The Bitch Posse (20 page)

“Fuck you.” Somewhere in those angry eyes is a little girl, a little seventeen-year-old girl with a baby “What’s that you always say to me? It’s
my
life.” Didn’t all those flower children want to be like the Lost Boys in
Peter Pan
? Never gonna grow up. Now
that
was a brilliant idea.

Peace, and freedom, and the rest of that hippie bullshit can lick my fucking ass. Rennie still believes, but she’s been sold a bill of goods.

She pushes me away, hard. “Get out of here, get out of this room, get out of this house, leave me alone!”

“I’m not leaving you like this, Marian.” If I leave her she’ll just shoot up again, and again, and again, until it’s gone. This is my mother, my mother, my mother. All pale and chalky and marked up with tracks on her arm, eyes webbed through with blood, and sweat all along her face.

This is my mother.

Her lips curl into anger. That mama at the barbecue is dead, has been for a long time.

She balls up her fist and takes a swing at me. But I’m not as fucked up as she is, and I duck.

I can’t help her.

I turn away and leave her there with her syringe and her buzz. If she wants to rig coke, I guess I can’t stop her. I don’t say good-bye, just imagine the smack of her fist into my cheek and walk toward the door. I’m going to Sam’s. And even though I’m not supposed to see Rennie or Amy, I’ll damn well find them. I may even spill my guts tonight.
Cherry Winters isn’t as strong as you all thought.
I slide the keys to the truck off the hook in the kitchen and slam the door.

She can die for all I care.

May 2003
Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan

Amy presses her hands to her aching breasts. Time to pump her milk. She needs to be a lot more careful about how much she drinks, because alcohol can get into breast milk, but she pushes that thought away. Scotty’s in Lucky’s bedroom hammering and banging and clanging away at what he insists is going to be a dollhouse. A dollhouse. Imagine. Lucky isn’t even home yet, and the thing will be a hazard until she’s at least four or five. Just something to get hurt on. But Amy knows better than to criticize. The air is thick with tension, and she’s been taking long walks along the Soo lately, watching the boats go up and down, making themselves useful, unlike Amy, drifting along.

She plugs in the breast pump and attaches the bottles. Things were going so well for Lucky for a while after the heart operation. It seemed she’d gotten past a big hurdle; she’d had a nasty chest infection, and her lungs were secreting something, but they put her on antibiotics
and soon after lowered her respirator rate to eighteen breaths per minute. She put on weight and was almost three and a half pounds.

Then the reflux started, and Lucky’d stop breathing for minutes at a time to try to keep the milk from getting into her lungs, Amy’s milk, the milk that’s now flowing through the clear tubing into the bottles. A wave of sadness washes through her. She knows it’s physical, the letdown reflex that’s swooshing the milk from her nipples. But it feels phony, like eating a picture of a sandwich instead of a sandwich. Her baby should be attached to her, nursing, gulping down milk, tiny streams rolling from the corner of her mouth. Instead Amy’s attached to a machine, not unlike the ones that are attached to her daughter. This communion of machines, this sad force of connection, these wires are all that unite them.

Upstairs, Scotty bangs the hammer. “Shit.” They rarely speak, except to exchange news about Lucky. Now that Amy can’t stay the long days anymore, they get most of the news at the same time.

The reflux stopped for a while, but Lucky got sick with another lung infection and they had to put ventilator tubes in her chest. The doctors gave her a medication to keep her from moving around and using up her energy, and that’s when it became painful to see Lucky, because it was like she was paralyzed. When the tubes didn’t seem to be enough, they attached the high-frequency ventilator. The thing pumped in breaths so fast it sounded like a helicopter flying over fucking Baghdad.

The pulmonary specialist told her and Scotty that Lucky, if she made it through the lung infection and made it home (the “if” was the specialist’s, not Amy’s, she still believes, she does, she does), she’d probably be on a ventilator until she’s three years old.

And somehow, Amy can’t even imagine still being married to Scotty three years from now. Maybe if Lucky gets better it will change things. For now, the valley between them has opened up so wide and deep no bridge can ever make it across.

The pump has emptied her breasts, and she switches it off, caps the milk bottles, walks to the refrigerator, and puts them in. Tomorrow morning she’ll bring them to the hospital and drop them off. She’s not allowed to visit Lucky anymore because she’s in an isolation room to cut down on outside noises that may stimulate and upset her, wasting her energy. Energy seeping out of her baby like a battery gradually going dead, and the word drops into her mind, just like that.

She slams the refrigerator door, and Scotty’s swearing again at the damn dollhouse. What is there to do but drink? She’s pumped out the clean milk for Lucky, and it doesn’t matter now. So she opens the refrigerator again and pulls out the old orange juice
(God, I’m like Mom despite myself),
grabs the vodka from the liquor cabinet, and pours herself a good stiff one. Just then the phone rings and Scotty shouts, “Get it, will you, Amy?”

And no she doesn’t want to get the phone because it might be news about Lucky, but she picks it up anyway. The “really sorry” and “cardiac arrest” and “resuscitate” of Judy, the nurse, hardly register with her. The last thing she hears is “down to say good-bye to your daughter.”

She drops the phone and yells for Scotty, just like she did that night back in March, and he runs into the kitchen and picks up the phone from where it dangles against the wall and is banging, banging against the bead board. Amy just wants to blot everything away, so she chugs her screwdriver and pours another. Good-bye to Lucky? Did she really say that?

Scotty presses his fist to the curls that fall across his face. “Yes. I understand.” He hangs up the phone and says without a trace of emotion, “Come on, Amy. Get your coat.” Noticing the full drink in her hand, he says, “What the hell are you doing?” He grabs the tumbler and hurls it across the room, where it smashes against the tile above the stove. Pieces of glass fall in slow motion inside the vent of the Viking range—
that’ll be a bitch to clean
—and the orange juice trails
down the wall. It’s
so
not appropriate, but Amy begins to laugh hysterically. Goddamn it, Scotty won’t stop her from drinking. She uncaps the vodka and swallows some right from the bottle, and it burns her throat, lights the fire in her stomach.

He seizes her hand. “Amy. Get ahold of yourself. Stop it.
Stop it
.” She still doesn’t stop laughing, and his open palm smacks across her face like a splash of cold water. The laughter stops, and she’s calm again but pissed. “What the hell’d you do that for?”

“This is it, Amy.” His face is steady. “You can’t drink it away. Come on. Lucky needs us.”

He gets her coat, slides her arms into it, and in a strange moment of affection presses his arms around her chest from behind. She leans into him, wishing he’d kiss her ear like he used to; he hasn’t kissed her anywhere in months. But he doesn’t, and she pulls away.

He offers his hand, but she won’t take it. On her own she follows him out the door.

The chaplain’s at the hospital even though Amy didn’t request it, along with all the nurses who’ve taken care of Lucky all this time. They link hands around Lucky’s incubator and pray, and Amy’s prayer is this:
If You are real, God, I hate You for doing this to me, to Scotty, to Lucky. Just go fuck Yourself and anything You ever created.

God doesn’t answer, of course.

Sorry, that number is no longer in service.

She clings so tightly to the hands of Scotty and Judy the nurse that Scotty gives her an evil look and Judy shakes her hand when Amy lets it go.

They’ve resuscitated Lucky, so now she’s attached to the ventilator again. But they did an EEG, and the results said Lucky’s brain activity showed low voltage, and the doctors told Amy and Scotty she’d never recover from it. So when it comes down to it, if they took off the ventilator
Lucky’d just stop breathing. She might move for a few minutes, and then she’d slip away. They know they can only suggest that to her, they can’t make her do it. What they decide to do is to give her and Scotty “some time alone.”

“Amy,” says Scotty when the room’s empty.

She won’t answer him.

“Amy, I just think we have to get into reality.”

“Fuck reality.”

He grasps her face and turns it toward him, and she’s drowning in his eyes, they’re full of heartbreak and she knows he’s hurting too. “I love you, Amy. I won’t do anything you don’t want to.”

The machines, the machines hum, breathe in, breathe out, the rhythm’s driving her mad, and words come out of her mouth from somewhere. “Don’t you dare say you love me because I’ll never believe you.”

“Amy—”

“But you love
Lucky
, I’ll buy that. I do too.”

“Amy—” Heartbreak’s poured onto his face, his lips are tight, his skin pale, and his eyes, those eyes, so searching, so beaten down . . .

Emotion pulls itself up from a place so deep inside her she didn’t even know it existed, and pushes words out of her mouth. “Oh, God, Scotty, why,
why?
”

And now, now is when she falls into his arms.

They have a conversation without words and without tears (they’ve been driven so deep they’ll never come out). At the end of it all he brushes his lips over her hair and pushes the button to call in the doctors. Scotty’s the one who tells them that they want Lucky to be comfortable before she . . . And he can’t say that last word, but fortunately the doctor lets him trail off into “We’ve decided it’s best for Lucky if we remove the ventilator.”

Scotty gets to hold Lucky one last time, run his fingers through her hair, a bittersweet smile on his face, and then it’s Amy’s turn. He gazes
at her, stricken. “I can’t, Amy. I can’t stay here when they do it. I can’t watch her . . . ” He won’t say the word, the final final word.

So he’s left it all on her, but that’s par for the course. Amy says sweetly, “That’s all right, Scotty,” because she can’t bear any more conflict, any more energy floating in the air.

It’s so, so dark outside, dark as only the Upper Peninsula can get. The overcast night is a warm blanket of death. A choke of sadness seizes up in her, but she knows the real tears will come later. Now is surviving, getting through it.

Scotty leaves the room, and the doctor removes the ventilator, and she holds Lucky and rocks her in the rocker. It doesn’t take long for the life to slip out of her little body, and after she’s gone, the staff leaves the room, Judy touching Amy’s shoulder before she goes.

Amy holds her baby and rocks her for even longer, rubbing her back. She loses track of time and stares into the night, pressing her eyes into the blackness so they become one.
This night will never leave my eyes.

Finally Judy comes back, and Amy hands Lucky’s body to her. Judy takes a scissors and cuts a little piece of Lucky’s hair for her. Amy’s numb now, number than vodka ever makes her, number than the Xanax ever made her, and all within her is the black night of outside.

Scotty returns, and she sees the heartbreak in his eyes and falls into his arms, not because they’re warm and welcoming but out of sheer exhaustion. It’s 3:00
A.M
. now, she somehow registers, and Lucky, their Lucky . . . This is the first day starting without Lucky.

They drive home in silence. Inside, Amy leaves the glass and orange juice mess and just pours herself another one. Scotty pours one for himself too, and they sit like that in the kitchen, drinking and pouring and drinking and pouring until the sun rises over the Soo. Scotty tries his voice and says, “I’m calling my folks. Then I’m going to bed.”

The dollhouse flits into her head, and it’s the saddest damn thing in
the world. She whispers, “Lucky would have really liked the dollhouse.”

And he bites his lip. It was the wrong thing to say. Tears burst out of his eyes, and it’s like the spigot has opened, but when Amy goes to hold him he pushes her away. “You call my folks. I can’t do it.”

On his way to their room, he closes the door to Lucky’s nursery. Amy shoots up the stairs after him, but he closes the door to the master bedroom too, so she goes back down to the kitchen and pours one big last drink and finishes half of it in the living room before passing out on the sofa.

She dreams of blackness, of Nothing, of emptiness.