howled, his face mashed sideways as he yelled, “It’s that bitch, not me. Kick her ass. Fuckin’ slut-thief!” There was blood on the white door frame beside him.
I scrambled down the hall. “Leave her alone. Don’t touch her!”
Marlene looked up and whispered my name. Blood on her face, she swung her hand, shooing the couple away from her.
“Is this your mother?” the woman asked me. “Sweetheart, maybe you should let us—”
“Fuck off,” I said.
The woman shrunk back against her husband. “Somebody should call the police.”
“No police.” My mother cried it—all her words were cries.
I had hold of her now. Her face. Jesus Christ, her beautiful face. Blood ran down from her eyebrow, and from her nose, and rimmed her teeth. She was all broken. Her hands hung in the air in front of her, blood between her fingers.
The yellow dress puffed around me as I knelt on the floor. This never would have happened if Sam were here, I thought. I have to call Sam.
A few feet away, Hank raged and hollered and I hollered right back. “Shut up, you fat prick.”
I tried to use the hem of my dress to wipe her hands but the synthetic material wasn’t doing the job. “You got any Kleenex?” I asked the woman who still hovered near us.
The woman gave me some tissues and I brought them to Marlene’s nose, trying not to hurt her. “We have to go to the hospital,” I whispered.
“I want to go home,” Marlene whimpered back. “Please.”
“I don’t think there’s a flight tonight.”
“Home. Take me home.”
“Mom. Please. Maybe we should call Daddy.”
“Who? What are you—?” Marlene was panting now. “Take me home.”
Security seemed just as happy not to call the cops. Eventually I got Marlene back to our room and packed our bags while she sobbed in the bathroom. I got her some ice wrapped in a towel and talked her into lying down for a while. Then I lay in the second double bed and listened to her cry.
It was 4:58 a.m. when Marlene sat up again. “Let’s go,” she whispered.
I called downstairs and asked to have a taxi waiting.
Lionel Richie and Diana Ross sang “Endless Love” on the radio as we got into the cab. I asked the driver to turn it off, please.
“Leave it,” Marlene said.
The desert sun was just coming up and the radio station gave us more Lionel. Tears ran down Marlene’s face as “Three Times a Lady” filled the taxi. Richie was in town at some big hotel. We passed his name up in lights.
So much dirt and misery and meanness, and here was Lionel Richie droning away about love two shows a night.
We were on the first flight out of Vegas.
It was ten-thirty in the morning by the time we got to Vancouver General. Under her sunglasses, Marlene’s face was one big mass of swollen purple bruises and black cuts. She phoned Fat Freddy from a pay phone while we waited in Emergency. She cried. She whispered bits and pieces of what had happened to her.
When a doctor finally saw us, she told him that she’d fallen down the stairs. It was her divorce, she said. The stress was giving her insomnia and the lack of sleep was making her clumsy.
They put five stitches in her eyebrow and taped her nose, gave her prescriptions for Percocet for pain and some Ativan to calm her nerves. Freddy picked us up and drove us back to the apartment.
On the way home, he asked Marlene how much Ketamine she’d used. “A hundred milligrams,” she told him. “One millilitre dumped into his drink. You said—”
“Orally? Ah, honey, no.” He reached for her hand. “Hundred by injection, sure. Orally—that’d barely put a German shepherd to sleep.”
He murmured sympathy and kissed her hand as he drove. I stared at the back of his head.
For weeks, Marlene wouldn’t go out. She stared at the TV and popped painkillers and Ativan. She started sipping vodka and milk sometime around noon each day.
When the phone would ring, she barely looked at me. “Tell them I’m not home.” Unless it was Freddy. Suddenly Freddy was the only one who could really understand what had happened to her.
He came by the apartment to see her every couple of days. He brought her a Hummel figurine the first week: a little blonde girl bathing a baby. Marlene touched the smooth, pale arms on the little girl and tears rolled down her face.
Freddy smiled. “Cute, isn’t it? I thought you’d like it.”
“I’m a terrible