I knew, from the very moment my phone lit up and his name appeared, that Jacob Waldman wanted something from me; even worse, I knew that whatever it was, I would give it to him.
I stared at the glow of the screen for several admirably resolute moments, trying hard to ignore the damnably hopeful flutter my heart had taken up at the sight of his contact photo. It had been months since last I’d heard from him. In any case, we were finished, he and I. That was what I’d resolved after the idiot had shown up to my parents’ house the night of my birthday party drunk out of his mind, reeking of weed, and as high as I’d ever seen him.
I had been furious with him then–for humiliating me in front of my family and all of my work friends; for taking his shirt off at the dinner table and insisting everyone do tequila shots; for snatching off a corner of my gorgeous white-frosted, coconut-flaked, truffle-dusted pineapple rum cake with his bare fist and shoving it into his mouth like the honest-to-God child that he was; for announcing that he could procure weed for half the price that anyone there was used to, should they be interested (no one was).
For coming onto my insufferably hot roommate Crystal.
Then at the end of the night, once everyone had gone home and I’d stood tearing into him on my parents’ front lawn while he’d tried hard to focus his big, dumb, impossibly dilated pupils on me, he had managed only to blink sheepishly at me–dried Swiss meringue buttercream still crusted to the corners of his lips–and say, “Oh. Sorry, Laura.”
Even now, the thought of him like that–shirtless, mumbling, swaying pitifully on his feet, one hand running through his dark flop of hair–was so infuriating to me, I almost allowed the call to go to voicemail. Almost.
I drew in a deep, shuddering breath. I blew it out in resignation. Then I answered. “Hey.”
“Laura!” he about bellowed into my ear. “You answered!”
“What’s up?” I fought to keep my voice level, terse. So he would know I had not forgiven him for my birthday.
“I thought you wouldn’t! Answer, I mean.” I heard the familiar laugh in his voice. “Thank God you did.”
“What do you need?”
There was a pause. Then, with a note of apology this time: “Laur…”
“It’s okay,” I said, less sharply. “I’m not mad.”
Another long pause. “Come outside. Please.”
Without a word, I rose from the bed and went to the window. I drew back the curtain a little.
There, in the dull yellow gleam beneath one of the wrought iron late Victorian-style street lamps (mostly decorative) that lined the Ellington Homes complex, stood Jacob–one hand thrust deep into the pocket of his coat, the other holding his phone. There was the glow of a lit cigarette between his lips. He was hunched with cold, and he had his hood pulled low over his eyes, but I would recognize that gangly frame and duck-footed stance anywhere.
“How did you know where I live?” I demanded. The last time we had seen one another, I’d still been holed up in the same dingy apartment I’d rented since college.
“I asked your sister.”
I blinked. “Which one?”
“Abby.”
I made a mental note to tell Abby where she could stick it.
“Okay,” I said at last. “I’m coming. Just give me a minute.”
After I hung up, I lingered there for several beats. I watched him dawdle below. From six floors up, he was but a figurine on pavement–a clay-forged character illumined by a painted-black model lamppost, thumbing a Marlboro-rendered matchstick, fashionably alone.
I stepped out of the rotating lobby doors five minutes later and descended the stone portico steps in my slippers. Jacob caught my movement. He glanced up, and at once broke into a bashful grin. He waited for me to cross the front lawn and come to a halt at the edge of the pavement before inching closer himself, tentative. Still smiling that infernal sheepish smile.
Normally, he would have gone in for a hug; but we both hesitated too long, and then the space between us became irrecoverable.
He gestured behind me, at the collonaded front porch and trimmed hedges. He laughed. It was an easy, bright, familiar sound. “Jesus, Laura–how do you afford this place?”
“Don’t act so surprised.”
“No, I’m not, I just… wow. I mean, I knew you were doing well, but I didn’t realize you lived in a goddamn palace.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s a luxury apartment.”
“It looks like a hotel.”
He blew out a plume of cigarette smoke, which I watched dissipate in the night air. He moved just the same; smelled just the same too. I pulled my wool wrap coat tighter around me and tucked strands of my hair behind my ear–busying my hands. Anything to keep from looking at him head-on.
“I feel like it’s been forever,” he ventured.
“Since my birthday.”
He was silent.
I glanced away and shivered against a chill breeze.
“You look good,” he said. “I like your hair–it’s darker.”
I touched it absently. “Thanks.” He, on the other hand, looked like hell–at least, his coat was rumpled and stained, and his eyes were bloodshot. Either he was high, or he had not slept. “What’s happened?”
By way of distraction, he produced the pack of Marlboros from his coat pocket and held it out to me.
I shook my head. “I quit.”
“Since when?”
“Since a year ago.”
He shifted to the other foot. “Oh.”
“It’s late, Jake. I have work tomorrow. What do you want?”
“Look, I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t an emergency. I know how busy you are.” He scrubbed his free hand over the top of his head, beneath the hood. I could see that he had shaved it. It suited him. “I really fucked up this time, Laur.”
“What did you do?”
He nodded back in the direction of the parking lot. “You know my main dealer? Iman, remember? I’ve told you about him…”
I shrugged.
“Well, yesterday he came by and parked his car right in front of my place. Left the keys and everything. I wasn’t even at home–it was just sitting there when I got back from work. And then I get this crazy text from him, telling me he needs me to hide it for him. Telling me I need to keep it safe cause he’s in some deep shit. He told me not to get rid of it.
“So of course, I’m like, ‘Well, what the hell do you want me to do with it? And why do you need it hidden?’ You know what I mean? Like, what’s inside that’s so valuable? And then–get this–I go out to the car and I take a look inside, and Laura…” Jacob let the cigarette fall from his mouth, and ground it into the walkway with the toe of his Vans for emphasis. “It’s full of drugs. And I mean hard stuff–cocaine and heroin and shit. Must be a hundred pounds of coke in there.”
“What the fuck,” I said.
“And next thing I know, Caleb–you know Caleb? Yeah, Caleb is texting me too, telling me that Iman’s just been arrested on two counts of manslaughter.” Seeing the alarm on my face, he hurriedly went on, “Apparently, two of his buyers just overdosed on Fentanyl. Two high school kids. So they really have it out for him.”
“Fentanyl,” I repeated, incredulous. “Jacob, what the fuck.”
“Caleb says the cops went through his whole entire house. They found every last ounce of weed and Fenty and anything else he had lying around. He must’ve known it was coming–that’s why he gave me the car, so that I could save it for him–for when he gets out. And so that they can’t raise the charges any more than they already have.”
“Tell me you don’t still have that car.” My palms suddenly became very slick despite the cold. “Tell me you didn’t break it here.”
Jacob nodded miserably. “I didn’t think, man.”
“You never do,” I snapped. It wasn’t true, though.
“I didn’t know what else to do. All I know is, if I’m found in possession of all those drugs, I’m fucked. It’ll be a felony, Laura.”
You know what else is a felony? I wanted to shout. Aiding and abetting you!
But when he’d trained his helpless gaze on me and said, “So will you help?” I found myself nodding along. He’d made a little offhand remark, then, some stupid shit about how he was glad to have his Bonnie back, the Bonnie to his Clyde. And something about how he’d been afraid that maybe I would have finally outgrown him, but now he guessed not.
Of course I hadn’t. I never could–though I’d tried well and hard to.
#
Jacob’s plan sounded to me like utter idiocy. On the face of it, there seemed a million and one alternatives, a million and one better means of getting rid of Iman’s car than lighting it on fire and driving it into the creek off of US 52; but upon closer consideration, these all fell short.
For one, Jacob could not very well just turn the car into the police–then Iman would have incentive to rat on him for all the dealing that Jacob himself was guilty of (which involved, he grudgingly informed me, more than strictly pot); nor could he have just stored the car someplace–to begin with, he had nowhere to put it, and in any case, he could not risk the police finding it and charging him with both possession and accessory to Iman’s offenses.
Vanishing the car entirely would allow Jacob to claim (to Iman, anyway) that someone had merely stolen it out from under him. Plus we needed to make sure that even if the car did somehow reemerge from the dredges of the creek, there would remain no forensic traces–or drugs themselves–linking it to us. This, Jacob reasoned, was why we needed to scorch everything first (“You know, to like, get rid of the fingerprints and shit”).
As with everything he got himself into, the whole thing would have been funny were it not so terrible: take the destruction of my beautiful, criminally expensive birthday cake. Take peeling his shirt off in front of my parents and attempting to sell cheap weed to my buttoned-up corporate colleagues. Take flirting with Crystal when he knew for just how long I’d loved him.
We rode together in Iman’s little black Sedan in near-total silence. We had to stop back at Jacob’s apartment first, to pick up his car. That was the bit he needed me for, he’d explained–so that we would have a way of getting home after dumping the Sedan. I sat shotgun, my knees drawn close together, my hands clutching my phone in my lap, careful not to touch anything. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror at the three large garbage bags in the backseat, each filled to the max with God knows what kinds of substances.
I held my breath and tried not to think of what might happen if we were pulled over.
I was then all too relieved to get behind the wheel of Jacob’s Honda, and to trail innocuously behind him for the whole forty-five minutes up to the creek.
Just before we pulled off of US 52, onto the grassy shoulder of the road that led to the creek, Jacob called me to tell me he was going to turn off his head and tail lights, and that I should do the same. Fortunately, it was past one in the morning by this point, and there were hardly any other cars about when we both, one after the other–by the light of the moon alone–began the mucky, rutted, off-road trek.
Jacob drove the Sedan all the way into the waterlogged wood that adjoined our creek–where it was too far, and where the marshy overgrowth became too dense for us (or for the smoke, we hoped) to be seen from the highway. I followed closely behind him.
We called it a creek, the place where we meant to dump Iman’s Sedan, though really, it was but a deep, treacherous mudhole surrounded on all sides by yards and yards of year-round sodden swampland. We made our way slowly, very cognizant of the precariousness of the terrain, and of the limits of our vehicles. At several points throughout the tedious slog, one of the cars would stall a little, and I would watch with horror as two or more of its desperately spinning tires sprayed up mud and moss behind them. If one of us were to become stuck in the quagmire, too sunken in to go any further, our only recourse would be to hike all the way out to the highway and call a ride. No doubt that would raise suspicion.
Evidently, Jacob shared this concern, because at a certain juncture, he stopped to tell me that I should not take his car any further, that I ought to get out and ride the rest of the way to the creek with him in the Sedan. First, though, he saw to it that we’d taken the two cans of gasoline–plus a packet of bonfire kindling (for good measure, I suppose)–from his trunk.
When at last the great murky bog, nearly black in the dark of night, came into view, I felt more than ready for the task at hand. Adrenaline surging, we worked swiftly and, for the most part, without a word; I held my phone flashlight up for him to see while he doused the whole interior of the car in gasoline. Then he lit a cigarette and tossed it inside. We both leapt back in alarm as the Sedan burst aflame.
I held my shirt over my nose to stifle the reek of burning rubber and gas, and turned my head away from the smoke, blinking furiously.
The most prolonged part of the whole thing was waiting for the fire to go out. I noticed Jacob glancing anxiously about. I knew he was worried that the blaze, or at least the smoke from it, might be visible from the road. After ten or so minutes had gone by, we both resolved to take off our coats, and with them, begin batting down the unrelenting flames ourselves.
Jacob ought to have driven the Sedan nearer the edge of the bog, but alas, we were both saddled with pushing it through the mud from behind for several long yards. With each trudging step I took, my feet were sucked deep into the sludge. Still, I did not stop until I was ankle-deep in the stone-cold water, until the weight of the vehicle took over for me, and it began sinking rapidly on its own.
Jacob went on pushing until he was waist-deep–until the creek had swallowed the Sedan whole, its gleaming black top disappearing beneath a softly gurgling brown-black cloud.
Water sloshed in our shoes as we came tramping out. I was grateful for the cold, though; I shuddered to think what those murky depths might have been crawling with in warmer months. I stumbled over to where we’d discarded the empty gas cans. I felt lightheaded–whether from exertion or smoke inhalation, or from some traitorous twinge of exhilaration, I could not be sure. I allowed myself to plop down onto the marshy bed with a soft, squelching plunk.
Jacob sat beside me. “Well,” he said, and his voice was piercing in the earthly quiet, “I’m guessing you’re going to have to call in sick or something tomorrow.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m spent.”
After a while, I heard him shift his weight. “I really don’t know what I would do without you.”
“You’d go to jail, that’s what.”
He laughed. “Probably.”
“You owe me for this one, Jake.”
In the dark, I could feel his eyes on me. “Laura…” he began. “God, Laura, I hope you don’t think…”
I knew what he was going to say before he said it, and I wished he wouldn’t.
“I hope you don’t think I’m, you know… cashing in.”
There it was, uttered aloud–the momentous debt, the looming blight, the un-evenable score between us.
An unwelcome evocation of the night when, nearly a decade ago, he’d stumbled into the bathroom at a homecoming house party and forcibly pried a drunken, brutal, single-minded Levi Hennings off of me… The night when I, then a sophomore in high school, had watched, doe-eyed and half-naked, as he’d delivered me from certain ruin.
And now that was all Jacob thought it boiled down to.
“That’s not why I did this,” I told him.
I could not be sure whether he believed me. I could not be sure how to make him understand that I only wished it were as simple as a debt of honor.
In truth, I’d worked hard to make myself into somebody since then–somebody impressive, somebody regarded well enough that anyone else might believe I deserved a lot better than the part-time taco truck manager, part-time weed dealer who showed up on my doorstep in need of a felony accomplice. The only person I could not fool was myself; for I knew the plain truth about him.
I knew that he was good.
“Okay,” said Jacob. He sounded unconvinced. “Just… Thank you for coming. Seriously.”
I wanted to say, I’ll always come, but there was no need; he knew the plain truth about me, too.
We sat a while like that–soot-faced, our shoes caked with mud, smeared head to toe in sweat and bogwater–taking in the welcome stillness. I felt the wet moss seeping into my pants, pressed like a sponge beneath my weight, but I could not yet bring myself to move.
Wordlessly, Jacob reached into his pocket and again held out his pack of Marlboros. I took one.
I leaned in so he could light it for me. I smelled the muck and bitter nicotine on him as I did so, and when I inhaled–when the warm, putrid fumes filled my breath–I was struck by the impossible conviction that I had been here before.
–
Whitney Crawford is originally from Houston, Texas, but she currently resides in Virginia, where she is pursuing her doctorate in clinical psychology. When she is not writing or occupied with school, she enjoys spending time with her friends, her family, and her puppy Ivy.
© 2023, Whitney Crawford
Halfway Down the Stairs 