You Take It From Here (27 page)

“Do you want me to buy stuff for you guys to eat, to smoke, to drink?” Mia asked.

“Yep,” said Smidge. “All of it.”

“We don’t need to smoke anything,” I said, handing over eighty dollars. “Is this enough?”

She smirked. “God, I hope so.”

“And buy some for yourself, too.”

“Thanks, Danielle. I was going to do that, anyway. Now I don’t have to steal it from you.”

“Hey, what do
you
have?” Smidge tapped Mia on the bare shoulder with a sudden interest.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you have that makes you need pot?”

“Uh, a job I don’t like? Debt?” Mia looked at me, confused.

“Smidge, it’s not polite to ask people their medical history.”

“Oh,” Mia said, nodding. “I have
anxiety.
That’s how I got the card. So much anxiety.”

Smidge looked at her hands. It wasn’t often you would catch her in a moment of naïveté. When it happened it felt like a glitch in her whole system. “I’m like country came to town,” she mumbled.

Mia ducked out of the car, telling us to wait. She disappeared into the dark building, sliding between heavy curtains that hung just inside the door.

Smidge spritzed lavender water on her wrists and inhaled. “You were right. This stuff smells good and makes me feel better.” She opened her door to let the sun shine on her face. “All this stuff makes me feel better. Why doesn’t everyone live in California?”

“Maybe you should shut that,” I said, concerned.

“Why?”

“A police car has pulled into the parking lot.”

Smidge leaned forward, her face going pale. “Oh, my God. It just hit me, what we’re doing. And now the cops are here. Danielle! What are we doing? We’re criminals!”

I thought she was teasing at first, but she seemed actually scared. “I don’t know,” I said. “Calm down. It’ll be fine.”

“But what if the cops ask Mia who she’s buying the drugs for? What if she tells them the truth? Do we go to jail for that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should get out of this car!”

I looked around. “And go where? That Thai food joint?”

“Don’t say
joint
! Oh, my God! I can’t wait here! I ain’t no sitting duck!”

Smidge shot out of the backseat like a bullet. She wiggle-stepped over to the 7-Eleven, half hurrying, half trying to look nonchalant. She even mimed tipping a hat toward the officer, who was taking a break, leaning against his car.

I couldn’t just leave Mia’s car. If she came back and both of us were gone, she might drive away. I certainly would’ve, if the people I had just bought drugs for skipped out when a cop parked next to my Prius.

Ten minutes later Mia still hadn’t appeared and the police officer hadn’t budged. Smidge came wandering back, sucking an enormous Slurpee. She knocked on my window. Smidge lowered her voice, trying to sound official. “Ma’am, can I ask you why you’re sitting in this parking lot?”

“Get in the car and shut up.”

As Smidge slid back into her seat, Mia opened her door and dropped into the car before lowering a paper bag into my lap. It was heavier than I expected and I heard glass bottles clank against each other.

“It’s okay that there’s a cop right there?” I asked.

Mia laughed. “Is that why you two look like you just pissed your pants?”

Smidge looked over her shoulder out the back window. “Drive!” she shouted. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

Mia slowly backed up. “You are a trip,” she said. “I think this is going to be actually medicinal for you.”

“In many ways,” I said, leaning back into my seat, relieved to be done with our dangerous errand.

But once we were sitting on the floor of my living room, redfaced
and breathless from laughter, eating cheeseburgers while ordering a large pizza, I was grateful we’d made the journey.

“I have never been this happy in my entire life!” Smidge shouted over the phone to the pizza deliveryman. “You are bringing a pizza and therefore I may just kiss you. Consider yourself warned, pizza man!”

As she searched my pantry for Doritos, she wondered, “Why haven’t we been stoners our entire lives? This is my one regret. I should’ve felt like this more often in life. I haven’t been in this much
not
pain in a very long time. Everything just feels so good, so good,
soooo gooooood
!”

“When did they say the pizza would get here?” I asked. “I’m still hungry.”

“They said it will be here any minute,” Smidge replied, standing on her bare tiptoes to nudge a box of Raisin Bran from the high shelf. Reading the side of the box, she asked, “How much fiber is a bad idea for one night?”

My head felt fuzzy, but in a good way, like it was formulating something important. “That’s not true, is it? That the pizza will be here any minute.”

Smidge was counting on her fingers. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, it can’t be here
now
, so there’s one minute that can’t count as ‘any,’ because it’s not here. Also, it can’t have been here the last minute.”

“Oh, you’re saying if ‘any’ refers to the
concept
of ‘any’—”

“Which means all things, right?”

Smidge was getting it. Her eyes lit up as she rubbed her nose excitedly. “Right. You’re right! The pizza won’t be here
‘any’ minute. Because the pizza will not arrive during the French Revolution.”

I raised one finger. “Our pizza will not be here when the Beatles sing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.”

“Our pizza will not arrive that time Marty McFly went back to 1955.”

“Smidgey, that’s fictional.”

“Even better! All fictional minutes should count in the concept of ‘any’!”

“Genius.”

“I know. We totally wasted our lives not being genius potheads. Dans, I love you the mostest. Thanks for letting me be a druggie.”

That night she taught me how to snap a bottlecap across the room. She French-braided my hair. We had a slumber party that ended with us falling asleep in front of the television about six minutes into
The Legend of Billie Jean.

I love this memory of your mom because it wasn’t often she’d allow herself to be truly free. That night she couldn’t have cared less what anybody thought about her, including when she actually tongue-kissed that pizza deliveryman. Your mother would kill me if she knew I told you this story, but there it is. I think of it every time I want to imagine her giddy and satiated, and truly at her silliest. When she just loved me and loved being together. No agenda. No judgment. It had only the parts of her that made up the best of who she was.

I often think of that night for another reason. It was the last time I ever let myself believe she would find a way to live forever.

TWENTY-THREE

W
e’d reached one of the six days of the year when it rains in Los Angeles. There was a late-October storm that would be gone within an hour or two, but would tangle traffic for the rest of the day. This was, of course, exactly when Smidge and I were headed to the beach. Consequently, we’d been stuck in traffic on the highway for more than an hour before she broke what I sensed was a thoughtful silence.

“Do you remember that idiot cat you had with the missing eye?” she asked. “In that apartment before I met Henry, the place we left because of the termites and Bucktooth Betty with the tap shoes?”

“Sprockets,” I said.

Sprockets wasn’t a very smart kitty. He had depth perception problems because of his eye, and he seemed to be in a constant battle with what his whiskers were telling him about his world compared to what he could see out of half of his head. Consequently, Sprockets often would get lost in a corner, standing still, staring at the wall until someone came over to turn him around. Sprockets almost drowned in the toilet
one night. He burned his tail on a candle. Sprockets was a bit of a sad case.

“You hated that cat,” I said.

“I did not. Please don’t confuse apathy with hatred. But you loved Sprockets. I guess because he
was
so pathetic.”

I got a little misty at the memory of his lopsided, orange face, how his weird eye socket made it seem he was an abandoned stuffed toy. “He was a little pathetic,” I admitted. “He was sweet, though. He liked to sleep on my feet.”

Smidge took a sip from her coffee. It was after three and she was still drinking hot coffee. I don’t know how she could do it; I would have been up all night. “What happened to Sprockets?” she asked me.

I had to put him down. She knew this. “What is your point?”

“You found him under the building. You knew he’d been hit by a car and had dragged himself under there. What did you do?”

“I accused Bucktooth Betty of running him over because she always drove so fast in the parking lot.”

“And then you wrapped him in your flannel and you took him to the vet, where you had him put down.”

I swallowed the lump rising in my throat as I tried to focus on the personalized license plate of the car in front of me.

Up until the moment Sprockets’ body went limp, I’d never seen anything die. It wasn’t peaceful to me. It was awful. It felt like someone had robbed my cat of its very catness, as I stood by, helpless to stop it.

The license plate read: SUPRSTR8. I couldn’t tell if it stood for
Super Star 8
or
Super Straight.

“I’m no different than Sprockets,” Smidge said.

Maybe
Soup or Street
?

“My grampa went down the long way,” she continued. “He wasn’t that old, but he was really sick. He spent years withering away, and I had to watch it. The Lizard would take me over there and I’d have to sit with him in his hospital while he stayed hooked up to machines. He went away piece by piece. Sometimes he’d lose a memory; sometimes he lost control of his bowels. Sometimes the Lizard had to feed him.”

“When was this?”

“I was eight. That man had fought wars and won medals and now we had to take a break during Christmas so my grandmother and my father could tag-team changing his diaper. He didn’t die until I was almost Jenny’s age. One day he told me about the cyanide capsule they made him carry on his uniform during the war, in case he was ever captured. Told me he’d been dreaming about cyanide pills for months. You know what he said to me then? Well, he thought I was Ginger Rogers so he said, ‘Never let them do this to you, Ginger. Find the way out.’”

I gave her a couple of seconds before I made my point. “Smidge, that was an old man, and he lived a full life. I bet your grandfather wouldn’t want you to do what you’re doing. He’d say maybe stop focusing on whether or not
I’m
wearing the right nail polish, and look into seeing if taking some fish oil and niacin pills might keep you around for another year or two.”

A space opened up to the right. I pulled in and drove alongside the Lexus that was previously in front of me so I could put a face to the personalized license plate. I glanced at
the driver, who was an older, Hispanic female. She was shaking her head while talking on her Bluetooth headset, fingers outstretched on her steering wheel.

I’m gonna go with
Superstar 8.

“I
hatechoo
,” Smidge said.

“Why? Because I don’t support you on your little death wish?”

“Because you think things can be simple and then you judge me for not doing what you want me to do. You think I’m weak when I don’t do what you think I should do.”

“I cannot believe you just said that.” I felt my neck wrench as I turned to face her. “How is that any different than the way you think of me?”

“It is completely different.”

“In what way, Smidge?”

“I can’t believe you live twelve miles from the beach and it takes an hour to get there. This city is fucking stupid.”

It took another fifteen minutes to get to the water, which was the same length as the heavy sigh that came out of me.

Smidge jammed both of her feet into the sand and took as deep an inhale as she could muster. “This is good,” she said. “Can you bottle up
this
smell? This feels like it could help.”

I was still too upset to pretend everything was fine. I kept my fists in my pockets as I stared out at the horizon, shaking my head.

“Okay, that’s it,” Smidge said as she pushed me backward onto my butt, plopping directly into the damp sand. I was unprepared for her strength.

She straddled my stomach, sitting over me like an older brother about to spit in my face.

I didn’t struggle. “Get off me.”

Sand stuck to her cheek. She ran the back of her hand across her forehead as she sneered.

“This is officially the last time I talk to you about this,” she said. “
This is it.
I cannot get better. It sucks and it ain’t fair, and it’s embarrassing enough without you trying to make it sound like I am doing some kind of high-horse bullshit, which I assure you, I am not.”

She lifted her head to gasp a few breaths, trying to calm down. The tide was coming up around our feet, chilling the backs of my legs. My toes were numb from exposure.