Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“It must’ve been obvious to her by now that I wasn’t going to rip her off or drop a dime on her with her mother or some social worker and certainly not the cops, so she was talking to me more easily. Plus she was making eye contact with me and not just with Helene, which she wouldn’t do at first, like an animal that’s been abused by adult humans in the recent past and only expects more of the same. By this time I was really into mothering her. Something about her childlike physical awkwardness and her ignorance of the world, which usually make me impatient with people, in her case made me feel protective. Also I liked her company. Nights were a lot less lonesome in the apartment than they had been. I’d gotten over her pierced eyebrows, nostrils, ears and lips and had even started liking her tattoos, especially the Rastafarian lion’s head on her right shoulder. The rattlesnake around her left wrist and the World Trade Center in New York on her upper back were cool, too. This was before nine-eleven, of course. Someone other than Veronica must’ve tattooed the Trade Center because it was on her back, but even so, I could tell from the others, since she’d drawn them herself and tattooed the ones she could reach, that Veronica had a real talent for art.

“All the time, though, like it’s her only subject, Veronica is talking about Rudy, only I notice it’s not as negative as before. Slowly certain positives are creeping in, like, ‘Rudy’s this amazing mechanic that can fix any kind of bike and even fixes cars for his friends who have them,’ and one night we’re burning a pretty inferior joint, regular ditch weed, and she says, ‘Y’know, Rudy grows the best boom in Oregon, but he’d never show me his patch. He said it was to protect me in case I ever got busted.’

“‘Yeah, right,’ I say. ‘Mister Fucking Protective.’ Obviously she needed a lot more instruction and self-confidence in order to kick this guy. Still, although on a deep level I know better, I’m telling myself this is turning into a successful home-detox-slash-rehab, and I’m thinking of tossing another party to finish celebrating my thirtieth. Plus I want to introduce Veronica to some new people so she won’t be so dependent on me and Helene for company, when one Friday I come home from work and the second I walk through the door I know Rudy’s been in the apartment.”

I asked her how she could tell.

She said, “I could smell him. Grease, oil, gasoline fumes and something coldly chemical, almost medicinal. My first thought of course is where is Helene? That junkie punk bitch Veronica better not put my baby in danger or I’ll kill her, I’m thinking as I go from room to room, until I find Helene in her bedroom down on the floor marrying Barbie and Ken with Share a Smile Becky as the bridesmaid. Everything looks okay, even the cats are there for the wedding, so I give her a hug and say, ‘Where’s Veronica?’

“Helene says, ‘They went out, her and the man who threw the knife.’

“I asked her a few more questions, like how long was he in the apartment and how long ago did they go out, which turned out to be only a few minutes of each, and Veronica promised she’d be right back, which in fact she was, while I was still sitting there on the floor with Helene. She comes into the bedroom and leans against the doorframe and says, ‘Awesome you’re home. I was just getting rid of Rudy. On account of how you feel about him and all.’ ”

I said to the woman, “That’s really good, right? That Veronica was just getting rid of Rudy?” I was into her story by now and was starting to hope everything would turn out for the best, even though I knew from the way she’d begun her story that it wouldn’t.

She said, “Yeah, right, really good. Not. Because when Veronica shoots me this big intense smile, I can tell right away from how she’s handling her body and her breathing rate and her lying smile that she’s high, and it isn’t from weed, it’s crack or meth. Which means that anything she says is pure bullshit. She says she has to pee and goes into the bathroom and closes the door. And of course that’s bullshit too. It’s just to keep me from looking at her.

“Since the girl doesn’t know what’s real or isn’t real, there’s no way I’m going to know it either. That’s the way it goes down with junkies. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. They make up and shape reality with their jones, and if you buy even a small part of it, your own reality gets infected by it, until their jones is yours too, and all the time twenty-four-seven you’re thinking about whether she’s high or not, holding or not, going to rip you off to buy drugs or not, telling the truth or not, or if she even knows the truth. It’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. The only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them, don’t listen to word one of their elaborate explanations for their actions or inactions. Assume everything is a lie and just throw them out of the house. Even if it’s your own kid. Which is what I did.”

“You mean Helene?” I ask her.

“No, Veronica! It’s like you can’t think about the consequences. You can’t think about what’ll happen to her now down there on the streets traipsing after the Rudys of the world until finally he decides she’s too high-maintenance and is losing her looks, so he tosses her out like garbage for somebody even worse to scoop up, because no matter how far down the ladder of men she goes there’s always some dump picker on the rung below glad to grab what little body and soul she’s got left. That’s why I believe Veronica is dead. She could’ve hooked up with one of the hundreds of losers heading south to Cali these days, of course, and maybe she did, or she could’ve gotten busted for manufacture and distribution and has been doing time at Coffee Creek Correctional down in Wilsonville. But something tells me she never left Portland. Maybe because in spite of the lousy climate I stayed here myself even after the dot-com bubble burst back in 2001 and I lost my job at the agency and had to go on welfare until I got hired at Wendy’s. Because this is where Helene grew up. If she’d been busted and sent to Coffee Creek I would have heard about it from Huey, Dewey or Louie, although since they moved back to Eugene to start their own motorcycle repair shop I never see them anymore. But somebody would have told me. Everyone knew how attached I was to that girl and how rotten I felt when I had to throw her out on the street.”

I said, “You don’t mean Helene, do you? You sure we’re still talking about Veronica?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve never once run into her anywhere in the city, and Portland isn’t that big and there are only a few neighborhoods where people like her, or like me for that matter, can afford to live. Like I said, I look for her everywhere, and you’d think I’d see her standing in line outside one of the soup kitchens or panhandling downtown or waiting in the rain for one of the homeless shelters to open. But I haven’t. That’s why I think she’s dead.

“Anyhow, when Veronica finally came out of the bathroom that day I was waiting for her in the living room by the door with a trash bag filled with the few things she’d accumulated while living with me, the T-shirts and flip-flops and some underwear I’d laid on her and the junk she’d bought with the hundred bucks a week I was paying her, like a half-dozen CDs and a stack of fashion magazines that she liked to cut up and turn into these weird Goth-type collages and a pair of sunglasses that she wore just for looks, since the sun never shines in Portland.

“‘Here’s all your shit. Take it and get out,’ I told her. ‘We’re done, you and me.’