Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [42]
Eliza plucked the glass from her hand. “Can I have a sip?”
“You don’t normally ask. How was your week?” Taking Eliza by the shoulders, she kissed her repeatedly on the forehead, pecking like a bird, while Eliza looked deeply into the pool of wine. When the kissing was over, Eliza put her lips tentatively to the glass and drank. “That was Les. Guess what. He’s gone to Vermont, to fetch his son.”
Eliza swallowed. “To fetch him?”
“Yes, to bring him here, to live with him for a while. I’m so—”
“Why?” said Eliza.
“Well, he’s been having a difficult time. Of course he has. I think it’ll be good for Les, don’t you? And the son, I hope.”
“When will he be here?”
“Tomorrow, I guess. If that vehicle will make it back.”
“I’m going to start on some homework real quick.”
“Oh, you had calls. Nadia and Cissy both called the other night—they said they’ve been trying to reach you at school.”
“Okay. I’m going to real quick just start some algebra, while it’s fresh.”
“Darling?” Diane Urbanski had a pert, compact face, her eyes dark and round, eyebrows full, skin white as cream; she wore her black hair, always, in a French braid. Her grandparents had been Russian Jews. Together they had sailed to England from Murmansk, her grandmother pregnant with their only child, her grandfather fleeing the Great War. On the passage over, he died of the 1918 flu, and their daughter, Eliza’s Babushka, never met him. “I’m happy you’re making a fresh start,” Diane said and smiled.
In her room, Eliza locked the door, took off her coat, turned on the stereo, and emptied her backpack on the bed—sweater, wallet, keys, books, makeup bag, which she also emptied, hands shaking as she dug through it, the lipstick and mascara and contacts case clicking as they fell, and the itty-bitty plastic bag dusted pink on the outside with a bit of stray rouge. She enclosed it in her hand and held it to her heart, which was racing. The security guard wouldn’t have looked through her makeup bag. He wouldn’t have found it. And what if he did? It wouldn’t have been the first time she was caught with drugs. Why had she let him scare her away?
She dumped the cocaine on the glass nightstand, cut it into four pretty lines, and then, kneeling on the carpet, staring at it with such concentration she felt she might have an aneurysm like her father, that her brain might burst from uncertainty, she swept the powder onto the floor and collapsed crying across it, a soundless crying that hurt.
Something to remember him by. She wondered if this was how her great-grandmother had felt, sailing across the Arctic to a strange country, suddenly alone. Eliza was pregnant by a dead boy, and whatever was growing inside her felt dead, too.
As a brother, Johnny had been unreliable, usually in and out of the house, like their mother, usually high on something. Perhaps because of this, his memories of Teddy were disturbingly few, and without pattern. Traveling with their mother from motel to motel. Climbing the yellow tree behind their trailer in Delaware, where someone else’s father had left a tree house. Locking him in the trunk of Delph’s car. Walking him to the emergency room when Queen Bea was off somewhere, Johnny’s T-shirt pressed to Teddy’s bloody forehead, when he fell off the porch banister trying to do a rail slide. Johnny had slept in Teddy’s bed with him that night, Teddy spooked and pretending not to miss their mom, the stitches through his brow bone as clumsy as shoelaces.
Most of his memories of Vermont did not have Teddy in them. Filling notebooks with band logos, supermen, marijuana leaves. Getting stoned before school in the Kramaro. Waking up hungover in the parking lot behind Birkenjacque’s. He had always been careful to exclude Teddy from his fun, even after Teddy was running around with Jude, stealing their mothers’ cigarettes—“Not yet, little man, get out of here