Beautiful Ruined Things
By: Vanessa Ford
Tags: Women, Fiction, Short Story, Homelessness, Relationships

Beautiful Ruined Things

Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash

The constable showed up at 7 a.m., banging on her door. He held a paper in his hand. “We’re here to enforce this court order, ma’am. I’m going to have to ask you and any other occupants to vacate the premises at this time.”

He gave her five minutes to pack. The landlord and his locksmith were there, too. When she didn’t work fast enough, the landlord picked up her duffel bag and two backpacks and threw them outside, onto the street.

Crystal Richardson lifted the duffel bag and heard the clink of broken glass. Without looking, she knew what it was: the family portrait. She closed her eyes and could see her mother’s face, and her father’s, and those of her brother and sister. Three months after her mother died of leukemia, her father took up with another woman, who moved in with her bratty daughter. Two adults and four children in a shabby trailer outside Fresno. Roaches crawled all over everything. The kids learned to flick them off their sandwiches and keep eating.

Reaching inside the duffel bag, she found the photo still intact, and slipped it inside the only book she owned, The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers.

“Where are we going now?” asked Nevaeh, Crystal’s five-year-old daughter.

Years of hard living had taught her not to plan too far ahead, for she would arrive at that future only to be disappointed. She thought only of what they would do that night. Taking her daughter’s hand, she headed to Albertsons to buy food, then to the Sapphire Suites.

Standing by the entrance was a white girl with bleach-blonde hair with black roots, wearing a dirty-looking sheepskin coat and smoking a cigarette. She stood on one leg like a crane, the other up against the brick wall. Crystal smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. Crystal wondered whether she was a prostitute. But once she paid for the room and had the key card in hand, she forgot about the girl and headed upstairs.

Room 207 was as dismal as Milton’s vision of hell, the lamp casting more shadow than darkness. This wasn’t what she had wanted for her daughter. Motel rooms, weeklies. Places even worse than where she grew up. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried. She had worked two jobs, one at a casino as a cocktail waitress, serving Jack-and-Cokes to old drunks like her father who nodded off at the slot machines; and the other at a call center. Before being laid off due to the pandemic, she’d been saving up to move to a better complex in a safer neighborhood. A constable holding an eviction order was not exactly how she’d imagined the move would go.

She tossed the bags onto the bed closest to the bathroom, rubbing her aching shoulders. Outside, she heard laughter, a bottle smashing against the pavement. Pushing aside the curtains, she saw two young men, one black and one white, and the girl in the dirty sheepskin coat, and another taller girl in a miniskirt and thigh-high patent-leather boots. The taller girl looked up to Crystal’s window, and she quickly pulled the curtains together, embarrassed.

Nevaeh was now sitting cross-legged on the bed, combing her Barbie’s hair with her fingers.

“Mommy’s going to take a bath,” said Crystal. “You hear gunshots, you come let me know.” The girl nodded. She hated that her daughter knew the sound of gunshots.

Crystal cleaned and filled the bathtub. Sinking into the water, she unscrewed the cap of the Smirnoff she’d bought at Albertsons; gulped the cold, clear liquid. She thought of Jacob Ellis. At seventeen, she ran away from home, hitched a ride up to Humboldt County where she got a job at Jacob’s marijuana farm, trimming buds twelve hours a day alongside other young people from Southern California, New York, Mexico, the Netherlands. Trimmigrants, they were called. They were almost always girls because they ate less and didn’t complain. Jacob paid $120 per pound, the best wage in town.

All the girls loved Jacob, a fortyish white man with waist-length dreadlocks. Jacob would play the sitar and sing the haunting melodies he’d learned in India when he lived on an ashram. And then he’d take one of the girls, sometimes two, to the farmhouse. Crystal was never among them. But she caught him whenever he was free, listened to him talk about reincarnation in Buddhism and the perfect soil composition to turn his marijuana crop to emerald gold.

Soon she found herself the focus of his attention to the exclusion of the others. One night, he read to her from his translation of Clarice Lispector, a story about a hen laying an egg. He was the first man to tell her she was beautiful; he traced her jawline with the side of his finger, remarking that she had the bone structure of a French aristocrat. He showed her how to eat oysters, and took her to Tor House, where the poet Robinson Jeffers once lived, an eagle’s aerie high above the Pacific. He held her around the waist and recited “The Beauty of Things” in her ear.

A month later, her breasts were sore, her period late. When one of Jacob’s associates, K.D., walked in taking hits from a foul-smelling bong, she threw up all over a basket of freshly trimmed buds. K.D. slapped her across the face and made her go outside and wash them with a hose.

“I have to tell him,” Crystal said to her friend Josie, a fellow trimmigrant.

“No. That’s a terrible idea.”

“Why?”

“His wife would kill you if she found out.”

“His wife?” This was the first she’d ever heard of Jacob’s wife. In the farmhouse, there were no traces of a woman, no clothes, no makeup.

“You didn’t know?” said Josie. “She runs the other property over in Alderpoint. She’s the tall, skinny lady with the magenta hair — ”

“That’s his wife?”

“Marjorie, yeah.”

Crystal’s head spun. She’d noticed the pistol tucked into the waistband of Marjorie’s jeans. This was not a woman she wanted to mess with.

“Look, I have some friends in Vegas,” said Josie, her voice soft. “They’ll give you a place to stay till you get on your feet.”

The next morning Crystal held a one-way ticket to Las Vegas on the Greyhound bus. She rested her head against the cold window, watching the emerald landscape become desert, her hand on her lower belly, which had become rock-hard.

Josie’s friends, a young couple named Chad and Mindy Fort, met her at the bus station by the LINQ Hotel and took her to their house in North Las Vegas. The guest room was small, but very clean, with more closet space than she required. She thanked them profusely.

On Sunday morning, she accompanied them to Word of Life, an evangelical Christian church, and to Tuesday Bible study. Her father didn’t believe in religion; he was God of the Paloma Gardens Mobile Home Park, and he made it known that there were no gods before him. But Crystal wanted desperately to believe in something, if not for herself than for her unborn child.

At Bible study, she met Greg Somers. Greg was twenty-four, newly out of High Desert State Prison on a drug charge, and in recovery; he’d recently secured a union job as a shop technician.

After only a month of dating, she moved out of the Forts’ house and in with Greg. If Jacob was the first man who made her feel beautiful, Greg was the first man who made her feel loved. He shopped for cribs and baby clothes with her, took her for a prenatal checkup. It was the first time she’d been to the doctor in over a decade. It felt like a privilege she didn’t deserve: the kind voices of the nurses, the doctor addressing her as “Ms. Richardson.” The ultrasound revealed that she was having a girl.

Greg displayed the sonogram image on their refrigerator, a proud father-to-be. He proposed to her that day. The ring was tiny, a quarter of a carat, but it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given her. When Nevaeh was born, they decided to give her Greg’s last name. With her new baby in her arms and her fiancé by her side, she had never felt so happy in her life.

But that happiness was not to last. When Nevaeh was six months old, Greg’s younger brother died in a car accident and he started using again. He lost his job, turned into someone she didn’t recognize, who sneaked off to shoot black tar heroin with the downstairs neighbor.

Whenever his supply dried up, his body became a heat lamp, too hot for her to touch. He moaned, scratching invisible insects from his skin until it bled. She wanted to call someone, but she didn’t know who. His family was back in Minnesota and she didn’t know his parents’ names or how to reach them.

One afternoon after work, she picked up Nevaeh at the babysitter’s and came home to find him in bed, lying on his side, face in a pool of sunlight. Needle and spoon on the bedside table. She put the baby in her crib and hopped into bed and hugged him, but his body was cold. She didn’t need the coroner to tell her what she already knew.

She got up and began pacing, biting her nails, an old habit from childhood. Spitting jagged half-moons onto the floor. The life he had promised her was gone: the wedding, the honeymoon, the house they were going to buy, where Nevaeh and their future children would each have their own room and a yard to play in. So much for believing in something.

She called 911, told the operator she didn’t need an ambulance. They dispatched one anyway. Nevaeh began squalling when the paramedics entered in their heavy boots, carrying a stretcher.

Once the paramedics left, Crystal went into survival mode. She packed up as much as she could fit in two suitcases and left with the baby. She didn’t know what else to do; her name wasn’t on the lease, she couldn’t afford the rent, and she didn’t want an eviction on her record because it would make it that much harder to rent somewhere else. She pawned her engagement ring, pawned the silver that had once belonged to her mother. Watching her beautiful things go one by one was like standing in a fire with no one to hear her scream.

Then began her descent into the purgatory of seedy apartments. There were the Starlite Motel and a room in a house owned by a crazy Iranian woman who accused Crystal of flirting with her boyfriend and slit her dresses with an X-Acto knife. But the worst was a complex where half the doors had violation notices from Code Enforcement and you could hear rats tunneling in the walls. They had lived there only a couple of months when the man upstairs fatally shot his girlfriend: this was Nevaeh’s introduction to the sound of gunfire. Mommy, are those fireworks?

Crystal took another long pull of Smirnoff and sank down again under the water, trying to hold her breath as long as possible. When she opened her eyes, Nevaeh was standing over her.

“Did you hear something?” she asked her daughter.

“No, I was just cold. Are you coming to bed, Mommy?”

“Mommy will be there in a second. Go on back to sleep, baby.”

She drained the bathtub, watching the water spool down the rusted drain. After toweling off and putting on a clean t-shirt and shorts, she climbed into bed with Nevaeh, pulling the little warm body to hers, burying her nose in the fine blonde hair.