Marlena Read online

  “Look at that,” she said, pointing at the S scrawled by the van’s tires into the fine powder coating the street. “Those kids are going to kill someone.” The cuter of the two boys I’d seen hanging around Marlena’s hopped from the driver’s side, and his zitty friend hauled a duffel bag from the backseat. They roughhoused their way to the barn, the cute one ambushing the other with fistfuls of snow.

  Mom and Jimmy and I still weren’t used to Dad-less holidays, even after our depressing Christmas. Instead of eating real dinner, we ate countless pigs-in-blankets and three cans of black olives, because, as Mom put it, “we could.” By nightfall Mom and Jimmy had graduated from festive to loopy. They laughed too loud and talked over each other and made increasingly stupid decisions in gin rummy, so that I won over and over. “You,” Mom said, “are the all-time champion.” She leaned across the table and tried to balance an olive on my headband. Her eyes were marbled with veins. The olive bounced onto my lap and then onto the carpet.

  “I never believed in a germ I couldn’t see,” Jimmy said, picking it up, inspecting it for hairs, and popping it into his mouth.

  Since well before sunset, bass had thrummed in the foundation of our modular, connecting our house to the Joyners’. The vibration held steady when the clock struck midnight. The ball slid down into the crowd of people in Times Square. The year prior, when I said I’d love to see it happen in person, Dad had given me one of his You’re no daughter of mine looks. That right there, New York City on New Year’s, is hell, he said. See all those people? Every single one of them has to pee, and there’s nowhere to do it. My first New Year’s in New York, I’d stand on my fire escape listening to the city-wide cheer of eight million people wishing for happiness at the same exact time, and think how he’d been wrong about that too. I remember wondering if we’re all cursed to have the same arguments with the same people forever, no matter how gone they are. Happy New Year, I whispered to the cabs below, to the goddamn Empire State Building, just drunk enough to squeeze the hands of Marlena and Dad, as if they were right there. Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.

  “Happy New Year!” Mom and Jimmy shouted, banging their pans together.

  “Happy New Year!” I said, two seconds late. I smacked the underside of my pot with my palm. Instead of my usual New Year’s feeling, that bubble in my heart, filling up, I felt the opposite; a deflation, a popping then a falling, as if I were one of the balloons in Times Square, drifting down to rest on the sidewalk before getting trampled.

  “Going to go test out what the air feels like in the new year,” I said.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jimmy said. “It appears that no miracles have taken place here tonight. The old are still old, the ailing are still ailing, and my freak sister is still a complete and total freak-loser.”

  “Hey,” Mom said.

  Outside, the Joyners’ music was even louder; classic, country-infused rock, some male singer Dad would have recognized. Light seeped through the barn’s planks, pulsing in time with the music. Who would open the door if I walked over there and knocked? I felt, somehow, worried for Marlena. Absently, I wandered over to the road, to the line of parked cars. I would smoke somewhere too far from the window for Mom and Jimmy to see, on the off chance that either of them was coherent enough to wonder where I’d gone. I leaned against the van I’d seen those two boys drive up in and lit a cigarette, enjoying the sneaky little thrill that came with indulging in a new, bad habit. In five years, smoking a cigarette would be like putting on pants. I tipped my head against the window and exhaled.

  Something smacked into the glass behind me and I jumped, slamming the base of my skull into the van.

  “What the,” I said, and the smack came twice more, a palm against the window. The door slid open and Marlena grinned at me from under the automatic light, a blast of skunky smoke whirling around her. The boys were with her. The cute one’s hand was nestled under Marlena’s bare knee, and the acne-covered one sat in the front passenger seat, his seat tilted back. My cheeks twanged just looking at him.

  “Don’t you ever get cold?” I asked.

  “Not really. I’m like a vampire. But maybe if you stand there keeping the door open. Get in.” She slid over, into a kind of cave the boy’s body made to accommodate her. I climbed in and shut the door, thinking briefly of Haesung, how much she’d hate what I was doing, how she’d never have gotten in the car. The light clicked off. “Greg, this lurker is Cat. She lives in that little gingerbread house over there. Cat, that is Greg,” Marlena pointed to the front and the boy’s profile nodded, “and this is Ryder,” she kissed him noisily on the cheek, “and we are all really stupendously stoned and I’m one hundred percent sure that Ryder’s blacked out right now.” She flicked his ear, and in slow motion, he tried to bat her hand away. “See?” Though she’d called me lurker, her voice was warm.

  “Nice to meet you?”

  Ryder snickered, and my skin flared.

  “So tell me, because I’ve been thinking about it and it literally makes less sense to me than anything in the world. Why the fuck did you move here? Nobody moves here. People are born here. People die here. People pass through here, I guess, but hardly even that.”

  “Ram moved here,” Greg said.

  “Ram’s dad was like the original pioneer of here,” said Marlena. “Doesn’t count.”

  “My mom’s crazy,” I said. It came out faster than I intended, and I realized that I mostly meant it. Mom had worn the same tank top, braless, for four days. She did not have a job, or a single friend, and sometimes I walked into the living room to find her staring into space or even, horribly, asking questions of herself out loud.

  “She must be. Ryder’s mom’s crazy, too, if it makes you feel better. And Greg’s is dead. And mine’s MIA, presumed dead, and if she’s not, she’s definitely crazy.”

  Marlena laughed, and so did Greg, a little. I let myself, too.

  “Well, sorry, I guess?”

  “You didn’t kill them. And anyway, we’re the ones who should be sorry for you. You just moved to Silver Lake.”

  “Where is the lake, anyway?”

  “The lake to which we can attribute the name of this place is, really, called Silver Lake,” said Greg. “It’s a mile or so past the sign, one of the many small lakes inland from Lake Michigan. Not the finest of those, either. Lots of seaweed, zebra mussels, etc.” He pronounced etc. one letter after another, drawing out the sounds. Eee. Tee. Cee.

  “Thanks, Professor,” said Marlena. “Also you’re not supposed to walk around barefoot on the sand because of the needles, so, yeah. Like I said. Welcome.”

  “Basically, not worth a visit?”

  “We go sometimes,” said Greg, “despite its flaws. Home, and whatnot.”

  “Not mine,” said Ryder, his voice coming up from underwater.

  “Ryder and his mom live in Kewaunee,” said Marlena. “He used to live in that trailer down the street, the one with the happy face on it? But he’s moved up in the world.” Kewaunee was the next real town over, on the bay, where the schools were, and the charming downtown, and the Walmart and the movie theater and the only Chinese place for sixty miles. Aside from me and Marlena and Greg, Silver Lake was just a gas station, a trout fishery, a church, and a sex shop.

  “Marlena,” a voice shouted from outside, mean even from a distance.

  “Hurry up, please, it’s time,” said Greg, in a put-on British accent.

  “Oh, lord. Be quiet and maybe he won’t find me. Put out your cigarette, Ryder, he’ll see the cherry.” She shrank down in the backseat, and I copied her.

  “Stalker,” said Greg.

  “Marlena, your daddy’s asking for ya, hear? Sal’s whining,” the man called, nearer.

  “What a liar,” Marlena whispered. “I put half a Dramamine in his milk. He’s conked out.”

  “You drugged your brother?”

  “Oh, don’t m
ake it sound like that. I read about it on a parenting blog. Anyway, what am I supposed to do? Risk him walking in on a bunch of people all tweaked out in the living room like last year? Truly,” she said, sighing dramatically, “the only good thing about my dad being all slush-brained from that shit is that I will never, not in a hundred billion years, not as long as I live, touch that drug.”

  “Yeah, but by touching Ryder,” said Greg, and Marlena reached around his seat and pulled his hair until he yowled.

  Tweaked out, I knew, had something to do with drugs, though I couldn’t have said what. I was a young fifteen. My knowledge of drugs came from school handouts and TV movies with moralistic endings. The circumstances of Marlena’s life scare me more now, in retrospect, than they ever did then. I let more immediate concerns override the danger; the delicate web of connection between the three of them, and how I envied it; the way a cigarette tasted, how it looked burning in the dark. How when I did something that made me nervous, I was rewarded with a shock of adrenaline that obliterated my self-consciousness and fixed me to the moment. I still chase this feeling. I can capture it during happy hour, sometimes, a diluted version—it lives near the bottom of drink two.

  “There goes my New Year’s,” Marlena said, tugging down the black tube dress she wore so that it wasn’t riding all the way up her thighs. Through the windshield I could see the man a couple cars ahead, looking into the windows. A minute and he’d reach ours. Without thinking about it, I tugged the handle and jumped out of the van, slamming the door closed.

  “Hey,” I yelled, walking fast, so that I’d intercept him before he reached the car. “You looking for Marlena?”

  “Who’re you?” he said. He wore a sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up around his forearms, so that I could just make out his tattoos. This was Bolt, the guy from the truck, I thought, the don’t-touch-me guy, the guy who’d left her on her front lawn like an empty shell.

  “Cat. Marlena’s friend.”

  “Okay, Cat-Marlena’s-friend. Where’s Marlena?”

  “She went walking around with Ryder, I don’t know, a little while ago. I was just in the van calling my dad,” I lied, grateful, for once, for my mousiness. In the lunar glow that Michigan gives off at night when there’s nothing but snow and stars, I could just make out the angry crease between Bolt’s eyes.

  “That way?” He gestured toward the Silver Lake sign.

  “No. Over there. Where the cars stop.”

  “If you see her, you tell her it’s time to come in now.”

  “I sure will.”

  He headed off the way I’d pointed, and I almost drew my elbow into my gut, a tiny huzzah, like the nerdy girl I still was. “Happy New Year,” I shouted. Instead of getting back in the van, I beelined for my house, chewing on a smile, feeling three sets of eyes follow me there. That was enough Cat for one night. I didn’t want to push my luck.

  Back inside, Jimmy was even drunker than Mom, his eyelids so heavy that to call him awake was no more than a technicality. Though Jimmy was just eighteen, Mom had given up pretending to turn a blind eye to his drinking and whatever-else-ing since we’d moved to Silver Lake. She claimed that rent-paying adults should be able to have a beer, and that it was constitutionally wrong that Americans could die for their country before having a drink with dinner. But really, she let him because she didn’t want to drink alone.

  Mom had nodded off in the computer chair, her chin against her chest, an exclamation of salsa drizzled onto the chest of her T-shirt—one of Dad’s. I logged out of her online dating profile and closed the browser. I combed my fingers through her hair until she stirred, and helped her to her room. “Your father can do the dishes,” she mumbled, I think, her arm around my waist. She curled up on top of the comforter, and I had to pull her legs flat to tug off her jeans, so loose they didn’t even need to be unbuttoned. I filled a glass with water and left it on the bedside table next to a couple of Tylenol. Jimmy was snoring on the couch; he could stay there all night. There was so much I wanted to ask him: about Marlena and tweaking, or better yet, where he thought Dad was right now, if he pictured him like I did, celebrating with Becky, not thinking about us at all.

  Until Marlena descended like a UFO, Mom and Jimmy were all I had. If I didn’t call Haesung or Dad, and I only responded to direct questions, I was pretty sure I could go a whole day without saying more than ten words. For New Year’s, I resolved to try it.

  Before going to bed I rearranged the magnetic letters on the refrigerator door. Happy new fam!, I spelled. We didn’t have enough Es and Ys.

  * * *

  Not long after, Jimmy reported that he’d gotten a job at a plastics factory. He speared two pieces of meatloaf, stacking them into a tower on his plate.

  “Is the money good?” Mom asked.

  “Twelve an hour,” said Jimmy.

  “That’s better than I would’ve thought.” I could tell from the look on her face that she had silently started to count.

  “Okay,” I said, pressing a carrot into a gravelly landslide of meat. “Let me get this straight. Aside from the obvious insanity of deferring a scholarship to Michigan State University to move to Silver Lake with us, now you’ve gone and taken a job at a plastics factory. A factory where people make plastic?”

  “Plastic is made at the plastics factory, yes,” Jimmy said.

  “Thanks for the clarification. Congrats, Jimbo! You’ve finally begun your downward spiral into a futureless hick who eats pot three meals a day. Maybe you can use some of the plastic you make to carry your weed around in.”

  “You know something,” Jimmy said, before Mom could intervene. “You’re growing up to be one snobby little bitch. Thank God we got you away from Concord before it made you even worse.”

  “Mom!” If Jimmy’d said “bitch” at the dinner table in front of Dad, he’d have gotten a smack. Mom just sat there, staring into her carrots.

  “I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “But, Cat, I will not be judged about my life choices by someone who is too young to drive.”

  I mashed my meatloaf into a meat wad. A couple years before, Jimmy and I had watched a documentary about American factories. People lost hands, eyes; people stopped to scratch their foreheads and thirty seconds later they plummeted into vats of boiling water. The movie was full of real-life accounts of accident after accident after accident. The subjects were all missing things: a strip of eyebrow, the top segment of their first and second fingers, entire arms.

  Jimmy told us how he’d seen the Help Wanted posting on the window, how the manager had looked him over top to bottom and asked if he considered himself a night owl. Jimmy was a night owl, and that was that. Jimmy modeled his khaki uniform and his protective eyewear, and then he showed us these gauzy tube sock sleeves that he was supposed to pull over his arms to protect him from burns. He’d work four days a week, sometimes from midnight to six in the morning. He described his duties in detail, but from then on when I pictured him at work I saw him standing in a bright room, picking up fingernail-sized chips of plastic and putting them back down on a conveyor belt.

  “It’s like a Huxley novel,” he said. This killed me. It was not like a Huxley novel. It was like working in a plastics factory.

  “Well,” Mom said. “It’s good to experience new things.” Her eyes were all big and sort of wondrous. She poured herself another glass of wine and left the dishes for me and Jimmy to clean up.

  * * *

  Eight words, the next day.

  Yes, no, no, no thanks, night Mom, night.

  * * *

  Marlena’s phone was often either dead or out of minutes, and so it was hard to get in touch with her—a quality that added to her magic. I assumed she’d been distant because school was about to start. She was cool. She must be, because of how she looked, because of how she sang, because of Ryder, how easily she called him her boyfriend. Kewaunee High squatted on the horizon like a beast, winged and all teeth.

  “Mom, the thing is, this has been a reall
y difficult time. Children suffering from the effects of divorce should be introduced to changes outside the family situation very, very slowly. That’s what everybody says. All the experts.” I was quoting, nearly word for word, from an anonymous message-board comment posted by bunneehart 2109 (help me my parents just got divorced and my cat got hit by my boyfriend’s car:(), an extremely unlucky person.

  “Fascinating. You know what that makes me think of?” She sprayed the counter around the sink with Clorox. Her bathrobe flopped open at the neck. It wasn’t tied tightly enough. I could see the grayish cups of the bra she’d been wearing for days. For a moment, I was overtaken by an urge to hit her. “Hint. It’s a Rolling Stones song.”

  “‘Satisfaction’? ‘Brown Sugar’?”

  “‘You can’t always get what you wa-ant,’” she sang. How could I explain it to her? She’d gotten married after dropping out of college. But I’d had Concord. How could I go from those ivy-covered buildings, from the cafeteria where students argued about Nietzsche and paid for coffee drinks with their own credit cards, to KHS—from a future that had seemed limitless (even if I couldn’t imagine a single thing about it) to one more like Mom’s, babies and a husband, every night the kitchen growing dim in the same way, the carpet forever in need of vacuuming. I really was a terrible snob.

  I tried to enlist Jimmy’s help. He could explain that I was motivated enough to practically home-school myself; he could remind Mom of the time I created a set of Spanish flashcards for him, color coded by conjugation, and picked up enough in the process that after a couple hours I could quiz him without even using the cards. I banged on his door. It took him a long minute to open it. Just a few days into his new job, and his eyes seemed deeper in his face, as if someone had pressed them into his skull with their thumbs.