Three years passed. The MBA nearly all finished, one more year to go, and they struggled insurmountably to make ends meet. They couldn’t afford to drop the milk because they wouldn’t be able to buy another gallon, and she diluted the milk a little bit with water for the kids’ cereal, hoping they wouldn’t notice, waiting, waiting until the day the MBA would change their life and make it all go away.
“Yes, Kai,” she said. “I really wanted it.” She didn’t sit up, didn’t look at him.
He splashed her. She came out of it. “Are you happy?”
“Of course.” She paused. “Though the Chinese food was better in Hoboken. But now I can afford it. And I can still get Chinese when I go visit Evelyn, but at least I get to come home to a house with a ping-pong table, a breakfast nook, a bills nook.”
“You need that.”
“Yes. Lots of bills to pay. Just like before. Difference is, now we can pay them.”
He was pensive. “House is beautiful. The dog especially.”
“Boy is beautiful, too.”
“The boy that came with the house? Yeah. Must be nice to have kids.”
She watched him carefully. Studied him. “It is.”
“Do you have a chandelier? Mood lighting?”
“Yes.”
“Fireplaces?”
“Three.”
“I know you have a pool.”
“With a diving board. And a movie theater room.”
“With popcorn?”
“A popcorn maker.”
“Drink holders?”
“And remote controls built into the arms of the reclining leather couches.”
Kai whistled appreciatively.
“Three years it took us. Three years of grad school, of eating pasta, potatoes, counting every nickel we put into the jar. Paying for our weekly groceries with change the kids were saving to buy a new game system. No one handed it to us. We worked very hard to get here.”
“It paid off. Look where you are.”
Thing was, she was bare in his naked arms.
3
Simi and Eve
“You wanna go do something?”
“Like what?” They were in bed, and she was less woozy but more raw. Cosily she was nestled against him, his body an ironing board, a stern taskmaster. He was the wire-mesh monkey mother, too hard for comfort, yet what comfort it was. The sheets were pulled over them, and he was tap-tap-tapping a fast beat on her back.
“Well, Larissa Stark,” Kai said in his tour guide voice, “this is the Split Rock Lodge and Resort. We have many different activities for your entertainment.”
“I think I may have already partaken too much of some of those.”
“Well, yes, I see you have enjoyed our daytime portion of the program, a Hacky Sack game for adults, and I commend you on wanting to play it time and again, and improving your speed in reaching the finish line, but I wanted to draw your attention to other things we offer in this resort for you and your eager and able partner. Would you be interested in attending our Motivational Seminar called ‘The Magic of Split Rock’?”
“Thank you, but I think I’ve already attended that. I’m sold.”
Tap-tap on her back, kissing her on the head, kissing her mouth, contemplating her, Kai continued. “In the Galleria Main Lobby we have a Scrabble tournament this afternoon.”
“I’m all scrabbled out.”
“A little later we’ve got one-on-one basketball. Perhaps your lover can play you?”
“He’s played me. One on one.”
“We’ve got indoor tennis courts, a bowling alley, a fitness center, or boating if you’re feeling outdoorsy and adventurous instead of sleepy and naked.”
“But what if I’m feeling sleepy and naked?”
“Well, perhaps you’d be interested in our nighttime entertainment calendar. We’ve got jackpot bingo, and a family dance party with a live band. In our Benchwarmers Pub, we offer Big Willie Live…” Kai mock frowned. “I don’t know if Live is his last name, or if Big Willie is being offered live.”
“I hope he’s being offered live,” she murmured, her hand caressing him up and down.
“Will you consider coming to the Family Sing-Along?”
“Coming to? Or coming at?”
“No, no, we do not allow hotness. This is a family establishment. What about the Newlywed-Oldywed Game? How well do you truly know your young lover? This may be a good time to find out. That’s at 10 p.m.”
“Hmm.” She was less sleepy, and he was less sleepy. She climbed on top of him, held him between her legs, kissed his face, his chest, kissed his eyes. His hands were holding her hips. “What about the Great Pocono Ping-Pong Challenge?” she asked. “The winner gets to have sex with the loser.”
“Done deal,” he replied, dancing rings underneath her. They kissed deeply. “But I want payment upfront.”
“Done deal.”
They played Miss Mary Mack, all dressed in black, and were lying on top of the sheets in a quiet room with the curtains drawn, the windows shut, in welcome air-conditioning, the hum from the wall unit soothing out the silence.
“Kai, we have time,” Larissa said. “We have a little time. Tell me things. Please.”
“I was about to drift off, so happily, too. What things?”
“Tell me things about my young lover…” she whispered.
Kai sighed. He was on his back, but his arm around her became less embracing. “What’s the point?” he said. “Is it going to make you want to come more?”
Was he being naughty? She peered into his face.
“Is it going to make you want me more?”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” she whispered. “I can’t think of anything else but you.”
“But what if it makes you want me less?” he said. “What if instead of pity and compassion, you’ll be afraid, you’ll stay away?”
“Kai,” she said, “how in the world can I stay away from you? Please, yes, tell me something that will make me stay away.”
“What will do it? What if I was in prison like my dad, for drug dealing?”
Larissa was quiet. Was he testing her or hypothesizing? She didn’t think that would do it.
“I wasn’t, by the by.”
“Kai, you’re so young.”
“Only in body. I’ve been quite careless with things. You know how reckless you can be when you’re young.”
She knew.
“Look at the scar on my stomach. I went for a demon ride, but a girl was on my bike with me. I nearly lost my liver, but she broke both legs, a rib, and her front teeth. She could’ve been killed. But I wasn’t thinking about that. She wanted to go so I took her. That’s what I mean about careless. Slam! Right into the side of a mountain. At night. I was going way too fast and came to a hairpin turn and couldn’t stop. With the lights off.”
Larissa rubbed him to soothe him. “But the girl went of her own accord. You didn’t force her to come with you.”
“I should’ve known better. I knew the risks. She didn’t.”
“She went of her own free will. You didn’t kidnap her.”
Kai said nothing at first. “Sometimes you have to watch out for people you care about,” he said at last. “Sometimes they make the wrong decisions. You have to try to help them.”
“You think she made the wrong decision?”
“Surely she did.”
Larissa cajoled him, but he remained reluctant to speak. Not angry, just withdrawing. She had not seen him angry.
“Is this not enough?” Kai asked, shying away from being tickled, probed. “We have it good. Why can’t we just leave it like it is?”
“Is this good?”
“You don’t think this is mad good?” His body was suddenly over her, his inquiring hand between her legs. “I don’t mean this. I mean us. You and me.”
“Will it be less mad good after you tell me?” Larissa moaned. Will we be less good? But she didn’t ask that.
“I th
ink it might be, yes.” Kai pulled away, lay on his back again, his burst of energy spent. He did that thing she saw him do sometimes: when he was stressed, in traffic, or in a hurry, he would pull up, straighten his back, sit preternaturally still, frozen without motion, like a painting. He made himself a still life and dealt away with his anxiety. It was a Zen move and she loved it because it made her calmer too. She didn’t want him to be tense. She thought of stroking him, but the result of him being stroked would not make him less stressed in the end, and he might welcome the diversion and a stop to the unwelcome conversation.
“Tell me anyway.” Was she hoping somewhere in the recesses where a tiny breath of conscience entered that perhaps she might dim in her ardor? Wouldn’t that be loverly, to dim in her ardor. “You’re a kid. How much trouble could you have gotten into?”
“Plenty,” Kai said. “And real trouble. The kind that’s hard to walk away from.”
Larissa hoped, almost prayed, the trouble she was in now wasn’t that kind of trouble.
“I was a party boy. Lots of friends, lots of drink. Girls. My mom was working two jobs, and partying herself, my grandmother had raised me, but she was getting old, and my granddad had died. I was on my own, fending for myself since I was thirteen. Working, partying, whatever.”
Funny how from a different provenance that had also been Larissa’s life: her mother and father lovingly but deliberately hands off. “We want you to make your own mistakes,” they had told her. “That’s the only way you will learn. We’re not here to run your life.” Larissa always suspected that after strictly raising three boys they were done with serious child-rearing by the time they got to her and used the libertarian argument to justify their parental exhaustion. But the effect on her was the same: she had love but little guidance.
“One of the girls I met at a party,” Kai continued, “was Simi. She was sixteen. Had a crush on me.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
Leaning over, he kissed her lingeringly, kept his lips on her as if he didn’t want to continue. He sighed. “I hooked up with her one evening. With all that music blaring, I couldn’t tell anything about her except she was cute. It was nothing serious, just one of those things.”
“Have you ever had something serious?” Larissa asked tentatively.
“You decide,” Kai said. “After I tell you. I kept seeing her. But I had a few other things going on…”
“Girls-wise?”
“Mmm. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Simi was a junkie in the worst way. I mistook pinpoint pupils for doe eyes. She had been hoping I had the goods because she’d heard about my dad. She was thinking she’d sleep with me and I’d give her the H. I told her my dad didn’t deal blow to his son, how sick is that? And he was in prison besides. Hard to sell dope from prison. I thought that’d be the last I’d see of her, but no. She kept coming back.”
Larissa looked at his stomach, at his legs covered with a white sheet, at his lips. He had the goods. She tried not to quiver.
“Well, she continued with me like I was her methadone or something, but she was a real screwed-up girl, a nice girl, but so messed up, like…messed up.” Kai lifted his arms as if in surrender, and broke off. “She was a cotton shooter. You know what that is?”
Larissa shook her nervous head.
“That’s someone who’s so bad addicted that when they’re broke and can’t get the man, they shoot up the residue from the cotton used to filter the H. Pretty bad.” He clucked his tongue, but Larissa could tell from the way his bottomless eyes refused to look at her when he spoke, that this wasn’t a gossip story to him, this was the source of much of his solitary inwardness.
“I didn’t see her getting out of it,” Kai went on. “You know how sometimes you can tell if people can get out of shit? Like you sense in them a way out? Maybe a bit of strength, or a bit of hope for themselves, maybe a little upbringing, a little ambition, God maybe? Something. It doesn’t have to be much, but it has to be real. Well, Simi had none of that. Her home life was terrible. She was a high school drop-out, had no skills, lived at home with her stepmom, and stole serious dough from her to score.”
“Where was her dad?”
“Out of Maui with another woman. Can you blame him?”
“I don’t know,” Larissa tersely replied. “I know nothing about him.”
“I wanted to stop seeing Simi, but she was so tightly wound, I didn’t think she’d take it well, and so we kept at it, me hoping she’d move on from me, find an actual balloon, um, a supplier,” Kai explained. “But she wasn’t moving on, floating, floating, promising me week after week when she was broke that she’d quit for good, and then we could have a normal relationship.”
“Were you…on it?”
“What are you worried about?” He peered into Larissa’s face, shaking his head. “Control over myself is my thing, my drug of choice. H wasn’t my scene,” Kai said. “You know what I believe, Larissa? Life is so fucking short, you never know when it’s going to end, and I didn’t want to spend a second of it in oblivion. Trouble was, Simi thought life was entirely too long and oblivion was exactly what she needed to make the hours run faster.” Kai paused. Larissa was still lying down, but he was now sitting up bowling pin straight against the headboard. He looked down into his palms. “You want to know how the hours of her life crawled to a stop?”
“She ODd?”
“She got pregnant.”
Larissa put her face into her hands. Why were young women so wantonly reckless with their lives and bodies? “While on heroin?”
“Yeah, apparently those two things are not mutually exclusive. Turns out heroin is not synonymous with contraception. Who knew? It may stop you from coming, but not from conceiving. So how do you think a seventeen-year-old girl still living at home with no job, no education and a devastating King Kong-size monkey on her back would feel about this?”
“I can hardly guess,” said Larissa.
“Simi got it into her head that the baby was going to be her ticket out. Suddenly she got religion! Here was this baby from God, and now everything was going to be okay with her and consequently with us.”
Larissa sat up in a lotus position, her hands on his legs. “Were you okay with that?” She looked into his face searching for answers.
Kai shrugged inscrutably. “I wanted her to get better. She was a frail girl. And—you know, my mother had me at sixteen, had my sisters soon after. Many of my mother’s neighbors had their kids young. I didn’t have a problem with it.”
“But a baby for you at eighteen!” Larissa said, wistfully anxious.
“My dad wasn’t much of a dad. I wanted to do better. I thought I could do better.”
Did Kai have a baby waiting for him in Hawaii? That was coldly inconceivable. Rather, Larissa didn’t want it to be true.
“So I said to her that if she quit the H, I’d marry her.”
“You’d what?”
“Yeah. It was the right thing to do. I said I’d marry her. I’d graduated high school, I was working, lots of business for a stonemason with the luxury hotels and the condos springing up everywhere. I was making money. I said, why not? We’ll do it right, Simi.”
“You’re crazy.”
“That may be so, but she got pretty excited.”
“Kai, is Simi the girl who was in the motorcycle accident with you?”
He was utterly quiet for at least a minute. It seemed like he wasn’t even breathing, his chest not rising nor falling.
“Yes,” he finally said.
“Oh, Kai.”
“The accident didn’t happen when she was pregnant. It happened first night I met her. That’s how we found out she was a junkie. She went into mojo withdrawal at the hospital.”
“So you hooked up, went for a demon ride, and both nearly died?”
“Yes.”
Larissa herself fell silent. She became frightened—of him. Of the calm that hid life-threatening danger just below the surface.
&
nbsp; “Anyway…” Kai made a rolling forward gesture with his hands, like he wanted to get on with it. His usual animation was nowhere to be seen. “You want to hear more?”
Larissa didn’t. She imagined no good endings. She nodded.
“Simi decided she would cold turkey it and get off H, but the doctor at the free clinic said never. You should’ve quit before you got pregnant, that’s how you do it. First quit, then get knocked up. Now it’s too late, you’re out of options. You quit now, the baby dies for certain. If you want this baby to have the remotest chance of living—and Simi desperately did—you have to continue the heroin, in the smallest dose you can manage without going through withdrawal, and we’ll do what we can to keep the baby inside the womb as long as possible. Heroin babies are usually preemies. If we can get to thirty weeks, thirty-two, we stand a good chance. Then you and the infant can go on methadone.”
Larissa was so silent, she could hear a boat rev its engine in the water, beyond the hum of the AC, through the closed windows. She could hear a woman calling down the hall, a siren wailing off in the distance. She could almost hear the hands of the clock. Thirty weeks of tick tock.
“Simi tried hard to eat, to sleep, to take her vitamins, to only shoot up when she absolutely needed the fix.”
“Where was she living at this time?”