Cracked Read online

  My parents had five kids including Ginger and me, and they weren’t even Catholic. Go figure. My mother, a beauty queen back in the day, didn’t know what the hell to do with all of us, and who could blame her. My father owned a couple of dry cleaners in Maine, where I grew up. I guess you could call him successful, but for us, back then, success meant that we had a shit-box summer cabin on a tiny lake and we usually got meat for supper. The steamy chemical smell of a real dry cleaner – as opposed to the storefronts at which we drop our shirts off in the city – always makes me feel eight again. In a good way.

  Ginger and I had three brothers. Skipper was almost eighteen years older than Darren, the youngest, and he and his wife Marie lived back in Maine. Laurence, the second oldest, worked in television in New York City. And our little brother Darren, the pet, was a musician, and now lived in Toronto, like me. I had struck out for Canada after high school. Ginger, who had always had her head in a book, had gone off to Bennington, and I had met a Canadian boy who had spent the summer with his grandparents in Downs Mills. When he left for university in Toronto in the fall, I followed him, full of love and craving adventure like I now craved crack. I hadn’t been anywhere, and even though I was from Maine, Canada seemed as foreign as Paris.

  Of course, the boyfriend didn’t last, but Toronto did. And two years later when he finished high school, Darren followed. He was my baby, my pet, and Ginger was engaged to Fred and planning her own life.

  Mom had had us, the twins, at forty, and Darren a couple of years later. She called us her change-of-life babies, but until I knew what that meant I couldn’t figure how a few more kids could change your life that much. As close as Ginger and I were, Darren was sort of like our honorary third twin. We babied him and dressed him up and for the most part took him with us everywhere we went. The three of us would read together, perched in a tree in the backyard. We shared a stereo, Ginger and I letting Darren take it for two or three days at a time into his room once he passed his twelfth birthday. And when Karen Milton, the love of his sixteen-year-old life, stood him up for junior prom, Ginger and I went to her house, rang the doorbell, and I punched her straight in the face when she answered. Ginger was scared to death, but stood her ground. She might not have been as impulsive as I was, but she never left me to flounder alone. She was always there.

  Karen Milton’s folks had me arrested. They didn’t understand familial loyalty one little bit. I couldn’t totally blame them – I did break Karen’s nose, and she had supposedly had a burgeoning career as a catalogue model. I found it difficult to believe – I thought she was shaped like a tuber – but I knew better than to say so. My dad was so proud of us for sticking up for our little brother that he bought Ginger and me our first car, an old Buick station wagon with actual wood panel sides. We had the summer of our lives, riding around in that thing, stopping at Dairy Queen and singing out the window at the fireflies, and arguing whose turn it was to drive. We never talked about it, but Ginger could always tell what was bothering me, and I her. If she was in math class and I was in English, sometimes the answer to a quadratic equation would pop into my head, and Ginger would find herself reciting bits of Macbeth in her head.

  I loved my older brothers well enough, but in some ways they were like foreign creatures to me – blond and athletic and perfect. In fact, I looked like that too, but I always felt darker, as though I should have inky black hair and pale skin. But we all had the quirky, snide sense of humor that made me love my family, when I could bear to talk to them in my angst-ridden teenage years. In my family, the highest form of humor is self-deprecation. Not the “I’m so ugly” kind of thing, but got a long anecdote about having your skirt blow up in front of a class of tenth-graders when you were a student teacher? That story will get told and retold in various guises in my family, with continued appreciation. Bump somebody’s car in the parking lot and accidentally leave your dentist’s business card instead of your own on the other card’s windshield? Hil-arious. In my family, one-upmanship is about how stupid you could be in any given context, not about the money you made or the house you just bought.

  Sometimes I thought my being a crackhead was the ultimate manifestation of stupid one-upmanship.

  * * *

  I, Danny, am the black sheep of the family. Literally, now. When my life started taking its sharp sudden downtown after my leaving Jack, when I went from a few glasses of Shiraz once or twice a week to being a full-time crack addict within a year, I dyed my naturally wheat-blonde hair black. Since I had always felt like a goth Sylvia Plath inside the body of a brainless cheerleader, I figured it was time to let the outside match how I felt inside. I’m the only person I know who has blonde roots showing. Dark hair feels much better on me. I don’t care how it looks. I don’t spend much time in front of the mirror anymore anyway.

  When I left Jack – when I felt like I had to leave, to separate myself from the madness that was overtaking him – I wanted to jump into a dark pool and never resurface. And that’s what I did. I made almost a career of it, in the beginning. From a young age, I could drink like the Irish girl I was, generations back, and I became a regular at a neighborhood pub, where I learned how to drink like a professional. I found myself enjoying the company of people who lived on the margins; the unemployed actors, wait staff on their days off who couldn’t stay away from the place, tweedy retired professors with English accents and broken capillaries, and guys who didn’t get work at the union hall that day. I could watch baseball, discuss politics or read a trashy novel with a glass of Shiraz in front of me, and I didn’t have to think about a thing. No one judged me. No one asked difficult questions. I was everyone’s little sister. The bartender dealt coke, and soon I became one of the people running to the bathroom every forty minutes, becoming more animated every time I came back. Then I met Gene and he introduced me to cocaine’s evil cousin.

  Crack.

  All I can say is, if it didn’t feel like a choir of angels all of a sudden bursting into the room and whispering into your ears, I wouldn’t do it. Taking a hit off the pipe is like having every good thing in the world rush into your head in one moment, and stay there for a bit, and all the bad things are gone, gone, gone. It’s better than a twenty-minute orgasm. Not that I would know.

  Crack had me at hello. But it also took my money – I spent over a hundred grand in one year on my habit, without blinking. I had always been a saver; never cared a whit about material things. But crack became my full-time job. I used a lot of creative financing, believe me, and I think most of the collection agencies had me on speed dial. I change my unlisted phone number more than some people I know change their underwear.

  Not only did it take away my money, but it also took away most of my straight friends – what we in the drug world call the normal people, with nine-to-five jobs and mortgages and kids, regardless of sexuality – and most of my family. Not that they didn’t try, my family, but my shame meant that I knew they were better off not worrying about what I was getting up to.

  But Ginger knew. She knew what I was doing to myself.

  Of course she did. She was my twin. I couldn’t get away with lying to her about anything important. I couldn’t figure out how I hadn’t felt her death. I told myself it must have been the crack; it messed with everything in my head, and I couldn’t read any signs clearly when I was high – no hunger, anger, love or hate. That’s why I did it; that was the beauty of it. Torturing myself that I left Jack when he needed me? Crack, please. Haven’t eaten for three days and feeling a bit weak? A couple of stale crackers and another hit will fix me right up without having to go to the grocery store or call for pizza.

  And my twin sister had died, without me knowing anything about it. I hadn’t felt her death, but I felt her absence.

  I used to be a twin. I was Ginger Cleary’s twin.

  * * *

  The airport in Toronto was particularly crowded. Word had gotten out that the Rolling Stones were flying in with their walkers to do one of
their impromptu concerts at The Horseshoe or some other old-school bar band kind of place. Other than “Sympathy For The Devil,” I’m not much of a Stones fan, so I couldn’t have cared less if they were standing next to me at the Starbucks getting shots of espresso to shoot into their veins. Now, if Tom Waits was next to me in line, I might have made a sycophantic ass of myself. Or Elvis Costello. Or Kris Kristofferson. God, I’d had it bad for KK when I was a kid. He still did it for me. The whole Rhodes Scholar-troubadour thing. And his version of “Me and Bobby McGee” is probably my favorite recording of all time. But all around me were your basic no-names. Like me.

  I scanned the crowd in line at Air Canada, looking for Darren. Darren had paid for my ticket, and he was supposed to meet me here. I didn’t have the confirmation number, but he had assured me on the phone that we were booked on the 5:15 flight to LAX, California.

  I’d like to say that as soon as I’d gotten Fred’s message that Ginger had died, I’d pulled myself together and gotten on the phone with my brothers, trying to arrange a flight. I’d like to be able to say that.

  Instead, I’d unplugged my phone, taken a huge hit, and spent the next eight or ten hours with Gene, sitting on my battered green couch. Anyone who tells you that drugs don’t help make pain easier to bear is telling only a half truth. When you’re high, the pain is a part of you, but bearable. It’s when you come down that it gets you, and the pain hits you a millionfold. And therein, as they say, lies the rub.

  Gene watched over me, his eyes red from sadness for me and two or three days without sleep, and listened to me talk about Ginger. What a great mother she was. How, being fraternal twins, we looked so different, yet still like sisters. How beautiful Ginger was, how everything that was awkward and uncomfortable about me was somehow effortless and gentle on her. How she had gotten her period a year before I did and when I finally got mine at fifteen and Mom wouldn’t let me wear tampons because she thought it would mean I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore, Ginger had given me a big box of Tampax and told me to hide them under my bed. She had even, God help her, locked the two of us in the bathroom and showed me the right way to put one in. And made it funny. By the time it was done, we were both laughing so hard that Dad started banging on the door wanting to know what all the commotion was about in there.

  The heartbreak when we were eighteen and Ginger decided to go off to Bennington to study French literature.

  French literature. That was Ginger. Loved what she loved, and wouldn’t be talked out of anything because it might be impractical. When I finally enrolled in college in Toronto, I went from travel and tourism to culinary arts (big mistake – I was asked to leave after I started my second fire in one of the college kitchens), and finally settled into a diploma program in something they called Health and Wellness.

  The irony is not lost on me.

  Whenever Ginger came to visit me we wouldn’t stop talking. We would sit up late into the night while she told me about boys – she and her high-school sweetheart Fred had taken a year’s break from each other, and I was a single girl around town – and her classes, and what it was like in Vermont. I would make her laugh, talking about how I felt like I was stuck in one perpetual Phys. Ed. class.

  I would just sit on my bed and watch her cleaning her face with Nivea, a ritual that she performed every night of her life. She had never put on so much as a swipe of mascara, not even years later at her own quirky wedding at Cape Cod, when she and Fred had exchanged vows in front of our two families and a half dozen friends. It was a cold day in October, they were both barefoot, and the breakers were so loud that none of us could hear a word that the justice of the peace was saying. Still, it was the most beautiful wedding I have ever attended, and I wasn’t the only one crying. And crying is something I was never in the habit of doing. Not then, anyway.

  She and Fred were the happiest couple in the world. They had started dating when they both worked at McDonald’s at sixteen. I had opted to work in Dad’s dry cleaners, but Ginger went for the glamour of the golden arches. Fred and Ginger: it had to be destined, right? Fred was no trip to Hollywood, as my mother, bless her, was fond of saying: he had never grown into the Dumbo ears that protruded from his gigantic head, and the man seemed to have been born without shoulders. But he was funny, smart, kind, a whiz with computers and business later on, as well as being a great fan of early twentieth-century Irish poetry. I always thought Fred was a prize – I think, looking back, that he was my first crush. Even though we were the same age, he treated me with the affection one would reserve for a beloved family dog. And I was always just as loyal as one.

  Ginger was what I had always wished I could have been, but have always known deep in my soul that I couldn’t. I didn’t have her charisma, her loving openness with everyone, even strangers in the grocery store. Her infinite capacity for nurturing.

  She was the best of us, and now she was dead.

  And in his hysterical voicemail to me, Fred had said it was by her own hand.

  * * *

  I got to the front of the line at the Air Canada check-in counter, and slapped my passport down on the counter. Thank God it was still valid. I hadn’t used it in two years, but before that, with Jack, I had travelled all over the world. I had more stamps in there than all of the Jolie-Pitts combined.

  “I’m on the 5:15 to Orange County,” I said, not returning the ticket agent’s perky smile. “I don’t have the confirmation number. My brother has it, but he’s not here yet.”

  The agent slid my passport off the counter and looked at the picture, looked at me.

  “You’ve certainly changed,” she said. I’ll say. My passport showed a woman with long blonde hair and thirty extra healthy pounds on my 5’10” frame.

  “Plastic surgery, Lisa,” I said, glancing at her nametag. I met her eyes with a level gaze. She smiled uncertainly, then dropped her eyes. She was clicking away at her terminal. “Aisle seat, please, Lisa, if possible. And please seat my brother, Darren Cleary, next to me.” I was trying to sound normal and control the shaking that was starting to take over my limbs. Sometimes after a long enough bender and not enough sleep or food, I could resemble someone with a neurological disorder. I had managed a bit of sleep, so I should be okay without a hit for a while, but I was days past any food other than saltines.

  And my twin sister had committed suicide. Ginger was dead. I knew I couldn’t think about it now. If I thought about it now, I would sink down to the floor and might not be able to get up again. And this, I had to do. I fantasized about running out the door, into a taxi and back home. Calling D-Man and hitting the pipe until my heart exploded. What did it matter? Ginger was dead. I somehow used every reserve of strength left in me to stay standing. To not flake out on Darren and leave him to deal with Fred and the boys – oh God, the boys – alone. Not to mention Skipper and Laurence and the horrors of funeral planning.

  I closed my eyes, and willed myself to be still, and to not vomit.

  Lisa the Ticket Agent clicked away further without acknowledging me. She probably had dealt with enough wise-ass freaks today. She was in her forties, tanned to a nice leathery quality, and looked as tired as I felt.

  “Sorry if I was rude,” I said to her. “I’m going down to California for my sister’s funeral. I’m a little…”

  I stopped when Lisa the Ticket Agent quickly glanced up at me. Something in her eyes made mine start to water.

  “Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to my sister. She’s my best friend.” She leaned across the counter and patted my hand. “I’m sorry for your loss, Danielle.”

  Danielle. The only person who had ever, and I mean ever, called me that was my mother, and she was dead too. Three years ago, she and Dad, driving back from their yearly Florida jaunt, killed by a drunk driver on the I-95.

  “Danny,” I said, wetness leaking slowly onto my pale cheeks now. “Everybody calls me Danny.”

  “Well, Danny,”
she said as brightly as she was able, faced with a scrawny junkie with a bad dye job crying in front of her, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Coach is overbooked, so I’m going to bump you and Darren Cleary into first-class. Is that alright?”

  I loved Lisa.

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said softly. Lisa nodded and whipped my suitcase onto the conveyor belt behind her and handed me my boarding pass. She pointed out the gate and boarding time, half an hour from now. Where was Darren?

  “You have a good flight now, Danny,” she said. I glanced at her and tried to smile but I think it came out all crooked. I was about to walk away from the counter when a glance at Lisa’s face stopped me.

  “Danny,” she said, in a quieter, different voice than she had used before, “I just had a flash of something. Do you know what I mean?” She was looking intently at me.

  “A hot flash?” I asked, confused, and then blushed, because I didn’t want to insinuate that she was menopausal. Lisa looked like she cared about her looks. Women who spend that much time in tanning beds don’t usually want to be mistaken for anything past thirty-five, even if their skin resembles an alligator handbag.

  “Your sister. She didn’t die naturally, Danny,” she said. She was whispering, and the look on her face made the hair on my forearms stand straight up.

  “No, they’re saying she committed suicide,” I said, locked onto Lisa’s face. Somewhere in my brain I couldn’t believe I was telling a stranger that my sister had offed herself.