Kathy pushed up her sleeves so Ms. Amanda Holt, MSW, could see the two snake-like scars running up the inside of her arms.

“I cut up, not across,” Kathy said, resisting the urge to scratch them. They felt itchy as if they really were snakes struggling to slither out of her. “I thought it would make Tommy love me.”

“And did it, make him love you?” Ms. Holt asked, emphasizing the word love, as if Kathy couldn’t see the error in her reasoning.

Ms. Holt was a wispy blonde in her late thirties, with wide hips and an institutional smile that flickered on and off as if it had a short in it.

Kathy pulled her sleeves down and stared over the social worker’s head toward the barred window of the Blue Sparrow women’s shelter, where afternoon shadows sliced into the room. She wanted to smack the woman, but she held her temper. She needed her help to get Nicki back. The daughter she’d signed away in a boozy haze ten years ago to her brother and sister-in-law.

“Look, I don’t want to talk about him anymore, okay? It’s not like he’s Nicki’s father or anything. He was just some loser I married.” Kathy felt sweat trickle between her breasts. She thought the scars would get her pity points, but Ms. Holt had turned them against her.

“I can’t help you with your daughter if you don’t answer my questions.” Ms. Holt pinched the bridge of her thin nose as if she’d smelled something bad.

Nicki was all Kathy thought about day and night since she’d arrived at the northwest side shelter a month ago. Nicki and those self-righteous pricks who were collecting money from the state for doing a piss poor job of raising her. At fourteen, Nicki was hooked on drugs. She had to get her away from them. Nicki was the only good thing she’d done in her life and those pricks had messed her up.

“Yeah, I can see now that it didn’t make him love me. So there’s no way I’ll do that again.” She twisted a lock of her long, dark hair round her finger. Let her ask her questions, Kathy thought. She’d tell her what she wanted her to know—that she loved her daughter and she’d do anything to get her back.

“So after Tommy didn’t want you any more, where did you go?”

God, the woman was like a dog with a bone. Wouldn’t she be surprised to know that Tommy never stopped wanting her? She could still hear the crunch of bones that last time he’d kicked her in the face with his steel-toed boots. Oh, he’d wanted her. It was her that couldn’t take his wanting any more.    

She let out a sigh. “I ended up on the streets. Then I came here to get myself straight. Isn’t that enough?”

“And how did you survive on the streets?” Ms. Holt glanced down at Kathy’s file, which lay open like a wound.

Kathy hesitated. “There was this guy at the Laundromat,” she’d tell her about Hank—skipping the part where she’d traded sex for shelter. “He’d let me stay there, at the Laundromat. I could wash my clothes and take a shower. I did that for five years, on and off, living that way. So you see, I’ve already hit rock bottom and I got no intention of going back there. My whole focus now is on getting my daughter.”

Ms. Holt was nodding her head, not saying anything—her face as unreadable as the late December sky. “This guy, at the Laundromat, he just let you come and go, free of charge? You didn’t have to do anything in return?”

Kathy felt her face flush. A vivid picture flashed through her brain of her giving Hank a blowjob. She was on her knees, his fingers grasping her hair.

“Well, I’d watch the place for him when he had to go out. Sometimes I did special orders. You know, like quilts.”

Suddenly the radiator hissed and spit out steam, causing Kathy to jump. Her hands were sweaty and her heart was pounding. She wanted a drink. She wanted out of there before she said something that would kill her chances of her getting Nicki and that state money she was entitled to.

“But you gotta know that I’m done with all that. I’ve learned my lesson.” She couldn’t sit still any longer. She stood up and started pacing.

Ms. Holt looked at the gold watch on her thin wrist. “We still have twenty minutes. So, please sit down and tell me about your parents.”

Kathy sat down, crossed her legs and began twirling her hair again. “My mother raised me with, ‘you’re no good.’ I was bitches and whores before I knew what sex was. My father’s was a physical abuse, which the bruises went away. My mother’s was a mental abuse, which never went away. I was outta there by eighteen. End of story.”

Ms. Holt stared at Kathy as if she was seeing her for the first time. “You survived on the streets for five years. I’m curious, why come here now?”

Kathy let out another deep sigh. “Like I told Sister Marie, I want my daughter back.”  Which was only partly true. The other reason was she couldn’t spend another winter on the city streets. At thirty-three, she couldn’t do it anymore. And getting her daughter back meant, she’d get state money. With that money she could get a place to live. She’d never be on the streets again.

That last day before coming to the Blue Sparrow had been her breaking point: the city park bench, the scraggly grass patched with snow, the grey Chicago sky. She’d sat there for hours with a bottle of Jubilee wine in her hand shivering. She didn’t have a coat. It was cold out, and she didn’t even have a coat. That’s when she decided she had to get her daughter back. She was her ticket out of that life.

Kathy watched Ms. Holt write something in her file. What was she saying about her?  She felt sick to her stomach, fearing she’d said too much.

“I’m not going back there. You write that down in there. I plan on getting my act together. I’m going to make a home for Nicki and me.” She shivered as if the room had gone cold. The radiator’s hissing and spitting seemed to mock her.

“How long have you been sober?” Ms. Holt crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her chair.

The question sounded like an accusation, making Kathy think it was some kind of trick.      

“One month. I’ve been sober ever since I got here. You have to help me get my daughter back,” she pleaded. She could feel her daughter and that monthly payment slipping away.

“You see I can help her ‘cause I know what she’s going through right now, with her own treatment for addiction. Those people raising her are doing a lousy job. That’s why she took up the drugs. She wants to be with me. She wants to be with her mother. I’m the only one who really understands her.”  

Ms. Holt straightened the papers in Kathy’s file and closed it.

“You know what I told her last week on the phone,” Kathy practically shouted. “‘Baby,” I said, ‘I know what you’re really feeling. I know what you’re acting like and I know why. I know because it hurts.’ You know what she says to me? ‘You’re full of shit.’ That’s okay too, you know. That she says that.”

“Well, I think I have everything I need,” Ms. Holt said, pushing back on her chair.

Kathy wasn’t going to ask, but the words came tumbling out. “Then you’ll help me get Nicki, right?” She was rocking back and forth, trying not to grab her file and run out the door.

“I’m going to recommend to Sister Marie that you be allowed to stay the additional three months. After that, I’ll reassess your progress. But, you’ll need to get a job and line up a place to live. You have to show the court that you can provide a home for Nicki. When you are able to do that, then we can think about petitioning the court to reinstate your parental rights. And you have to stay sober.”

“Like I said, I’ve been sober since I got here. A whole month. That’s got to mean something.” She tried not to sound desperate.

“I’m going to be honest with you, Kathy. I have strong reservations that you can manage a teenager, especially one with addiction problems. But, it’s up to you to prove me wrong.”

Kathy was shaking with fury. “What about these other women in here, huh? They’re homeless like me and no one’s taking away their kids.”

Ms. Holt shook her head back and forth, that institutional smile flickering. “You gave Nicki away. No one took her.”

Kathy felt as if the woman had punched her in the gut. “Yeah, but I was doing it for her. I couldn’t take care of her. Isn’t that what a good mother does? Looks out for her kid? You think it was easy standing before that judge and telling him I can’t take care of my kid. That I’m unfit?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Ms. Holt walked around the desk and handed Kathy a sheet of paper.

Kathy looked down at a copy of the house rules.

“In case you lost yours.”      

And that was it.

Kathy stumbled out of the room into the din of the shelter dormitory, the smell of roasted meat and disinfectant engulfing her like a fog.

It was clear to her now that she would never get Nicki back. Her entire life she’d never been able to follow rules, hold a job or live without someone supporting her, what difference would another three months make?

She walked through the rows and rows of bunk beds set at odd angles, wherever another one would fit, glaring at the other women and their children until she reached her own bed, a bottom bunk near the washroom.  

Margaret, her only friend at the shelter, was sitting there, waiting for her. “What that social worker say, she gonna help you with your daughter?”

“If I get a job, and a place to live and be a good girl.” She held the house rules out to her and then tore them up, letting the scraps fall to the speckled linoleum floor.

Margaret laughed. “She might as well ask you to grow two heads. Well, you hang in there, girl. I gotta go see to my dinner or Sister Marie have my ass.”

After Margaret left, Kathy sat down on the narrow bed and pulled out the silver-framed picture of her daughter from under her pillow.

Her daughter’s eyes looked at her with that smart-ass expression that seemed hereditary. “Yeah, Baby you got that right, I am so full of shit.”

She started to shiver. Her body felt like it was made of ice and nothing would ever make it warm again. She put on her down jacket and crawled under the blue blanket, and lay there until the shelter lights went out, holding her daughter’s picture, not getting up for dinner, breaking a house rule.

She didn’t care; she was done with rules.           

***

It was after 10:30 p.m. and the snow was swirling and blowing when Kathy snuck out of the shelter through the washroom window.

As she walked to the all-night liquor store on Fullerton, she felt jittery with adrenaline. Everything in the city seemed heightened to her, the crunch of the cars’ tires, the screech of the el trains, even the tinny bell as she pushed open the door of the liquor store.

Not until she was huddled in the alley next to the store, savoring the sweetness of the gin as it flooded her brain, did the sounds become muted and far away as if in a dream.  

“Thanks, Sister Marie,” she said, raising the pint bottle in a toast. She’d earned the money doing laundry at the shelter—Sister Marie’s ideas of teaching her responsibility.

“That worked real good.” Kathy laughed to herself.

After drinking half the bottle, she started to shiver again. That’s when she thought about Hank and the Laundromat. How had she left it with him? If she remembered right, it had been on good terms, meaning she’d given him what he wanted.

As she walked west, she detoured down side streets, looking for an unlocked car where she could sleep. On Fletcher, she thought she’d found one, but when she pulled on the handle, the car alarm went off.          

By the time she reached the Laundromat on Belmont, she couldn’t feel her hands or feet. The Closed sign rested against the window, but she saw a block of light coming from the back where some nights Hank slept. She pounded on the front door.

After a few minutes, she saw his bulky shadow fill the block of light.

“It’s Kathy,” she shouted, waving at him. 

He held the door open for her, a sly smile playing around his mouth, saying everything she was thinking about herself. “I thought you were done with all this.”

“Like you’re not happy to see me.”

He closed the door and relocked it, letting down the blinds over the door.

She could hear music coming from the back—Howling Wolf singing, “I should have quit you, I should have been gone, Baby.” Hank loved the blues—especially Chicago blues—Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy. As far as Kathy was concerned, it was the only good thing about him.  

The familiar smell of chlorine, cigarettes and fabric softener made her queasy, as she followed him to the back room, the music getting louder.

“I was just about to head out. Ain’t you lucky, princess?”

She hated when he called her princess, because it made what she did with him even more disgusting. She’d never been anybody’s idea of a princess—virginal, cherished, living happily ever after.

Nothing in the back room had changed since she’d last been there: grey cinder block walls, ripped Naugahyde couch, messy desk, folding chair, even Hank’s Harley T-shirt was still draped over the couch. And the boom box in the corner blaring the blues. “Killing Floor” ended and Sonny Boy Williamson started singing about going down the road. “Don’t start me talking, I’ll tell everything I know,” he sang. “Somebody’s got to go.”

“The usual?” She asked, taking off her jacket.

“What no conversation? No, I missed you Hank?” He had a mean face with pockmarks that ran across his nose like a dotted line.

When she didn’t answer, he unzipped his pants. “Sure, princess.”

She turned her back to him, took off her jeans and underpants, leaving her sweatshirt and bra on.

When she turned around, he whistled through his front teeth. “You put on a few pounds.”

“All for you, honey,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, daring him not to want her, and hating herself for doing it.

As he rocked back and forth inside her, heaving and sighing as if he were a porn star, Kathy stared at the dotted line of pockmarks, then the three scorings in his forehead that looked as they’d been cut into him, and finally his ears, which had tiny dark hairs that were like spider legs.

While Hank banged away, in the background, Bobby Bland sang to her, “I know you’ve been hurt by someone else. I can tell by the way you carry yourself.”

As the bluesy music played, she thought about dying. The quickest and easiest would be by train—a matter of lying down on the tracks and waiting.

The waiting would be the hardest part, she reasoned. But if I timed it right, I wouldn’t have to wait too long.

She pictured herself lifting her hair over the rail, feeling the cold steel on her bare neck, the snow on the tracks seeping through her clothes. She would be cold, but that would be good, because it would be the last time she would be cold.

The tracks would begin to vibrate and she’d panic, wanting to run. But she wouldn’t. As the train bore down on her, she’d turn her head away and watch a newspaper flutter like a trapped bird in the tall snowy weeds and then escape flying down the icy tracks toward Chicago’s jagged skyline as if pursued. It would be the last thing she saw.

“Hey, yoo-hoo.” Hank snapped his fingers in front of her face. He was already putting on his jeans. “Next time put something into it, okay. I felt like I was fucking a dead woman.”

Kathy reached over for her jeans and underwear. “I got stuff on my mind.”         

“Don’t mess with anything,” he warned, walking toward the door. Which Kathy knew meant his stash of marijuana and cocaine. There was a time he would have offered her a joint or a little coke, to get the party started. That time had passed.

As he put on his coat, he asked, “How’s that kid of yours?”

Kathy zipped up her jeans. “Okay.” She didn’t like him asking about Nicki. Nicki was none of his business.

“You ought to bring her around here sometime.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, thinking to herself, when hell freezes over and you’re in it.  

Hank paused at the door. “Good thing, you got me to keep you off the streets, huh, princess?”        

After he left, she rolled herself a joint and smoked it, trying to stop herself from shaking. When that didn’t work, she crawled inside her jacket and lay back on the couch. As she stared at the ceiling she knew too well, one thought throbbed in her brain: that once again what stood between her living and dying were the Hank’s of this world.

The room started to spin and her stomach roiled. She turned sideways and vomited on the ratty green carpet again and again until only bile came up, and finally she passed out.  

***

“Shit,” Hank shouted.

Kathy moaned and put up her arm over her eyes, blocking the glare from the fluorescent lights. For a minute, she didn’t know where she was.

Hank stood over her yelling into her face, “You got puke on my floor, you bitch.”

She started to sit up, but he yanked her by her hair onto the floor.

“I’ll clean it up, you don’t have to go all crazy on me.”

“I’ll show you crazy, you bitch whore,” he said, kicking her hard in her side with his boot.

The first kick took her breath away. Instinctively she curled into a ball, so the second kick landed on her backside.

She managed to scoot away from the third kick and stood up. It was then he punched her in the face, sending her reeling back against the metal desk. In a panic she looked down at the desk for anything to defend herself. That’s when she saw the screwdriver. She grabbed it, lunged at him and shoved it deep in his chest.

He stared at the blood oozing around the screwdriver, a look of utter astonishment on his face.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said, pulling the screwdriver out of him as if she could take it all back. Then she shoved the screwdriver into him again, a little left of the first wound. “You shouldn’t have called me a bitch whore.”  

As he crumbled to the floor, she ran out of the room, down the hallway, and out the alley door.

And she kept on running down the snowy streets, past the storefronts and apartment buildings until she couldn’t run anymore.

The End