In summer 2003, we piled into my car, Charine and Nerissa and C. J. and me, and met up with Nerissa’s friend at a hotel on the beach near Illusions. He’d been renting a suite for a week. We had no idea why he’d been renting such an expensive suite for so long, since he had a house: I assumed he rented it because he could, because he wanted to brag about his wealth, which he’d gained by selling dope. It was an unspoken display of his status. Once there, we sat in my car and got high. The Gulf water, black in the night, rolled inexorably in. We felt good. We watched the parking lot of the nightclub, the cars moving like a current past one another, people swarming, preening. The bass from the club called out, and the bass from the cars answered. When we went into the hotel room, C. J. sat on the sofa. Charine sat on one of C. J.’s legs, and I sat on his other leg. I’d never sat on C. J.’s lap before: even in rest, his muscles were hard, and suddenly I felt bad for sitting on him, for bearing down on his small frame with my weight, so I stood.
“You ain’t got to move,” C. J. said. I sat back down. We were quiet. We watched the TV without any sound and watched Nerissa’s friend, who’d been a top college football draft pick but never gone to university. He walked to the bathroom, where he stayed for a few minutes, and eventually he emerged. He sniffed and sucked snot from his nasal cavity. After swallowing, he’d laugh and talk with us. His sniffing was staccato and annoying. He stays with a sinus infection, I thought naively. He was restless, walking back and forth, again and again.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
There were cigarette butts in the sink and in the toilet. There was no toilet paper. There was no soap, and there was only one towel in the room; it lay on the floor, rumpled and dirtied. I decided I didn’t need to pee, and went back to the sofa and sat next to C. J. and Charine.
“That bathroom is awful,” I said, suddenly depressed.
“Come on,” C. J. said, and we left the hotel room, darting between the cars speeding past on Highway 90 to the beach. The moon shone like a bleached oyster shell, and we spent the rest of the night until just before dawn drinking beer on the boardwalk. On the drive home, C. J., who was the only sober one, said, “They was doing coke in the bathroom.”
“What?” I said.
“That’s what they look like when people do coke in them. All them cigarette butts and shit.”
I laid my head down on the seat, stared out at the thin white line of the beach, the trees, the water, all of it lightening from black to gray to blue. Eventually I fell asleep, thinking about what he’d said. Had C. J. been in another bathroom like that? How did he know? If C. J. said anything else, I didn’t hear it.
Weeks later, one night when my mother wasn’t home, Nerissa and Charine and I sat at my mom’s house, watching movies. The front door was open: the light was on. Charine left us to use the phone, and a few minutes later we heard a dragging noise scratching its way up through the darkness near the road and bordering woods, past the front yard.
“What the hell is that?” Nerissa said.
Charine ran out the front door, down the concrete front steps, and out to the road, where the dragging continued between pauses. Nerissa and I stood on the steps and saw C. J. and Duck standing at the edge of the pebbled drive. We walked down the driveway into the night to greet them. A blue ice chest with a long white handle sat between the boys, and C. J. sat down on it and turned up a can of beer. He offered us some. I took one and drank in sips, the beer bitter. Duck told jokes but didn’t laugh at them. Duck didn’t stay long. He left C. J. and us to the cooler. C. J. knew my mother disliked him, so he often kept some distance from my mother’s house. For Charine and him, knowing that their relationship was opposed by so many lent it a romantic air, made them feel like star-crossed lovers. Even though Charine had told C. J. my mother was gone, we sat on the ground at the edge of the yard, slapping at mosquitoes and gnats, talking.
“Y’all can have this.” Tipsy, I stood up. I was tired of the sharp bite and the itchy burn of the mosquitoes. “I’m going inside.”
“Me too,” Nerissa said. She followed me into the house. Charine remained outside with C. J. Twenty minutes later, the house phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Man, y’all come outside.”
“Who this?”
“Your sister is upset. She think y’all mad at her. You need to come talk to her.”
“Oh Lord.”
Nerissa shrugged and kept watching TV. I walked outside, wondering what had gone wrong in the twenty minutes we’d been watching TV. C. J. pocketed his cell phone when I walked up. Charine was sitting on one of the wooden railroad ties my mother had used to landscape the yard. She was slumped over, and her face was in her hands.
“Your sister’s crying,” C. J. said.
“What for?” I said.
“She thinks y’all are disappointed in her.”
“Where did this come from?”
“For real man, y’all sister love y’all.”
I paused and scratched at my leg. I had no idea why Charine was so emotional, but I mistakenly understood it as hormonal histrionics: a teenage temper tantrum. She and C. J. must have gotten into a fight and she was funneling it into her relationship with me and Nerissa. The last place I wanted to be was outside in the yard with my needy sister. Regardless of how drunk or high he was, C. J. would choose to be no other place.
“I don’t know what to say to her,” I said. C. J. looked at me, his eyes wide and brown in the near darkness.
“Just talk to her,” he said.
Charine wouldn’t uncover her face.
“Charine.” Her shoulders shuddered. “What’s wrong?”
“Talk to her,” C. J. said.
“I be fucking up,” Charine said through her fingers.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “Calm down.”
“Tell her you love her,” C. J. said. He bent to the cooler, grabbed another beer, popped the top.
“What?” I said. “I’m talking to her.”
“Tell her.”
“Charine,” I said. “I love you.”
She cried harder. C. J. grabbed my arm and walked me off into the darkness, to the pebbled edge of the road. He leaned in to whisper, and his face was the brightest thing, made even harder than it already was by the night, which whittled his nose to nothing, his cheekbones to peach pits, his forehead, a sliver of light. He took a sip of his beer.
“For real, y’all don’t understand. You need to talk to your sister.”
He was insistent. I leaned away from the feeling that he held me by the back of my neck, like my mother had when I was a child and she led me through crowds by grabbing hard and bearing down.
“I’m going inside,” I said.
“You should talk to her,” C. J. said.
“All right,” I said as I turned and glanced at Charine. She still sat on the crosstie, still hid her face, crying.
“I’ll be inside,” I told her, and then I turned my back on both of them and walked up the driveway. The woods were riotous with night bugs. C. J. tossed a can into the street. It clinked, then went silent. The rocks dug into my bare feet, but once I was a few feet up the driveway, I ran on my toes to lessen the bruise. What the hell is wrong with them? I thought. Charine’s behavior I accredited to grief: Joshua had died three days before her birthday, and as the summer burned itself away to autumn, our loss made us act out in strange ways. I wondered to myself, Is C. J. on something? In the house, Nerissa was asleep; the TV turned her face blue. I heard shouting and the sound of the cooler being dragged, stopped, then dragged again, so I knelt on the rough green trailer carpet and raised the blinds so I could look out the window. In the pale reach of the one streetlight, C. J. tugged the cooler a few feet, drank his beer, raised it to the sky, and yelled at the woods. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He flung beer after beer into the ditch, into the trees, kicked the cooler. Charine followed him, sitting on the ground or the plastic top of the cooler, or standing at his side. I could tell by the way he slung the cans, which must have been half full because they flew far and fell quickly and didn’t float like empty aluminum, that he was cursing. I sank into the carpet, watched Nerissa sleep, and wondered why I felt afraid.