Callous

Kate came to in a puddle of piss and vomit.

Lifted her head from the mess, groaned, retched, looked ’round, even though it hurt to raise her head.

Gave a tiny sigh of relief. She at least was in her apartment. How she got there was lost. She managed to stand up, grab a near-empty bottle of tequila, swigged delicately from it. It hit her stomach like acid and she threw up again.

Checked her clothes, a Ramones tee, covered in blood? Once-white skinny jeans, covered in grime. Her clutch bag was on the bed. Begging the God she only half-believed in, opened it.

Phew-oh.

Credit cards, MetroCard, many hundred-dollar bills?

Whoa, what?

Ben Franklins?

Christ, was she hooking?

Most days, she came to praying/pleading with a God of torment that she hadn’t been raped. This kind of money was horror of a whole different kind.

No way was it what her dead dad would have sneered,

The result of honest toil.

She hadn’t shot up for nearly a week, and fought the heroin withdrawal sickness with buckets of booze. The ferocious urge to fix now was screaming, Just a taste.

Fuck, yeah, sure, and slap-bang to the five-hundred-bucks-a-week monkey. She wept, bitterly.

On her right arm was a tattoo of an angel.

Zadkiel.

Angel of Mercy

Love.

Compassion.

Every time she glanced at it, she snarled,

“Yeah, right!”

Under a small statue of Saint Jude was her rainy-day stash.

Five oxy tabs.

She muttered,

“This is the day.”

She lay on the couch, let Gretchen Peters sing softly in her buds, nearly missed the slight plop of mail. She thought,

Bills and threatening letters, final notices on all my appliances, especially my credit card.

When the oxy kicked in and a cloud of bliss enveloped her, she made some coffee, even managed to shuck a cig from a crumpled pack of Camels, she drifted over to the door, picked up a lone envelope.

Irish stamps.

Say what?

Ireland?

WTF?

  She poured some more coffee, the oxy really kicking in, settled in her chair, and opened the letter.

“Sweet Jesus,” she gasped.

The letter was from a lawyer in Galway, Ireland.

Informing her of the death of her aunt, Mary Casey.

And.

A bequest leaving her the cottage in Claddagh, where her aunt had lived.

She was delighted, amazed, thrilled, and truly stunned.

She ran her fingers along her angel tat, said,

“Thank you, Zak.”

She realized this was a second chance. Well, maybe a ninth one, but who was keeping score? She swore, standing like Scarlett O’Hara.

“I’ll be better now.”

Hmm.

She had a passport, a stack of unexplained money, and no ties. Like, none.

Go!

Her mind screamed.

She would.

She would just up and flee.

Already she felt renewed. So, OK, the oxy helped, but something deeper, a sense of steel hovering over her usual bewildered self.

Her favorite brother, Colin, was due back from deployment in Afghanistan and would be well mind-fucked. She’d write him, offer to share a little home in the west.

Colin, born in America of Irish stock, had the completely unrealistic view of Ireland as Nirvana.

So what?

So fuckit.

She’d make it so.

Their last time together, the night before he shipped out, he’d confessed,

“I’m starting to like the killing.”

She’d help him heal. By Christ, she would.

She thought of her younger brother Patrick, always present by his absence.

She smiled, if ever there was an Oirish thought, that was it. Patrick, with his Down syndrome features, a beacon for bullies, he’d come home from school, asking,

“Sis, what’s a Mongol, a retard?”

Colin, always a hothead, tearing out of the house, laying waste to all the shitheads who taunted Patrick.

Mitch, the fucking saint.

Colossal pain in the ass, always with the lame,

“Turn the other cheek” shite.

Until.

Yeah, until he spent a year as a beat cop on Park Slope and Williamsburg, then he morphed into a cynical thug. Anger leaking out of his every pore.

Then the asshole became a priest.

For crying out loud.

She’d said to him,

“Gimme a fucking break, padre.”

Colin, always privy to some secret source of amusement, said to him,

“Couldn’t hack it as a marine, huh?”

Dad, dead way too early.

Mom, a crushed, Valiumed wreck after Patrick died.

She often moaned to her own self,

“It’s not that I do drugs; it’s that I don’t do enough of them.”

Word.