Tim - The Liability
As the door closes behind Curly, you notice for the first time how much your sister is beginning to look like you. She's pulled her hair back off her face with a butterfly clip, exposing the same cheekbones and mouth that smirks, never smiles. Her eyes are grayer than yours, though – more like your father's. It's like looking down the barrel of a gun, or at the sky before a thunderstorm, with just enough blue in them to make her look inviting, approachable. Honest.
But you know now that she is none of these things.
"What's this about?" she asks.
You lean back in your chair, assessing her. She's too stubborn, too independent, and if you don't stop this behavior now she'll be pregnant by her junior prom. You know this, because you've seen it happen to people who thought they knew everything about everything: Davie Adams, a guy you used to run with, who overdosed on speed; Paul Stilts, who was always a wise-ass but supplied keggers when needed, now serving fifteen to life for second-degree murder; and finally, the most important of all, the one you sometimes wish it hadn't happened to – your mother, so messed up she can't recognize her own son.
"What the fuck do you think, Angela?"
This takes her aback. She sputters, "Excuse me?"
"The cigarettes. What's Sylvia got up for you next, drinking and sleeping around like a whore?"
"I'm not a whore, Tim –"
"I didn't say that. God, if you actually listened to me instead of fuckin' around all the damn time, we wouldn't have to talk about this."
"Talk about what?" she retorts, her voice rising, matching your own. "We never talk about anything! It's not my fault you can't keep control of Curly!"
You slam your glass onto the table, the noise sudden and loud in the quiet. "This isn't about him! You don't take responsibilities for your actions, and look what happens –"
Her face is getting red, how it gets when she's about to cry, and you know, then, that you've inflicted this on her as much as you've inflicted it onto yourself. "Nothing has happened, Tim! I'm not knocked up, I don't do drugs… You're such a hypocrite, you know that? You were in Juvie at fourteen! Do you know what it's like growing up with no dad and basically no brother?" Her voice breaks on the word brother, but she keeps going, won't stop. "You never called, you never wrote –"
"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
"It has to do with everything!" she shouts, cutting her eyes away from yours. "If you weren't so goddamned self-absorbed all the time maybe you'd realize it. But I guess I should've known better by now, huh? All you ever cared about was yourself; you never cared about anyone. No wonder Curly hates you so fucking much!"
It takes you a moment to realize what she has just said, to truly hear it. When it does hit you, the fullness of it, as wide and heavy as a brick, you don't feel angry or guilt-ridden or shocked; instead, it's something worse, something you've almost never felt before, wasn't sure possible – sadness, so powerful it makes your jaw drop and the air whoosh out of your lungs in one big gasp.
You want to say something that refutes this, makes it untrue, but before you can, she's gone, pushing back her chair and running outside, into the hot afternoon and the dizzying sunlight and the unknown.
xxx
You are in an alley.
It's humid and dirty, leaden with the smell of wet pavement and mud and cat piss. Your brother is bent over, his head between his knees, hands over his ears, whimpering. Lydia is standing a few feet away, a disgusted look on her face, like she's watching two hyenas fight over a bloody carcass on the side of the road.
You can't stand it when he screams, when you can't make it go away. Since the jumping, this has only happened a handful of times – the cold sweats, the anxiety, the wailing – but it has gotten progressively worse. You don't know how to calm him down, how to make him understand that everything is in his head, those kids and that tire iron and the rushing sense of blood.
Lydia swallows. "What… what happened to him?"
"He was jumped last summer."
"Jumped?"
"Yeah, like, attacked. He almost, he could've…" You shake your head, stopping yourself before you say it, the word that changes everything. "Nevermind, it's not important."
"Yeah, it Is," she argues, taking a tentative step forward. She crouches down in front of Curly, her arm halfway outstretched, as if she wants to touch him but isn't sure how to.
"It doesn't – it was never like this. You know, real bad," you continue, feeling like you have to explain his behavior away, somehow, make it neat and clear so she won't ask questions you don't have the answers to. So you can finally stop blaming yourself.
More sirens cut through the sky, surreal and obnoxious. From what you could tell, before you pulled Curly over here, a car had wrapped itself around a pole; officers stood in a crooked line, protecting the body in front of them that lay in the middle of the street, blood trickling out of its' o-shaped mouth.
Curly rocks back and forth on his heels, his sobs quieting to hiccups – the sign that this is almost over, that whatever he has just experienced is passing by. As you poke your head out of the alley to see what is happening now, an officer shifts his feet, his gun catching the sunlight while he does so.
The metal winks at you. It wants you to come closer. It wants to say hello.
xxx
You've been staring at the same Chicago Tribune headline – "Freedom Summer" Hoping to Draw in Negro Voters – for thirty-five minutes when someone steps inside the house. You think it must be your sister, coming back to apologize, and you ready yourself for whatever teary-eyed bullshit excuse she's going to lay on you.
Instead, you hear another voice entirely.
"Mom?" a woman says as she pushes the kitchen door open. "Are you home? You didn't answer when I called –"
The doorknob bangs against the wall. Your cousin, Lydia, who you haven't seen in years, shrieks, dropping her purse to the floor. Sitting in her mother's kitchen, you'd be goddamned afraid if you saw yourself in here, too; the scar on your face and the tattoos on your hands and arms (at least, the ones that are visible) don't exactly scream cousin.
"Nice to see you, too, Lyd," you say.
Her mouth opens so wide that you can see her molars, the black abyss of her throat. "Tim?"
"That's the name. Sorry about not picking up; I was takin' a piss."
"Like hell you were," she cries, shaking a finger at you. "Where's my mother? So help me God, if you did something to her, I'll –"
"I'm right here, dear," Cathy answers tiredly, appearing from the side-door that leads onto the back patio. Over the top of Lydia's head, as she smoothes her daughter's hair down, she glares at you, which can only mean one thing: She heard your fight with Angela, every single part of it. "Your cousins were nice enough to come in for the funeral," she explains.
"Cousins?" Lydia repeats, pulling away in horror, like the word has the same effect as communism or polio. "You mean it's not just him?"
"Actually, it was –"
"Shut up. You shouldn't have come at all, you know that?"
"Lydia Marie," your aunt snaps. "That is not the way we talk to guests in this house, especially when they've driven for God knows how long to pay their respects to a dead relative. Have some class, would you please?"
"But…" she whimpers. Rejected, she slides into the chair across from you, huffing to herself. Cathy sets a glass of, nonetheless, iced tea (is that all they drink here?) in front of her – this must be her reprimanding ritual, you think – and orders the both of you to play nice in adult terms, then scuttles out of the kitchen.
Lydia sips it cautiously. "So," she starts, drumming her blood-red painted fingernails on the table, "how'd you get that scar on your face? Get into a knife fight?"
"Lydia!" Cathy scolds from the other room, her voice slightly muffled by the thumming of the air conditioner. "What did I say about talking like that?"
"It's fine," you call out to her. To your cousin, you respond, "No, Lydia Marie, I didn't get into a knife fight. I had a beef with this gang leader that needed sorting out."
"A gang leader?" she snorts. "What are you, some big-time drug dealer?"
"If you say it like that, then yeah, I am."
"You treat all your customers like this?"
"Only the nice ones." You smile at her, making sure to show all of your teeth. "Why do you care so much, anyway?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe it's because I don't want a goddamn drive-by shooting at my dad's funeral!"
"God," you say, rolling your eyes – this chick's attitude is worse than your sister's when she's on her period. "You have quite a mouth, don't you? You'd be a hell of a looker if you learned how to fucking use it right."
Her eyes narrow, her hand tensing around the glass. You expect her to throw it at you, like a sane broad would, but she doesn't. Annoyed, you shake your head and shove away from the table, not in the mood to partake in whatever fucked-up shit is going on. "Whatever. I'm not gonna sit and play fuckin' patty cake with you all day when I could be out doin' something productive."
"Productive? I bet you've never worked a day in your life."
"Workin' a street corner ain't the same thing as a real job, sweetheart," you say, and leave.
xxx
It's not until you've driven around the block three times that you realize neither Angela nor Curly are in sight.
Shit.
You turn into your aunt's driveway too fast, accidently clipping the back of Lydia's shitty car. For a second you think about telling her what happened, then decide the bitch can rot in hell. So she gained some weight and grew a couple inches, and her dad might be dead, but that doesn't give her the right to act like such a fucking prick to you.
"Lydia!" you yell, your voice booming off the walls. "Where the hell are you?"
"I'm upstairs!"
Sighing, you take the stairs two at a time, and find a bedroom door ajar at the end of the hall. She's sitting on a pink frilly rug in the middle of the room – which is, sadly, twice as big as yours – painting her toenails that same awful red color. "Close the door, please."
You do. You've never been good at asking for help, even in school, and struggle to find the right words. You're ninety-nine percent sure that if you told her, My brother's probably off getting drunk and oh, yeah, before you came home, my sister and I got into a huge fight and now I'm afraid she's become a fuckin' prostitute, she'd involve CPS, and you don't need them on your ass anymore than they already are.
You clear your throat. "Curly and Angela…"
She looks up, annoyed that you've interrupted her makeover. "Yeah?"
"They're, um…" Uncomfortable, you pull out the box of emergency Marlboros from your pocket, only to remember that you left your Zippo in the car. "They're… I don't know where they… are."
"Where they are?"
"Curly took off with my wallet and Ang – she's pissed at me, I've no fuckin' idea where she could've gone."
"Oh, my God," she says, closing her eyes. "You're kidding, right?"
You wish you were.
In the car, her feet propped up on the dashboard – as to not let her pedicure smudge, Lydia informs you – she directs you north, toward a strip mall. She keeps messing with the radio dial, switching the channel from rock to the news to an itty, bitty Bop station, and you can't stand it. As she belts out (in a very shitty voice) to Goldie and the Gingerbreads, a group your sister listens to, you jerk the wheel to the right, the tires skidding across the road, and slam on the brakes, nearly getting side-swept by a semi-truck in the process.
Lydia's back hits the seat, her feet sliding to the floor. "You almost got us killed! What the hell are you doing?"
"Will you stop it? Jesus, I didn't ask you to sing fuckin' show tunes the whole ride." You pop open the lighter and hold a cigarette to the open flame, inhaling the smoke until you can breathe again and don't feel like you're underwater, until the tightness in your chest and the dizziness behind your eyes has diminished to a dull throb.
"I'm just having fun," she barks, her laugh bitter and ugly behind her big, insect-like sunglasses and headscarf, which took a whole goddamn fifteen minutes for her to adjust. "You're the one who wanted my help because you couldn't keep track of your siblings, Timothy."
All of a sudden, the tension that's been building inside of you for the past two days – since your uncle died and your mother didn't cry and your sister stood up to you in the parking lot of that gas station – comes to a head, an explosion. And you can't fucking take it anymore, can't hear anything besides what Angela said to you an hour ago, all you ever cared about was yourself, over and over and over again.
But fuck her. Fuck them. Like you don't fucking care about anyone fucking else. What bullshit.
You reach across Lydia's lap and push open the passenger-side door. "Get out."
"What?"
"Get the fuck out of my car, Lydia."
Her mouth opens and closes, a dying fish out of water. At last, she stammers, "But… but how am I supposed to get home?"
"I don't give a shit. Leave, now."
With an indignant shriek, she unfastens her seatbelt and steps onto the curb, shutting the door with enough force it makes the car shake. She's still standing there, her purse limp in her hands, when she disappears from view. The last thing you hear her yell is, "You son of a bitch! You'll pay for this!" and you know, in some way, you will.
xxx
After kicking Lydia out of your car, it doesn't take long to find the strip mall. The buildings back up to a small wooded area, and as you turn the corner, navigating around a pothole and then a Dumpster, you see him. Actually, he sees you.
In an instant, he's on his feet, stumbling backwards, up the slope and into a tree trunk. At that moment, you're honestly not sure what to be more upset about – the bottle of alcohol on the ground, or how he's so out of it he can barely stand.
You stop the car and walk over to him. The midday sun beats down on your head, similar to the way you want to pummel him in the face. Wrapping your hands in his T-shirt, you hold him up against the tree so he won't be able to run.
Not expecting this, he grunts, his arms flailing blindly as he tries to fight back. You're able to dodge a few punches, though he gets a good one in, to your cheek. For a second, there is a numbing sensation below your left eye, and then you hit him back, harder than you'd meant to, in the jaw. Pleased that you've somehow sobered him up, despite the sourness in your stomach, you uncurl your fists and step away. You're too upset to curse at him, to yell, to struggle for dominance.
"The fuck was that for?" he slurs, rubbing the corner of his mouth with his hand. When he (clumsily) pulls it away, blood smears down his chin, fresh and red – he must've accidentally bitten on his tongue. "I didn't fuckin' do nothin', Tim."
"I reckon you fuckin' did, Curly. What the hell made you think you could get piss-ass drunk with my ID in the middle of the goddamn day?"
His eyes are bleary and unfocused, not meeting yours. Afraid to, ashamed to. "I didn't…" he trails off. "It doesn't – it doesn't matter, alright?"
Your fingers dig into his shoulder roughly, the bone tensing under your palm. "Do you even care what happens to you? I'd never fuckin' bail you out if the fuzz threw your sorry ass into a cell."
"But they didn't! God," he says, running his hands through his hair, "that's what I'm so – I'm so sick of… Of you tellin' me what to do all the time, like I'm – like I'm a fuckin' kid, and not a person, like I'm some toy you can play with…"
"That doesn't mean you can just do whatever the fuck you want. You live in my house; you live by my rules."
"Oh, yeah? Since when the hell are you payin' the mortgage?"
His tone is sharp, aggressive, and behind the slurred words you know he wants a fight as badly as you do, although you won't give him that pleasure. Not today, and especially not now.
As an alternative, you raise your leg and knee him in the abdomen – for all he's done, the bastard deserves a fuck of a lot more than that. After he's done coughing, you wrap one of his arms around your shoulders, bearing the weight he is unable to lift on his own.
Together, you stagger down the hill and to the car.