Читать книгу The Road Out - Deborah Hicks - Страница 15

CHAPTER THREE

We're Sisters!

A sickly-sweet odor prevailed in our classroom on the morning of June 28. On humid days and when it rained, the smell was always worse. Smells from a nearby industrial stripping company that burned off waste in the bottom of barrels and pumped it into the air mingled with those from a former creek, Mill Creek, that now doubled as an industrial sewer. In earlier times you could actually swim in the creek. Now the creek was so polluted from industrial waste that it had a rainbow of colors in its water: blue, green, orange. On warm sticky days it felt like you were living in a chemical factory, unable to escape the odors seeping into your skin.

At 8:45, I sat with the girls and Miss Susan at our makeshift breakfast table, lingering over food and talk. Sometimes our breakfasts stretched on past the nine o'clock hour, when my summer reading class officially began. And this promised to be one of those mornings. The neighborhood outside was quiet. Adults were still sleeping off the effects of second or third shifts. Children were only beginning to emerge on the playground and the streets. Only the whirling fans in our ground-floor classroom, rotating in a helpless attempt to ward off the encroaching midmorning heat, interrupted the rhythms of talk at our table. Already I could feel pockets of moisture forming between my skin and the button-down cotton shirt I wore that morning.

Alicia.

Alicia sat next to Blair and across from Miss Susan and me at the table covered with a hot-pink paper tablecloth. She had a small face, with long oval eyes that had a soulful quality, like a mystical wood fairy or small elf. Her eyes could flash colors of gray or sea blue in her comical moments. But this morning she seemed more contemplative than normal. Changes were happening in her family, and Alicia seemed to be struggling to understand what it all meant. At first, her mother had begun staying out late at night. When this happened, Alicia and her brothers found themselves alone in the rental unit all night. Finally Alicia and her brothers had moved in with their grandma. Soon after that, strange events began to take place.

“You guys know what happened yesterday? I was sittin’ on my bed and my window was open and a bird flew in.”

“A bird? A bird?” said Elizabeth, suddenly looking up from the pile of bread and jam on the small paper plate in front of her.

Blair looked up too. Her thoughts had been elsewhere: all week long she had been hard at work on her own fictional story, set in the attic of her house. At night when the house went dark, she lay awake, half-dreaming about the attic and its invisible occupant, Rose. Sometimes at night she saw things. When she couldn't sleep she would stare at the dresser her Grandma Lilly had placed against one wall. She could see things on it, like Frankenstein or Freddy Krueger with his claws.

“One time my grandma seen a bird fly through her bedroom window,” said Blair. She still looked sleepy at this early hour. On her plate was a half-eaten piece of French bread with jam and a cooked brown egg that was still in its shell.

What all of the girls knew about birds was this: When a bird flies through your window and goes out a different window, that means somebody is going to die. If it flies through your window and goes out the same window, that means somebody is going to be born.

One time a bird had flown through Alicia's bathroom window and then flew back out. That was the time her baby cousin Nathan was born. Alicia was nervous about this latest sighting of a bird. And there were other things about the house where she now lived that didn't seem right. For one thing, the house had a ghost. The ghost's name was Howard, and he was prone to misbehaving.

Earlier that week, Alicia had been holding her baby cousin while her Aunt Emily was doing her hair.

“And the light was flickering on and off,” said Alicia. “My aunt said, ‘Stop it, Howard!'”

“Psycho!” said Shannon in a giddy voice. Her mother's people, down in West Virginia, liked to tell stories, and she perked up at the prospect of a good ghost story.

“And the light kept flickering on and off,” said Alicia. “And my aunt didn't have ‘nough light, so me and her went upstairs.”

Ghost Howard's room was downstairs. It was the dining room now, but it used to be his bedroom. His mother was a woman named Dora who had worked at a nearby Boys and Girls Club. She had to retire because she was old and people were mean to her. One time someone put a banana peel on the floor and she slipped and broke her arm. Then her son, Howard, couldn't take it anymore and he shot himself in the head. Dora moved out, but Howard's spirit remained.

“My brother was downstairs, and he heard a big noise,” said Alicia.

Elizabeth had for once fallen still. Even her restless arms seemed to be in a state of listening.

“My brother walked, he walked into the living room. And there it was! He saw the light had fell. And busted all over the floor. And if me and my cousin was still in there we would've been cut up.”

My thoughts drifted back to my girlhood, when I used to sit outside at night with my friends and tell ghost stories. The mist that hung low over the mountains framing our small western North Carolina town seemed to give rise to spirits. Long summer evenings were our time for sitting outside for hours, imagining that a flickering light barely visible on one of the hills was a lantern, its owner a sad and tormented dead man. The ghosts of my childhood always lived elsewhere—on the hills—turned a luscious, nearly blue color by the rain—or on the back roads where lost souls and headless girls roamed at night. It had taken me by surprise, when I first began teaching my students, that the ghosts haunting their neighborhood were so close. You could hear them breathing at night, their voices speaking from the spirit world. And they were real, I had learned. The girls’ stories made them come alive, and stories were what mattered anyway.

Adriana's voice interrupted my brief journey into the past. Her friend Alicia's story had made her think about the house closer to the bingo hall, where Miss Susan herself had once lived.

‘Ain't there a ghost in that blue house down by the church?” she said.

Miss Susan shifted her broad shoulders and raised her head slightly, like a queen signaling her intent to speak. The girls hushed up and I listened too. Miss Susan had a story to tell.

Once, when she was only a young woman, Miss Susan had lived in a house not far from the school. There were some things about the house that were not right, she said. Miss Susan's eyes darted in Blair's direction, then stared straight ahead.

It started when Miss Susan, then a young mother of two little girls, began to notice freakish things. The vacuum cleaner would start up on its own. The family dog wouldn't come into one room where Miss Susan often read. Some parts of the house stayed mysteriously cold, no matter how high the heat was turned on.

One day, Miss Susan was taking a shower, and she saw a shadowy figure enter the bathroom. Assuming that it was one of her girls, she opened the shower door to speak to her. No one was there. On another occasion, Miss Susan was brushing her long hair in her bedroom, and she felt a presence behind her. She turned around to see a man wearing a 1920s suit and a fedora. The man reached out to her, but then he disappeared.

By the time Miss Susan finished her story, Alicia's long eyes had gotten even wider, with a look that melded fear and delight. She smacked her lips softly.

“I'll never go in there again!”

“I want to go in that house, man!” said Elizabeth. She shot Alicia a glance with her hazel eyes, and I could see the energy that I hoped some day could be channeled in the direction of books and learning.

I was mesmerized by the story, feeling like a girl again myself. But even so, the cogs of my teacher's brain were turning. I couldn't help but think of the paperback series that Alicia and Elizabeth were reading. The books had many parallels with the stories that came out of their own cultural lives. The two children living in the sinister house on Cherry Street in the series had to contend with ghosts every bit as unruly as Alicia's Ghost Howard, or the unseen spirit in Miss Susan's old rental house.

“Are you still working on The Haunting today?” I asked, looking in Alicia's direction.

Alicia nodded, though she had become distracted with more important things. She and Blair, looking like sisters with their fine blonde hair and porcelain complexions, were whispering some giggly secret. Putting their two heads closer together, they suddenly flat out erupted in giggles. Alicia had begun to turn red and was snorting from trying so hard not to squeal. Blair began to chant, and soon Alicia joined her. The two had their arms around each other:

"We're sisters!"

"We're sisters!"

I smiled with the two girls, but all of us at the table looked at them in a puzzled way.

“What makes you sisters?” I asked.

Soon we learned the story: both of their mothers were out on the streets. The trouble had come into Alicia's life in the form of a small white pill.

Only a few years before, a perfect storm—brewed of anxiety, despair, and the chronic health problems that afflict the poor in Appalachia—had gathered force in the neighborhood. It was a storm that had already cast its shadows upon poor white communities across the Appalachian region and in rural Maine. In 1996, the prescription painkiller OxyContin was released on the market by Purdue Pharma. The drug's active ingredient was a synthetic opiate—oxycodone—with a twelve-hour time release that was supposed to reduce the likelihood of addiction. But weekend drug users who were used to crushing milder painkillers—Vics (Vicodin), Percs (Percocet)—for a short-term buzz made a discovery: when crushed to disable the time-release function and either snorted or injected, OxyContin yielded an intense, warm rush, an opiate high. The journey from weekend user to addict could be as short as weeks. Suddenly whole communities of unsuspecting thrill seekers were finding themselves reeling from the impact of an addictive opiate. The difference was that this was a prescription drug, and the dealer could be anyone: a grandmother, a neighbor or friend, anyone with a prescription.¹ Someone on Medicaid with a chronic pain problem could get an OxyContin prescription for one dollar. By the time my class was in full swing, the drug had acquired a new name: hillbilly heroin. Entire families and communities were transformed. In one old-industry Appalachian town in Ohio, nearly one in ten babies would, before the decade's end, test positive for drugs, with painkillers in the lead.²

The cycle of addiction caught many by surprise. As Paul Tough wrote in a 2001 article in the New York Times Magazine: “When you hold it in your hand, an OxyContin pill doesn't seem any different than a Tylox or a Percocet or any of the mild narcotic preparations that have for years seeped out of the pharmaceutical pipeline and into the lives of casual drug users. Despite appearances, OxyContin actually belongs to the other side of the drug drive; it might look like a casual Saturday-night drug, but it's a take-over-your-life drug.”³ As the medical community became increasingly aware of the drug's diversion, tighter safeguards were set up around its prescription, making the drug more costly on a street market. The going price by the early 200 was one dollar per milligram, forty dollars for a forty-milligram pill.⁴ Users could snort or inject four or more pills a day. People who would never have imagined themselves as hard drug users found themselves turning from OxyContin to a cheaper drug, heroin, that satisfied their need for opiates. Many of the new addicts were younger, people in their twenties or thirties. Some poor women who did the drugs turned to the one commodity they had in a cash market—their bodies—to raise the needed money for pills or powder.