After my divorce, I took a job teaching poetry to inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. By then, my daughter and I had moved into a large, creaky house in Cambridge with two other single moms and their children. Looking back, I can honestly say that life in that big house could seem as dark and dangerous as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison.

THIS IS PART 4 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

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Looking back on those times after all these years, I can honestly say life in the big house on Fayerweather Street could occasionally seem as dark and dangerous to me as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison. This was largely because of Lina De Vries, the tall, beautiful woman from Suriname whose room was just opposite from mine leading off the kitchen. Lina was a few years older than I was. I can’t say what her profession was -- she often slept late and I never saw her go to work -- but she was well-read and intelligent and I enjoyed talking to her. She had café au lait skin, a deep, hoarse, sexy voice, a head of lustrous black curls, and a striking face that made men stare at her wherever she went. Over her curls she wore her signature piece -- a jaunty black beret pierced by a glinting diamond brooch (I never saw her without this accoutrement). That, combined with her throaty Dutch accent, caused her to be something of a sensation as she wandered in and out of the shops and bookstores and restaurants of Cambridge. 

Lina had an eight-year-old daughter, Shelly, who lived on the second floor, and an ex-husband in California. She and I spent a lot of time together. I’d bought a little yellow Toyota Corolla, which turned out to be a dud, but which took us all over the place on various adventures. We both drank a lot. I’d come home from work or from picking Jofka up from the babysitter, and we’d spend the evening cooking and getting drunk on big bottles of cheap wine. The two of us smoked a lot, too, easily going through two or three packs of cigarettes a day. And then there was weed, a substance I hadn’t used very much during my marriage, but which I indulged in frequently now, even though it made me feel paranoid and depressed. Together Lina and I would get very high, then talk late into the night. Sometimes, wasted and slurring her words, walking unevenly, Lina would leave the house, disappear to a bar or secret haunt, and I wouldn’t see her again till late the next afternoon or evening. Where had she been? She’d never say.

To me she seemed haunted and mysterious, a beautiful woman who’d suffered some sort of unspeakable tragedy, and was quickly -- and unadvisedly -- becoming a close friend.

I went home to New York for Thanksgiving that year. A few weeks earlier, I’d filled a prescription for pain meds from the dentist and put the bottle in my top bureau drawer after having taken only one pill. When I returned, I noticed the bottle was empty save for a single tiny white pill. “Um, what happened here?” I asked Lina. I’d only been gone four days and there had been twenty-nine pills in the bottle. “I had a migraine,” Lina said, pouring me a drink. “So I used a few of your pills.”

“A few?” I said, goosebumps rising on my neck.

“Yeah, not a big deal,” she said.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want this to be a big deal either, so I decided to ignore the situation, temporarily at least. “Okay,” I said. “But this can’t happen again.”

Famous last words. 

Cover Image: Pexels-Pavel Danilyuk

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