Thin Space

by Jody Casella

  She twitches, blinks. “Marsh?” she says.

  I see what’s in her hands now. One of those stupid blown-up photos. I can just make out an eye, half a lip, the looped letters: AUS. My mother pulls herself up, perches unsteadily at the edge of the bed and a box tips off, clunks to the floor.

  “I came in to straighten up,” she whispers. “The things from the accident—I can’t look at them anymore.” She shakes the picture, and it’s like she’s waving a flag of surrender. “I’m sorry. I don’t like for you to see me like this.”

  I’m stuck, one foot in the hallway and one foot in the shadowy bedroom. A wild thought flips around in my head. It’s me, crossing the room, grabbing my mother by the shoulders. Telling her what I’ve done.

  Once and for all, just letting it out. Truth, like the dumb saying on the coffee house cup. The truth shall set you free or whatever.

  “Don’t pack up everything,” I manage to croak out. “Can you wait a little longer?” I keep my mouth open, try to say more. I can almost see myself doing it, spitting out the rest of what’s crammed up in my head. But I can’t imagine what would happen after that. What my mother’s face would look like. Horror? Anger? Shock? Her son, the person she thinks she knows—

  Something rumbles up from my chest. It’s a laugh, and I quickly swallow it down. Maybe I’m going to crack. Have a delayed nervous breakdown. It almost happened in the hospital the day I found out he was dead. When my parents stood by my bed, moaning Marsh over and over, that’s when I should’ve said it. I should’ve hurled myself out of that freaking bed and screamed at them.

  But is this something a person can even say to his parents?

  I get a flash of Maddie when she talked about her father, wanting him to know her. I’ve got news for her. He probably won’t.

  I grab the doorway to steady myself. I can’t keep doing this. It’s pointless—stupid—to keep replaying it. I suck in my breath, squeeze my eyes shut, will the anger to leak away.

  When it’s all gone, my mother’s just a sad lump on the bed, clinging to a crumpled picture. “I won’t,” she says, her voice cracking. “I mean, I’ll wait, Marsh.”

  I sigh as I help my mother up, walk with her across the room. We part ways in the hall—my mother heading downstairs, mumbling about ordering a pizza, and me, back to brother’s bedroom where I’ll stare at his ceiling until our dinner gets delivered.

  Maddie and I are standing in the hospital lobby when she starts a new line of questioning. “What about your story?” she says. “I spilled my guts to you yesterday. Now it’s your turn.”

  I don’t know what my face must look like, but Maddie’s cheeks immediately fire up. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says. “I was just thinking that I don’t know a lot about you.” She raises an eyebrow. “Besides your interesting choice of footwear. Or lack thereof.”

  “Well . . . uh . . . ” I really do want to talk to her, it’s just that what I want to talk about is her, not me. To buy a little time and throw her off track, I point to the hospital gift shop. “Let’s buy flowers first.”

  “Okay,” she says, but she picks out a clump of Get Well Soon balloons instead. “This is better than flowers. People will be so focused on these they won’t notice our bare feet.”

  I have to give her credit here. She’s very thorough. The more time I spend with her and her Plan B chart, the more ridiculous I feel about my old method: shuffling around aimlessly.

  We head over to the elevators, the balloons bobbing along behind us.

  “How’d you get past Sam’s eagle eye today?” I ask her. “That’s the story I want to hear.”

  She groans. “I told him I was hanging out with Lindsay and Heather.”

  “He bought that?”

  “It’s not a total lie. They invited me to a movie. I’m meeting them at the theater at four o’clock.”

  “Fun,” I say. “Lindsay and Heather.”

  “I know.” She smiles. “But they’ve been kind of nice to me. Probably because Lindsay has a crush on Sam, but that’s okay. I haven’t made that many friends yet. . . . ”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s cool.”

  A balloon thumps my chin and Maddie yanks it away. “I don’t know if I should warn her. He’ll never go for her. She’s a sophomore, so too young, according to him. It’s one of the main reasons he hates us hanging around.”

  “Right,” I say, even though I highly doubt this.

  Maddie must doubt this too, because she makes a snorty sound. “Okay, you’ve got . . . issues, he says. Like we all don’t. Whatever. It didn’t help that my mother was there too, with Mrs. Golden and her dumb cake.”

  “Jeez. What did she say?”

  “She was all like, ‘this is off the record. I’m not being a guidance counselor, I’m being a neighbor.’ I thought any second she was going to bring up how I walked around barefoot on the football field. She stared at my feet the whole time she was talking—”

  “About me,” I say, because I have a feeling that’s where this is going.

  “Yeah.” She looks at me, and then quickly averts her eyes. “She said you were going through a rough time. And she started talking about your brother. How he was a great kid—how both of y’all were smart and athletic, the popular guys in school. She really went on about it, how wonderful everybody thought you were.”

  “Huh.” I let out a breath. “You’re embarrassing me.” But for some reason, this conversation isn’t pushing me over the edge. Maddie’s looking up at me expectantly, so I smile. “And Sam’s still not thrilled about me hanging out with you?”

  “Well . . . ” She bites her lip. “That was the good stuff. Mrs. Golden had other things to say too.”

  Balloons whack me in the head when we step on the elevator. I knock at them so the doors will close.

  “Which floors did you do last time you were here?” Maddie says.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. That day’s kind of blurry to me now.”

  She pushes the button for the top floor, keeps tapping at it even though the light’s already on. “If you want me to stop talking about this, I will.”

  “No, keep going,” I tell her. I feel my feet heavy on the floor and my stomach dropping as the elevator shoots up.

  “So then she said that your barefoot fixation—that’s what she called it—was upsetting to people because it was like you didn’t care about yourself anymore. And she brought up what’s been going on with Brad, and Sam had to put in his two cents about that. How that just proves you’re unstable. I tried to tell them it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t even start those fights.”

  “Which I’m sure your mother believed.” I say it like I don’t care one way or another, but it feels kind of nice to know Maddie’s defending me.

  The elevator squeaks to a stop. The doors ding open, and we step out into a fairly busy hallway. There’s a waiting room immediately to our left and we move toward it.

  “My mother,” she says, stopping for a moment to look at the TV bolted to the wall. It’s blaring some news channel even though the waiting room is empty. “She’s kind of . . . in her own world lately. You know, she actually made a joke to Mrs. Golden about my stupid nightmares. Can you believe it? I thought I was going to die right there.”

  The conversation’s off me, so I let out my breath. “Did she give you a good dream analysis? Mrs. Golden lives for stuff like that.”

  “No.” Maddie frowns. “All she kept asking was who the people in the dreams were, did I know them. I mean, what difference does that make? It was weird.”

  I nod. “Yup, that’s our friendly neighborhood guidance counselor. Sometimes she gets weird ideas stuck in her head.” Inside, though, I’m thinking of her staring me down in her office, making me say the accident wasn’t my fault. But no point going off on that depressing tangent.

  “Oh, and listen to this: out of the blue, my mother has to bring up her divorces—plural—and my father dying. It was like ‘spill the
family drama’ day at the Rogers’ house. Sam left all mad, then my mother and Mrs. Golden and I ate some of her cake. She got kind of upset after that. Did you know her husband died of a heart attack a few years ago?”

  I scratch my chin. “That’s right.” I don’t know why I’ve forgotten this. “He was out shoveling, I think.”

  “That’s horrible,” Maddie says. “Lots of death in our neighborhood.” She blushes and throws her hand up to her mouth. “Oh. I’m sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I don’t mind talking about it with you.” I say it to make her feel better, but it’s halfway true. “You didn’t know my brother. Everybody else around here, that’s all they’re thinking when they see me—my brother and me and the accident. But you—all you know is me. Crazy barefoot guy at the bus stop.”

  “Hey.” She sounds offended. “I never thought of you as crazy. I’m here with you now, right?” she drawls the word. “We’re fixing to slide around a hospital looking for a doorway out of this world.” She laughs.

  “True,” I say, and I have to laugh too. “Well, let’s go find it.”

  I think I could do this all day—tiptoe around corners, slip into empty rooms, pull off my shoes, and sweep the floors with my feet. For some reason, Maddie and I can’t stop laughing. She makes up this system where one of us checks if the coast is clear and the other covers the area. We do little chunks like that all day, stepping in and out of our shoes. Maybe it’s the balloons. They keep whacking us. Or maybe it’s the weird looks we get from the people in the halls. I feel like I’m a kid, playing a game that’s not allowed. And it just makes me crack up more.

  When we hit the ward where I stayed during my recovery, I hesitate before getting off the elevator. Maddie doesn’t seem to notice. She’s out of breath. On the last floor, a nurse yelled at us, told us we needed to settle down and get to where we were going. Maddie and I grinned at each other. “Yeah, we’re trying to get sucked into the afterworld,” I whispered, and she practically lost it.

  But being back here doesn’t bother me too much. No one looks familiar. The hallways themselves don’t seem different from any other hallways in the building, same hospital smells and noises. I can’t even remember what room I was in. The whole time I was here is kind of foggy. It was only the day they discharged me that I started to feel like myself. That was when I watched my father sign the papers and I looked at my face in the mirror. That was when a lot of stuff hit me, about the accident and before.

  And that was when I wished I could crawl back into the fog.

  “Marsh?”

  Funny thing, maybe I’m still trying to do that. Step into a thin space, escape into fog.

  “Marsh? Are you okay?”

  A balloon taps the side of my head and I blink down at Maddie.

  “You zoned out on me again,” she says.

  “Sorry.” I keep my eyes on the clump of balloons. One of them looks like it’s lost most of its helium. It’s just sitting on the floor jogging a little up and down. “Do you really think this is going to work?”

  “I don’t know.” She bites her lip. “Do you want to quit?”

  It’s not like it’s a difficult question, but for some reason I can’t think of a response.

  “Marsh,” she says in her soft, twangy voice. And just like that, I know what my answer is.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not quitting.”

  The two of us cover a ton of ground, but we’re nowhere near finished. Too many occupied rooms. Too many suspicious people walking the halls. At three-fifteen, we’ve got to stop. We need to catch the bus downtown so Maddie can meet Lindsay and Heather.

  On the way over, she asks me if I want to see the movie too.

  This shouldn’t be a difficult question either, but the problem is the last time I went to this theater was with Kate and Logan. I’m not sure I can handle reliving that night.

  “It’s okay,” Maddie says. “No big deal. Another time.”

  But when the bus lets us off downtown, I find myself following her across the street. I can’t keep avoiding this place, I tell myself.

  It’s just a movie theater. What’s the worst thing that can happen?

  19

  Showtime

  “Before we go in, I have to tell you something.” We’re standing in line at the ticket booth, nudged up against each other because it’s so freaking cold out here.

  “Okay,” Maddie says. “Shoot.”

  Without thinking about it, I start blurting it out. “See, my brother and I came here with our girlfriends one time and—”

  “Kate and Logan?”

  My heart heaves up into my throat. “You know about this?”

  “No,” she says, “but I heard that Austin used to go out with Kate, and I know about you and Logan.”

  “Yeah, uh, well—” I can feel my stomach roiling. “It was a double date. Last summer.” I get a nice painful flash of the four of us standing on this very sidewalk. Logan’s breathy voice skimming my ear. Kate worming her way practically up into my brother’s armpit. The stupid smirk on his face—

  Maddie curls a gloved hand around my arm and I shiver. “Is this going to be too much for you?” she says. “To be here?”

  Yeah, I think, but instead I find myself saying, “No.” I’m getting that weird feeling again, like other times I’ve unloaded stuff on Maddie, that maybe it’ll be okay. The truth is, what happened that night is hanging over me. If I don’t get it out, it’ll knock around in my head for the next two hours. But if I can say it, just throw it out there, maybe it will go away for a while.

  I clear my throat. “I guess I started telling you this before, about how my brother and I did this really stupid thing.” I shake my head. “No. It was me. It was my idea, this stupid thing—”

  Before I can finish, Lindsay and Heather come skipping up with their arms linked. “Maddie!” Lindsay gushes. “We were just looking for you!” Her mouth makes an O. “Whoa. Are you guys together?”

  Maddie’s looking up at me and I nod—because what the hell? We’re standing here together, aren’t we?

  Lindsay and Heather pass each other knowing looks, then cut right in front of us and launch into one of their standard inane conversations.

  “No way.”

  “I told you—”

  “You did not—”

  I turn back to Maddie, who’s half smiling at me, her head tilted away from the girls. “So you did a stupid thing,” she prompts.

  I nod. “Right. My brother and I asked Logan and Kate to see a movie. Well, the four of us did that a lot, went to movies. I mean, what else is there to do around Andover? But anyway, it was summer, and we were going to this movie.” I’m rambling, trying to circle back to the point, but it keeps slipping away from me until it’s our turn at the ticket booth.

  I scan the list of movies and realize I’ve heard of none of them. “What do you want to see?”

  Maddie raises an eyebrow. “Pulse Referendum.”

  “Okay.” I have no idea what that is. “Two for . . . uh . . . Pulse Referendum?” I say, and fumble around in my pocket for my cash. There’s a nice, pathetic flash of déjà vu as I skip past the driver’s license, and I curse myself yet again for not getting rid of the damn thing. Glad to see there’s still some money left. But why wouldn’t there be? It’s not like I’ve been a big spender. A few bus fares, cheap hospital flowers, that pretty much covers my expenses these past few months.

  We push through the doors and the popcorn smell hits me. “We never ate lunch,” I say to Maddie. “You want something?” We sidle over to the concessions line, notice Lindsay and Heather already swaying in it, and I consider cutting in front of them this time but decide to let it go.

  I’m not done with my story, and now I’m feeling that if I don’t get it out of me, I might spontaneously combust.

  “You don’t have to pay for everything,” Maddie says. “I invited you, remember?”

  I wave my hand in front of my face. “W
hatever, but listen. See, that night was kind of messed up.” I close my eyes for a second and it’s like I’m back in the dark theater, sitting next to my brother and the girls, the light from the movie flickering over us. The sick feeling, like I’d been punched in the gut, that comes back too, so I have to stop, open my eyes, and search out Maddie’s face, just to keep from hurling all over my boots. “See, that night my brother kissed my girlfriend and—”

  “Wait,” Maddie says, and the word has two syllables. “I thought you said you did something stupid.”

  I blink at her. I don’t think I’m telling this story right.

  “Marsh.” It’s Heather. “I don’t have enough money. Can I borrow a couple dollars?”

  “Yeah, Yeah,” I say. I dig into my pocket again—I freaking hate this wallet!—thrust some bills at her. I’m practically doubled over when it’s our turn at the counter. Maddie wants popcorn. I get a big bucket but can’t imagine eating any of it. A voice is screaming in my head, Tell her, for God’s sake. Tell her.

  “My idea,” I say. “Because of what happened after the football practice. See, I was coming off the field and I took off my helmet. It was really hot that day, and anyway my head was sweaty and I was exhausted, and someone came running behind me and started tickling me.”

  Maddie’s frowning. She’s probably thinking: Where the hell is he going with this story? But I press on. “I turned around, and it was my brother’s girlfriend. I tried to laugh it off. I said to her, ‘Hey, wrong guy,’ but she did what people usually did when they saw one of us. She stared at me. She had to think about it, see? She had to take a minute to figure out which one of us was which, and then she apologized, of course, all embarrassed because she made a mistake.” I let out a sigh. “It happened all the time. So it wasn’t like it was a big surprise. But here’s the thing: you think some people—your girlfriend, well, you think she’d be able to tell the difference, right?”

  Maddie’s forehead’s wrinkled up. I’m only halfway through with this and my stomach gives another lurch. I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake, if I should shut up. I’m holding the popcorn, and I notice that my hand’s shaking. Pieces of popcorn have been dropping out, leaving a trail down the hallway.