The Art of Adapting (12 page)

“He doesn't need any hospital, sister. He took one tiny sleeping pill, that's it. He didn't have enough cash for more and charity's not my thing.”

Spike didn't move. Lana had sixty dollars on her. She hoped it was enough to buy five minutes of Spike's time and one dingy towel. She held it up. He eyed the cash, then shrugged. “I'll get a bedsheet.”

With Spike's help she got Matt into the car. She turned and glared at Spike, wanting to say something hurtful and frightening, but out in the bright sunlight of the day Spike had lost his smugness and swagger. He was nervous and exposed, glancing around him. He was small and worn, a shell of anxiety and fear. He reminded Lana of her mother in those hard months after losing Stephen. Gloria had developed that same wounded look, that same forlorn weight about her. She'd become a black hole of emotion, sucking joy from the air around her, swallowing it, and leaving only emptiness behind. Lana wondered what the source of Spike's pain was, what he was trying to numb.

“You aren't a goner,” she said. “Neither of you are. Please get some help before it's too late.”

Spike laughed in her face, but it was forced, betrayed by his wounded eyes. She could see that in choosing to be kind instead of cruel, she'd managed to hit him in an even deeper, softer place.

Once at home, she had the issue of how to get Matt out of the car and into bed. Or into a much-needed bath and then bed. She checked his breathing and pulse again. Both were within normal range. She was grateful she'd had enough CPR training to know this. She called his name and shook him, and he was able to open his eyes and glare at her before turning away, but she couldn't get him conscious enough to get him on his feet. He'd have to sleep it off in the car. She was staring at him when her phone rang. For once, she had it on her. It was Nick.

Matt had worn the wrong shoes for an 11.3-mile walk to Spike's apartment. He realized that now. The problem was that he hated tennis shoes. The laces never stayed tied. It seemed so easy for others, but laces always gave him trouble. He wore his favorite slip-on loafers, but they weren't comfortable enough for miles and miles of walking. He had a blister on the back of his left heel. He should've worn his boots.

He also brought along a jacket because it was cold in the night when he left Lana's house, but then it got warmer, and he didn't feel like carrying it. He considered leaving it, maybe hiding it in a bush somewhere so he could fetch it on his return, but the best hiding places were all damp with dew or shot through with spiderwebs and he liked his fleece cobalt-blue jacket and didn't want it ruined. But he was confused now. He didn't seem to have his jacket anymore. Where had it gone? Lana was calling his name from somewhere very far away, and he tried to open his eyes, not to answer her, but to look for the jacket, his favorite one ever, only his eyes refused to open. They were glued shut. Had Spike glued them shut?

Matt wondered if he'd made a bad decision, walking to Spike's apartment. He realized now that he could have just called Spike
from Lana's house. He could have asked Spike to drive over in Matt's car, the car that Spike had demanded as payment for the ant and roach cleanup from all the beer cans Matt forgot to recycle, to drop off something to help Matt sleep. That was all Matt wanted. Sleep. If he'd stayed at Lana's he would've had his favorite breakfast, not Spike's Pop-Tarts. The Pop-Tarts didn't feel right in his stomach. But he probably would not have slept. He'd been having one of those nights. One of the ones when the melatonin had only worked for two hours, and the blackout curtains and the noise machine and the warm milk and the weighted blanket did nothing to help.

He'd forgotten to bring his cell phone with him on his walk, or he could've called Spike before he got the blisters. Matt wasn't good at remembering about phones. He hated talking on the phone.

Google Maps said it would take Matt three hours and forty-five minutes to walk to Spike's. It took more than four hours because his feet started to hurt. He could've taken a bus, if he knew the routes. He could've asked someone about the bus, because there were people outside their houses doing yard work and fetching newspapers, but making conversation with people was exhausting for Matt. He decided he'd rather walk, blisters and all.

There were some things he missed about living with Spike, but some things he didn't miss. Spike didn't try to have conversations with Matt, which was good, but sometimes he yelled at Matt, which made Matt feel anxious and restless, like he might do something bad if the feeling kept building inside him. But then Spike had the pills and pot to make the anxious feelings less overwhelming.

Matt had woken up at one a.m., but waited almost three hours before he set out to walk to Spike's for the pills to help him go back to sleep. He was nervous at first, because Lana had told him that he needed to stop his neighborhood walks in the middle of the night because her neighbors were the type of people who might call the police if they saw a man wandering around at that hour. But nobody was awake and no police came. And then by five a.m. there were a couple of joggers in the neighborhood. That made him feel better. Not that Matt looked like a jogger. But he figured
it was less suspicious to be out among the joggers. Matt didn't want to talk to the police ever again. Except maybe Nick Parker. If he was going to teach Matt to hit a baseball. Matt didn't even like baseball, but Nick Parker had liked Lana and wanted Matt to like him and they both seemed to think that Nick teaching Matt to hit a baseball would make Lana happy. Then Lana met Graham and broke up with Nick and Matt forgot about baseball until he saw Nick again.

After walking for several hours Matt had to sit down and take off his shoes. He found two blisters, a big one and a little one, side by side on the back of his left heel. There was an old newspaper in the gutter and Matt tore a piece off, folded it carefully, and slid it over the blisters, under his sock. He tried walking in a circle to test it out. It didn't help. It still hurt to walk. He sat down again on the curb. A cat wandered up to him, tail raised, eyes wide, ears forward, asking for attention. Matt wasn't a cat person. Especially not outdoor cats. He liked birds. Songbirds. The seemingly cute pet cats were killing off the local songbird population. People didn't seem to care what their cat was doing when it was running free outside their house. But Matt cared.

The cat was small and looked jet-black, but when the sunlight hit its fur in just the right way Matt could see that it was actually a striped cat, it just had black stripes against black fur. Matt figured the cat would be soft and feel good against his hand. But he also figured it had eaten more than its fair share of songbirds. He wadded up the paper from his shoe and threw it at the cat, but missed. The cat pounced on the wad of paper and batted it playfully, pretending to be cute and harmless instead of the bird-killer it really was.

“Murderer,” Matt said. The cat swatted the paper wad and skittered sideways, dancing up high on its toes for a sneak attack on the little ball. Matt couldn't help but smile, but he still refused to like the cat. He took his shoes off. He couldn't decide whether it was better to walk the rest of the way barefoot or in socks. The socks would offer a little protection from germs or any sharp objects on the ground, but then he'd ruin his socks.

“Can I help you?” a man's voice asked. Matt turned and saw a balding man in a T-shirt, boxers, and a bathrobe, his big belly straining to be free from both the shirt and the robe, on the doorstep of the house behind him. He was holding a newspaper and eyeing Matt suspiciously.

“Is this your cat?” Matt asked.

“Yes, that there's Bucky. He's a sweetheart, isn't he?”

“He's a murderer,” Matt said. “He's killing birds and you need to stop him.”

The man swatted the newspaper across his palm. “Why don't you move it along there, buddy? Find somewhere else to sit.”

So Matt walked on in his socks, carrying his shoes, and hating Bucky the bird-murderer and his owner who didn't care. Matt had ruined his favorite dark blue socks and his only feet by the time he finally made it to his old apartment. He was hungry and thirsty and hurting and exhausted enough to sleep, probably without Spike's pills, but he was ready to lie down and sleep for a long time, so he still wanted the pills. He knocked on his old door, what was now Spike's door, and it felt funny not to just walk into his own home. Except that it wasn't his home anymore. He waited. It was probably only eight in the morning. Spike would still be sleeping. Matt pulled out his wallet and removed a twenty-dollar bill. It was all he had. He pounded on the door until it flew open. Spike's bloodshot eyes and a metal baseball bat greeted him. Matt held up the money.

“I can't sleep,” he said. “And I'm hungry and thirsty.”

“Holy fuck, Matt,” Spike said. He set the bat down and rubbed his red face. Spike had terrible acne. He saw the money and grabbed it. “Come on in and let's fix you up.”

The last thing Matt remembered was Spike handing him the Pop-Tarts and sleeping pill. And then this. Matt was lying in his bed, tucked under his blue weighted blanket in his room at Lana's house. His head felt cottony and he was desperately thirsty. He could hear voices. Lana and the kids, he decided. But something wasn't right about the kid voices. The pitch was all wrong. There was only a male voice, and it wasn't Byron's. It had a gravelly quality to it that meant it wasn't Graham's, either. Graham had a
nasally voice. Matt pulled himself out of bed. He had no clothes on. Matt never slept without clothes on. He got dressed and tried to remember how he got to his bed, but couldn't. He didn't know what time it was, but it felt late. He opened his door and there was Nick Parker, drinking coffee in the kitchen. It was Nick Parker but not the same Nick Parker, because this Nick Parker wasn't in uniform.

“You're up,” Nick said.

Lana jumped up from the kitchen table and came at Matt to hug him. She barely got her arms around him, her forearms grazing his shoulders, sending a ripple of pain down his arms and back, before Matt's body flinched and buckled in response. Matt pushed her away as he backed up, warding off her painful touch, nearly falling backward as he tripped over his own feet. Lana almost fell, too. He was worried she'd land on him. Nick came at him, whether to help him or hurt him he wasn't sure.

“No!” Lana said. She held out her hand and Nick stopped moving. “Sorry, Matt. Reflex. I didn't even think about it. I shouldn't have touched you. I'm just so relieved. Are you okay?”

“I'm thirsty,” Matt said. He was leaning against the cabinet and he was afraid to move. His legs weren't under him and he wasn't sure what to do about that. They watched him as he struggled to stand. His legs were sore and heavy and his blisters hurt. He made it into a chair and smiled, not because he was happy, but because they were looking at him and it made him anxious and sometimes when an uncomfortable feeling was too much inside him he smiled.

“Glad you think this is all so funny,” Nick Parker said.

“He's not laughing. It's a grimace,” Lana said.

“He's lucky he's not dead,” Nick said. Matt didn't think luck had anything to do with it, but he didn't say so. He'd forgotten his Wellbutrin that morning but he was still able to censor himself. That seemed like a good thing. Nick wasn't someone you wanted to say the wrong thing to. Nick leaned forward quickly and Matt jumped away from him. “I had to carry you from the car. Strip your dirty clothes off of you. Bathe you. Your sister here was panicked this morning. You care about any of that?”

“Please,” Lana said. “Let me handle this.”

“I'm sorry, Lana,” Matt said. “I couldn't sleep. Spike has these pills that help me sleep.”

“I know,” Lana said. “But those are the same pills that put you in the hospital before. You can't take them, even if you can't sleep. Your liver is damaged. It needs time to heal. And you can't drink while on the Wellbutrin, remember? It can cause seizures.”

Matt shook his head. “I didn't drink. I just took the sleeping pill. I didn't take anything but the pill. I drank it down with tap water. Straight from the tap, because Spike's glasses were dirty. And the Pop-Tarts. They were cherry. I don't like Pop-Tarts, or cherry-flavored things. But I was hungry and that's all Spike had.”

He was smiling again, and even though he knew it was making Nick mad he couldn't stop. He didn't understand why Nick was there, or why he was so angry. Matt just wanted to sleep. Why did anyone else have to care so much about him wanting to sleep? He remembered his long walk, his run-in with Bucky the bird-killing cat.

“I hope you don't have an outdoor cat,” he said to Nick. “They're killing off the songbird population.”

“I'm allergic to cats,” Nick said. He was watching Matt closely, and not in a nice way. “Lana said there was a pipe of some sort? What was in it?”

Matt shook his head, smiled harder, tried to stop but couldn't. “I'm so thirsty,” he said. His mouth was so dry it hurt to talk. He was hot and cold at the same time. He remembered his missing jacket. “Where's my jacket?” Matt asked. “My blue fleece one?”

“You didn't have a jacket when I found you,” Lana said.

“No,” Matt said. “I had it. I brought it. It's my blue jacket. The one I like. The only one I like. Did you lose my blue jacket?” The feeling in his chest was building: sharp little points of anxiety growing, spreading, trying to break out.

“I'm going to pay a little visit to Spike,” Nick said. “Shut down his little pharmacy. I can look for it when I'm there.”

Lana said something, but Matt couldn't hear her because the feeling was getting too strong in his chest, the ringing in his ears
too loud, the tension in the room too overwhelming. He covered his ears and closed his eyes. He pressed harder and waited until it was quiet and then looked up. There was a tall glass of water in front of him, his Wellbutrin pill beside it, and he was alone in the kitchen. He could hear Lana and Nick in the front room, talking quietly. Matt placed the pill on his tongue and drank the water. It was the best water he'd ever tasted. He drank it all and filled the glass again, using Lana's pitcher of filtered water. It was much better than Spike's tap water. He made an English muffin, which was the only breakfast he ever wanted. He was about to sit back down to eat when he heard the front door open, and Byron and Abby's voices. Matt picked up his food, ready to hurry to his room, but his head was still cottony and his legs were still heavy and he couldn't move fast. He heard the kids stomp up the stairs to their rooms and he relaxed. He couldn't carry his food and cover his ears, so if they'd come to the kitchen in their noisy way he would've had to leave his breakfast behind.