Susan Buttenwieser

            Sinclair’s Pharmacy hasn’t even opened yet, but Marnie can already see there are problems with Jimmy’s plan to rob it. The drugstore is on the main street of this beach town, and as they park outside and wait for it to open, Jimmy says holding it up will be totally easy, like taking candy from a baby. He says, this early on a Sunday morning, only one person will be working and the place is old-school so there won’t be much in the way of security, no video cameras or cash registers behind Plexiglas the way the chains have. All they have to do is wave the gun in front of the cashier, who is probably going to be some little old lady, and the money in the register and the safe and all the prescription pills will be theirs, he tells Marnie.

            The first problem with Jimmy’s plan occurs only a few minutes later, when a powder-blue Oldsmobile Omega pulls into the parking space in front of them. An elderly woman in sunglasses and a flowered bathing suit cover-up gets out on the passenger side of the car and takes slow, deliberate steps towards the pharmacy. As the woman waits, lights come on inside and Marnie can see two employees walking around the store. Then, the man behind the wheel of the Oldsmobile rolls down all the windows and crooks out his left arm, dangling a cigarette, so he would definitely be able to hear screaming coming from inside the pharmacy. Now there are at least four people to deal with.

            Marnie and Jimmy have been living in his Chevy Nova for months, running heroin and cocaine and whatever else their dealer wants moved along the southern New England coastline. Jimmy insists that Marnie stay in the car when they go to the dealer’s house. For her own good, Jimmy says. But a lot of what he says isn’t actually the truth. Like, it would be easy to rob this drugstore. Or that selling drugs could be profitable even when the proportion of personal ingestion exceeds the amount sold. No matter how the math is done, no matter what Jimmy says, the numbers never add up. All the money they make dealing goes towards their heroin habit, with barely enough left over for gas, and they have to shoplift or dumpster-dive in order to eat.

            Marnie looks over at her boyfriend, his grey sunken eyes, dried-out patchy skin the color of a spider web. He looks like a corpse when he’s asleep and sometimes, in the mornings when she wakes up first, she checks him for a pulse. This is the person she has everything pinned on.

            Some of the towns they pass through are named for places in England. Marnie remembers her grandmother, who was English, always pointing out the irony that Americans went to all this trouble to overthrow the British government, and then couldn’t think what to call anything. Her grandmother had raised Marnie, and on their weekly trips to the library when she was little, they’d look through the world atlas and invent expeditions they were going to take together someday. “Let’s pretend we’re going on a safari, just the two of us,” her grandmother would say. “And we’re off to see some lions and zebras and giraffes.”

            “How about a gorilla?” Back then, Marnie’s tastes tended towards gorillas.

            “Oh, most definitely a gorilla. Yes, absolutely. We must see a gorilla.”

            The street is starting to wake up after a Saturday night. It’s a warm July morning and clusters of vacationers are starting to form outside Vi’s Beach Sundries and Supplies, directly across from Sinclair’s and Jimmy’s Chevy Nova. There’s a young couple with a baby in a jogging stroller sitting on a bench with the paper spread out in front of them, holding Styrofoam cups of coffee. A group of moms dole out doughnuts to their kids, while the dads shout out the scores of last night’s baseball games. Four guys are even starting in on Bud Tall Boys. Yet more witnesses.

            “Jimmy,” Marnie whispers.

            “What is it?” His eyes scrunch up with irritation every time Marnie speaks.

            “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” she says.

            He takes a long breath and exhales loudly, his pupils pinpoints of rage. “Why do you do this?” He slams his hand on the steering wheel. “You’re always bringing your negative energy into everything!” He mimics her in a high- pitched screech. “’Jimmy, I don’t have a good feeling about this. Jimmy, I’m scared. Jimmy this, Jimmy that!’ I’m so done with your paranoid, fucked-up shit, Marnie!”

            She closes her eyes and tries not to cry. What would happen if she grabbed her backpack, opened the passenger door and got out of the car? She has tried before to get away from her boyfriend. But even after a heroin overdose in February when she almost died, the gravitational pull was too much and she went right back to him. Now she no longer has it in her. The ability to leave Jimmy.

            There have been some occasional good moments. In early June, they went out to Block Island, delivering to a musician, and stayed overnight in his house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was like being in some sort of dream, sleeping in an actual bed the entire night. This crazy-ass comfortable bed, with like 400-thread-count cotton sheets, and soft down pillows, the waves crashing right outside their bedroom, white curtains – clean, white curtains – blowing in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Amazing coke, the kind that actually makes you feel good, which they did at dinner with wine while watching the sunset and listening to jazz. Just her and Jimmy and the musician and his girlfriend, like all civilized and normal.

            Normal is so far away that when Marnie stumbles upon it, she feels like she’ll break apart. Last week, they slept outside a campground so they could sneak in to use the bathrooms. Marnie swam at dawn in the salt water pond, floating on her back while nearby a father was fishing with his son in a rowboat. She listened while the man showed his son the way to put a worm on the hook without cutting his fingers and how to cast, the fishing line whipping through the air before landing in the water. The sky became pink and orange and even a hint of purple. Marnie could have stayed there all day listening to the man tell his son fishing stories in his soft, gentle voice. After she had a shower, she saw them at a picnic table with the mom and a baby, eating breakfast by a small campfire. A feeling of total loneliness had come over her and she ran to the car, crying the whole way. “What’s your fucking problem?” Jimmy said when she got into the front seat.

            The older woman waiting outside the drugstore pulls out a piece of paper. The man in the Oldsmobile Omega calls out to her. “What?” she asks him. They are talking loudly, yelling really, and Marnie can hear them as clearly as if they are right in the car with her and Jimmy.

            “Can you get me some Tums?” the man shouts.

            “I told you not to order that orange juice,” his wife says. “It doesn’t agree with you. I told you.”

            “Can you just get the Tums? You’re going in anyway. What’s the difference?”

            “The difference is I just bought a whole huge pack of them on sale. This place is kinda pricey.”

            A young woman around Marnie’s age—21—unlocks the door from inside Sinclair’s and opens it. “Good morning,” she says. “Sorry to keep you waiting. What can I help you with today?”

            “Oh, it’s all right, dear. Just picking up my prescription and some Tums. Now, where would I find those?”

            After the woman has gone inside, the man in the Oldsmobile Omega turns on the radio, flipping around from news to Top 40 until he settles on ‘Uptown Girl’.

            “There’s so many people around, Jimmy,” Marnie says. “This is too messed up. You don’t know shit about holding up stores.”

            “Would you just shut the fuck up and stop harshing me with your negative vibes?” Jimmy opens the glove compartment and pulls out the gun, tucks it in between his boxers and his blue jeans, pulls his T-shirt over it.

            “I’m not doing it.” Marnie stares straight ahead. “I’m not going in there with you.”

            “Why are you like this?” He twists around until he is up on his knees and puts his hands around Marnie’s throat, squeezing hard.

            “Please, Jimmy, don’t.” she tries to push him away.

            “Shut the fuck up!” His teeth are clenched, his lips curled into a snarl. “Just shut the fuck up.”

            She starts to cry as his fingers tighten around her wind-pipe. Finally, he releases her and lies back across the seat. They are both panting, as if they’ve just had sex. He rubs at his face.

            “Fine, I’ll do it myself. I have to do everything, don’t I?” Jimmy gets out of the car and leans in to talk to her. “Keep the engine running. Think you can at least do that?” Then he slams the door behind him.

            Marnie moves over to the driver’s seat. After pulling out of the parking space, she idles there in the street. It would be possible for her to lift her foot off the brake, place it on the gas pedal and drive away. It’s only a matter of a few inches, the shifting of her right leg, swiveling her ankle, a minor movement of the muscles in her right foot, her toes. Instead, she adjusts the rear-view mirror and waits for Jimmy, ready to floor it when he comes back outside.