With or Without You: A Memoir (24 page)

The next day I say fuck it, drink some whiskey, smoke a joint, and come to the conclusion that I need to quit my job. I’m sick of cleaning urine stains off wealthy people’s toilets. My job is the problem. It’s driving me to drink. My job and my apartment. I keep locking myself out of my apartment. I’ve gone through three sets of keys in one month. It’s a sign, obviously. Time to leave.

I call my stepmother and sheepishly ask if I can move into the studio on the top floor of her sister’s apartment building. I don’t have much money, and I’m hoping she can negotiate some kind of deal for me. My stepmother makes a phone call and gets back to me in less than an hour. The apartment is unoccupied, she says, but her sister can’t rent it out. There’s no fire escape and no heat in the bathroom or kitchen, so the city won’t let her have tenants. But I can stay there as long as I don’t report her to the Housing Authority.

“It’s furnished,” Carla says. “It’s ready and waiting for you. I’ll even clean it up a little if you want.”

I ask Carla about my mother. She is reluctant to tell me everything she’s heard. A few days later, I talk to my father. “She’s not in jail yet. So there’s that,” he says. “How she’s managed to escape getting locked up I don’t know. No one can believe it.” According to the mostly reliable network of small-town gossipers, my father reports that neither my mother nor my stepfather has a job. “I don’t know where they get the money for, you know, the stuff they need.”

“She was always really good at solving that problem,” I say bitterly.
Was
. As though she really were dead.

My sister says she passed my mother going into a pharmacy. “I put my head down, and so did she,” she told me. “I don’t know if she even recognized me. She looked pretty out of it.” My brother tells me that he saw her once, driving around town in a beat-up old Chevy. “Looked like one of the old cabs painted black.” She was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes, slouching low in her seat, my brother reports, like a person on the run.

She’s not just hiding from the police. She’s hiding from everyone. Danvers is a small town. You can’t go around telling people you’re a millionaire and then lose it all without having a steamy shovel of schadenfreude flung back in your face.

“Where does she live?” I ask my father.

“I’ll find out,” he says.

The next time we speak, about a week later, I have to ask him again. This kills me. I don’t like saying her name. Even the pronoun
she
, when it refers to my mother, swells into a stone in my throat.

“They’re over at Michael’s mother’s place, that apartment next to the old taxi garage.”

I wish I could travel invisibly into her life, observant and untouchable like a ghost in a Dickens novel. I would be able to check up on her from time to time without her knowing I was there. What would I see? Nothing new. My mother hiding in the back bedroom of her mother-in-law’s apartment. All the windows covered up with towels. There were curtains in that room, but they’re lacy and white and wouldn’t block enough sun, or maybe Michael’s mother took them down to protect them from all the cigarette smoke. My mother sits
in her bed smoking. Next to her is a small table, every inch of it covered with pill bottles. There are enough bottles of similar size to make a flat surface, and balanced on top is a tea saucer with a spoon and a lighter. In the little drawer is where she keeps her syringes or the empty bottles of methadone, whichever is her dependence at the moment, along with a thick pile of losing scratch tickets. All over the floor, at exactly arm’s length from where she sits, are several disposable plastic cups with the remnants of chocolate milk. The floor is littered with dirty paper plates, the plastic wrappers of beef-jerky sticks, and dozens, possibly hundreds, of packs of cigarettes, most of them empty. Facing the bed is a television that is never turned off. In the far corner of the room are a mini fridge and a microwave, the kind of setup you would find in a college dorm. Maybe Michael or a dog is lying next to her on the bed. Maybe she’s alone, the light of the television flickering on her—a thing in the shape of a woman, neither alive nor dead.

I get it into my head that if I can know exactly what’s happened to her I’ll be okay. So I do a very banal thing I’ve done countless times when I wanted to know more about a person: I Google my mother. It is hilarious and surreal to type her name in the search box.

And there she is, the very first hit. No one else like her in the world.

I had heard from people back home that my mother made the paper a couple of times. Front-page news, I soon learn. Oh, Mum, honestly, I’m a little proud. I read the articles online, about how she lost her house, her taxi business as well as the building it was in, a building described by the journalist as “habitually unkempt.” Was the C&A building that bad? Even with the yellow stained walls, I remember it was ten times cleaner and nicer than the house we actually lived in. She and my stepfather were arrested for class-A drug possession; my mother was also charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She and Michael got pulled over while driving home from a drug run. Mum jumped out of the car and booked it down the highway on foot. When she was apprehended by the police, she kicked and swore.

I hardly breathe as I read this part. I’m playing it like a movie in my mind. What was she wearing? What song was on the radio? Then a gift: in the middle of the article there is a quote from her. The journalist had called her asking for a statement. Kathi’s voice comes to life in print.

“Call someone who gives a f—, sweetheart.”

Reading this sentence, I miss her more than I ever imagined possible.

TWO WEEKS AFTER I
arrive in Danvers, I’m reading the
Boston Sunday Globe
at my father’s house. “Look at this,” the old man says. He drops a section of the newspaper called Homes in front of me. There are two properties featured on the first page. Above the fold is a house built in 1668. It belonged to a family of Puritans who landed in Massachusetts fourteen years after the first colonists arrived at Plymouth Rock. This house, which has remained in the same family for more than three hundred years, is a beautiful New England saltbox with the original seventeenth-century hinges still creaking open the doors. The first owner, Isaac Goodale, saw his brother murdered by Giles Corey, one of the five men who was crushed to death by heavy stones during the Salem witch trials of 1692. The current owners, I read in the article, are descendants of these same Goodales, now elderly Vermonters too frail to make the trip to the family house on holidays and too prudent to justify the cost of a house that has no use.

It must be a hard sell or it wouldn’t be in the paper. The owners acknowledge this in the article and offer an explanation: there are ghosts lingering in the halls. They joke that one needs experience to live in a house like this and not be afraid.

“We’re heartbroken to see the house leave the family,” they say.

Below the fold is another article, another house, also large, beautiful, and difficult to sell. Or, more accurately, hard to keep inhabited. Unlike the Goodale house, this one has passed through several owners since the original family left. It’s a three-thousand-square-foot
contemporary cape with a large wraparound porch, offering what the newspaper quaintly describes as “a front seat for the Porter River across the street.”

35 Eden Glen Avenue. My mother’s house.

“It’s cursed,” my father says. “That’s why no one’s buying.”

Staring at the paper, I wonder for a moment which house he means.

———

I
F YOU GOT AN OLD PAINT CAN, FILLED IT WITH RUSTY NAILS, THREW
in a couple of sweaty jockstraps, and soaked it all in acid rain, then brought this mixture to a boil, somehow burned it, topped it off with toilet water, then boiled it again, you would have a beverage ten times better than the stuff they call coffee around here. I should know, because I’m the one who made it. Having nothing better to do, I volunteered for this job. In a state of desperation, an emotional nadir that I would later come to think of as a
gift
, I wandered into this ramshackle white building and took a seat in one of the eighty metal folding chairs. A woman with thick black hair stood up on the dais. I couldn’t glean how old she was, only that her life had obviously been long.

“We need a coffee-maker for Thursday nights,” she said in a gruff voice, as though already annoyed. “It is a minimum-three-month commitment. Does anyone want to volunteer?”

I don’t know if it was an overachiever’s reflex or a deus ex machina, but to say I raised my hand implies an agency that simply wasn’t there at the time. Looking around, I guessed about a hundred people were gathered in the small A-frame building, what might, in a simpler time, have been a one-room schoolhouse. Everyone in the hall was either skin-and-bones scrawny or grotesquely obese, and not a single face was smiling. Nor was anyone raising his hand—no one except, I noticed with disembodied amazement, me.

The woman nodded at me and slammed a battered spiral notebook down on the counter next to an industrial samovar. “Write your name and number in there.” She walked me through the six-step process for making coffee, pointed out the supply closet, the Styrofoam cups, the cream and sugar. “Make sure the chairs look nice. Not sloppy. In rows of, like, five or six chairs each.” She handed me a key to the building. “It’s not rocket science, but you’d be smart to get here a little early. If the coffee’s not ready at four-thirty sharp, they start to riot.”

For no one really knows how long, this building had been dedicated to the single purpose of meetinghouse for addicts in various stages of recovery. Situated between a Presbyterian church and the town fire department, it has a graveyard that is close to four hundred years old. Square gray stones poke out of the grass like rows of crooked teeth. Here lyes ye Bodies of the Zachariahs and Abigails, the sea captains, British colonels, and their wives, the “relicts.” They were Puritans who looked at the world with shrewd, dry eyes and saw that you could work as hard as an ox all your life, never uttering a nasty word, not even in your dreams, but nothing can guarantee your escape from hell. God-given redemption was limited to a few, and its allotment was random and inscrutable. What’s truly amazing about these people was their belief that, given a choice, knowing as all sentient beings do, that you are going to die no matter what, you might as well die trying.

The gravestones are all carved with that curious Puritan hallmark, a skull gritting his enormous teeth and sprouting thick fronds of grass out of his ears, a bodiless skeleton flying on angel’s wings. Sometimes the truth is delivered with artistry. Think of Mahler or Caravaggio or Yeats. Sometimes it’s as sublime as stars strung up
just so
across the black night sky. Sometimes it’s something as embarrassing as a rainbow, or as gross as dog shit on your open-toed shoes. It’s a punch in the gut, whatever it is. It physically
hurts
. It has to, or we might intellectualize until we’re cross-eyed and blind to the thing we need to see. That’s the way it has always worked for me, at least—a gastrointestinal revelation of Truth.

That day, I wandered the graveyard behind the meetinghouse with a cold lump of fear sliding down my throat. I didn’t want to be here. I regretted raising my hand. I regretted every single moment of my life leading up to now. Way, way down deep, I still sort of wanted to die. But the morbid little seraph carved into the thin slabs of stone—he was jubilant, on the brink of laughter, ready to sing the eternal good news: Life springs from death, and death from life.

Whether I liked it or not, the person I used to be had to die.

I LIKED TO SAY
that I would quit drinking when I got pregnant or when my mother died, whichever came second. As my twenties came to a close, it was becoming clear that I might not live long enough to see my mother go, let alone to take over the official role of being someone else’s mother. My friends in recovery tell me that you finally get sober the day before you were supposed to die. It’s a dramatic, hysterical, almost superstitious idea, which is precisely why I love it, and why I think it’s true.

At the end of my drinking—what I hope is the end—I began to hallucinate. Walking my dog in the early morning, I’d fix my gaze straight ahead, on the flat rectangles of concrete beneath my feet, as though actively trying to shut out the overwhelming nonsense of life in the periphery. I would pay very close attention to the ground, to the wads of gum dotting the sidewalk like malignant black moles, or the impertinence of a tree root breaking through the cement. If I let my eyes scan any higher, I would start to see visions, and though I never thought they were real in any ontological sense, the possibilities they suggested scared me witless.

Beams of headlights on the highway sliced through the mist in two continuous bands of light. The gold light was coming toward me, the red light streaming away. Staring at them, I’d picture a car skidding off the road and pinning my body against a scraggly tree. I could see it all happening frame by frame, feel the air being pressed out of my lungs, feel my ribs being crushed, my heart stopping. Then I’d shake my head and walk home.

Sometimes, as I climbed the staircase to the third floor of my apartment building, I’d feel my foot slip. My body would lean back. Reflexively I always caught myself, but what if I didn’t? What if I just let go, fell backward down the stairs? I could hear the hideous thud of my head whacking the steps several times before my neck broke. Gripping the knob of my apartment door, I’d think, Not this time.

Then there was the train. A commuter rail ran from Boston to the suburbs of Cape Ann and cut through my neighborhood every hour. I lived close enough to hear the whistle. To listen for it, and then wonder. How drunk would I have to get first? Blackout drunk. Not hard at all, when auspiciously placed a few feet from the tracks is a decent bar called the Depot. There’d be no way to screw this one up, I thought. No rescue, no miracle surgery, no way to undo it. An action completed as soon as it began.