by Julie Buntin
I sat up, tugging the blanket away from her body.
“Mmmm,” she mumbled into her pillow, drawing her arms to her sides and tugging the blanket back. “You’re alive.”
“What happened,” I whispered.
“You got shitfaced. You were basically drooling. Greg had to carry you.”
“My leg hurts?”
“Yeah, you fell climbing up the ladder.” A swirl of shadows, a searing square of light above me, a rope tearing through my hands so fast and hot I couldn’t hold on to it no matter how hard I tried.
“Where are we?”
“My house, where do you think?”
“I have to go home.”
“Shh. I took care of everything. I texted your mom from your phone and was like, Staying next door, and she texted back, Have fun, with an actual literal winky face, so you can go back to sleep. I even set your damn alarm because you have to be home by eight in the morning. Please do not let that shit ring also, because it’s a Saturday and that is not how I roll.”
“How did you know which number was my mom’s?”
She rolled over. “She’s in your phone as Mom, peaches, really? Can we sleep now, please? I feel like death.”
“I’m so thirsty.” I was feeling almost giddy, a Christmas-morning excitement. I’d never been inside her house. And yet, behind that lurked a sick, cold horror. How many hours had I lived that I could not remember? What had I done?
“Water’s downstairs. Just be quiet. Sal is a light sleeper, and if he gets up I have to get up.” She settled back onto her stomach, lifting her arms.
I slid out of bed and poked around in her purse until I found my cell. The hall was no wider than a children’s slide and appeared to exist only to separate Marlena’s room from another bedroom. The door was cracked, and I could just make out what I thought was Sal, asleep in a fully extended recliner. I climbed a ladder down into a room wreathed with couches. Most of the ceiling soared to the barn’s beams; where it didn’t, the place from which I’d descended, a kind of makeshift loft held the two bedrooms. Another room was partitioned off below this lower ceiling—in the corner opposite, a cluttered kitchen counter ran the length of the wall, lit up by a bug light shining through a window in the back door. I picked my way to the kitchen, lifting my feet extra high out of fear of what I’d step in. A body on the nearest couch rustled and I froze, counting to one hundred before moving again, which is how long Dad said it took people to fall asleep.
Dishes overflowed from the sink. The cupboards were mostly empty, but on a higher shelf I found a plastic bowl. I used it to catch a dribble of water, lapping it up before filling it again. With every sip, the previous day elbowed its way further into my thoughts. Marlena said I’d been drooling. Was she kidding? And what was that last bit, fluttering in the periphery of my memory like a butterfly? Had we kissed? I had to get out of there.
Grit sandpapered the linoleum, sticking to my bare feet. Where were my shoes? My shirt, my backpack? I tested the back door. It opened easily; when it did, I realized I’d half expected it to be bolted shut. Eyeing the distance between my house and hers, the packed trail in the snow that led to the stand of garbage cans our two houses shared, I decided to go for it. I glanced backward. Marlena’s dad, who must have heard me, stood in the entryway to his little room off the kitchen, staring at me without interest, his face psychotically alert.
I shot out the door, not caring that it slammed and almost certainly woke up Sal and therefore Marlena, bare feet kicking up a spray of snow, the skin on my arms, my chest, my belly, my toes so cold it burned, like I’d frozen my body into losing its mind.
I had put together by then that Marlena’s dad cooked meth, and that he did it in the railcar behind our houses, the same way that, though I could never remember her directly telling me, I knew Haesung’s dad worked in a hospital. Like everything to do with our parents, their occupations were gross and boring, and if the meth frightened me, I remember that less than I remember thinking it was lame. Still, when I saw Marlena’s dad that morning, I was reminded that he had probably done things I could not imagine.
I opened my front door, grateful that it was unlocked, my bare feet a howling red from running through the dirty snow. I went straight into the shower and stood under the running water, turning the tap until it was so hot it hurt. I didn’t leave the bathroom until Mom banged on the door, yelling at me that we had to go.
* * *
I crammed myself into the passenger seat of Mom’s car, a bucket full of sponges and blue cleaning spray and hairballs of steel wool at my feet. The pain in my head was both distant and increasing, as if my skull was stuffed too full of cotton, expanding.
So this was a hangover.
“The day I skipped out on Public Speaking, I did not see myself speeding toward forty without a bachelor’s degree,” said Mom. “Or cleaning houses for money, for that matter.”
“Or living in Silver Lake,” I said.
She turned on the radio. Who knew kisses were so wet? Maybe that was just Marlena. I couldn’t think about it.
“I like Silver Lake,” Mom said.
We drove along Lake Michigan, heading toward Coral Springs, a tinier, richer iteration of Kewaunee. We turned off the highway into an enclave of four-story houses that stared from the base of long driveways. The Top 40 song blaring from the car radio wrinkled, some trash Marlena would never tolerate. Baby, I’m—on my—owwwn. Mom had lasted seven months in college. I’d heard the story a million times. In high school she’d been at the top of her class, a squinty girl whose high grades and glasses must have hidden her prettiness. First-chair viola in the Michigan Youth Orchestra. She started at Michigan State as an English major. She had wanted to be a teacher. But she got itchy. After so long in school, the thought of four more years made her, as she put it, want to peel off her skin. I’d done the math—she must have been just a couple months pregnant with Jimmy when she quit. Shortly after we got settled in Silver Lake, Mom had enrolled part time at NCC, the local community college, taking on two core classes. Would she major in nursing, or would it be general studies, a nice, broad foundation for a master’s, she’d ask us over dinner. “I’m really smart, you guys,” she’d say. “I have options.” I couldn’t understand the point of all her planning. What was it all for? What did she want? She was Mom; how could she be anything else?
Though she’d stopped talking, Mom had a strained, searching look. She liked to talk about the past, especially after a glass or two of wine. Listener—child—optional. At that age, I assessed and dismissed her at every turn. It must have been awful to be around me. Later, I’d find myself returning to Silver Lake the way, when I was there, I’d returned over and over again to our old house in Pontiac, and wonder if a difficulty letting go of the past can run in families, like a problematic thyroid.
“We’re looking for 2044,” she said, leaning over the steering wheel. The pores by her nose were very big. We inched past 2038, its roof crusted with snow, one giant window suspended above the grand double doors like a snoozing eye. The radio static climaxed, then smoothed itself out. All of the houses were locked and abandoned. Like most of Michigan in the winter, the neighborhood had the atmosphere of a shipwreck—structures half sunk in snow, abandoned in the name of survival.
Impossibly, 2044, a castle, slate blue with windows everywhere, was the biggest house we’d seen so far. The driveway was so snowy the car hummed with effort as we pulled up to the garage. Mom jumped from the car with put-on energy, and slipped the key out of a pot of ivy hanging near the door. Counting the garage, the house was really two buildings—the main one and a smaller one behind it, closer to the lake, that was almost identical. The littlest was twice the size of our modular, and had a second level.
“Do we have to clean that one, too?” I asked, pointing. When I lifted my arm, my head swam, pulse trapped dizzily inside. My heartbeat had never felt so delicate before, so imprecise.
“If that’s the guest house, the
n yes we do,” Mom said.
We lugged the cleaning supplies inside, which was harder than it should have been because my leg twanged with every step and I had to make a special effort to hide my flinches from Mom, who would want to know what happened, and who was so good at extracting the truth that there was no doubt I’d spill the whole thing and never be let out of the house again. The front door opened into a spacious room, its entire far wall a sheet of glass that overlooked the lake. Nothing looked dirty, though the air had a shut-up smell, as if a flower somewhere inside had wilted, died in its own dirty water.
“Holy cow,” Mom said. She was Cinderella, standing on the marble floor, her blond hair tied up wispily in a bandanna, black workout leggings, a dust rag in her hand. The house was three stories tall with an atrium in the middle, like the one at the Chicago hotel I’d stayed at during a choir competition my freshman year. From any floor, you could stand on a sort of balcony and look down to the living area below. We wandered through, taking stock. “This is the big time, huh?”
“How much are you getting paid for this, again?”
“Twenty an hour. Sixteen after subtracting your cut. So, my dear Watson, take your sweet, sweet time.”
Each of the chairs at the twelve-seater dining room table was made of the skin of an exotic, leopardlike creature. Twenty an hour seemed low. I didn’t really know how dire our money situation was, if it was Marlena, Ryder, Greg dire, room at the Mapletree dire, or what. Jimmy was paying one third of the mortgage on our crappy little house, and Mom was always in a cheerful, grocery-shopping mood when my child support checks were deposited on the first and fourteenth of the month. She’d taken out more in student loans than she owed for tuition, and had told me to thank her government “kickback” for my new snow boots. A few days before, at Glen’s, I’d put a frozen pizza in the cart. Two seconds later, Mom put it back, telling me that $5.99 for a single meal was a sin against humanity.
Mom disappeared up a curving staircase into the rooms above. Antelope or moose heads watched glassily from the walls, and a deep, yellowed rug, some other kind of skin, spanned the space between two L-shaped leather couches. The people who owned this house were murderers. I slipped off my shoes, scrabbling my toes into the fur.
On the coffee table, a diamond-cut jar full of raw almonds. I’d never actually tasted a raw, whole almond before. I unstuck the lid and grabbed a handful, popping one into my mouth. It split into halves under the pressure of my teeth, releasing a sweetness, familiar in a kind of reverse, as if I’d finally reached the source of something I’d known only in echo and gesture—the paste inside an Almond Joy, gas station coffee flavored with syrup. The almonds left a chalky silt on my tongue. I kept eating them. Now raw almonds taste like that house, like someone else’s success. They taste filched. To me, they’ll always taste like money.
Less than an hour later I was sick in the master bathroom, running the water to mask the noise even though I was on the third floor and Mom was downstairs scrubbing the stovetop with a scouring pad, singing along to country radio. The almonds came back up, a grit in my throat. Marlena’s face, the sparkles glimmering from the apples of her cheeks. Was she always wearing makeup, or was it just her skin? Ground glass, the way a snowball looks on a sunny day when you hold it to your eye. Her fingers sticky, tripping haltingly along my jaw.
I cleaned as if I were doing penance, until my arms hurt and my eyes prickled with dust, until I could taste the chemical tang of Clorox, until I’d bleached away my thoughts. Mom checked my work, but she didn’t need to—I’d learned from watching her, from ten years of weekly chores. I drew the twisted corner of a cleaning-solution-dampened rag along every counter seam; in the bathroom, I hunted down even the tiniest hairs, my kneecaps shifting uncomfortably against the tile. By the time Mom and I finished, the sun was melting into the lake, turning the whole universe an apocalyptic pink.
I stood on the front porch watching the deserted neighborhood as Mom mopped herself out the door. I could barely straighten my fingers, and a tense cord ran from the base of my head down my neck. Soon it would be dark. That’s how the sky worked at dusk in Michigan; it went pink and then, seconds later, the blue-black of ink. After locking up, Mom tucked the mop under an armpit and slipped the house keys back into the ivy planter. A house so big four or five of ours could have fit in it with room left over, and empty most of the year. I still believe that at that moment, I hadn’t yet made any decisions.
I swear.
* * *
Marlena showed up shortly after Mom and I got home. I was reading on the couch. Every couple of pages I stabbed a wedge of Brie with a peppery cracker, scooping the creamy middle, pungent and not exactly good, away from the rind. I’d stolen both of these exotic foods from the mansion, along with a handful of almonds that I stuffed into an inside pocket of my coat. Taking the cheese and crackers was okay, Mom said, because the expiration dates would pass before the Hodsons arrived. No knock, just the door creaking open, Marlena’s face, a question on it, like Is this okay? As soon as I put down my book—a tattered copy of David Copperfield that smelled of sour milk—she breezed fully in.
“You always look so pretty,” Marlena said to Mom, in lieu of a hello. “Until I met you I didn’t know moms could be hot still.”
“What a nice thing to say,” Mom said, standing up a little straighter, as if she’d been watered. Marlena’s manners were unpracticed, but she was what Dad would call winning. She was abrupt in a way that I always associate with rude people, but bestowed a kind of brightness on whatever caught her interest—if it happened to be you, nothing felt more sublime. Though when the beam of her attention drifted away, a searchlight scanning the next bit of horizon, it stung. She would have done well in New York, where so many people cultivate that air of intensity cut with indifference.
In my room she flopped onto my bed, kicking her feet up and crossing them at the ankles, ready to dish. The painted walls gave my room a kind of hum; we thought we were clever for calling it the think tank. Sometimes, she’d throw open my bedroom door and sing, “I live in a box of paints,” at full volume. I shut the door, praying she wouldn’t bring up the kiss. I hardly remembered it, but the blurry details were already so potent that even approaching them, warily, in memory (Ryder and Greg laughing, Marlena’s forehead clunking against my nose), sent my body into panic mode.
“You can really put it away,” she said, fiddling with her pin, turning it around and around so that her shirt twisted up. Her tone was easy, relaxed—maybe she remembered the kiss even less than I did.
“Yeah, that was news to me,” I answered, sprawling beside her.
“You’d actually never had a drink before? I have kind of a memory of you saying that.”
“Not unless you count a sip of my dad’s beer.”
“Hot-ass damn. You drained that flask like a juice box. Like a pro.” Marlena loved vulgarity. I once heard her tell our choir teacher not to “cream her pants.” I think it was her way of revolting against her loveliness, which she called more curse than blessing, which I thought was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. But now I think I understand how beauty like hers can pen you in, how it can make your life smaller and smaller, until it’s all anyone thinks you are.
“The pot made me thirsty!”
“Blah blah blah. Next time, just remember the rest of us. Also please, that level of fucked-upness is your prerogative, but not at St. Patrick’s, when somebody has to carry your ass.”
“Pre-rog-a-tive,” I said. She’d pronounced prerogative “perogaty.”
“What?”
“That’s how you say it.”
“Are you fucking serious,” she said. “Did you just correct my pronunciation? Did I use the word wrong?”
“Well, no.”
“So you just wanted to establish that you’re smarter than me?”
“No, I just—”
“You’re a snob.”
“I’m so—”
“You’
re sorry? I’m sorry. That’s a shitty quality.” When I didn’t say anything, she backed off, probably realizing, and rightly, that I was humiliated. “Just forget it. What I really need is for you to be a girl right now. Can you do that? Like a stupid, gossipy girl?”
“Uh, sure.” I sat up, still blushing, and got into a listening pose. How was what I was doing not being a girl?
Marlena’s problem was this: She and Ryder weren’t having sex anymore, at least not when they weren’t high or drunk or stoned or rolling, and the worst part was that she didn’t even care. She didn’t miss it. But wasn’t it weird that she still liked cuddling and kissing and stuff? She still loved him—she’d always love him. I mean, she didn’t even know what love was except in relation to him—she felt bad even saying this kind of shit. Was it possible that they were outgrowing each other? All of this was a terrific betrayal. If she ever got wind that he’d had a thought in the same family as the stuff she was saying, she’d cut his dick off and feed it to Bolt.
“Well, that doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “Especially because Bolt would probably like it if Ryder didn’t have a dick. Less competition.”
She fake-retched. “You think Ryder’s thinking this too, don’t you? How is it that I can’t stand the idea that he might not be like, absolutely crazy about me still, when I’m having so much trouble getting it up for him?”
“My parents stopped having sex, I heard my mom talking about it to her friend, like years and years ago.” I was dying to ask her what sex was like but I also didn’t want her to know, unless she did already just by looking at me, that I was a virgin. Men had done things to her, and she had done things back. How did she know what to do, and when to do it, and what what he did meant, and whether any of it was what she wanted? Would anyone ever do those things to me?