by Julie Buntin
I let her voice turn off the alarm ringing through my body, my conviction that in choosing to protect Marlena (and from what? from Bolt? from what my mom would think of her?) I’d surrendered my own mother to whatever made me so instinctively afraid of Marlena’s dad, who hovered at the periphery of everything we did, a shadow holding something sharp.
Plus, when Bolt kissed Marlena, Mom had reared up on her hind legs, a signal only I could read. It rarely happened these days, but I knew that aura of hers from childhood—from the time I told her that Maxwell Berry hawked a loogie into my hair every day on the bus home from school, from the few tense minutes after Dad canceled a visit. Behind the closed door, before the sound of a car revving up and pulling away, I’d heard Mom’s laugh. Fake and wary, in the key of I-don’t-know-about-this.
What did all that add up to, if not that she had everything under control?
* * *
After Mom left, Marlena and I went to work on the wine, wrestling an unopened Franzia from way back in the cabinet, where we’d carefully aligned a few boxes to stand in for Mom’s former stockpile. We filled two water bottles and took that and three boxes of macaroni and cheese over to Marlena’s house, to hang out with Sal for a little while before putting him to bed. Marlena and Ryder weren’t talking, for some new stupid reason I couldn’t keep track of, and Greg was with Tidbit, so it was just us. I liked it better that way, though I joined Marlena in grumbling about how lame it was to spend a Saturday with a kid under twelve. I even liked Sal, how when we were with him we took a break from being daring and got goofy drunk instead of wasted, went to bed early enough to see the sunny side of Sunday morning.
Probably most teenagers think where they live is boring. But there aren’t words for the catastrophic dreariness of being fifteen in northern Michigan at the tail end of winter, when you haven’t seen the sun in weeks and the snow won’t stop coming and there’s nowhere to go and you’re always cold and everyone you know is broke and the Gaslight Cinema only gets two shitty blockbusters every few weeks and not a single place is open twenty-four hours except a gas station. We couldn’t ski because only rich kids like Chelsea and Micah could ski unless you knew someone who worked at the slopes. School was a joke. The only thing that resembled a concert venue was the Goldwater Pub after ten o’clock on Friday nights, when the high school band teacher played James Taylor covers while he got soppy drunk off rum and Coke—and they were strict about IDs. The nearest shopping mall was a ninety-minute drive downstate, a solid two hours in bad weather, and the weather was always bad. Everything outside was beautiful. Icicles as tall as toddlers, the air so clear your breath dirtied it. So everyone drank. Teachers came to class with hangovers. Parents got DUIs after gliding past stop signs. We drank, and Marlena took her pills, and Ryder sold his crap meth, and even Jimmy, the smartest person I knew, was a miserable zombie, shuffling back and forth from the house to Kewaunee Plastics to Subway to the house as if someone had wound him up and set him down. Sometimes we drove whatever car we could get our hands on way out into the country, even farther out than where we lived, and parked by one of the zillion frozen lakes in a twenty-mile radius for a profoundly unsatisfying change of scenery. Cher’s office had a UV light, and during appointments she shined it into my face, promising it would cheer me up.
What she didn’t get, and what I could never have fully explained, was that though it was truly, numbingly, oppressively, dangerously boring in Silver Lake, I was happier than I’d ever been. I felt strangely free. I had dropped the ball so completely; but the world hadn’t ended. Winter muffled everything.
The barn was messy, as usual, but at least the dishes were sort of clean. I rerinsed a huge pot and set some water to boil, lining up two boxes of mac ’n’ cheese on the counter.
“My mom always puts ketchup in it,” Sal said. We tried to ignore it when he mentioned his mom—he kept doing it lately, talking about her as if she was upstairs instead of missing for years.
“How about we just put lots of ketchup in yours?”
He considered this, frowning. Sal was quick, and no one seemed to notice or care, and even in just those few months I’d watched his temper grow into something unmanageable, a little beast curled up inside him, eager for blood.
“But you have to try it,” he said.
I lifted him under the armpits, all squirmy forty-something pounds of him, so that he could dump the boxes of pasta into the water. It wasn’t boiling yet, but Sal was impatient. When had he last eaten? Marlena was in the bathroom. After I strained the pasta, I let Sal stand on a chair and mix in the powdered cheese and a half stick of only partially hardened butter I found in the bottom drawer of the fridge. There was no milk, so we moistened it with water and added lots of salt and pepper.
“I want like a lot,” Sal told me. “I can eat more than my sister.” He always called Marlena that—my sister, my sister, a stamp of ownership and pride.
We watched a show starring a group of teenage monsters attending monster school. One held its eyeballs in its hands, occasionally using them as weapons. I ate an entire bowl of pink macaroni just to make Sal happy. “Tu es mon diamant,” Marlena told Sal, when he finished all of his food. “Je t’aime beaucoup.” How strange to hear those swinging vowels—all city lights and crusty loaves of bread and blue shutters and expensive perfume—in that place, with its cement floor, with its bone chill and empty cabinets. It made me suddenly and extremely sad, and I pulled Sal to me and hugged him hard.
“Don’t,” he said, staring at the TV.
When Marlena’s dad got home, we were giving Sal a makeover. He sat on a splintery chest that served as a coffee table, surrounded by Marlena’s impressive collection of mostly stolen drugstore makeup. “You aren’t as pretty as my sister,” he told me, as I used lipstick to draw red circles onto the apples of his cheeks.
“Oh really,” I said. “How about now?” I bared my teeth and jutted out my chin. Sal laughed, scattering flecks of mascara under his eyes.
“You will be rewarded for your loyalty, Sal,” Marlena said, adjusting his rhinestone headband. “Voilà! You, mon petit prince, are the prettiest one of all.”
No car announced his arrival. Later, when I thought about it, I decided he must have come from the woods, from the railcar, and taken a snowmobile. Otherwise we would have seen headlights, shining through the single window on the street-facing side of the barn. He slammed in the kitchen door, taking us all by surprise, so that Marlena dropped an open tub of eye confetti, sending sparkles careening across the floor.
“Smells in here,” he said, the word here dissolving into a series of body-shaking sneezes. Why is it always so obvious when someone is very, very high? The seams of their body don’t match up with their surroundings—it’s as if they’ve been cut out of their lives and then stitched back in all wrong. When Marlena was really out of it, it felt like her movie was in black and white while mine was in the regular old colors of every day. Marlena’s dad was messed up, his wrongness curling like smoke through the room.
“Get that shit off your face,” he said to Sal, taking a few unsteady steps. “Who is that? Who are you?” His eyes were focused just above my head, so I wasn’t sure if he meant me or some figment visible only to him. Sal was gone, a magic trick. The fringe of the blanket we’d tied around his neck disappeared into the dark loft above.
“Dad, it’s Cat. You’ve met her. You know who she is. Our neighbor.”
“Oh yes, the noisy one. Nosy.”
He sat down between us on the couch and wiped his lips with his knuckles. I didn’t like his leg against mine. “You two been drinking?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re a liar,” he said.
“Cat, go home now,” said Marlena. “You need to leave.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Marlena’s dad said, mimicking me. “She doesn’t want to go.”
Marlena said something in French, too fast and sharp for m
e to understand it.
He put his hand on the small of my back and my entire body stiffened.
“What are you, Indian?” His thumb drifted along my spine, a place no one, I realized, had ever touched. “You got Indian eyes.” Then his hand was up underneath my sweatshirt, playing with the clasp of my bra. “Black,” he said. He unhooked it with a twist of his fingers and breathed loud, a version of a laugh. I could feel Marlena thinking hard in her stillness. My bra hung open, freeing my breasts, but I didn’t move. He pulled his hand away and a shiver hummed through me, from the scratch his skin made, leaving mine. “You have titties like a fat girl but you’re small,” he said.
I fucking giggled.
“Stop it,” said Marlena, looking at no one.
“You drink too much, Lena-bee. You drink like a grown man. Like a loser. I think you drink more than me.” He picked up one of the water bottles, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed. He threw the capless bottle hard. It hit the stairs in an explosion of ice, the plastic landing with a thunk on the ground. “Where’d you learn that from? Your momma didn’t drink like that.”
“Let’s go,” I said, and stood, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Take a hint,” said Marlena, still looking off.
“What?”
“You’re so clingy.” She pressed her palms against her closed eyes, as she did when her head hurt. “This is not your business. I want you to leave—please don’t make me tell you a million times. Just go.”
“Come with me.”
“Go home, Cat.”
I would not cry. But what she said had left me airless, scooped clean.
“Marlena?”
She shook her head.
I’d been dismissed, and she would not acknowledge me again. Just like the night I’d seen her in Bolt’s car outside of her house. Addict behavior, I know now, that shutting out. I do it to Liam sometimes. Marlena whispered to her dad in French, soothingly, the way you’d talk to a frightened dog, kneading the back of his neck, her lips beside his ear. This was how Marlena handled men. This was how she removed their stingers without them noticing. This was how, even if they took from her every last thing they wanted, she convinced herself that she’d still won. I stood there until I couldn’t any longer, bra still unhooked. Then I left her alone, like she wanted me to.
Outside I struggled to fix my bra without removing it, lifting my sweatshirt and flashing the blank, black woods, so deceptively quiet, full to the brim—I knew—with watchers. I was a twenty-minute walk away from that railcar. How many matches would it take to blow it to the sky? There was lighter fluid in the shed—I could use that. If I threw the match from a safe distance, and it didn’t burn out mid-air, I might be able to run fast enough to escape the flames.
I fished my cigarettes from my back pocket and sat on my front steps, hands liquid. I lit each new cigarette off the butt end of the one in my mouth, until the pack was gone. Inside the barn, they were yelling at each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
With my bare hand, I dug a little grave in the snow piled against the stairs and buried the seven cigarette butts. The front door of the house was unlocked; it usually was, and I felt a retroactive fear about the hundreds of nights I’d gone to sleep in a place that could be accessed by anyone, anytime. Inside, all the lights were off. The stove clock blinked 10:42 p.m.—earlier than I’d thought. Mom probably wasn’t back yet from her night out with Bolt. I wanted her. A primal, cellular desire. I wanted to call her and for her to come home and sit with me on the couch, my head on a pillow in her lap while we watched The Godfather, something long enough to erase every horrible step I’d ever taken away from home. I took out my phone and dialed. To this day the memory of her number from when I was a teenager still lives in my fingertips. A few seconds after I pushed Call, I heard her phone ringing nearby, inside. I followed the sound through the kitchen and into the hall that led to the bedrooms. The house felt profoundly empty except for that preset bring, bring; she’d never bothered to change her ringtone. Her bedroom door hung open and I was sure, at first, that no one was there. Object by object—dresser, half-parted curtain, watercolor on the wall—my eyes adjusted to the dark. She was facedown on the bed, on top of her covers, wearing the Eagles T-shirt, her legs bare.
“Mom,” I said. “Mommy?”
I tripped over her boots as I approached, sure, sure—sure of what? I was overtaken by dread, out of my mind with it. I bent over her and pulled one of her shoulders until she rolled, awkwardly, onto her back. Her arms flopped. She was asleep, her exhales full of wine.
New York
I woke up at some sickly, colorless hour, the cat watching me from the floor. In the bathroom, I chased two Advils with two large glasses of water, and then sank back into a twitchy approximation of sleep, just alert enough to monitor the apartment’s horrible brightening. When Liam’s alarm went off, our room full of sun, I stayed in bed. I did not want to take the subway with him. I was hungover again. It was a bad one.
In our home office, the contents of the box were scattered across the desk—the trash can had three empty beers in it. A fourth, gone except for a single swig, stood near my open laptop. When I touched the trackpad, the screen revealed a Word document, covered in text. I closed the computer and grabbed the pin out of the box, for Sal. I put on more makeup than normal, to hide the ill tint to my face. I’d left the lids off my contact case; my toothbrush was in the bathtub, bristles against the drain. When I left the apartment, I took the bottles and the empty six-pack sleeve from the fridge to the recycling bin at the end of our hall, praying I wouldn’t bump into a neighbor.
Standing on the subway, crammed in between two men in business suits, my stomach heaved and settled, heaved and settled, lifting toward my throat and then sinking to my feet. No matter how sick I felt, I never threw up—not the night of, not the day after, not unless I made myself. I had no Off button. Nothing to stop me, no internal mechanism that said enough, please, what you’re doing hurts. I was so tired. The shame came then, that old familiar, and I watched my reflection in the subway glass cringe, thinking about the beer and the martinis mixing together, curdling my blood. In the morning, it was always possible that I might never drink again. But then I thought of stumbling into the kitchen while Liam slept, opening one more, powerless. I couldn’t go on like this. And yet, with a tiresome mixture of longing and dread, I was already imagining the moment, that late afternoon turn, when it would again be appropriate to drink.
She wasn’t there when I arrived, but a few hours into the day, when I came downstairs to ask Alice a question, the girl was in her usual spot. She was alert-seeming, staring into a heavy pictorial dictionary of dog breeds. Her face was clean and very pale, and when I approached, she was tracing the outline of the dogs on the page the way a child would, with her first finger. She wore dirt-caked jeans and a long brown jacket, her backpack overstuffed and covered in marker and patches and scuffs of mud. Nineteen, I guessed, though Alice thought older, closer to twenty-five. But I knew drugs bumped you up in your own timeline, leaving you, even if you sobered up, a little closer to death. What else is age but an awareness, in expression and gesture, in bone and skin, of your own ticking clock?
I had a box of expensive granola bars in my work desk drawer, the kind with whole almonds and chunks of dark chocolate. Liam bought them in bulk; he worried about my blood sugar. He would leave me if I didn’t stop drinking, I knew, and I also knew that I loved him, the sweet comfortable safety of our life, the paychecks and the coming home and knowing, always, that he’d be there. The way he folded the washcloths under the sink. How he called the cat Little Baby, Little Baby, and me, too. When Mom met Liam, the second he got up to go to the bathroom, she told me he was a snooze. She was a little drunk, it’s worth saying, and Liam hardly drinks at all. It took her years to come around, to see what I saw—that Liam was a man who would only leave if you forced his hand. Marlena would have understood that, I think. We wanted to be the l
eavers, instead of always being left.
I took two granola bars downstairs and into the reading room. The girl was focused on the last page, where there were no images of dogs, just a list of sources and photo credits in minuscule type. I came up behind her and touched her shoulder, which was probably a mistake, but I wasn’t thinking right, my head was thick and slow and my heartbeat was off. I was having problems with perspective. She turned with a snap, and when I saw her face up close I knew it wasn’t heroin that she was on.
“I brought you these,” I said, holding the granola bars out to her. She looked at them, then back at me, her eyes raw. She opened her mouth, tightening her lips, and hissed. Her teeth were outlined in a grimy yellow, and one on the bottom was entirely gone. “I’m sorry,” I said, and leaned forward far enough to drop the bars onto the book. She kept hissing, her teeth bared. Spit rattled in the back of her throat, leaped from her mouth and landed on my arm, a row of shiny beads. I backed away, but she kept hissing, folding herself over the back of the chair. In my periphery, a little girl in an armchair near the entrance to the kid’s room was staring, frightened. She would remember this later, maybe, as an adult—the woman unhinged in the library, a little split in her reality.
I was a safe distance away, near the checkout desk, when Alice came up beside me. The girl now appeared to be trying to pluck her eyes from her skull. Every few tries she stopped, shook herself, and then ground her palms into her face. Her lips were moving but no sound was coming out; still, it would have been impossible not to notice her. The jerking of her body, her arms, was so inhuman that it gave off a kind of sound. I wiped my arm against my jeans but I felt her spit still there. A few children streamed out the front door, their mothers leading them. “I called,” Alice said. “They’re on the way. Are you all right?”