Jax grabbed it and chugged. He chugged until his eyes watered and his brain cleared and his belly lit up with liquid fire, and then he dropped behind the wheel and reached for the keys.

34

Micah stares at me from the opposite couch. “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything.”

“I didn’t. I don’t. It’s just snippets, really, but...”

But now I can’t tell what’s real and what’s my mind twisting up on itself. The image of Micah is so vivid it feels almost tangible, but dreams are like that too sometimes, those blurry moments right before you’re good and awake. Our mother scrounging around for liquor and drugs, that was a constant, and there were always people hanging around the trailer park, there to do business with Bobby. Maybe I’m seeing something that wasn’t there, putting Micah’s face on another person’s body. I was only six. How real can it be?

Come on, Bobby. Just one little hit.

Mama said it, I’m positive. I squeeze my eyes shut and new pictures flash behind my eyes, turning from black and white to technicolor. Mama’s red underwear. A grubby yellow blanket. Expensive blue jeans.

My phone lights up on my lap, Chet calling from the car, but I let him go to voice mail. Those first blurry memories have broken through the darkness, knocked something loose in my brain, and I don’t want to let go of the images.

“My mom wanted some of Bobby’s cigarette. No, not a cigarette. A joint. She was begging him for a hit, and he laughed at her. He pushed her down in the dirt.”

“Jesus, that scrawny lady... That was your mother?”

“And the baby in my arms was Chet. He was a really light sleeper. The noise from Bobby’s place was constantly waking him up.”

Micah laughs, a strangled sound. “Damn. I thought maybe I’d seen you working the register at the gas station, or busing tables in town or something.” He shakes his head slowly, not bothering to wipe away his surprise. “But I should have known because you look just like her—minus the bad skin and tweaker teeth. Oh my God, your mom was a tweaker. Too strung out to notice she was outside in her underwear while her babies were bawling on the stoop.”

Micah’s tone hits me wrong—too high and mighty, and I shift on my chair.

“Bobby laughed at her, and so did you.”

There’s a voice in my head screaming at me to just let it lie. To shut up and pick up my phone, silent and dark on the cushion next to me, to tell Chet to hurry. But the memories have edges now, and this one’s too big, too consequential to keep inside.

“What can I say? We were real shits back then.”