Page 22 of Be Not Far From Me

My limbs are concrete and the mattress water; I feel as if I’m sinking into it. Either that or I’m water and the mattress is solid, because every time I shift it’s like the movement keeps on going even once my body stops, the bed the only thing keeping me from becoming pure liquid and dripping right out the door.

Like water I’d search for a low point, slipping down the ridge and into the little stream at the bottom, joining a creek and then a river. I’d slide past my hometown and maybe see Duke fishing off the bridge, and then I’d go on out to sea, all my pain and everything, until I am a single drop in the ocean.

I’m not okay and I know it, but there’s a sense of calm in being high, like all my troubles are balloons floating just above me and now that I’m awake enough I can pull them down one at a time for examination.

First there’s the pain, a shiny red balloon full to bursting. The oxy didn’t make it go away, for sure. I can still feel it, hot and bright, but it’s not the first thing on my mind. It’s someone else’s problem, a confidence whispered by a friend that made me feel bad for them but left behind in a rush when I take off for a run. My pain is something to be remembered later, when it occurs to me.

Duke is a blue balloon, half-deflated, hovering somewhere over my face like a moth that can’t decide whether to land in the fire. Now that I’m not worried about dying—not that it won’t happen, I’m just not worried about it anymore—I can’t stop thinking about him and Natalie, the sound he made that I thought was for my ears alone.

Exposed bone and sliced nerves I can ignore, but even the oxy can’t touch how it feels when I remember finding them. It hurts. More than taking off a piece of my own body, even. I wave that balloon away, not able to deal with it yet. My hand keeps going, all coordination lost, and bounces off the side of the camper to fall back across my face. Davey’s hat is scratchy against my wrist and soaked with sweat. I pull it off but keep it nearby, convinced that I smell a bit of him in it.

There’s a white balloon up there too, one with a string so long I didn’t notice it until I moved. It’s up against the roof, so high above me I can’t imagine what problem I’ve got that it could be so far from me and still cause issues.

Then I realize it’s my momma.

She wrote me a letter once. Dad kept it for a few weeks, debating about whether to give it to me. It wasn’t him that made the decision but a raccoon that snuck into the trailer and trashed the place, leaving bits of dinner, his own shit, and pieces of our mail everywhere. I found the letter from Mom in the kitchen sink next to a chewed chunk of Colby cheese he’d drug out of the trash and a half-full can of beer (I don’t know if Dad drank that or the coon did).

Momma told me in her letter that she wished she could say that leaving me was the hardest thing she ever did, but it wasn’t. She said it was an easy decision, because I didn’t need her. Dad did, she said—maybe too much. And leaving him wasn’t that hard of a call because you get tired of picking up a grown man’s socks, but whenever she tried to brush my hair for me I just yelped and told her to leave me alone.

She said she always wanted a girl, but what she got was me.

I didn’t know what to make of that, so I folded it up and kept it under my pillow for a while, looking at her writing to see if there were any of her whirls and loops in mine. But there wasn’t. My letters were all hard angles and dark slashes, like Dad’s, and who cares if there’s socks on the floor, anyway?

Maybe I didn’t need her brushing my hair, but I guess I could’ve used a word of advice a time or two, like the first few times I got into fights with Duke, or even when things were going really well. Maybe even more then, come to think of it. She thought I didn’t need her, but I needed something more than just Duke’s mom reminding him to wear a condom. At least I had that though. She didn’t want him to get straddled with kids before twenty, but it would’ve been my ass too, and maybe she didn’t want to see me living somewhere with a nice-enough basement but a man who came home and made everything quieter than church.

Not that Duke would act like that, but he would take another girl into the woods, which is a whole different kind of problem, and maybe if I had a mom I could go home and talk to about it I would’ve done exactly that instead of punching him in the face and running into the woods, drunk, ending up with half a foot and high on oxy in an old meth lab wearing a dead boy’s hat and wrapped in a moldy blanket.

And the worst part is, I consider this an improvement.

Day Six

The dead bit of my foot is rotting by the door. It’s getting warmer, and the camper works like an oven, my foot a bad piece of meat, cooking slow in the heat.

I wake to the smell, sunlight slanted at an angle that tells me it’s late afternoon, and my tongue so dry it’s swollen. The flask sits on the floor where I left it, miraculously intact after my kicking fit. I sit up slowly, deciding if I’m drunk, high, or coming down from both. It must be the last because even though I’m woozy my foot hurts like shit set on fire. I unwrap the bandage to have a look.

I’m swelled still, but the red lines of infection might be retreating. I tilt my foot in the sunlight, trying to gauge if that’s true or if I’ve suddenly decided to be an optimist. But I think I’m right, and somehow the swelling looks less angry, which I know is hardly a medical term but is somehow completely accurate.

I slide to the edge of the mattress, good foot first, and put my heel down in my own blood, now tacky and drying. The floor is covered, and it sticks to me like syrup as I get down on my butt, scooting over to the flask and the one granola bar I’ve got left. I crawl past the piece of flint, still stuck into the linoleum like a tombstone for my foot.

My foot thumps like my heart decided to vacate my chest and move down there, so I lean against the wall, propping it onto the counter and wiping my hands as clean as possible on my jeans. I swig back what’s left of the water even though it’s flat and stale, and try to figure out how long I can afford to stay here.

I don’t know whose setup this is, but I do know that nobody stays away from this many pills for long. Judging by how my uncle Chuck was dealt with for making junk meth on the side, I don’t think the owner of this camper will take kindly to me knowing where their stash is kept, or kicking in their door, for that matter.

I’m a girl alone where she doesn’t belong, and one who will be presumed dead in a week or so. If someone were to finish off that process a little more quickly than nature intends and dump my body elsewhere, nobody would think anything of it—and that’s if I ever got found in the first place.

The pill bottles are still strewn across the floor and I reach for one, feeling a little tug of resistance as my dried blood tries to keep it. The label’s been torn off to hide who it was stolen from, but the date it was filled is still up in the corner. I count backward and figure out that it was filled maybe ten days ago, which means somewhere between then and now it got up to a ridge in the woods and somebody is going to be coming back sooner or later to fill all these little sandwich Baggies with something that doesn’t belong between two slices of bread.

I rest my head against the wall, rolling the bottle back and forth across my palm and shifting my foot on the counter. There’s a chance that the person who comes up here to count pills is decent, like my uncle. Just someone who needed to make a buck and cashed in on the only industry we’ve got left. They might give me the shirt off their back—literally—to cover my nakedness, draw me fresh water and other biblical stuff and then take me to the ER, which isn’t so Jesusy but would be a lot more helpful.

They might.

Or they might drag me out of here screaming, beat what’s left of me into a pulp so that only my dental records can identify me, or not worry about anybody ever finding me and end it quick with a bullet to the head. I run my tongue over my teeth at the thought, dislodging the last crumbs of granola. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but I do know I’ll leave on my own accord and not one drop of my blood spilled that I didn’t shed myself.

I also can’t live on meth and whiskey, the only things they seem to store out here. Wherever I am is a far piece from anything else, and food won’t find me. I’ve got to go to it. Might as well be headed toward something while looking for food, rather than waiting for a drug dealer to show up and hoping he won’t kill me and brought more granola.

“One more day,” I say into the hot, close air of the camper. “You get one more day.”

I find my dead bit of foot and put it in a sandwich bag.