The cops and coroners left and we were allowed back into Helen’s apartment. It appeared that everything had been moved. Even the water stain, spider-webbing across the ceiling. I get it. Helen’s boyfriend was dead. She woke up this morning to his alarm going off at 5am to wake him up for his job collecting the city’s compost and there he was lying beside her—gone.
Russell had just turned twenty-five the week before. The cops seemed to think they had it figured. Drug paraphernalia. A clue they held in their hands. They thought. Helen, nearly naked in a yellowed, silk negligee and a quilt wrapped tightly around her body, corrected them, “Are you talking about my seam ripper?”
My sister, Helen, shook in big, cartoonish waves from shock and being out on Cumberland Ave for hours in late October, whipped by wind from off the coast. I sat in her living room on a peeling couch that was once our parents’. She stood in the center of the room, struggling with it all, her eyes like nothing I’ve seen before. She reaches for an opened can of Miller High Life from the array of empties beside a spider plant, rocks the can back and forth to see if anything is left, and brings it to her mouth. “Breakfast beer,” she laughs. She laughs again, harder, and her eyes finally seem to recognize me in the room. “I’m not me until I’ve had my breakfast beer,” she says. I laugh too. She had even made the trauma counselor laugh earlier. This guy with a lanyard turned up on the scene with a packet of helpful hints about how to handle the coming days. Remember to eat and all that. He was flipping through the pages of this packet and said “Some of this won’t be useful, like this how to handle the media stuff.” Helen paused, then says to him, dead serious, “You don’t know who we are?” We are nobody.
The sun is brightening and its light comes through the apartment’s tall windows, through the red fall leaves, making the wood tones of the interior look ablaze. The large loom in the corner with a rejected project strung up on it, a pair of killer, thigh high boots leaning against a bookcase,VHS tapes, a piece of cardboard with ‘West’ written in bold on one side and ‘East’ on the other that was Russell’s when he hitchhiked, mended jeans, a butane torch for dabs, an opened bag of oyster crackers on the ground, some loose and crumbled—it’s certainly not neat here but it has meaning.
A couple years back, Helen started teaching herself from YouTube videos how to get bones from roadkill she’s found. Once she found a deer on the side of the road and she asked if she could bring it over to our parents’ backyard. She laid the deer in an old, rusting bathtub that was out by the compost pile with the intention of burying the deer in the ground then uncovering it after it had decomposed for a while. But it stayed there, in the tub, with a thin piece of sheetrock over it for weeks. Mom got upset finally because the rot started to smell from the porch when the wind moved.
Outside, gulls shriek. Through the thin walls of the apartment you can hear someone’s alarm. We are quiet for several snooze cycles coming from this anonymous neighbor. I watch Helen like she’s ice. She freezes and breaks, stops in the doorframe, picks a pair of jeans from the ground, pulls them on. Oversized, browned, low on her hips. She strips her slip off and pulls a waffled long sleeve from underneath a pile. Before she puts it on, she smells it. Her eyes water. She goes into the bedroom. I can’t see her, but I hear her. Her muttering and her uneven breath.
They’d met when she was on a date with someone else. Russell was more interesting than the guy she was with so she’d left with him. Dirty blonde hair, a soft Southern accent, and a bluing tattoo underneath his right eye that said “We suck.” “People,” he clarified later. It wasn’t just because he was homeless, Helen said, that she asked him to move in. They fell in love quickly. I saw him on the streets of Portland, always in motion. He knew who I was. Even though he was shy around me, he’d talk a little to me before heading off.
There were stories I liked about him that Helen told. How he got kicked out of a bar for a fight with a man who told his girlfriend not to make unattractive facial expressions, or that Russell saw a guy real messed up in the street without shoes and so he took off his and gave them to this guy. Russell himself didn’t have another pair of shoes, so he walked around with two layers of socks until Helen ended up finding some shoes in his size. One morning Helen woke up and in her living room was covered in flowers with the roots and dirt and everything, a mess loose across the floor. Russell had the idea late at night to make sure Helen woke up to flowers.
There were others I didn’t like. How he’d just leave sometimes and Helen had no idea where he was and how was and had no way of getting in touch with him. He drank. He yelled at her and said hurtful things in fights like he didn’t love her or that he was doing drugs. They were figuring it out. A couple weeks back, Helen was telling me about how she wanted to be pregnant. She wanted to give Russell a family. Helen was seeing a future. All her life the future barely seemed like a prospect that was there for her. Sometimes it seemed like she was flipping it off, and other times it seemed like the future itself was flipping her off, but here it was. Normal—even when Helen was young, she was a counter current to the world. She wore a bolo tie with a scorpion in resin at its center with her uniform to the Brownie parade. She refused to carry the flag. She never announced that she liked boys and girls, just was what it was. She was the highest scorer on standardized tests but was a truant. I was short with her when she said she wanted a baby. I said that before she gets pregnant she should be able to make and commit to going to doctor appointments and she should probably not misplace butt plugs in her apartment. But something about Russell, something about love, it was clear now, made something open up within her. And now, with a succinct mercilessness, that was lost too.
Fuck the cops—really. How quickly they looked at Russell, at Helen, at the apartment, and assumed. Their attitudes. On principle, I’m angry about it. But the truth? Overdose? Yeah. It’s possible. Sometimes things are what they look like.
Helen comes out of the bedroom holding a pillow. The pillow has a large, damp circle. It was Russell’s. This damp spot, a halo of sweat that had grown in the night. My throat tightens. I imagine her waking to his body—bloated and wrong.. I see her in her wildness, trying to conjure him back to life. She brings the pillow to her face and inhales deeply, her brow a heavy furrow. “This doesn’t smell like him,” she panics. “This isn’t right. Something is wrong.” In quick motion, as though thought and action were itself the same, she grabs a bowie knife from the nearby shelf, drops to her knees and brings the pillow to the ground with her, then she raises the knife above her head, her fist so tight it looks more stone than flesh. I reach towards her and, in a tone lacking conviction, call out her name. Soundlessly, she stabs and drags down as if she were gutting an animal on its back. The fabric splits open. She tosses the knife to the side and begins to dig. Feverishly, with her hands. Her eyes like flashlights trying to find something in the dark, in the woods, trying to find something lost, pulling out the stuffing in chunks. In a moment, the pillow is flat and empty. Then she says out loud to me, astonished, “I thought I’d find something.” And I say back to her after a second, “I’m sorry.” Then, “Let’s get out of here, Helen. Let’s go.”
◆
We are driving 295 and Helen is shotgun, taking long pulls of whiskey without flinching. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to just let her do whatever feels right, but I don’t stop her. I also don’t know if it’s a good idea to drive to Macy’s right now to buy her new bedsheets, but it’s the sort of thing my brain does. Tries to solve problems immediately. We are on the bridge and the Atlantic passes us on both sides. The air is licked with salt. The neon buoys and docked boats look stuck because they are near motionless on a day this calm. The reflection is so bright off the water, I put on my sunglasses. Helen sets the whiskey down and opens the window to smoke one of the cigarettes from Russell’s coat pocket. “It’s a new pack. He was looking out for me… Even got the 100s,” she mumbled after scrambling the whole ride to find something to smoke after her pen ended up being dead.
“Share?” I ask. She passes me one. We stay quiet exhaling smoke out the windows. She lets out a big sort of cry, I toss my butt out the window and grab her hand, surprised that she lets me. Ours isn’t a relationship that embraces. She sobs, “He’s gonna be so mad he died. He’s gonna be so pissed.”
◆
It’s going on four years now since I found Helen overdosed in her bedroom. She called me, said she was scared. She wanted to live. I knew immediately it wasn’t an accident, beat the ambulance there. There she was—a body going in two directions. When she was all hooked up to machines at the hospital, eyes closed, propped upright like a queen, I saw this fight in her and it made me smile. The responding officer asked her if it was because of a boy. Barely conscious, she threw up her middle finger.
She gets mad at me sometimes and accuses me of getting into her business, making it my own. There’s some truth to that. It is wrong to think of Helen as my enchanted mirror showing me how my life would have gone if I had done some things differently. Her life is not a lesson. Once we’d bought Claire’s necklaces at the mall. The two charms formed a heart together. One read sisters, and the other, forever. We wore them committedly for only a week, but we believed there was magic in it. So it’s like that. The way I am bound to her.
◆
Macy’s had only just opened and the Home section looks like a museum exhibit. I stand some feet back from Helen who staggers through bedding and linens. “I don’t like buying new,” she says, “Look at all this shit.” Her voice echoes across the store and employees at the register stiffen. I get closer to her and pull out some options from the shelves, and say to her softly, “Some things you have to buy new, like underwear and sheets.” She scoffs, “You’re brainwashed.” A worker in a pencil skirt, nylons and smart black heels heads towards us. “Christ,” I mutter under my breath as I see us—Helen and I—as she is seeing us. Helen is loud and slurring words.
“Can I help you ladies?” she asks, her face winching, recognizing the smell.
“This bitch,” Helen rolls her eyes. The woman widens her eyes and opens her mouth but I quickly attempt to charm.
“No, we are good. Thank you for asking,” I say, almost in song, trying my best to make each syllable sound like we belong in a nice store like this one.
The woman nods but lingers, pantomiming folding cloth napkins in the section over.
“Fuck. Pick something,” I whisper.
“I’m not gonna buy any of this shit,” Helen spats.
I grab a set of flannel sheets printed with pine cones. Helen smiles a big fake smile to the woman playing with napkins watching us as we head towards the register to pay.
◆
Back at Helen’s apartment, I offer to change the bedsheets. There is a clear outline of Russell’s body on the bed, his sweat bloomed into a dark shadow. I strip the old sheets off and put them in a garbage bag. I make the bed up nicely, fold her quilts and clear some trash, the half-eaten pizza they had shared for dinner last night. Helen is curled into a ball on the floor, her head on a thin jacket, close to sleep. I lean over her, put my hand on her back, ask if I can help her into bed. She says half asleep, “I’m not going in there.”
I pause, I tell her, “I’m gonna be back,” and as I grab the garbage bag of old bedding, she picks her head up and sees what I’m holding and starts to cry.
“I’m gonna be back. Don’t do anything,” I say hard. She nods, reluctantly.
◆
Two weeks later, Helen calls to ask for fifty dollars. I take the call at my desk at the dental office because everyone else is at lunch. From my window, I can see our parents’ first apartment in town. I ask Helen how she is doing and she laughs.
Stumbling, I push her for more information, “Have you called that cop to ask about cause of death?”
I hear wind whipping in the background like she was at sea, like she isn’t in the same town I am but has been cast somewhere distant.
“I haven’t called.”
“Why?”
“It’s just… I don’t know which day to ruin, you know?”
I can’t help but to laugh and she laughs too.
“I just can’t do it.”
“Fair enough,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter. He didn’t count. It’s like I dreamt him.”
I start to choke and feel a giant noise coming from somewhere deep in my body but it gets stuck at my throat. In my mind I see Russell being carried out in a body bag. His gut from beer and calloused hands and blue eyes.
Helen goes, “So you know how I was looking at the genealogy of Dad’s side, right? Going through papers with him because he’s trying to get me to do something to not kill myself or whatever?”
“Ha, yeah.”
“Well, turns out one of the women that we came from, her name was Fear. Literally. Fear.”
“That’s wild. Fear?”
“Fear!”
We are really laughing now and Helen goes, “Fear, when will you be home for dinner?”
“Fear takes her coffee with cream!”
“Fear paid the bills!”
“Fear fell in love!”
“Fear moved to town and she stayed!”