Under My Skin

My knock is a gentle cadence.

shave

and a

haircut

I wait, lifting my head to the heavens. A few clouds scatter across the sky, but the moon is full, illuminating the night. The air is sticky and humid. It feels like rain.

It’s been a few minutes, but I don’t mind waiting.

No, I don’t mind waiting at all.

She takes her time. Fumbles a bit with the locks. Cracks the door open.

A fraction of an inch.

A fraction of trust.

That’s all I need.

I can work with that.

A smile touches my lips. “Good evening, Irina.” A plume of menthol smoke blown directly into my face is her only reply. Still, my smile remains. She makes a move as if she wants to slam the door in my face but three little words give her pause and grant me entrance.

“Daddy sent me.”

Abracadabra.

Irina noticeably trembles, making the dark circles under her eyes and the hollowness of her cheeks more pronounced. She steps back from the door but doesn’t go as far as to invite me in. Just leaves the door open a little wider, disappearing into the confines of the tiny bungalow that my family had once called home.

Billie Holiday blares from the family room. She beckons me down a hallway littered with empty pizza boxes and overturned noodles to the sitting room. Billie is singing “good morning” to “heartache” even though it’s well past midnight.

The room is sparsely furnished, stripped of all memories of my childhood. A chaise lounge stained with cheap alcohol and cigarette burns is placed precariously close to a roaring fire. An ancient record player spinning Billie Sings the Blues is off to itself in a corner on the floor. A cracked glass coffee table littered with cigarette butts, burnt spoons and broken needles is crookedly aligned next to the chaise. A king’s ransom of rocky brown heroin is piled high, proudly on display in the center of the table.

She isn’t a gracious host. Irina tightens the belt on her satin ivory robe and sprawls across the lounger. With no place to sit I lean against the fireplace mantle. Once again, I am patient. I wait for her to begin.

“Have you no respect, child? Nothing of loyalty? What happened to you?”

I tap my fingers on the dusty mantle as my gaze falls to the lone framed picture laying facedown. I pick it up and turn it over. The glass is coated in dirt and cracked, but it is hard to deny the beauty of a nineteen year old Irina, glowing and beautiful. Her manicured hands are loving placed on her swelled belly, a diamond and emerald wedding band practically jumping off the fading photograph.

Irina twists the very same band on her finger. But she’s not nervous. No. She’s feening. She needs it. She needs it more than Daddy. Needs it more than me. Her words form a knot in my stomach. You get loyalty when you earn it. That’s what he said to me before I came here. I thought they were strange words. Now, not so much.

“Have you ever, have you…” she stumbles on her words and reaches for me. I stay where I am. It is appropriate for the moment. “Have you ever been in love, Kalinda?” Mother’s words are jumbled together, a speech I alone had the patience to take apart like a puzzle and found sense out of her verbal chaos. “Have you ever been in love, Kalinda?” Her eyes are unfocused and cloudy. Her breath catches. A tear slides down her cheek. “I mean that intense, dangerous, mad kind of love?”

Irina rolls on her back, inhaling deeply on the menthol tube that has been attached to her lips from the moment I’ve been born. Irina’s head rolls, her watery eyes struggling to focus on me. “You know it’s no good for you, but you need it—like air. Cause if that love isn’t in your life, you can’t breathe. Colors, they don’t exist. There’s this emptiness, this hole that nothing, no one can fulfill. You feel less than whole unless that love, your better half, your other half, your reason for being isn’t constantly there?”

I am silent and it frustrates her. She puts out her cigarette on the floor and runs a shaky hand through her tangled, unkempt mane of hair. Irina snatches a broken cigarette off of the table. She plays with it. Rolling the nicotine-filled tube up and down her cracked palm. Sadly fascinated.

She glances up at me suddenly, her bloodshot eyes unfocused, unsure.

“Well?”

I shake my head, answering honestly. “I would never want to feel that way, Irina. To be that dependent on something so—“ I gesture to the pile of heroin on the table. “Something so fleeting. It sounds perilous. It’s not worth the risk. I refuse to be that—“

“Weak?” Irina sighs and drops the cigarette.

“You said it, mother. Not me.”

“Sweet Kalinda. So young. So much to learn.”

“Is that what made you steal from Daddy? Love?”

The room is quiet again. Save for Billie. She’s over heartbreak. Has moved on to Stormy Weather. While it belies the stillness outside the window, it’s appropriate for the hurricane slowly building in this room. Mother begins to sing along with Billie. She’s always had a beautiful voice, so I let her finish the song. As Billie starts to sing the blues, mother’s tears flow freely.

“You know you don’t have to do this, Kalinda.” Her words are a whisper. So low I have to strain my ears to make sure I hear her correctly. “I love you just as much as it. As much as Daddy. I love you as much as Daddy. More, baby girl. I love you more.”

I pause, absorbing her words before I ask again, “Is love what made you steal from Daddy? Is love what made you run away with his property? Is love why you left your family? Is love why you’re hiding out here?”

She gives me only silence. With a sigh, I push away from the mantle and cross my legs on the polished wood in front of the coffee table. I quickly go to work, crushing the heroin onto a bent spoon.

“That son of a bitch must be so proud of what you’ve become,” she hisses. “Daddy’s Little Fixer.”

There are limits to my patience but I maintain my focus by ignoring her. My hands are busy. I mix the brown rock with a few drops of water from an ash-filled bottle of water. I add blood-stained cotton to the mix. Cotton surely plucked from the very same chaise she lays upon. I pluck the most usable syringe off of the table, readjusting myself so my feet meet my bottom.

“Kalinda, you know hard I love. How deep it is. And I’m so sorry.” She’s not looking at me, though. No. It seems best she have this conversation with the ceiling. “I need, um…I need…”

She always needs. It has always been about her needs. No one else’s.

“I need help.” It’s a wonder that she’s able to find her words. She turns to me, her eyes suddenly soft and dreamlike. It’s not me that’s put that mesmerizing l look back on her face. She struggles to focus on the fix I’ve prepared for her. She must know what’s coming, yet still, she’s damn near hypnotized. “I love…I love…”

Fucking junkie.

“I know, Irina. I know you love. I know you do,” I say, putting down the butane lighter. “But I know what you love best. Do you want it? Do you want what you love best?” Her eyes never leave the syringe. I fill it slowly. I fill it completely. All of the way to the top.

A fatal dose.

Billie is over the blues. Starts singing about someone getting under her skin. Irina licks her lips and flicks at a rubber tube already wrapped around her bicep. I wait as she tightens it. Pushes it up past her elbow. She doesn’t ask. Just holds out her arm like a kid on Halloween waiting eagerly for a piece of candy.

Before I slide the needle into my mother’s vein, I am compelled to ask, “Was it worth it?”

She doesn’t answer. Just wiggles her fingers impatiently. Demanding that I give her the love she needs.

It’s a silent command that I don’t ignore.