Blues

Chapter Eight

When Dallas is at home, the tension in the air grows smoky, looming, and sad. It's imperceptible until he's been gone for a while, a short window where, just for a moment, everyone starts to relax, but upon his return it becomes clear that a significant gear has been turned. Although I consider this placement no more glorious than captivity, and have experienced more violence here than during an entire war back home, in my days here I've at least allowed myself to smile. I can't not be enamored of Cia, after all, who would never dream of doing someone harm, whose wit and generosity are so refreshing. I can't discipline myself enough to not laugh at Nas, at her crazy ideas and colorful speech and her playful way of going through motions that are, to me and to the onlooker, grave, painful, and dangerous. And as much as I've been instructed to find a way, I can't not be transfixed by Adaline. I can't not await her next word, I can't not want to absorb her intelligence, sophistication and ease, and I can't not want to spend as much time around her as I possibly can get, especially in the rare moments when her walls are down. 

Dallas is a wall. He makes Adaline angry and closes her off. He makes Cia afraid and makes Nas daydream of leaving. And while Nas and I have the same end game, and both of us knows it, Nas appears each day to be nearer and nearer to the end of her rope. And the idea of her performing her threats on a whim, because someone has finally set her off, terrifies me. I know that she must have saved up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars since entering this game. I expect that there's nothing keeping her here anymore. I wish that my reliance on her could be the thing to make her stay, but I don't feel that she thinks that highly of me. 

Dallas returns from Boston as we're clearing the table on Sunday evening, and everyone, Adaline included, is miserable. I look to her as she leaves the room upon his entrance, trying to figure them out once again. She does not greet him, or even acknowledge that he's come home, just disappears out the door. I wonder what's transpired between them since he left. I wonder when she'll divorce him, before wondering if they're even married on paper, before wondering what schemes Nas could come up with to break them up and why she hasn't followed through on one yet. It seems unfortunate, at least to me, that Adaline is the only reason he's still here, and even she doesn't appear to care for him much at all.

"Hey Sav, by the way," Nas says, stacking plates from the table. "Make sure you give me back the CE-7 you took with you the other night so I can add it in my count tonight."

"Wait, what? What CE-7?"

"The drugs you had on you, to give out," Nas reminds me. "Before you ended up taking other people's drugs instead. Remember?"

"Oh my God," I say with a sudden recollection.

"Oh, I so love the sound of where this is going."

"I don't have anything," I whisper to myself. "What did I do?"

"Yes, that's where I suspected this was going."

"I must have lost it," I say stupidly. 

"You lost a quarter ounce of CE-7?"

"Maybe...I don't know, maybe I dropped it or something. I cleaned out the bag I used on Friday this morning. I don't have anything. I would've known."

"Let me get this straight," she says with an incredulous look. "You maybe dropped seven hundred dollars worth of the drug whose composition we're trying to keep under wraps or something?"

"Don't yell at her, Nas," Cia says, on rare occasion sounding firm. "You sound like Dallas, give it a break."

"I'm not yelling, Cia, but goddamn-Jesus-mother-fuck, I mean--"

"She didn't lose it," Cia interrupts. "Get ahold of yourself. It must have been stolen. You think it's a coincidence that all that CE-7 goes missing the night she's drugged and doesn't remember?"