by Paula McLain
I walked aimlessly for a while. It was after midnight and the streets were relatively empty. I was a little afraid to be out on my own, but not as afraid as I had been at home in my own bed. So I kept walking. At the corner of Nineteenth Street and Twenty-fourth Avenue, the 7-Eleven glowed in a friendly way. I had no money but went inside anyway, cruising the bright racks of magazines and candy bars as the Slurpee machine gurgled pleasantly.
“Hey stranger,” said a voice behind me. It was Claudia. A rope of foot-long red licorice trailed from one side of her mouth, and as she talked around it, I saw her teeth were pink. “Where’s Fawn? I thought you guys were attached at the hip or something.”
“Not anymore.” I shrugged. “We sort of had a fight.”
“About Tom?”
“Actually, yeah. How’d you know?”
“There’s always a boy involved, isn’t there? Besides, I sort of got the impression things weren’t going well between him and Fawn, and that maybe he’d rather be with you instead.”
I was shocked to hear this. “Really? Did he tell you that?”
“Tom never tells me anything, but most of the time he doesn’t have to. The man’s totally transparent.”
She burped unself-consciously, then bumped one side of the swinging doors with her hip. I followed her out into the parking lot, feeling baffled. Tom was transparent? I couldn’t fathom him any more than I could Fawn or Raymond—or anyone, really. The only one who seemed transparent in my world was me, but at the moment I didn’t care. I wanted Claudia to read my face, my mind, and know that I needed her to stay with me—with her pink teeth and affability, her skates pulsing back and forth on the asphalt—even for five minutes longer. I wanted to hear more about Tom, sure, about why she would ever guess he was interested in me, but it didn’t matter if we talked about the weather instead, or nothing at all, if we just sat and watched clouds of bugs circling the streetlight as if their lives depended on it. I knew that if I was left alone just then, I would lose my mind.
“Well, I’m glad I ran into you,” Claudia said, her ponytail flicking to one side as she glanced behind her.
“Do you have to go?” I said and sort of lunged at her, grabbing her arm. I knew I sounded pathetic but couldn’t help myself.
“Are you okay?” She wrinkled her forehead. “I mean, you look a little sick to your stomach.”
“I am,” I said, relieved for something tangible to pin my desperation on.
“My house is only a few blocks away. Do you want to come over and lie down awhile?”
“Really?” I asked. I couldn’t quite believe her niceness, her concern. If I ever showed one sign of panic or weakness to Fawn, she pounced on me like a hawk on a squeaking, flailing mouse. “I’d like that.”
“What’s your shoe size?” Claudia asked, sitting down on the curb and loosening the laces on her left skate.
“Seven and a half.”
“Close enough. Here,” she said, handing the boot to me, “we’ll be a lot faster this way.”
And we were. For the six blocks to the Fletchers’ house, we each used our one bare foot to push off against the sidewalk, and then sailed as far as we could before pushing off again. Inside, the boot was still warm and sweaty from Claudia’s foot, but I didn’t mind. It felt good to be moving in tandem, with a singular task and direction. Through the open windows of the houses we passed, we could see the occasional blue rinse of TV light, but most of the world was asleep around us. The sound of skate wheels clicked and rolled through the quiet like a miniature train, and I realized I was having fun. Just fun—without Fawn’s constant scrutiny, without the pressure of having to pretend I was older than I was or knew more than I did. Without having to guess what Fawn was thinking or plotting. For the first time in weeks, I was actually happy. So much so that by the time we arrived at Claudia’s house, I’d nearly forgotten why we were there.
“Everyone’s probably asleep already,” she said. “Wait here.”
In a few minutes she returned with a squat glass of warm water and an Alka-Seltzer tablet. “This might taste yucky,” she warned, bending to sit next to me on the front step, “but it should help.”
I dropped in the tablet and took a big gulp. Hot fizz climbed into my nose, washed over my tongue leaving behind the taste of aluminum and baby powder. It was awful. And it was kind of wonderful too, the way Claudia sat beside me and watched me drink it. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone worried about me.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked when I’d nearly finished.
“Yeah,” I said. “I feel better already.”
The next night after Fawn snuck out, I waited half an hour and left myself. This time I dressed with deliberation and headed straight for the 7-Eleven. Just as if I had willed her there with the force of my concentration, Claudia stood in the magazine aisle, sucking on a cherry Coke and chortling over something foul Alfred E. Newman had done in that month’s Mad.
We greeted each other, and I could tell she was just as happy to see me as I was to see her. Claudia didn’t seem to need to protect herself by acting casual or aloof the way Fawn did. Ultimately it was what I liked best about her, the way she was who she seemed to be, sunny and uncomplicated—no games or masks or machinations.
“You want to go check out Turner Park?” she suggested once we were outside.
“Why don’t we go someplace new? I kind of like it just being us.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Tom’s been a real jerk lately, so maybe it would be best if we didn’t run into him or, you know, anyone else.” She glanced at me knowingly.
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
I trusted Claudia to lead the way and when we came upon the wrought-iron gate of a cemetery, I was only slightly nervous.
“We used to come here when we were kids,” she said, “me and Tom and Collin, and tell ghost stories. Are you game?”
I nodded and followed as she led me well past the front gate to where a fat lilac sat, its unpruned blossoms brown and shriveled. “We have to crawl under,” she said. She pushed aside a handful of branches and pointed to a kid-sized hole in the chain-link fencing. “Tom used to say someone made that hole trying to get out, not in.” She raised her eyebrows spookily.
“Did you believe him?”
“Every single time.”
Once we were inside it was like any other garden in the dark, long sweeping pathways, islands of shrubbery, trees pressing down from above—except there were dead people everywhere.
“What I really want to show you are the babies,” she said as we walked. “There’s a whole section for them, little tiny graves. Some are so small you wonder if they’re not buried in shoe boxes.”
“Ugh.” I shook my head, trying to unhouse the image. “And you came here as a little kid? Weren’t you scared?”
“Yeah,” she said, stopping to pick dead lilacs out of her ponytail. “But I was sort of into it. It was my job to be scared just like it was Tom’s job to scare me.”
“What about Collin? What was his job?”
“To tell jokes on the way home if Tom did his job too well.”
“Jokes. Really? Collin doesn’t strike me as such a funny guy.” I thought briefly, guiltily of our talk by the mailbox.
“No, I guess not. But he used to be hilarious.”
“What happened?”
“His mom died. Didn’t he tell you?”
I shook my head.
“She had a brain tumor. I guess that was about five years ago, now. It was terrible. Her head swelled up and she lost all her hair. It’s a little creepy, I guess,” she said, turning to me in the dark. “But she’s in here. We could go see her grave.”
It was creepy but I wanted to see her just the same. Claudia found the right path, and there was Collin’s mom under a sedate and slightly pink marble stone: Miriam Elizabeth Caldwell, 1931–1968, wife and mother. I did the math on my fingers as Claudia stooped to clear away some long grass from the stone. “S
he was only thirty-seven,” I said.
“Yeah. She was really young, and pretty too. We had a barbecue once when I was a kid and she wore this orange bikini and a sarong that tied around her waist. She looked so fantastic, I wanted to be her. That was right before she got sick.”
We sat down in the grass right between Miriam and another Caldwell, and Claudia sank back, tucking her folded arms behind her head. “Can you imagine losing your mom?” she mused, as much to the trees and the faraway stars as to me. Then she caught herself, sat up suddenly, and said, “I’m sorry, that was really thick of me. You live with your uncle but I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about your mother. Is she still alive?”
“I think so.” I shrugged. “But I’m not sure. I don’t know anything about her either.” It was the strangest feeling, telling the truth to Claudia. Over the years I had concocted so many lies about Suzette—to friends and strangers, to Fawn, to myself—that the unedited facts sounded exotic spilling from my mouth, like I had woken to find I spoke Russian or Taiwanese. “She ran away when I was a baby, so my grandparents raised me.”
“Ran away? Can grown-ups do that?”
“Well”—I tried to laugh it off—“if I ever see my mother again I’ll be sure to tell her she broke the rules.”
“No, seriously though, Jamie. That’s really awful.”
And for the passing flash of the next few seconds, I really felt it, the unwieldy awfulness of Suzette’s leaving. I felt the anvil on my chest, my breath disappearing in a crush. Felt the smallness and the emptiness and the dark question that was Suzette in the universe somewhere. But where? A tear rolled into my ear and then another. Claudia put her hand on my hand in the grass. She was being so nice, and without making me feel stupid at all. But it was hard, thinking about Suzette, being reminded of all I had lost. I looked up into the fuzzy stars, focusing on the larger ones around the moon, which were surely planets, until I wasn’t so aware of my own body, of the way it hurt to breathe.
Claudia was silent for a long time and then said, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
An hour or so later, Claudia and I were back at the 7-Eleven parking lot, splitting up to head home. “I could meet you here tomorrow,” she said. “And I promise I’ll think of someplace better to hang out in the meantime.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I actually sort of liked the cemetery.” And I meant it.
When I got back to Raymond’s, I saw that not only was the screen we used to sneak out of fully back in place, but the bamboo blinds were drawn. Fawn was home. I had my key but didn’t want to risk going in the front door and waking Raymond, whose truck was in the drive. I sucked in my breath, prepared myself for the worst, and knocked on the screen. “Fawn,” I whispered. “Are you awake? Let me in.”
To say I expected a hassle from her is an understatement. I wasn’t sure Fawn would let me in at all. But before I could even knock again, the blinds rolled up, and there was Fawn’s face, beautifully blurred in the dark. “I’ve been wondering when you would show up,” she whispered, deftly pulling the screen aside to let me in.
I was too surprised to speak. The last time Fawn had said anything to me was to call me a bitch—and that was several days before. Who was this girl?
Once I was fully inside, Fawn sat back on her cot and watched as I shucked off my shorts and T-shirt.
“You’ve lost more weight,” she said. And then, when I didn’t answer, “At least five pounds. You look great.”
“Thanks,” I said, and slid under the cool sheet in my bra and panties.
“So where were you?”
“Um, out. With Claudia.” I didn’t want to say anything about the cemetery. Fawn wouldn’t understand. She’d make a joke, ruin it. But she didn’t seem as interested in where I was as with whom.
“What? You and Claudia are best pals now?”
I flared at her. “What’s wrong with Claudia?”
“Nothing, nothing.” Fawn backed off. “I just didn’t know you were, you know, best friends now.”
Fawn’s interest was confusing, suspicious. If I didn’t know better, I might have guessed she was jealous. “It’s not like you’ve been around so much,” I said pointedly.
“I know.” Her voice softened then. “But I’ve decided to forgive you.”
I flopped over and faced the wall, not sure what to feel. What if I wasn’t ready to forgive her yet? She’d been so hurtful and so distant, and now she thought she could just reel me back in?
“I’m not mad at you anymore,” she said more loudly, in case I hadn’t heard her. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
The thing was, I hadn’t been a saint either. And I had missed her so much. I felt myself caving by the second, and when I turned to face her, it wasn’t because I couldn’t help myself, but because I didn’t want to. “I’m not mad at you either,” I said. “I was never really mad at you, I guess. I don’t know. I’m just sorry for everything that happened. For Tom and everything.” I took a deep breath and continued, unable to look at Fawn. “I never slept with him, you know. I made that up.”
“I know that, stupid. Jeez, give a girl some credit.” She shook her head lightly, chidingly, at me in the dark. “If ever there was a virgin, it’s you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling stung.
“It’s like a big flashing sign over your head, sweetheart.” She mimicked a flashing motion with her hands: “Cherry. Cherry.”
“I don’t think I’m that bad.”
“It’s not bad, exactly. There have to be a few virgins in the world, sort of like division of labor. You’re just doing your part.” She laughed, pleased with her own analogy.
“I won’t be a virgin forever,” I insisted.
“Whatever you say, dear,” she said, her voice trailing off. And then she was asleep.
Fawn never did fully fill me in on how she spent her time those days and nights we weren’t speaking, but after a time, I was able to put most of the pieces together on my own. A big part of the equation was the Razzle Dazzle, a bar on West First Street that Fawn introduced me to with proprietary flourish soon after we made up. It was sort of a dive, with a diamond-shaped gravel parking lot and a long, low front window studded with beer signs and dusty spiderwebs. As Fawn led the way toward the front door, I worried that we wouldn’t make it past the bouncer—what about ID?—but there was no bouncer, and the bartender knew Fawn by name. Seconds after we walked in, he’d slid her a gin and tonic with extra lime as if she had one on standing order.
I ordered a sloe gin fizz and tried to keep my voice steady. It was my first cocktail in a bar, and I didn’t want anyone, especially the bartender, to know that. But I was soon to learn that all the barriers, nets, and fail-safes I’d always just assumed were in place to keep someone like me from getting into real trouble were purely theoretical. I could have drunk myself comatose in full view of the bartender, could have stripped in the center of the pool table in the back room and made a few friends—as well as some cash—in the process. If anything, what prevailed there and everywhere over the coming weeks was a feeling of permissiveness, of silent and not-so-silent invitation. And then there was Fawn, a firm hand on my back, urging me on.
For the first few nights I felt more than a little guilty thinking of Claudia waiting for me at the 7-Eleven. She’d been so nice to me and I liked being with her, but I also didn’t know how Fawn would respond if I asked if Claudia could come out with us. It was still pretty fragile territory, this new good feeling with Fawn, and I didn’t want to threaten it in any way. For this reason, I swallowed questions I still had, like what had really happened between Fawn and Tom. I wanted to believe Fawn’s story that Tom had gotten too serious, but Tom had been pretty convincing the night of Claudia’s slumber party—baffling in regards to his behavior with me, true, but when he talked about Fawn his message was crystal-clear. Was the truth that she’d gotten in over her head with Tom, that she liked him so much sh
e wouldn’t or couldn’t get the hint when he lost interest? And if she would lie to me about this, what else might she lie about?
But Fawn seemed to have forgotten about Tom altogether. She had new friends, new conquests—like Murphy, the drummer for Nickel Bag, a local band that played the Razzle Dazzle four nights a week, doing Deep Purple covers and Santana and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Murphy would come over and sit with us on breaks, and sometimes would send out dedications to us, saying “This one’s for my favorite pretty ladies,” or some such bullshit. He had his eye and occasionally his hands on Fawn, and she didn’t discourage him. I thought he looked a little like Tom, though Fawn said she didn’t see the resemblance at all. “Murphy’s a man, not a boy,” she insisted. He was twenty-five and had lived in California for a while.
“Do you know how to surf?” Fawn asked him one night.
“Sure I do, babe,” he leered. “Come out to the van after the set and I’ll show you my board.”
I didn’t know how old the other guys in the band were. Before the first set, they all seemed haggard and ancient to me, but song by song, the years fell away. They became gods, particularly after my third or fourth cocktail, and then there was only the music, vibrating from amps not ten feet from my head, and the syrupy taste of grenadine on my tongue, and a lovely fading sensation as everything grew edgeless. Between sets Fawn would disappear with Murphy into the parking lot, but I was never alone for long. One of the guys from the band would come sit with me, or invite me out to the Dumpster to smoke. The bass guitarist’s name was JJ. He was cute in a grubby way and spoke with a fake British accent that faded as the night wore on. For the better part of a week, I was his girlfriend or something like it. He’d pull me onto his lap or into a corner, stroking my belly with calloused fingers. He told me I was luscious, hissing the word along my neck, and I felt it was true, that I was luscious, that he was powerless against my charms. When he led me out into the alley and rubbed against my leg, his tongue hot in my ear, I waited to feel entirely swept away, but the place smelled like garbage and cat pee, and within two minutes, JJ had backed away from me, murmuring “fuck” under his breath, and the next night, he was attached to a town girl named Tammy and seemed not to remember me at all.