1 Straight to Hell (9 page)

He was in his upper fifties, I guessed, with overly-moussed gray hair and a gold earring.  His white suit had been tailored with perfection, and his paisley tie flawlessly knotted.  “You look terrible.”  His voice carried one of those cultured accents that sound like it comes from American royalty.

“So I’ve been told,” I said.

“You are a mess, my dear.”  Miss Spry came through the French doors, a bouquet of freshly-cut roses in her arms.  She handed them off to the man in the suit and walked a circle around me, clucking her tongue.  “Mr. Clerk, please make a note to help Ms. Straight with her wardrobe after today’s task.”

Were they always so formal here?  Mr. Clerk, Miss Spry, Mr. Darcy.  Speaking of whom…  “Is Mr. Darcy here right now?”  I looked around hopefully.

“William is off on an errand for me,” Miss Spry said.

William.  So he did have a first name.  And I was so glad that it had been appropriately shortened, for no matter how sexy or alluring a man was, I simply couldn’t make it with a guy named ‘Fitz’.

“She’s already in love with him,” Mr. Clerk said.  I was pretty sure I detected a note of wistfulness in that comment.  It came as no surprise to think that Mr. Darcy appealed to both sexes.

“After today’s little errand, Lilith, I’ll make sure that you have some appropriate clothing.  Mr. Clerk, my assistant, will aid you in this.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t have money for new clothes.”  Especially not the expensive ones worn by these people.  “I’ve got more bills than I know what do to with, not to mention that I don’t have any teaching assignments lined up in the foreseeable future.  And my child support isn’t due for another two weeks.  Plus, now that Ariel and Jasmine are living with us, I’ve got extra groceries to buy, and more gas to put in the car, and those two don’t even come with child support payments…”

Miss Spry held up her hand, cutting me off.  “Ms. Straight, we’ll take care of the clothing expenses.”

 “Oh.  Okay, then.”  My cheeks burned with embarrassment.

“Now for today’s assignment,” Miss Spry continued.  My insides clenched as I readied myself.  From beneath her desk, she removed a paper shopping bag.  “You will see a man in a gray sweatshirt and jeans.  You are to tell him that he has dropped this and then hand him the bag.”

I waited for several heartbeats.  “And?”

Miss Spry raised her eyebrows.  “And what?”

“And then what do I do?”

“Well, I imagine you’d want to get back to your mother’s funeral.”

I couldn’t wrap my mind around this.  “You want me to give this bag to a man wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans.  That’s all.”

She frowned.  “I wanted your first assignment to be simple.  Is there something wrong?”

I was starting to have this giddy, lighter-than-air feeling, the kind you get when you’re driving and look up in time to narrowly avoid hitting a car that’s turned right in front of you.  But I didn’t dare trust it.  “I thought that because I’m a, you know, succubus, that I’d have to…”  I couldn’t finish the sentence no matter how much I wanted to.

“She thought she’d have to have relations with the man,” Mr. Clerk offered when Miss Spry still appeared puzzled.

“Oh, Lilith.”  The older woman looked both annoyed and amused.  “Why do the minds of your generation always immediately jump to sex?”

Oh, I don’t know.  Because that’s what succubae are supposed to do?  At least according to the Wikipedia article that I’d Googled the night before.  Thrilled that I wouldn’t have to make torrid love to a total stranger, I willingly accepted the bag from Miss Spry.  And I was actually grinning – grinning! – when I was once more whisked away from her office.

Oh, it breaks my heart now when I think back to what a complete, naive moron I was.

I found myself standing in front of one of those chain drug stores, and as Miss Spry had predicted, a man in a gray sweatshirt and jeans was coming through the automatic doors.  I waited until he’d passed by before saying, “Pardon me, but I believe you dropped this.”  When he turned, I held out the bag.

I had thought he might give me a once over, seeing how I was dressed, but his eyes immediately fixed on the bag.  “It isn’t mine.”   His voice was husky.

“I’m sure it is.”  I approached him and held it out.

“No.  It isn’t mine.”  He fumbled with his keys, dropped them and then scrambled to pick them up.

I shook the bag like it was full of treats, and he was my dog.  The things inside shivered.  He stiffened, holding perfectly still.  I shook the bag harder to entice him more, then the side of it ripped open.

A myriad of little white boxes with red labels spilled onto the ground.  I recognized the boxes right away since, every summer, I suffer from allergies and sinus headaches.  This was non-prescription stuff, but, nonetheless, it was kept behind the counter at the pharmacy.  So that guys like the one in the gray sweatshirt couldn’t get a hold of it.

Seeing the boxes, he lunged.  Then, reflexively, so did I.  Despite Miss Spry and her warnings and her hot eyes, I was determined not to let this man have these boxes.  Because, suddenly, I knew what those boxes represented, and what this man meant to do with them.  And I refused to let him hurt Ariel by hurting her mother.

Some brief history.

When Tanya, Ariel’s mother, showed up at my door with her daughter six months ago, her teeth were as brown as the bottom of a dirty ashtray, and she was jittering from side to side and up and down like a puppet in the hands of a seizure victim.  Now, I may live in the suburbs, but even I recognize these signs.  After all, I do watch A & E.

So I knew what those little red pills would mean to a man who cooked meth, and what the cooker’s product meant for meth heads like Tanya.

I scrambled for the boxes, tightly clutching the ones I picked up.  “You’re right.  This isn’t yours.  Sorry.”  My laugh sounded strangled.  “My mistake.”

There was real hunger in his eyes.  “No, these
are
mine.  And my wife’s.”  He gave a cough so phony that it wouldn’t have fooled Grace.  “I’ve got this virus, see?”  He grabbed boxes and began shoving them down the front of his sweatshirt.

I didn’t relent and continued to lunge for the boxes.  I could almost feel Miss Spry’s eyes on the back of my neck, her hot gaze boring into me.

“Are you in rehab?” I asked him.

For a moment, he blinked in surprise, but then his eyes hardened.  “What the fuck is it to you?”  He snatched a box from under his car.

“Call your sponsor.  Right now.  Right this second.”

He shoved me backwards, tumbling me onto my butt.  Then he pawed at my arms, dislodging the horde of boxes.  I tried to fight him off like a rapist, but in the end, I gave up.  Sobbing, I flung the boxes at him.  “Take them, you shit!  Just take them.”

So he did. And when he left me, he was whistling like someone who’s won the lottery.

I sat on the dirty asphalt, wiping my eyes and runny nose with the back of my arm.  Asshole!  Dick!  I wasn’t sure who made me angrier: the meth cooker or Miss Spry.

I thought she might bring me back to her office to shout at me, or worse.  A wave of dizziness rose, and my vision grayed.  But when my eyesight cleared, I saw that I was squatting on the steps of the funeral home as the mourners exited the building.

My dad hurried to my side.  “Lilly, are you all right?”

Jasmine, Ariel and Grace came over as well.  “Did you miss the funeral,” Jasmine asked.  “I didn’t see you there at all!”

“I was there,” I lied.  “Standing at the back of the room.  I just couldn’t bear…”  In my mind’s eye, I saw the strange man in the gray sweatshirt happily carting off his boxes of sudaphrine.  “I just couldn’t bear to…”

My weird little family – Jas in her chic designer clothes, Ariel in a Goth getup complete with black, fishnet stockings, and little Grace in her purple sparkling shoes – crowded around me, and I realized how much I loved them.  And how much I desperately needed them.  “I didn’t want to do it,” I finished.  “I couldn’t.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Grace said.  All three of them hugged me, and I hugged back, crying and crying as if my heart would break.

The day after my mother’s funeral, I sent the girls back to school.  They both protested, but for different reasons.  Grace said her tummy hurt though she ate two immense bowls of Frosted Flakes, and Ariel – older and wiser – claimed she was still too upset over Carrie’s death to sit in class.  “You never met my mother,” I reminded her.

“It’s not just her death,” Ariel said.  “It’s death in general.  It makes me sad.”

“You know what makes me sad,” I asked.  “Illiteracy.”  I held out her backpack.  She narrowed her eyes at me and yanked it out of my hand.  Grace, still whining about her stomach, kissed me before leaving.  Ariel, on the other hand, slammed the door so hard that the windows rattled.

I counted to ten, then hurried outside to crouch behind the hedge that separated my yard from my neighbor’s.  I waited, predator-like, behind the bushes, peering through the gaps in the leaves so I could watch as the girls walked to the corner bus stop.

I’d resorted to this undercover behavior after Ari moved in with us.  It seemed that, most mornings, Ariel would get to the bus stop and keep right on walking.  Hours later, I’d get a call from the school secretary saying that she never made it to class.  Then I would have to spend half my day touring every public park, comic book store, and tattoo parlor in the city looking for her.  But on the other hand, if I tried to actually walk the girls to the bus stop, I would be met with such outraged shrieking (from both girls) that I simply couldn’t endure it.

So every morning, to save my own sanity, I hid in the bushes like someone your mother warned you about.  Unfortunately, I occasionally got caught.  Not by the girls, but by my neighbors.  This time, it was by a little boy on his way to the bus.  He was slightly built with dark skin and serious, brown eyes and carried a backpack nearly as large as he was.

“Did you lose something,” he asked.

“No,” I said, feeling foolish.  I stood up and brushed off my knees.  “I was checking the bushes to see if something was hiding in there.”  I’m a terrible liar even on the best days.

He regarded the bushes.  “Hiding?  What would be hiding?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  A monster, maybe?”

I meant it as a joke, but it was clearly the wrong thing to say for his eyes went wide, and he nearly stumbled over his backpack as he moved away from the bushes.

“I was kidding.  There are no such things as monsters,” I assured him.  “You know that, right?”

“There’s demons,” he said, looking up at me with his solemn, brown eyes.

A week ago, I would have written off his comment as the result of too much T.V., but now I wasn’t so sure.  “Do you see demons,” I asked him.

“Not right now.”  He finally looked me in the eyes, and when he did, he smiled.  “You’re that lady who works at our school, right?  The substitute teacher.”

Then I recognized him, too.  I’d never been in his classroom, and I couldn’t remember his name, but I’d seen him in the halls on the days I subbed.  “That’s right, I’m Ms. Straight.  I’m also Grace Dempsey’s mom.  Do you know Grace?”  I pointed to where the girls waited at the corner.

He frowned.  “She’s the cousin of that freaky girl with the black hair?  The one who always rips up library books and who always – hey, I gotta go!”  The bright, yellow bus was pulling up to the corner.

I wanted to detain the boy and make him tell me what else Ari had been up to, but it was probably best if I didn’t know.  I already had enough nightmares as it was.