The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

me when I was helpless.
    In the jostling car, on the cold vinyl seat, I kept trying to wake up yet with each effort I fell back into sleep. Trying to explain to a buzzing crowd How scale walls of—whatever.
    Someone was missing: only three of us in the car hurtling at above the speed limit on the Garden State Parkway in the starless late-night through New Jersey countryside blank and bleak as a cinder wall. For reckless Mercedes had decided to stay a while longer in the casino—she’d connected with a man who’d offered to drive her home in his Jaguar, or maybe he’d rent a room for them, a suite, at the Borgata.
    Maralena said vehement and disapproving, “That girl! She gon regret this! Her age, she don’t know shit how to handle a man even some old pissy white asshole like that one. You wait, she gon be sorry.”
    “Her pappy, he gon be damn unhappy. Fuck, I ain’t gon mess with him .”
    Now I was worried, Mercedes hadn’t come back with us. As the girls’ “teacher,” I would be blamed for her absence.
    If something happened to Mercedes, I would be blamed.
    Trying to determine how much money I’d lost that night—tokens I’d gambled away, given away or “loaned”—each time I calculated the sum it was different.
    No less than five hundred dollars, certainly. Six hundred?
    Next I knew, I was being shaken awake by Maralena—“Lyd’ja! Wake up girl, you home .”
    The car wasn’t carjacked after all. One of my friends had called a relative on her cell, to come pick them up at Grindell Park.
    And there was Harvey helping me to walk the stairs. Agitated and disapproving saying words I couldn’t decipher, chiding me, cursing me, in Aramaic for all that I knew.

Chapter Eight
    A n evil smell in the apartment. Smells.
    And whenever I went out, and returned, the contrast between the outdoor air—(even the polluted “outdoor air” of Trenton, New Jersey)—was so extreme, I felt faint stepping into my brother’s apartment. Something has died here. Mice, rats in the walls. . .
    It was always shocking to see, my brother who’d once been over six feet tall, now no taller than I was, and nearly as thin. I slid my arm around his waist to assist his walking and Harvey was resistant at first then unprotesting, ironic. His vertebrae felt loose like marbles caught inside his skin.
    Harvey hated the clinic. Hated rehab, and the clinic where he had to submit to “blood work”—two small vials of blood drawn from his veins that had become increasingly shrunken, difficult of access.
    These were veins in arms, legs, even feet. In case you thought these were veins merely in Harvey’s arms.
    In the days following Atlantic City I awaited the wrath of Mercedes’s pappy . I feared that something had happened to the reckless girl and I would be blamed. I feared that something had happened and I would never see my friends again. Yet I could not bring myself to telephone Maralena on her cell phone, I seemed to know beforehand that my friend had no interest in hearing from me; if I identified myself she would exclaim in her bright vivacious bird-voice Who? Who that? Sorry you callin a wrong number.
    Must be that I loved my brother, that was why I was here.
    Depressing clinic on State Street, Trenton. Not far from Book Bazaar but we had no time for Book Bazaar today.
    Welfare, Family Services, Trenton Rescue Mission. Pawnshops and bail-bond shops amid vacant stores on every street. And the white dome of the State Capitol building rising above the ruin of the city, less than a mile away, like a luminous cloud.
    It was trickery, but also desperation. For ever more that I lived with him, and came to know him, and beneath the patina of his difficult personality, came to love him—I wanted to know my brother’s secret for then perhaps I could save his life.
    “How’s my brother doing, d’you think?”—it was a deceptively casual question put to the nurse at the clinic who might’ve seen me once or twice before in my