Marlena Page 5

  “In case you couldn’t tell, I’m trying to sleep,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

  “I can’t go,” I said. “She’ll listen to you.”

  “You’re a moron,” he said, and shut the door on me.

  Dad was next. I stood on the porch. It was so cold the air had a smell that reminded me of holding my breath underwater. A shadow drifted through the barn’s windows—too large to be Marlena or any of her siblings. Perhaps it was her dad. It didn’t occur to me then, and not for a long time after, to wonder how Marlena really felt about her mother. I was so focused on my father’s disappearance that I hadn’t realized a mother’s might be even worse.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed Dad’s number. The phone sang “Country Roads” into my ear—Dad had figured out how to change his ring into music. He was great at everything useless. The song was almost halfway over before he answered.

  “Dad,” I said. “Let me come home.” The shadow in the Joyner window disappeared. I wouldn’t beg.

  “Hi, babe,” he said, his voice so close, so his, that for the first time I thought about what a phone actually does. “What are you talking about? You are home.”

  * * *

  The night before school started I carefully cut the collars out of every single one of my T-shirts. I put one on—plain white except for C-O-N-C-O-R-D in red letters across the chest—and stood in front of the narrow mirror that hung off a plastic hook on my closet door. Now the T-shirt slid off my shoulders when I slouched to one side, cocking my hip; it gaped toward my cleavage when I leaned forward, even just a little. It looked good—better. Sexier and tougher at the same time. I balled up the leftover collars and shoved them into a mateless sock that I buried in the back of a plastic drawer.

  New York

  As usual, the conference room was boiling. We went around in a circle, delivering our weekly updates. I talked about the platform-wide surge in followers we’d been enjoying since my intern posted an animation of a sleepy bunny falling headfirst into an open book; I reported that the gala invites would go out by Friday. No one asked why I was sending them late. I manage our branch’s communications—a lot of copywriting and event planning, lunches and meetings and social media strategy. Details and people. “Close enough to being a writer, isn’t it, working at a library?” Liam said, on one of our early dates. I’d just gotten the job after years of sixteen-hour days, internships and volunteer gigs and networking, all sandwiched between waitressing shifts and nights behind the bar. He didn’t mean it that way. My phone vibrated in my blazer pocket and I sneaked it out onto my lap like a college kid, expecting some follow-up from Sal.

  Liam, with a question about when I’d be home.

  What did Sal want to know? It was hard for me to pinpoint where one memory stopped and another began. The tattoo Marlena talked about getting on the inside of her wrist, the word blue, her favorite color, her favorite album, a bridge across her pale blue veins, became the color of the walls in Liam’s old apartment. The tattoo I myself got—yes, a word, just as hers would have been—when I was thirty, to celebrate a year of sobriety that didn’t last much longer than that. Yes, because I needed a physical reminder to say yes to the person I want to be, not the person I mostly am. Now my ankle says yes for no reason.

  It was the only time I’ve voluntarily had a needle against my skin, at least outside of a doctor’s office. I won’t tell Sal that part. Thank God he was too young then, to remember much. To remember how when it was Marlena and me, when he was with us, at the movies or in the backyard, driving around in Ryder’s car, she was always high and I was usually drunk, and if we were both drunk I was drunker.

  Our last Fourth of July, she braided a section of her hair, skinny as a pinky finger, and left it in until Halloween. I tugged the elastic off and tried to unwind the strands but they were stuck fast with sand and salt and smoke and grease, all the moments that made up our summer, knotting them like a dread. I’ve heard your hair retains an imprint of everything you ingested since it started growing. A single strand is like a fossil that way. We soaked it in conditioner and still couldn’t get it untangled. I cut it off for her, at the scalp, leaving behind a funny, spiky tuft. I think, maybe, I could tell Sal this.

  I never once imagined him grown up, and now he is. He looked exactly like her, as a kid—his hair was shorter, but not by much, longer than normal for a boy. It brushed his shoulders. His nails were always filthy, fingers tacky with juice and who knows what else. I didn’t always like it when he tried to hold my hand, though mostly I let him. The winter we met, he’d made a game out of jumping off the hood of a broken-down car in their front yard, into a drift of snow. He screamed when he hurled his body into space, arms spread, so that he cycloned through the air. Ow! he cried when he landed, stunned every time. The force of his weight compacted the snow until it was slick and hard and almost shiny. And yet he did it over and over again, demanding that we watch.

  * * *

  Alice untied and retied her headscarf, releasing the almond-butter smell of her hair and ridding the air, for a second, of its onion miasma. I felt a wave of fondness for her that lasted only until she brought up the girl. “We can’t just let her loiter in here,” Alice said, sitting up straight for the first time in an hour, leaning into her outrage. “Day after day, for hours. She takes up half the table.”

  “Most of the time no one’s even in there,” I said, and then, “We are a public resource. Who does she bother?” Pretty much everyone agreed with Alice, I could tell, but I pushed, asking again who she bothered, and because of the tone of my voice Alice was the only one who said, “Me, she bothers me.” We came to no conclusion. When we all trickled out of the conference room, the girl was gone, her place at the table empty, three crumpled wrappers under the chair where she’d sat.

  On my way out, I crouched by her chair. I picked up the three wrappers—twisted cellophane, from rolls of Smarties—and tucked them into my jean pocket. It was only four, hours earlier than I ever left. I didn’t tell anyone I was going.

  When I reached the mouth of the subway, the walk sign turned to green and I changed my mind, darting across the street and down the block to the North Park Hotel, where there’s a lounge I’ve always liked. It was quiet there that time of day, just a couple of old ladies chatting quietly at the corner of the bar. I sat in one of the low couches by the window and shrugged off my coat. I would have a drink, and then I’d call Sal. I wanted so badly just to text him. The conversation would be more comfortable without the intimacy of voices. But a text wouldn’t have the right gravity—and anyway, the drink would help.

  The waiter came and we performed the ritual, exchanging our handful of words. I ordered a martini. It cost fourteen dollars. The waiter nodded, took the leather-bound menu, and disappeared. The people walking by kept their heads down. They thought their private thoughts. I liked the ones who ran across the street the instant the hand went red, into the slow-moving wall of traffic. The martini arrived; the waiter shook and poured. Just one, dry and salty. Splinters of ice floated on the surface. Two fat green olives drowned on the plastic spear. I ate them last, so tight with gin that they bit me back.

  Michigan

  Kewaunee High School was a squat brick building in the middle of a cornfield, and with the snow swirling around it I was reminded of one of those bunkers where scientists live for years in Antarctica, conducting tests of the earth’s magnetism. Jimmy dropped me off and I joined the students funneling through the front doors. I believed, back then, that Marlena and I were pulled together by an invisible current. That morning, when she blew in, bringing a considerable amount of snow with her, coatless, hatless, wearing Keds and baggy jeans soaked almost to the knee, I felt a grateful wonder at the fated-ness of our friendship, though the school lobby was probably the most predictable place for us to meet. The first bell had rung ten minutes earlier. I was sitting on the stairs, alone. Stalling.

  “Hey!” she said, leaning
against the railing so that she filled my view. Instead of a backpack she carried a small tote with nothing on it but the sentence “Dogs like books too!” It didn’t appear to have any books in it. She fished out a pack of Parliaments.

  “You can smoke in here?” I asked.

  “Are you an idiot,” she said, tucking a cigarette behind her ear. Her thermal shirt was mustard-colored, and above her right breast that pin she always wore caught the lobby’s fluorescent light. “I had a night.” She grabbed the puff at the top of my knit hat and tugged it off my head, dropping it onto the muddy tile. “Not a good look for you,” she said, and I wondered if it was happening, if she would be cruel to me now that we were at school. “Want to get out of here? The first day back is always bullshit. They’re just gonna phone it in until next week.”

  Botany/Soil Ecology had begun a few minutes ago. I’d already missed homeroom. “Like, skip?” One morning the previous April, I’d ditched choir with Haesung for the first and only time. We met in the bathroom farthest from the rehearsal room. We were so nervous we spent the whole time locked in separate stalls, jumping onto the toilets whenever someone opened the door, lest they recognize us by our feet.

  “Like, skip?” Marlena parroted. She twirled a strand of my hair around her finger. “You’re seriously the cutest person I’ve ever seen.” Her hand was so cold it lowered the temperature of the air around it. “I have to get something from my locker. You probably saw the shop lot when you came in? No one will be out there in this snow. You can wait in the houses. I’ll be like, five minutes.”

  She sprinted up the steps, her tote bag banging against her hip, and vanished behind the swinging doors.

  * * *

  Outside, the snowstorm had mellowed, flakes whirling from everywhere at once, like the spray from a snowmobile. I unlatched the gate that surrounded the shop class lot, white crystals peppering my eyelashes. The area was empty except for a dozen doghouses, some as big as sheds, others so small I’d have to crawl to get inside. Staked into the ground near the entrance a wooden sign dripped blue letters: “$150 Dollars! Treat your DOG like a KING and SUPPORT KHS Football! GO FIGHTING VIKINGS!” All the Os doubled as smiley faces.

  I ducked into the biggest doghouse to wait for Marlena. Inside it was cold and dry, snowdrifts piled against the back corners, the wood crystallized with a glaze of ice. One entire wall was covered with the word “PIZZA,” gouged again and again into the wood. At the very bottom in different handwriting: “FUCK YOU FATTY-TITS.” I sat down, my back against the words. After thirty-two minutes exactly I would leave, I decided. Whatever happened in Silver Lake wouldn’t carry over here; this was a lesson. But seventeen minutes later, when I heard footsteps dragging through the snow outside and Marlena appeared in the door, blocking out the light, I had to admit that so far, almost everything I’d predicted about her had turned out wrong.

  “Funny you figured out which one is ours,” she said, and I felt a wary relief. Her tote had been replaced with a backpack, and she was now, for the first time since I’d met her, wearing an actual winter jacket. She’d put on some makeup. Her eyes were black-rimmed, and her cheeks sparkled when she tucked her hair behind her ears. “Ryder did that. Not the pizzas, the fuck-you part.”

  “I thought maybe you weren’t coming.”

  “I had to get some stuff.” She shrugged off the backpack. “My sheet music, books, all that jazz.”

  “You took forever.”

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Chill.”

  “Okay, sorry, sorry,” I said. “So what now?”

  She pulled an Altoids tin from her coat pocket and popped it open. “First, we’re going to smoke this joint.” She plucked out a joint, slightly skinnier than the ones Jimmy hid in a playing card box in his top desk drawer, and sniffed it before lighting one end and sucking on the opposite side. A few seconds later, smoke curled out of the corners of her mouth. Her voice went tight, as if she were squeezing her words through a straw. “Your turn.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Still, she held the joint toward me, its smoke giving off a sweet smell, like Jimmy’s sweatshirt after he got off a shift.

  “No.” I kind of wanted to, but I was too afraid to try it now, at school of all places.

  “You want to hang, you have to smoke.” She raised one of her eyebrows slightly, as if in challenge.

  “I don’t want to.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m just kidding. Your face! Oh my God. You really think I’d make you smoke weed? Who do you think I am? You know me better than that by now, I hope.”

  I forced a smile and tried to shake my head like “You got me!” The cloud of smoke was making me dizzy.

  “You did drug your brother,” I said, finally.

  “Touché.” She exhaled a series of rings, her throat going pfft before each O left her mouth. I was impressed. “I’ve hot-boxed the shit out of this doghouse so many times. If we made a bonfire out of this place, the whole city would get stoned. Babies would get stoned. I’m serious. Fetuses in the womb would get stoned. They’d be like, ‘Ahhhhh, Mom, what the fuck.’”

  “Won’t that stuff mess up your voice?”

  “What, pot? Haven’t you ever heard of Janis Joplin? Or Stevie Nicks, you think she didn’t smoke weed?”

  “Of course I have,” I said, though I hadn’t. The first time Marlena sang “Rhiannon,” picking out the chords slowly on Jimmy’s guitar, I asked what it was. We have to fix this, right now, because your soul is at risk, she had said. She texted Ryder to tell him not to come pick us up, and we spent the rest of the night listening to Fleetwood Mac’s first album until every word imprinted itself on my DNA. It’s Marlena’s music, not the stuff that was on the radio then, that really gets to me. She loved the Pixies, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and Sublime as much as she liked the slowed-down, good-for-singing stuff, Joan Baez, Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn, Etta James, and of course the goddess Joni Mitchell, old-school singers her dad introduced her to. I don’t listen to those songs. Years ago, a date played Fleetwood Mac on his antique record player and I was fifteen again, a disorienting sensation, like turning a corner too fast. I told him I wasn’t a fan.

  She rubbed her wet eyes with the back of her hand. “Shall we?” she said, and for the second time in less than two hours I acted as her mirror. I stood an instant after she did. I even adjusted my backpack, without thinking, when she shifted the straps across her shoulders.

  * * *

  I followed Marlena into the residential neighborhoods surrounding the school. These houses had chimneys and shutters and multiple stories, elegant, weather-beaten shingles, wraparound porches. Marlena claimed to know the last name of every single family who lived in every single house, on both sides of the street. I tested her, pointing to a yellow one with bay windows, a ramshackle brick one with an iron gate. She could always identify the occupants, or she was a very good liar. She told me rambling stories about the people inside; the Grinells, where the father (the brother of the probate judge!) was once arrested for trying to stab the mother, the Davisons, where the oldest son was a famous recluse and suspected albino.

  “Mar,” I interrupted. “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, ha. To Ryder’s, sorry.”

  Just beyond the post office we intersected with a set of train tracks, following them until they ended in a pile of torn-up ties. We continued up the road until we reached a motel called the Mapletree, one word, advertising NO VACANCY/CABINS AND ROOMS. A picket fence enclosed the main building, where neon tubing on a long window flashed out “B-A-R,” one letter at a time. I’d never been to a place that seemed more vacant in my life. A dozen or so one-room cabins dotted the woods around us, as rickety and slapped together as houses a kid would build out of Lincoln Logs.

  “He lives in a hotel?”

  “Sort of,” said Marlena. “Him and his mom share an apartment in the big building. But it’s cool, because he can pretty much do whatever he wants in the empty cabins. Some have pe
ople living there, but lots don’t.”

  “So how do they make money?”

  “They have renters. There’s this crazy guy whose whole face got burned off, so he just has these holes, like sort of shaped like what should be there? Like nose hole, eye hole, mouth hole? One time I ran into him out here in the dark when I was leaving Ryder’s and I swear to god I almost shit myself.”

  The bar—which presumably doubled as the lobby, because there was a sign with room rates hanging next to the register—was full of a tea-colored light that fell through the lace curtains flanking the single window. There was nobody in the room, but a TV against the back wall played a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond, the volume turned to deafening. A grocery bag on the bar top had Marlena’s name written on it in marker, letters all capitalized. She lifted out the contents one by one: four family-sized cans of Campbell’s Chunky Soup, beef barley flavor, a few rolls of toilet paper, and some mildewy ears of corn, silk tassels hanging limply off the ends.

  “From Ryder’s mom,” she said. “I don’t know how to cook this.”

  “My mom grills it.”

  “Très gourmet.” She loaded everything back into the bag and slid it off the counter, carrying it against her hip. “I guess they’re in 42,” she said, and I followed her through a door just to the left of the TV, which opened onto a salted pathway trickling through the snow, pocked here and there with soda bottle caps and candy wrappers, pieces of tissue, coffee filters maybe, stained a reddish pink. There were only about eight cabins, but the numbers jumped around, as if designed to confuse anyone looking for a specific place. When we reached 42, the number painted in tiny red letters on the door, Marlena shouted, “Knock, knock!” The door swung wide, broken, maybe, nearly hitting her in the face. She stepped back, the groceries shuffling in the bag. “Goddamn,” she said. “You don’t have to break it down.”