Sarah Cortez - Houston Noir

The doctor told her, “He needs it like air. You’re trying to keep him from air. So be careful.”

Ping.

She picked up his phone.

Jamie had an appointment.

When Kenneth moved out, he gave her a gun. He said the neighborhood was rough; he wanted her to be okay. He showed her how to load it and sent her a link to a video about how to use it. She stuffed it in a Tampax box, but also watched the video.

Now, she went upstairs and got the gun. Put it in the zipper pocket of her purse. Then took it out of the pocket and put it in the loose bucket of the purse, with her loose change and loose bills and the lipstick she used every day and a package of Kleenex. She came downstairs with her purse and a quilt made of stitched-together biplanes. When Jamie was ten, she’d bought two of these quilts at the Neiman Marcus Last Call. For his bunk bed, back when he could fit into a bunk. Back when sleepovers happened every weekend. Now she laid the quilt over her son, drawing it up to his chin and tucking it around his feet.

Here’s something she remembered — something she’d pull out every now and then: Her boy at two years old. She would put on a CD and turn up the volume, and they’d dance. Holding him on her hip, her left hand clasping his right. They’d spin and dip and twirl across the family room floor. He would throw back his head and that bright splash of golden hair would flare as they spun and he would laugh and laugh and laugh.

She was careful with that memory. That memory could kill her — crack her open so everything inside would slide out, and she would not ever be able to keep things together again.

Once she knew what she was up against, she did her research. She called in sick to work, which God knows was the truth because the night before she’d stood frozen in Kroger, in the canned vegetable aisle, dialing his number over and over, crying without shame. Her hands shaking, praying, Please, God. Please, God. Please, God . Barely aware of the small woman next to her, patting her arm and murmuring consolation in Spanish. She’d walked away from the kind woman, walked away from her full cart. Drove home and poured a bourbon. Put in her earbuds and played Adele’s heartbreak as loud as the iPhone would go. She’d danced by herself, bourbon in hand.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was a heroin addict. He overdosed, he died. His mom had twenty-three good years when he was sober. She would take that. Twenty-three years? Yes. She’d take that deal.

There were people who’d gone down that road and found their way back, she learned. But if the numbers told the truth, she would bury Jamie. Jamie wouldn’t bury her. This was the truth. She did numbers for a living and believed in them. They hadn’t given her false hopes and, God knows, God had.

Months ago, they pulled into a gas station to fuel up, and Jamie said, “Mom! What the fuck? You can’t stop here!”

She ignored him. She usually ignored what Jamie said by then because, like her husband, she wasn’t sure it was Jamie saying it.

She slid her card through the slot and turned, and three men glommed onto her, touching her, pressing in. One needed bus fare. His mom was sick. If she could only... Ten dollars, lady. Ten dollars.

Jamie’s face was turned away from her, stony. He’d told her. What the fuck.

She pulled out of the station, stopped at the red, and a zombie peered in her window and said something she was sure she had misunderstood. She drove through the red. “Jamie, did that woman proposition you?”

He smiled a smile that was a lot like Jamie’s. “She propositioned us , Mom.”

When her friends asked about Jamie, she lied. When they pressed, she dropped her friends. Ignored their calls. Stopped going to church. It was easier.

Here was a piece of good advice: she needed to go to Al-Anon. At least three meetings.

She went to one and sat there for an hour and a half, listening to the terror and desperation of strangers. She didn’t go back.

The text said he had what Jamie wanted. Gooood shit. Truth. Meet the same place as last time.

She scrolled through the text messages and found the last time.

A couple of months back, maybe three, she got a call from her bank. There was a young man. The signature — they weren’t sure.

She heard herself say, “That’s not my signature.” Then she walked into her boss’s office, said she was sick and had to go home. She looked sick. He walked her to her car; she didn’t want him to.

At home, she pulled up her account and did the math. Seven thousand dollars, give or take.

She went to her grandmother’s dresser, opened the top drawer, and took out the navy velvet box where she stored her wedding ring and the pearls her father gave her on her wedding day. The ring had been her husband’s grandmother’s. She was saving it for Jamie’s bride. For when he got better.

She didn’t shake the box. She carried it downstairs, poured a bourbon, and sat at the dining room table. Drank the bourbon. Waited until her heart was still. Opened the box.

The ring was there.

Covering her face with her hands, she wept with gratitude. It was such a gift, such generosity that Jamie hadn’t taken the ring. Oh, he did love her. He hadn’t taken the ring.

He had taken the pearls. Could have been both, but it was just the pearls. And seven thousand dollars. Give or take.

She used the phone’s map app to find where to meet the man. When she saw how close it was, she pressed the walking-man icon and got directions.

Here are some of the lies she told herself...

No. She was done telling herself lies.

She wiped Jamie’s face with a fresh cloth. Put a glass of ice water on the coffee table and pulled the table within his reach. Turned off the sound on his phone.

She blew out the spruce-scented candle. Dimmed the lights. Turned the television on to the Pandora channel and let Zoe Keating pour comfort and healing on her child.

She got on her knees and put her arms around his shoulders and held him close and breathed him in. He was still beautiful, you know? He was warm and bony and her Jamie, deep inside. She was sure.

She didn’t want to be late. She dropped Jamie’s cigarettes into her purse, filled a paper cup with ice and bourbon, set the alarm, and locked the door behind her.

Oh, that cool air. The breeze lifted her hair at her temples. It felt good. See, that was something else she’d learned: to take her pleasures where she could. It felt good to click the wrought-iron gate behind her. To be walking these happy streets by herself at night and not feel afraid. Because she wasn’t afraid. She was doing something for Jamie.

Her heels made a nice click click on the street. This block didn’t have sidewalks. She felt great. Healthy and strong, not too cold, not too warm, and the bourbon was good. She’d poured just the right amount: not too much, not too little.

Here was the house that had been on the market for three years — it went for seven hundred — plus and now there was a baby swing on the porch. Right next to it, Juan’s house. When she first moved to the Heights, she thought Juan was a slumlord. He had a four-unit garage apartment in back — she knew from the garbage cans out front on Thursday. He sat in a plastic chair in his front yard with a Chihuahua named Tiny on his lap. Neither Juan’s house nor his garage apartment had seen upkeep.

She and Juan were friends now. Long ago, Juan was a professional baseball player in St. Louis. He’d brought his whole family over from the Dominican Republic. He wasn’t a slumlord — he was a family man.

She passed under the massive oak tree some builder had the sense to save. The Heights had these lovely old oaks — more than a hundred years old and as big around as a rowboat. She walked up to the tree and pressed her cheek against the bark. See? She could enjoy this. This tree and the bark and the weather being good and her feet not hurting even though she hadn’t thought to change her shoes.