Chapter 4
The woman on my bed turned her attention back to the dogs, who were willing enough.
She was a page ripped out of a women’s magazine—those stuffed-in perfume sample ones?
She smelled rich, and she was draped in layers of softness: red cashmere sweater, flowing green scarf.
Gold glowed at her ears, wrist, left ring finger.
A big designer bag sat at her side, with some seasonal red wrapping paper peeking out.
Her hair was an effortful near-blond, straight from a blowout.
It was a good disguise. The white snowflake dots on the wrapping paper swam before my eyes as I recognized her anyway.
“Aren’t you surprised to see me?” my mother asked.
“I assumed the next time I heard from you, Marisa, someone would be calling to ask me to claim your drug-ravaged corpse. Did you break in? Despite appearances, not much changed?”
She looked away. “The door was open.”
“Yeah, ripped off its hinges,” I said. “Did you do that?”
“It was open,” she said.
Could the wind have done that? I reached automatically for my back pocket, my cell, but of course it wasn’t there. My ancient phone was a brick at the bottom of my makeup case until I begged, borrowed, or stole a charger that worked for it.
I made a move to the door. “I have to get Alex to fix the door before rats get in,” I said.
I didn’t say she was one of the rats.
“Oh, Alex,” she said.
“Don’t,” I said.
She had let me down my entire life. That was the beginning of every story like mine, someone who should have been the adult letting down a kid who relied on them.
Or maybe the story started even earlier.
Someone who should never have had a kid in the first place is forced to carry that weight around like a cheap suitcase banging against their shins.
I was the suitcase.
Everything about me that was broken, I could trace back to her.
She’d had me too early, too stupid, too self-involved.
Didn’t have the right help or intentions or sense to stay away from the pharmaceuticals, and then she discovered what I can only assume was heroin or oxy, and things went fast from there.
We’d bounced between friends with extra bedrooms or fold-out couches, then run out of friends, I guess, because I remembered a few nights in shelters, first with other women and kids, and then in places kids shouldn’t be.
We’d spent at least one night in a car. Whose car? No idea.
And then Alex was there, Chicago meatpacker DNA, a guy who had already beat an addiction, someone willing to help.
Okay, fine. You ready? My deal.
Alex? Alex is my guardian.
That’s the old word for it, the court-filings word, although officially he had only served as my guardian for a short time, as a conduit from a mother hitting rock bottom to the vibrant foster care system of Cook County.
So, no, not my dad. Not any kind of boyfriend, though the guys down at the pub had always looked to see what Alex thought of Joey putting his arm around me.
Just a friend of Marisa’s, probably from the drug scene, who had already tackled his demons.
A guy who, if he’d been born thirty years later, would have had his autism spectrum disorder mapped precisely, but instead was the strong and silent type.
In contrast, I was the small and feral type.
I had lived my short life almost entirely out of view of authorities, cameras, safety precautions, vaccines, or nutrients, and marched into Alex’s life with a little pink cast on my left arm.
I’d told the people at the hospital I’d fallen, and I still remembered the “oh boy” sidelong looks, the clipboards pulled out.
Only six years old, but old for my age, having already learned a lot about trust, and who deserved it.
But Alex took me in anyway. The brief stay I’d had with him was an in-between space, out of the haphazard existence I’d scraped out with Marisa and a future I didn’t yet know was coming, the precariousness of being the foster kid, always a stranger in a strange land and always dreading the day another clipboard would say it was time for a new placement.
Another garbage bag with my things in it.
At Alex’s bungalow, a few blocks from the bar, there had been a little blue room he’d called mine.
Even as I spent the rest of my childhood wearing out the goodwill of a series of other people’s families, it was Alex who represented the most direct line to a real home.
To my mother, I suppose, but then just to himself.
He got visitation, so throughout my childhood, we spent occasional Sundays together, not having to talk all that much.
I’d come to the pub and sweep the floors, I’d make myself useful.
I would invent ways to be near him, even running away to the pub once.
Which had immediately earned me another unsuspecting home, where more perfectly okay people didn’t know what to make of me.
I was almost eighteen, aging out of the system, barely scraping out a high school diploma. Alex attended the ceremony, my audience of one, a necktie nearly strangling him. Again, he offered me the little blue room.
No bio dad had ever stepped forward to change my trajectory, and Marisa, as far as I knew, had never got herself clean.
Which meant that, yes, when I passed bundles of old clothes in street corners and tucked into doorways, I had always stopped to look closer.
But I hadn’t been holding out hope. I moved on.
And I kept moving. I stayed with Alex at the bungalow only until I could find a job—a series of jobs—and roommates to split rent.
A series of roommates. A boyfriend or two.
Isn’t that what life was? Making your own mistakes?
When I turned twenty-one, Alex built the stage at McPhee’s so that I would have a home base to perform anytime I wanted. The band came together over time, and then one night two years into playing at McPhee’s, a curly-haired banjo player named Joey came for the show and introduced himself—
But you know how that worked out.
I had never meant to be Alex’s problem to solve again.
But the weirdest thing was, most of my life I’d thought that Alex had only managed to save me. Now here in front of me, standing in my room, was proof of—well, it was proof of something, but I wasn’t sure what yet.
I looked Marisa over, head to toe. “Did you used to have red hair?”
She blinked up at me. “What?”
I don’t know why. I’d always pictured her with flowing red hair and a sort of Joan of Arc fierceness, despite everything. Like how Dolly Parton describes Jolene, you know? Flaming locks, ready to take what she came for.
“You didn’t remember what I…” Her voice gave out and she pressed her wrist to her nose.
I was six the last time I’d seen her. I’d got it so wrong. Where had that fierce image of Marisa even come from?
As little credit as I had given her, it was still too much.
“Well, thanks for stopping by after—” I checked my naked wrist. “Has it only been twenty years? We’ll get that door fixed so next time you can knock.”
Knock and keep knocking, but I didn’t have to say that part aloud.
“Couldn’t we spend a little time?” she said. “Catch up?”
“I’m busy.”
“I could take you to dinner—”
“I have a show,” I said.
“You have shows every week,” she said. “You could cancel one.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “Cancel or catch up with you.” There, she had forced me to say it. I would rather eat out of the bins in the alley than—
Wait.
I said, “If you know I have a show every week…”
The look on her face—she had walked right into it, and she knew it.
“Why didn’t you come by last week?” I said. “Or anytime in the last five years?”
Or the last twenty. Alex had always known where I was. The number for the pub had never changed, not in probably sixty years, since Alex’s great-great-whatever put in the landline. I had not been difficult to find. Apparently.
“I should have come, you’re right,” Marisa said. “I tried to—I did ask, but … I don’t know. Life got complicated.”
My neck was suddenly stiff with rage. “Oh, your life was complicated,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so? Did you have thirty-six cavities in your baby teeth the first time you were taken to the dentist?”
Twenty years, thirty-six cavities. Did it seem like I had been keeping count? Waiting?
I was hit by that knock-kneed shame I knew so well, stomach plummeting, cheeks burning like lanterns. I was that little girl again, listening to whispers as decisions about her life were made over her head, wishing her mother would swoop in and—
I turned and left the room, the dogs rushing to follow. In the kitchen, I returned the knife to the block on the counter and fetched my trash bag of belongings from the door.
Of all days to have my life balled up in a Hefty bag.
When I got back to my bedroom, Marisa hadn’t moved. The dogs discovered her all over again, butts wiggling vigorously. Traitors. I dumped my bag onto the floor.
“Can I help?”
I ignored her and arranged my Frye boots side by side in the back of the closet. Then I turned my attention to the tangle of hangers, my wrinkled show dresses.
I had imagined meeting up with Marisa again, of course.
I’d be headlining a show somewhere big, Thalia Hall or the Hideout.
The House of Blues or Chicago Theatre, since we were dreaming.
Or maybe the girls and I were on tour and just happened into whatever town she’d been subsisting in.
I could see it so clearly: After the show, when I’m flying high and dripping sweat, I’d come out to find a long line of autograph seekers.
Of course I’d make time for them—those people got me where I am today, et cetera—but then there’d be a sun-cracked face watching me with hungry eyes, and the crowd would part. Marisa, come to beg forgiveness.
I’d be kind to her. That’s who I was, deep down.
Really deep down.
Maybe there’s a paparazzo snapping pics, or a film crew even, capturing the moment, but even if no one got out their phones to grab video for their socials, I could spare her a meal. Here’s fifty bucks. Don’t spend it all in one place. Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowgirls.
“What are you smiling at?” Marisa said.
“Nothing,” I said.
I shopped for tonight’s outfit from among the rack and started to warm up my voice, too, motorboating my lips up and down my scales.
Behind me, Marisa cleared her throat. “It was time I—”
“BpbpbpBPBPBP,” I raspberried loudly through two octaves.
This was a job for my favorite dress, the blue Nudie-style Western one stitched with bright blue beaded peacocks and enough spangles to make an audience see God or go blind. It had also suffered the least from the rough transit from the apartment.
I switched to a siren voice exercise, gliding from the lowest note in my vocal range to the highest like an ambulance. “OooooooOOOO.”
Lemon lifted her head and howled with me. That’s my girl.
I took off my jacket, pulled the sweater over my head, unbuttoned my shirt.
Behind me, Marisa gasped. “Dahlia, what in the world have you done to yourself?”
She meant the tattoos. “Expressed myself as I saw fit as the owner of my own body,” I said.
“And you don’t wear a bra?” she said.
“What is feminism for?”
I brought the dress down over my head, careful of the pins in my hair, and let the skirt swirl around my knees. Kicked off my boots, my jeans, and then slipped the boots back on. Boots were made for walking, Marisa. Best to be direct this time.
“I have to go see Alex about the door,” I said, tucking a lipstick tube into my cleavage. “And you? You need to disappear.”