Marlena Read online

  I kicked a box labeled HALLWAY so that it blocked him from leaving the bathroom. “What’s this? What do we need for the hallway?”

  “You know, hallway stuff. Pictures of you blowing out candles and so forth.”

  “Are there towels in there?”

  “In the closet. Is Mom out?” He touched the toothpaste on his chin.

  “Think so. She didn’t say good night, but the light’s off in her room.”

  “Did she get her sheets on and everything?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  He looked at me like, I’m trying, why can’t you? In the days before the move he’d amped up his über-adult attitude, as if he’d not only taken Dad’s place, but become Mom’s caretaker too. Had he really postponed his future to make sure Mom put her sheets on? The act seemed to me like a load of bullshit, and I couldn’t bear bullshit, which I sniffed everywhere I turned. At fifteen, I believed that I would grow up to be the exception to every rule.

  Jimmy stepped over the box and squeezed my shoulder, his hand dampening my shirt. “It’s going to be okay, Cath. Try to have a little perspective.” He moved away down the hall and leaned against Mom’s door until it fell open a lightless inch. “Momma,” he stage-whispered, and stepped in, checking.

  I peeled off the tape holding closed the HALLWAY box. The flaps popped open. No pictures of Jimmy with a foil crown on his head, me with baby teeth, Dad in the distance, waving a lit sparkler. All we needed for the HALLWAY were tangled extension cords.

  * * *

  What did I do, in those days before Marlena and I were friends? I unpacked my room, maybe, finished one of the books in my stack, watched a bowl of reheated soup spin in the microwave. But the I who began during those months, the I who’s still me now, had just begun to stir. I’d spent ninth grade at Concord Academy, an expensive prep school, on a combination of loans and scholarships—none of which were applicable for just the fall. After the news of the move I fought for my parents to let me stay on as a boarder (“Ha,” Dad said, “keep dreaming”), but they pulled me out a couple of days into my sophomore year, early enough to get a tuition refund. Mom called it an adventure; Dad said private institutions made people into sheep. Even with the aid, that single year did a number on their finances. I’d heard them fighting about it. I was a studious and focused girl, and already taking advanced classes—I don’t think it really occurred to them that letting me drift for an entire fall term would undo something in my brain. But cut free from the net of school and routine that had surrounded me since childhood, I could feel my edges rearranging.

  I killed a lot of hours watching for signs of the people next door, telling myself it was boredom, that my interest had nothing to do with her. Besides Marlena, I noted a little boy, her twin in miniature; a scrawny man who always wore an orange knitted hunting cap; and another, larger man, who was around intermittently and drove a black truck with extra-large wheels. I had a good view of her house from the kitchen window. Sometimes Marlena came and went, flanked by two boys our age. One of them was cute; the other had terrible acne.

  It was one of those nights when, sleepless and hungry and full of vague anger, I got out of bed in the predawn morning. I stepped into a pair of Dad’s slippers and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. The new house was too quiet. I stood in the refrigerator light, drinking orange juice from the gallon, and wiped a sticky drizzle off my chin with the back of my hand. Mom kept her secret cigarettes—secret cigarettes, such a Mom thing to do—inside an Express shoebox that she hid on the upper shelf of our coat closet in Detroit. We had no equivalent place in Silver Lake, so it took me a while to find the shoebox at the bottom of a giant nylon bag full of odds and ends. I removed the lid and there they were, the Merits, nestled between the spooning heels of her mint-green pumps. Mom and Dad used to come back from nights out smelling like smoke and salt and wind and something sweeter: raisins maybe, or wine.

  I grabbed the lighter gun from the kitchen counter—like lots of our stuff, it would never find a proper place in the new house, and would drift around from surface to surface. Outside was just inside with worse cold. Stars, stars, stars, and a couple trailer windows glowing television blue. I sat on the platform outside the front door, where Jimmy had left his muddy shoes. A poor man’s pied-à-terre, Mom kept calling the tiny deck, until Jimmy told her that pied-à-terre didn’t mean balcony or even porch, his voice weary. I opened Mom’s pack and pulled out one of the two cigarettes turned smoking-side-up. Who knew how old it was. I propped the filter between my teeth and clicked the lighter’s trigger. The flame didn’t catch until I sucked a little. I’d imagined that I’d splutter and hack, that my very first drag would burn. But I was three inhales in before I coughed. Smoke curled above my head, and I exhaled and watched the cloud tumble away, traveling far from Silver Lake.

  I reached the filter, snubbing the ember out against the railing, and a sparkling started behind my eyes. I breathed deep and lit another. The cold from the icy step burned through the three layers I sat on—blanket, flannel pants, cotton underwear—but I was committed.

  A pair of headlights appeared down the road, and then the truck with giant wheels swung into Marlena’s driveway. I slid off our stairs and crouched in a triangle of space between the porch, the house, and one of the chubby evergreen bushes that flanked the steps. I’d told myself that in Silver Lake, I was going to be someone new, someone too bold for hiding, and yet I hid. Catherine had apologized for everything, for the simple fact of her body taking up space. But not Cat. Or that’s what I hoped. The passenger-side door opened. I’d only been Cat for a couple of days; I decided not to move. Marlena sat in the cab, despite the hanging-open door. The cigarette pack crumpled in my hand as I craned to see. The lighter had fallen into the snow. Marlena pulled her knees into her lap, tucking them under her chin. In the quiet, early dark, every sound was amplified—her nails scritch-scratched against her jeans as if she were crouched next to me. She ran them up and down her legs.

  “I’m going,” she said. A cough spidered around in my throat, but I fought it back.

  “Just a minute,” said the driver. “I love looking at your goddamn pretty face.” He clicked on the dash light, and her body came into focus. From her outline I knew the position she was in—her chin buried between her kneecaps, her elbows hugging her sides. I’d made that shape in the car with Dad, the last time I saw him. Don’t touch me was what that meant. Leave me alone. I stood up a little, trying to see.

  “Goddamn pretty,” she said, with a fake laugh. “Please.”

  “I brought you home, didn’t I?”

  “Give it to me, Bolt.” Her voice sounded tired. “C’mon, babe. My daddy could come back any minute and I haven’t checked on Sal all day.”

  “Your daddy,” the man, Bolt, said, as if he were saying Yeah right. “But I’ll give them to you. Didn’t I say? But I want a kiss first. Just a kiss good night.” Kissing noises, like a crappy punch line.

  She didn’t move and my legs ached and I ticked off the seconds, sure I would cough. He lifted a something into the air, pinched between his fingers, and shook it above her head. Her body undid itself as she grabbed, laughing, at whatever he held. I swallowed over and over. She turned to face him and his palms slid over her shoulders and then she was just whitish hair, one of his tattooed arms all tangled up in it, the other sliding up her sweater. I don’t know how I knew it from there, when she was still a stranger, but I could tell that she could hardly bear him touching her. She wriggled away after a few seconds and jumped from the truck. My skin crawled on her behalf.

  “We need Band-Aids, too,” she said. “And eggs. Tomorrow or the next day, okay?” She slammed the door before I could hear an answer.

  Marlena sat on a crate near where I’d first seen her, a kind of alternate-universe version of my front steps, and lit her own cigarette, staring at the blank windshield. As soon as the car left her driveway I started coughing, hands on my knees, until the coughing turned
to hacking and the hacking turned to dry heaves and I had to steady myself against the house. I spat a few times, tasting pennies, or blood. Knowing I was found, I scrambled out from behind the bushes and stood where she could see me, right between our two houses, just a few long strides away from where she’d kissed him. She kept staring at the place the car had been, like I wasn’t there.

  Marlena began to sing, very quietly, a song I couldn’t place. Her voice was so clear, coming from a million directions at once, that to hear it was to feel it in your skin. I didn’t go inside until her song was over.

  In the version of this story where Marlena lives, I force her to stop singing, to tell me what’s going on. I force her, even though in that moment we are no more than strangers, to show me what’s in the plastic baggie she’s twisting in her fingers, its thin membrane illuminated by moonlight and snow. I threaten her, maybe, I grab her by the shoulders and shake, I refuse to leave until she confesses everything.

  New York

  The adult reading room was almost empty, except for a couple of college students and that girl again, nodding out, her dirty backpack placed on top of the table—the biggest in the room, and empty except for her—as if daring us to ask her to move. Her forehead nearly touching the wood. When I passed the info desk, Alice caught my eye and then tilted her head toward the girl, pointedly. I lifted my shoulders, gave her a so what face. So what? The girl smelled like urine and soil, but only if you got close. She was quiet, and it had been weeks since we’d found any syringes in the bathroom trash, at least.

  Back in my office, I sat down and slipped off my pumps, pressing my stockinged feet against the floor under my desk. My space is off a little landing between the library’s second and third floors. It is very small, just enough room for a desk and me; the single window lets in a kaleidoscope of green and blue light. On the higher levels, most of the smaller panes of glass are stained. From the outside, this building looks like a church, but it was built for trials. In the early twentieth century, it became a women-only courtroom, with a detention center in the back. The girl, and there have been many different versions of her over the years, belongs here as much as the books, I told Alice just the other day. She scares the kids, Alice said. She scares the moms, I corrected, and won, for a little while. I never give the girl any money, though seeing her always gets me thinking about how much I have. Of course she reminds me of Marlena. My office is full of money. Three-hundred-dollar leather bag hanging from the door hook. Cropped jeans, exact price forgotten, but definitely not less than one hundred and ten. Silver bracelet with inlaid row of turquoise, gift from Liam, probably half a grand. That morning I’d patted a seventy-dollar serum, a nose-stinging concentrate of green tea and rose hip, along my cheekbones. Growing up, we had just enough, and yet Mom had expensive taste, an innate sense of what made something beautiful and fine, probably fueled by the hours we spent dusting invaluable tchotchkes in the houses that she cleaned. We lived in fear of emergencies—an errant tree limb, one of Mom’s seasonal clients skipping their ski trip north, a rattle in the car’s engine, a toothache or slipped disc. We were just one big one away from Marlena and Sal, from the handful of other families that lived in the mobile homes and A-frames on our street.

  The smell of my hours-old coffee made my stomach twist, and I nudged the mug to the edge of my desk. My computer pinged. I tapped my phone instead, illuminating Sal’s message. Twenty-five seconds long. Call me back, if you want, he’d said. I’ll be here until Sunday. He actually spelled out the ten digits of his phone number, even the one, like the person from the past that he was. No one left voicemails anymore—Mom or Liam, sometimes, as a novelty, or maybe the pharmacy with an automated reminder, but that was it. Sal had sent me an email, too, his spelling and grammar perfect, a smiley face beside his name.

  Sal. Eight, maybe nine years old when I last saw him. His springy body appeared to be mostly limb, so that Marlena joked that if you threw him down a well he’d bounce right back. Marlena claimed to love him more than herself, but that didn’t always seem true—we’d go days and days without seeing him, or so I remember, days he must have spent shut up in that barn by himself, watching the adults filter in and out, mostly high, mostly drunk, mostly men, except for us two girls, who treated him like a toy. Once, when I was carrying Sal piggyback—this was in the fall, around when Marlena died—I smelled body odor, salty, like my brother’s. That was the first time he registered in my brain as a child who would grow up.

  I met him one of our first nights in Silver Lake. The doorbell rang three times in a row, crazily, and I’d been both alarmed and excited—I was still on the lookout, then, for Dad. Jimmy hollered at me to get it and I pointed my middle finger in the direction of his voice, closing my book, The Stand, I think, because I was reading it when we moved. That novel colored my first impression of Silver Lake, all trees and crooked mailboxes and snowed-over road, without even any streetlights. When I opened the door a few inches, Sal blew in, a runty, child-sized draft, a flightless piece of wind. His pajama shirt was misbuttoned, so that one end hung down past the other; he wore no coat. A child of the 45th Parallel, impervious to cold. He invited me over, babbling about his purple house, and I imagined that she’d sent him. Before he left, I knelt to his level and wrapped him in Jimmy’s checked scarf, knotting the edges at his collarbone, so that it hung down his back like a cape. Sal stood there patiently, giving off his kittenish smell, all fur and warm milk.

  When he dialed my number, did he think of the scarf, our house chaotic with boxes, the teapot whistling in the kitchen? What did he see when he looked at me that day? When we still had the potential to be nothing to each other? I was just a girl, a girl in the same general shape as his sister, but not yet an extension of her. Or maybe, to him, I was only ever what I am now: an accessory of Marlena’s, just as he was to me. As soon as I finished the knot, he pushed out the door and darted through the snowdrifts that separated our yards. His house was dark, but he went inside. To what, I can still only really guess, despite how many hours I spent there.

  I would call him back. Of course I would. It was less a decision than it was an acceptance. Alice knocked on my office door, two sharp raps that made my hungover ears ring. We had a staff meeting. I smiled and sat up straight in my chair, ignoring the hard throb in my head when I changed positions, and jammed my feet back into my shoes. Steady old Cat. I always come when called.

  Michigan

  A few days after Christmas, I woke late—nearly one in the afternoon, though I’d gone to bed before midnight. What a luxury, the endless velvet of teenaged sleep. Now I sleep patchily and have trouble waking; less than eight hours or more than three glasses of wine, and I’m hungry and dim.

  Mom was on the couch, reading the classifieds. The house was dark and cold, except where the winter sun splashed in through the living room window, a shriek of yellow that made me squint. “Good morning,” she said, glancing away from the paper. Her hair was in a fresh braid, and she wore jeans and a white pullover in her actual size—all good signs. “It’s the year 3000 and we’re still alive. But the bad news is, the aliens heard a rumor that lazy people taste the best.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “You hungry? Want me to make you something?”

  “I think I’m going for a walk.” How else would I be able to have a cigarette? I wasn’t hooked yet, not physically, but it gave me something to do, and I treasured having even that small action to hang my days on.

  Mom followed me into the kitchen, filling the teakettle with water while I poked around in the cabinets, loading up my sweatshirt pouch with fruit snack packets. Tea and wine, tea and wine; Mom was always drinking one or the other. “You know how expensive those are?” Mom said. “We’ve gone through like two boxes in a week.”

  “It’s not my fault we don’t have anything else to eat.”

  “We don’t? We have apples. We have cereal. Why don’t you make yourself an egg? There’s soup in the cabinet too—”

>   The teakettle hissed and she stopped talking. Mom has a way of dropping out of conversations. She gets a little worse as the years pass. At her second wedding, it happened during her toast, Mom standing at the foot of the long table and going silent right in the middle of explaining her own happiness, so that Roger had to pick up the thread. Dad would have made fun of her, especially given such a public opportunity, and I started falling for Roger then, when he paused, smiling, and asked her a question to get her started again, pulling her closer to him. Like Liam can be—gentle. But when I was a girl, I had no patience with Mom’s scramble to find her place in her own mind. “Let me make you a sandwich,” she said, finally, and I pictured how, if Dad were here, he’d meet my eyes, the two of us in on the joke. And we’re back! he used to shout at the dinner table, banging his hand against the table so that our plates rattled.

  In my room, I packed my bag with the cigarettes, the lighter gun, my phone, a copy of Franny and Zooey, and the fruit snacks. Mom appeared in the door frame, holding a brown paper bag, and I zipped my backpack in a hurry. She’d lost at least ten pounds since the divorce; her cheeks had caved into a permanent fish face. Jimmy and I gave her new nicknames—Elly the Skelly, Clickity-Clack, Mr. Bones—and though she laughed with us, it must have stung. Even at her skinniest, she was lovely, with her Nordic coloring and elfin cheek dimple, her intelligent eyes. I hated that she hadn’t passed their color—aqua blue and distinct—down to me. For a teenage girl, a beautiful mother is a uniquely painful curse.

  “Heads up,” she said, and tossed the sandwich. It hit my shoulder with a crinkling sound and landed on the floor. I picked it up, sighing pointedly. “Don’t go too far. We don’t really know what’s out there yet.”

  * * *

  Our houses butted up against a swath of open field, big enough for a full-fledged game of soccer, that ended, abruptly, with a row of trees. Up against the woods stood a rotting jungle gym with a dented slide. Marlena and I would lie there hundreds of times over the next year, our legs dangling off the platform edge, blowing smoke into the sky. Winter, spring, summer, fall, tenting a garbage bag over the wooden stakes like a roof when it rained, meeting at all hours of the night to talk. About the future, I think, and the past, and what we wanted and who we were and especially who we weren’t. Sometimes we’d take a harmonica with us, Marlena’s busted-ass guitar, and sing until our throats were raw.