The Fallback Plan

by Leigh Stein

  “Stay” by Lisa Loeb came on the jukebox.

  Girls like this song. Girls listen to this song when they’re drunk and lonely.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “I haven’t thought about doing it in such a long time,” she said. “I used to, in high school, with a razor. In college, I bought a scalpel set. I don’t know why I kept it, after I got married and had kids, but it’s there, at the bottom of my jewelry box.”

  “Maybe you should just throw it away,” I said.

  Amy sipped at her beer. “I know,” she said, “but for whatever reason I can’t. It would be like throwing away something that happened to me. I feel safer knowing it’s there if I need it.”

  I thought about the paper lantern the Streetcar cast had brought me in the hospital. I remembered how my parents had packed all the flowers and the Mylar balloons in the car to take home, and how I’d kept the lantern in my lap, like a kitten, because I knew it would be the only real survivor. I’d carefully folded it back into its original octagon and stashed it with the Christmas decorations in the basement. I knew that I would never throw it away. I would keep it like a piece of evidence, like proof of the past spring, but the difference between Amy’s souvenir and mine was that mine never beckoned me to return to it.

  I didn’t know what Amy wanted from me. Did she want me to rescue her? Give her permission to injure herself? Permission to leave what was left of her family? She thought she’d been doing such a great job of holding everything together, but now I felt like I was watching a lone shopping cart, hurtling through a vacant lot, at the mercy of a great wind.

  “How long have you been in therapy?”

  “This time? Six months. Seven months.”

  “And it’s helping?”

  “No,” she said, “not really. I just need to get away. That’s the only thing that will help.”

  “Maybe you should find a new therapist.”

  “Too late,” she said. “I told Nate tonight that May and I are going to Arizona, to stay with my parents.”

  When I heard May’s name I felt as if I’d fallen from a great height in a dream. Even though she’d mentioned it once before, she hadn’t seemed serious, and a part of me could not believe she would take May with her. May wasn’t anywhere in my cacti vision. Didn’t we spend almost every waking moment together? And didn’t I know not to shut her door completely at nap time because it stuck in the frame? Didn’t I love her? And by loving her, didn’t she partially belong to me?

  “What did Nate say?” I felt like I was rehearsing lines, reciting words in rapid fire and not paying attention to what was underneath them.

  “He said he wouldn’t let me. That I could go, but he wouldn’t let me take her.”

  “You could go by yourself. Take a vacation.”

  She shook her head, her eyes clenched shut. “We’d had a couple drinks, May was watching a video on the TV in our room, and so I asked him if he wanted to see the attic. He said sure; he said he was so glad he was going to finally get to see what I’d been working on. I felt like I was in grad school again. Like I was his cool girlfriend who made stuff, who was good at making stuff. We went upstairs. I turned on the lights. I sat in the chair, I did what you did, I did the whole bit.”

  She swallowed the last of her beer.

  “And?”

  Amy stared at me. For a second, she said nothing.

  “And all Nate would say was that he couldn’t believe he’d been paying someone nine dollars an hour so I could make that.” She laughed, but it came out dark and humorless. Her eyes were red from when she’d rubbed them. She reached in her purse and fumbled for something.

  “Order one more round,” she said, “will you?”

  I caught the bartender’s eye. My glass was still half full, so I worked on finishing it. What had Nate expected to be shown? Didn’t he know her? Couldn’t he imagine?

  Amy found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said, and handed me a check. “That’s for this week, up to today, plus an extra week, but consider yourself released. You don’t have to come by anymore.”

  “I don’t have to come by anymore?”

  I imagined May, chewing clover. On a swing. Sleeping.

  Standing at the window, her hands pressed against the glass.

  Amy shook her head. “He’s so full of empty threats,” she muttered. “He said, ‘I’m calling your psychiatrist.’ ‘I’m telling your parents you’re unfit to travel with May.’ I finally talked him into letting me take her for the rest of the summer. I said we could talk in August. He was crying.” There was a trace of cruelty in her voice, as if the thought of him crying secretly pleased her.

  “It’s his guilt. He thinks it’s his fault Annika died, and if anything ever happened to May he’d think it was his fault because he let me take her. But I’m her mother. She needs me. I told him that if he took her away from me, I’d kill myself. But maybe that’s what he wants.”

  We both drank with the thirst of wandering Jews. I didn’t feel sorry for Nate, for his guilt over Lila. I didn’t even feel sorry for Amy anymore; she had drained my compassion, and now she was taking May, too. I tried to remember the woman I’d met at the party. Amy’s bright eyes. How quick I could make her laugh at my stories. How approachable she’d seemed then, the youngest mother in the room, the pretty wife. They’d been a picture-perfect family. That was the Amy I sent my condolences to. This one felt impossibly far away, unreachable.

  You have over five hundred dollars in your pocket, I told myself, but at that moment I didn’t even care. I only felt sorry for May. I wanted to go home.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “On Tuesday,” she said. July third. “You could come with us, there’s room at my parents’. Go swimming, finish your screenplay. Buy a one-way ticket.”

  “I’m not going to Arizona,” I said. I looked down at the bar and drank my beer, so she wouldn’t see that I was crying. I didn’t know why I was crying. I’ll kidnap May, I thought. I’ll rent a Winnebago. I’ll change my name to Loretta Lynn or Alice or Hiawatha. We’ll drive to Canada. To Prince Edward Island.

  “I should go home.”

  “I’ll drive you,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “I’ll ride my bike.”

  “That’s silly. You’ve been drinking.”

  “So have you.”

  I put my ladybug helmet on and fastened the chin strap like a high school football star. Amy watched me.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “But think about it tonight: Arizona.”

  There was nothing to think about. I was tired. I was so tired of saying the things I thought Amy wanted to hear, of lying to her about her Mary Cassatt rip-off, of mothering May only to lose her.

  “I don’t need to think about it because I’ve already made up my mind,” I said. “I’m not coming with you. I have other things to do.” Who was I trying to convince? I was crying again. I put the heels of my hands in my eyes. “And your daughter needs a mother, not a fucked-up, suicidal art school grad.”

  Amy didn’t say anything. Her face had gone white and frozen. We looked at each other for another moment, and I willed myself not to apologize. Someone handed me a cocktail napkin from the bar and I blotted my eyes with it.

  Then I followed her out into the muggy night to get my bike from her van, and walked it the two miles home.

  • • •

  The panda arrives in the woods. It is snowing. She is dressed for the weather, in a blue parka and a pom-pom hat. The snow is falling in curtains, as always. The little panda used to be the type of panda who dreamed of falling in a kind of fairy-tale love, but now she sees she never will; she was never meant to fall in love. She was meant to fight a war and save the world like Joan of Arc.

  “Hello?” she calls, into the deep emptiness of the wood. Her footsteps crunch against the snowy earth. The tallest trees reach higher than her eyes can see, obscuring the clouds, if there are any. As usual, the littlest panda came out
of the wardrobe at the lamppost, but the wood looks different than it did before. More menacing. She isn’t quite sure which direction to take in order to reach the faun.

  Come get me, she thinks. Know that I’m here and come get me.

  She stops walking and listens. The trees are whispering secrets behind her back. Far in the distance, sleigh bells ring. When the little panda closes her eyes, she can feel the earth turn, and the great gravitational pull, and the weight of her body, solid and warm and filled with blood. Blindly, she follows the bells. She hears a voice—and it isn’t hers, it isn’t the faun’s—telling her she’s close to finding out what she ought to do next, like seeing a flicker of gold.

  “How close?” she says, but before any answer can come, a beautiful white sleigh, pulled by two beautiful white horses, appears before her. Inside sits a woman with skin as clear and smooth as milk. Her cheekbones are sharp like icicles. When she tries to smile, the littlest panda thinks she hears the icy skin around her mouth cracking.

  She remembers what the faun said: “Aryan white, if you know what I mean.”

  “Hello there,” the woman says, in a British accent.

  “Hello,” the panda says.

  “That’s a very pretty jacket.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you care for a piece of Turkish Delight?”

  The littlest panda considers whether or not this is a trick. “Is it like Turkish Coffee?”

  The white woman laughs and covers her frozen mouth with a furry white mitten. “Just pop on up here,” she says. Her cold eyes dance behind her silver-framed glasses. The rhinestones in the corners dazzle, even in the thin winter sunlight.

  The panda moves closer to the sleigh. She can see the breath of the horses floating in the air like phantoms. The woman holds out a candy wrapped in cellophane.

  “What will the Witch do if she catches me?”

  “Probably do what she always does: tempt you with a delicious treat, promise you a rose garden, and then persecute you for your religious beliefs.”

  “Don’t be shy,” the woman says. “We should go somewhere. You and I.”

  And before she can allow herself the chance to change her mind, the littlest panda unzips her parka, pulls out the dagger, and plunges it into the witch’s throat with the strength of a hundred men. Immediately, hot red blood pours forth and streams down the witch’s chest, staining her white lap, her white mittens, the white floor of the beautiful white sleigh. The horses whinny and pummel the frozen ground. The witch’s eyes roll back inside her head. She tries to speak, but it just makes the blood pump harder. She is voiceless. Her hands feebly move toward the dagger handle, but it is too late. She is in the throes of dying, and then she is dead.

  The panda shivers. She removes the dagger and holds it up to heaven.

  The horses cry. They turn into unicorns and break their reins with majestic strength. All the snow melts, and then chipmunks and children and badgers all emerge from the forest, holding menorahs, triumphant. She sees the faun coming toward her, from far across the wood, except now he is a man, and there is love in his eyes. She knows it is love because daffodils bloom in the wake of his footsteps. The panda feels her fur melt away and when it is gone, she cannot imagine what it was ever like to live inside it. The body of an eighteen-year-old girl that was there all along blossoms as it should. Her hair is long and thick and brown. She is lovely, the loveliest. All this never-ending springtime is hers; now this is her kingdom; they will crown her with gold, and she will reign, Queen Lucy Anne Shirley Laura Lennox Ingalls March, over Narnia, forever, with her beloved.

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  All the lilacs were dead by July.

  For the party, we wrapped the leafy bushes at the side of the house in patriotic crepe paper, and left a spray of red, white, and blue balloons at the foot of our driveway to let everyone know they’d arrived. The lawn was mowed, the garden weeded, the folding chairs unfolded. Citronella tiki torches circled the picnic tables like we were staging a luau.

  I took the broom we kept by the garage out to the driveway, and swept the dead and weak cicadas into the grass. When would they finally be gone? A couple more weeks? By August? How long until the drone subsided?

  After my dad put all the beer on ice, he grabbed a couple for himself, and went to start the grill. He’d be starting the grills for hours, I knew, doing anything he could to stay away from the kitchen.

  “Did you put suntan lotion on your head?” my mom called through the screen door.

  “I’m fine, Jeanine.”

  “Do it before you forget!”

  He smiled at me and shook his head, as if we were allies against her paranoia. I didn’t mind. I smiled back. I knew that later, I could switch allegiance. She was always worrying one of us would get cancer, but he was always worrying someone would break into our house and murder us. I could see it going either way.

  In the kitchen, my mom told me there was frosting and a tub of strawberries in the fridge, and asked me to finish the cake. “I saved the best part for you,” she said, and smiled, broad and generous, holding a clean spatula. I’d always loved baking, especially spreading the frosting. It was a childlike pleasure, sticky and yet still refined. It was brainless, something your hands remembered so you didn’t have to.

  “You always loved spreading the frosting,” my mom said, watching me cover the cake in white waves.

  “I do,” I said.

  By three in the afternoon, the air was redolent with bug spray and lazy plumes of barbecue smoke—summer vacation smells, smells I wanted to go back to, but that didn’t make sense because I was already there in them. I was sitting on the tire swing, hidden from the growing crowd by the trees at the back of the yard. I kept my sunglasses on, even in the shade, and rocked myself, back and forth, toes hinged to the earth.

  From my shady perch, I could take in the entire landscape of my childhood, the geography of my memory. The rabbit hole in which I had once twisted my ankle was now filled with sod, but it was still a spot I avoided by habit. This tree, the one the swing hung from, the tallest one in the yard, had served as the lamppost in Narnia when I’d made believe I was Lucy Pevensie, back when the yard was just overgrown grass and white clover and downy dandelion heads, before my grandparents died, and my parents inherited their rattan lawn set.

  It was unfair that life was so irrevocable, that nothing could be frozen in time or retracted. But that’s what I’d loved about being onstage. I loved acting because it was like living inside of a fixed amount of time, looped from start to finish. In rehearsal, I went through the best and worst moments of some woman’s life, again and again, until I’d perfected them. It was a false reality, but a controllable one.

  Pickle texted to say he was on his way. I got beer not salad OK? I replied that was fine and that he should just hurry up and come over, I felt like a stranger in my own yard. Not that I didn’t know anyone, but that no one knew me.

  I watched a newly arrived gaggle of small children, small children who were not May, chase one another around a chair.

  Duck, duck, duck!

  Potato!

  I watched Nate. He was standing by our staked tomato plants, listening to a bald man in a Cubs t-shirt explain something that required expansive gestures. Nate held a blue plastic cup. With the back of his other hand, he wiped his brow. I was surprised to see that he had come, but maybe it would have been stranger if he’d stayed at home. Maybe he wanted to forget the new weight of the empty rooms of his house, in the same way I couldn’t help but imagine them.

  I watched Mrs. D., who I had known since fifth grade, and whose Greek last name most people had given up on ever mastering, make elliptical paths through the yard to serve grapes off a large platter.

  “They’re seedless,” I heard her say, above the dull pops of faraway firecrackers.

  My mom was near the grill, telling my dad something. He shook his head at her, but I could tell he was laughing, and she kissed his cheek be
fore she went inside with an armful of plastic cups and dishes.

  A low trail of hostas marked the perimeter of the house and the back porch steps, and tall bunches of day lilies burst like stars along the driveway. I’d helped her plant them on a weekend home from school, in spite of the fact that I hated gardening. It made me feel resentful. I hated the tedium of it, and there was no immediate reward like there was in baking; I didn’t have anything to show for a chilly afternoon spent on my knees until months later, but there they were, those long green necks, faces turned toward the hot July sun.

  I had almost a thousand dollars saved at the bottom of my sweater drawer.

  Where could I go? On a cruise?

  I wanted to leave, but not like a runaway, not out of desperation, not like Amy. For all those weeks I’d felt sick, and wished to feel sicker. It was as if I wanted my body to be damaged, to betray me, because then it would be obvious to everyone else how I felt, more obvious than the sickness of depression, of apathy, of inertia, a betrayal of the mind.

  I’d wanted the kind of blameless freedom that is given to the crippled, the grieving, children. She didn’t mean to. She didn’t know any better. I remembered how kind I’d tried to be to Amy in the attic, knowing she’d created this thing out of her suffering, which made it both allowable and unbearable.

  But here were these lilies, which only grew because I’d made them grow. May could hula hoop on one foot because of me. There had to be other things I could do.

  My mom pushed her way through the low-hanging branches.

  “Esther? What are you doing all the way back in here?”

  “Planning a coup,” I said.

  “Did you get any grapes?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I will.”

  “Come out and say hello to everyone. We’ll cut the cake soon.”