Free Smoke by Lisa Unger Page B

hair, the delicate lashes on her wide eyes. When Jasmine opened her eyes again, Lydia saw that they were light hazel, with the slightest tease of green.
    “I met her when we went up to visit over the summer,” she said slowly. “I think it was Mariah. I don’t think I ever got her last name. She was beautiful, with this really long blonde hair, bombshell body. There was something cold about her, something sneaky. But Mickey was smitten. Big-time.”
    Lydia flashed on Lily’s message. “I’m out of my league. Big-time,” she’d said.
    “He was always looking to throw himself into something. When he was a trader on Wall Street, it was his religion. He lived and breathed the Journal . When he got into the martial arts, it was his obsession. Then it was Buddhism. Lily always called him a ‘seeker.’ She said he was always looking to belong somewhere but that he always felt like he was on the outside looking in. Lily always thought that it was the death of their father that made him like that. Lily was only two when their dad died, but Mickey was seven. Old enough to feel the loss. Mr. Samuels, their stepdad, loves them both; he was always good to them. But Lily never remembered her biological father; Mickey did. I think there were some challenges for Mr. Samuels in taking on the role of father for Mickey.” She shook her head, chewed on the cuticle of her thumb. “I hate myself for not being more present. I should have listened better.”
    Lydia saw the tears start again before Jasmine put her head in her hands. She felt a familiar, helpless sadness opening within her. It was a terrible empathy she’d always had for the people who’d lost loved ones. She saw their pain, their fear, that slick-walled abyss of grief within them, and it connected with the space inside her that still grieved the murder of her own mother.
    “Go easy on yourself, Jasmine,” she said softly. “It’s too easy to blame ourselves. And it doesn’t help anyone.”
    She nodded but didn’t look up from her hands. Lydia gave her a minute. She got up to find a tissue for Jasmine and looked around the apartment. It was the apartment of a person who worked a lot, didn’t have much money and spent most of her time in the space sleeping. It was neat, tasteful, but didn’t have the charisma and energy of a more home-centered person. The fixtures were generic; even the simply framed posters on the wall—Van Gogh’s Starry Night , some erotic bloom by Georgia O’Keeffe, the inevitable Robert Doisneau print of The Kiss where a couple are lip locked in a crowded Paris train station—were on the walls of a thousand other apartments all over the city.
    She found some tissues in the bathroom and brought them to Jasmine, who thanked her.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, blowing her nose. “I still can’t believe this is happening. When I’m working I can almost forget about it; I’m on my ER rotation and there are so many people hurt and in pain. It’s so frenetic. I can forget about Lily, about what has happened. Isn’t that awful?”
    “No. I think it’s normal,” said Lydia, sitting back down. After all, she’d been doing it all her adult life, using her work to avoid her pain and problems. Better than heroin, she thought. “The brain can only handle so much worry and grief at a time. It needs a way to shift off for a while.”
    Jasmine nodded doubtfully.
    “When the news came about Mickey,” she said with a sniffle, “Lily was just destroyed. I’ll never forget her face or the way she screamed. I was here when her stepfather called. The next few days were kind of this miserable blur. The viewing, the service, the burial.”
    “Was Mariah at the funeral?”
    Jasmine shook her head. “No. I never saw her again after meeting her. I think she left him; that was supposedly one of the reasons he was in so much despair.”
    Lydia nodded.
    “The police said that Lily was sure he hadn’t killed himself.”
    Jasmine nodded, stretched out