Vein Fire (9 page)

CHAPTER
  11

Paisleys

In her life, she lived lucky days and good days, but Hannah never experienced ones like those that Matt gave her. The weekend rolled and she felt like clothes tossing in a dryer—round and round, in and out, like jelly beans and belly buttons.

Customers came and the paper stacked until Matt said they were even. Soon, the paper stacks were bundled and he said they were making profit. Hannah told him he was a prophet. He kissed her for it.

It was usually men who bought the drugs. Some would stay and indulge while others would take their stuff and leave. If they were smoking, sometimes they’d share with Hannah, but it made no difference because Matt always had plenty for her. Hannah passed out easily. Matt only let her have little rations of the stash because he said the drugs would eventually make her skin itch if she didn’t have them.

After her first shower, she realized she hadn’t brought clothes with her, so she wore one of Matt’s long t-shirts and a pair of his sweat pants. He said she looked cute in them and liked how they were easy to take off. They hadn’t had sex yet while she was awake, but she was almost sure all of the days on her calendar w
ould need red x’s.

Hannah called in sick on Monday, and Tuesday, and then she dared to call off on Wednesday. She wasn’t eager to see Donna, and staying with Matt was too much like a dream she once had of things she thought she’d never do.

Matt had the tolerance of a horse. He smoked, snorted, and popped pills, but he could always function. Unlike Hannah, he went to work every day. Hannah slept on the couch when he was at work and she never answered the door. Tweakers would knock for what seemed a mouthful of minutes, but she ignored them. Matt was right—she couldn’t protect herself, and he didn’t want robbed. The gun was kept on the coffee table while he was gone. Hannah never touched it, but it was there if she needed it. She thought she heard someone calling her name and Skye’s name once, but she went back to sleep and ignored the knocking.

Marcus was a friend of Matt’s who bought in bulk to sell on his own. Because of this, Matt said he gave him a discount. Marcus didn’t sell out of Matt’s house—it was Matt’s territory. Since he was a good customer, Matt didn’t mind that he hung out a lot, shooting heroin up his veins, and then spending an hour afterwards with his head doing a drug nod as he stared at the television.

Hannah knew Marcus was waiting on Matt’s porch, but she didn’t bother to let him in. Matt got off of work early on Wednesday and when he arrived home, Hannah heard him unlock all three locks before they entered the house. She was lying on the couch, half-asleep, her arm dangling down and resting on top of Skye. Skye jumped up to greet them, but Hannah didn’t move.

Matt took the gun, went upstairs, and brought down a few buns. Marcus took them and held up a needle, “Do you mind, man?”

“No, go right ahead. I’m all sweaty from work. I’m gonna go upstairs to shower and then I’ll be down.”

Matt bound up the steps, two at a time, with Skye running behind him. Hannah opened her eyes and saw Marcus cooking his heroin in a spoon. She longed to inhale the fumes.

He saw her watching and he nodded towards her, “You wanna hit?”

Hannah nodded her head, but didn’t move. As he methodically prepared the heroin for injecting, Hannah watched Marcus; it was the closest he’d ever come to her. The scent of his deep cologne traveled up her nose and she smiled. His skin was a lovely cocoa color and she noticed his impressive arm muscles. After he pulled the plunger back to suck up the heroin, he plinked the side of the syringe so he could force the air out. She nearly said, “Please don’t,” but knew the tiny air bubble wouldn’t have killed her anyway.

Marcus removed his belt and tightened it around Hannah’s calf. He pulled her sweat pants up and smacked a blue vein on the side of her ankle. She held her breath, terrified he’d raise her pant leg higher and see her scars.

The beveled end slid into her skin; a lightning strike of red flashed into the barrel and with a flick of his thumb, he pushed
the heroin into Hannah’s vein.

She felt it—a
sticky warmth massaged her cells. Marcus took the tourniquet off and it swam through her body in a flutter. Hannah was in a waterfall of orange welding sparks again.

Sitting on the floor, Marcus hit himself, but in a large bulging vein in the crook of his arm. His body fell back against the couch, his head rested on Hannah’s abdomen, and he closed his eyes for a few minutes.

The shower started and the rhythm sounded like rain. Marcus peeled the blanket off of Hannah in slow motion and crept a hand between the waistband of her sweatpants and her skin. Hannah was still swimming. She didn’t care who was touching her because everything felt like cotton candy.

Marcus explored her and pressed his lips to the small mound beneath her belly button. Hannah smiled. Somewhere, behind closed eyes, she was floating on a little raft on a stream, surrounded by veil-tail goldfish. The rain stopped, and so did the touches and kisses. She wouldn’t tell Matt. She had come to expect this sort of thing when he left her alone with one of his customers. She wasn’t sure if it was part of his plan, or if they were all just opportunists doing things opportunists did.

Hannah kept secrets from Matt—things she should have told him. Marcus left and she didn’t mention the hit he’d injected into her. The prick was on her ankle and he’d never notice it. He brought out the last of the tar and smoked it with Hannah, who was still high from what Marcus had given her.

Hannah sucked the smoke up like a good girl. When Matt told her to take her shirt off, she did that too. When someone knocked at the door and he laid her down and covered her with the blanket, she was still. When he let Jared into the house and argued with him in the next room, Hannah pretended she was asleep.

Hannah was under a tree with paisleys for leaves. They were fall colors and spring colors. They were delicate, and they were elaborate. In her mind, it wasn’t winter—she didn’t have to wear long sleeves or tights under her clothes. She lay under the tree and it shed its paisleys on her like cupcake sprinkles. She rolled around in them, inhaled their scent, and moved her arms and legs back and forth.

Between the paisleys were words. The words fell from a cloud hanging over the tree and were either purple, or blue, depending on whether it was Jared or Matt who spoke them: Murder. Blame. Institution. Fuck. Need. Want. Secret. Refuse. Permit. Hannah. Fly.

In the scatter of paisleys, the words didn’t make sense to her, but she knew they were important.

Sometime later, her eyes flickered open. Matt and Jared sat on a couch, watching her contemplatively. She closed her eyes and remained still until she opened them and it was just Matt sitting on the couch. Something had changed. She could feel it.

“Hannah, I need you to sober up.”

“I’ll try.”

“Do you want something to drink?”

“Yes, please.”

“Coffee or grape juice?”

“Grape juice.”

“I think you need coffee.”

“Okay, coffee.”

Matt stood up and walked into the kitchen. Hannah swung her legs over the side of the couch and sat up. Her head was heavy. Matt returned with the coffee and handed it to her.

“What happened?” Hannah’s voice cracked and she took a sip of the juice.

“You passed out, I guess.”

She smiled, “Hmm…it was nice. Was Jared here?”

“No.” Matt’s lips tightened.

“Funny. I thought I heard and saw him.”

“You were really fucked up.” Matt turned the television on.

The alarm that never seemed to sound in her, chimed like church bells. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Listen, I have to cook some of that coke into crack and it’s best if you aren’t here.”

“You’re cooking it into crack?”

“What I don’t step on, I’m cooking.”

“What do you mean, step on?”

“That means dilute it with baby laxatives. I’ll make more money off of it that way.”

“Why do I have to leave?”

“Hannah…” Matt hung his head and shook it from side to side, laughing. “This house is going to smell
really
bad and everyone in it is going to be high as fuck; you can’t stay while I cook the crack.”

“Okay, when do you want me to leave?”

“I don’t want you to leave, you just need to.” Matt looked at Hannah. She shivered in his clothes and starting to tear up. “You aren’t going to cry, are you?”

“No,” she said as tears eased from the corners of her eyes.

“Don’t cry. You can come back; you just shouldn’t be here for a while. Listen, let me cook it up and I’ll come stay at your house.”

“You will?” She perked up.

“Yeah. Hannah, you need to go back to work anyway. I talked to Bob today; Donna’s starting to get suspicious.

“Donna’s suspicious? About what?” She perked up and could feel the obviously guilty look on her face.

“Yeah, you’ve missed a lot of work this week. She’s worried about you. Go back to work, and it’ll be no big deal.”

“Okay, when I think I can drive, I’ll leave.”

“If you want me to drive you home and then walk back here, I will.”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Okay, just wait until after eleven.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask.”

Hannah didn’t wait until she was sober. After a half of an hour of watching TV in silence, she picked her purse up, grabbed Skye, murmured a slight goodbye, and went home.

The apartment was still and smelled stale. It was as though it slept and died in her absence. She showered and made neat red x’s on her calendar before she went to bed. Facing Donna wasn’t something she looked forward to
.

CHAPTER  12

Divulgences

Jared could smell Hannah’s stupidity. She believed the whole bit about the dog and didn’t even question him. Girls and puppies, puppies and girls—they were interchangeable. Usually. Except for Hannah. She might be a bird—a little blackbird in her long shirts and pants, hiding something he was eager to see. But first—first, he wanted inside of her in every way possible. She had secrets and he wanted to make them his before he heard her chirp.

Matt was a prick. Jared didn’t mind taking all of the responsibility for Danny, fuck, it was his idea, but Matt could show his gratitude. He could
share
. Living in a group home made getting laid almost as hard as it had been when he spent his entire teenage years in near solitary confinement. The doctors didn’t trust him. His blood tests frequently showed he wasn’t taking his anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers. They labeled him as uncooperative and either shot his medicine into his ass, or made him drink it. They thought they were smart, but Jared was the one living on the outside now.

The group home sucked. He shared a room with Ben, who he kept catching masturbating into a hole he had cut into his stuffed teddy bear. It was disgusting. He told him to blow his load into tissues like everyone else did, but he just kept fucking the bear. The bear’s insides had to look like a Jackson Pollock painting with the varying shades of dried cum.

The worst part was the staff. They were such fucks; they made him forget about the rules. He only had an hour long window to take his medication three times a day. They still didn’t trust him to medicate himself. He missed his afternoon dose on Sunday when he was with Hannah, so they restricted his privileges for ten days. Because of this, he couldn’t visit Matt or Hannah. He had only missed his medication by fifteen minutes and the staff woman, Carla, refused to give it to him. She was a fat bitch with three chins. He called her ‘jowls’ and it made her hate him even more. She had toothpick legs with a beach ball belly and she smelled like a mixture of cheap perfume and shit. Her arms were kind of short and he figured she might not be able to reach her ass to wipe properly. She brought in video recordings of soap operas and sat on the couch watching them when she should have been working for her pay. She wasn’t the laziest, there was a tall skinny woman named Susan. She kept her hair in cornrows and started and ended her shift on the couch. At least Carla passed meds to the residents.

The e
veryday routine consisted of chores and day treatment, which was a circle-jerk version of group therapy. The day therapy was six hours long, so it consumed most of his time. Attendance was mandatory, so he went. He followed the rules because he didn’t want to return to Oakmont. He hoped he could get his own place in a few months like Matt had done. Matt had left the group home in record time, but he wasn’t court-ordered there like Jared was. Jared would live there for at least a few more months, depending on how well he played the game.

His time in Oakmont taught him about people and games, secrets and need. Want was a forbidden candy which tempted people to make mistakes. He could read others well—it was one of his strengths. The remainder of his time at Oakmont was spent as a watcher; nurses, orderlies, patients and doctors all operated on the same habitual matrix. People didn’t change. Everything was a game and the trick was to not get caught, but to play better than
everyone else. Every person kept secrets, and these were to be used to be a game player. Jared knew he needed things. He needed to satisfy his wants. And what he wanted was Hannah.

When he met her, he knew she was special. He could almost see her heart fluttering under her blouse. She scared easily and couldn’t hide that she hid things.

Matt resisted giving Hannah to him. He asked if he could have her there, on the couch, like Matt had done in Hannah’s apartment. Yes, he admitted to having watched them that night. Matt turned him down, saying he didn’t want anything to do with it—that he had done enough to Hannah. Jared knew what Matt had done to her. They’d whispered their stories to one another, and since they only gave one and shared one, it was the only thing Jared had, so he remembered it well: Matt had crushed Hannah’s legs with a cinder block. It wasn’t Jared’s thing; he didn’t like messy middles to sandwich between clean beginnings and final endings. Still, the story was a lollipop in his mind, and he sucked it for almost six years.

Jared needed time with Hannah. The truth was, he didn’t plan on blowing his load in her after two minutes and then moving on. He wanted to savor her for hours, even if it meant tying her up.
The drugs were a great idea—Matt’s idea, but smart nonetheless.
If she was unconscious, it would give him time to put the ropes on her…unless she cooperated.
Oh, but no! She wouldn’t cooperate with all of it; no, no, no. The ropes would be an eventuality, a guarantee, insurance, a divulgence of her future.

Matt’s anger made Jared laugh. There was no statute of limitations on murder and Jared had Matt by the balls. Matt understood the difference between want and need. He wanted Hannah, but he didn’t need her, so he gave her up. Matt would leave Hannah alone
and Jared would have his chance, not only without interference, but with help from Matt.

Jared knew Matt would bend to his will. He spent the previous ten days constructing a plan, and he’d spend the next ten days carrying it out.

The visit to Matt’s house was more productive than he could have imagined. Hannah was asleep, so it was easy for Matt to steal her house key. Jared said he was just using it to go through her house while she slept, and he’d return the key. He said he would leave it on the back porch so Matt could sneak it into her purse before she left. He agreed to keep Hannah there with him until after curfew, so Jared wouldn’t have to worry about her coming home and surprising him.

Jared didn’t go to Hannah’s house right away. At the bottom of Matt’s street was a hardware store. It had already proven to be a great place to purchase other needed things. Jared went there and had a copy of the key made. The extra time allowed him to sneak into Hannah’s house and look around. He stole three things: a picture of her, a pair of her underwear, and an old diary. He would
learn
her. The key would allow him to return to covet what was no longer Matt’s.

A first skim of the diary revealed to him one of the things she’d been hiding—her scars. She churned about them in her diary a lot; how to hide them and how ashamed she was of them. And she was a cutter. He took delight in that. Knives sang to her, and he was glad something did. He had spent so many hours in group therapy with little girls worshiping the pain they did unto themselves. He experimented with them in the institution—they fell the quickest to pain that wasn’t from their own hands. Hannah would be more than just an experiment in nature, she’d be
fun
.