Liz Bahti woke up curled on her side, with a noxious-smelling scale of dried puke crusting her lips and cheek.  Her eyes didn’t want to open at first, because they were stuck closed by something that felt like Elmer’s glue dried on her face.  She dragged a circulation-deprived hand from underneath herself to wipe her eyes, and every joint in her body howled in protest.  Painful pins and needles raced down her arm, which seemed heavier than it was supposed to be.  That was odd, because as far as she could tell she was naked.  Grime from the floor clung to her skin.

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Liz woke, and didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there.  There was a tube going up her nose.  It wasn’t comfortable, so she pulled it out.  It was a lot longer than she expected it to be, and she kept pulling until she had maybe two feet of plastic tubing coiled on her chest, and before she could figure out how they had gotten the whole thing inside her head, she fell asleep again.

She woke a second time because something was chewing on her feet.  When she opened her eyes to see what it might be, she was in an unfamiliar room, and there was a gallery of people looking at her out of a frame.  They were waiting for her to do something so that they wouldn’t die, and she was running out of time.  No, no, they weren’t, it was a nightmare.  Liz clutched at the railing on her bed with her right arm and pulled herself toward it, and the nightmare faded.

When she woke again she knew she was in a hospital.  That wasn’t much of a surprise.  She woke from another horrible, vivid nightmare, of things crawling inside her veins and a giant monkey climbing around the outside of the hospital looking for a way to reach through her window, pull her out and eat her brain.  She could remember the pitying looks the nurses and passers-by she had screamed at gave her, too.  Once the delirium tremens ended, and they untied her, she called her mother.

Her mother was in a white-hot rage.  When Liz called and told her where she was, Midori Bahti shouted at her daughter in Japanese.  The noises of the Italian restaurant she owned filled the background at first, and then faded as activity came to a halt at the hands of the proprietor’s screaming.  “No more!” Midori shouted.  “No more! I don’t need you to call and tell me you’re still alive to torment me!  I am sick of you, do you understand?  Sick of my daughter!  I have no more to give you!  You show up drunk and ask for money, or the car, or a place to sleep, and I give it to you.  You go away and don’t call at all until you need something, and I am not going to take it any more.  You’ve taken too much from me!  It’s too much. I can’t give you any more.  Too many times, you’ve shown up drunk and asking for money.  Or asking for the car, or for a place to sleep, and I always give you everything. Or you don’t call at all, and you say you’re sorry, that things have been hard.  And worst of all, Liz, you’re always getting it together.” Midori lapsed in and out of Japanese; Liz barely noticed which language she was speaking.  “Every time, you’re getting things together, and you’ve got a job lined up, and you’ve got big plans, and the next time you’re too drunk to remember them.  I’ll bet you can’t remember even now what the last big plan was.”

She tried.  She couldn’t.

“I am not going to take this any more.  I can’t help you any more, Liz.  It’s too much.  I’ll pay for the hospital, and then you stay away.  Don’t fly up here. If you don’t stop drinking, don’t come back.  You hear? No more!”

“I’m going to quit,” Liz offered.

“Words aren’t good enough! You come back when you’ve done it. It makes me sick and I don’t want to look at you and wonder when you’re going to die. Not if. When.”

“But Mama, I need help. I can’t even get home.”

“Why not?  I thought you had a motorcycle.  That green one, that looked like your hair.  That expensive one.”

The speech would have gone on to describe exactly how expensive the bike in question was, and Liz remembered, foggily.  She did have a nice bike, and it had been expensive.  How had she paid for it?  Midori would have insisted the money could have gone into better things, into a bank perhaps.  Yeah, right. Liz didn’t even have a bank account.  “My bike, right. I don’t want…” She wasn’t sure how that sentence ended, exactly.  She hadn’t been sober much for the past year or two.  Who knew where that motorcycle was now?  She certainly didn’t.

“Then call your father.  Make it his turn for a while.”  Midori hung up on her.  That wasn’t much of a surprise either.  Of course, her father was two thousand miles away in Michigan, so it wasn’t like he was going to be able to help much.  Liz didn’t want to call him.

The doctor who finally came in was condescending.  Liz forgot his exact words as they fell out of his mouth, but he told her that she hadn’t consumed much that wasn’t alcohol for months, had lost about thirty pounds, was lucky to be alive, and lucky that gonorrhea was the only disease she’d managed to catch during her binge.  He told her he knew she’d gotten desperate because they’d pumped half a bottle of rubbing alcohol out of her stomach.  He told her that she had reached the point at which she had to make a decision:  quit or die.  She wasn’t going to make it to her twenty-fifth birthday otherwise.

“Twenty-sixth,” she said quietly.  She was already twenty-five, and her birthday was in March, six months away.  The doctor didn’t hear her; he had delivered his doomsday message, and was mentally out of the room already. As he left for real, something went “thunk” against the window. Something small, light and solid, like someone had thrown a piece of cardboard at it. Liz looked, but didn’t see anything.

The counselor who came to see Liz said her name was Martha and seemed to know her.  There was another “thunk” when she came in.  Liz didn’t remember the woman, but it wasn’t inconceivable that she’d met her in another hospital room.  She had straight blond hair so fine it seemed to be evaporating from her head and a perpetually worried expression.  Martha was full of, “oh, Liz, how long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?” and, “you’ve been lucky so far,” and other such pap that Liz wasn’t in the mood for.  Martha said some things that made sense, too, but they were buried under a lot of rhetoric, much of it irritatingly Christian, so Liz mostly looked out the window.  While she did that, she discovered the source of the thumping sound. There was a huge yellow grasshopper in her room, and it was trying to get out, leaping into the glass over and over.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

It had to hurt, slamming into that barrier over and over again.  Liz sympathized with it.

Eventually the counselor sensed that she was being ignored, and left with a promise to return “to talk” later.  She left an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet.  The moment she was gone, Liz tore it to shreds and wadded up the pieces.

That bit of petty destruction complete, Liz folded her arms, careful not to pull her IV out, and watched the grasshopper.  It seemed to have tired of slamming into the window and was sitting on the ledge.  It was almost three inches long.  How the hell did a big-ass grasshopper like that get to Los Angeles, anyway?

She called some friends, dialing as many numbers as she could remember.  It seemed like there should have been more.  She certainly felt more popular than the four or five phone numbers she could remember, although the feeling didn’t last long.  Charlie was too busy to come and get her.  “What about the party you dropped me off at?” she said.  “I almost died there, asshole.”

“What are you talking about? I haven’t been to a party with you for almost two months.  I haven’t heard from you in three weeks, and I’m kind of pissed about that.  It makes me feel pretty fucking unimportant to you.”  Judging by the tone of his voice, Charlie wasn’t surprised, just pissed off.

Didn’t anyone care that she’d almost died? “Well, forgive me.”

“Well, fuck, don’t get mad at me. I don’t know how you got there. Last I heard you were out in the Valley.”

“Sorry,” she said, meaning it this time.

“Whatever,” Charlie replied. “Anyway, I’m headed out the door to work, so I can’t give you a lift.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“I’m working then, too. Give me a call when you’re feeling better, and maybe we’ll hit a few things this weekend. I know some stuff that’s going on.”

She was in no mood for a night of raves, that was for sure. House parties, either. “Well, shit, do you know Janice’s number? I can’t remember it.”

Charlie sighed. “Janice moved to Las Vegas a month ago, Liz. Nice of you to remember.” He hung up.

She ran into answering machines until she finally got through to Pogo, whom she actually woke up.  Twelve in the afternoon was early for him.  “Liz? How you been?”  His slightly nasal voice sounded surprised to hear from her.  Had she not called him in a long time either?  She could remember having had a dream about him; maybe that was why it seemed she’d talked to him recently.

“Like shit. I’m in the hospital. I need a ride home.”

“Aw, man.  I ain’t got a car, though.  My brother took it to San Jose for the week.”  Pogo snuffled loudly. She could hear him lighting a cigarette. “How’d you end up in the hospital? Was it Valentine again?”

Valentine?  Even with her fractured memory, she knew she hadn’t seen him. “I haven’t talked to that psycho. I got myself in the hospital.  Alcohol poisoning.”

“Aw, man, that sucks. Valentine wasn’t there? I thought he said he was going to see you.”

“He’s delusional.  I haven’t talked to him in three months.”  Valentine had tried to drown her–in a public pool of all places–the last time she’d seen him.  In spite of everything else that had happened, she doubted she had gotten drunk enough to talk to him again.

“You sure about that?”

“Pogo, don’t mess with me right now.”

Ever the submissive, Pogo didn’t argue. “Okay, whatever. I can try and get a car, maybe, if you need a lift,” Pogo offered. “Valentine might loan me his car.  He wouldn’t have to come or anything.”

Another bit of information was coming back to Liz; Pogo’s network of friends consisted mainly of Valentine, his brother, and herself.  Anything he did was going to involve Valentine.  “That’s okay,” she said.  There was some dim unease about what Pogo might say to Valentine as she hung up, but she was too tired to think about it much.

The nurse who brought Liz’ lunch didn’t notice the grasshopper.  Lunch was watery and bland, mostly fruit and vegetables in deference to her tortured stomach.  Liz considered it for a long time.  She was hungry, barely. She wanted a drink more. Liz could almost taste it just thinking about it, the burn in her throat and the lovely boost that took the hard edges off of the world. If she just kept it in check this time, watched how much she drank, and what she drank, she’d be okay. She could handle it…

Liz thought again about vomiting up blood, and about not being able to speak English briefly, and about her mother being so pissed off at her for all these times she’d been taken advantage of, that she couldn’t quite exactly remember.  And she’d been drinking rubbing alcohol? 

“This is not a good life,” she said, speaking to whom she didn’t know.  Maybe the grasshopper, who seemed to agree.  She still wasn’t hungry, but she ate something runny and greenish anyway.  Her stomach clenched around it like an oyster around a rock, considering whether or not it would accept this meager gift.  Liz closed her eyes until the cramps went away.

Even as sick as she was, her mind was spinning.  Fast.  It was always like this; she felt like she was thinking about too many things, trying to take care of too many things.  It was one of the things about real life that made an attractive alternative of being drunk and burning every possible bridge that linked her to anyone or anything.  And this was where it had gotten her.  She’d almost died, and no one would have noticed.  The skaters would likely have tossed her body in a Dumpster and made a speed-addled adventure out of it.

She closed her eyes, but didn’t want to sleep. She asked a passing nurse if she might be able to take a long, hot bath, but the gentle smile she got in return wasn’t encouraging.  That was well and good anyway; she was too tired to move.  Liz fantasized about finding out where she had been picked up, so she could go back and kick the shit out of the skaters who had apparently been perfectly willing to let her die.  And if she had died, what then?  None of her friends would have known.  Or been particularly upset, from the sound of it.  Liz felt as though she’d killed herself but somehow survived without anyone knowing, and everyone had already mourned and gone on with their lives.  As far as they were willing to care, she might as well be dead.

This is not a good life, she thought again. 

It was going to get harder before it got easier.  Everything always did, didn’t it?  Liz had to stop thinking, or move, so she got up.   There was a bandage on her foot, and a twitch of pain that said she’d cut it somewhere.  Her head went light as she got vertical, as if her brain had forgotten how tall she was.  Her little hospital room looked different, from this vantage.  Liz hated being tall.  She had to stand still for several minutes before she felt confident enough to take a step.

She stuck her finger into her lunch plate, limped to the window and smeared a thumbnail-sized dollop of mashed banana on the windowsill for the grasshopper.  It moved warily away from her, making her smile.  “Give you some energy,” she said.  “Maybe you’ll break that window yet.”  The grasshopper wasn’t impressed.

The trip to the window had made her so tired she didn’t care, and Liz tumbled gratefully back into the bed.  Her body’s meager supply of excess energy expended, she was able to finally stop thinking for a few minutes, too.

She thought again about her life.  About the ties she’d severed.  She couldn’t even remember why she’d run away from everyone.  Had life really been that bad?  She’d never been abused, or particularly unpopular, or even particularly poor.  Up until the alcohol had fucked everything up, there hadn’t really been anything terribly wrong with her life.  And maybe, just maybe, that had been the problem, because she felt horrible anyway.

“At least now I have a reason to be miserable,” Liz said darkly, speaking to the grasshopper again.  She closed her eyes, and an hour passed.

Her father, when she finally decided to call him, issued an ultimatum.  “Answer me one question,” Ted Bahti said.  “Do you want to quit?  Do you want to get your shit together?”

The way he said it made the short hairs on the back of her neck rise.  Her father hadn’t spoken to her in his State Cop voice for years.  It was the voice she imagined him using with his traffic stops–the voice that would take no bullshit.  It was also a voice that seemed to know that she didn’t have her shit together, and she’d always thought she’d been successful at concealing the dark underbelly of her life from him.  He was never there anyway, how could he have known?  “Yes,” she replied, her voice much more tremulous than she wanted it to be.

“Then I will help you, and this is what I will do.”  He took a deep breath.  “You’re going to come back to Michigan.”

“I figured that.”

“Don’t interrupt.  I’ll find you a job.  You’re going to get a full-time job, and you’re going to keep it.  I’ll find you a place to stay, and you’ll pay for that place with your own earnings.  You’re old enough to pay your own bills, and that’s what you’ll do.  I’ll cosign whatever you need, and I’ll help you out, as long as you stay clean.  You slip up, you drink so much as a single swallow of booze, and I’m through helping you.  For good.”

“Funny, that’s what Midori said,” Liz muttered in Japanese.

“In English, please.”

“I said, Mom told me the same thing, without the part about being willing to help me out.”

“I probably shouldn’t be doing this either.  You should have gotten your shit together a long time ago.  I’m going to test you, too.  I’m going to show up at your door as often as I think I have to, and you’re going to blow a Breathalyzer for me.”

She sat forward in the bed, nearly pulling her IV out.  “Are you fucking crazy?” Liz gasped.  “You can’t do that!”

“I’m your goddamn father; I can do whatever I want.  You say you want help, I’ll help you, but it’s going to be my way.  Cold turkey.  No twelve-step shit.  No second chances.  Because, frankly, it disappoints me to see you like this, Liz.  You’re twenty-five years old, for God’s sake, it’s time to quit partying out there in California and get on with your life.”

Liz looked at the phone, her eyes tracing the cord to the wall as if there was some answer there.

“Well?  What’s it going to be?  Yes or no?”

Fuck that.  She didn’t need his help.  She could do everything he suggested right here in LA; find a job, work her ass off, and just quit, quit with Charlie and all the rest of them.  She didn’t have to be under Ted Bahti’s microscope twenty-four-seven, blowing goddamn Breathalyzers like she was a DUI.  No.  No way.  Liz closed her eyes for a long moment, and thought about dying in a filthy bathroom surrounded by losers who didn’t even know her name, didn’t know her from a piece of meat.  And another thought, on the heels of that–did anyone in Los Angeles know her from a piece of meat?  Even Charlie?  Did she have any real friends in California?  Something had changed, between the Midwest and the West Coast, and she wasn’t sure what it was.  “My God, I almost died, you know?” Her voice came out small.

“Yeah,” her father said.  “But you didn’t.”  His voice was as uninflected and stony as always.  He could have given voice lessons to Clint Eastwood.

The next words came unbidden.  “I want to come home, Papa.  I want to come home and be someone else.”

“Good.  I’ll get a bus ticket for you and have it waiting at the station.”

“I have to take the bus?”

“Plane tickets cost money.”

“Can’t you just send me cash or something?  I’ll buy a car and drive.”

Ted Bahti laughed.  “Like I can afford to buy you a car!  If you need one, I know a guy who’s got one for sale.  It’s in Canton.  I’ll tell him to save it for you.  No arguments, Liz.  I’m sending you a bus ticket.  See you in a week or so.  Happy trails.”  He hung up.  Neither Ted nor Midori ever said goodbye on the phone.

“Yeah, well, I love you too,” she said without feeling.  Liz looked at the grasshopper, which was still on the windowsill, within an inch of where she’d last seen it.  The smear of banana was gone.  It wasn’t on the floor, either.  Her head felt too heavy, and her shoulders and thighs and back and neck ached as if she’d spent two days in a mosh pit, but she got up again anyway, with another smear of banana for the grasshopper, and placed it where the first one had been.  The grasshopper backed away from her again.  “Yeah, big tough guy, I know,” she said, smiling.  When she returned to her bed and looked back, the grasshopper had approached the lump of fruit and was eating hungrily.

The nurse who checked in on her late that evening was younger, with a henna-colored pageboy haircut.  She was more inclined to talk, too.  Her name was Jessica.  “You’ll look so much prettier when your face fills out again,” she told Liz.

Liz shrugged the comment off.  She knew her face had gotten gaunt; she’d seen it when she was in the bathroom.  “Being around my dad’s house should take care of that,” she said with half a smile.  “Long as being around my stepmother doesn’t make me puke too much.”

“Aw, you’ll be all right,” the nurse said cheerily. “How big is the tattoo on your back, if you don’t mind me asking?  I couldn’t help but notice.”

“From the base of my neck to my tailbone,” Liz said.

“Wow.  Can I…do you mind if I see?”

“Help yourself.  Can’t help not showing it off in this gown,” she replied, and leaned forward in the bed so the nurse could have a peek.  A maze of Celtic thorns and curls covered Liz’ back.  Monarch butterflies floated through the pattern, as if it were some kind of rosebush without leaves or flowers.

“That’s beautiful,” the nurse said, reaching out as if to touch it but not quite doing so.  “Did it hurt?”

“Gee, they injected ink into the skin of my entire back with a little tiny needle, over the course of a couple of months.  You’re the nurse,” Liz said.  “What do you think are the odds that it didn’t hurt?”

Jessica smiled with a hint of mischief.  “I always ask that anyway.  To see if people lie about it.  How much did it cost?”

“A lot.  Almost two thousand.”  Liz suddenly wondered if having most of her back tattooed was a waste of money.  Sitting here, it seemed like an act of colossal self-indulgence.  Just like the rest of her life had been.  Liz didn’t like feeling sorry for herself.  She wanted to be proud of her tattoo, and everything it represented…but just right now she couldn’t be.  She pulled her gown back over her shoulders.

“Do you have any more?”

“Two on my ankles,” Liz said.  “A Celtic bracelet on one and a Red Hot Chili Peppers tag on the other.”  She didn’t show those off.

“I thought about getting one,” the nurse said.  “Never got up the courage, though.”

“You’ll do it if and when you’re ready.  It just happens.”  She didn’t feel like helping boost Jessica’s confidence about getting ink, and masked the feeling with a humorless smile, hoping that the subject would change.

Jessica smiled and nodded, sensing Liz’ reluctance.  “Martha tells me that you weren’t interested in joining AA, even after what happened to you?”

Liz kept her voice as neutral and cheerful as she could.  “I’m not Christian enough.  All they do is get on my nerves.”

“You should do something, though,” she said with a look of honest worry.  Liz looked into the girl’s blue eyes, and saw…she wasn’t sure what.  Jessica seemed honestly worried that she might have to go on living in a world that didn’t include Liz.  It wasn’t a look of someone who had a crush on her, or needed something from her, just naked, honest caring that was somehow not diminished by the fact that Jessica probably extended it to every idiot that she met.

“I know, I know.  Downward spiral, all of that.  I’m breaking out of it, though.”  Liz met the nurse’s skeptical look.  “I am.  I’m going home.  My dad’s going to help me quit.  I’ll be okay.”

She tilted her head.  “You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

“I am,” Liz said.  “And I’m pretty stubborn.  But I’m going anyway, as soon as I get out of here.  Which will be…?”

“Tomorrow,” the nurse replied.  “They wanted you to stay one more day for observation.  You may have more hallucinations, too, as your body adjusts.  You should make sure you’re around people who’ll support you, if you’re not willing to go to AA.”  Liz could tell Jessica wanted to pressure her more about AA, but had decided it would be futile.  Good.  More people telling her what to do was just going to piss her off, at this point.

She slept well.  In the morning, the grasshopper was perched on the headboard.  Liz shared her breakfast with it.  When they discharged her and brought her some clothes from a goodwill box–grungy tennis shoes, some exceptionally ugly slacks that were too short, and a Pizza Hut t-shirt–she scooped the grasshopper into a plastic cup, covered the top with her hand, and took it with her.  “Don’t worry,” she told the insect as it hopped frantically against her palm and the clear walls of its prison.  “You need to get out of LA, same as I do.  You’ll just die here.”  The nurse at the desk looked at her like she was nuts, but she talked to the grasshopper anyway.  Liz felt a little nuts, and it always felt good to scare the norms.  “You’ll see.  I know some great, huge fields in Kansas you’ll like.  All sorts of green things to eat, and lots of other grasshoppers, too.  You’ll get laid like crazy.”

Liz decided to take the bus home.  Might as well get used to it, if she was taking a bus to Michigan.  She opened her fingers enough to let the grasshopper breathe, but kept it imprisoned until she got home.

She smelled her apartment before she got there.  She didn’t have keys, so she’d planned to go in through a window, but that became a moot point when she saw that her door was standing wide open.  A pungent stink of sweat and burned tortillas reached her nose before she’d even gone upstairs.

Liz wished she could remember who she might have given the key to.

Her apartment was destroyed.  The front door was open because there was a red-haired girl in DKNY overalls sleeping in the doorway.  She looked to be about six months pregnant and she didn’t stir when Liz stepped over her.  There was no point in waking her up.  Liz’ only plan was to get in, get whatever she thought she might be attached to and could stuff into a small bag, and get out.  Just as well, too; judging by the look of the place she’d do well to be at the other end of the continent when the landlord came by.  Whoever was here could deal with whatever rent was owed.

The furniture in the living room was a write-off.  Liz couldn’t remember if it was hers or if the place had come furnished.  Either way, it looked like everything in the apartment had been dragged outside, left in the rain for a month, buried in sand, and then brought back in.  The filth obviously didn’t bother the three people who were sleeping on the couch and loveseat, however.  One of them wore the castoff clothes of a career squatter, the second the remains of a halfway decent suit, and the third’s sparkly dress marked her as either a hooker or a party girl.  Liz made no effort to wake any of them, either.  She noticed that someone had painted the screen of the television blue.  The sound of flies buzzing came from the kitchen, and as she went past it to her room Liz saw a dirty Labrador retriever rooting in the overflowing garbage can.  All of the windows were closed, and it was stifling.  The smell of alcohol was at once overpowering and delicious.

Pausing at the door to her room, Liz wondered if there was anything to drink in the kitchen.  She kept a bottle of vodka in the freezer…yeah, right.  Someone had torn the curtains down and taken them away–there wasn’t going to be any alcohol here.  Just as well.  She did stop in the kitchen long enough to find an empty peanut jar to put the grasshopper in.

Her dresser drawers had mostly been dumped out by partygoers, and the mirror was shattered, but the closet was largely untouched, apart from a nice pair of Blundstones that should have been there but were now (likely permanently) missing, and bright orange spray paint on the door.  It said, “Keep out!” and Liz had a vague recollection that she had painted that herself.  She had no idea when.  How long had she lived here, anyway?  At least a year.  Longer than that.  Almost two years, maybe.  Maybe almost three.  Shit.

First things first; she changed clothes.  The donation-box clothes came off and went on the floor, and she found some gray camouflage pants, underwear, and a green T-shirt in the chaos of upended dresser drawers.  The cheap-ass sneakers were exchanged for an equally cheap-ass pair of black Vans she hadn’t worn since high school.  She looked at herself in a shard of mirror.  Better.  Good enough for a bus trip, anyway.

There was a beat-up red suitcase on the closet’s top shelf, mended with duct tape, and an old motorcycle helmet next to it.  She threw the suitcase on the bed, opened it over the crusty sheets, and went methodically through the small closet.  Some clothes she folded neatly and put into the suitcase; others she tossed in the corner, where whoever stole them could have them.  Anything that wasn’t going with her today she never expected to see again.

She ended up with a week’s worth of clothes.  It was a start.  A crushed shoebox full of photographs went into the suitcase as well, along with a handful of jewelry.  There was one more thing…Liz tossed the bedclothes around until she found the monarch butterfly throw pillow she was looking for.  She had had it since…she couldn’t remember.  Grade school, maybe.  It had been a birthday present from a faraway Japanese relative, back before she’d alienated most of them by growing tall.  It hadn’t been pilfered, but someone had thrown up on it.  With a sigh, she dropped it on the floor and kicked it into the corner.

With all of the clothes out of the closet, Liz saw one more thing; a big crack in the wall, into which had been stuffed a metal briefcase.  She didn’t recognize it.  There was a Lufthansa Airlines claim tag on the handle, and except for smears of plaster it looked new.  It was heavy.  One of the combination clasps was unlocked, so she pried at the edges of the case to get a glimpse inside.  She could only make out tightly banded stacks of paper.  Greenish paper.

There was a briefcase full of money in her closet.  “Oh, shit!”  She relocked the clasp and made a note of the comb:  918.  She could at least open half of it again.  There was a briefcase full of money in her closet.  Trying to figure out where it had come from was pointless; she couldn’t even remember the hole in the wall being there.  Jesus!  There was a briefcase full of money in her closet.

Liz took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down.  Later.  She could deal with that later.  The desire for a drink returned, insistent as an old friend, and she shook that off as best she could too.  If she could get on the bus to Michigan, she’d be out of reach of temptation fulfillment for a few hours.  Maybe she could sleep.  She was getting tired from all the walking around already, and now there was this damned briefcase.  Her mind was starting to whirl too fast again.

Another sigh.  She looked at the briefcase, then stuffed it into a filthy pillowcase, retrieved her soiled butterfly pillow, stuffed that in there with it, and went to the bathroom to find her comb.

The smell stopped Liz at the door.  The bathroom was more nightmarish than the rest of the apartment.  Someone had taken a very large shit in the sink, perhaps a week ago.  Not that she could blame them; the toilet clearly hadn’t been flushed for a month or more.  The bathtub was at least a quarter full of vomit and water.  Buying new toiletries was better than looking for anything in there.  Less likely to result in disease, too, from the stink of it.  She closed the door as she backed out.

She walked through once more, and gathered her stuff.  Pillowcase, red suitcase, crappy old helmet, grasshopper in peanut jar.  Good enough.  Her arms and legs were aching again.  The nurse had told her she needed to be sure to eat.  Liz was starting to believe her.  On the way out, she put her burden down, squatted by the pregnant girl in the doorway and nudged her awake.  “Hey.”

“Huh?  Whozzat?”

“I’m Liz.  This is my apartment.”

The girl smiled sleepily in false recognition.  “Oh, hi, I’m Cassie, how’re you doin’?”

“Fine,” Liz smiled back.  “Listen, Cassie, I need to get some food.  Give me some money.”

“I don’t have any,” Cassie said, shaking her head.  Liz guessed that she was about sixteen, and didn’t want to consider anything else about her after seeing that.  “Cheri does,” she added, pointing to the party girl on the couch.  “I think her purse is up over there somewhere.”

Liz nodded and went to the couch.

“I like your hair,” Cassie said.  “That green is sweet.”

“Thanks.”  She found the purse after knocking a few cushions aside, found Cheri’s wallet inside, and took out thirty dollars.  There was considerably more there, and Liz guessed that Cheri might not even miss it.  Definitely a party girl.  And oh, hello.  Car keys.  BMW keys, no less.  Cheri never stirred, nor did her companions.  There was a half-empty bottle of Boone’s on the couch between them.  No, wait, it looked like they each had one.  Liz borrowed one, wiped the top, and took a big hit out of sheer habit, before even realizing what she’d done.  She put it down, horrified at her lack of restraint.  The swallow of cheap wine didn’t kill her, and she tried to forget that it had happened.

“Did Cheri drive you guys here?” Liz asked Cassie.

She nodded.

“Where’d she park?  I need to borrow her car.”

“I don’t know if you should…”

“Hey, you guys borrowed my apartment,” Liz said.  She already had the keys; she wasn’t going to argue with the girl.  She took the key and alarm fob off the ring, stepped over Cassie again, picked up her stuff, and left.

Back on the street, she pressed the panic button on the key fob until a horn started honking, then followed the noise.  Moments later she was at the wheel of a white, much-newer-than-a-twenty-something-party-girl-should-be-affording BMW convertible.  Liz considered driving it all the way to Michigan, but she was starting to get the shakes and grand theft auto would be the least of her worries if she didn’t get some alcohol in her system soon.  And she wasn’t planning to do that.

She drove to Mail Boxes, Inc., put the mysterious briefcase in a big box, tossed her soiled butterfly pillow and motorcycle helmet in with it, and mailed it to her father’s house.  She sent it the cheapest way possible, so it would take a week or so to get there.  She’d be ready to think about it in a week or so.  After that Liz drove Cheri’s BMW to the bus station, locked the keys in it, and sat down to wait for her bus.

Shit.  She’d forgotten to eat.  She bought a bottle of water and a hot dog from the snack bar.  Neither did much for her stomach, but she forced it all down anyway, and then bought an apple, another dog and more water for good measure.  She broke off a chunk of apple and dropped it into the grasshopper’s jar.  “Hang on for a few more hours,” she told it.  “Trust me.”  She noticed that she was squeezing the armrest of her chair, and stopped.

Time seemed to be moving very slowly.  She had time to check out every miserable, depressing bit of disrepair or decay around her, both in the people and in the bus station.  She was surrounded by unhappy single mothers, bored college students, cracked tile, knife-slashed seats, a broken monitor hanging from the wall, stained paint, ripped posters, and indifferent Greyhound employees.  It was like sitting in a massive trash can; Liz meditated on the lofty metaphorical idea that someone had spilled whatever was in America’s “melting pot” on the floor and left it there to rot.  Much of the feeling, she guessed, was just her mood.  When the bus arrived an eternity later, Liz found a seat near the middle, on the driver’s side.  She settled herself in by the window, put her forehead against the glass, and closed her eyes.  She was on the bus now.  She could crave a drink all she wanted; there wasn’t anything to be had.  Thank God.  If she didn’t get off again, she’d make it to Michigan straight.  She might chew her own arm off, but she’d make it. 

When she opened her eyes again the bus still wasn’t moving, but she did notice that the window was completely spiderwebbed with tiny, sun-induced cracks and scores.  There was a small panel that covered the vent below the window, and that was broken, too.  The bus looked great from fifty feet away, but up close it was falling apart.  Everything was falling apart.  Caught firmly in the grip of entropy, Liz put her head back and closed her eyes again.  At least her seat was working.

The day had worn her out, and she slept.  Bus-sleep wasn’t like normal sleep though, it was more correctly described as a series of interrupted naps.  The bus’ motion lulled her to sleep despite the occasional violent left to right tosses, but every time she started to dream the bus would stop and the driver would bark stop names and directions over the PA.  Twice the bus stopped and they kicked her off for half an hour, exiling her to the station so they could do some mysterious “maintenance.”  At one station a fat red-haired teen with fingerless gloves who resembled one of the Berenstein Bears ignored her usually very effective “don’t-talk-to-me” mien and whispered to her that he’d give her twenty bucks if she’d let him touch her tit.  He needed his ass kicked but she was too tired to do it, and merely glared at him.  He called her a slut and retreated.

Charles Saxen had just arrived in his office when the phone rang, patched through the switchboard to his direct line.

“Mr. Saxen,” a cheerful voice with a vague Boston snap rang out, a bit too loud.  “It’s Marty Katz.  Are you sitting down?  I got some news for you.”

Charles sighed.  Martin Katz was a private investigator–at least, that was what he’d been told when he called the guy eight months before about attempting to pick up the two year-old trail of his sister’s disappearance.  As it had turned out, Katz was an investigator of sorts, but his bailiwick was the supernatural.  Katz hunted ghosts, vampires and goblins, not missing persons.  As Charles believed firmly in none of the above, the men didn’t have much use for one another.  That didn’t stop Katz from offering the services of a psychic he knew, of course.  Or tea leaves.  Or a number of other arcane locating methods.  For six weeks he’d called Charles every few days with a new scheme designed to test his own theories and ostensibly help Charles at the same time.  Clearly the ghost-hunting business didn’t pay that well, and Katz needed all of the clients he could get.

“Mr, Katz,” Charles said quickly, hoping to forestall the man before he got going, “as I said the last time we spoke–”

“Forget that.  I said I have news for you.  Two pieces.  First, I have a fingerprint that most likely belongs to your sister.  What was her name, Nicole?”

He sat up, surprised.  A fingerprint?  Katz had  never provided anything resembling solid evidence before.  “Nikki, that’s right.  Where–”

“Bank in Colorado.  Not important, actually.  The print came up a few days ago but she’s not there.  The second thing is that I also found the friend of hers you wanted to track down.  Liz Bahti?  She’s in L.A.  How long’s it take to get there from San Francisco anyway?”

“What is Nikki doing in Colorado?”

“Ah, ah, Mr. Saxen, no more details till you get on the scene.  You know how I work.  I’ll get it all for you once you get to L.A.  Meet me in Westwood?  I got a professor I want to talk to at UCLA.”

“Mr. Katz, I can hardly just take off and–”

“Don’t worry, I got a couple days.  I love coming out west.  Tell you what, take a day or two to clear your case load–you’re a lawyer, right?–and I’ll give you a call Wednesday afternoon so we can meet.  Then I’ll give you the whole enchilada.  Trust me, it’ll be worth it.”

Day bled into night.  A man who got off in Barstow left his book on the seat:  An Introduction to German.  When he didn’t return for it, she took it as her own, and began re-teaching herself German.  She’d taken the class in high school, but they were mostly forgotten.  It made the time pass.  Liz liked languages.  Every time the bus stopped, Liz considered getting off to stretch her legs; if her first thought was that she could get a drink, she stayed where she was and practiced her German silently.  She called herself a pathetic little shit in three languages until the bus started moving again.

She fell asleep, cramped in the seat, and got another fourteen or fifteen hours of bus sleep.  It came fitfully; she woke every few minutes with cramps or when the sulky baby in the rearmost row started wailing again.  When she finally did fall asleep for a length of time she awoke starving, in pain and with her right hand reaching across her body to clutch at the window frame on her left.  The sun had come up and there was a grossly obese woman taking up both seats across the aisle from her. 

Her name was Denise, Liz learned shortly, and nothing short of full REM sleep could stop Denise from striking up a conversation.  Realizing her predicament, Liz tried looking out the window, closing her eyes, and even making snide comments, but none of it worked.  The monologue continued through Oklahoma and deep into Missouri.  Liz heard all about Denise’s children (who were in Columbus, Ohio) and her job (as a cafeteria worker in a college dormitory) and her problems, oh God yes, Denise’s problems (bad back, bad neck, bad knees, some nebulous kidney issue, an equally nebulous digestive issue that apparently allowed green beans to pass through her system untouched, painful periods, astigmatism, pinched nerves, the list went on and on).  Her psoriasis monologue was thankfully interrupted by a rest stop.

Liz fled the bus, digging the peanut jar out, and crossed the road to get to a big field full of the tall browning grass of late fall.  She looked back at the bus station–actually a convenience store along the highway, surrounded by fields.  Some of them were cultivated and already harvested, others, like the one she stood on the edge of, wild.  She had fifteen minutes before the bus continued on its way through Missouri or Kansas or Illinois or wherever the hell they were; she hadn’t been paying attention.  It had all looked the same for most of the day.  She had picked this field at random; it just felt right.

She carried the long-suffering yellow grasshopper in a loosely cupped palm.  When she was an appropriate distance from the road, she held her hand to her lips.  “This is it,” she told it softly.  “This is the place I was telling you about.”  After a day and a half with Liz, the grasshopper was actually becoming a little bit tame.  When she opened her hand, it surveyed the area, but didn’t jump away.  Maybe it was actually starving to death; she hadn’t fed herself or it since leaving California.

She could hear crickets and other bugs chirring happily away all around her, happy with the dying days of the indian summer.  “Hear that?  Isn’t this better than LA?  Fresh air, lots of other bugs.  Go on, you.  Sire some offspring or something.”

The grasshopper jumped.  It sailed in a high arc, free, and at the top of the arc a flash of brown feathers swept down in an intercepting path, and it vanished. The bird flew off with just as much grace as the grasshopper had shown.

Liz let out a wordless cry of outrage and horror.  She felt tears in the back of her throat. Which was stupid, and she knew it instantly, feeling badly for getting a grasshopper killed.  It was just the stupid irony of it, she’d bonded with the damn thing and she had really wanted to help it, which had turned out to be the worst thing for the grasshopper in the end. It wasn’t a boost to her shaky self-confidence, that was for sure.

Liz straightened, and her hands started to shake.  Maybe they’d been shaking all along; she wasn’t positive.  She was dizzy from hunger.  Stupid.  She needed to take better care of herself, not starve to death.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t hungry.  She was thirsty.  So goddamned thirsty.

Okay, she told herself.  You have to eat something.  You’ll go in the store, and get something with some damned protein in it, and then you’ll get back on the bus and go back to sleep.  No wine.  No beer.  Water, if anything.  She wished they’d stopped at a real bus station instead–they didn’t serve alcohol.  Did the Midwest have dry counties?  That would have done nicely.

She couldn’t take the first step toward the store, though.  She knew that no matter what she told herself, no matter what she planned, she’d come out with a fifth of whiskey in the bag.  It was destiny.  It was something worse than that.

Thanks for not lying to me, she said to her body.  You pathetic fuck.

She went to the pay phone at the far side of the parking lot instead, searched her murky memory, then dialed collect.

She gave her name to the operator, said, “For Andrew Ford,” and waited.  “Please be there,” she whispered, speaking Japanese without thinking.  “Please still live there.”  AT&T informed her that it was three-thirty-seven pm where she was calling, and then the phone started to ring.

The charges were accepted.  “Liz?”

“Ondrew,” she said, suddenly drained.  She leaned heavily on the phone, closing her eyes.

“Holy shit!  It is you!  How have you been?  Where have you been?”  He was as happy as a puppy, like he had always been.  “Forget all of that.  Where are you?”

“I’m coming home,” she said softly.

“Home southern California, or home southeastern Michigan?”

“To Michigan,” she said. 

“Fucking wonderful!  We can still have a picnic when you get here, and go for a ride!  It’s not that cold yet.”

“I don’t have my bike, Ondrew.  I don’t…”  She didn’t want to tell him she didn’t know where it was.

He got a little more serious as he picked up on the weary, beaten-down tone in her voice.  “D’you need a ride or anything?  A place to crash?”

She smiled, thinking of Ondrew’s cute little farmhouse-with-no-farm out in the middle of nowhere.  “I think my papa’s putting me up.  He’s going to babysit me, some shit like that.”

“Calling for moral support, then?”

She felt tears well up in her throat.  That was about as close as she had gotten to crying for several years, that she could remember.  “I fell off, Ondrew.  I fell off so hard.”

“I know,” he said.  “I was there.”

Liz bit her lip, feeling even closer to tears.  She thought she’d stayed sober until she had left Michigan, but apparently that wasn’t the case.  “Fuck,” she whispered, ashamed of herself.

“But you’re back on again, right?”

“Yes.  I almost died,” she said.  She told him what had happened, including her father’s ultimatum and her bus trip back to Michigan.

“You’ll be okay,” Ondrew said, his usual cheerfulness coming back.  “You’ve got me and all the others for moral support.  But most importantly, me.”

“Yeah, just what I need.  The Boilermaker God of Michigan.”

“No!  No, that’s the Boilermaker God of the Entire Northeast, thank you very much.  I earned that title, now you bow down and respect it.  I’ll throw myself in front of any alcohol that comes toward you.  I can drink for two.”

“Bastard,” she said, but she was smiling.  “I’m starving, Ondrew, I have to get some food.”

“So go on.  I’ll see you when you get here.”

“It’s a party store,” Liz whined, hating having to ask for help, not even knowing what she was asking for.  “I don’t think I can go in there.  I’ll come out with something.”

“No, you won’t.  You’re strong.  You’re not an animal.”

Liz opened her eyes, looked at her feet.

“C’mon, just eat something.  It’ll go away.  If I could go in there for you, Liz, I would.  But I can’t.”

Just knowing that she still had a friend out there somewhere who gave a shit was an immense boost.  “I can’t do this,” she said, but she wasn’t quite believing it any more.

“Bet you can.  I’ll bet you dinner.  If you don’t buy any alcohol, you get to make me dinner.”

“How is that winning?”

“Because if you do get a drink, I’ll cook dinner for you.  And I’ll make you finish it, too.  No matter how fucked up it is.  I got this great recipe for tuna with a yellow curry sauce, and you bake it with Cheetos on top–”

“Okay, okay, you’re making me sick now, thanks.”

“G’wan.  Get a Hostess fruit pie and get back on the bus.  Get your ass up here so we can see you.  Peach and Rob miss you, too.”

“Oh, I’m sure they do,” she said.  Her smile was stronger when she got off of the phone.  Andrew wasn’t like Charlie and Pogo and the others.  She had friends in Michigan.  She’d run away from them, and forgotten about them, but they hadn’t forgotten about her, or at least Andrew hadn’t.  She allowed herself a little bit of hope.

It went okay.  Liz spent a bunch of party-girl money on multi-grain breakfast bars, little bottles of orange juice and milk (they were at the opposite end of the cooler from the alcohol), a box of Fig Newtons (which were kind of like real food) and a bag of popcorn, then fled to the temptation-free safety of the bus.  Soon the Greyhound was eating up miles again.

With food in her stomach, Liz felt somewhat better, but if Denise got going again, she was going to have to kill the woman.  Sure enough, as soon as the bus hit the freeway, Denise started talking about her plans for Christmas, and how to get her kids away from her ex-husband for that particular week.  “I’m going to get everything all unwrapped and set up the night before,” Denise said, as if every parent in the country didn’t do the same thing, “and then my boyfriend is going to rent a Santa costume.  It’s for the kids, you know, Natalie’s almost ten but she still gets into it.  She still believes in Santa, you know, and my mother says that–”

Inspiration struck in the form of a memory.  “I stopped believing in Santa Claus because my papa killed him,” Liz said.

Denise was derailed.  “Whuut?”

“I was six or so.  Christmas Eve.  I woke up in the middle of the night and I was starving.  Little-kid hungers, you know?  And I started thinking about the cookies we put out for Santa, since they weren’t all gone or anything.  Not that I was going to take Santa’s cookies or anything, but there were more in the bag.

“So anyway I put it off, and put it off, and tried to go back to sleep, but of course that wasn’t going to happen.  I didn’t want to get caught awake, and I just knew I was going to, and the only thing that was going to put me to sleep was a cookie.  So finally I gave up, and I figured I’d sneak out and get a cookie then sneak back to bed and everything would be cool.  I figured if I hid under the covers Santa wouldn’t know anyway, you know.”

Denise was listening.  Liz kept talking, just so she wouldn’t have to hear the woman’s voice for a few more minutes.

“So I finally decided to do it. I put on my sweatshirt with the hood so I could cover my head just in case Santa did catch me.  I don’t know what I was thinking, I was just a little criminal-minded kid.  I didn’t turn on any lights, so as not to give myself away, and I stayed low.  I knew the whole commando shtick from watching CHiPS or whatever, I was cool.  I stayed away from the windows and stayed out of the light from the tree and everything.  When I made it to the kitchen, I had to climb up on a chair to get to the cabinet where the cookies were.  I got the bag and it made this huge crackling noise, and I froze, because it was the loudest thing in the world just right then.  I held still and listened.  I don’t know what for.  Maybe Papa waking up, maybe Santa’s little spies whispering to each other.  Who knows?

“Anyway, there wasn’t any noise, so I made to get my ass back in bed before I did get caught.  And just when I went out of the kitchen and started around the corner, I saw him.  There was this huge man standing next to the tree holding a bunch of presents in his hands and it wasn’t my dad!”

“Hol-ee crap.  I don’t know what I would have done,” Denise said.

“I do.  I screamed my little head off.  I dropped the bag of cookies and I just screamed my ass off.  The guy dropped the presents too and he came at me.  I covered my eyes up and started crying to Santa that I didn’t see, I didn’t see, and I was gonna go back to bed.”  She smiled.  “I wasn’t even scared that there was a strange man in our house, I was just afraid I was busted and wouldn’t get any presents.  He grabbed me, and he said ‘You saw Santa, you bad little girl,’ real quiet like that.  I remember he smelled like soot too, but that might have been my imagination.  I said ‘No, Santa, I didn’t see,’ in a tiny little squeak.  Then I said it in Japanese, I have no idea why.  He said ‘Oh yes you DID!’ and lifted me way up, so high I thought I was gonna hit the ceiling.”  Denise’s eyes were wide.  Liz was enjoying this; it hadn’t occurred to her to just hit the woman with stories from the headlines of her own life.  She wished she’d have thought of this eight hours ago.  “Right around then I peed myself.  Then the lights all came on, and my papa yelled, and ‘Santa Claus’ dropped me and I heard Papa’s service revolver go off–BOOM!  BOOM!  BOOM!–and when I opened my eyes again Santa was lying in the foyer on his face and Mama was pulling me away in this big hug and trying to cover my eyes at the same time.

“You know the thing that scared me the most?  I thought I was gonna have to go to school after New Year’s and explain that no one got any presents because my papa shot Santa Claus.  But of course, it turned out to be a burglar, and I figured out the rest of the Santa Claus myth by myself some time around Valentine’s Day, I think.  It sounds kinda depressing, but it wasn’t, really.  I think that’s the reason Papa moved from California back to Michigan and refused to go back, though.  The burglar, I mean.”  Come to think of it, it was probably part of the reason that her parents had divorced.  Her mother had often said that her feelings for her father had changed after seeing him shoot at the man holding her daughter, with no apparent thought for Liz’ safety.

Denise looked like a photograph of a woman in shock.  When she finally shook off her righteous horror, she said, “That is the most horrible thing I ever heard.  How could your father do a thing like that?”

“I thought you’d say that,” Liz replied with a smile.  She closed her eyes, turned her back to Denise, and pretended to sleep.

“So tell me about her,” Katz said.  “Your sister.”

Charles sighed.  He wasn’t in the mood to talk and wished Katz didn’t feel compelled to fill every moment with conversation.  He kept his eyes on the apartment that had purportedly belonged to Liz Bahti but looked more like a squat.  The place was just barely visible at the end of the U-shaped courtyard, and they were parked illegally so they could see the door.  Traffic sped by, oblivious, and the sun was getting hot on Charles’ arm in spite of the air conditioning.  They had been waiting for forty minutes and it would have been excruciating enough without Katz’ constant questions and chatter. 

“I know she’s your kid sister.  She’s what, ten years younger?”

“Nine,” he said. 

“Any other sibs?”

“Just the two of us.”  Charles tried to force himself to be patient.  Nikki wasn’t going to walk out of that apartment—they had already gone up and knocked and found the door open,  nobody at home—and it wasn’t likely she’d show up there, either.  The link to Liz Bahti was tenuous at best, he reminded himself.  He’d never met the woman and had only second-hand confirmation that she and Nikki were even acquainted.

“Pretty big spread.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ten years is a long time to go between kids.  Whoa, check out the fairy.”  Katz pointed.  Charles looked, frowning, at the person he had indicated, who was crossing the street half a block up and not headed in the direction of Liz Bahti’s apartment at all.  She wore a colorful, flowery skirt and her hair was white-blond and fell in a braid halfway down her back.  She moved gracefully, looking left and right to avoid the traffic.

“That’s a woman,” Charles said, not sure how Katz could have mistaken her for a man in drag.

“‘Course it is.  And she’s a fairy.  You know, fey.”  At Charles’ uncomprehending look, he shook his head.  “You can tell by the way they move.  They don’t come into cities much; I wonder what she’s up to?”  Katz touched the cloth bag he wore on a cord around his neck unconsciously, considering.  He noticed Charles’ complete lack of interest, too.  “Aw, never mind.  Did you and your sis get along okay?”

“Of course.  She was my little sister.  She used to follow us everywhere, because there weren’t many other kids in the neighborhood her age.  She’d hang around while we played baseball or built forts or whatever.  You might say she was like the mascot for our gang, such as it was.”

“From the pictures you showed me, she looks like a tiny slip of a thing,” Katz said.  The question was unvoiced—at six-five, the barrel-chested lawyer posed an interesting contrast to the slender, wraithlike girl in the photo.  They shared the same black hair and dark blue eyes, but that was about it.

“I was the big one.  Took after my great-grandfather, according to Mom.  The rest of the family was built like Nikki.  Of course, she was only fourteen the last time I saw her, so she might have grown.”  He sighed again.  He had been focused on the door to the apartment until it blurred, and forced himself to look away.

“And she’d be, what, nineteen now?”

Charles nodded.  “Almost twenty.  God.”

“That’s a long time.  No use in asking what she was into, or what she liked.  Kids that age, all of that stuff changes.  You never did tell me how she managed to disappear.  Reports I got said she ran away from a foster home?”

They had had this discussion before, and Charles didn’t want to discuss the frustrating snafu of Nikki’s disappearance.  He studied the intersection ahead of them.  “It’s not important.”

“You never know what’s important.”

“Katz…” he said, his voice full of warning, but the private detective was already distracted by something else, and lunged forward in the seat.

“Someone just went into the apartment,” he said.  “Two guys.”  Charles started to open the door, and Katz put a hand on his shoulder.  “Wait.  What the hell are you doing?”

“Going to talk to them.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Why not?”  Charles spoke with the confidence of a man unused to being physically intimidated.  He hadn’t been in an actual fight in years; his size tended to deter them. 

“Bad feeling,” Katz said.  “I’ve been doing this a long time, just trust me.”

He hesitated, then closed the door.  “Sorry.  I’m feeling somewhat impatient about things.”

“Patience is a virtue, Mr. Saxen,” the private eye said sagely, sitting back in the seat and fingering his charm bag again.  “Let’s just wait, and watch.”

The two men who’d gone into the apartment were soon back out again–no surprise, given the condition of the place.  It certainly wasn’t someplace one would hang around in to wait for someone.  Charles got his first look at them.  Both were dressed in black and shades of gray, despite the warm sunny day.  The taller of the two was even wearing a long duster, which had to be an affectation.  The man had to be roasting.  Long, flowing black hair and oversized sunglasses conspired to hide his face from view.  The shorter of the two looked to be in his early thirties, with a poorly trimmed, spiky haircut and a doughy face that didn’t match his slender build.  He walked half a step behind his taller companion, talking rapidly from the look of it.

“Know anything about them?” Charles asked Katz.

The detective shook his head, not taking his eyes from the two men.  “After we’ve followed them for a while, I will.”

“We’re not waiting for–?”

“No,” Katz said, interrupting.  “We ain’t.  I get the feeling she’s not coming back.”

There was no one at the bus station to meet her.  Liz’ bus got in at about eight-thirty, and she found herself amid the crowd with her suitcase and no way to get to her father’s house.  If he thought she was going to take a goddamned taxi…  Liz scanned the bustling Detroit Greyhound station, which was a flurry of activity in the early evening, and saw no familiar faces.  Where the hell was Papa?  She was tired, she was hungry, and the more time she spent here the more she was going to want to just ditch the whole plan and go get trashed.  Thinking about seeing Andrew chased the desire back a little bit.  Not much.  What she needed to do was get to her father’s house, where no one would let her drink, even if they all had beers in hand.  Either way she wanted to get out of the bus station.  Too many ordinary people.

With a sigh and clenched teeth, she picked up her suitcase and went outside.  It was cooler than Los Angeles, no surprise there, and it was also raining.  The air in Detroit had a metallic, ozone-ish smell to it that LA lacked, and Liz realized that she had missed it a little.  It was hardly fresh country air, but there was something comforting about it.

The rain she could have lived without, though.  It was a cold October rain, too.  Lovely.  She looked up and down Mack Avenue, singing a tuneless song of irritation to herself and seeing no one who might be looking for her.  The rain plastered her green and black hair to her head, and she ignored it.  For a while she watched the cars come, and willed each set of headlights in turn to be her father with a warm car and maybe a welcoming smile (not that Ted was much good at those, but still).  It didn’t work, though; the cars sped past, one by one.  “So where the hell are you, Theodore?” she asked the rain.  She thought Theo was a better nickname for her dad, but he preferred to be called Ted.  Liz didn’t care for it much.  All of his friends called him Ted.  It made Liz think of Ted Nugent and the two men couldn’t be more different, her disciplined dad and the gonzo rocker-turned-right-wing-mouthpiece.

Hot on the heels of that was a dim gnawing worry, one she’d almost learned to ignore over the years.  If anyone else showed up late, it was no big deal, but when your father was a cop…you never knew if his watch had stopped, or if he had been stopped by something else.  Worrying that something might have happened to him was a feeling she hadn’t missed.

He was twenty minutes late.  Liz was sitting on her suitcase by then, soaked to the skin because she was too stubborn to go back inside, feeling sorry for herself and aware that she was being childish.  When a big blue Ford 4×4 pickup pulled up in front of her, she just looked up at it until Ted reached across and opened the door.  “Hey,” her father said.

“Hey, Papa,” Liz said, accenting the second syllable of “papa” as she always did, looking at the ground as she stood and picked up her suitcase.  She stowed it in the cab behind the seat and then climbed up.  “New truck,” she said, not asking.  He’d bought it since she had moved out to LA to stay near her mother three years ago, anyway.

“Like it?”

“You’re late.”

“Traffic,” Ted said by way of explanation, pulling away from the curb.  “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Liz said with a shrug that half contradicted it.  Ted didn’t reply.  Liz recognized the silence, and knew it would persist for the rest of the drive, so she reached over and turned on the radio, to fill up the silence before it could become uncomfortable.  She flipped instinctively to WHMH, which was the only Detroit radio station she liked.

On the radio, a female DJ was cheerfully razzing a caller.  “What to you mean, you want to hear ‘some Green Day?’  What song do you want to hear?”

“Uh, I dunno.  Anything, I guess.”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that, sweets.  C’mon.  Name a song.  Just one.  Just for me.  Make me want to play it.  Make me afraid not to play it.”

“Uh…play some Green Day, or, um, you’ll regret it?” the guy on the phone tried.

“You suck!” the DJ laughed.  “I’m not playing anything for you until you’ve finished your assertiveness training.”  She hung up on the caller.  Liz laughed softly, which made Ted look at her, but he didn’t say anything. 

The DJ was taking another caller.  “97 HMH with Sigue-Sigue and Vim, what do you want to hear?”

“Oh, hi.  Can I request a song?” another tentative male voice asked.

“Not the right foot to get off on with me, cutes.  I want decisiveness tonight.  I’m feeling like I need a real man.  Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want,” she said, a hint of dominatrix in her voice.

“Oh.  Sorry.  Well, I wanted to request ‘Fell on Black Days,’ by Soundgarden?”

“Hey, Vim, he knows what he wants!  Now we’re closer to being friends.”  Sigue-Sigue’s partner laughed but didn’t contribute to the caller’s humilation.  “Okay, what’s your name?”

“Joel.”

“Okay, Joel, this is the hard part; make me want to play your song.  I’m in a really crappy mood today, my boa constrictor is sick, and all I want to do is help somebody out.  So why do you want to hear Soundgarden this evening, Joel?  Appeal to my softer side.  Shut up, Vim, I have a soft side.”

“I know,” Vim said.  He had a faint British accent, and his cultured-sounding voice made for an interesting contrast to Sigue-Sigue’s suburban drawl.  “Usually you’re sitting on it.”

“Ignore him, Joel, he’s just jealous of you.  Tell me why you need to hear your song.”

“Oh, man.  Well, I kind of had a fight with my girlfriend, and I was just sitting here feeling like sh–”

“Crap!” Sigue-Sigue interrupted.  “You were feeling like crap!  You can’t say sh–” she was interrupted by a harsh censor-bleep– “on the radio.”

“Oh, sorry.  Yeah, I was feeling like crap and it’s a pretty cool song when you’re feeling like crap, you know?”

“Would it make you feel better to hear Soundgarden, Joel?” she purred.

“I don’t know.  I guess, yeah.”

“Then I’ll do it.  I’ll do it, sweetie.  You gotta promise me one thing, though, just promise Sigue-Sigue one thing.”

“Um, okay, what?”

“You gotta sing along.  I don’t care who can hear you, you have to sing as loud as you can, okay?  And I’ll sing here, too.  We’ll have a little metaphysical duet, it’ll have power, you’ll see.”  Sigue-Sigue laughed.  “Do we have a deal?”

“Uh, I have to sing on the radio?”

“Naw, of course not. Just sing in your car. Fake the words you don’t know. It’ll make you feel better, I promise.”

“Um, okay, cool.”

“All right!  Here’s a little Soundgarden, for Joel who had a fight with his girlfriend…”

Liz grinned again.  As far as she could tell, her father wasn’t paying any attention to the radio at all.  He didn’t speak all the way to the house.  Liz was used to this; he wasn’t angry, just taciturn.  Her father tended to get lost in his thoughts a lot–even with his prodigal daughter in the car–and it didn’t occur to him that they ought to talk.

Ted lived in a lower-middle class suburb of Detroit, close to Ford’s Michigan Truck Plant, where the F-150 he was driving had been built.

“Stay here a couple of days,” he said as they pulled into the driveway.  There were two other cars there, one of them presumably that of Ted’s second wife Margo.  The other was a muscle car under a tarp.  Its twin was in the garage, Liz knew.

She nodded in reply.

“I found an apartment in Ypsi for you.  You can go and check it out, see what you think.”  The tone in Ted’s voice hinted that it had better be okay, because there wasn’t another option.

She didn’t particularly want to live in Ypsilanti, but at least it was a half hour’s drive from Ted’s house.  He wouldn’t be able to crowd her too much.  “Furniture?” she asked as she slid out of the truck.

“We might have some stuff in the basement.  And Frank McIntyre is going to let you work receiving at the fish store, starting Monday.”  He closed the truck’s door, and the sound seemed to punctuate the end of the discussion about Liz’ apartment.

She wanted to argue with the phrase, ‘let you work,’ which irritated the shit out of her, but it wasn’t in her to bitch right now.  She felt tired, overwhelmed, and she’d been wearing the same clothes for three days.

“Tomorrow we can call about that car I told you about,” Ted said as he opened the front door for her.  Ted lived with his new wife Margo in a small ranch house that was similar to, but not the same as, the one Liz had grown up in.  It was a blue-collar suburb, one of several that had been commissioned by the great Henry Ford himself to house his factory workers.  These days much of Garden City still served basically the same function.

Margo came out of the kitchen to greet Liz.  Liz hadn’t seen her stepmother in three years, and had never been inclined to shed any tears about it.  Maybe it was because the difference in their ages was less than ten years, or maybe it was because Margo was shorter than she was.  But then, most women were shorter than Liz.  Margo was too damn young, that was the problem.

Margo had blond hair the texture of cornsilk, sparse freckles, a light mall tan, and vacuous blue eyes.  Thanks to her Swedish Barbie appearance, Liz had been surprised to discover that there really was something going on in her head.  Of course, it was usually self-serving and petty, but there you were.  “Elizabeth,” Margo said, hands outstretched to take each of hers and squeeze.  “It’s so good to see you.”

“Nice to see you, too,” she murmured, submitting to a brief hug.  Hugs were not a part of Margo’s MO.  Liz guessed that there’d been an argument or two about letting her stay here.  Point for Ted.  “I’m so wiped out,” she said, “I just want to take a bath and fall into bed, if that’s okay.”

“You’re not hungry?  We’ve got some meatloaf and potatoes left over from dinner.”

“Thanks,” Liz said with a smile.  “I’ll grab some after I clean up.  Don’t worry about me, I’ll just come out and grab it.”

Big mistake; the kitchen was Margo’s undisputed, unchallenged territory, and had been ever since she learned that Ted’s first wife ran a restaurant.  Unfortunately, Midori was a better cook.  “I’ll warm up a plate for you,” was the response.  “It’s no problem!  It’ll be on the counter when you’re ready.”

It was stupid to argue, so Liz didn’t.  It wasn’t even her house.  Avoiding the fight also got Liz into the bathtub a lot sooner.  She ran a near-scalding bubble bath, immersing herself to the neck, and lay in a near-comatose state for an unknown amount of time.  It wasn’t quite floating, but it felt good nonetheless, made everything seem a little farther away and put a hundred little stressful things on hold.

When she grew tired of soaking with her eyes half-closed, Liz wet a washcloth and began to scrub.  She soaked the rag, wrung it out, then wrapped it around her fist to create a tight, rough surface.  She applied this to her legs first, scrubbing without soap, taking the top layer of skin off in little gray curls like eraser shavings.  When she lowered her reddened legs into the water, it burned deliciously.  Liz remembered her mother giving her scrub-baths as a child, and a faint smile touched her lips as she washed mindlessly, meditatively, working her way up her body from legs to belly, sides, chest, arms, and finally her neck.  She felt like she was shedding more than just the dead skin that she rinsed out of the washcloth after finishing each section of her abused body.  Los Angeles was scrubbed away, and all the stupid things she’d done were scrubbed away, and that horrible bus was scrubbed away (and Denise with it).  Soon she was submerged again, fresh and pink.  Liz ducked her head underwater and scrubbed her face as well, leaving it as raw and new as the rest of her.  The last thing she did with the bath water was to wash her hair quickly, using the showerhead to rinse.  Now she could be someone else.  She told herself she felt like someone else, but she still wanted a drink.

When she got out, she found an oversized shirt to sleep in and put her hair up in a towel.  The bath had taken about an hour.

Margo had gone to bed, but Ted was still up, watching ESPN on the big-screen television that dominated one wall of the living room.  “Liz,” he said when she entered the room with her plate of leftovers.  She sat on the couch so she could see him in his La-Z-Boy.

“Don’t you have to get up early?” she asked.

Her father nodded.  He handed her a breathalyzer without a word.

Liz had to work to keep the scowl off of her face as she blew, equally wordless.  He didn’t have to goddamn test her now, she hadn’t even been in town for half a day.  The fact that she’d thought seriously (and more than once) about grabbing a fifth of whiskey while she was on the bus didn’t help.  She hadn’t done it, but she felt as though she’d been caught anyway.

Ted was satisfied with the negative result, anyway.  “Good,” he said, tossing the cellophane in the trash.

“I don’t like asking for help,” Liz said, looking at the floor.  Her left hand trembled.  She grabbed it with the right, and squeezed it hard.  A knuckle popped.

“It ain’t going to be easy.”  Her father didn’t look at her, either.  They’d never communicated well.  Ted was a man’s man, and had never known what exactly to make of the child who was, in the great scheme of things, supposed to be a first-born son but had turned out female.  He’d tried, of course; Liz could remember many an awkward moment during her childhood when Papa had attempted to make sense of tea parties and hopscotch.  And just about the time he started to get the hang of it (her mother had confided once that he had even read a Sweet Valley High book or two, as research), Liz had turned tomboy on him.  Even the newly sensitive Ted didn’t have the slightest idea how to give fatherly advice to a girl who was more likely to beat up the boys than to run home crying after being teased.  Liz had never known if he’d been proud or disappointed in her, or maybe a little bit of both.  Then, when she was sixteen, the divorce had happened, and since then she got nothing from him, except the cool, appraising look he was giving the television now, although it was clearly meant for her.  “Frank’s going to work you hard,” Ted said.  “You’re going to be too tired to think about drinking.”

“Good,” Liz said.  “I need the exercise.”

“How’s your mother?” Ted asked.  He didn’t sound particularly interested, and never did.

“Same as always.  The restaurant is doing well.”  She felt somewhat abashed, because she didn’t know.  Something in Ted’s tone suggested that she ought to know more about what her mother was up to.  “She hired a chef from Milan.”

“The number for the apartment complex is on the table,” he said before she was finished.  “Ask to talk to Annie, when you call.”

Annie was the landlady, and she looked tired.  Her hair was a mass of orangeish frizz barely held back by a barely-visible scrunchy and her skin was so sallow it was almost translucent.  More than anything else, she looked tired.  It wasn’t long before Liz started thinking of her as Little Orphan Annie gone very much to seed.  “The boy who was staying here dropped out and went home,” Annie said, her voice a monotone.

The apartment was an efficiency, obviously used hard by several generations of college students.  Yellow stove and refrigerator, bookshelves built into one wall over a spit of Formica posing as a desk.  The linoleum was lumpy and warped, the wood paneling at least fifteen years old and cracked in places, and Liz could feel a chilly draft coming in through the window.  It smelled of antiseptic, and it was a tiny little shithole, but what more was there to say?  It was in Ypsilanti, which was close to the fish market Ted had her working at, and it was cheap enough that maybe, just maybe she’d be able to afford paying for it and for insurance on whatever shitbox car her father found for her.

Besides, anyplace nicer would have insisted on a reference from her previous apartment.

“There’s the bathroom back there,” Annie said, pointing toward the shadowy rear half of the single-room apartment for a brief moment before tucking her hand back into her armpit.  “Round behind the bed.  That curtain pulls out of the wall for privacy around the bed and stuff.  You can study, or whatnot.”

Annie obviously thought Liz was a student, which wasn’t a completely absurd notion.  Likely all of her neighbors were going to be students, too.  Liz sighed.  Her back and shoulders were killing her.  Ted hadn’t been joking about working her so hard she wouldn’t want a drink.  The need gnawed at her a little bit, but was kept at bay because she’d been so damned busy the past couple of days.  At least she didn’t smell like fish.  It was going to take a few more days before the stink got permanently into her skin.  Margo had gone so far as to put a little electric air freshener in the guest room.  The thing buzzed all night, making it harder than it already was to sleep on the squeaky couch-bed in there.  Liz looked longingly at the bed, the only piece of furniture in the apartment.  Even a dingy twin mattress looked like home right now.

“It’s got an electric heater and an electric stove.  You pay for the electricity and water.”

And chairs, Liz thought.  And dishes, and pots, and a breakfast table, and a sofa, and linens, and towels, and maybe, if there’s a good one at Bunky’s Pawn Shop, a goddamn television.  “Fair enough,” Liz said.  “I’ll take it.”

Annie showed teeth in a near approximation of a friendly smile.  “Awright.  I’ll go write up the lease.  You can move in whenever you want.”

Wonderful. Furniture could come later.  She had to get out of Ted and Margo’s house.  “How does this afternoon sound?”

A security deposit was paid, a lease was signed, and Liz got the keys to her new apartment. The notion of having a drink to celebrate crossed her mind, just one private drink, nothing terrible, but therein lay a slippery slope. Just one wouldn’t be enough. She wasn’t sure how much would be enough, exactly, but it was more than one drink, and if she didn’t have quite enough it would just leave her wanting more. In fact it made more sense to go out and drink more than she could possibly want, to get so sick she’d remember why she was quitting in the first place. Overindulging seemed like a better idea.  Of course then she’d have to find a way to avoid Ted’s BAC tests for a while.

Liz didn’t get a drink, but as she returned to Ted and Margo’s house she considered what the best timing might be, to get a drink between Breathalyzers. Papa wouldn’t understand, but she needed to do this, just one more.

You’re lying, she told herself, and tried to put the idea out of her head.

Charles had lost sight of the nondescript white sedan the two men had gotten into within a block of their departure, but the obnoxious little private eye seemed to have the scent.  “Make a left at the next light,” Katz said, sitting confidently forward in the seat. 

“I don’t see them,” he replied, but turned anyway.  He knew this wasn’t his bailiwick, but couldn’t stop the comments from slipping out.  Katz’ unprofessional manner was part of the problem; his own eagerness to find Nikki was probably a big component of the rest. 

“Don’t worry, I got ‘em.”

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“I’m happy to be helping you, even though we’re not related by blood,” Margo told Liz as she stacked hand-me-down linens in the bathroom of Liz’ new apartment.

Luckily, Liz was facing away from her; Margo didn’t see the look that flew across her face.  Liz busied herself with making the bed.  The sheets that Papa and Margo had given her were hideous mod things that hadn’t seen the light of day since she was a toddler.  The colors were okay–chartreuse and yellow–but they smelled of mothballs, and the curly, swirly pattern would have been better suited as the background of a Jefferson Airplane video.

Of course as soon as Papa offered to spend Monday helping her move in, Margo had dropped what she was doing to come along.  It had been barely three days and Margo was already so jealous of the minimal attention Ted paid Liz that she could barely sit still.  Liz had heard Margo enthusiastically fucking her father every night, and had the feeling that the show had been put on for her benefit.

Or, maybe not.  She had been sixteen when her mother and father had divorced, and although Margo hadn’t been in the picture then, Liz couldn’t help transferring a bit of her own confusion and anger at the breakup of her family onto Papa’s new wife.  But at least she knew she was doing it.

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