The Falling Away Read online

Brandilyn patted Quinn’s arm. “Maybe . . . maybe we could call in to school for you today.”

  Call in to school? An odd suggestion for a worker at the homeless shelter. Why would she want to do that? School was a warm place. They fed her toast in the morning, gave her a free lunch, took her mind off the long hours she’d have to spend with her mother in the late afternoon and evening.

  Those weren’t always hours she wanted to spend with her mother. For others, an evening with Mom might seem simple; with her mother, nothing was simple. Least of all the evenings.

  “Where’s my mom?” she asked.

  “That’s . . . well, honey . . . we don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re looking for her.”

  “She wandered off again, didn’t she?” Quinn itched at her arm.

  “Again?”

  Right. This woman was new at the shelter. Maybe a stand-in. She didn’t know the long story of Vicki Simmons. Still, Quinn didn’t want to go into it all with her; let someone else at the shelter fill her in.

  Quinn scratched at her arm again. “She, uh . . . she has problems.”

  “What kind of problems, dear?”

  “Mental problems.” For starters. Two years ago, when Quinn was thirteen, her father had disappeared. Just walked out. Her mother—Vicki—hadn’t been the same since. At first she did okay. She had a job, working in a dry-cleaning business, and she did her best to act like nothing had changed.

  Well, sometimes she acted like that. Other times she went on long crying jags, lasting for a few days at a time. She just lay in bed, unable to speak. Unable to do anything but breathe. And that, just barely.

  Those spells—that’s what her mom had called them, spells—ended up costing her the job at the dry cleaner. And after that, Mom hadn’t really been able to hold on to any steady work. She’d be a cleaning maid for a few weeks, or a dishwasher.

  But then she’d have one of her spells, miss a shift, and get fired. Which only made the spells last longer.

  One day Quinn came home from school to find her mom outside their apartment.

  “Let’s go,” she said simply, and just like that, they left everything.

  Just as her father had done.

  Another one of those things Quinn hadn’t understood at the time, but had come to realize as she grew into adulthood: on that day, her mother had been evicted from their apartment. At that time, stupid little kid that she was, she’d thought they were just leaving to go somewhere else, and Quinn had been excited.

  That night had been their first of many in a homeless shelter.

  In the year that followed, her mother’s spells became more frequent, to the point that the true spells weren’t the long bouts of listlessness and hopelessness. They had become her brief bouts of coherence.

  “She’ll be back, dear,” Brandilyn said, still patting her arm. “We’ll find her.”

  Quinn looked at the woman before her, the woman who wore a BRANDILYN name tag and a puzzled expression, and felt a mixture of emotions beginning to bubble up inside her. This woman had no idea where her mother was, had no idea what her mother was doing, had no idea about anything. What gave her the right to say what her mother would do? Nothing.

  At that moment Quinn found herself wishing, for the first time, that her mother would never come back.

  Little did she know she would get her wish.

  8

  Webb grunted or whimpered every time Dylan hit one of the many potholes or bumps on this stretch of secondary highway.

  Thoughts of Iraq, of the 710th, of Claussen, tried to claw their way into Dylan’s head. But he wouldn’t let them.

  Normally, the Percocets or Vicodins or OxyContins would help control those thoughts. That was part of their magic. But he couldn’t sink into the fluffy, warm embrace of the drugs right now. He had to stay grounded in reality.

  Still, the rusty gears of his mind wanted to explore the images that constantly wandered the hollow corridors of his memories. He could count fence posts or telephone poles, but even that effort wasn’t soothing at the moment.

  You there, Joni? he asked in his mind.

  Always.

  You’ve been pretty quiet since—

  Since you shot two guys, then ran with the money and drugs.

  Yeah.

  Figured now wasn’t the time for an I-told-you-so lecture.

  Hard to think of a better time.

  Good point: I told you so.

  Now that we got that out of the way, what do I do?

  You’re asking me? I’m just imaginary; what do I know?

  You’re not imaginary; you’re my sister.

  You mean I was your sister.

  He ignored the comment. I could use some help here.

  You could use a lot of things. A hospital, a time machine, a get-out-of-jail-free card . ..

  You’re not helping.

  Just feeling like I should play the role of your conscience, since I live inside your head and all.

  Well, since you’re into role-playing, put yourself in my place and tell me what you’d do.

  I am in your place.

  Joni.

  Okay, I’d go with Webb’s suggestion.

  I don’t recall Webb making a suggestion since he cowboyed up on the Percocet. Just some groans.

  Medicine man.

  Dylan laughed, and Webb stirred in the seat beside him, opening his eyes for a few seconds and mumbling something before returning to a stupor.

  We’re nowhere near the Crow rez, and I doubt any of the elders would welcome me with open arms. Especially when I bring them a white man who’s been shot in a drug deal.

  I’m not talking a real medicine man. I’m talking a man who deals in medicines.

  Dylan paused. Andrew.

  Yeah. Andrew.

  You trust Andrew to keep something like this quiet?

  Not for a second.

  Me neither.

  But we’re not trusting him to keep quiet. We’re trusting him to find some help that would be . . . under the radar, let’s say.

  With Andrew, it’s more like under the bus.

  Whatever works.

  Dylan sighed, glanced at the pained look on Webb’s face. Yeah, whatever works.

  At that moment he heard a chime from his cell phone, indicating he was in range of a tower.

  See? Joni said. Almost like you’re supposed to call.

  Two bars.

  Okay, okay.

  He dialed as he drove, knowing inside that he’d have to ditch his cell phone sometime soon. Once Krunk found out, and the guys up in Canada . . . well, he had no doubt they had access to deep resources that could trace his phone signal.

  “Yeah?” said a voice on the other end.

  “Andrew, it’s Dylan.”

  “Dylan.” Andrew paused, and Dylan could almost hear him smile through the phone line. ”I already bought Girl Scout cookies, if that’s why you’re calling.”

  “You in Great Falls, or on the rez?”

  Andrew grew up on the Fort Belknap rez, but called Great Falls home these days. Even so, he was still on the rez as much as, maybe even more than, he was anywhere else. On the rez, he was a player. Hard to leave behind power, evidently. Hard to leave behind the rez in general, something American Indians from any tribe understood.

  “On the rez. Why?”

  “I’m in your neighborhood.”

  Another pause. “Just out for a Sunday afternoon drive on the Highline? It ain’t Sunday afternoon, cuz.”

  “I need some help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “The medical kind.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Only what I had to. But a friend got shot.” He winced as he said it, picturing DEA agents listening in on Andrew’s phone conversations—a distinct possibility. Probably not, though; Andrew was shady, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. That’s what made him dangerous.

  “So you come up from the Crow rez, start shooting
Assiniboine. And now you want my help.”

  “He’s white. And I didn’t shoot him.”

  Andrew laughed. “They don’t even buy that story in tribal courts.”

  “We’ll worry about that later, Andrew. Right now, I need you to do me a favor.”

  “That’s me, the Favor Man. You know the Kwik Trip in Harlem? Can’t miss it; it’s the store with all the drunk Indians outside.”

  Dylan shook his head. Andrew was one of those Indians who made constant references to clichés and stereotypes, as if spouting them gave him some kind of power over them. To Dylan, Andrew’s posturing smacked too much of a desperate need to be clever. Probably not a desperate need to be liked; no one really liked Andrew. But the water was rising, and Dylan didn’t have any waders.

  “Yeah, Andrew. I know the Kwik Trip.”

  “I’ll meet you there. Can you make it in fifteen minutes?”

  “I can make it in ten.”

  9

  “Wake up, young lady,” a man’s voice said.

  Young lady. When was the last time she’d been called that? Quinn checked all seventeen years of her memory banks. Maybe she’d never been called that, truth be told. Most often, it was something like “junkie,” uttered by police officers who mistook the cuts on her arms for needle tracks. More than a few junkies on the streets of Portland, to be sure, but she wasn’t one of them. At least, not in the traditional sense. She wasn’t addicted to crack or heroin or meth or anything like that.

  She was, however, addicted to cutting herself.

  Quinn kept her eyes closed, pretending she was still asleep.

  She wasn’t ready to open her eyes. That meant starting another day, and Quinn didn’t want to start another day.

  Not that sleeping was better. In fact, it was worse, much worse, than being awake. When she was asleep, her body drifted away to . . . nothingness. Just a few short years ago, she had felt the opposite: sleep was a comfort, an escape. But she had been young and stupid then, disillusioned into thinking there could be an escape, however temporary, from her life. Now she understood it was all just one long nightmare. Being nothing, feeling nothing, was much more frightening than pain and anguish. She knew, because she’d experienced them all. Give her pain any time. Sleep was death.

  “Quinn, I need you to listen to me.”

  She opened an eye, stared at the man standing above her. She didn’t recognize him, so he obviously wasn’t a street regular. She knew all the dregs out there on the streets, because she herself was one of them. Had been for four years now. Two since her mom had disappeared. But she was sure she’d find her mother again soon; she checked the homeless shelters, the clinics, the hospitals, all across Portland. And even though no one ever said they’d seen her mother, no one thought her photo looked familiar, Quinn knew she was just a step or two behind. Her mother had simply gone into one of her episodes, come out of it, then been unsure where she was.

  “Who are you?” she asked as she sat up.

  The man was tall and thin, his features taut and sinewy. He had the look of a homeless person in this sense—he was thin—but not in other, expected ways. For instance, he wore new clothing, freshly laundered. And gloves. Not the gloves you’d typically wear to keep your hands warm, but those plastic things doctors wore.

  “My name is Paul,” he said, and smiled.

  She pushed back the thin blanket covering her body, stood to face him. Pretty much her typical morning routine: throw off the blanket, get up, and go. She was already dressed, always dressed, and so she was ready to move. She remembered, long ago, sleeping in pajamas. Remembered her mother, her father even, tucking her into sheets that smelled like sunshine, kissing her forehead, and wishing her a good night. Her mother had even continued that bedtime routine for a time after they were out on the streets: pajamas and then a tuck-in, even though the bed sheets no longer smelled like sunshine. Eventually the pajamas faded from the picture, like so many other things.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked. “I don’t know you.”

  “You don’t,” he admitted. “But you should.”

  Quinn knew this was dangerous territory. Alarm signals should be going off inside her head—a strange man waking her in the middle of the homeless shelter, telling her she should get to know him—but nothing about him seemed dangerous. At least, not dangerous to her. Quinn was good at reading body language; her time on the streets had taught her that much. When she was panhandling, for instance, she could tell who would give her money. She knew within the first seconds of seeing the person approaching.

  Besides, she’d put down men much larger than this guy calling himself Paul. She’d learned that much on the streets as well.

  “Why should I know you?” she asked.

  “Let me buy you breakfast, and I’ll tell you about me. More importantly, I’ll tell you about you.”

  “Right. You’re gonna read my palm or something?”

  “Something.”

  She narrowed her gaze, studied his face. He didn’t seem uncomfortable being looked at. Most people, men especially, had a hard time being studied. “Just for breakfast,” she said.

  “At Denny’s. You like Denny’s.”

  He’d said it as a statement, not a question. Not too surprising, since they were just around the corner from a Denny’s. A hot meal would be good. And it wasn’t like this guy could do much to her in the middle of a Grand Slam breakfast, surrounded by dozens of other people.

  “Okay,” she said. “You got it.”

  They walked to the restaurant in silence, Paul keeping his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat and Quinn struggling to keep pace. Dude walked fast, was all she could think.

  At the restaurant, the man told her to order whatever she wanted. She figured she wanted a Grand Slam and some coffee. Paul ordered nothing. She felt guilty about that for about half a second.

  “You graduated from high school this year,” Paul said, no more than ten seconds after the waitress left to put in Quinn’s order.

  Quinn shrugged, sipped at the glass of water in front of her. “Yeah.”

  “You did well in school,” he said. “You’re smart.”

  She shrugged again.

  “What are you going to do now?” he said.

  “Eat breakfast,” she said. “That’s all I promised.”

  He smiled. “Yes, it is. But while you do that, I was hoping you might think a bit about your future.”

  “Don’t have one. In case you didn’t notice, you woke me up inside a homeless shelter.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  Quinn had to admit she was starting to get a bit torqued. This guy woke her up at the shelter, obviously knew more than a little bit about her, offered to buy her breakfast. Okay. She knew what all those signs pointed to—she’d learned that, if nothing else, from life on the streets. But something about this guy calling himself Paul seemed . . . different.

  His eyes, maybe. Many times she’d peered into the eyes of people who were mentally imbalanced, people who’d lost touch with reality, people who’d left the launch pad with the help of crystal meth or cocaine. She could tell those people were dangerous because their eyes showed . . . well, nothingness. No soul. No humanity.

  But this Paul character was different. His eyes seemed alive, and that was something that made her curious. Something that even made her hopeful, she had to admit. Because when you were out on the streets, passing an endless wave of dead, soulless eyes, you had to hope you’d see something different; if you didn’t, your eyes became empty, soulless coals themselves.

  So yeah, she’d maybe let herself hold on to some little flicker inside. It was the flicker of hope that told her she’d someday see her mother again, the flicker of hope that told her someday, somehow, some way, things would get better.

  She’d seen all that in Paul’s eyes, and now she was angry at herself. Because really, there had been nothing in Paul’s eyes at all; it had been her own eyes that betra
yed her. Even after four years, hope was a dirty thing that mocked her.

  This Paul character was no different from any of the other whack jobs she’d met on the street, and she was mad that she’d fooled herself into believing otherwise.

  She stared down at the table a moment, then met Paul’s gaze. At least she could knock him down a notch before leaving. She’d find a place to be by herself, maybe curl up with her trusty penknife and relieve the pressure that was now pounding behind her eyes.

  “Look. Paul. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re a dirtbag. I mean, cruising homeless shelters, looking for seventeen-year-old girls? Stalking them, finding out where they go and what they do before you move in and offer to buy them breakfast? What comes next? After my Grand Slam, you casually mention that you have a hotel room not too far away? You’re pathetic.”

  He showed no immediate reaction, so she continued. “I’m okay with that; I’m an expert on the subject, you might say. So here’s what’s going to make your story even more pathetic: I’m going to sit here and eat my breakfast when it comes, but there’s no way I’m going anywhere with you when this is over. Think what that says about your life, when you can’t even pick up a homeless teenager.”

  The waitress picked that exact moment to put down a platter in front of her, so Quinn smiled, gave Paul a quick salute, and tucked into her pile of scrambled eggs.

  Paul watched her in silence for a few minutes, and she was amazed at the glee she felt inside, thinking of what must be going through his mind.

  “You’ve been cutting yourself,” Paul finally said, his voice low.

  She stopped chewing, looked at him. “Come again?”

  “To release the pressure,” he answered. “You’ve been cutting yourself. You’re careful—you took a penknife and some of the razors from your art teacher at school this past year when you started, and you keep a stash of rubbing alcohol to sterilize the razors and wounds—but you’ve been cutting yourself all the same.”

  Quinn felt a queasiness building inside her. The bit about releasing pressure was too . . . personal. It was a thought, a feeling, she’d never shared with anyone else. No counselor or therapist or caseworker. No one.

  Paul had closed his eyes, but now he opened them again. “You think of it as deep-sea diving. You feel like you’re sinking, every day, and you feel that pressure threatening to make you explode. Except it’s a pressure inside you, and that’s why you do the cutting.”