“Jess?” she asked.
“No, no,” I said. “I’ll go get her,” but Jess’s father grabbed hold of the top part of my arm, hard, meaning business—the way Jess had meant business when she slapped me off the phone—and he pinched deep into that spongy gap between muscle and bone. I forced myself not to flinch, to let the pain dig, to take it. That heavy, ugly pinkie ring he wore pressed in.
“You stay here with Penny,” he said. “I’m talking to Jess alone,” and he squeezed harder; I felt the tiniest edge of a fingernail. I hated too-long fingernails on men. I would bruise. The mark would last several days, and a flash through my mind showed my little sister with bruises, my mother getting her dressed for church, tugging a long-sleeved turtleneck over her head, the heavy silence of that moment, but the sharp flare in my arm right now dragged me back to here, to Jess’s father, to his bulk. I nodded, moving aside—he would have trampled his way through—and as he stepped over the suitcase, I edged out sideways onto the porch, thinking I should keep the girl outside as long as possible. If I were outside, she wouldn’t notice she wasn’t inside, right? My reasoning felt sound yet surreal. I pulled shut the wooden door, then let the squeaky screen door close with a bang.
Outside had a crisp chill, that sort of autumn nip that got your hair smelling good, hinting of the sweet side of winter: snowmen, hot chocolate, mittens. Though actually I liked winter best, how guilt-free it was. Outside was cold, so you stayed in and read books. That was all there was to do in the winter. No picnics or gardening or walks in the fresh air or vacations or rounding up friends for swimming pool dates like the other seasons. Make a snowman if you felt like it, but no one cared if you did or didn’t. Once you hauled yourself over the nightmare hump of Christmas, winter was ollie ollie oxen free.
Sometimes I truly admired how my own mind wandered inside itself, getting lost, going other places than where it was supposed to be. But Penny was staring at me, chewing the inside of one cheek, probably a bad habit, something she imagined no one could detect, but that side of her face looked caved in, unsettling me further. I babbled: “I’m Jess’s roommate. Jess is inside. She was on the phone, but probably she’s off now. She—”
“My mom ate one of those poisoned pills,” Penny said.
I assumed I hadn’t heard her correctly. I said, “Jess is...” but Penny’s eyes teared and glossed, so I had heard. “Oh,” I said. And, “Oh,” again as Penny blinked and watched me and blinked harder. “Oh. I’m so sorry,” I said. “So... she’s...?”
Penny yanked the baseball mitt off her hand, dropping it onto the suitcase so she could swipe roughly at the tears her blinking hadn’t caught. The pillow slipped to the ground, and she half kicked it. “So now I’m here.”
I sort of reached an arm out to hug her, thinking she might expect that, but her body visibly stiffened, so instead I patted the sleeve of her jean jacket, kind of the way you pat a dog’s head when you don’t like dogs, which I didn’t. Penny reminded me of that dog you find shivering on your porch on a rainy night that you wish had ended up on someone else’s porch, the kind of dog your dad calls the pound on.
“She had a headache,” Penny said. “She was cooking dinner and had a real bad headache from work and she said, ‘Go get me a couple Tylenols, lovey,’ and I did. Right off the bathroom counter, still in a bag. She swallowed them without water, and like five minutes later she thumped down flat on the kitchen floor.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. And I also thought, Oh, wow, “lovey.” The word that belonged to Jess’s family. Lovey, pay the check so we can leave. How was your day, lovey? The show-offy, “we’re a perfect family with this perfect word” word that I hadn’t realized I hated until I heard it in Penny’s voice.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “So I called up my dad, though I’m not supposed to, not even if it’s important. But I didn’t know what to do.” There were more tears than she could stop; they rolled down her cheeks one after the other, the wet trail of them glittering in the porch light. Her shoulders hunched, collapsed, and her arms twisted tightly around her ribs. I stumbled back a step or two, tripping on the pillow. Here was the worst bad luck. There was not one bit of this that Jess was going to like. We heard Jess shriek, “Oh my god! No! No, no, no, no!” through the closed door, the closed windows. I wondered if her father would pinch her arm into a bruise. He didn’t mean it to be that hard, I reminded myself, he’s under a lot of pressure obviously, or why else would he have brought this girl here? Jess’s half sister. Jess might slap him the way she slapped my hand. I thought about Jess’s frantic, furious mother alone at home, dialing our number while we were at the dumb movie, calling, calling; thought about this girl waiting under that porch light at Jess’s house, clutching her pillow, trying to ignore that screaming fight inside; about Jess’s mother hurling words no one knew she knew. Cocksucker. This girl, not much older than my own sister, alone on the porch. Why didn’t she have an aunt, for God’s sake, some real family? Wasn’t there anyone else? A wave of fury walloped me, deep tribal fury, as if this were all her fault—getting the Tylenol, winding up on my porch—as if it were her doing and she should have known better. But I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again. Forced out a smile, kept it there for a moment to make sure it would stick.
“What grade are you in?” I asked.
“Eighth,” she said.
“My favorite grade,” I said, though it wasn’t. “One funny thing is I had to take shop class. We were the first girls who had to take shop—you know, for equality—and the teacher kept warning we’d all chop off our fingers with a saw because we were dumb girls. He had us make cutting boards, not lamps like the boys, because girls belonged in the kitchen and home ec.”
“You liked that?” Penny asked.
“I liked when he was the one who shaved off the tip of his own finger with the jigsaw when he was yelling at a girl who hadn’t sanded the edges of her cutting board enough.” Okay, Penny had stopped with the tears and seemed to be listening. It was me the shop teacher was yelling at, but probably Penny didn’t need to know that. I continued: “There were buckets of blood everywhere, and a bunch of the cutting boards were wrecked”—though ironically not mine—“and the girl, who wanted to be a doctor, wrapped a tourniquet around his arm, and he yelled at her that she was doing it wrong, but she got a special award in the end-of-the-year honors assembly. Then we had a sub for the rest of woodshop who smoked so much dope he didn’t even notice we were girls.”
Penny said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
I barreled on, pretending not to hear her: “Also in eighth grade I had the biology teacher who promised to swallow a live goldfish in front of every class on the last day of school. I don’t know what that would prove, really, or teach us, or why parents didn’t complain.”
Penny didn’t even barely smile, but as long as I was talking, she wasn’t.
From inside, Jess shrieked, “I already have a sister and she’s dead!”
“Linda,” Penny said.
“You know about Linda?” I asked.
“I know about all of them.” Penny looked down, scuffed one foot roughly against the wooden floorboards of the porch, following the line of the plank with her toe. She wore Frye boots, real ones, which looked too expensive to match the cruddy plaid suitcases and the lumpy pillow, and I realized that Jess’s father had bought these boots. I imagined her ripping paper off the box two days past her birthday, or the week before Christmas, never a gift from him on the holiday itself.
“The cops were going to take me,” she said. “I thought I was being arrested for killing my mom. But then my dad got all involved, and I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next.”
“Do you have... a grandmother?” I asked.
She shook her head, yawned, kept watching her feet. “Me and my mom. Some aunt I met once is married to a preacher saving souls in Africa who’s psycho, says my mom.”
“Where do you l
ive?” I asked.
“Near Wrigley Field,” she said, a glimmer of a smile brightening her face as quick as a flashbulb snapping. She grabbed her mitt up off the ground and crushed it onto her left hand, smacked her right into it with a pop that was clearly satisfying, because she smacked it again several more times as she spoke. “Last summer I’d go hang out with the guys trying to get home run balls on Waveland Avenue, outside the park. My friends called me weird, but the guys were all crazy Cubs fans, kinda like me. They’d bring coolers and lawn chairs and everyone with a glove, and someone always had a radio to follow the game, and when they cheered inside, we all jumped up, knowing if the wind was blowing out there was a chance a ball might sail over, though they hardly ever did. Didn’t matter. Harry Caray on the radio would go, ‘It might be, it could be...’ and we’d jump around, all happy because maybe the Cubs would win, and they’d toss me an Old Style. I never got a ball, but guys did, especially at batting practice. Getting a ball would be magical, like once in a lifetime. Sometimes my mom gave me money for bleacher tickets, and once my dad got us seats behind home plate and bought us programs, and we kept score like he did when he was a kid and he promised to give me his old scorecards. Back then he snuck into games with his friends, he said, no big deal. We went for batting practice, but I still didn’t get a ball, so he bought me one off the souvenir stand, and I acted all happy, but that’s not like catching your own ball yourself.”
There was more—wow, she really was into the Cubs—but I couldn’t listen, because it was impossible to imagine how this could work out, with Jess, with Jess’s mom, even with Jess’s dad. Impossible. I imagined Jess’s father living all these years split right down the middle into two separate halves, the halves each wrapped up separately in tissue paper and placed into two separate boxes, the boxes going into two different rooms, into two different closets on two different floors of the same house... and then I imagined that house burning all the way down to the ground with the only thing left in the rubble those two halves of one life, right out there for everyone to see. I would like to think that I couldn’t imagine such a thing, but I imagined it perfectly: how fantastic it felt, how exciting, keeping that secret solid and heavy in your chest, holding two halves of you so separate they weren’t even really you anymore, knowing anyone less daring, anyone less smart couldn’t do what you were doing, couldn’t get away with it. No one saw they had only half of you, which was amusing and powerful: half of you was enough for them, more than enough; half of you was better than a whole of anybody else. So you told yourself. So you believed. Until that house burned down around you one autumn night. Don’t play with fire popped into my head.
I realized Penny had stopped talking. Her silence made me nervous, so I said, “I don’t know anything much about baseball. Three outs. Home run. Nothing intricate. I guess there’s a lot of strategy?”
“Totally,” she said. “I could explain some, not that I’m any expert, but maybe when we watch the World Series—if, I mean. I think it’s going to be the Brewers for sure. I’m drawing up scorecards on graph paper so I can keep score, even—”
A dish or two crashing. A door slamming. A howl: “I hate you, thanks for ruining my whole life forever. You make me sick!”
Penny’s face seemed paler, or maybe my eyes had adjusted to the yellow bug light. I should grab her hand and dash down the porch steps, lead her somewhere that wasn’t stuffing her like a sack of groceries right back into Jess’s dad’s Audi parked on the street.
I smiled at her yet again. My smile felt weak, like watery tea made from twice-used tea bags. “This will all blow over,” I said for the second time this night. Stupid phrase.
“I’m sure.” Her voice was polite, as if she agreed that we’d reached the part of the conversation where meaningless bullshit was expected. She picked up her pillow, maybe anticipating that she’d be heading out shortly, shifted it into a tight wedge under her arm.
A car zoomed too fast down Ridge Road, then screeched to a stop as the traffic light up the block switched red. “That happens all the time,” I said. “The light’s blocked by tree branches. Someone should do something.” I’d heard people complaining to the cashier at the little neighborhood market. I didn’t care that much. I didn’t even have a car.
“Linda killed herself driving,” Penny said. “A suicide. That’s what my mother said.”
“I think it was just a regular car accident,” I said. “Bad luck.”
Penny gave me that same polite smile.
Another pause. I yawned, and Penny copycatted my yawn. She looked like a little girl yawning. Maybe if Jess could just see her.
I turned and put one hand on the doorknob.
“No,” Penny said abruptly, grabbing at my wrist, letting the pillow tumble to the ground again. Her fingers felt cold and numb, almost dead—how lips feel after the dentist shoots in Novocaine. When I pulled my hand off the knob, she let go and picked up the sad pillow, pressing it against her chest, as if posing as a fake Santa.
“You should come in,” I said.
“The story of my life,” she said. “No one wants me.” Calm, no self-pity.
I matched her tone: “She doesn’t know you yet. Give her a chance.”
“All I ever wanted was a real family like everyone else,” she said. “That’s the only thing I would ever pray for in stupid old church. And I guess maybe a home run ball, but that’s selfish.”
Jess’s father swung through the door. His face was red and sweaty and he looked startled, as if he’d forgotten I would still be here. “She won’t listen,” he said, to me or to Penny or to no one, to the crisp autumn air. He paced off his excess energy for a moment, then settled about five feet away from Penny, leaning up against the slatted wooden railing, where the light was dim, and he angled his leg backward against the boards, once, twice, more, kicking hard and harder, until the wood crackled and splintered.
“I’m sorry,” Penny whispered. She gathered in a deep breath before smushing her face deep into her pillow. I imagined the smell, the feel, like mine back home: slightly musty, prickly with feathers from ancient dead birds, the striped ticking soft with age.
“I’ll try,” I said, slipping through the door, into the living room, on to the kitchen. No Jess. The back door slammed. “Jess,” I called, “wait up,” but only half-heartedly, only to say I tried. Her car was parked in the back alley. I guessed she was going to drive; she’d been doing that since she and Tommy broke up. They used to like to drive Sheridan Road down to Lake Shore Drive really fast, after midnight, his black Porsche slicing ribbons through the dark. She wanted windows down no matter the weather, and I imagined the rough wind like sandpaper over her hair and face. “He doesn’t go fast enough,” she would complain to me when they first started dating and she was dragging in at four A.M. and there I was, wrestling with a paper or a poem or insomnia when my mind wouldn’t shut up. “That car does one-fifty easy, but he won’t kick it to the top. Fraidy-cat.” “It’s dangerous,” I would say, playing the lecturing scold she wanted me to, and she’d say, “Now you’re my mom? What, are you afraid, too? Or jealous? Come with us sometime.” No, I wasn’t her mom, and it wasn’t that I was jealous that she was the one in Tommy’s fancy car, watching the glittery Chicago skyline blur at a hundred miles an hour; that she was the one who got the ring; that she had those things and I never would. Honestly not that, or mostly not. But I knew she was lying: it wasn’t Tommy afraid to kick it up, it was her. She was the one driving. Jess was afraid of fear, confusing it with weakness, and her solution was to bully herself into doing things that terrified her. I was the opposite, so used to fear I felt nothing.
I called again, just in case: “Jess?” A tire squealed, and she was gone. Probably she was driving home to be with her mother. Either way she wouldn’t be back here for a while.
I took a deep breath, assessed the kitchen. I screwed the lid back on the peanut butter jar and returned it to the fridge. Set my dirty spoon in the sink fo
r next time someone did dishes. This was as good as it was going to get. Maybe there isn’t an exact moment when one makes important realizations. Maybe this nothingness is what doing the right thing feels like, I thought, as I forged a slow path back to the front door, uprighting the tipped kitchen table chair, tugging a crooked couch cushion straight, stamping flat an upturned corner of the rug, clicking shut the door to Jess’s bedroom.
I hurried to the front door and yanked it open. Jess’s father and Penny were halfway down the front walk; he was actually almost at the car, which was parked under the burned-out streetlight, walking faster than Penny, I suppose, in spite of carrying both suitcases, and I shouted, “Hey!” and the footsteps stopped and he turned around. I couldn’t see his face in the dark. The upstairs landlord’s lamp flicked on, sending a square of light out onto yard. A window squeaked open. “Hey,” I said more quietly. “She can stay a couple of days.”
“Really?” he said. He sounded annoyed, as if he had expected to be the exclusive architect of any plan. “Jess changed her mind?”
“Jess changed her mind,” I agreed, delighted to be given an acceptable lie. “It’s okay.”
There was a pause, where I sensed him wrestling with Jess’s alleged magical transformation, the whole top to bottom of it, but to question it would mean a longer, harder conversation. I figured he wanted to believe me so he would choose to, and I was right.
“Hear that?” he said to Penny. “It’s okay. You’ll stay here tonight, maybe a few days, and we’ll figure out the rest. You’ll see.”
They spoke slowly, lots of pauses. It was only their voices coming out of the dark. I couldn’t see their faces. Like listening to a radio, that detachment. What would happen, I wondered, before remembering it was happening to me?
“What about school?”
“You’ll miss a few days,” he said.
“I’ll get behind,” she said.
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