Alice comes back to me because the tow and impound notice is mailed to my address. I go down there and talk the cashier into releasing the car into my custody. Lu surfaces about three months later. I hear what she’s doing from Andy, who’s still at Harbor Lights, feeding Lu now, and her new girlfriend; smuggling them leftovers out the back door. They’re both strung out, flopping in an abandoned building on Sixth Street. The whole neighborhood is being torn down, all the residence hotels emptying out to make way for lofts and condos. Lu and her gal are lucky to have a roof; the alleys between Market and Mission are lined both sides with appliance boxes and shopping carts.
I tell Andy to have Lu call me. “Tell her all is forgiven. Tell her there’s nothing to forgive. Tell her something.” A few days later she shows up at the bar right at one, when I open. Rode hard and put up wet, as my brother once liked to say. She stares straight down and mumbles into her sweatshirt. I know I couldn’t raise her stubborn head with a car jack.
“Don’t look at me, Cookie.”
I just want to heal her all up. I have medicine. “You want a drink?”
“I want a gun.”
“What happened to yours?”
“Some cocksucker stole it.”
I sigh, pour her a brandy. Her hands are shaking so bad she has to hold the glass with both of them. I can see fresh track marks on the backs, among the smaller veins and the tiny bones. That piece of brown velvet is still tied around her wrist, hanging on by a few fine threads. She won’t meet my eyes, and all I can think to ask is how she is and know what a ridiculous question that would be, so I don’t say anything. I go back to setting up the bar, cutting limes, making Bloody Mary mix. The place smells a bit more like bleach than booze still, since Andy was in this morning cleaning. Light prisms through the beer signs overlapped in the front window, illuminates the settling dust. For lack of something more befitting the occasion, I examine the floor and see how scarred it is, not just in the burned spot, but all over. Lu says, “I did not set that fire.”
“I believe you.”
“You’d better, Cookie. No one else does.” I know some people who would call that a burden, a moral obligation, but I am not one of those people. Nina Simone sings softly on the jukebox, about the morning of her life. Lu finishes her drink.
“You got fifty bucks?” she says. Like she’s saying, “Can I have a bite of that?” I hand her a wad out of my pocket. “I’ll pay you back,” she says, crumpling the bills up even more. “I will, goddamn it.”
“I don’t care about that. Just don’t die on my dime.” I pick up a lemon, wonder if I can throw it hard enough to break a window. “Just don’t.” I put it back down, take the big stainless-steel bucket to the alcove where the ice machine is, by the back door that leads to the deck and the garden, where by my count seven trees have been planted for dead people in the five years I’ve worked here. And those are only the special ones. We don’t plant trees for just anybody. That would require a second lot. Probably some new zoning. I don’t need ice, but Lu needs space to pull off her ever-astonishing vanishing act.
I say, “I am not planting a tree for you, Lu. You can just forget about that.” I don’t say it very loud, and she probably wouldn’t have heard me even if she wasn’t already gone. She’s left a cigarette burning in the ashtray. She knows I hate that. I leave it burning, to remember her by. Lu one; Cookie fuck-all.
The new girlfriend lasts until spring and then dies on Lu’s birthday in April. Lu calls a few weeks later, and I go pick her up at Fifth and Harrison at three in the morning. It’s raining, but she’s standing out in the open, no coat, saturated like she’s been swimming in the bay. She has a small duffel bag and a pure black kitten in a carrier behind her in a doorway, out of the rain. “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me.”
“I know how to find you. You glow in the dark. Get in here.” I don’t ask about the cat right away, and we drive back to my flat in the Mission. My roommate and his girlfriend are out of town, so I can run a bath for Lu, keep her for a day or two. I put the cat in its carrier in the bathroom to keep an eye on Lu and put her clothes in the washing machine. When she’s done in the bathtub, I wrap her in a bathrobe and put her to bed. “You sick?”
“Not too terrible. Been doing some home-remedy detox since Chrissy OD’d. Pot and Valium. I got a stash.” She doesn’t try to hide the abscess scars on the back of her right hand. I hold it and run my thumb over one of them. Smack doesn’t burn like that unless it’s cut with something really weird.
“What the hell, Lu. Speed?”
“I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Something new. Chrissy liked it.” She looks at the scars like she’s seeing them for the first time. “That’s what killed her. She was just a kid.”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
“I didn’t know how much, Cook. I think I almost died too. My legs went right out from under me. My heart must have just been stronger than hers.”
“You’re a pro, Lu.”
“You bet I am.” She looks away so I can’t see her eyes. After a minute, she reaches into her pocket and holds out a handful of little blue pills. “You want some?”
“Not now. I’m pretty sleepy. I’d just waste it.”
The cat yowls from the bathroom. I raise an eyebrow at Lu, but she just says, “He came to me in a dream. His name is Mick.”
“Mick.” At the moment, whatever it means that Lu named her cat after my brother, accidentally or not, doesn’t register. Not on any scale. That’s how good I am. “Does Mick eat?”
“There’s food in my bag.”
I get the cat, the bag, a bowl, a towel, a dishpan with some torn-up newspaper in it. I say, “We’ve got ’til Sunday.”
“Time enough,” she says. Then, “What’s that line? That song? About Valium. That Rickie Lee Jackson song.”
“Jones,” I say.
“Yeah, sure, whatever, Cook. But what does she say? You know.”
“She says you shouldn’t let them take you back. Broken.”
“Like Valium?”
“Right. And chumps.”
“Out in the rain,” she says. “I love that. It makes so much sense.”
“It doesn’t really,” I say. But it kind of does.
I could just holler, but I might not ever stop, so I close my eyes and play dead instead. When the Valium kicks in and Lu falls asleep, she’s curled around me like a boa constrictor.
Amazingly, she stays cleaned up for a while: two months and a slip, two more, et cetera. It gets so I nearly start trusting her to show up when she says she will, even though a part of me is off in the corner, frantically waving its arms in alarm and asking loudly, “Have you completely lost your mind?” She gets a little room down on Market for her and that cat, a place that’s safe and not blow-your-brains-out depressing like most of them. The guys at the front desk are nice and, of course, immediately fall in love with her because she’s smart and funny and doesn’t take any shit. She gets a steady cab gig with National, driving mostly night shifts, but night is her best side anyway, since she’s still really vain and it’s so much harder to see in the dark how the years have worked her over — better than the Cajun could ever have done to me and been allowed, by Lu, to live.