[this work of fiction contains descriptions of abuse and institutional violence, but no explicit depictions of the acts themselves.]
She came from up north, from Pittsburgh. Except—well, really she was from that vast abyssal stretch of Pennsylvania coal country that frottages up against West Virginia’s buxom border. It’s just that when she’d tell folks where she was from, they’d just stare and ask her ‘where’s that?’ And even though ‘near Pittsburgh’ was stretching the language of proximity, that’s what she started telling people, and eventually ’near Pittsburgh’ became just ‘Pittsburgh.’ I don’t know, maybe she thought it glamorous, to hail from a place with its very own football team. Maybe it was just one of her many small efficiencies. She was that, if nothing else. Efficient.
They say ‘hurt people hurt people.’ Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. Who’s ‘they’ anyway? She did have it rough as a kid, though. Her mom was a junkie; she’d always be nodding off in the middle of 4-H, Girl Scouts, whatever little girl social scene Em was involved in. Em learned to tell adults that her mom had narcolepsy, which, while flimsy enough to suggest scandal, was nonetheless more socially acceptable than heroin number four.
Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe, but she loved 4-H. Loved horses; she had this old mare her father dumped on them on her fifth birthday before once again fucking off to parts unknown, exiled from the county amid allegations of prescription pill theft and a penchant for crossdressing. In addition to a pill head and part-time lady, the old man was a gambler; best I can figure it he hit on a big parlay ticket and figured hey, what little girl doesn’t want a pony? Old horses bound for the knacker are surprisingly cheap; the real costs are in maintenance. Like a houseboat.
Em loved that horse. I think she put the work in, mucking out all those stables, and coming up with ingenious hustles at school to pay for its upkeep, because that horse was the only decent soul in her life. Horses aren’t expected to take care of you back. Horses don’t forget to pay the gas bill in the deep winter. Horses don’t disappear for years at a time or go on benders, leaving you to fend for yourself. Horses don’t smoke crack and call you a ‘little heart-breaker’ when your mom is unconscious.
Her mom sold it, of course. The horse. Em walked straight from school to the stables every afternoon, and one day it was just gone. Tears stinging her eyes, she ran home to find her mom’s dealer and a crew of tweakers stripping the house for copper. Turned out the bank foreclosed, and Mom decided to pay down her drug bill, liquidate whatever assets she had before shacking up with the dope man to ensure favorable credit terms. I guess that’s the day it all started. From scrap to scrap; there’s a sort of symmetry to that. I’m sure y’all know what I mean.
I’m getting there, alright? Just keep the drinks coming and let me tell it.
So that was junior high; you hang around Rome enough you start to act like a Roman, and so before long she was her mom’s drug buddy. Somehow she graduated, though, even made the honor roll. You take Em out of the equation and it sounds unbelievable, right, like what teenage addict from a broken home barely shows up for homeroom but still manages to eke out a 3.8? That was Em though; you could see the brilliance in her eyes when her wheels got turning. It terrifies me to imagine what she could have accomplished if . . . well, anyways, I guess that happens, doesn’t it? I don’t think college even occurred to her at the time. She slummed around until she turned eighteen, the day before Christmas, which is pretty much the worst birthday you can have. Her mom, in a rare moment of lucidity, saw that stepdaddy-of-the-year was getting a little too close to their ‘little heartbreaker,’ and threw her out. On Christmas Eve. On her birthday. Her speech slurred, she handed her a plate of Christmas ham wrapped in tinfoil, and told her if she didn’t leave now, she never would. So Em left. She had nowhere to go and no way to get there, so after some soul-searching and a quarter-gram of dope, she decided to do the last thing on Earth she could imagine her mother approving of: she joined the Navy.
She hated it, of course, every minute of it. Hated water. Hated boats. Hated authority. More to the point, hated being the only pretty girl on a floating locker room full of bored, lonely, hygiene-challenged sailors. She never talked much about her deployment, except that by the time she got back to dry land she’d been to the captain’s mast for disciplinary sanctions three times, and that she was in a romantic relationship with her commanding officer. Now, I don’t know if this was a matter of the heart or one of necessity, but I’d wager the latter. This guy wasn’t a captain, but was more than an ensign . . . a lieutenant? Does the Navy have lieutenants? Hey, there’s no stupid questions, Jim. Yeah, that’s right, just stupid people, but you hired me. Twice. So who’s the stupid one? Uh-huh. Anyhow, they shacked up shoreside, on the QT as they say, and best I can figure she might even have been something close to happy-at least until some jilted petty officer put two and two together and dimed them out.
This was back when lady sailors were in the vast minority at sea, and for whatever reason the whole thing went way, way up the chain of command. They figured they’d end up with some minor fraternization rap: his first, her fourth. Instead, they were court-martialed. Yeah. You can imagine how that went. You ever seen a cop ’round here who didn’t know the score try and book her for trespassing or vagrancy or whatever? Like trying to put a feral cat into a burlap sack. Eyes aflame. Well, like I was getting at, the Navy taught her that blinding hatred of authority. I think it’s a sort of learned helplessness, after being powerless long enough you stop even trying to navigate the system that oppresses you, all you can do is just come to hate it and everyone in it.
The long and short of it is she told them where to shove their court-martial. Them and her el-tee too. They threw her kicking, spitting, and screaming into the brig for a spell, but I guess someone somewhere felt bad about something, because when it was all said and done she made it out with an ’other than honorable’ discharge, which, yes, is different from a dishonorable one.
That’s what I said. But I guess that’s why they sent the flag like they did.
Well, sure. But they sent it here because she has no fixed address. Had. Molly let her get her mail here, ’cause unlike the post office it was open at hours that loosely correlated with the hours Em kept. They say a sailor never stops waking up at oh-four-hundred; Em never went to bed ’till then. If at all. When she was on a jag, be it crank, coke, or just a run-of-the-mill manic episode, she might have slept no more than twice weekly, and fitfully at that; until it was over, anyhow, in which case not even I would see her awake for several days.
The el-tee? Woof. Poor bastard had to resign his commission. Can you imagine getting dumped and fired on the same day? Yeah, and what’s more this guy was from a five-generation Navy family. You ever had a day like that? I mean, my old man was a machinist, but if Jimbo ever decides to can me again I can find another shop. Ain’t but one Navy. So I don’t know, maybe if she’d stuck around they wouldn’t have found him swinging from a beam in that supply depot. But she might not have known then the effect she has on a man. Perhaps no one happened to tell her.
Once, in the blackest of black moods, reeling from one of those tirades into which she’d slip your worst fears about yourself, a twist of the verbal knife with surgical precision, I—and I ain’t proud of this, in fact it may be one of my life’s great shames—drunkenly remarked that I ought to go and take a long walk off a short dock, pockets full of rocks and sockets, Virginia Woolf-style, that she’d be oh for two on boyfriends. Her eyes got all flat and black-like the too-still water of a drowning pond at midnight, the look I’d later come to know as RUN—and she stared at the floor and muttered something that sounded like ‘more for me.’
‘What?’ I shouted in reply, my stomach twisting, feet already pointed toward the door. ‘Speak up!’
She didn’t. Didn’t speak to me for the rest of the week, though otherwise she acted like nothing had happened once I worked up the gall to come back ‘round. Only later did I put it together: ‘oh for three.’ I don’t know what happened to the other guy. She never talked about it.
Hey, Jim, how’s business? Good, huh? So now that we’ve discussed business, this is a work thing right? So you can put my next round on the company card. My man.
The good thing about all that ‘other than honorable’ business is she still got the G.I. bill, which got her foot in the door for nursing school. I don’t know how she managed, but she took to it like a fish to water. I think it was just the path of least resistance; there was always something intuitive to her about looking after people. No matter how desperate her own existence was. Once we were driving on black ice and lost traction just as a minivan came careening towards us. As she steered into the skid, she flung her right arm across my chest to brace for impact. No thought to her own safety. I’ve never known that kind of love before or since; even though we were at each other’s throats more often than not, I knew she’d kill for me if push came to shove. I lose sleep wondering if I could say the same. Like there’s a part of me that’s broke, like she was, but maybe between us we comprised one normal, well-adjusted human?
Yeah, I know. But you know how everything with her had to be just so? Like even when she was living out of the Storage Queen, shooting her way through an eight-ball every couple of days, pissing in a bucket, and making two trips to the scrapyard a day to cover her habit, bending in her short shorts and asking for help she didn’t need so the poor bastard manning the small scales would give her better prices; even when she’d finally figured out that 12-steppers are Chicken Little in reverse, that there is no rock bottom, no bottom at all, that we just fall and fall forever until the sensation of the fall is no more jarring than the Earth spinning on its axis, she still unflappably kept what was hers in ship-shape; that storage unit was cleaner than any shop I’ve ever worked in. It was logical, sensible, even comfortable. She was, above all else, preternaturally good at making do.
In Spanish, to make do would just be hacer hacer. She told me that the last time I saw her. I can’t remember why. I don’t know if it’s even true.
She came down here for a job at the hospital. They put her in the psych ward, but she put in for a transfer just as soon as she could. She said ‘the veil between them and me was as thin as mountain air.’ I guess she meant the patients, but who knows with Em. Maybe that is where I get my poetic streak, jackass. My money’s on the addies, but hell, ain’t no telling. En’s where I get a lot of things. Once, after one of our uncountable breakups, she told me with utmost sincerity that ‘whenever you feel a shiver in the cold, it’s my ghost doing her best to make you warm.’ Honestly, I don’t know where she got some of this stuff, but sometimes in the dead of winter I’ll turn off the heat before I go to bed and lay on top of the covers. Just in case.
Ha ha. Eat shit. I’m telling the story, so y’all can keep the drinks coming and keep quiet, or you can piss off. Deal? Deal.