Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“She stared at me, wide-eyed and openmouthed like she was in shock. Her teeth were already starting to rot from the meth, and for a second I could see how she was going to look a few years from now, and I wanted to cry for her. I wanted to change my mind and hug her and believe whatever bullshit explanation she offered for having let that scumbag criminal into the apartment and then going off with him to get high while my daughter was still a vulnerable little girl, at least in my mind she was. But I couldn’t. I had to be strong. I told her I don’t want to have to change the locks to the apartment, so give me the keys.

“She doesn’t say anything. Just hands over the keys.

“‘Now go,’ I tell her.

“‘Where can I go?’ she says in her little girl’s voice.

“‘Anywhere. Just not here.’

“‘I was only trying to get rid of him without getting him pissed at me,’ she says. ‘He gets real mean when he’s pissed.’

“‘Don’t talk. Just go,’ I told her. I pulled open the door for the girl and she stepped out to the hall and turned back one last time.

“‘I bet someday you’ll be sorry you did this to me,’ she said.

“‘Only if you turn up dead,’ I told her. It was the first time I thought it. But I had to take the chance on her turning up dead. It was like she hadn’t given me any other choice. As a mother, I mean. I was only trying to save my daughter from ending up like Veronica, that’s all. That was so long ago. But it’s why every time I read in the paper or hear on the evening news that some young woman’s unidentified body has been found down along the Willamette River or in Washington Park or in a vacant lot in Northeast Portland, I take the bus over to the morgue on Northwest Nicolai Street near the port, and I offer to identify the body, since I know all her tattoos and most of her piercings. But so far it hasn’t been her. It’s been some other young woman. The guys at the morgue, they know me now and know why I’m there. I don’t even have to tell them that I’m searching for Veronica. Of course, they probably think I killed somebody and am checking to see if the body’s been discovered yet.”

I ordered another round of drinks for both of us, our third. I said to her, “When you go down to the morgue, you’re not searching for Veronica. You’re searching for Helene, aren’t you? All along you’ve been talking about your daughter, Helene. She’d be twenty-six or twenty-seven now, right? Helene, I mean. You kicked Helene out of your apartment. Veronica, if she’s alive, would be in her early forties. If she existed in the first place.”

She said, “You don’t understand! I’m looking for them both. I might be the only one who can identify them, you know. It’s like I’m having a bad dream, and I want to wake up from it, but I’m afraid that when I do, the reality will be worse than the dream. I don’t even know your name,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

I told her my first name and asked for hers.

She said, “Russell is a nice name. You don’t hear it much anymore, though. I’m Dorothy. You don’t hear that one much anymore, either.”

We both went silent then and for a few minutes watched the end of a Trail Blazers game on the TV above the bar. Without looking down from the screen she said, “You’re right. About Helene, I mean, and me having to kick her out and it being recent. A year and a half ago is recent, right? But you’re wrong about Veronica. She existed. It all happened the way I said, and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Sometimes I thought I found her in Helene, especially after Helene got busted two years ago for dealing meth for her piece-of-shit boyfriend and spent six months at Coffee Creek and had to move back in with me when she got out.” She sighed loudly, longingly, like a smoker wanting to step outside for a cigarette, and said, “Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole adult life searching for Veronica.” Then she suddenly grabbed my sleeve and laughed, the first time she’d laughed all night. It was a slightly mocking laugh at something she found ridiculous. She said, “Maybe I’m Veronica! You ever think of that, Russell?”

I turned and looked at her face and tried to look into and beyond her eyes, but her eyes coldly kicked my gaze back out. She was smiling, almost in triumph.

I said, “No! Not until this moment. But now I do. Now I think in this story, your story, you are Veronica. And you’re Helene, the daughter, too. And you’re Dorothy, the mother. And I think all three of you combined and did something very bad together. I think that’s the reason whenever they discover the body of an unidentified young woman you go down to the morgue.”

I stood up and waved for the check and paid for our drinks. “You’re not looking for Veronica or Helene,” I said. “You’re looking for someone else, someone the three of you did a very bad thing to. Someone whose name you haven’t revealed yet. And that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me tonight. And trying not to tell me.”

“I’m only telling you what I know, Russell.”

“That’s why you scare me. It’s like you said about Veronica and junkies like her. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. You said it’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. You said the only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them. You said to assume everything is a lie. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Good night,” I said, “whoever you are. Wherever you are. Whatever you’ve done.” I left the bar then and, shaken, walked straight to the gate to wait for my flight to Minneapolis.

The Piano Hollywood is a piano bar squeezed between the casino and the hotel at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, and like I deal cards instead of drinks the guy wants me to tell him the rules for Texas Hold’em. I know the rules, of course — who doesn’t?

This guy doesn’t. He’s a somewhat oversized, maybe fifty-year-old pear-shaped dude with pink skin and a thinning gray-blond comb-over. He’s wearing a blue-on-gold striped bow tie and a tan tropical-weight suit that at first I think is J. C. Penney or Sears, only when I have a chance to check the lines and workmanship close up I decide it’s quality garb, nice cloth, probably Italian with a two-K setback, and the problem is not the suit, it’s the guy’s Sears, Roebuck body.

He’s on his second Long Island iced tea when he pops the Texas Hold’em question. It’s early, a little after four in the afternoon, and the Piano is quiet — the day-trippers from the Fort Lauderdale and Miami old-age homes are over at the slots giving away their social security checks and the high rollers like bats in their caves are just waking up — so I give him the short form. I tell him about hole cards, the burn card, which amateurs sometimes think is the dealer cheating, but it’s the opposite. I describe the preflop and the flop and the turn and the river, by which time the guy’s eyes are glazed. He’s going to get skinned eight different ways, I think. I tell him he should watch a few games before putting any chips on the table. But then I lie and say it’s like seven-card stud, only simpler. For some reason a part of me doesn’t feel like protecting the guy from himself.

He thanks me a little too much and orders another Long Island iced tea. I’ve got my back to him, jiggering the contents into an ice-filled glass — vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, sweet-and-sour mix and a splash of Coke. It’s an alcohol mash-up for drinkers who don’t like the taste of alcohol but want to get wasted. While I’m pouring the mix into the shaker, out of nowhere he asks me in a too-loud voice, “Where can a fellow find himself some interesting sexual companionship for a few hours?” He’s southern, Georgia or South Carolina, with a suburban, gated-community accent. You see a lot of them down here, men and women both, mostly good Christians sniffing for stuff they can’t get back home.