by Julie Buntin
The best was when Marlena and I went to the beach alone. I’d been worried that Marlena and Jimmy’s relationship would translate into her spending less time with me, but the opposite was true—we were together all the time now. Whatever was going on between her and my brother had even put an abrupt end to the way she’d sometimes go missing for a day or two without warning or explanation. I thought my brother had put an end to Bolt.
On a night while her dad was away and Jimmy was working a night shift, Ryder and Greg stayed over with us at the barn. For hours Ryder had ignored me, directing his stoned commentary to Marlena and Greg, while I sat on one of the beanbags, drinking quietly, noticing, in my misery, the way his jeans rode up and exposed where his hairy calves met his socks. I knew that his indifference meant I’d failed at some feminine calculus, and that I would continue to fail, as long as Marlena was part of the equation. The next morning we woke up early and abandoned the boys. Marlena stole the keys from Ryder’s pocket, digging her nails into my arm to keep me from giggling, waking them up. She stuck a note to Ryder’s forehead, touching him with an ease that gave me a flash of violent anger. Plz make Sal b-fast. Back soon. XOXOXOX.
I kept waiting for the police, but when weeks went by and nothing happened I started to wonder if Ryder’d exaggerated the whole thing. How could I tell her about Ryder going to the cops without telling her that I’d slept with him? And anyway, he was still dealing—sneakily, and only to old clients—but still, not such a change from business as usual. He texted buyers from a phone that was different than the one he used to text me, and I’d seen the hollowed-out children’s Bible in his van, I knew what it was for.
* * *
I have just one picture of myself from that year—the Polaroid that I keep tucked away in that shoebox. We didn’t take many. Facebook was very new, then, and mostly used by college students, so little of our life was online yet. I’d uploaded a bunch of photos onto my family desktop, maybe I emailed them to myself at some point, I don’t know; they’re lost now, as gone as that time itself. Jimmy bought the camera for Marlena as a gift, and she’d taken it to the beach with us the day after she got it. Greg snapped the picture as Marlena and I were walking back from the water, toward our blanket. I remember being annoyed. Like most girls like me, insecure, full of hatred for my body, I disliked having my picture taken. How different those manifestations of me were from how I saw myself.
Marlena took the picture from Greg and shook it, as the instructions said to. We watched it develop. There we were, both of us squinting in the sunlight, our faces all laughter, our bodies strong and suntanned, sparkling with water. Beautiful.
“Yikes,” I said, because I still didn’t know how to say what I thought, especially if it required confidence.
“What do you mean, yikes! You’re a supermodel.”
“I don’t want to look at it.” But I took it from her anyway and looked at the girl beside Marlena in the photo. Now I wonder, why did I spend so much time hating her? Hating her out-stuck ears, the curve of fat below her belly button, her cravings and urges and all her messy feelings? She had a clever face. She looked normal and fun, like someone I might have passed on the street, arm in arm with her equally perfect best friend, and envy. I dropped the picture and sprinkled it with a palmful of sand.
“Don’t do that,” Marlena said, rescuing it. “That’s mine.”
I can explain it now, I think. I think I was sorry that I didn’t love her enough.
* * *
After Culver’s, Dad stopped picking up his phone. Whenever I called, “Country Roads” played on and on. He texted me just twice after our lunch—first, a photo of him and Becky eating fried clam strips at a restaurant overlooking Niagara Falls (happy as clams!), and then, less than a day later: Misz ya boops!
“Have you heard from Dad?” I asked Mom at dinner.
“Nope.” She sipped her wine, the ice clinking against the glass.
“What about you?” I asked Jimmy.
“Ha, yeah right,” Jimmy said. “We’ve been giving each other the silent treatment since January.”
“He’s probably just busy or traveling or something, honey. Don’t you worry about it. It’s not your responsibility. He’s the parent. He’s the one dropping the ball, not you.”
Later that night, Mom asleep, Marlena off somewhere with Jimmy, I wrote an email.
from: Catherine
to: Dad
subject: thanks a lot
I called you yesterday. You didn’t pick up. I called you the day before that, and a few days before that, and pretty much all the time since we moved up here and guess what Dad? You never pick up.
Remember how you used to have fifty different names for me? Stupid stuff, like Syrup, and Melvin, and Turd. When I was a kid I thought that was like the funniest thing on earth, whenever you’d call out Syrup, Syrup, in the grocery store or at the playground.
I’m going to stop expecting things from you now. I am going to stop calling and texting and I’m going to stop asking you questions in my head, thinking of what you would do or say, whether you’d be proud. I bet if I really tried I can remember all fifty. Can you remember even five? The three I just reminded you of don’t count.
Seems pretty backwards, but that’s life, I guess.
PS. The funny and stupid and embarrassing thing is I was always proud of the fact that I’m more like you than Mom or Jimmy. The follies of youth, or whatever.
PPS. Anyway, I hope you’re not dead or something and your silence isn’t because the Canadian government just hasn’t figured out who your family is, because then I’ll feel really guilty that I wrote this.
I hit Send without rereading.
And if he deleted the message and pretended that everything was fine? Well, whether I could forgive him would depend. It would depend on how he explained himself, whether he’d ever even try.
Because I was still here. I was right here, where he’d left me.
* * *
Yes, Dad showed me how to use a compass, yes he told me some things about trees, yes, sometimes he drove me to the movies and listened to me rehearse for choir tryouts and when I was a little, little girl I remember that he threw me in the air, that he’d kiss my forehead with a fish noise and I’d laugh until I went blind. But what about the stuff I intentionally try to forget? What about the time he and Mom were screaming and he pushed her and she fell against her StairMaster and he kept coming and her foot got trapped and she broke four of the fine bones there, so that she had to wear a plastic boot the whole time we were in Florida on our only true family vacation? What about the time he called Mom an alcoholic and then started smashing things in the kitchen, I was no older than ten, and Mom took me and Jimmy to a hotel where we lived for a week? What about when I was even littler, right before we moved to Pike Street, and I hid in the back of the U-Haul, and when he finally found me he pulled down my pants and hit me with a wooden spoon until Mom started to cry? What about the whole months when he disappeared, what about Becky, what about how sometimes when I asked him questions he didn’t answer, he just stood there staring out the window or at the TV or walked away, leaving me to wonder what I’d done wrong, why I couldn’t make him stay?
By the first days of August, two months in the sun had done something to me, or maybe it was the fault of the weeks, how each one edged me closer to sixteen. My skin was a thorough, reddish brown, my hair white-blond at the temples. I’d become a strong swimmer. If Dad passed me in the grocery store, or walked by me and Marlena sunning ourselves on the beach, I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me.
* * *
Jimmy and Marlena got in their noisiest fight, at least the noisiest one I ever heard, the morning after Marlena and I got brain-cell-slaughteringly drunk and used a steak knife to carve identical inch-long cuts into our upper arms, halfway between the swell of our shoulders and the crease of our elbows. We bled all over the place, laughing loud enough to wak
e everyone up, only no one was there—my mom was with some boyfriend we hadn’t yet met, Jimmy was at work, so it was just us, us and the giant box of wine that we’d pretty much drained, us and the steak knife and the blood, the two of us amazed at how little it hurt. And then, hours later, before we passed out, Marlena sobbing on the couch, saying something about not being good enough for anyone, me patting her back, telling her no, telling her shh, bewildered.
“You are so messed up,” I heard him yell at her, the two of them in the kitchen, me curled up on the bathroom floor like a worm. “It’s disgusting. Whatever crazy shit you want to do to yourself, Marlena, I can’t stop you. Honestly, I’m getting tired of trying. But leave my sister out of it. She does whatever you do. She’s fifteen years old. Take some goddamn responsibility.”
“What about me?” she said. Was she crying? “It’s like none of you ever even think about me.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” Jimmy said, and something slammed, and then they didn’t say any more.
For ten years or so I had the scar, noticeable any time I wore something sleeveless, an equals sign with half of it missing. A few months ago, I glanced in the mirror before going out, and realized that it was gone, absorbed into my body like nothing.
* * *
I hadn’t seen or heard from Ryder for a couple weeks when he texted one hot August night, my window open all the way. Black flies hurled their bodies against the screen, drawn by my bedside lamp. Marlena and Greg and Tidbit and I were full of theories about Ryder’s disappearance. Marlena thought he’d met someone, an idea that made me prickly, Greg thought his mom was sick, Tidbit agreed with both of them to the point of canceling herself out, and I, of course, didn’t say a word.
Ryder must have known that I was alone. Had he texted Marlena, who was at a movie with Jimmy, first? Or maybe he knew my brother’s schedule, that he had that night off. Manipulation was part of Ryder’s nature—I wouldn’t put it past him.
Whats up
Where the hell have you been?
Nowhere
Okayyy
I folded my page, irritated. Marlena was going to like this one, The Turn of the Screw. She loved to be scared.
That’s all you’re going to say?
Miss u
HaHA
Srsly
Then: Send me a pic
My phone had a crappy little camera, and he was always asking for pics. “Of your boobs and ass,” he told me helpfully, the night I touched him through his pants in Marlena’s jungle gym.
give up, not going to happen
Ok then i’ll come get u
I blushed like a moron.
why? what do you want me for
i want to kiss you
I want to kiss you. I imagined him kissing me. He was slower than he’d ever been in real life and he kept most of his spit in his mouth, and he knew my favorite color and that I don’t like marinara sauce, and he didn’t smell like pot or cigarettes or beer, and we were in my bed not in some hot-boxed car or up against a tree or hiding from the house lights in my backyard.
i want to fuck u again so bad cat he wrote before I could answer.
why?
because u r hot
I spent a long time thinking before I typed you are full of shit go back to telling me what you want to do to me.
Then I was actually turned on.
i want to lick ur tite pussy
“Tite”?
no thx.
Had I ever said no to him before? I hadn’t that night in the rowboat, or the time after that, when his name suddenly showed up on my phone, asking me to hang out, or the night he wanted to “go for a walk” while the others watched TV.
pretty plz
no
im gonna leave now
i said no Ryder
why u being a cocktease? be there in 15
no
I set my phone to vibrate. So Ryder was annoyed. So what. I brought the fantasy Ryder back and put him there, on the bed next to me. “I want to lick your pussy,” that other Ryder whispered in my ear, and I told him okay, and I touched myself where my underwear was damp, and this time, I did not stop. And after, there was no shame at all. Nothing but me, alone in the room with a buzzing phone.
helloooo cat?
hello?
real cool
wtf? where r u?
* * *
Mom kept a few pregnancy tests deep in the back of the cabinet under our bathroom sink, behind the cleaning supplies. I found them one day while I was looking for backup conditioner. Marlena and I had laughed about it for hours. So when she told me she hadn’t gotten her period in almost two months, we somberly shut ourselves up in my bathroom. She sat on the toilet and held the white stick between her legs. “How are you supposed to do this without pissing all over yourself,” she asked, as her urine splattered into the bowl. She pulled up her pants and washed her hands, placing the test on the lip of the sink. A single blue line appeared. Two minutes, three, and then four—the line remained alone.
“No plus,” I said, relieved I wouldn’t have a niece or nephew, or have to wonder if it was my brother’s or someone else’s.
“Weird,” she said, and we took the pregnancy test out into the woods, where we buried it goofily, a fake ceremony, so my mom wouldn’t find it in the trash.
* * *
It was the sucked-dry, ragged end of August, the air soupy and buzzing with insects even at ten in the morning, when the police came. I watched from the window as they traveled in a silent line. The first car parked in Marlena’s driveway, and another sped between our houses, off-road, flossing itself through backyard junk. It picked up the two-track near the jungle gym and zipped into the pines, nothing left to see but a red light that blinkered out in seconds.
I pulled on cutoffs and a tank top and went outside. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t mean to. To stop the trembling in my hands, I wedged them under my thighs, right up against the baked wood of our makeshift stoop. I’d have two deep splinters in my right palm when I stood up. A cop knocked on Marlena’s front door. His fist dropped and he cocked his head, as if he had all day to wait. I knew Sal was in there, thinking about whether he should let them in. “I’m a little kid,” Sal liked to say when he was trying to convince us to let him stay over longer, to let us keep him around. “I won’t bother you.” We always cracked up at that, how he thought he was less trouble just because he was small.
Marlena shot out of my house, pushing past where I sat on my front steps, pulling her hair into a ponytail as she jogged barefoot across the yard. She’d been over—but not with me. This happened sometimes; days would go by without her and Jimmy talking and then one morning there she’d be, drinking coffee at the kitchen table with my mom, looking at me like, Whoops?
“Excuse me,” she called. “That’s my house.” She wore a T-shirt of Jimmy’s over a pair of shorts that barely peeked below the shirt’s hem. Her legs were long and tan and both cops nibbled them with their eyes, up and down, up and down.
“That’s your house what you doing over there, this time in the morning,” the cop asked. His partner leaned against the car, watching, his arms crossed over his chest.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant to anything.”
“That where your boyfriend lives?”
“Do you have a warrant, officer?” I’d never known she was experienced at talking to cops.
“Pretty convenient walk of shame. More like a couple steps.” The other cop laughed, shuffled his feet in the dirt, looked at Marlena again like she was a snack.
“I asked a question.”
“We’re following up on a tip. We been getting reports about illegal activity happening here, minors running around late at night, smoking and boozing, and we know you got a little kid in that house.”
“Sal is fine.”
“You’re not old enough to take care of a kid alone. Your daddy here?”
“I’m almost eighteen. You never met an
eighteen-year-old with kids?”
“We just have to take a look,” said the other cop, walking over to them. “You get that, right? Someone calls in, that’s our job. We gotta look around, make sure it’s all okay, make sure nobody is in a bad situation.”
“If you don’t have a warrant, you’re gonna have to come back another time.” Marlena folded her arms over her chest. Perhaps their eyes had just reminded her that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “You’re gonna have to come back when my dad’s home.”
“Where’s your daddy at?”
“I don’t know. I’m not his wife. I don’t keep track of him.”
A voice came in on the car radio, shouted numbers and static.
“We’ll be back,” said the one getting in the passenger side. “Try’n get your story straight.” They took off, following the car that had gone ahead into the woods.
* * *
More cop cars down the road, and then a big nondescript van, all heading the same way. Inside the barn, Marlena dialed her dad’s number over and over again. The fourth time, when he didn’t pick up, she threw her phone against the wall, just as he’d thrown that water bottle full of ice and wine. “Fucker,” she said. “Where is he.” The battery flew out and skittered across the floor. I could see his silhouette in the rage on her face, in how quick she could be to lose control. Like one tracing laid over another, both sets of lines showing through. Our parents were with us always; no surgery could cut them out. Sal stood in the middle of the big downstairs room in a nightgown-length T-shirt, his feet bare. “It’s okay, Sal,” I said, and he slid a hand into my empty one. I squeezed his sticky palm. He didn’t react.
“Call your brother,” Marlena told me, trying to jam her battery back into her phone.
“Did you break it?”