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blinking away tears. She smiled, and for a second I saw the pretty coed from the picture. Then the tired, lost young woman came back. She said in a very different voice, “So, you want to come in?”
    We entered the building and she closed the door behind us. Then I followed her up the creaky, trash-filled stairwell. The old woman I had seen before sat in the filth, her back against the stairway wall. She groaned drunkenly as I squeezed past her on my way up. Under her breath I heard her whisper again, “Jerome.”  
    On the fourth floor, Lena opened the door to a small, neat room. It was sparsely furnished: a couch, a chair and a coffee table.
    “Sit,” she said.
    I took a seat on most of the couch. She took her package into the kitchen.
    “So, who is Jerome, anyway?” I asked Lena as she came back into the living area. No more package.
    “ Was , Jerome,” she called back over her shoulder. “He was her dog . . . a cute little dog. I used to give her scraps for him. Of course there’s a leash law, and the animal control people came and got him, something about him running loose. I think somebody who lives in the building complained. She’s been real broken up about it. I guess that he was all she had.”
    As she sat down in the chair, I saw that the trembling was still there, perhaps a little more pronounced. I began to suspect that maybe the shaking hadn’t been from nervousness. She steadied herself with an effort. “How are my parents?” She tried her best to sound flip. The brown eyes widened. I saw they were moist with tears.
    “They’re fine. They said for me to tell you that they aren’t angry with you for dropping out of college any more. They said to tell you they love you, and they want you to come home.”
    She put her face in her hands and I could see that the shaking had returned and was getting worse now.
    “They want me to come home.” She said it in a hopeless way, as if I had told her that her parents wanted her to assassinate the president. As if it were a task beyond hope. Suddenly I knew my suspicions were correct; it hadn’t been Chardonnay and Brie in the package Lena had brought in.
    “I can’t go home . . . not now. You don’t understand. I—I have a problem.”
    I sat for a moment, hearing the gentle sound of her weeping. I felt her tiredness suddenly, the incredible weight of what was pressing down on her. I had felt it myself, too recently, though my demon had been different.
    “Heroin?” The word tasted bitter in my mouth.
    She nodded quickly without uncovering her face, without speaking. I stood and went over to her window, watched the rain that whispered down. It glinted as it floated, caught between us and the lights from the office buildings in the center of town. Neither of us spoke for a time. Lena broke the second silence.
    “You don’t understand . . . I just can’t let them see me like this.”
    I spoke softly without turning. “You don’t have to stay like this. You can get better.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “Lena, it isn’t impossible, you know. People do it every day.”
    She turned looked hard at me for a long time. I watched her reflection in the window and her expression was almost angry. Then her eyes moistened and drifted past me. She stared out the window.
    “How did I get like this?” she asked me, herself, or maybe no one.
    Then she began to tell me about herself, in a hushed, strangely hollow torrent of words. She had been an aspiring artist, but the artistic discipline she’d learned about in college hadn’t appealed to her. Instead, she’d opted to drop out at her boyfriend’s urging and come to The Magic City and “Make it.” Birmingham isn’t really the best place to make it. There are a lot of places like that. They seem to attract young people who have no clue. She went on.
    “I wanted to come here and get involved in the art scene. I figured if I could display some of my art while I was still in school, I could take it somewhere