I saw it in a Facebook post, at a stoplight on my way to work. One of her friends had posted it and tagged her. There was a photo attached too. It was blurry, like the camera hadn’t quite had a chance to focus before whoever was taking the picture clicked the shutter, but I knew it was her. I knew it was her, but I couldn’t believe it was her. Still, there it was, spelled in black and white in the caption. I looked over the steering wheel. The gray October sky was holding something heavy, clouds pressed down dark on the western horizon.
It had to be a mistake, I decided, as I drove. There was an explanation, I kept telling myself as I walked from the parking lot to the school. But at the same time, I didn’t doubt it was true. A thick cloud of dread like the clouds outside descended on me for Helen. It hung over me all day while I taught my English classes. Sometime around noon the rain started, and the sky outside grew so dark it was as if night had fallen. Inside me felt like night too. It was a few minutes before the lunch bell, and I’d given my class time to work on their papers. I stood up and went to the window, looking out across the parking lot. It was late October, nearing November. Rain spattered against the ground and leaves huddled together in wet clumps, clinging to the corners of buildings. I saw three girls sitting in a car, the distinct fog of cigarette smoke crowning around them.
Helen had been like those girls in the car, skipping class to suck on cigarettes. I wondered now if those girls would become like her. In the Facebook picture Helen’s face was gaunt, skin pockmarked and raw. Her eyes, which had been the color of shiny new pennies when she was young, held something dark, tarnished. I didn’t even know if the photo was recent. She’d been picked up two nights ago, according to the post, for using and making meth. The photo was posted by her friend, someone I used to know too, trying to rally bail. It could have been from that night, but it could have been from three months ago. I hadn’t seen Helen in nearly six. But as far as I knew—unless her bail had been posted—she was in the Lee County jail and here I was, teaching high school English and watching girls out in the parking lot who might as well have been Helen.
When the last bell rang and my last class filed from the room, I stayed. The sun had made its way through the clouds and the evening shadows lengthened quickly, filling my room with a strange golden light and then darkness. Through the closed window I could hear the sound of the parking lot as it emptied. The laughter of students floating upward. They all sounded like Helen.
The parking lot was deserted when I finally walked to my car. But leaning against it was a girl who looked so much like Helen that for a moment I thought it was her. My heart leapt. It had been a mistake. The woman in the picture had been someone else. Someone who only looked like my sister. But then the girl moved her hair out of her face, and I saw it wasn’t Helen. It was her friend Lindsey, the one who had posted about Helen on Facebook. I’d never liked Lindsey. And now, even though she was grown up, she still hung around the high school, and I knew why, of course. I usually tried to avoid her. I didn’t want the other teachers to see me talking to her. But more than that, I didn’t want her to tell me anything about Helen.
As I came closer to my car she pushed off it. “You check your phone?”
“You mean did I see your post? How’d you get lucky enough not to get picked up with her?”
“Shit,” she grinned and gave a wicked, knowing sort of laugh, “I wasn’t there. I stay away from the Dirty 30.”
The Dirty 30. The gentleman’s club on Route 30. Its real name was Heartbreakers, but no one ever called it that. Helen had been working there on and off for years when she needed money. She’d always said it was harmless, but of course there was more to it.
“Good for you.” I moved past her to unlock my car. “You wait out here in the cold just to tell me about Helen?”
“Nah, I figured you’d see it.” She followed me. I paused, nervous to open my car now lest she ask me for a ride. I could smell her. Body odor and the greasy scent of unwashed hair. I inched away. “So what are you going to do?” she asked. And then, as if I needed her to clarify, “about Helen.”
“Look, I haven’t seen Helen in maybe six months. I’m not sure I’m going to do anything.”
“Fuck, that’s cold. You could at least post her bail.”
“With what money? I’m a high school English teacher. I have a family.”
“Damn.” She drew the word out. “Helen’s fucked then.”
It was what I was thinking, but I didn’t like that she’d said it.
“Well, she should have thought about that,” I said like I was scolding one of my sons or arguing with my husband. We’d been arguing a lot lately and the sharpness sat on the tip of my tongue, ready to strike anyone who crossed me. Just that afternoon I’d scolded a student so severely for forgetting her homework I saw tears form in the corners of her eyes. But I couldn’t be bothered to care, couldn’t be bothered to stop the viciousness that poured from my mouth. I pressed unlock on my key fob, paused with my hand on the door and looked at Lindsay. “What do you think will happen to her?”
She didn’t answer. She was off by herself someplace. “You know, it’s funny,” she said finally, and from her tone we might have been discussing the best way to roast a whole chicken, “when she called me from jail the first thing I wondered was if this was my fault.”
I folded my arms. “How do you mean?”
She licked her chapped lips, spit. “First, I never gave Helen shit. You should know that. But… back in high school, one day I came to school high and Helen asked me what it was like.” She paused and I looked away. She was so skinny and pale and I couldn’t bear to look directly at her. I looked out across the parking lot, watched leaves skitter in the wind, listened to the bass of a passing car which seemed to make the pavement vibrate. “I said it felt like fucking flying.” The car passed and the music died away.
The last of the daylight was draining and everything around seemed ominous. The passing cars, the trees at the edge of the parking lot with their skeletal branches, the girl in front of me.
“But what will happen to her?” I asked again, though I was sure I already knew the answer.
“They’ll probably send her away some place to get clean.” She shook her head, scratched behind her ear. “But then she’ll get out. She’ll come back here. It will start all over. That’s all.”
“That’s all.” I repeated. And then the anger boiled in me again. “I don’t get this death wish Helen has.”
Lindsey’s face twisted up into a smile, revealing a mouth full of yellowed teeth. “She doesn’t. That’s the whole thing. No one wants to die. Ever.”
We were quiet. The wind cracked through the tree branches. “I should go.” I opened my car door.
“Any chance you’re heading toward downtown? I got a meeting to get to at the Lutheran church.”
I lifted a brow. “Prayer meeting?”
She spit again. “Fuck prayer.”
I drove her to the Lutheran church, to her AA meeting or NA meeting—I didn’t ask. When she got out of the car she said, “Don’t worry about Helen. She always lands on her feet. She’s like a cat. Nine lives and shit.” And then she was gone, disappearing through the double doors of the church.
And I didn’t worry about Helen. Or tried not to at least. I didn’t write her or email her or visit her. When I finally did reach out to Helen, nearly six months had passed. My divorce—which had come on quickly but should not have surprised me in the way it did—had just been finalized that afternoon. I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, and the boys were tucked up in their beds when I decided to write. Helen was in a facility somewhere in Iowa. I’d found out where she was from her social worker. She wasn’t allowed to have internet access, but if I wanted, I could write her a physical letter. So I pulled a yellow legal pad from my desk and wrote. She wrote me back almost right away, my name across the envelope in her loopy script. I felt like an asshole for waiting so long to get in touch.
Sis,
You don’t know how good it felt to get mail here. To see your name. I’ve wanted to write you, but I imagined you opening your mailbox to find my letter and setting the envelope on fire. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had. It’s like I’ve been walking around at night with no flashlight and the sun has suddenly come up and I wasn’t expecting it. Everything feels brighter.
You asked how I ended up here, and I don’t even know what to tell you. Remember after Dad died and we got in that fight about New York? I always thought it started then, but lately, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking it started with Mom. After she died. You probably guessed that already. Maybe I can’t even pinpoint the exact start. It feels like my life has always been hurtling toward this. I don’t know, whatever. I don’t want to get all philosophical and shit. I just want to put it in the past. I want to get out of this place. I’ll tell you this much, if I ever have to come back to this shit hole, I’ll slit my wrists first. I guess that’s sort of the point, they don’t want you to come back.
Anyway, I have to go, group therapy. Tell the kiddos Auntie Helen said Hi. And I’d say I was sorry to hear about you and Derrick, but I’m not. I never liked that asshole.
Xoxo,
Helen
After that, we wrote to each other a lot. If not weekly, then at least every other week. When her program was done, I drove from Illinois to Iowa to get her. When I pulled up to the facility and saw her standing at the curb waiting for me, it was like seeing a ghost. She didn’t look like the girl in the Facebook photo. Her figure had filled out, her face was round and her skin had started to heal where she had picked at the meth sores. She looked like the Helen I remembered from girlhood. The Helen who was bright-eyed and eager. Who’d wanted to be a ballerina ever since she’d gotten a copy of Angelina Ballerina from the school library. I hugged her for a long time.
“How are you?” she asked when we finally let go.
“As good as a person can be after a six-hour drive. Let’s go get something to eat. This everything?”
I picked up her duffle bag and put it in my trunk. She slid off her backpack and stuffed it at her feet in the front seat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
The town where the rehab facility was located was small, but they had a McDonald’s and we went in and got cheeseburgers and milkshakes. Helen moaned when she bit into her sandwich. “Oh my god. This is the best thing I’ve eaten in months.”
I pushed my fries toward her. “Eat up. You look good.”
“Well once you’re not high all the time you realize you’ve spent half your life being hungry.”
I watched her eat. The seven years between us felt like a canyon I couldn’t cross. I didn’t know what else to say, where to start talking. How did I start constructing a bridge? I wasn’t sure I’d ever known Helen as a person, not really. She’d been first my kid sister, scuttling after my friends and me, unwanted. Then, after our parents were gone, she’d become a responsibility, a burden. Then she’d become something wild, wholly feral. And then, finally, she’d become a stranger. Someone I use to (almost) know.
“How are the boys?” she asked into my long silence.
“Fine. Can’t wait to see Aunt Helen.”
“Yeah right, they were babies the last time I saw them. They don’t remember me.”
“Of course they do. Jax still has that toy race car you brought him.”
“Oh shit, I forgot about that. I think I stole it from the guy I was hooking up with.”
I grimaced, but if she noticed, she didn’t say anything. We threw away our trash and got into the car to make the journey from Iowa back to Illinois.
The closer we got to home the more restless Helen became. She’d slept most of the way, but just outside of the Quad Cities she started to fidget. I wanted to reach over, to put my hand on her, to soothe her, but I didn’t know if she would let me. If she would think I was trying to act like her mother. Something I most assuredly was not and we both knew it.
“Almost there,” she muttered as we hit the Lee County line.
“Almost.”
I exited at Wild Lake and drove through town. Past the high school where I taught, a castle like building perched on the river and through the downtown with the Lutheran and the Methodist churches flanking opposite ends, bars and taverns in the middle. No one knew Helen was coming home today, but it felt like they were all out to welcome her. The bakery had chairs set up out front on the sidewalk. The little bookstore had set out a cart of used books for people to brows. Even the bars and taverns looked welcoming. Fall was coming on again and the sky was that bright October blue.
But then we were past downtown and heading out of town. Past the fancy subdivision called The Estates where I knew Helen used to party with the rich Chicago kids who vacationed there in the summer. We took the two-lane highway dotted with cornfields and family farms and billboards for seed corn. We drove toward home.
We grew up on what our dad called a farmette. There was a barn and some out buildings, but there was nothing remotely farm-like about the place. The barn was leaning to one side and had been ever since I could remember. The other outbuildings were rented to a local farmer to store extra equipment. I’d never been inside any of them, but I was pretty sure Helen and her friends used to get high in the hayloft of the barn. When Dad died, Derrick and I bought the place. Now it was all mine. I’d bought Derrick out after the divorce. A decision that cost me most of my savings.
“Looks the same,” Helen said as she got out of the car.
“Looks the same,” I agreed.
Our father was always just on the verge of making it big. He was always just about to get a better job, make improvements to the house, buy a winning lottery ticket. When I was little he worked at the flexi-glass factory and though he always seemed tired and wrung out after the week, he never seemed unhappy. Then the factory closed and Mom got pregnant with Helen. Dad went through a series of jobs. He drove grain trucks for farmers, worked at the cement plant, and tried his hand as a mechanic. Nothing stuck.
And then Helen was born at thirty-one weeks, after our mother was rear-ended at a red light on her way home from the grocery store, me in the backseat. The impact of the crash caused her to go into labor. When Helen was born, she was small and her lungs were weak. She spent two months in the NICU in Rockford. Our mother never left her. For two months it was my father and I alone in the house. I’d dislocated my shoulder in the crash, and he had to help me dress and bathe. At seven I was old enough to feel embarrassed by this. I wanted my mother, but she only wanted Helen.
Helen, when she finally came home, seemed to cry until she was purple.
“Lungs sure work,” my father joked in the mornings before he left the house for whatever job he’d picked up that week. “Still going?” he’d say when he came home in the evenings, weary-faced, and collapse into his chair by the TV.
My mother, face white and lips drawn into a thin, tight line paced the house at all hours, Helen in her arms. She was always on edge, always ready with a harsh word, reprimands if I made noise or a movement to trouble baby Helen. I learned in those days to be good. To make myself small, to do what needed to be done in order for Helen to thrive.
As she grew, Helen became our mother’s shadow. They were always together, always consorting. They belong to a world my father and I couldn’t access. So the day Helen found our mother in the bathtub her world shattered. Helen was twelve and our mother, who had never quite recovered from the car accident that had brought on Helen’s birth had developed a habit none of us knew about—pills she had been taking hand over fist. Pills that, with a glass of red wine in the middle of the afternoon, had put her to sleep in a hot bath. By the time Helen found her, tap still running, she’d been dead for hours.
I was out of the house already. Living an hour away at the university. I came home for the funeral, but I left again quickly. The weight of Helen’s sorrow was too much for me. She wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t eat, hardly left her room.
I try now to have grace for my younger self. Because I was just that. Young. I saw Helen’s pain, and I didn’t want to touch it. Didn’t want to plumb the depths. Didn’t know how.
By the time our father got cancer I was back in Wild Lake, married to Derrick, pregnant with Jax, and teaching high school. Helen was fifteen and full of more than simply teenage angst. Our mother’s death had nearly unmoored her. The only thing keeping her tethered in place was her dance classes. She committed herself to them with an almost manic devotion. But the darkness had already seeped in. Wrapped her up and pulled her under. The same way it had our mother.
When Dad died a year later, and Derrick and I bought the farmette, Helen stayed on with us to finish high school, though she didn’t want to. She wanted to go to New York.
The first time she told me I nearly laughed. Jax was a toddler and I held him wailing in my arms as Helen pled her case.
“I’m going to be a ballerina. Madam Spear says I have it.”
“Helen, be serious.” I bounced Jax in my arms, trying to sooth him. I was wrung out in those days, trying to mother both Helen and my son. Seeming to fail at both. “Madam Spear teaches ballet in the middle of nowhere Illinois, I hardly think she is in a position to say who ‘has it.’ New York is for… I don’t know… girls who didn’t learn to dance in a barn.”
“But she danced in New York.”
She had me there. I only knew Madam Spear as the eccentric woman who had converted the stone barn at the edge of town into a dance studio and lived above it. My only other knowledge of her extended to her habit of drinking three cups of coffee at the Corners of the World Diner every afternoon and her claim to have once seen her dead sister in line at the bank.
Helen was a good dancer. A fabulous dancer, if I was honest. But it didn’t seem to me she was anywhere near good enough to think about being a ballerina in New York. Nor disciplined, and I said as much. Real ballerinas didn’t roll joints in the bathroom during rehearsal.
“That was one time! And Madam Spear caught me and told me not to do it again.”
“And I’ve told you not to do it a hundred times.” By then she’d been caught smoking at school more times than I could count. “You have to think about your future, Helen. You’re almost seventeen. I can’t keep taking care of you. I have my own family.” I lifted Jax higher on my hip as if to prove a point.
It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it even as the words tumbled from my lips, but I couldn’t stop them. My sleep-addled brain wasn’t fast enough. If there had ever been a chance to build a bridge, I had destroyed it with those words.
“Can’t you understand I want out of here?” Her voice was tight, quiet. “This place is killing me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
But I knew she was right. She was being pulled under. I saw the desperation, but I didn’t want to let her go. Maybe I was afraid. Afraid if I let go—let her leave—I would lose her forever. “Dancing isn’t the way out,” I said quietly. “Finish school, get your diploma. Go to college.”
Tears welled in Helen’s eyes. “That didn’t do you any good. I’ll just end up back here, married to some dick like Derrick and knocked up.”
“Jesus, Helen.” I put a hand up to cover one of Jax’s ears, pressed him to me. “Don’t.”
It was her turn now, to spew venom. “You could have done anything. Remember how you wanted to be a writer? Instead you’re here, in Mom and Dad’s house, married to a guy you met in middle school. Don’t you want more?”
Heat flashed through me and a bitter laugh rose in my throat. “You think I had a choice? To come back here or not? Someone had to take care of you.” Jax’s breath was hot on my neck as I spoke. He’d started to squirm again. I was crushing him to me, hands squeezing tight around his chunky toddler legs. I put him down and he tottered off, wobbling past Helen with a hand on her shin.
“So everything is my fault?”
Her question settled heavy between us. I watched Jax disappear around a corner, heard the clock on the dining room wall tick the seconds. Helen sniffled once, twice. She waited for me to speak. To say something. “You can’t stay here,” I finally told her. “Unless you finish high school.”
She stayed. She didn’t have the money to go anywhere else. She took on a part-time job with Madam Spear, teaching the youngest dancers in the program. Suddenly she was getting serious, making plans to graduate and audition for a dance program in Chicago where she could learn to teach. I felt better, knowing she had something solid in mind.
I had Robert around that time and Helen was such a help. She took feedings so I could sleep or wore Robert strapped to her chest in the Baby Bjorn when his colic kept him up, gracefully twirling and swaying through the house until he finally fell asleep. It seemed to me we were climbing our way out of the darkness, constructing the bridge I’d so longed for.
But then I discovered she’d stopped going to school. It was a phone call from the principal while I was on maternity leave that gave her away. He called one afternoon asking if I was aware Helen had racked up more than a month’s worth of absences. I said that no, I was not, and he informed me she was in danger of not graduating. I asked why he hadn’t called sooner and apparently the school had sent letters. When I hung up I went up to Helen’s room. She was gone—supposed to be at school, but now I knew she could be anywhere—and I rifled through her things shamelessly. I found the letters in her nightstand drawer, folded next to a silver zippo and what looked to be two loose baby aspirin, but a sinking feeling told me they were something far less innocuous.
When she came through the door that evening, I tried to be calm, but my voice shook as I asked her where she had been spending her time, what she thought she was doing for herself by not graduating high school. Did she even know she was in danger of not graduating? My voice rose higher; shrill in a way I’d never heard it before. My anger only grew as Helen stared at me blankly, so clearly high. How long had this been going on? How had I been so blind? Missed something so obvious?
“Don’t worry, sis,” was all she said as she teetered by the front door “I’ve got it all under control. I’ll be getting out of here soon.”
We fought. It was loud and the children cried and I cried and Helen cried and then finally, after Derrick came in from the living room and told her to straighten up or get the hell out of his house, Helen put some clothes hastily in a bag and slammed through the front door.
I saw the Facebook post about Helen’s arrest at Heartbreakers in the fall and that winter Derrick asked me for a divorce.
It had been four years since Helen had fled our house and into a life where I couldn’t reach her. Four months since her arrest. I was hard to live with. Prone to foul moods. Irrational and at times, nearly catatonic in my grief for Helen. He needed out. Needed to save himself.
That was how he justified it when he sat me down on a snowy Sunday afternoon and handed me the papers he’d already had drawn up. Outside the kitchen window the snow sparkled below a brilliant blue sky. But the wind gusted hard, blowing drifts up against the house and barn, through the frozen flower beds.
He wasn’t taking custody of the boys, and I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. After all, if he needed saving, didn’t they? After he left, sometimes at night I would wake myself up crying. Hot, fat tears soaking my pillow. More than once I woke in the morning with both boys wrapped around me, having slipped into my bed sometime in the night. If they heard my crying, they never said. I pulled them close and held them to me, their warm bodies a comfort in my loneliness.
I wrote to Helen for the first time the day after one of those terrible crying nights.
On a Saturday night after Helen had been staying with me and the boys for more than a month, I found myself home alone. The boys were with Derrick and Helen had gone out somewhere I didn’t know. I tried not to ask too many questions. I tried to extend grace, having faith she wouldn’t go back the way Lindsay had predicted. But I didn’t know what she could be doing out on a Saturday night, didn’t know what kind of respectable friends she had left.
The house was heavy with its silence. Darkness seemed to fill up the corners even though I’d turned on lights. I didn’t like sitting and watching TV alone, but there was an old radio in the kitchen that had belonged to Dad, and I flipped it on, fiddling with the antenna, looking for some music to keep me company while I did dishes. Through the static an old church hymn warbled to life, something I hadn’t heard in a long time. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling for you and for me. I left the station there and plunged my hands into the scalding dishwater. The song swelled on the static and floated through the empty kitchen and I suddenly found myself singing along to words I’d buried somewhere deep inside. Come home, come home, ye who are weary, come home. I didn’t go to church, hadn’t since girlhood. And even then, it had been sporadic. I hadn’t realized I’d collected these words, or that they meant something to me. But suddenly I was crying. Big, wet, heaving sobs. The kind that usually only came at night, in the darkness and privacy of my own room. I let myself weep; my arms submerged in soapy dishwater. I didn’t wipe away the tears, didn’t quell my sorrow. I was alone and I let the hurt I’d held in for so long make itself known.
The song ended and the station fell back into static. Nothing else played and I stood at the sink, my arms still immersed up to my elbows, my sobs slowing to heavy, sloppy hiccups.
After a while I heard tires crack on the gravel in the driveway and knew it must be Helen. I pulled my arms from the water; they were red and screaming. I was just taking the dishtowel from the stove when she came through the kitchen door.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. You want dinner?”
“Where are the boys? Are they in bed already? Is it that late?” She looked at the clock on the stove.
“They’re sleeping at Derrick’s. Sit down, I’ll fix some leftovers.”
“Why are you listening to static?” She went to the radio and manipulated the antenna as I had done until suddenly Ralph Stanley’s rendition of “I’ll Fly Away” filled the kitchen. “Oh, here we go! One to really rock out to.” She started dancing along. I laughed as she flung herself around the kitchen to the lively tempo, surprised somehow that she was still as graceful as she ever was. With the drugs and the rehab, I had imagined her body becoming stiff, calcifying in its lost dream. But to look at her you would never know the dream was lost. She dipped and twisted and my stomach dropped and I wondered where she had been tonight. She didn’t smell like smoke or booze, her eyes were clear and bright. But I worried. I wondered if I would always worry.
“You’re in an awfully good mood,” I said.
“Well, I’m listening to a song about the joy of our impending deaths. If the end of our mortal suffering can’t put us in a good mood, what can?” She winked and fell into one of the kitchen chairs as the song ended. “Turn it off. I can only take so many reminders that I haven’t yet shuffled off this mortal coil.”
“Helen!”
“I’m only kidding. But what is this station? Since when do you listen to church music?”
I shrugged and switched the radio off. “I don’t. Where have you been all night?” My voice had a sharp edge I hadn’t intended.
She stiffened and turned away. “Out. Just working on something.”
“Working on what?” I put leftover ravioli in the microwave and pressed start, trying to sound unconcerned.
Helen gave a small snort and slouched in her chair. “Wow, not like that.”
“Not like what?”
“You know, sometimes when I’d get real high, I’d sing that song.”
“What song?”
“‘I’ll Fly Away.’ That’s what being high felt like. Like I was flying away some place new. Some place distant. Not heaven or anything, I doubt I’m welcome there. But some place bright and new where there was no suffering. I always felt like nothing bad could touch me. I liked that feeling.”
“Bad stuff is inevitable,” I said. “The drugs didn’t stop you from feeling it, it just gave you an excuse not to deal with it.” I put her ravioli in front of her.
“At least I had an excuse.” She said it so softly, stabbing at her food, I almost didn’t hear her. I bit down hard on my lower lip, turned back to the sink. I didn’t want to argue.
She continued to come and go for the next few months. Winter melted into spring and the warm weather came fast, the nights turning balmy in early April. But our relationship—mine and Helen’s—still hadn’t thawed. Both of our hearts still seemed frozen somewhere in our past.
Then one night she came home too late. I’d expected her for dinner, waited until finally the boys had started to complain. I fed them, gave them both baths and read stories. They’d been asleep for hours by the time Helen came in the door. I was curled on the sofa, balled into the corner. The lights were off.
“Where were you?” I asked as she toed off her shoes.
She whirled around. “Jesus, you scared me. Why are you up?”
“I was waiting.”
“For me?”
“Of course.”
She turned on a lamp and dropped into one of the living room chairs. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” I scrutinized her face for signs she might be high or drunk, or both. I wanted to get closer. Smell her. Hold open her eye lids and check her pupils. Anything that would give me a clue as to where she had been.
Helen dropped her head back and laughed. A throaty, horse laugh.
“You really don’t trust me.”
“How can I when you—when I don’t know…”
“I was with friends.”
“Helen, that’s just the thing. Your friends.”
“What, I’m not allowed to have any?”
I wanted to yell. To say of course not. Not if they were the same friends she’d always had. The same friends that pulled her down into the darkness. I thought of Lindsey, her greasy hair and unwashed body. What she had said in that parking lot over a year ago. Helen would get clean, but then she would come back here, and it would all start again. That was all.
That was all there ever was. Helen would never be able to leave its clutches. I could feel it creeping through the dark corners of the house. Her addiction haunted this place. Her sadness—our sadness.
She seemed to know what I was thinking because she said: “It’s hard, you know? To live in this house again. I feel them everywhere, but especially her. Do you know how fucked up it is to have to take a shower every day in the same place she died? Every time I close the fucking medicine cabinet, I imagine her behind me, wailing like a banshee, telling me I’m next.”
“Helen, don’t.”
“How can I not? She and I were the same. Are the same.”
I shook my head. “She wasn’t as strong as you.”
“I’m not strong. I want a hit. A drink. A something every hour of the day. I hate it here. But I don’t know how to get out anymore. I’ve fucked everything up.”
“So you have been…” I let my voice trail off again, waiting for her to confirm what I already knew.
“No!” She jumped from her chair, her voice so loud I was sure she’d wake the boys. “No! Jesus. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I want it, but I haven’t done it. Sometimes I want it so badly it’s all I can think about. I’ve nearly bit through my lip to stop myself.” She jutted her lower lip out, and I saw then that it was swollen, purple on the inside where her teeth had clamped it again and again. I imagined the pain. The blood seeping from it, the metallic trickle in her throat.
She sat back down in the chair, pulled her knees into her chest and rested her chin. We were silent for a long time. From upstairs I heard Jax moan. He’d been having night terrors. I waited for him to call out for me like he sometimes did, his little voice screaming, “Mama help!” into the night. But nothing came. The silence descended again.
When I spoke, it was quiet and I didn’t know how much time had passed. “I shouldn’t have left you,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t have.” Her voice wasn’t cold or angry. Just resolute. “But you’ve never been like me. You’ve never needed anyone else—anything else. You didn’t know. I mean look at this place, the boys. You’ve got it all under control.”
She was right, from the outside I had it all under control. The house was neat and tidy. The boys were polite. My hair was straight and shiny, my skin clear. I managed our lives well. “Helen—what happened to you was terrible—”
“But I would have ended up like this no matter what.”
“Don’t say that.”
“No, it’s true. I think no matter what had happened, if Mom had lived, I still would have turned out like this. I would have been a goner no matter what.” She stood up and went to the front window, looking out on the dark yard; a thumbnail of a moon hanging above. “That night I got picked up at Heartbreakers I was almost glad. Because if someone hadn’t forced me to get clean, I never would have done it. I just would have gone on doing what I was doing. I probably would have died that way. And that’s just the thing. I never wanted to die. I just wanted to fly away.”
What I couldn’t tell her, what I wanted to say, was that I dreamed of flying away too. That sometimes on those hard nights, those nights when everything pressed down on me, I imagined sprouting wings, the roof of my house fading away as I rose up up up toward the moon, toward the black nothing of the sky.
“Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?” Helen asked.
“More than anything.”
“I’ve been teaching girls to dance. Don’t look so shocked. I’ve been teaching ballet. Madam Spear gave me my old job back. There’s a recital tomorrow. Will you come and watch them? It would mean a lot to me.”
The next evening, I found myself crammed into the high school auditorium among moms and dads and siblings and grandparents, Robert and Jax on either side of me, waiting for the lights to go down. I’d brought a bouquet of white tulips and Jax held them across his lap. The theater was hot with bodies and anticipation. I was nervous for Helen. I wanted everything to go well. When a baby cried two rows behind us I turned and glared until the mother got up and walked to the lobby.
The recital was long. Toddlers bopped around on stage, middle schoolers twirled their awkward bodies, older dancers who had been at it for years, moved with poise. Beside me Jax and Robert fidgeted. Jax dropped the bouquet of tulips on the floor where they were inevitably trampled by his wiggling legs. Finally, the music started for the last performance. It was a solo, given by a senior girl who the program said was bound for New York. Next to the title of the music, in a small bio written by the dancer, she thanked Helen by name. Thanked her for working with her these past few months, and for encouraging her to go after a dream she never thought possible. For helping her fly. In the darkness, lit by only a small pool of light I watched the last dancer spin and spin and spin. If I squinted, tilted my head, it could have been Helen up there.
When the performance was over and the dancers came on stage for their final bows, their teachers stood beside them. There was Helen, grinning like a little girl, her face glowing. I remembered the way she used to dance through our kitchen when she was young, the same way she had that night back in the winter. Like her body was made of light and air. I clapped until my hands hurt. Beside me Jax and Robert cheered for their Aunt Helen, their little voices full of something that sounded so much like hope.
