Tim Murphy - Christodora

“I’m not coming to you!” Milly fired back, now fully awake. “I’m infuriated at you! You’re not a good friend!”

This was the lance that pierced Drew’s pent-up tears. “Don’t say that,” she sobbed. “I want to be. Sweetie, please! Give me another chance.”

The low break in Drew’s voice, the snuffly snobs, took Milly aback. She sighed deeply, pushed her sleep-tangled hair back from her face. “If you’re that scared, get in a cab and come over here,” she said. “I’m not leaving Brooklyn at three in the morning.”

“I don’t even know where you live now,” Drew snuffled.

Milly gave her the address — Drew said she’d be there soon — and put the phone down. She was annoyed, and annoyed at herself for acquiescing. Hurricane Drew was about to come sweeping through her safe, well-ordered home. She went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, took out the Ativan that she barely ever took anyway, and hid it in a dresser drawer so Drew wouldn’t steal it. She turned against the wall a canvas she was working on so she wouldn’t have to bear some casual remark Drew would make about it. How else could she protect herself? She went into the kitchen and made a pot of chamomile tea and sat there in her bathrobe, fake-mulling over the crossword puzzle in yesterday’s paper.

In the Village, Drew put down the phone. Again, the clicking started and she thought it was coming from the windows and the walls, the neighbors and the authorities trying to get into the apartment in a subtle, quiet way, then arrest or hospitalize her. The thought of pulling herself together, locking the door behind her and venturing down the bright, empty stairwell, braving the sidewalk and hailing a cab, giving the cabbie the impression of normalcy all the way to Brooklyn, terrified her. But she also knew that if she didn’t leave, it would just be her and the clicking until dawn, and she’d go insane. So she blocked out the clicking, dressed, got her bag and keys.

Oh, and the coke. There was that baggie in her bureau she hadn’t told the others about, because surely they’d have gotten her to bring it out, and she’d wanted them to leave. She took it out and, fully acknowledging how crazy she was, scooped a fair-size mound on the end of her key and snorted it. Then she put it in her bag and lay on her back on her bed with her head hanging off the edge until she felt the familiar, comforting tang in the back of her throat. She got up and swaggered out of the apartment — the heels of her boots criminally loud in the echoing stairwell with the buzzing fluorescent lights — and walked to Seventh Avenue and hailed a cab. She even made small talk with the cabbie, careful not to talk a blue streak like a cokehead on a new jag.

When Milly opened her door, Drew embraced her and sobbed. Milly stood there, dumbstruck, finally embracing Drew in return, gingerly.

“When did you start doing drugs tonight?” she asked Drew.

“I don’t want to talk about drugs,” Drew said through tears. “I just want you to know that I stayed away because I want your life too badly, and I hate that feeling.”

“I don’t think I’m awake enough for a big, deep talk right now,” Milly said. “You should try to get some sleep. I found an Ativan. Do you want it?”

Drew nodded yes, following Milly into the kitchen. Milly went away, came back, and set the Ativan down before her on the table with a glass of water. Drew took it. She reached into her bag for her cigarettes.

“I don’t smoke in the apartment,” Milly told her, concealing rapid waves of pity, morbid fascination, horror, and sadness. She’d rarely seen Drew high or so wrecked. In a way, it was a relief to see Drew letting herself fall apart, finally abandoning her bravura performance. “Come on, we can go up on the roof.”

Up there under a night sky with a wan sliver of a moon, sitting cross-legged on the roof’s gravelly floor, they smoked, Drew’s hand shaking. Milly had all but quit smoking and— Wouldn’t it figure, she thought — was having her first cigarette in weeks with Drew.

“Can I just tell you one thing?” Milly asked. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want my life if you fully knew what I went through with my mother growing up. I know you didn’t have it easy with your father, but if you could only know what it was like. Because it was really awful. It was like growing up with Patty Duke for a mother.”

Milly said this gravely, but Drew laughed, which made Milly laugh, which made Drew feel a bit better suddenly. The first cool edge of the Ativan was creeping in. She would know peace soon; she would sleep with Milly nearby, perhaps close beside her. A thought dimly formed, which seemed too much to ask for: there could maybe be moments of peace when she could put down the exhausting project of Being Drew.

“And,” Milly added, “I hope it’s obvious to you that you have to go to rehab. Everybody thinks so.”

Drew continued to nod, staring at the ground. Then she pulled the baggie of coke out of her bag and handed it to Milly. “Will you get rid of it for me?” she asked.

Milly looked at the small plastic square of white powder in her palm. “What should I do with it? Sell it?”

“Dump it down the toilet, then rinse the bag and throw that out,” Drew said. “That way I won’t try to find it wherever you’re hiding it.”

“Oh my God,” Milly said. “You are so addicted.”

This made them both laugh again. They finished their cigarettes and went downstairs. On the stairwell, walking behind Drew, Milly put her hand on Drew’s shoulder, and Drew pulled it around to nuzzle it against her face and kiss its back. Drew went into the bedroom to undress and Milly took the baggie of coke into the bathroom. She knelt down by the toilet and tapped its contents into her left palm, moving it around a bit with the index finger of her right hand. She marveled for a moment at the ability of a lump of inert white substance to so completely steal someone away, to the point that she was barely recognizable anymore. Milly had tried coke only once, in high school, and hadn’t liked the effect at all.

She dumped the coke into the toilet, brushed her palm, rinsed the baggie in the sink so as not to leave even a powder film of remains in the trash bin that might tempt Drew, and tore the baggie in two. She felt a bit like she’d felt when she’d spied Perry on the street, rushing self-importantly back to the Harper’s office, unseen by her, a few weeks after he and Drew had finally broken up. Both cocaine and Perry had given Drew a sense of being all right in the world, but then had turned on her. Now they were things that Drew would have to put huge amounts of energy into saying good-bye to rather than enjoying.

It was exactly how Milly felt about Jared. How can I really judge her when I’m going through that myself? Milly thought. That allowed her, amid her exhaustion and annoyance, her first tiny wave of forgiveness toward Drew. In the bedroom, with pale strips of light in the slits between the blinds, the Ativan had put Drew to sleep. She lay on her side, in her T-shirt and underpants, her head tucked under both hands. Her face, Milly thought, looked childlike, unguarded, not straining for wit or charm. Milly undressed and lay down the same way, her arm holding Drew below her breasts, her nose in the scent of Drew’s hair. It was much the same way Jared had once held her in bed, before she learned she wasn’t free.

Ysabel was having so much fun. The music sounded amazing and the men around her were beautiful. Whatever she and Tavi had taken — MDMA, she thought Tavi had said — had made her feel euphoric, and she and Tavi were dancing close, bumping, grinding. In the song, the woman sang something like, Had enough of all the pressure. . had a life that felt like pouring rain. . Then I turned around. I was so astounded by your smile. Finally there was light. . and this is the moment of my life!