Page 79 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

Margo unrolled the wet bundle and tossed the clothes in his hamper, not sure what to do with the needle. “Where’s your stash?” Margo whispered.

“What?”

“Where’s your stash? What do I do with this needle?”

“Oh,” Jinx said. “There’s an eensy-weensy Allen wrench in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet, and you can use it to unscrew the towel bar. And, you know, it’s hollow.” For some reason this cracked him up. “The tube thingy.”

“Wait, inside the towel bar?” Margo said. Really it was ingenious. “You stay in here. Okay? Stay in your room. Do you understand?”

“Who am I hiding from?”

“Suzie.”

“Oh God, I wouldn’t want Suzie to know.” This seemed to genuinely scare him.

“Stay,” she said, and slipped out, the needle hidden up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She went in the bathroom, recently vacated by a grateful Suzie, and locked herself in and took apart the towel bar, found in its metal tube three more needles and a small baggie of brown paste. She emptied the brown paste into the toilet and flushed, then wrapped the needles in toilet paper until they were a big, soft wad. She put the towel bar back together, her hands shaking. She was sweating.

“Um, Margo,” Suzie called through the bathroom door, “Bodhi woke up and I grabbed him, but he’s fussy. I think he needs to nurse.”

“Okay,” Margo said, and shoved the bundle of needles in her hoodie front pocket, opened the door, and took Bodhi from Suzie, holding him out from her body as she rushed to her room. She set Bodhi, by now bawling, on her bed, and hid the bundle of syringes in her closet behind her shoes, feeling both like she’d successfully defused a bomb and that she was a naive idiot who had no idea what she was doing.

Margo,

Do you have time for a phone call to go over the depo later? I have 2–3 free. Short version: We didn’t get anything great. He is, it turns out, an awful husband but a pretty great dad.

Talk soon,

Ward

Margo read the email numbly later that day as she sat with Jinx on the pink velvet couch, Bodhi asleep on her chest. The main point of the depo, Ward had explained, was to prove Mark wasn’t a great father to the kids he already had. Who made the kids dinner, who bought their clothes? Whom did the kids go to when they got hurt? What books was he reading with them? What was their pediatrician’s name? “Most dads have no clue who their kids’ doctor is,” Ward told her. Margo had also given him enough details to ask damning questions about the chronic infidelity. Ward was hesitant to use moral fiber arguments, though, lest they be turned against Margo. Sex work > cheating, sin-wise, at least in the minds of most.

She had allowed Jinx out of his room once Suzie went off to class. He was more awake now, though all he wanted to do was watch wrestling and doze and endlessly itch his nose. She’d already tired of interrogating him. How long had this been going on, where did he score, why had he done it?

His answers had been frustrating, if, she thought, fairly honest. He had found the medication in her closet almost immediately, the day after she’d hidden it, and zipped through it in less than a week. After that he’d called a guy he knew in L.A. Of course he had known a guy in L.A. Margo felt incredibly stupid. Jinx had been stealing medication from the hidden stash from the beginning, and she hadn’t even noticed.

“Yeah,” he said, and laughed. “I started telling you I didn’t need them because if I asked for one you would go look at the bottle and see how many were missing.”

She had never hated him before, not even as a child when he’d wounded her the most, not like this, not this hot dark fury in her lungs. The worst part, really, was how dopey and slack his face looked as he told her all this, scratching his nose with the back of his hand.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, slurring a little. “Hey, why are you crying?”

“Because I don’t know what to do!” she said, trying to wipe away her tears without waking Bodhi. Being with her dad high was like having to deal with another person while still being totally alone. It was almost like having a baby in that sense.

“Margo,” Jinx said, “the thing is it’s not as big a deal as you think. Like, I’m not saying it wasn’t a huge betrayal on my part—it was. But heroin is a drug. It’s not, like, the symbiote or something—it doesn’t turn you evil.”

Margo did not know what the symbiote was, and this involved a whole discussion about Spider-Man and Venom and some Google Image searching of the living black goo in question.

“I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seeming slightly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again. And if you treat it as this big terrible thing, like every time I relapse it’s the end of the world—well, then I’m just gonna hide it from you more and then I’ll be in a worse spot to fight it.”

She stared at him, trying to understand if he was manipulating her.

“Margo, I’ve been fighting this battle my entire adult life, it’s pretty normal to me.” He laughed, looked up at the ceiling. “I mean, God, what a sad thing to say. What a waste of a life.”

“It wasn’t a waste,” Margo said. “Look at your children and your career. I mean, you’re literally in the WWE Hall of Fame. Nothing was a waste.”

“But all that time,” Jinx said, still not looking at her, “I was secretly here. And all my energy has gone into this. I feel like I never really experienced the other stuff at all, it was kind of reflected on the surface around me.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Margo said.

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