A Life in Men: A Novel by Gina Frangello

don’t have anything on them, so they point him to one of the flats. Her blood’s cold and stiff on his shirt and jacket, his movements jerky like the Tin Man in need of an oilcan. He sees one of the younger boys gaping at the sight of him, but nobody asks. Who’d want to be an accomplice to the things of which he is obviously capable? The cat who opens the door he knocks on is white, a mild surprise, though he’s got dreads and is wearing a Rastafarian-colored shoelace tied around his throat like a necklace, a dirty feather sticking out of the knot. He takes one look at Yank and gets down to business, barks at his old lady and a couple of café-au-lait-tinted little girls to let them alone. No offers to taste the shit together, or talk mishaps and music to kill some time: today they want him out as fast as he wants to leave. It’s why he didn’t wash her blood off in the first place. In a cool twenty minutes he’s back turning his key in the door.
    Back to where he left her half-naked, clothes in a pile on the carpet, head lolling onto her red-tinged knees. For just one moment before he opens the door to his and Joshua’s room, fear grips him: What the hell was he thinking, leaving her alone? Who knows what might have transpired while he was gone? Then he opens the door and sees her, still slouched against the wall. She
could
be dead, but no, at his weight on the mattress she opens her eyes, and all her earlier faces—the venomous woman of the train station, the dying animal of their long walk home—are gone. She smiles like a child at a father, serene.
    “We’re going on a little trip together, darlin’,” he tells her.
    “Where?” she asks foggily. She more topples over than lies down, her tiny body curled fetal on its side. She’s trembling from a drop in blood pressure, a loss of blood, the aftershocks of trauma—who knows? Yank shrugs his crusty jacket off, clumsily maneuvers the bloody sheet out from under Nicole to cover her up, his knees pressed against her abdomen in the thoughtless way their bodies first touched on the train. He hasn’t forgotten she’s there yet—hasn’t forgotten the jut of her clavicle, the curve of her ribs, the shadow of darker hair through her flimsy panties—but she’s no longer the thing he wants most in the room. He’s pretty sure that’s not why he’s doing this, but he wouldn’t bet his life on it.
    He’s pretty sure the matter was decided in the broken way her head recoiled from his hand, the harshness with which she spat into her little plastic bowl, the hopeless turning away of her bloodshot eyes. In those gestures he understood all he needs to about her body’s betrayals. And though he’s got little to offer her or anyone, the one thing he could think to do was to say without words,
I’ll take your shame and raise you one. At least whatever’s wrong with you isn’t your own damn fault
.
    He has been carrying his paraphernalia around since his exodus from London a year and a half ago, just like she carries hers—the way an agnostic might still carry his grandmother’s rosary, just in case. His hands shaky, too, from the energy of shifting one desire into another, Yank pulls his old spoon from his bag of tricks and clicks it against the orange bottle of her cough syrup.
    He toasts, “To the Pilgrims,” loads the spoon, and begins to cook.
    She watches him heat the heroin, her eyes as innocently curious as his son’s on the rare occasions he bothered to give Hillary a break and warm the baby’s bottle. This girl watches him this same way, as though when he’s achieved the right temperature he may spoon-feed the dose right into her mouth. Instead, when the tourniquet goes around his biceps, he sees her eyes flick down to her own puny girl-arm, no veins even visible, and then her fingers reach out to touch the strong, ropy veins that pop from his skin, throbbing with ugly, beautiful life. Her fingers are cold, and he notices her teeth chattering,