So, there’s some blood on the passenger seat, the cop announced as the police cruiser rolled out of the Mission. Michelle had had her face pressed to the glass of the cop car, dying to see someone she knew. How hilarious would that be! Think of the rumors! But it was so early, like eight o’clock in the morning. Michelle didn’t know anyone who got up that early. Maybe she’d see someone stumbling back from one of Captain’s after-parties or something.
Blood! Michelle gasped. Had the van been used in a crime?
Not a lot, the cop said. Maybe none at all. But there’s something on that seat. We’ll have to open it up. Michelle and Quinn stared at one another in excited horror. What if there was like a dead body in the van? Both watched a lot of Unsolved Mysteries and had bonded over a mutual obsession with Robert Stack, his suits and his hair and his grim delivery. They liked when he delivered his mournful epilogues before a blue screen no one had bothered to project an image onto. It was so low-rent — the sordid vanishings, the bad reenactments, the alarming sound track.
If There Is A Dead Body In The Van I Could End Up On Unsolved Mysteries, Michelle whispered, but the cop heard her. He played down the likelihood of murder.
It’s not like a blood bath in there, he said, glancing at them in the rearview mirror a little too long. Michelle grew nervous. If there was a murder the lovers would be immediate suspects. Warrants to search Michelle’s home would be issued swiftly. Drugs would be discovered and nobody likes a druggie. People kill for drugs, everyone knows that. Drugs are a gateway crime for murder. Quinn was already passively lying to the cop, allowing him to think she was a man even though no one had said anything. It didn’t matter. None of it would look good on paper. Michelle forsook her Unsolved Mysteries aspirations and hoped there were no dead bodies in the van.
The van — a Dodge, fat and blue — had been brought to the curb at a hectic angle and abandoned. No windows were smashed. The vehicle was laughably easy to break into, you jiggled the handle and the locks practically popped themselves open for you. The pair looked for the blood the cop had mentioned. They found it on the cracked front seat, a few dark red sprinkles on the pleather. A bizarrely familiar sticky nub of heroin clung there as well. A plastic bag of syringes on the floor. The van had been stolen by junkies! A Big Gulp from the 7-Eleven sat on the dash, the ice melted, condensation sweating through the waxy cup. Everywhere were cookie crumbs, as if the joyriding dopeheads had grabbed great fistfuls of animal crackers and crushed them in their palms, flinging the sweet debris around the vehicle like confetti. Someone had had a great time in that van. Michelle walked around the side of it and slid open the door for the cop. It was empty.
All right, the cop said, I got a tow truck coming, you can pick it up at 850 Bryant.
What? Michelle asked. Can’t I Just Take It?
It got a ticket for being parked in a bus zone, the cop explained, and on top of that you have a bunch of outstanding parking tickets. You like to park on the sidewalk, it looks like?
Fucking Ziggy! Drunk driving home from the bar and leaving the van on the sidewalk in front of her house. The arrogance! Those Weren’t My Tickets, Michelle began.
This vehicle has too many tickets. You pay them at 850 Bryant and we’ll release the van to you. And, here. The cop grabbed the bag of needles and flung them at Michelle. Take care of these please.
The cop’s work was done. He gave them a nod of dismissal. Michelle was aghast. She’d been pulled out of her narcotic slumber for this? To be abandoned on top of some godforsaken hilly part of San Francisco she had never been to? Where was the Mission? Aren’t You Going To Drive Us Back?
I’m not a taxi, the cop said. He went back to his squad car to wait for the tow truck.
What Am I Supposed To Do With These? Michelle shook the bag at Quinn. Never mind what she would do now that the van had been impounded. She couldn’t afford to bail it out, no way. It would rot there. How would Michelle get off this sinking ship of a city? Michelle had to get out of there. The energetic walls of San Francisco were closing in on her. Of course the van had been stolen, her plan ruined, by druggies. How desperate do you have to be to actually inject something into your bloodstream? You did not have control of your life if you were unable to wait two minutes for the drugs to work through your sinuses.
I Cannot Bring These Home, Michelle said intensely, rattling the bag.
Of course not, Quinn shrugged.
No Really, Michelle said.
Throw them away, Quinn nodded at a trash can on the curb.
Someone Could Get Stuck. A Sanitation Worker.
So? They’re clean.
Yeah, But Imagine How Scared They’d Be. They Wouldn’t Know They’re Clean. They’d Have To Get Tested And Everything.
There are actual dirty needles in the trash in San Francisco, Quinn said. There’s like toxic waste. I’m sure they wear gloves and stuff.
Michelle’s mother Wendy had once been stuck with a questionable needle at the psych hospital. She was dosed with precautionary AIDS meds that made her terribly sick. For a week she writhed in bed, sweating from fever dreams of sawing her own lip off or having bullets lodged in her brain. She was certain she had AIDS, punished by God, but for what? Being gay? Did Wendy really believe that? She supposed, in some dark corner of her brain, she did. And the AIDS medication had turned her brain into one big dark corner.
Michelle and Kyle learned of their mother’s hardship like they always did, long after the fact, when the opportunity to help had come and gone.
Why Didn’t You Tell Us? Michelle wailed, though what could she have done? Her mothers were so far away, and plane rides were pricey.
If Michelle thought about putting the needles in the trash can on the sidewalk she thought of her mother’s hand, laden with Claddagh rings and shaded with nicotine, reaching in and getting pricked.
I’ll Take Them To The Hospital, she said.
Walking through the lobby, searching for a biohazard bin, Michelle couldn’t stop thinking of her moms. She hadn’t told them she was moving. Michelle’s life made her moms nervous and Michelle hated the feeling of it — sort of monstrous, always bad all the time. They were happy she was gay, of course, but she was a weird sort of gay, a degenerate gay. She didn’t want to sue the government for the right to marry, she wasn’t interested in gays in the military, she was queerly promiscuous and thought that this was enough, that this was activism. Wendy and Kym hated to say it but it was Michelle and her generation that were holding back the gay rights movement. When Fox News wanted to show gay people, did they bring a camera crew to Wendy and Kym’s to show two middle-aged, out-of-shape lesbians smoking cigarettes in front of the television like the rest of their audience? No. They went to people like Michelle and her friends, who seemed to only want to scar their bodies and strap rubber phalluses to their crotch.
Wendy and Kym checked in on Michelle and Kyle, and Michelle and Kyle checked in on their moms, and then the siblings checked in with each other about their moms — epic conversations wherein Michelle and Kyle detailed all the ways in which their mothers’ lives were sad and stunted, all the ways they could be better if they would just do something to improve their circumstances. They clucked and marveled at Wendy’s unwillingness to become a different person, not this chain-smoking, codependent caretaker of crazy people by day and Kym by night. Working too much overtime, getting bleary with sleep deprivation and then jabbing herself with a needle. Michelle and Kyle talked about the needle incident forever. Was it a cry for help? How ironic it would be for their mother of all people to get AIDS.