Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  “Who? The police? Why did you do that?”

  “Cat, are you kidding me? Look at her. She’s not safe. She’s on crack or something.”

  “Meth, I think.”

  “Whatever,” said Alice. “She is fucked up. I always wonder when I see people like her, where is the family, you know?”

  The girl was docile by the time the police arrived. They led her to the library’s entrance, one on either side, like they were escorting her to a ball.

  “I am so relieved that’s over,” Alice said, once the library was back to its quiet self. “Maybe now she’ll get help.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No,” Alice said, looking at me strangely. Maybe I smelled like booze.

  Michigan

  “Unbelievable,” said Jimmy, channeling Mom. We were standing in Marlena’s backyard in the Thursday dusk, just the three of us, smoking. I could exhale perfect Os. It was okay with Jimmy that I smoked, but not okay to miss school. I didn’t point out that his reasoning seemed sort of confused—I was just glad I could count on him to drive to the gas station and buy cigarettes for me with the money I saved from cleaning with Mom. After starting with Camels, I’d settled on Parliaments, like Marlena—a drier and more sophisticated flavor, I actually said once, to Greg, who was kind enough not to make fun of me.

  “What,” Marlena asked.

  I pulled out my phone and opened up the text—Dad had sent Jimmy and me the same one, notifying us both that he’d be in our “neck of the woods” for a few hours on Sunday, and that he wanted to take us out to lunch so we could all “catch up.”

  “Whoa! The devil emerges from his den of iniquity.” She exhaled a jet of smoke. “I think this is nice. It’s good. At least he wants to see you.”

  “Almost six months,” said Jimmy. “That’s how long we’ve been here, a barely five-hour drive from where he lives. Cat’s basically gone overboard, and it takes him six months to get up here so we can all ‘catch up’?”

  Jimmy threw his half-smoked cigarette wastefully into a drift of melting snow and turned toward our house, though the three of us were an hour into a Monopoly game with Sal. His boots left prints that filled with water as soon as he lifted them; early May, and still snow pocked our yards, brown patches of it like sculpted mud. Despite the junky houses and trash pits and busted cars, Silver Lake had been strangely beautiful in the dead of winter. But over the last few weeks, as the weather warmed, everything was turning ugly.

  “Well, I don’t see why he had to up and leave,” said Marlena, her disappointment and longing transparent, for once. She’d shown up at my house first thing the day after the incident with her dad, near tears, a row of bruises scaling her right arm. She hugged me and said she was sorry for calling me clingy. She said, what would I do without you? She said she’d only said such a mean thing because she knew that in order to get me to leave, to keep me safe, she had to hurt my feelings bad enough that I would go. I can handle him, she said. You can’t. He’s my dad, she said. As much as I hate his fucking guts sometimes, he’s a part of me, you know? I get him. I believed her.

  I followed her into the barn, wishing a Dad-wish for each of us: that seeing mine wouldn’t be a disaster, and that hers wouldn’t be home for a long time, or maybe even ever again.

  * * *

  On Sunday morning we couldn’t find Jimmy. Mom woke me up early; we were meeting Dad at noon in Gaylord, a two-hour drive from our house, a three-hour drive, he claimed, from wherever he was living. He and Becky were going to Toronto and couldn’t be bothered to go out of their way, despite the fact that Silver Lake was really only an hour or so west of the highway they’d be taking up to Canada. We only have the week off, after all, Dad texted, ending his message with a:). I checked for Jimmy outside. He was probably just up early, steeling himself against the day with a bowl of weed, but I didn’t see him out back or out front. I glanced toward Marlena’s window, my attention catching on the prints that traveled back and forth to her door, surely just the ones he’d left yesterday.

  Jimmy’s bed was all messed up like he’d only just left it, but his boots and coat were gone, his cigarettes too. I kicked through the piles of clothes on the floor, taking advantage of the opportunity to snoop. He never let me in there. My bare foot landed on something sharp and cold. It crunched a little under my weight. I bent over to see what I’d stepped on. Marlena’s pin, popped open from the pressure of my foot, spilling white powder and triangular shards of pill. I’d seen her wearing it as recently as the day before; I remembered her fiddling with it, one of her thinking tics, while we were playing Monopoly. The door to the tiny house wouldn’t close properly, and the pin part was bent to the side. Had I ever seen her not wearing it? I rubbed the pill powder into the carpet until it basically disappeared and took the pin to my room, where I messed with it for a while, trying to bend the sharp part back into place, panicking about having broken something so important. The panic distracted me from the question I should have asked the second I realized what I’d stepped on. Why the hell was Marlena’s pin on Jimmy’s bedroom floor? Someone knocked, and, heart leaping, I hid the busted pin in the pocket of a wretched sweater hanging in the far reaches of my closet.

  “He could have at least left a note,” Mom said when I opened the door, her face half-hidden by a curl of steam rising from the mug she carried.

  “He’s so fucking childish. I can’t believe he’s leaving me to handle Dad alone.”

  “What a lovely mouth you have.”

  “Fucking,” I said. “Fucking, fucking, fucking.”

  Mom stared into the milky eye of her tea. “We’re leaving in twenty minutes and if you’re not ready we’re not going at all,” she said. I rolled my eyes, and then, realizing she was already walking away, sighed loud and hard, so that she’d hear. I decided I would try not to think about the pin and where I’d found it, though what I’d learned was there, butterflying at the edges of my thoughts, waiting to be named. It’s easy to ignore something you really don’t want to know.

  I would see Dad soon—nothing else mattered. Even, for once, Marlena.

  I’d never been on a date, but I felt like I was preparing for one that morning. I tried on one skirt and then another, neither of which had escaped the closet since Pontiac, before settling on something of Marlena’s—the peach dress she’d worn the day I’d watched Ryder make a drop at Cascade Drive. She’d left it at my house weeks before, a habit she picked up after noticing Mom would wash her clothes with mine. I pulled the cotton dress over my head, surprised that it fit me not unlike it fit her—it flared a little more at my hips, which were chubbier than hers, but the neckline revealed a similar valley between my breasts. My hair skimmed my collarbone, mouse brown. Nothing I could do about that. I smeared foundation across my face and brightened my cheekbones with bronzer. Marlena had taught me how to run the smudgy pencil along the inner rim of my eyelids, that the shimmery powder went in the hollow between the bridge of my nose and my tear ducts, what the word definition meant. I curled my eyelashes and coated them twice with mascara. To finish, I sprayed vanilla body mist into the air and then walked through the stinging cloud.

  In the car, Mom pointedly rolled down the window, despite the chill and the whiffs of manure that blew in as we sped out of Silver Lake and past the farms along the highway. Mom, too, had dressed with care. She wore a gauzy tunic that showed off the camisole hugging her torso; the skin on her chest glittered a little in the light, from that stupid lotion she used. If it hadn’t been so obvious that she was trying to look young, I would have admitted that she looked kind of great. More and more lately, she was borrowing my clothes and shopping in the juniors section at Maurice’s. When she wore sparkly lip gloss and high-heeled boots, I wanted to shake her, hug her, and delete her existence, somehow all at once. To top it off, since her disastrous date with Bolt—which had not been repeated—I couldn’t stop noticing how, all sunny and pale-eyed, with her narrow hips and skinny arms, she looked
more like Marlena’s mom than mine.

  At a stoplight a few miles out of town, Mom pulled down her overhead mirror and frowned at herself, licking the pad of her finger and wiping at a smudge of brown shadow that had gone rogue below her left eye.

  “It looks good, Momma,” I said, surprised by a wave of love that interrupted the cringing mortification I’d felt for her since I realized she’d spent a good hour straightening her already perfectly straight hair. “You look really pretty.”

  She flipped up the mirror, threw an arm over my shoulder, and hugged me. My cheek glued itself to her chest—I worried faintly about my mascara but then I closed my eyes, taking in her essence, so familiar it was beyond sensory, a biological narcotic that I both resisted and craved. I let her hold me. The light turned green and she kept hugging me, not that it really mattered, since there wasn’t a single other car on the road.

  “There’s my baby,” she said to my scalp. “I knew you were in there somewhere.”

  * * *

  “Slow book?” Mom asked, glancing at the copy of The Left Hand of Darkness sitting unopened on my lap.

  “No,” I said. “Just can’t really focus.”

  Twenty minutes outside of Gaylord my phone vibrated. A text from Marlena. Ma peche don’t let the devil get you down!!! A few seconds later, my phone buzzed again. Hate it when you leave, hate it when you leave.

  Do you know where Jimmy is, I texted.

  An instant later: Nope.

  Mom drove us into the parking lot of a diner called Culver’s. Fields of half-broken corn stalks surrounded the restaurant; across the street a BP station and an Arby’s faced off. The lot was empty except for a few cars, none of which I recognized. “He’s not here yet,” Mom chirped. It was 12:14 p.m. Whenever a car whizzed by, we tensed, but none of them turned.

  “I’m sorry, hon,” said Mom, at 12:32. “He’s probably just running late or bumped into traffic leaving the city or something. Want to go in and get some food?”

  “At Culver’s?”

  Mom laughed. “What the fuck is Culver’s, anyway?”

  “I don’t want to eat anything that belongs to someone named Culver.”

  “They probably don’t even serve food. It’s probably just like, some sad hick’s living room.”

  “I bet it smells like a hundred million lima beans farted in there.”

  We were both trying too hard to truly laugh, but still, I felt more at home with her than I had in months. “You said fuck,” I told her.

  “Fuck,” she said, and then we actually did laugh. The sound of us blended together.

  “You know when I really, really started to wonder if your dad was bad news?”

  12:35. I texted Dad a dozen question marks.

  “I was pregnant with you. I guess I had plenty of reasons for thinking that when Jimmy was a baby, but I was in new mother mode and completely obsessed with your brother and paid more attention to his bowel movements, than, like, whether or not I’d eaten more than a potato chip in days.”

  “Gross.”

  “With you, I got really fat. Like, really, really fat. I had these crazy cravings for fish sandwiches from McDonald’s—they were literally the only thing I wanted to eat. Nana used to joke that you’d come out swimming.”

  “Gee, Mom, thanks for the brain damage.”

  “Oh, you’re fine.”

  One time, she said, settling into the story, when I was huge in her belly, ready to come out, she asked if Dad would go pick her up a Filet-O-Fish. Jimmy was fussy, crying about every little thing, and it was maybe seven or eight—she’d already eaten, she remembered, but she was hungry again. She said I would understand one day, when I was pregnant, what it felt like to be hungry like that, just all the time, a hunger that didn’t subside even when you were literally chewing. When Dad didn’t answer she asked him again—but still, he said nothing. “Rick,” she said once, twice more, but he kept staring at the TV. So she picked up Jimmy, who, by then, was absolutely screaming, and stood in front of the TV, blocking Dad’s view. “It wasn’t that he wasn’t jumping up to do my bidding,” she said. “It was that he wasn’t answering me.” He did that a lot, ignored even direct questions, and it got so she felt like she was crazy, like maybe she was opening her mouth to speak and nothing was coming out. When she lost it, started throwing a tantrum to match Jimmy’s, Dad stood up and banged out of the house. She assumed he was going to the drive-through, but he didn’t come back until the next morning. Later, she found two fish sandwiches in a greasy paper bag in the backseat of the car.

  We watched a truck zoom across Mom’s window and then off into the distance, beyond the Arby’s, beyond the intersection way, way ahead. With Mom’s story, my perception of my parents underwent a series of rapid changes, the way letters on an eye exam do when the doctor flips the lenses—clear, then blurred, sharp, then back to incomprehensible fuzz.

  “I get it: he sucks. Fifty percent of me is composed of the worst person ever. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “Don’t be so immature. I don’t want you to say anything. I just want you to know that this, what he’s doing, he was always like that. Just, cold. Weird. He always had that in him. The next morning he acted like nothing happened but he didn’t try to make it up to me or anything, and I swear, I felt this little door open up in my head, a little door to a room full of all the shitty shit I didn’t want to face about him, and it was like, oh, divorce, it was just there, as an option.” She shifted in my direction and reached out for me. I shrank toward the passenger-side door. “Hey. It was worth it, though. Definitely. You, your brother, you guys are so, so worth it.” I could hardly stand her. “I just don’t want you to expect anything from him, that’s the point I’m trying to make.”

  A line from my book swirled through my head. I was in the peril of my life, and I did not know it. A very early memory, so wavery I’d often brushed it off as a dream; me, five, half asleep in the backseat of his car, parked in the driveway of a house I didn’t recognize, as Dad sat on the porch talking to a woman with a thick blue streak in her hair. For a single summer when I was eight or nine, Dad moved into an apartment near the strip mall. When I visited, he’d offer me weird gifts—a troll doll, though I hated dolls to the point of nightmares, a stuffed dog that smelled like a secondhand store. I have few memories of him from those long weekends. Instead, my imagination unwinds footage of me wandering his neighborhood on cloudy days, burying the troll facedown in a pile of wood chips in someone’s flower bed, no one looking for me, no one caring what might happen.

  Mom unrolled her window halfway and then cranked it back up until it was open just a finger’s width, letting in a wheeze of mulch and spring-damp air. “What are you? Sixteen?”

  “I’m fifteen.”

  “You know what I mean. You can handle this stuff. You can face the truth.”

  We were just about to leave, when, at 1:03, he pulled into a spot a little ways down from us, as if to say I’m here, but don’t get used to it. He was driving an unfamiliar car, a maroon five-seater thing with a deep dent in the driver’s-side door. Scattered snow flurries would probably put it out of commission. Becky was in the passenger seat. I’d known, of course, that she would be—we only have a week off, after all:)—but seeing her still twisted my insides.

  We all met up on the walkway and exchanged weird greetings, Mom and Dad first, one of those fake hugs where your chests are far enough apart to fit a true hugging couple in between, while Becky tapped me on the head faux-affectionately. Then she and Mom ignored each other as Dad—instead of doing his usual super-charming swoop and spin, picking me up and generally pretending like seeing me was the greatest thing he could imagine—acted shy and saddish and told me I looked lovely and kind of hooked an arm around me and clasped me to his side. Mom said she’d wait in the car while we ate.

  “You sure?” asked Becky, all kiss-assy.

  “I’m sure,” said Mom, already halfway there.

  “Went a little cr
azy with the makeup, didn’t you,” said Dad, and my body temperature rose a thousand degrees.

  Inside, Culver’s was hospital bright and smelled like fryer oil and Windex, your standard fast-food place, with a menu pretty much identical to Dairy Queen’s. “Welcome to Culver’s!” screamed a cheerful overweight girl behind the register, who wore a terrible white nurse uniform splattered with ketchup and grease. I beelined for the bathroom and spent a few minutes rubbing at my face with a folded-up paper towel. The restaurant was empty except for one other table where a woman sat with two little kids. One of them had stuffed a French fry between the gap in his two front teeth and was shaking his head like crazy at the other, who ignored him.

  Here he was, Dad, finally. Dad, taking up too much space, distributing slimy menus, brushing crumbs off the booth. Dad. He was in better shape or something—the muscles on his arms had that overexercised clench that make older men look tired and a little pathetic. He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop as he read over his choices. His nose was sunburned and he kept sweeping his newly long hair back from his forehead. Becky sat so close she was nearly on his lap, and as Dad surveyed the menu she stared at her open cell phone, tapping at it with two metallic thumbnails.

  “I could destroy a burger,” Dad said. I’d never seen these wrinkles on his face before. “What about you babes? You hungry?”

  “Sure,” I said. I felt willing to do anything that would make this end faster and with fewer casualties.

  “Chicken tenders for me,” said Becky, without looking up from her cell. “And no fries.”

  “And extra barbecue sauce,” Dad said to her in a deranged baby-voice, turning his Rs into Ws. He stood up to go place our order.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  “No, stay, stay. You two can catch up on girl talk.” It took me a second to realize that the thing he was doing with his fingers was air quotes.