By Ashley Bethard
My brother came plodding down the stairs, with that hesitant manner – eyes darting around the room, perpetually shaking leg – letting you know that he needs something, really needs something, but is uncomfortable asking. He paused halfway down. His rounded body hovered there, completely unavoidable – bloated from the array of pills from his latest psychiatrist (antipsychotics, antidepressants) and the steady diet of sodium and preservative-laden state food he had been fed for months at the county jail.
“I…uh…need you to come up and get some stuff,” he said to my mother, who was sitting on the couch, Misty Slim Light 120 in hand. “I found a crack pipe. From a long time ago. And I don’t want to touch it.”
He tried to make it sound unimportant, a simple fact of spring cleaning – you never know what you’re going to find, right? – keeping his face nonchalant and benign, showing no signs of expression. His dismissive hand gestures—”from a long time ago“—were carefully placed, adding an air of casual to the bizarre request.
She stared up at him, a strange look on her face—the one she makes when she’s trying to mask her expression of extreme horror with the normal “I deal with this all the time, we’ll get through it” look.
I watched her. I waited a second.
Her gaze shifted to me.
“Ashley, go upstairs and get that,” she said. “Please.”
Naturally.
I stood up.
The crack pipe was broken in half, small shards from the point of impact surrounding it. Blackened on both ends, it was surprisingly small, about half the width of my pinkie finger. Next to the pipe pieces were two small plugs, which looked, at first, like extra-large mouse turds. They were densely-packed thin wire, also blackened, encrusted with a dark film. These, he told me, were the plugs—the screens used at the end of the pipe to filter the drug. Next to the pipe lay a crushed pill—so flat and so old, I couldn’t tell whether he had slit it open and dumped the powder out to snort or smoke, or if it was just smashed from being stored under all of his pens and paintbrushes for so long. It was a plastic oval, once cylindrical, half maroon, half pale coral. An antidepressant? Antibiotic? Or something to fear? Surrounding all of this was a chalky black dust – sometimes smudgy like lead, sometimes small black flakes, the tiniest of chunks.
I laid all of the pieces gently in the hollow of my palm, none overlapping the others, and carefully walked down the hall, down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen.
I was disgusted with my own fascination as I studied the fragments beneath the unforgiving fluorescent light above the kitchen sink.
What the hell am I supposed to do with this?
I carefully removed a Ziploc baggie from the cupboard with one hand, my eyes never leaving the objects I held. I fumbled open the seal, tilted my hand to the side, and let the objects slide gently into the bag. I sealed it tightly, making sure to press out any excess air, and set it on the counter.
I took the bottle of blue Dawn and squeezed a quarter-sized blob of the slick soap into my palm. I scrubbed my hands for a few minutes, slowly, meditatively, like those surgeons on TV who have just returned from long, grueling hours in the O.R.
I patted my hands dry on the dish towel hanging from the stove, a friendly, unsuspecting cow staring up at me from its loopy fibers.
How the hell am I supposed to get rid of this?
I picked up the bag and carried it to the entrance of the living room. I stopped.
My mother was sitting on the couch, freshly-lit cigarette in hand, staring intently at a gymnastics competition on TV.
“What do I do with this?” I asked, trying hard to keep irritation and hysterics from creeping into my voice. I made sure to keep the bag out of her sight.
She glanced over at me, then stood up and walked over.
“Put it in here,” she said, unrolling an empty potato chip bag.
I looked at her strangely.
“You’re just going to throw it out? In the trash?” I asked.
She directed her gaze at my hidden hand, the one holding the bag.
“Let me see,” she said, as if somehow the appearance and state of the crack pipe would tell us what to do with it.
I brought up the hand, bag splayed on my palm, and she examined it like a wound, peering from both sides, tilting the bag upward and then this way and that.
“You know, I never would’ve guessed what it was,” she said.
I don’t know if this statement was supposed to make me feel more comfortable tossing it in the everyday trash—Oh, I’ll never guess, so if the neighbors or the friendly trashmen stumble upon it, they won’t have a clue!—or whether it was just a reflective comment, one absolving her from any guilt in hindsight, indicating that she would never have known what to look for, let alone known a crack pipe had she stumbled upon one.
“Would you?” she asked.
“Um, yea,” I said, dropping it into the chip bag.
My palm tickled afterward, buzzed—as if it had known exactly what had been so gingerly cradled there. It’s strange, the memory of weight.
I wonder how long the feeling will last.