CHAPTER 1
2014
Had August Molloy not returned from the dead that morning in Detroit, the Molloy family line would’ve ended in the bathroom of a farm-to-table restaurant midway through lunch service. After the Narcan and the ambulance, he would pass this sanity check: yes, August was his real, stupid name and not the month, which was May. He was twenty-six years old. Barack Obama was the president. No, he wasn’t trying to die; he’d just misjudged his tolerance. He’d been clean nearly two years if you didn’t count—and he had decided not to—the shift drinks and occasional Xanax he bought off the sous-chef. But his car wouldn’t start that morning, and when the man on the crosstown bus asked if he was looking for something, he considered the day stretching in front of him and decided he was.
He’d died this time, he’d later grow sure, because it felt different from anything. It wasn’t a euphoric swoon like, at sixteen, home in Flint, when he shot up for the first time in a pawnshop parking lot and the city narrowed to the microwaves and guitars gleaming in the window display. Then, the clamor of his thoughts shushed, his fidgeting stilled, and gone was whatever his fellow dishwasher at Ponderosa couldn’t define when she said, “I guess you’re kind of funny, Gus, but you’re so…” It wasn’t a too quickly falling blackness, either, like the first overdose, when his mother opened his bedroom door to release the cat scratching inside and found his lips bluing beneath his Sgt. Pepper’s poster.
Instead, in the stall, the trout smell vanished from his fingers, the sixties soul playlist in the dining room shut off, and his heart stopped. Detroit was suddenly gone, as if one slide clicked through to another on a reel. August was standing on a grassy expanse. A flock of birds pecked around his feet, feathers a flare of copper. Beyond the birds, no houses, no people. Rolling grass and a gray sky slung with clouds.
In the next stall, a lawyer from Grosse Pointe noticed August’s scuffed boot kick toward him at an unsuggestive angle. He tapped it with the toe of his oxford. Called, “You all right in there, buddy?” Bending, he saw August’s white hand hanging, fingers pointing to the tiles.
“No, no idea what he took,” the kitchen manager explained to the paramedics. The diners gawked from their microgreens as August was wheeled through the back door. At the front, the hostess held a finger under her bottom lashes to dam her mascara, elbow out as if she were saluting him. The kitchen manager calculated the comped meals, mourned the ensuing Yelp reviews.
“Line cook,” he said. Then added, “Flint guy,” as if that explained it.
* * *
Across from Henry Ford Hospital, where August, resurrected, stood smoking beside his sister, Annie, tourists snapped pictures in front of the Motown Museum’s blue and white Hitsville USA sign. He’d taken Annie there just a month ago, after their mamaw’s funeral luncheon. The suggestion—August’s—was impulsive and probably inappropriate. Annie had disappeared to deal with Rita, who’d shown up to prove that while she still didn’t love Annie, she wouldn’t have ended their engagement if she knew her grandmother was about to die. Their mamaw had been a difficult person, and attendance was scarce. The potato salad rose back up August’s throat each time his mother reached out from beneath her grief to repeat, “Gus is doing so well. That’s something to be grateful for, isn’t it?”
August couldn’t pull apart what shivered in his nerves, couldn’t discern what was grief and what was shame. He felt for the cigarettes and keys in his pocket and left his mother with a huddle of second cousins nakedly calculating the debt the deceased had gone into on his rehab stints.
Between the sets of doors, August collided with Annie. Her ex’s taillights swung out of the lot.
With a rare wildness, she said, “Take me wherever you’re going.”
He was only going to sit in his car and smoke, but he was always the one who needed to be shown an escape route, and so, touched, he devised a quick plan. “Follow me back to Detroit?”
When the guide tried to coax their group into dancing like the Temptations, August, still in his suit and tie, was the only one to acquiesce, dipping and snapping his fingers. Annie gasped with laughter. In the halls of costumes, before a shrine of Jackson Five polyester and fringe, August sang, “Annie are you okay, are you okay, Annie?” He pointed to a sequined Supremes gown. “I’m going to wear that to your wedding someday,” he said. “That’s my maid of honor dress.”
He regretted it immediately. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. He braced for her to repeat that she was going to die alone and unloved.
Instead she said, “You’re way too shouldery for a halter.” Added, softly, “You’ll have to walk me down the aisle. There isn’t anyone else.”
Now, August ashed into a lilac bush and Annie fussed with a defeated Kleenex. Hers was always the number he gave because, unlike their mother, she never cried in public—a skill he suspected she’d honed getting her master’s in social work. By the time the call woke her, sleeping off the night shift at the women’s shelter, she’d had the sixty-mile drive from Flint to cry in her Honda, and her face, puffy with breakup grief-eating, was splotchy. He hung on to this last moment before they got in her car, and he had to explain again that it was just the one time, that he didn’t owe anybody any money, hadn’t even pawned anything.
Annie balled up her Kleenex, dragged the back of her hand under her nose, and pulled a ChapStick out of her hoodie. After she smeared it on, she said, “Well. Did your life flash before your eyes?”
“I saw birds. Maybe they were chickens. I guess it was heaven.”
“Get fucked, Gus.” Not like she meant it, but like she wanted to get back in her car and cry more.
“I’m serious.” He hooked a finger of his cigaretteless hand beneath his glasses to rub his eye. They’d been raised on Flint Public Library books and Joni Mitchell cassettes by an agnostic mother. They were goodish-looking, prone to solitude, and considered themselves too clever for their blue-collar lives. They weren’t heaven people.
“Chickens,” Annie repeated.
“I think they were eating.”
“You work in a kitchen, Gus. You were probably cooking chicken right before.”
“Trout. Friday fish special.”
An ambulance whipped past. “Let’s not tell Mom.”
August bent to grind his cigarette out. He felt his sister watching him. The hospital bracelet shifted on the knot of his wrist bone. His glasses slipped to the end of his nose.
He tapped out another cigarette and let it bob from his lips unlit. “Maybe I can stay with you again.”
“You want to come home?”
August couldn’t tell yet whether he felt compelled to go home, or if there was just nothing to stay in Detroit for. Home was where he circled back each time he did this. There was still a copper shine of feathers in his head, and he was a little nauseous. He slid the cigarette back into the pack. “Can I?”
She turned her head, face pinched. She muttered insults to bolster her efforts in the fight against loving him. “Of course you can, you stupid idiot. You asshole.” Her shoulders twitched, then her arms extended and he was in them.
He hated the tremor of his sister’s chin against his shoulder, the sudden smell of her hair, blond like their mother’s, and then the too-meaningful eye contact when she pulled away, one hand still gripping him as if he might float away if she let him go.
* * *
August lived in a house at John R and Baltimore with a crunchy subfloor and a few windows boarded with letters of a Tubby’s Subs sign. It was owned by an EDM artist from Los Angeles who occasionally flew in to think about turning it into a studio. He charged August a modest rent in exchange for keeping scrappers from ripping out the furnace and copper wire. Across the street sat an empty Chinese restaurant shaped like a ship that had run aground, and in its parking lot pheasants sometimes strutted. Beyond, an old Fisher Body plant sagged over I-94. Further, the glass and steel towers of the General Motors headquarters glowed, an omnipresent reminder of everything August wanted to get away from.
August went to the first rehab his mamaw paid for, with yoga and a piano in the common room where one of the alcoholics kept playing “I Say a Little Prayer.” Then he’d gone back to Flint, worked in kitchens and bars, and ended up in the second rehab, state-run, with bunk beds and guards selling instant coffee and cigarettes on the sly. He thought moving to Detroit established a sixty-mile-long no-man’s-land between him and his mistakes. He could do better without his mother’s eyes skittering to the insides of his elbows when he was just putting up the storm windows like she’d asked him to, and Annie inviting him to dinner like she could write it off on her taxes.
For a while, Detroit had been a modest success: from coney islands to the restaurant with its muraled walls and produce direct from urban farmers. There was a waitress with sleeve tattoos who invited him over every time she broke up with her boyfriend, and he played drums in a band, the Digital Displays. They thrashed through covers at the same dive bars, but it was something to do. He had a sponsor, a hippie Quaker named George who invited him to Friends meetings and kept asking him if people in Flint still talked about Grand Funk Railroad. “Underrated band. Really rockin’.”
But now August had fucked up Detroit, too.
August and Annie gathered up his phone charger, a pair of ear buds with the left bud that crackled, a collection of Beatles and Who T-shirts amassed from innumerable Christmases. His Narcotics Anonymous (NA) step working guide with old work schedules and the rough tally of his IOUs to Annie, not factoring in the interest rate that he adjusted with his fluctuating guilt.
“Do we need to get a truck?” Annie asked. “Is the dresser from Mom’s?”
“Leave it. A gift to the house.”
She rolled her eyes. She lifted the goldfish bowl off the dresser, the little man in the diving bell alone on dry substrate. NA said an addict alone was in bad company, but the fish had been flushed months ago and August hadn’t replaced him. August scanned the floor and decided the Detroit Public Library wouldn’t miss that Syd Barrett biography nor that copy of Passages Through Recovery. His sister was saying something about the closet, but he wanted to leave so bad he couldn’t hear her.
The house was the quietest place August had ever been. For a while he had liked that about it. Sound reverberated through it like a cathedral. The showerhead busted, bathwater tumbled into the tub like bells. When he played music, it pounded the walls and thudded on the floorboards, driving out his old thoughts. Since his mamaw died, though, the house’s silence grew oppressive. Convinced him he could hear the blood moving in his veins. He swiped through dating apps, imagining why each girl who looked like she might be kind enough to overlook his flaws and cool enough to listen to music with deserved better, deleting message drafts. It felt like every passing car was driving through the wall.
Annie surveyed the room with a bundle of sheets under her arm. “What about the rest of it?”
“Fuck the rest of it.”
August locked the door behind him, then buried the key in the mailbox beneath months of grocery circulars. He took out his phone to text his landlord—sorry about this, man—but a glance revealed a roll of unread texts from the restaurant, the bass player canceling practice. August’s drums were in his basement. He could have them. There was a voicemail from his mother, whom Annie swore she hadn’t spoken to. He shoved the phone back in his pocket.
He was too tired to tow his car out. It probably wasn’t worth fixing anyway.
* * *
Waiting for the turn onto northbound I-75, August cracked the window.
“You know you can’t smoke in my apartment.”
“I said I can stay with Mom.” He lifted his ass to dig a lighter from his back pocket. Annie’s snack cake wrappers crinkled under his boots.
“That’s not what I’m saying. It’s in the lease. The last time you stayed with me I got fined, and things are tight enough for me right now without Rita.” Then, when the light changed, “How are you feeling?”
It would seem ungrateful, to ask for a miracle greater than being raised from the dead, so August couldn’t explain how he wished that, before the Narcan jump-started his heart, he’d been offered some premonition of the future he was living for. Someone’s hand reaching to smooth the hair matted on the back of his neck. Anything he could want, anything he could try to be good at. He knew from rehab and counselors and NA and internet articles he read off his phone in the bathtub that after nearly ten years on and off opiates, his brain was chemically unfit for the rush of dopamine and oxytocin to want anything or anyone. Anhedonia, it was called: reduced motivation, reduced anticipatory pleasure (wanting), and reduced consummatory pleasure (liking). Three to five years, generally, for the brain to recover. He’d gotten through two years, and he didn’t know now if this fuckup meant he was starting all over.
So he just said, “Tired.” He tipped his forehead to the window and watched Detroit slide backward: the skyscrapers and church steeples and warehouses, the signs pointing the way toward Flint. He let the warm fuzz of the radio and the vibration of the road beneath him lull him to sleep. When he opened his eyes again they had just crossed into Genesee County, and the colossal sign for Dixie Baptist rolled before him, a sad-eyed Jesus asking, ARE YOU ON THE RIGHT ROAD? as if offering a last chance to turn around.
CHAPTER 2
From the windows of Annie’s seventh-floor apartment, August could see the Citizens Bank weather ball red and blinking to signal the coming spring rain. Each hour the bells of the downtown churches clanged a few seconds apart as if in eternal argument over the time. When he lifted the window to smoke, voices and sirens and the hiss of the buses’ hydraulic lifts rose up to him.
Annie’s apartment was as spare and anonymous as a hotel room, the kind of place you could leave anytime and never think about again. The only picture was framed beside the TV: a black-and-white strip taken at a roller rink in the nineties, Annie’s hair in a beribboned side-tail and August bowl-cut and toothless, their pretty mother squeezing them to her sides. Annie had the same pullout couch August crashed on when she was in college, the same empty refrigerator. All traces of her engagement were erased, save Rita’s record player in a console pressed to the far side of the living room wall, on which August heaped what little he had.
Through August’s first two weeks in Flint, he waited until Annie left for her night shift at the women’s shelter to crawl into her bed. He slept until just before she was due back, when the alarm on his phone told him to move to the couch. He’d wake again while Annie slept, walk to the gas station for cigarettes, skip through music he wasn’t in the mood for, ignore his mother’s calls, click through infomercials where people in spacious kitchens grilled shrimp skewers, and half watched the local news at noon repeat the story about the water switch. The emergency financial manager (EFM), installed by the governor to pull the city out of debt and dysfunction, decided to pull drinking water from the Flint River instead of piping it in from Lake Huron. On the TV he saw the same shot of the Flint River running through Chevy in the Hole, the same frowning locals saying they weren’t drinking from that polluted old river. Annie had a case of bottled water beside the fridge.
In one paroxysm of loneliness, he’d texted the waitress with the tattoos—this is the ghost of gus wondering if he can buy you dinner—thinking maybe Annie would loan him her car and he could drive down to Detroit and take her out, make a good showing. She never responded.
He’d done the math. His last paycheck had been deposited, and if he went on not spending any of it, occasionally making Annie risottos and curries for dinner and apologizing for being such a fucking loser until she lapsed into her social work training (Why do you say that? What can we do to change it?), if he kept shuffling the stack of résumés she’d printed for him and moving around his Narcotics Anonymous meeting schedule, he would never have to leave this apartment ever again.
It might have worked if not for the morning he forgot to turn on the alarm and woke in Annie’s bed to the sound of her coming into the apartment. She was on the phone: her voice rose when she saw her brother wasn’t on the couch. Keys clattered onto the kitchen table, then grocery bags. “Well, what would you do, Rita?”
Then August heard his sister say to her ex, who had always looked at him like he was about to pawn her TV and raid her medicine cabinet, “Relapse is part of recovery. That’s addiction 101. Did you hear me say he was clean for two years? Why am I explaining this to you?”
August rolled toward the wall. Maybe she’d go straight to the shower to cry. When she came out he’d be brewing coffee, whisking French omelets, proof that Rita had them all wrong. Look at how great he was doing, and all thanks to his sister. Or he’d go back to sleep on the sofa, which wasn’t hurting anybody.
But Annie said, “Forget I called. I don’t know what I was thinking.” A string of expletives crescendoed toward the bedroom, then stopped in the doorway.
Copyright © 2022 by Kelsey Ronan
