A Plague Year (25 page)

When I entered the office conference room, the unlikely team of Arthur and Mikeszabo were sitting together, working on a poster.

I asked Arthur, “What’s that?”

He flipped the poster over so I couldn’t see it. He answered impatiently, “Nothin’. I had an idea, that’s all.”

When he didn’t go on, I prodded him. “What was the idea?”

“I talked to Mrs. Lyle about a new slogan. Maybe something stronger than ‘NEO.’ She hooked me up with Mike here.”

“And?”

“And nothing. You’ll have to wait for the rest.”

“Okay.”

As kids filed in, they looked curiously at the poster, too, but no one else asked about it.

Wendy Lyle has not been back. I guess that scene with her father and Arthur was the last straw. Chris Collier doesn’t come anymore, either. Maybe they’re too busy with play rehearsal, being the two leads and all.

But otherwise, the group is growing. And the plague is growing. We might not have known much about meth in September, but we sure do now. There has been a major increase in car robberies, in panhandling, and in zombie sightings on the streets. There has been a major increase in corpses down at the hospital, too.

At least two kids per week join our group. Some are court-ordered; some come on their own. Folding chairs now ring the table two deep.

When everybody was seated, Catherine Lyle opened the meeting by laying out a topic. She touched her notebook with a long fingernail and said, “I’d like to talk today about living with someone who has a drug or alcohol problem.”

She looked at Jenny. “Jenny brought up this topic two weeks ago, and I noticed that a lot of you responded to it.”

Not surprisingly, Ben responded to it again. His hand shot up. “Yeah. Jenny talked about having to be the perfect kid so people won’t know your parents are using.” He asked Jenny, “But what if you can’t be the perfect kid?”

Jenny replied, “Well, you can’t. Nobody can.”

“What if you keep screwing up, and they send a social worker out to your house? And everybody gets mad? And you get a lot of tests, and then you get diagnosed?”

Ben looked at Catherine Lyle, who smiled at him kindly.

Mikeszabo held up his hand. He said, “I lived with parents who were using drugs, but I don’t anymore.”

Catherine squirmed slightly. “Why is that, Mike?”

“Because they got arrested. They’re in jail.”

“Oh?” Her eyes darted to her notebook. “Mike? Did this happen
after
you joined the group?”

“Yeah. A month ago.”

“Okay. So … where do you live now?”

“With the Weavers.” He smiled at Jenny. “Now I gotta be perfect all the time, too.”

A few kids chuckled—at the irony, I guess.

Some high school kids started telling stories about living with alcoholics and drug addicts. The stories were different, but they had points in common—missed birthdays, angry Christmases, public embarrassments.

Arthur really got my attention when he contributed this: “I have a … a relative who lives near me. I used to go over to his place all the time and play Nintendo. I guess he used to get high, but I didn’t know what was happening.

“Once, when I was about ten, he started a fire in his kitchen.” Arthur shook his head. “He totally freaked out. He just stood there screaming at me, ‘I don’t want to burn! Don’t let me burn!’

“My mom came running in the back door. She beat the fire out with a dish towel. She was real mad, because he wasn’t thinking about
me
at all. He was just thinking about himself.”

I looked at Lilly. Did she know he was talking about Warren? She didn’t act like it. I pictured the two white trailers in Caldera as Arthur continued. “She never let me go back there to play. To this day, I can’t go inside his house.”

Catherine Lyle responded, “That’s so true, Arthur. Addicts don’t think about anyone but themselves.”

Once everyone who wanted to speak on the topic had, Catherine Lyle summarized the discussion. “Thank you all for sharing those stories. Obviously, you do not have to be a drinker or a
drug addict to be the victim of drinking or drugs. You can just be trying to live your life, minding your own business, and drugs can ruin everything.”

I had a sudden strong feeling that Catherine Lyle was talking about herself. Arthur apparently thought so, too. He asked, “Do you live with someone who has a drug problem, Mrs. Lyle?”

“Pardon me?”

“Do you live with someone who has a drug problem? Or did you when you were our age?”

Catherine Lyle looked down. I could see the wheels turning in her head. She finally said, “The point is, Arthur, that I understand people who have these issues. That’s part of my job.” She measured her words carefully. “That sort of … empathy helps me to help others.”

She ended the discussion by pointing a manicured finger down the table at the overturned poster. She announced, “Now Arthur and Mike have a presentation to make. Arthur has come up with a suggestion for a new slogan. Let’s give them our full attention.”

Mikeszabo took that as his cue to flip the poster over and show us. The poster had a bright green background with blood-red lettering that said in no uncertain terms
I HATE DRUGS
.

Arthur leaned forward. He pointed to the words and began, “This slogan, ‘I Hate Drugs,’ is very direct.”

Arthur looked at Mikeszabo, who nodded with conviction. He continued, “It’s a simple message. No more pussyfooting around. No more ‘Just Say No.’ No more ‘NEO,’ although that was a righteous slogan. It’s more serious now. It’s war now, and it’s to the death.”

Catherine Lyle smiled nervously. “Well, that certainly is a direct, clear message, Arthur.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, how do the rest of you feel?”

Mikeszabo spoke first. “I know how I feel. My parents are in prison. My sisters and me are living on charity. I’ve had enough. It’s war for me.”

A high school stoner went next. “Meth killed my dad. My mom and me watched him die. Then we had to pay for his funeral with the last money we had. We lived in our car for six months. Then we started to freeze to death, so we live in a homeless shelter now. You’d have to kill me before I’d smoke meth.”

Arthur asked, “Are we gonna let meth destroy everything we have? Everyone we know? Look outside. It’s a war out there, and we have to fight back.”

Jenny agreed. “It’s like
Night of the Living Dead
. The people fought for their lives in that movie. Has everybody seen it?”

The kids who were not in Mr. Proctor’s class shook their heads or said no. Jenny explained to them, “People in a little town like ours were attacked by zombies. So they fought back with anything they had—bats, axes, fire.

“The zombies were spreading a plague. They were turning their friends, their family members, and everybody else into more zombies. The only way to stop them was to kill them.”

Catherine Lyle looked nervous. She interjected, “Well, there are always other options.”

Lilly agreed. “That’s right. You
can
help people. I mean, what do we have around here? We have coal, and we have drug addicts.” Some kids laughed, but quietly. “So if you want to work around here, you can dig coal, or you can help drug addicts.”

Mrs. Lyle nodded vigorously.

Arthur muttered, “Righteous.” Then he told the group, “All right. Let’s take a vote. Who is in favor of the new slogan?”

Every kid’s hand shot up. It was unanimous. Catherine Lyle gulped. “All right, then. This will be our new … direction. Thank you, Arthur and Mike.”

Arthur asked her, “So, are you gonna pay for shirts, like last time, and will the Student Council sell them?”

“I’ll speak to Mrs. Cantwell this week.”

Arthur looked her in the eye. He had wanted to hear a simple yes. Instead, he had heard ambivalence (PSAT word). I could tell that it bothered him, but he let it slide. For now.

Two separate zombie couples were wandering through the store today, looking suspicious, looking to shoplift.

Dad was already shadowing one couple when the second one entered. He waved to me, pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then at them.

I fell in behind my pair, a thirty-something husband and wife. Both wore really old black leather jackets. She had long, matted hair, torn jeans, and flip-flops, despite the freezing temperatures outside. He had on weird rust-colored pants, a plaid work shirt, and sneakers. I took to straightening boxes on random shelves nearby, keeping my distance, keeping an eye on them.

Gradually, I became aware of a noise, a commotion, near the front of the store. It wasn’t a bad noise, though, like a busted shoplifter screaming at Dad. It was a good noise—laughing, congratulating, oohing and aahing.

I left my zombie couple to investigate. Here’s what was going on, in a nutshell:

John had delivered Lilly’s cash drawer to her register, which was unusual. It turned out he had a secret plan—a plan that was romantic in a Food Giant sort of way. He waited for Lilly to count the money in the drawer. But when she looked inside,
instead of seeing the usual coin rolls and small bills, she found a square jewelry box. She opened it and saw a diamond engagement ring.

John then got down on one knee between registers two and three and said, “I love you, Lilly. Will you marry me?”

Lilly screamed, jumped up and down, and answered, “Yes! Yes, I will!”

The customers from the next register, and new people coming in, and people shopping near the front all got caught up in the excitement.

It was a very happy scene, with kissing and hugging and congratulating. I got in there and gave my future brother-in-law a high five and my sister a brotherly hug.

Dad finally abandoned his zombie couple, too, and joined us. Lilly held up her ring finger and showed it to him. She gushed, “John just asked me to marry him, Dad! And I said yes. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Dad assured her, “Yes. Yes, it is wonderful.” He shook hands manfully with John and gave Lilly a big kiss on the cheek.

While all this was going on, I saw Dad’s zombie couple slip out the front door with their faces turned away. I wondered what they had stolen.

My zombie couple, though, was standing on the edge of the crowd. They had an equally good chance to escape with merchandise, but they didn’t. Instead, they stayed to look at Lilly and John and the diamond ring. The woman in the flip-flops had tears running down both cheeks. The man was smiling sadly in approval.

I thought,
The hell with it. They can steal whatever they want tonight
.

After about ten minutes, things settled back down. Lilly got her real cash drawer, and everybody went back to their business.
Dad ducked into the office, apparently to call Mom and tell her the news.

I started rounding up carts in the parking lot. There were fewer of them every night. I figured they were getting recycled as hibachis, dollies, and firewood baskets. Maybe people were selling them for drugs, too.

I had just pushed a train of seven carts into the store (two over the Food Giant guidelines) when I saw Mom through the window. She was running from her car toward the entrance. (The last time I saw Mom run was on Memorial Day, when Dad had dropped a propane tank in our backyard and it started to fizz.) She ran right past me, all the way up to register two, where she screeched to a halt.

Mercifully, Lilly had no customers in line as Mom started in on her. “What do you think you are doing? You never said a word to me about this … this choice you are making! This choice that could ruin your life!”

Lilly stopped smiling in an instant. And she gave it right back to Mom. “Ruin my life? What life? My life can only get better, believe me.”

Dad hurried out of the office. He grasped Mom’s elbow and started moving her back outside, like a bouncer removing a loud drunk.

Lilly watched for a moment, but then she locked her register and took off after them. There was no way I was going to miss this, so I took off, too.

We all converged near Mom’s car. Lilly leveled a finger at Mom and shouted, “I got a call this morning from the Kroger Pharmacy, Mom. Do you know anything about that? They told me they couldn’t refill my Adderall prescription again because it was all used up. That prescription was for two refills, at thirty
pills each, and it was all used up. Do you know anything about that?”

I expected Mom to say no, or some variation of it, but she didn’t. She just stared back at Lilly, her face suddenly white.

Lilly went on, “That’s ninety pills, Mom! I took
one
of them, because you made me, and I felt sick. So tell me: What happened to the other eighty-nine pills? Who’s been calling for those refills?”

Dad’s jaw was hanging open by now, and I guess mine was, too.

Mom looked at us all and replied quietly, with some dignity, “Am I supposed to be the only one who never has a problem?” She told Dad, “You had yours. For years.” She told Lilly, “And you had yours. So this is mine. All I am trying to do is … keep up. I’m trying to keep up with two children and a house and a stack of bills. And the pills helped. At first.”

A strange silence seemed to fall over the parking lot. No one could think of a thing to say. This was just too weird, almost incomprehensible. Mom was taking Adderall? Of course. How else could she have driven for twelve hours straight?