. She understands with sudden clarity that bravery has nothing to do with the absence of fear, but the response to it. She could let Roosevelt terrify her into doing anything he wanted.

  Or she could stare him in the eyes and bide her time. She’ll get out of the hospital. She’ll understand what’s happened to her. She’ll find ways to protect herself.

  “Okay,” she says, her voice like blowing leaves, “why don’t you tell me.”

  Roosevelt adjusts his watch, pushing up his sleeve so she can see that it has a microphone attached. Someone is listening; he wants her to know.

  I hate you, she thinks, and smiles, and feels a breath of calm.

  “Well, Emily, the Venezuelan flu has gone critical. The president declared a national state of emergency the night of your accident, in fact. The DC metro area is under protective quarantine, essentially everything inside the Beltway. All suspected cases have been isolated, and no one else is allowed inside. If you want to leave, it’s a one-way ticket. So far, we’re safe. The news is not so good on the West Coast, I’m afraid to say. I heard you wanted to go to Stanford. I’m sorry.”

  Bird opens her mouth, then closes it. He would know about Stanford. He probably knows everything about her. He’s trying to keep her off-balance.

  “Naturally, there’s a lot of security in the city right now. There’s a curfew and restricted vehicle access and other precautions. But your uncle can tell you about all that. Now, Emily, I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m really here. You’re Carol Bird’s daughter after all. This might come as a surprise, but I’m here to apologize. I’m afraid I’m partly responsible for your accident after the party. They tell me you were doing some drugs and drinking, which you probably regret right now. It impaired your judgment. You wanted to talk to me about your parents, and I agreed to do it in a private place, which I regret, in hindsight.”

  Drugs? Drinking? She remembers the regurgitated flavor of peach schnapps, but not drinking any. And the strongest stuff she’s ever done is pot, and certainly none at the party. She wishes she could form a clearer memory of that last hour.

  “Didn’t Paul drive?” she says, her voice small and confused. Not on purpose, but she can see that Roosevelt appreciates any opportunity to display paternalistic sympathy.

  His left eyebrow twitches and he pats her hand. “Ah, I see you remember that much. We had wondered. The kind of drug you took was probably a dissociative. They tend to make it difficult to retain memories, especially with your head trauma. But yes, Paul was driving. He says you started having a paranoid attack when someone started to chase you both down the driveway. You grabbed the wheel to get away, and nearly crashed the car.” He pauses and leans the chair forward on two legs. “Do you remember anything else?” he asks, close enough that she can smell the coffee and menthol cigarettes on his breath.

  His eyes are the dullest, flattest brown she’s ever seen. Duller than mud, two discs punched from an old wood plank, so bland she almost thinks he wears contacts to make them that way. Beneath the mask his eyes must be cherry red or charcoal black. She focuses on the depilated remains of his receding hairline, a hint of something human and vulnerable, and thinks of what to say.

  “What sort of drug?” she asks.

  His lips tighten and then relax, like he might have caught and strangled a smile. “Well, I can’t say we’re so sure,” he said. “You got away from Paul and only turned up the next afternoon. You don’t remember any of this?” He shakes his head slowly. “Your blood tests were suggestive of a number of drugs, but we’re just not sure. Personally, Emily, I think that you saw a very ugly side of a designer drug. And I think we both know the only person who could have synthesized it for you.”

  He means Coffee. He thinks Coffee gave her some of that stuff they say he cooks in his secret lab, and that it made her go nuts and crash the car and end up here. Only she doesn’t even know if those drug-cooking rumors are true, let alone that he would give her some the night of the party. Let alone that she would take it.

  But then she remembers the putty-softness of her muscles when Paul strapped her into the car. She’d hardly managed to turn her head to watch Coffee sprint down the driveway. She was on something. Paul told Trevor she was drunk, but being drunk had never felt like that before. Like her limbs were hardly attached to her body, and moving involved a complicated set of levers and pulleys only vaguely connected to bone and muscle. And if Coffee had let her try some of the stuff he refused to sell Cindy, and if she’d done too much or it had hit her too hard, and if she’d persuaded Paul to take her home or take her to Roosevelt, and if Coffee had known …

  Why did he chase her? Why sprint after the car with that desperat
e, furious, agonized grimace?

  Because he had done something he shouldn’t have, and realized it too late?

  Now, Roosevelt watches the confusion ripple over her face and lets his smile show through. “You’re friends with Alonso, aren’t you? Paul told me so. But Alonso certainly betrayed your friendship. I hope you can see that. If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be here. This may shock you, but my colleagues in the police department had to put out a warrant for his arrest, given events at the party.”

  “If you don’t know what he gave me, how can it be illegal?” Maybe she shouldn’t be defending Coffee at this point — she doesn’t know what to believe — but annoying Roosevelt seems worth it.

  “We have testimony from someone at the party.”

  She wonders who would have cut the deal. Cindy? Her Gonzaga boyfriend? Maybe even Trevor, trying to save himself once his parents got wind of the disaster?

  “Why are you telling me this?” She wants Roosevelt away, so she can try to stitch together the bloody wound of her memory. She doesn’t want to believe Roosevelt’s story, but maybe Bradley Hall’s most notorious druggie was never someone she should have trusted. She feels light-headed at the thought of her mother’s reaction.

  “Well, Emily,” he says, letting the chair fall back on its legs with a heavy thump, “your friend Alonso is evading police custody. We strongly suspect that he will try to get in touch with you, and we’d like you to let us know the moment that he does. It’s very important. Just so you know, for your mother’s sake I have convinced my colleagues to overlook the … circumstances of your hospitalization, but if it seems like you won’t cooperate with us, well, illegal drug consumption has its penalties.”

  He puts his business card, the one she remembers from the party, on top of Uncle Nicky’s bear. She wonders, in deep panic, if this is some subtle signal, some hint that he knows about Nicky’s occasional street-corner deals and will hurt him if she doesn’t cooperate.

  “You’re not a cop,” she says. She’s never trusted cops. Some ignorances are just not available to a Black DC girl, no matter how assimilated.

  “I can get in touch with the proper authorities. This case involves some sensitive issues. Alonso is affiliated with the Brazilian embassy after all. If you don’t want this to go badly for him, I suggest you use that number.”

  Bird looks at the card, but can’t bring herself to pick it up. Snitch on Coffee, whose designer drug might have almost killed her, or get indicted for possession? Not much of a choice, but she hates herself for making it. “Okay,” she mumbles, unable to look anywhere but at her hands, ashy and stiff on the white hospital sheets.

  Roosevelt stands up. His posture radiates satisfaction, but his mouth turns down in something approximating sympathy. “I should let you rest. I hope you take this incident to heart. I’m sure Paul would hate to see anything else happen to you, Bird.”

  He taps his wrist, where his sleeve covers the recorder, and then walks out of the room.

  It takes her a full, paralyzed minute to realize that he called her Bird.

  * * *

  Her Uncle Nicky takes Bird home that night, though the doctor suggested she stay until morning. Her head is fine, the doctor said, no swelling on the brain, which was a worry when she didn’t wake up at first. “Whatever you took, it was a doozy,” she said, and Bird tongues the word “doozy” all the time Nicky fills out the forms and never once asks her the obvious. She loves and hates him for it. Her legs feel unsteady at first; she staggers when Aaron rushes her for one of his bear hugs. Aaron is a giant of an eleven-year-old, just like his daddy, but he hasn’t realized it yet. She gives Aaron both boxes of chocolate, and he smiles at her and then frowns.

  “You don’t want it, Em?” he asks, and where Aaron got to be so considerate, she doesn’t know. She hugs him, her left arm aching from the IV needle.

  “I’m not hungry yet,” she says. He attacks Russell Stover and Jacques Torres with equal dedication, and she smiles.

  “Looks like we’re done here, hon.” Cynthia the nurse takes the clipboard full of discharge forms back from Nicky. “Let me get your things, and you can go.”

  Nicky looks at Bird and clears his throat. “I brought you some clothes. Thought you might want something more comfortable.”

  He would. Nicky wears what he always does: baggy jeans, a Hoyas jersey, and the same old black do-rag he’s had since she was a kid. His shoes, on the other hand, are always bright and shining Nikes. His big concession at Monique’s graduation was to take off the do-rag and cornrow his hair. Bird’s mom complained for a solid hour in the car about appropriate behavior, and embarrassing “poor Monique.” Bird had cringed in embarrassment herself to watch her uncle fumble uncertainly among the Jack and Jill parents at the reception afterward, but Monique hadn’t seemed to mind at all. If anything, she seemed proud of her broke-ass, college dropout father.

  But the clothes Nicky brought for her are fine, a pair of boot-leg jeans and a cable-knit sweater. They leave while she changes out of the faded flower-print hospital gown. The nurse gives her a bag, and then they’re heading into the elevator and out into the parking garage. Bird feels like she’s holding her lost memories in a plastic gift shop bag, and they might explode if she doesn’t handle them very carefully. She can’t bring herself to look inside.

  She takes the front seat in Nicky’s black Impala, at least twenty years old and looking like it, though he does his best to keep the monster running. Nicky brushes the crumbs and wrappers — one of which looks disturbingly like a Trojan — off the seat and onto the floor.

  “Sorry about the mess,” he says, like he always does. The car smells like hair oil and Circus Peanuts — Aaron’s favorite. It smells like family and home, and though in his way Nicky scares her almost as badly as Roosevelt does, she relaxes into the worn leather seats and lets him drive.

  It’s Aaron who notices him — Aaron, with a smear of chocolate on his cheek and dirty fingers that smudge the glass when he points. “Hey, Daddy,” he says. “That’s the guy who wanted to know about Em.”

  Bird’s head snaps up so quickly her stitches throb. At the edge of a crowd of people waiting for the bus, someone about Coffee’s height scuffs his shoes on the pavement. His hoodie is a nondescript gray, pulled low over his forehead, but she swears it’s his eyes that follow the Impala as Nicky pulls out of the parking lot.

  “Quiet, Aaron,” Nicky says, and stares straight ahead like someone’s paying him to do it.

  “But —”

  “Aaron!”

  Aaron scowls at his dad and takes a vindictive bite of a chocolate, pink ganache dribbling down his chin.

  Even looking feels dangerous, but she can’t help herself. If the feds are after him, what business does he have standing there? Can’t he guess that they asked her to inform on him? She wants to tell him to get away, to protect himself from professional assholes like Roosevelt. But maybe she also wants to scream at him to tell her what the hell happened that night, what exactly he did to her. Instead, she puts her hand against the window. His lips curve in a bare, sad smile that she holds in her sight until a bus roars between them. Nicky shakes his head.

  “Nicky,” she says, “do you know anything about … did Coffee —”

  “I don’t know nothing, kid,” he says. “Except when to keep my head down.”

  * * *

  He waits until they’re almost at his place to drop the news.

  “Em, you won’t like this, but your mom’s house is boxed up. Quarantine. You can’t go back there. I got what I could, that CIA dude who was at the hospital helped me, but you won’t believe what it’s like out here. Like a goddamn war zone, kid.”

  Nicky never worries about things like cursing in front of his kids. Bird’s mom swears that “shit” was Aaron’s third word. But actually her cousin is pretty good about keeping his language location-appropriate. Monique, on the other hand, used to love to curse in front of Bird’s parents. Bird’s father, w
hen home, would just turn up the volume on the football game, filing down the sharp edges of family dynamics with smooth male voices discussing passing stats.

  “Why’s the house quarantined?” she asks. “Mom and Dad aren’t sick, are they?”

  “They’re safe, wherever they are. I talked to Carol yesterday. She’s cool. But that man at the hospital said someone in your maid service came down with it, so they boxed up the house. The whole thing’s gotten pretty serious. There’s quarantines all over the District.”

  Bird looks up at the steps and stoop of the house, covered in the same green Astroturf that has faded more each winter of her life. Grandma was always on Nicky to change it, and he always promised he’d get around to it, right until she went to the hospital. Bird hates the familiarity of that fake grass and the large brass numbers by the door; she hates how much it feels like home, despite her parents’ house on an appropriately tree-lined, affluent street in Northwest.

  Nicky helps her out of the car, and she shivers in her light coat while Aaron takes the stairs two at a time. Nicky lives in a squat row house on Twenty-first Street in the Kingman Park neighborhood, the same house he grew up in, the one his dad bought in 1945 for thirty thousand dollars. Today it’d be worth quite a bit more — farther down Benning Road, white families have been buying up houses in these old middle-class Black neighborhoods like overpriced, fixer-upper candy. Every time her mother or aunt comes back, they talk about how much the neighborhood has changed. But this street looks the same as it always has to Bird — until she notices the police tape on a house down the block.

  “What happened to the Gibsons?” she asks. She and Monique would play with the Gibson kids in the fire hydrants of young summers. She remembers the oldest, Tyrone, got involved in some gang stuff and spent three years in juvie. Heroin possession, she heard. Coffee doesn’t deal heroin — too dangerous, he says. But then, it turns out that even Adderall was dangerous enough.

  “The youngest got it,” Nicky says.

  “Is she all right?” Bird can’t remember the kid’s name — a granddaughter, she thinks, because another one of those hydrant playmates had a kid when she was just fourteen.