A Permanent Member of the Family

SEARCHING FOR VERONICA

This is what she told me. It came almost from nowhere. I happened to be sitting next to her at the bar in Gustav’s, a German-style pub and grill in the Portland International Airport between Gates 7 and 9 on Concourse C. I was waiting out the night for a storm-delayed Minneapolis flight. I think she was already there when I came in, but maybe not. I remember the bar was otherwise empty. The local TV news and weather was on without the sound.

We hadn’t even exchanged names when she started her story. I might have smiled and said hello or something bland to jumpstart a conversation and show her I wasn’t going to hit on her, the way you do if you’re a male traveler and you start talking to a woman in a bar. She was a worn-down fifty, a basically good-looking woman with a friendly smile and a lot of mileage who I figured was a waitress whose shift at one of the airport restaurants had just ended. Not a traveler. Turned out I was right and it was Wendy’s. Anyhow, this is what she told me.

As if we’re old friends she said, “Whenever the TV news runs a story about finding the body of some unidentified woman in the bushes by the river I wonder if the woman is my friend Veronica. And if I’m downtown I glance into alleys as I pass, hoping to see her alive. You probably think that’s weird.”

I said no. But I did think it was weird. Not the content of what she told me, but the fact that she was telling it to a stranger. That and the way she told it.

She said to me, “Sometimes the next day I even take the bus to the city morgue and try to identify the body, since I can still picture Veronica’s tattoos and piercings all these years later.”

I asked her who was Veronica.

She said, “It was the summer I turned thirty, a couple months after Carl walked out on us. Helene was seven going on eight.”

I said, “Helene is your daughter, then?”

She said, “Yeah. I was struggling just to survive and take care of her, so I swallowed hard and gave the back bedroom in our apartment, the room we’d been using for the cats, to this girl, to Veronica. She’d stayed over after my birthday party and was trying to cut loose of her idiot biker boyfriend and get off of drugs. The cats and their litter box we moved to the screened porch overlooking the back alley.”

She said, “I think Veronica and her boyfriend were into meth pretty heavy. Not just using, manufacturing in some trailer outside town, and selling, at least her boyfriend was. Rudy was his name, I can recall that even today, what, almost twenty years later, because when she talked that was what she talked about, Rudy Rudy Rudy. She drove me nuts with her fixation on this guy, who to me was just some piece-of-shit biker who liked to get high and boost his manhood by whacking his girlfriend on the head every few days to make her cry and say, ‘Stop, stop, please, Rudy, stop!’ You know the type.”

I knew the type, I told her, but the woman kept talking as if I hadn’t said anything. It was not exactly like she was alone, but more like I wasn’t a real person sitting next to her at Gustav’s bar. It was as if she was telling her story to a camera on a reality TV show and had already told a version of it many times. I didn’t care, I was just killing time and trying not to let my flight delay get me down, and she had a friendly face and a nice whiskey-and-cigarette voice.

She said to me, “I had an okay job at a travel agency then. Portland was into connecting with the Orient and all these fast-tracked techno-yuppies were booking weekends in Tokyo and Hong Kong and writing it off their taxes, so even though I’d been slam-dumped by Carl, who’d ridden off into the Hawaiian sunset with his dental hygienist, I was doing fine, no food stamps, no handouts necessary, except I had to work nine to five six days a week and needed somebody to take care of Helene after she got home from school. Which is where Veronica comes in.”

I didn’t say anything and looked off at the TV, checking the weather. The midwestern storms were moving east. She took a sip of her drink and plunged ahead. Her timing was pretty good, I noticed.

She said, “Veronica was a tall girl, taller than me anyhow, with a bunch of piercings on her face and elsewhere that I could guess but didn’t want to know about and homemade tats pretty much everywhere you looked and so skinny you could see her spine through her T-shirt like she had an eating disorder, anorexia or bulimia, one of those, only it was probably from the meth and whatever other chemicals she was putting into her body then, because later I found out she definitely had a healthy appetite. I wasn’t that much older than Veronica — she was nineteen or early twenties, I think, so okay, a decade — but right away I felt motherly toward her. Maybe because of Helene, who I was afraid would turn out like Veronica if she didn’t have me as a mother.

“She showed up following the shadow of Rudy, who came to the party with the three biker brothers from downstairs who came because you couldn’t throw even a small party in that building without those guys sniffing at the door, six-pack in hand. None of my female friends, especially the single ones, objected because the brothers were young and very good looking and lifted weights and you could hook up with one of them if you wanted. We did that sort of thing back then. We were still young. We called them Huey, Dewey and Louie. I can’t remember their real names now. They had jobs and were basically harmless although not too bright and were always holding good weed. But they sometimes brought along a wacko friend or two like Rudy who were into chemicals or crack or both and on the edge of freaking which made everybody nervous. The next day one of the brothers would come upstairs and apologize, which I didn’t mind at all, especially after Carl left.

“Anyhow, Veronica wasn’t in danger of freaking. She was just sad looking with big dark circles under her eyes like she hadn’t slept in a week, chopped-off dyed black hair that needed a good shampoo, little flat-chested nipples poking the front of her dirty T-shirt and jeans all torn on purpose below the crotch and at the knees like it’s a fashion statement.”

I downed the last of my drink and ordered refills for both of us. “It’s a good story you’re telling,” I said to the woman, and we clinked glasses.

She said, “Yeah, well, Veronica’s dead now. Or at least I’m pretty sure she’s dead. But maybe not. It was twenty years ago. Back then I figured if somebody doesn’t take care of her fast she isn’t going to last the summer. I mean, she thought Rudy was taking care of her. It was the early nineties, remember. All over the country teenage kids were checking out or being kicked out and nobody knew how to stop it. People weren’t experimenting with drugs like in the sixties anymore, they were dosing themselves with drugs. It wasn’t about fun anymore. Those kids, the ones who survived the nineties, they’re parents themselves now with kids of their own, some with grandkids, so what does that tell us? All they know about reality is what their parents found time to teach them. And what did we know?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Not much that was good. That was when county sheriffs and federal prosecutors were busting day-care centers and kindergartens for child sex abuse and weird satanic rituals and making kiddie porn. Remember?”

I told her I thought that was in the eighties.

She said, “It was in the nineties, too. You didn’t know what to believe. People were confused. I was glad Helene was still a little girl, even though it kind of fucked up my downtime, if you know what I mean. Because she was so dependent and all.”

I said I knew what she meant. “I helped raise four kids of my own,” I told her. “All adults now.”

She said to me, “Anyhow, Rudy flipped out at my birthday party and started throwing my set of good wedding present steak knives one by one at the door that led from the kitchen into the living room, and when I bitched at him he puts down the remaining three or four steak knives and pulls out this big sheath knife he’s wearing on his belt and throws it so hard it penetrates six inches right through the door. Everybody goes silent. Helene hides behind my skirt and starts to cry.

“Fortunately, Huey, Dewey and Louie muscled Rudy and his bowie knife out of the apartment, leaving Veronica nodding out on the couch, missing the whole show, although it was probably one she’d seen many times before. Afterward, scared that Rudy might come back alone, everyone split. So now it’s just me, Helene and Veronica alone in the apartment. Happy fucking birthday. We never even got to the cake part.

“I double-locked the door, threw a blanket over Veronica, put Helene to bed and went to bed myself, but Helene was still scared and wanted to sleep in my bed with me, so I let her. Rudy didn’t come back to get Veronica for three days, like he’d forgotten where he left her. But by then I’d gotten into her head a little, or maybe she arrived that night already primed to dump Rudy and kick drugs and only needed a little reinforcement from a third party, so to speak, like from a role model, an older independent woman able to take care of herself and her seven-year-old child.”

“Like you,” I said. “You and Helene.”

“Yeah, like me. Me and Helene. The back bedroom already had a mattress on the floor and I put Carl’s old sleeping bag and a lamp back there and hung a sheet over the window for privacy. I gave her some of my old T-shirts and jeans which were way short in the legs but she said she liked the pedal pusher look. Once she got rested she was real polite. Just not talkative.

“Veronica didn’t appear to own anything and didn’t have any money. She was like a child in certain ways. I had to buy her a toothbrush and let her borrow my shampoo and personal hygiene items and told her to eat whatever she wanted from the fridge and cupboards, which I sort of regretted once she got going because she was like a dog that’s lived on the streets all her life and thinks she’s never going to get another decent meal. By Sunday, not two days in, I had to restock practically everything, even the little boxed juices and Cheetos I kept for Helene’s TV snacks.

“At breakfast the Monday after the party, we had our little talk. I asked Veronica if she’d walk Helene to school because I was supposed to get to the agency early to start learning a new computer program for booking airfares. Computers were just entering the travel industry then and everybody was scared of them, especially me because in school I was always lousy at math. Mainly I have people skills.

“Veronica goes, ‘Sure, whatever,’ which was sort of her default answer to any question put to her, but she said it so nicely and with a smile that you didn’t mind.

“I told her, ‘Here’s the deal. You need a place to get your shit together. And I need a babysitter.’ My old babysitter had just quit to work for this recently divorced female professor at Reed College who’d offered her twice what I could pay. I had permission to bring Helene to the office on Saturdays, so if Veronica could walk Helene home from school every weekday and stay with her till I got out of work, she could keep the back room. Plus I’d pay her five bucks an hour for babysitting twenty hours a week, which came to a hundred bucks a week. It was a stretch, but I had a little saved and a raise coming once I learned the new computer program.

“‘But no Rudy,’ I told her. ‘And no drugs. Except maybe if you want to burn a little weed with me in the evenings. That’s up to you.’ I knew I shouldn’t be smoking in the apartment with her trying to quit using, but I needed my weed. In those days after Carl left I didn’t want to give up my few remaining pleasures, and weed was definitely one. Still is.

“She seemed excited and said, ‘No problem!’ Helene was happy with the deal too. Veronica was like her new best friend and playmate. All weekend when Veronica wasn’t asleep in her room she was stretched out beside Helene on the living room floor watching Helene’s favorite TV shows with her, even the cartoons, and talking about them with her like she and Helene were kids the same age. Maybe that’s another reason why I keep looking for her all these years later.”

“Could be,” I said. “Makes sense.”

She went on with her story as if I hadn’t said anything. “With me, though, she talked almost not at all, even when I asked about Rudy, if she had been living with him for long and so forth. Instead of words she answered with a humming sound, which I took to be a yes. When I asked where she was from originally she said, ‘Here,’ which I took to mean Portland. When I asked if her parents were still alive she nodded yes and said her mother was alive but she wasn’t sure about her father and crinkled her brow like it was painful to think about them, so I decided not to push it. I figured she was another of those throwaway kids who cross their mother or father or stepfather somehow and get tossed out or walk out and live on their own from about the age of thirteen or fourteen. Who knew what she’d done to survive? All she had to trade on was her body and her youth, and with the piercings and tattoos, not to mention the drugs, she’d done a lot to destroy her body, and the passage of time was doing the same to her youth, the way it does to everyone’s. Pretty soon she wouldn’t have anything to trade on, except loyalty to assholes like Rudy.”

I told the woman that I could dig it, as I had someone like that in my own family. I didn’t say whether it was someone like the parents who tossed their child out or like the daughter who walked out on them, but in fact it was both.

She said, “So okay, then you can imagine how I felt when I got home from work that evening and the first thing Helene tells me is that the man who threw the knife at the door was here. ‘But he’s gone now,’ she says. ‘Veronica told him to fuck off.’

“I said that’s great but she shouldn’t say fuck. The kitchen was all neat and clean, spotless actually, much cleaner than when I do it, dishes washed and everything put away. I went into the living room and it was the same there. She’d even folded my laundry and stacked it neatly on my bed. She was in Helene’s room putting away Helene’s dozen Barbies and all their flimsy wardrobes and accessories.

“I said, ‘So you told Rudy to fuck off?’

“She just smiled.

“I said, ‘Good girl,’ and thought that was the end of ol’ Rudy. But of course it wasn’t. Any more than her being clean for a few weeks was the end of her using drugs. But for a while, for a week or ten days, though she talked about Rudy constantly, she referenced him strictly in the negative, saying things out of the blue like, ‘I can’t believe I stayed with such an asshole,’ or when I offered to let her use my phone in case she wanted to call somebody to say where she was, she goes, ‘Rudy never let me call anybody.’ I guess there wasn’t anyone she wanted to call, though, because she never used the phone that I know of, and people didn’t have cell phones then.

“It must’ve been obvious to her by now that I wasn’t going to rip her off or drop a dime on her with her mother or some social worker and certainly not the cops, so she was talking to me more easily. Plus she was making eye contact with me and not just with Helene, which she wouldn’t do at first, like an animal that’s been abused by adult humans in the recent past and only expects more of the same. By this time I was really into mothering her. Something about her childlike physical awkwardness and her ignorance of the world, which usually make me impatient with people, in her case made me feel protective. Also I liked her company. Nights were a lot less lonesome in the apartment than they had been. I’d gotten over her pierced eyebrows, nostrils, ears and lips and had even started liking her tattoos, especially the Rastafarian lion’s head on her right shoulder. The rattlesnake around her left wrist and the World Trade Center in New York on her upper back were cool, too. This was before nine-eleven, of course. Someone other than Veronica must’ve tattooed the Trade Center because it was on her back, but even so, I could tell from the others, since she’d drawn them herself and tattooed the ones she could reach, that Veronica had a real talent for art.

“All the time, though, like it’s her only subject, Veronica is talking about Rudy, only I notice it’s not as negative as before. Slowly certain positives are creeping in, like, ‘Rudy’s this amazing mechanic that can fix any kind of bike and even fixes cars for his friends who have them,’ and one night we’re burning a pretty inferior joint, regular ditch weed, and she says, ‘Y’know, Rudy grows the best boom in Oregon, but he’d never show me his patch. He said it was to protect me in case I ever got busted.’

“‘Yeah, right,’ I say. ‘Mister Fucking Protective.’ Obviously she needed a lot more instruction and self-confidence in order to kick this guy. Still, although on a deep level I know better, I’m telling myself this is turning into a successful home-detox-slash-rehab, and I’m thinking of tossing another party to finish celebrating my thirtieth. Plus I want to introduce Veronica to some new people so she won’t be so dependent on me and Helene for company, when one Friday I come home from work and the second I walk through the door I know Rudy’s been in the apartment.”

I asked her how she could tell.

She said, “I could smell him. Grease, oil, gasoline fumes and something coldly chemical, almost medicinal. My first thought of course is where is Helene? That junkie punk bitch Veronica better not put my baby in danger or I’ll kill her, I’m thinking as I go from room to room, until I find Helene in her bedroom down on the floor marrying Barbie and Ken with Share a Smile Becky as the bridesmaid. Everything looks okay, even the cats are there for the wedding, so I give her a hug and say, ‘Where’s Veronica?’

“Helene says, ‘They went out, her and the man who threw the knife.’

“I asked her a few more questions, like how long was he in the apartment and how long ago did they go out, which turned out to be only a few minutes of each, and Veronica promised she’d be right back, which in fact she was, while I was still sitting there on the floor with Helene. She comes into the bedroom and leans against the doorframe and says, ‘Awesome you’re home. I was just getting rid of Rudy. On account of how you feel about him and all.’ ”

I said to the woman, “That’s really good, right? That Veronica was just getting rid of Rudy?” I was into her story by now and was starting to hope everything would turn out for the best, even though I knew from the way she’d begun her story that it wouldn’t.

She said, “Yeah, right, really good. Not. Because when Veronica shoots me this big intense smile, I can tell right away from how she’s handling her body and her breathing rate and her lying smile that she’s high, and it isn’t from weed, it’s crack or meth. Which means that anything she says is pure bullshit. She says she has to pee and goes into the bathroom and closes the door. And of course that’s bullshit too. It’s just to keep me from looking at her.

“Since the girl doesn’t know what’s real or isn’t real, there’s no way I’m going to know it either. That’s the way it goes down with junkies. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. They make up and shape reality with their jones, and if you buy even a small part of it, your own reality gets infected by it, until their jones is yours too, and all the time twenty-four-seven you’re thinking about whether she’s high or not, holding or not, going to rip you off to buy drugs or not, telling the truth or not, or if she even knows the truth. It’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. The only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them, don’t listen to word one of their elaborate explanations for their actions or inactions. Assume everything is a lie and just throw them out of the house. Even if it’s your own kid. Which is what I did.”

“You mean Helene?” I ask her.

“No, Veronica! It’s like you can’t think about the consequences. You can’t think about what’ll happen to her now down there on the streets traipsing after the Rudys of the world until finally he decides she’s too high-maintenance and is losing her looks, so he tosses her out like garbage for somebody even worse to scoop up, because no matter how far down the ladder of men she goes there’s always some dump picker on the rung below glad to grab what little body and soul she’s got left. That’s why I believe Veronica is dead. She could’ve hooked up with one of the hundreds of losers heading south to Cali these days, of course, and maybe she did, or she could’ve gotten busted for manufacture and distribution and has been doing time at Coffee Creek Correctional down in Wilsonville. But something tells me she never left Portland. Maybe because in spite of the lousy climate I stayed here myself even after the dot-com bubble burst back in 2001 and I lost my job at the agency and had to go on welfare until I got hired at Wendy’s. Because this is where Helene grew up. If she’d been busted and sent to Coffee Creek I would have heard about it from Huey, Dewey or Louie, although since they moved back to Eugene to start their own motorcycle repair shop I never see them anymore. But somebody would have told me. Everyone knew how attached I was to that girl and how rotten I felt when I had to throw her out on the street.”

I said, “You don’t mean Helene, do you? You sure we’re still talking about Veronica?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve never once run into her anywhere in the city, and Portland isn’t that big and there are only a few neighborhoods where people like her, or like me for that matter, can afford to live. Like I said, I look for her everywhere, and you’d think I’d see her standing in line outside one of the soup kitchens or panhandling downtown or waiting in the rain for one of the homeless shelters to open. But I haven’t. That’s why I think she’s dead.

“Anyhow, when Veronica finally came out of the bathroom that day I was waiting for her in the living room by the door with a trash bag filled with the few things she’d accumulated while living with me, the T-shirts and flip-flops and some underwear I’d laid on her and the junk she’d bought with the hundred bucks a week I was paying her, like a half-dozen CDs and a stack of fashion magazines that she liked to cut up and turn into these weird Goth-type collages and a pair of sunglasses that she wore just for looks, since the sun never shines in Portland.

“‘Here’s all your shit. Take it and get out,’ I told her. ‘We’re done, you and me.’

“She stared at me, wide-eyed and openmouthed like she was in shock. Her teeth were already starting to rot from the meth, and for a second I could see how she was going to look a few years from now, and I wanted to cry for her. I wanted to change my mind and hug her and believe whatever bullshit explanation she offered for having let that scumbag criminal into the apartment and then going off with him to get high while my daughter was still a vulnerable little girl, at least in my mind she was. But I couldn’t. I had to be strong. I told her I don’t want to have to change the locks to the apartment, so give me the keys.

“She doesn’t say anything. Just hands over the keys.

“‘Now go,’ I tell her.

“‘Where can I go?’ she says in her little girl’s voice.

“‘Anywhere. Just not here.’

“‘I was only trying to get rid of him without getting him pissed at me,’ she says. ‘He gets real mean when he’s pissed.’

“‘Don’t talk. Just go,’ I told her. I pulled open the door for the girl and she stepped out to the hall and turned back one last time.

“‘I bet someday you’ll be sorry you did this to me,’ she said.

“‘Only if you turn up dead,’ I told her. It was the first time I thought it. But I had to take the chance on her turning up dead. It was like she hadn’t given me any other choice. As a mother, I mean. I was only trying to save my daughter from ending up like Veronica, that’s all. That was so long ago. But it’s why every time I read in the paper or hear on the evening news that some young woman’s unidentified body has been found down along the Willamette River or in Washington Park or in a vacant lot in Northeast Portland, I take the bus over to the morgue on Northwest Nicolai Street near the port, and I offer to identify the body, since I know all her tattoos and most of her piercings. But so far it hasn’t been her. It’s been some other young woman. The guys at the morgue, they know me now and know why I’m there. I don’t even have to tell them that I’m searching for Veronica. Of course, they probably think I killed somebody and am checking to see if the body’s been discovered yet.”

I ordered another round of drinks for both of us, our third. I said to her, “When you go down to the morgue, you’re not searching for Veronica. You’re searching for Helene, aren’t you? All along you’ve been talking about your daughter, Helene. She’d be twenty-six or twenty-seven now, right? Helene, I mean. You kicked Helene out of your apartment. Veronica, if she’s alive, would be in her early forties. If she existed in the first place.”

She said, “You don’t understand! I’m looking for them both. I might be the only one who can identify them, you know. It’s like I’m having a bad dream, and I want to wake up from it, but I’m afraid that when I do, the reality will be worse than the dream. I don’t even know your name,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

I told her my first name and asked for hers.

She said, “Russell is a nice name. You don’t hear it much anymore, though. I’m Dorothy. You don’t hear that one much anymore, either.”

We both went silent then and for a few minutes watched the end of a Trail Blazers game on the TV above the bar. Without looking down from the screen she said, “You’re right. About Helene, I mean, and me having to kick her out and it being recent. A year and a half ago is recent, right? But you’re wrong about Veronica. She existed. It all happened the way I said, and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Sometimes I thought I found her in Helene, especially after Helene got busted two years ago for dealing meth for her piece-of-shit boyfriend and spent six months at Coffee Creek and had to move back in with me when she got out.” She sighed loudly, longingly, like a smoker wanting to step outside for a cigarette, and said, “Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole adult life searching for Veronica.” Then she suddenly grabbed my sleeve and laughed, the first time she’d laughed all night. It was a slightly mocking laugh at something she found ridiculous. She said, “Maybe I’m Veronica! You ever think of that, Russell?”

I turned and looked at her face and tried to look into and beyond her eyes, but her eyes coldly kicked my gaze back out. She was smiling, almost in triumph.

I said, “No! Not until this moment. But now I do. Now I think in this story, your story, you are Veronica. And you’re Helene, the daughter, too. And you’re Dorothy, the mother. And I think all three of you combined and did something very bad together. I think that’s the reason whenever they discover the body of an unidentified young woman you go down to the morgue.”

I stood up and waved for the check and paid for our drinks. “You’re not looking for Veronica or Helene,” I said. “You’re looking for someone else, someone the three of you did a very bad thing to. Someone whose name you haven’t revealed yet. And that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me tonight. And trying not to tell me.”

“I’m only telling you what I know, Russell.”

“That’s why you scare me. It’s like you said about Veronica and junkies like her. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. You said it’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. You said the only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them. You said to assume everything is a lie. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Good night,” I said, “whoever you are. Wherever you are. Whatever you’ve done.” I left the bar then and, shaken, walked straight to the gate to wait for my flight to Minneapolis.