Memories of the end came at night in the dark, when I was too weak to stop them.
From the park I went to the convenience store and tried to buy just one rose but they wouldn’t let me because they were sold in bouquets, so I walked to the florist, the same one we had used for the funerals and the only one in town. It made my knees watery, walking in there, and all the flowers blurred to brilliant masses, overloading my senses, and there was a line of people and the air-conditioning was way too cold and the whole place smelled like her funeral but it wasn’t, it was her birthday, and I just couldn’t take it.
I left the florist’s sweating and empty-handed, and walked all the way across town to the cemetery. When I got to the main gate I stopped dead, staring in shock at all the gravestones stretched out before me, hundreds of them everywhere, row after row of white, black, brown, gray . . .
I had no idea which one was Ellie’s.
I’d never even thought of it.
How could I lose her? My memory of the funeral was so narrow, so focused on her casket, hers and Aunt Loretta’s, that I thought I would always recognize her grave, that it had become a forever landmark in my mind . . .
I curled my fingers into the chain-link fence surrounding the cemetery and closed my eyes, trying to remember everything about the day she and Aunt Loretta had been buried. The ground had been flat because there were chairs set up in rows under a tent . . . and it was a family plot because Beale had said something about it and I hadn’t known what he meant, so he’d had to explain it.
Ellie and Aunt Loretta had been buried near his father, in a family plot back by the fence near a big old oak tree, where all the past Galens had been buried.
I’d never seen their gravestones—we’d left before they were done—but Beale had said they would have angels on them, smaller versions of the towering angel statue that marked Beale’s great-great-great-grandmother’s grave.
I opened my eyes and scanned the cemetery, ignoring the hilly side. There were two big trees in the distance, near the opposite fence line, one to the left and one to the right, but the one to the left had a monument by it that looked like an angel, so I took a deep breath and followed the fence line all the way around, stopping to pick the scattered clumps of Queen Anne’s lace growing wild at the base of the chain link.
When I got closer I saw gravestones with angels on them, but two of the white ones looked newer than the others so I headed toward them, legs heavy, footsteps slowing. Someone had placed a vase full of little pink and white roses on one of the graves and I knew that one was Ellie’s before I even read it, knew it must have been Beale who had been here.
What I hadn’t known, what I never could have imagined and what brought me to tears, was the photo of my sister on her gravestone, cradled in the angel’s embrace. She was laughing, her eyes bright and her hair damp and wispy, and I recognized that picture, knew exactly when it was taken because I’d been holding her after her bath and singing my “Ellie Ellie” song, and she’d stuck her fingers in my mouth and chortled and Beale had snapped the picture.
I could see her again.
He’d made sure she existed in more than our minds, made a place where we could see her, and I sat there for a long time whispering her song, carefully tucking the Queen Anne’s lace into the vase with the roses, memorizing her sweet face all over again. The photo wasn’t taped onto the headstone, it was somehow a part of it, and I would have given anything for a camera of my own so I could have taken a picture of her picture and had her with me again.
But at least now I could always come here and see her.
It was almost midnight when I finally made it home. The long walk back had been scary, the night alive with mosquitoes, bats, and unseen animals rustling alongside the road in the woods. I was tired, hungry, and all I wanted to do was collapse and go to sleep, but my mother was lying on the couch, snoring.
I stood there looking down at her for a long moment, at her slack mouth and the thin line of dried drool across her cheek, at her greasy hair and stained T-shirt, at the near-empty bottle of vodka and the pills on the end table, then turned away and picked up my blanket.
Normally when the couch was taken I just curled up with my blanket on the floor but not tonight. Tonight I went straight into her room, skirted the pile of used tissues, empty liquor bottles, and dirty laundry, shoved the overflowing ashtray away from the side of the mattress on the floor, looked at her stained and wrinkled pillow, and then lay down across the bottom of the bed, cradled my head on my arms, and closed my eyes.
Today was Ellie’s birthday, and we’d spent it together.
I would always love her.
Would always be her big sister.
Nothing in the world could ever change that.
The Downhill Run
WHEN MY MOTHER FIRST INJURED HER back, the doctors in the hospital had put her on strong pain medication, and when she left the hospital, they gave her a prescription for Oxycontin to manage the pain. She’d taken those pills willingly, faithfully, only one or two more than the prescribed dose at first, but then, as her body got used to them, she started needing more and more, going through the prescription far too fast because she’d been chewing or snorting them to get around the time-release action, renewing the prescription over and over until finally the doctor refused, suggesting she’d become addicted and provoking an ugly scene, with my mother being escorted out of the building by security.
She moved on to another doctor then another, sometimes two and three at a time, filling prescriptions for Vicodin and Oxycontin and anything else she could get, using vodka or beer as a chaser, and when she was finally denied by every doctor and drugstore in and around Sullivan, Candy called up her brother Bobby who turned her on to Buck, a guy who lived in a trailer down by the river and who dealt mainly in pills.
He always had more Vicodin than he did Oxycontin, which he called Hillbilly Heroin, and my mother was willing to take whatever she could get, but she needed money for them now, a lot of money, and so she started shoplifting in earnest, stealing anything and everything she could get her hands on to hock, including wallets and credit card numbers. She never got caught for the credit card fraud, but was arrested twice and banned from all the stores downtown for the shoplifting, pleaded addiction, and was sent back to rehab.
I saw it all happen, but from a distance, pulled back so far inside that sometimes I wasn’t even there anymore. I slept, I ate, I breathed, but I couldn’t afford to feel anything because Candy was vicious with my mother gone, resentful and bitter, hammering me all the time, venting her poison from the kitchen table, reminding me daily that I was living on her charity and so I’d better not fuck up or I’d be out on my ass.
I tried not to let it get to me, but it did.
When my mother was finally released, the first place she and Candy went was straight down to Buck’s, and when they got back to the cabin they put a big bag of Vicodin, a quart of vodka, and a quart of tequila on the kitchen table, and commenced partying until they both passed out.
The next night they went down to the Colonial Pub and hooked up with Harlow Maltese, who’d done his time in the county mental hospital for Miss Mo’s murder, moved out of the halfway house and was free and looking to party. My mother seemed driven to stay stoned now, even more so than before. She was never sober, never, and when Candy got home from work she joined her, and I was the only one in that cabin whose hands didn’t shake and who could walk without stumbling.
I visited Ellie’s grave on her birthday and holidays, somehow never running into Beale, although he always left proof of his existence behind in pink and white roses, a teddy bear, and once a Merry Christmas, to My Beloved Daughter card tucked carefully into a plastic Baggie and set at the base of the angel headstone. I crouched in the snow and stared at that Baggie for a long time, even reached for it once, but in the end, I didn’t open it. That card was fr
om a father to his daughter, and it was none of my business.
When I was a junior I hooked up with a senior named Carter who was second cousin to the Fees, and after his prom we all went out to a summerhouse on the river. We got one of the bedrooms, and in that musty, damp-smelling room on a lumpy twin bed under worn, faded, pinecone-print sheets, Carter kissed and stroked me, peeled off my clothes, and ran his hands everywhere. It felt good to sink into him, to have him sink into me, skin against skin, hot, sweaty, burning, it made me feel alive and wanted and close to someone again. He cared about me, I know he did, and so I stayed with him all summer until he got a job with the gas well drillers and left in the fall.
He’d used a condom that first time, and then I went to the clinic and got the birth control ring that only gave you four periods a year so I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant. I didn’t want a baby, couldn’t even look at one without thinking of Ellie, her short life and her brutal, wasteful death, and every time that pain started to resurface, the ice wall inside me would descend, trapping the memory in a frigid stasis and holding it there so I wouldn’t have to feel it.
Losing Ellie might have been the only thing that kept me from following in my mother’s footsteps, though. It was too hurtful a road to go down more than once. That part of my heart was done.
But I worried about other things as I listened to my mother complaining about her constipation and her headaches, as I watched her stumble around the cabin, dizzy and nauseous, as I endured her drunken tirades and insults, and watched her stagger into her filthy bedroom with Harlow or any number of wild-eyed guys so twitchy and sick they were little more than walking cadavers. I fretted and worried, and every single day when I came home to find her lying out drunk, stoned, and going nowhere, I wondered Is this who I’m going to be, too? Does history have to repeat itself? Has living with my mother imprinted so deeply, without me even knowing it, that no matter what I do differently, I’ll still somehow end up following right behind her?
No. No, I wouldn’t. I would rather be dead than be like her. I was positive of that.
But . . . what if I had no choice?
The thought scared me.
Haunted me.
I had to make sure I was different, that my path would be different, better, only I didn’t know what to do, and each passing night at the cabin only made it worse. I couldn’t sleep, listening to my mother, Candy, and Harlow clink the bottle to the glass, the slow, slurred babbling, and the crushing and snorting of pills right in the next room. My nerves were raw and I felt like I was leaning forward all the time, muscles tensed, actively waiting, all revved up but spinning my wheels because I didn’t know which direction to go.
I worried so much that a solid, heavy knot lodged in my chest, down between my breasts, near my stomach, a frantic knot all tangled with confusion and anger and anxiety, and it stayed there until the day I got my grades for the semester.
I sat in my seat in the back of the classroom while the other kids talked and laughed and joked around me, staring at all Ds, at the failure warning made out to me, Sayre Bellavia, right there in harsh, hard-lettered black-and-white print, and with a sharp piercing the knot cracked and something inside me rose up and said NO.
No.
I would not fail.
I’d been smart once, a man I’d loved dearly had told me so. Smart, with a good head on my shoulders. A survivor, a kid who’d managed to make it through a rough childhood.
A kid he was proud of.
A keeper.
If he could see me now, what would he think?
The thought gnawed at me. Shamed me.
And so it was that memory of Beale telling my mother that I had a future of my own ahead of me, that I was a different person from her, that I had the grades to go to college and make something of myself, that I could leave Dug County like he had and go out and see the world . . .
That beautiful year, the one I couldn’t speak of to anyone, became a smoldering ember in my heart, warm and alive, a golden memory I hung out before me so when everything became too grim and all I wanted to do was stop, I could close my eyes, turn my face to it, and feel loved again, even if only for a little while.
That memory made everything change.
I made everything change.
I started spending all my free time in the library and brought my grades back up to As and Bs. It wasn’t easy, but it got better once I started trying again, paying attention and turning in homework.
I got a job busing tables at a local restaurant, and paid the other busgirl, Marisol, gas money to haul me back to Candy’s after work.
I was away from the cabin a lot, which was good for the life I was trying to build, but bad in a way I hadn’t foreseen, as Candy decided that since I was out anyway I should stop by Buck’s twice a week for the Vicodin. And I did it, not because I wanted to but because Candy got enraged when I first said no, picked up a steak knife, and yelled that she couldn’t do it all and if I wouldn’t do that much for them, then I might as well get the fuck out since I was living rent free anyway, which was actually a joke as anything I didn’t want stolen I had to keep with the ruby blazer in my locker at school.
So they got plenty of money off me, and I became a goddamn mule.
I hated it, really hated walking down that dirt path to Buck’s, handing him money and waiting outside where anyone on the river could see me while he counted out the product. I didn’t want to be linked to him, didn’t want people to think I was just like my mother, and for a while I was tempted to tip off the cops and let myself get caught just to bring the whole stupid, ugly mess crashing down, but I didn’t because I couldn’t stand the thought of being led off in handcuffs, of maybe having Beale hear about it on the wind and forever thinking differently about me.
Because I’d heard something on the wind about him, too, something that split us farther apart but that made me happy for him, in a bittersweet kind of way.
He’d gotten married.
It was old news when I heard it—they’d met when she’d bought Miss Mo’s old house and married two years ago last fall, out at her church in Wilkes-Barre—and the waitress who’d mentioned it didn’t know much more than that, only that she’d come in once to pick up a takeout meal under the last name of Galen and they’d chatted for a few moments. The waitress remembered that Beale’s new wife had dark hair, what she called a “good face,” and a modest but pretty diamond engagement ring and wedding band on her finger.
I was glad to know that he had actually made it through and moved on, but the gladness I felt was mixed up with a dull, aching sadness for what could have been.
It could have been us.
I bought a card that Saturday, and a box of plastic freezer bags, and went out to Ellie’s grave. Sat there for a long time trying to decide what to write because there was so much I wanted to say but in the end only scrawled Congratulations! I just heard. You deserve all the happiness in the world. And then, because love was impossible and xoxo too frivolous, I signed it simply Sayre, put it in the Baggie and left it tucked up against Ellie’s headstone.
When I went back that next week before work on Thanksgiving, my card was gone and I searched around some, hoping, but he hadn’t left anything other than flowerpots of copper-colored mums for Ellie and Aunt Loretta. I’d warned myself not to expect anything, that too much time had passed and too much pain had been left unresolved, that if he’d wanted to get in touch with me he would have done it a long time ago, but the disappointment hit me hard, sent me hurrying out of the cemetery, head lowered against the wind, telling myself I was still a keeper, I was, and struggling to believe it.
And later that night, while I was lying on the couch in the darkness, drifting, a quiet calm settled over me, a feeling like I had discovered something that had been there waiting for me all along, that I did believe I was worth something, and that somehow th
e faith Beale once had in me had rooted deep and grown strong without me noticing. He had said I was a keeper and I still believed him, believed that I was worth the effort, and even if I was the only one making the effort, I was making it for me and that had to count. He had given that to me, and even if I never saw him again, I would still believe it.
I would always believe it.
I slept like a rock, and when I woke up I felt steady again, like I was standing back on solid ground, and that was good because everything else around me was disintegrating.
The snow started right after Thanksgiving and it never seemed to stop, which only made things harder. The restaurant was in full holiday swing and had upped my weekend hours, so I had no chance for a social life or to even visit Ellie’s grave. Candy was working the day shift down at the factory, so it left her plenty of time to bitch at me at night when I was bone tired and trying to do my homework.
My mother was sicker than I’d ever seen her. She kept falling into sleeps so deep she would pee herself, ruining the sheets and towels, and staining the whole mattress orange, and have to be shaken awake, hard. She trembled nonstop, was always cold and even skinnier than when she was addicted to meth. She hardly ever ate but was always drinking and pushing me to get her more and more pills. She had been in and out of the hospital every winter these past years, but that had been self-induced and somehow, this was different.
I took a day off from school and got us a ride down to the clinic with Marisol, where the attending doctor examined my mother, took blood, listened to me recite her problems, and armed with a very grave look and the blood test results, told us her liver was failing and that he would make an emergency appointment for her to be evaluated by a transplant team.