Blood Highway Read online

  “Well, okeydokey then. I’ve got some oatmeal-raisin for you, how’s that? How’s that for a tip from the crazy lady down the street?”

  Mom didn’t give him a chance to answer. She flipped on the hall light and opened the closet, getting her purse. Her heels clunked into the kitchen—writing the check, getting the cookies. It took that extra few seconds again, but Kyle was busy noticing me.

  “Hey, Rainy.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Is your hair different?”

  “Yeah. Needed a change.”

  “Is it, like . . .” Kyle was trying to think of a euphemism. He gave up pretty fast. “White?”

  “Needed a big change.”

  “Wow.” It was not a positive “wow.” But old crushes die hard. “I like it. It’s awesome.”

  “Here we go now,” Mom said. “There’s three cookies in there, so you give your brothers one each.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Kyle’s spitty smile said those fuckers were as good as digested. “Bye.”

  The “bye” was to me. I waved.

  “You put on some long pants next time,” Mom said, following him as far as the threshold. “And a coat and a hat, mister.” Her wagging finger and maternal sternness held until she stepped back inside and shut the door. Her lips drooped. Her brows wrote a pitiless V on her forehead. She turned the lock and looked through the peephole, transitioned to the living room windows and cracked a blind.

  Her nose twitched. She smelled something.

  “Mom,” I said. I went to her. While she watched to make sure Kyle left her property, I touched her blush-pink cheek.

  She spun, grabbed her bowl. I ducked as she threw it, and a line of milk-melt cooled my hot throat. The dish’s crash into the wall was enormous, completely obscuring the sound of the studio audience as Rachel got the door unlocked and Ross mashed his lips into hers. Mom flinched in every direction. Pale, stooped. Battle-ready and breathing hard. I stayed on the floor, not moving.

  She looked around the room. Up, like her tormenter might be floating above her head. Down, where I was, then behind her. Nothing. “You wait,” she said. “You just wait. You’ll find out soon. It’ll happen soon, and then you’ll be sorry.”

  She went and collected her broken bowl, smaller pieces clicking into a large crescent that remained intact. She left and came back with a rag and rug shampoo.

  The theme song played again. They danced around the fountain, struck poses on the couch.

  The clock on the mantel said 7:30. She came for the remote. I drew my knees way up so she wouldn’t trip. Her skirt skimmed the air in front of me, the lavender craze of her dryer sheets almost making me sneeze. She shut off the TV and the lamp, but when she got to the hall she turned the light on, and she’d leave it on, for no better reason—I’m guessing—than fear of the dark.

  I moved a few slats of vertical blinds and set my temple to the chilled glass. The rain was picking up. Its sounds mixed well with her bathwater running. The rush and gush and swish became a tide. I sang, very quietly, about rainbow’s ends and huckleberry friends—fuckever those are—and thought how the joke was on her. Everything had already happened. I’d found out more than I’d ever need to know.

  But Mom was right. I’d learn what it really meant to be sorry seven months and change later, on December 6, 2001. Any Thursday.

  I

  Rainy

  One

  I’m not a morning person, especially in winter, when dawn isn’t dawn but is instead an extension of night. I watched my clock radio and waited for it to blast an oldie at 6:30 sharp. I had eight minutes. The red numbers made my room seem bank-vault black and a tiny bit evil. I wrapped tight in my blankets. I read somewhere that adolescents’ brains need more sleep than adults’, because ours are in the final, crucial stages of development. Yet homeroom started at seven forty-five. So figure that one out.

  My alarm clicked. I slapped it before it played three notes. I still recognized the song—“Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds. It was my test for whether the day would be a good or bad one. Do I slap the button fast, and do I know the tune anyway? Yes to both meant I’d score breakfast without a problem, ace every assignment at school, and find an effective method to stay out of my house tonight until after she was already in bed.

  Meaning I was oddly ebullient putting on whatever clothes I grabbed, leaving my room, locking up, heading downstairs. I only paused a second when I saw her at the dinette, wearing a short robe that showed too much leg. Her hair still undone, no makeup, skin blank and stale. Mesmerized by the Early Today show’s carnival of colors splashing our dark walls. It was the single second I always spared, to confirm her mere presence, her adherence to routine. Is she ballerina-upright at the dining room table, pecking at buttered toast, a cup of black coffee turning with the fidgets of her knobby knuckles? Is she watching the morning news at too high a volume?

  Is she pretending you don’t exist? Yes? Okay, proceed.

  The sidewalks were iceless. The sky was going from ink to navy-blue ink. My optimism was holding, was growing, because I could feel a warm day waiting to happen. The cold had a humid quality, teasing my arm hairs, promising forgiveness for my lack of a coat. Winter coats suck in high school. It takes up half your locker space or you walk around like Mr. Stay Puft or you forget it somewhere. I had an alternative heating system, and I employed it now. It’s the best inhale, always, that first drag of the day. It tastes like a long, empty road.

  I noticed the cop car as I exhaled. My reaction was instant instinct: I put my arm down straight, cig clamped ash-out against my thigh. I played my throat cloud like cold-air steam, which it partially was. A citation for underage smoking would take a nice juicy diarrhea all over my morning. I’d never been caught, but I’d also never seen a cop car plunked in a direct eyeline to my house. I flicked cinders, nervous. Somebody sat in the driver’s seat. Streetlight hit his badge. His sleeve rose, and a McDonald’s cup disappeared into his dense shadow. I figured he was getting his a.m. caffeine, bound to set a speed trap nearby. He didn’t get out of the car.

  I turned the corner. Smoked cocky.

  Starbucks at six forty-five on a weekday. Suits of varying quality, lurkers on laptops at little tables, housewives in the good chairs sipping their extra foam. There were two other Sbuxes on my way to school, as well as a Caribou and a Dunn Brothers, plus two noncorporate locally owned coffeehouses—I never went to those; their profit margin was narrow enough that it couldn’t handle too many of me—and I used a rough schedule, rotating them.

  I popped to the bathroom, peed, brushed my teeth. Then I went to the pickup area and watched. Five minutes was my limit. Longer than that, and I became conspicuous. I was probably wrong—the baristas attacked their espresso makers and steam wands with the kind of focus that can only come from a brutal gig that pays shit hourly but nets you health insurance in a bad-joke job market. Still, five minutes. I was beginning to despair at four and a half, when a guy with three chins said into his phone, “Hang on a second. I said, ‘Hang on a second,’” and interrupted the cashier’s “Good m—” with “Grande nonfat latte and a cinnamon scone.” He threw a five at her and scuttled to the far wall with a finger in his free ear.

  So walking to school, I dipped the scone in the latte, letting chunks fall off and wallow to the bottom, where my last few sips would have a sort of puddingy texture. I surrendered the sidewalk to kids in bright winter wear. My coffee was mostly cold by the time I reached Dewey Street, with Dewey High its dumpy crown jewel. I went a block up, to a single-story house whose driveway I checked before I barged in without knocking.

  The others weren’t here yet. I bypassed the living room for the kitchen. “Ally! I’m nuking my coffee!”

  “Thank you for announcing that!”

  “You’re welcome!”

  The kitchen was catching the sun’s first desultory rays, weak things that made no halos as they bounced off old chrome appliances. Ally’s dad owned a grocery store. Her m
om owned a dance studio. They left the house at five a.m. and came home around ten at night. Ally saw her mom at ballet class and her dad at his store, where she cashiered part-time. He’d written her up twice for chronic lateness. It was a problem at school, too. That’s why we met here every day, to keep Ally on time. It was my idea freshman year, after she graduated from middle school with one of the highest GPAs and the worst tardiness record in our class.

  I hit the microwave’s minute button and heard the front door. “I’m just saying,” Ty was saying, “it’s not as weird as the one I had where we were anime characters on a pirate ship. Remember? Ally made me walk the plank?”

  Heather came in the kitchen with Ty right behind her.

  “Do tell,” I said.

  “Brad Pitt had a motorcycle accident outside my house,” Heather said. “I nursed him back to health and birthed his love child.” Heather’d known she was a lesbian since she was six, but lately she’d been having these very lifelike hetero dreams, and they were wigging her out big-time. She beseeched me: “Did you dream anything freaky?”

  “Rainy never dreams,” Ty said before I could.

  When Ally wasn’t out with seven minutes to go, I used my last-ditch ploy and convened everybody outside for a smoke. Heather and I were a quarter of the way to our filters when Ally exited her back door and locked it, joining us. Not because she couldn’t resist a cigarette, but because she couldn’t resist giving us flak for smoking.

  “How is it?” she asked. “How’s it feel, coating your respiratory system in pesticides?”

  “Tingles,” I said. “Tells me it’s doing more.”

  Ty took a baggie of sliced veggies from her backpack. “I don’t get how you can drink a big coffee and smoke every day. The one time I tried it, I was bouncing off the ceiling.” She chomped into a carrot. “I mean, Rainy, your mom. Wouldn’t she kill you?”

  I’d told them plenty about my mother. Cancer nurse at Mayo, had an apartment in Rochester, did the drive back and forth. She was superbusy and distracted but a really good person, a great mom. I’d patterned her on Nurse Hathaway from ER. Julianna Margulies struck me as tough but fair.

  “She’d ground me for life.” I pinched the ash and pocketed the butt. “Good to go?”

  We got moving. I was jittery, my mind going too fast. It’d calm down in an hour or so, but that hour would be brutal. As if she sensed my sensory overload, Heather didn’t talk to me. We were trailing Ty and Ally, who crunched celery sticks and bantered about their calorie allowances for the day—a discussion that boded well, since I never risked my sticky fingers in the cafeteria and they gave me the components of their lunches they considered too fat-dense.

  The droves were flooding Dewey’s main entrance. The Goths and their black everything. The preps and their pastel everything. Artsy types in self-aware grunge, and the college-obsessed with their ferrety panic. We didn’t fit with any of them. Ty did, kind of. She was our outlier. Her parents were okay, just old. The rest of us needed out of here. The details varied, but we’d raised ourselves. We weren’t outcasts exactly. We were more like floaters.

  I’d thought about it a lot, because somebody like me, who came from what I came from, I should have been on my second pregnancy, addicted to crystal meth, losing the last of my teeth. And the reason I wasn’t—for real, I mean it; this is the only reason—was because I found a handful of people who believed my lies. I put on an identity and stuck to it. I hadn’t realized why I created a persona at the time. I just knew, starting middle school, that I was entering a deep pool of new people who didn’t remember Rainy Cain’s scandal from fifth grade.

  Therefore: My mom’s a cancer nurse at Mayo. She works all the time. I get mad guilt points in the form of a daily coffee allowance and a blank permission slip to do whatever I want. She trusts me. She tells me at least twice a week, on our nightly phone calls, that I’m the best thing she’s ever done and I’d better live up to that.

  Heather, Ally, and Ty believed it, every word. That gave me something to live up to.

  We joined the crowd at the very back, its mass filling four tiers of dull-brown brick. School should’ve been a respite for me, but it was just a different gauntlet. I’d rigged it that way accidentally/on purpose, maxing my APs and piling on extracurriculars—debate team, track and cross-country, two choirs. I excelled quietly, not begging attention the way real overachievers did. I hadn’t started a single college application, and most deadlines were a month away. I pushed myself because I was scared of what would happen if I didn’t. What I’d become. It was also great cover. People favored a simple character calculus. Daughters of cancer nurses got A’s and won ribbons. Daughters of crazy women got knocked up and drug-addicted.

  All of which is to say, I can’t remember any specifics about what was to be my last day of high school. A full docket of grueling academics plus two concert practices with memorized repertoire would blur nine hours for anybody. I think I got my AP History report on imperial versus senatorial rule returned with a big red A on it. I seem to recall lunch was hilarious—Ally was ragging, so she was hangry, and the line was long, and Heather and I egged her on by talking about the delectable smells until she blasted us. Our mixed ensemble’s concert rehearsal had one of those moments where seventy voices somehow found that dimension of ecstasy and we were one.

  I hope all of it was real and all of it was on that dumb nothing Thursday, because what a way to go out. But I might be taking good things from lots of days, to counter the myriad bad that came after. I’m still not sure.

  I know for sure Heather and I clashed on what drills to do that afternoon.

  “Track’s wet, dude.” Heather’s tell for a shortening fuse was when she addressed me as “dude.” “I’m not breaking my leg. Call me a pussy.”

  “Well, you are what you eat. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She chased me. My legs shot out, knees fluid, gait relaxed. Coaches had been telling me since I was twelve that I ran like it was more natural than standing still. Heather couldn’t catch up without cutting a corner, and that would mean muddy grass, where she actually would slip. I let her get me when we’d run two miles.

  After, we made for the parking lot—mostly empty now, and dark. Her green Gremlin could’ve passed for a coffin on wheels. “Coming over for dinner?” she asked.

  Years of my refusals had taught her what I’d say if she offered me a ride home. If I assented to dinner at her house, I’d insist on walking afterward or I’d wind up staying over. I’d never told any of my friends my address. I found ways around it, narrowed it to a neighborhood, described features of the exterior that were so general they applied to most houses. I had a horror of hearing a knock on the door, watching Mom go answer and Heather saying, “Is Rainy here?” Mom saying, “Who?”

  Or her losing it. All-out losing it, this time for keeps, for public consumption, in any of the million ways I’d watched her lose it in the concealed confines of our house: cleaning jags that lasted for thirty-six hours, where she moved every single piece of furniture on the main floor and put the medicine closet in alphabetical order; what I thought of as “emergency preparedness,” when she ran to the basement and stayed for days, using a bucket for a toilet and eating stockpiled nonperishables. I couldn’t handle her basement episodes. The house got way too quiet and way too smelly. I’d stick a spare wifebeater in my bag and rent a hotel downtown for a few nights. Dominate a TV, order room service.

  “I’m cooking. Surprise.” Heather’s voice came out even. Her long fingers were flipping through her keys. I wondered sometimes how much she suspected.

  I patted my backpack. “I’ve got a fuck-ton. Thanks, though.”

  “So do I. We’ll cram.”

  We got to the Gremlin, and she unlocked it, slinging her bag into the passenger seat. I was this close to caving, going with her.

  “Enjoy the SpaghettiOs,” I said.

  “Shows what you know. It’s Velveeta Shells and Cheese.”

&n
bsp; “Mmm.” No kidding. Mmm. “See you tomorrow.”

  I waved when she drove past me. I lit a cigarette. Second-best inhale of the day, the one after a long slog of obligations. My stomach growled, and I remembered I was out of cash. I had been since Monday, when our AP English teacher gave us a surprise assignment that required buying two hardcover books.

  So I’d be going out for supper tonight.

  I put my backpack frontways and unzipped the smallest pocket. It took a dozen bobby pins to get my hey-look-at-me hair secured. My wig was shoulder-length and dark brown with thick bangs. The bangs annoyed my eyes; they also hid them. I stole the narrow black apron from Ty’s house last time I stayed there—her sister was a waitress at Chili’s. The finishing touch was a thick slather of maroon lipstick. My bearing had been northeast this whole time, and now downtown stretched in front of me, the glass-enclosed footbridges of the Skyway like tubes in a hamster’s cage.

  I got a free day pass at a gym and went to their locker room. I shrugged on a white button-down shirt I kept wrinkle-free in a freezer bag and stowed my backpack. The Skyway map was framed on a wall close-by, but I didn’t need one; the network’s bends and loops and intersections were branded on my long-term memory. Aboveground mole holes connecting theaters, concert halls, museums, sports arenas, restaurants, six-figure apartments, luxury hotels, little stores, and massive multidepartment monstrosities. The tunnels themselves overlooked the streets, so the cars passed underneath you in a tide. Seeing those millions of streetlights and headlights and shop lights in straight lines, beckoning, still choked me up when I was hormonal.

  The Skyway was unusually busy for a Thursday. I trailed a knot of women and girls who all had the same long brown hair. They talked in such quick succession I felt like I was in a Gilmore Girls episode. They peeled off and went to an escalator. I hit the door at Fourth Ave, hopped down the dull stairs, tied on my apron, and waited around the corner from City on Tap’s hostess station, examining my nails.