Marlena

by Julie Buntin

“Just call him.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Say that I need him to come home. Tell him to make something up, that he’s sick or it’s an emergency.”

  I called Jimmy. No answer. He never answered when he was at work. Jim, the cops are in the woods behind our house. Marlena says she needs you. Call us, okay?

  “He probably can’t hear it ringing. He has to put it in those lockers.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said. “Goddamn fuck. They found it, Cat.”

  Her sadness, when she let it show, usually struck me as wise and ancient, the sadness of an oracle, not hysterical and self-pitying and teenage, the way mine could be. But not that day.

  That was the Oxy, though, wasn’t it? She climbed the pill up to some cushiony planet, far above the wreckage of life on earth, and maybe she felt for us and herself, watching from there, a height so great she could, perhaps, see the beginning and the end. But she was just so far away. Water sprang to her eyes, loosening her face, slumping her shoulders, before evaporating just about as soon as it arrived. “They’re going to arrest my dad.”

  * * *

  Why do I keep doing this? Making her out to be more than she was, grander, omniscient even, lovely and unreal. She could be such a bitch. She could sense what you hated about yourself, and if you pissed her off she’d throw it back at your face, she’d make sure you knew she thought it, too. Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get. I’m trying to hold palmfuls of sand but I squeeze harder, I tighten my fists, and the quicker it all escapes.

  * * *

  I have never taken Oxy. I tried Ecstasy a few more times in college, floating through the disco ball of Times Square, the whole world gone purple, purple faces on the subway, purple halal truck, purple plants growing around the base of purple trees, so high I could’ve sworn she was the very air I breathed. I snorted lines of cocaine off the back of a toilet in a bar in Bushwick, a glowstick around my neck, a pyramid of shot glasses on the table where some man I barely knew was waiting, all of them empty, most thanks to me. I spent two years stealing ADD medication from roommates, fooling psychiatrists into writing prescriptions for drugs that made me move so fast I had no memory. I wanted to know something about how she felt, about why that was the thing she kept going back to, more than me, more than Jimmy, more than Greg or Ryder or Sal. I had a hundred chances to stop her. More.

  I replaced Silver Lake and one kind of cowardice with another kind. I nursed my screwed-up survivor’s guilt, let it take me over, but I never tried Oxy, not after watching how it scraped at her with its long fingernails, leaving nothing but a body. My freshman year of college, my boyfriend got a few pills, and when he showed them to me I slapped him so hard my hand stung. I never said why, and pretty soon after that he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore.

  I was terrified. No matter how far I fell, something pulled me back to safety—school and its occasional fascinating gift, dopey, well-meaning men, and books, books, that’s where I found her most often, in the intimacies of characters, Ruth and Sylvie in a rowboat, Esperanza on Mango Street, Anna K., of course, right before she jumps.

  * * *

  I don’t want to tell the rest.

  * * *

  The social workers came that same evening, one fat lady, one thin, both with the same crunchy cap of curls, the same middle-aged sag to their cheeks. Older women were of two main varietals, to me. They either looked like my mom, or they looked like these women. I wondered if being married for a long time had something to do with it, if it aged you differently. Their bodies were used up, somehow, less theirs, their skin pawed over, worn out by men. Back then, I didn’t want to grow up to be my mom, but I didn’t want to grow up to be these women. Neither did Marlena.

  They knocked. Sal was sleeping up in the loft, even though it was only a little past eight, that moment on every Michigan August evening when the sky goes violet for a second before sighing into blue, into the cooler night. Marlena was on the couch. I could practically see her consciousness hovering outside her body. In response to the knock, she turned her head, blinking once, twice, before mumbling, “Tell them to leave us alone.” Or maybe it was “Tell them nobody’s home.”

  Jimmy still wasn’t back. Who knows where Mom was, maybe next door; we needed her, but we hadn’t asked for her help. That day was my and Marlena’s emergency, and we’d tackled it as a team, calming Sal, trying to warn her dad and Bolt, and, most important, coming up with a bunch of ironclad reasons why she never knew what was going on, why the meth had nothing to do with her. Trying to get the story straight.

  Sal did not argue when we put him to bed ludicrously early. But who were we kidding? As soon as he was upstairs, Marlena conjured that big white bottle. I tried to take it away. I snatched the bottle and held it above my head, calling her a pill popper, telling her that now was not the time for getting high. “It’s exactly the time,” she said. “What better time is there?” She swiped it out of my hand and darted over to the sink, laughing, laughing, pretty as ever, nothing sick-looking or drug-addict-y about her, so I felt stupid for treating the pills like more than the joke she made them out to be. She washed down the pills, I didn’t see how many, with water straight from the tap as it overflowed the scummy pools collecting in weeks’ worth of used dishes. That was an hour earlier, longer, and Marlena was gone.

  They stood under the busted overhead light, those ladies, and I saw that beyond them was a car with a cop in it, just standing by.

  “You’ll have to come back later,” I said.

  “We’re looking for Marlena Joyner and a little one, Salamander? You must be their friend, Catherine?”

  “We’ve had a long day here. Please, maybe, let’s do this tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry, but there is a minor here without an adult, and they can’t be here overnight.”

  “He’s with us.”

  “Are either of you eighteen?”

  “Marlena’s birthday is next month.”

  “Let us in, honey,” said the fatter lady, who was in charge. She wore a cardigan, though it was muggy outside. “My name’s Candice, and this is Josie. We’re just here to help. Nobody is in trouble, but you need to let us in. If you don’t, we’re going to have to get our friend Officer Dalkey involved.”

  Marlena was visibly fucked up. I’d never seen her quite like this—out of it to the point of senselessness.

  “Marlena’s not feeling well,” I said, and let them in.

  They scanned the barn, a science to their looking, some social worker math whirring in their brains, registering the smell, which was on the edge of uncomfortably bad, the mismatched furniture, the concrete floor and the dishes everywhere and the instability of the ladder/staircase and how the loft seemed to be loosening from the barn walls, on the verge of collapse. The bathroom door barely closed—whenever I used the toilet, I held on to the doorknob to protect myself against someone walking in. Was there a washing machine here? I’d never noticed. Maybe that was why Marlena left so many clothes at my house. There was nowhere for them to sit—the two chairs around the kitchen table, which was really just a Ping-Pong table with the net taken off, were covered with junk, newspapers and cables and three inexplicable N64 controllers. Marlena lay across the couch, which was barely long enough for her whole body, asleep or worse. I knew from experience that the two beanbag chairs against the wall were the source of the B.O. smell.

  “Marlena,” said Candice. She sat on the lip of the chest that functioned as a coffee table, and touched Marlena’s arm like a mother. “Honey? Are you awake?” Marlena groaned, turned to face the backside of the couch. Her tank top rode up her back, revealing an ugly bruise, deep purple and spotted with black, rising above the horizon of her shorts.

  Josie strode toward Marlena’s dad’s bedroom. I’d never been inside. For all I knew, it was full of guns, or dead bodies, or posters of naked girls Marlena’s age.

  “What did she
take?” Candice asked me. Nothing mean in her voice, nothing angry. “It’s okay, Catherine. You can tell me. I promise you—we are here to help Marlena and her brother. That’s what we do. We’re not the police.”

  “Nothing. She’s just tired.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. And I bet Officer Dalkey wouldn’t, either. I think Marlena’s been taking something, and I think she could be in pretty big trouble.”

  “She’s tired.” Why couldn’t I come up with a better lie? Food poisoning? The flu?

  “Listen to me. We are going to take Sal with us. That’s what’s happening. If Marlena comes too, she’s going to get drug-tested, and if she gets drug-tested I think you and me both know what we’re going to find.” Josie was climbing the ladder. I wished for her to fall. I wished for Sal to hide.

  “She can stay at my house. She’s just messing around. Please don’t get her in trouble.”

  I wanted to reach down and pull Marlena by that long, greasy hair until she woke up, until her head lifted right off the couch. How dare she lie there snoring on the couch in front of me and this lady, this well-meaning Candice, leaving me to deal with the mess that was her life. “Please—please. She’s really stressed out.”

  “Is your momma home? She’d be okay with Marlena staying with you for a little while? Even like this?”

  “Marlena stays with me all the time.”

  “Okay, so if I go talk to her about what’s happening, she’s gonna open the door over there?”

  “Yes.” Was Mom home? I had no idea. Sal probably really was hiding.

  “You seem like a good girl, Catherine. You need to be a friend to Marlena right now. She’s gonna need your help.” Candice took one of my hands and cupped it between her own. Her palms were crinkly and velvet-soft. She had a daughter, maybe, and that’s why she was so kind to us that night. She’d come down too hard and pushed her daughter away, and so she was going to try and make it right by giving us an extra chance. I could see it like it was a movie, the girl throwing up behind some A-frame in the woods, this Candice standing at the phone at four a.m., wondering when it became a betrayal to call the police. I didn’t know whether to pull my hand away or climb onto her lap. “I want to give Marlena a break, do you understand? I want to keep her out of the system. I want to give her this chance, because I know what happens to girls when they get sucked up into all that. But that means I can’t ever see her like this again.” Together we looked at Marlena. She was wearing my shorts. Probably my underwear, too.

  Sal came down the ladder, still in his pajamas, and then Josie, Sal’s backpack slung over her shoulder. “Cat, can I stay at your house?” he asked me. “I’ll be quiet.”

  “I know, Sal, you’re the best,” I said, crouching down to look him in the face. “But I think you have to go with these ladies now, okay? They are really nice, and we’re gonna come see you tomorrow, when Marlena feels better. Does that sound good?” He looked at the floor, and I saw that all he’d ever known was that people couldn’t be trusted, that nothing anybody said ever meant a goddamn thing. This wasn’t something he’d had to learn, like me, after a couple of shitty turns—Sal expected to be left.

  “What’s wrong with my sister?” he said, tugging himself away from Josie’s proprietary arm. When he got to her, he shoved Marlena, her body tilting, and then shoved her again with his whole side. She made an untranslatable sound and so he hit her, right between the shoulder blades, with his little fist. He hit her again and again, trying, you could tell, to make it hurt.

  “Stop it.” I grabbed his hand. “She’s sick.”

  “She’s not sick. She’s high.”

  To Candice, Josie said: “That girl might need a hospital.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Candice answered, but I wasn’t sure she was right. “I felt her pulse. She’s just passed out.”

  “Sal, she’s sick.”

  “I hate you,” Sal yelled. “You are not my friend anymore.”

  He spat and a burst of wet trickled down my neck. He slammed the door behind him, and when Josie opened it he was already in the backseat of their car, ready to go.

  * * *

  I’ve never been more grateful for Mom than I was that night. After Candice talked to her, the three of us together got Marlena to my house and into my bed. Marlena was kind of mumbling by that point, weird stuff—my brother’s name, questions like where were we, and something that sounded like “watermelon man.”

  “Are you okay?” Mom asked, once Candice left and the cars were gone, the barn empty of even Sal.

  “I’m okay.”

  Mom didn’t ask any more questions. She was so quiet I wanted to cry. We drank a cup of tea together in the dim kitchen, waiting for Jimmy without saying.

  Marlena and I were very different, but sometimes, when we were together, we could erase our separate histories just by talking, sharing a joke or a look. But in the kitchen with Mom, the kitchen that was always clean, where there was always something to eat, where the water flowed predictably from the tap and behind every cabinet door were dishes, only dishes, I saw how wrong I was to feel like Marlena and I had so much in common, and how lucky. Because here was the difference that mattered. My skinny mom with her Chardonnay smell and her forgetting to unplug the flat iron, with her corny jokes about broccoli farts and her teeth bared in anger and her cleaning gloves in the backseat of the car, my mom who refused to stop loving me, who made dumb mistakes and drank too much and was my twin in laughter, my mom who would never, ever, leave, who I trusted so profoundly that a world without her in it exceeded the limits of my imagination. That was the difference, and it was huge, and my never seeing it before is something that I still regret.

  I slept with Mom that night, in her big bed with her good, sinking pillows, listening as she woke herself up every couple of hours with a single snore that made her turn over, and I loved her, as my mom and as a person, for everything, for being the one who stayed.

  * * *

  The cops picked up Marlena’s dad at the Shell station in Grayling. He was hiding in the bathroom, sitting on the back of the toilet, his shoes on the seat, hoping they’d look for feet and nothing more; that’s what he told her when she visited him in the jail below the courthouse.

  “You know where the park kind of like mounds up,” Marlena told me. “That’s where the cells are. They’re underground, right there in the middle of town.”

  Drunks drying out under the gazebo, the decorative railroad ties, the sunflower garden. All those men pacing their tiny rooms, waiting for their transfer to whatever crappy place was next.

  In the Kewaunee News story about Randall Joyner’s arrest, Ann Simons wrote that he stood on top of a toilet in an attempt to evade police, yelling that he had a gun, right hand tenting his T-shirt, trying to fool four officers with their weapons drawn.

  “We knew that was no gun,” said Officer Dalkey, in the article’s only quote. “No gun’s that skinny.”

  A few weeks after his arrest, he was moved to a penitentiary in the Upper Peninsula. As far as I know, Marlena never visited him there.

  * * *

  Candice got Marlena a job behind the counter at Mulvie’s Pies, downtown, next to the post office. She picked her up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning and drove Marlena back to our house at the end of her shift. One weekend morning, Candice had breakfast with us, and she talked to Marlena about how to apply for custody of a minor, the steps she’d have to take to get Sal back. To be his in loco parentis, Marlena said. Loco, like crazy, which made sense to me, because I couldn’t really imagine her taking care of a kid. I watched them scheming, Marlena’s hair butter-yellow in the sunlight coming through the window. I don’t want your charity, Marlena must have told me a dozen times. If you don’t want me in your space, if it gets too much for you, I’m okay, I’ll sleep in the barn. But I never didn’t want her in my space. And she did want our charity, didn’t she? Maybe that’s why Candice was working so hard—helping Marlena navigate
the system, her missing mom who had no death certificate and couldn’t be tracked down to sign a custody form, barrier after barrier after barrier.

  After that horrible day, after Marlena woke and after she spent two hours throwing up, she thanked my mom with tears streaking her face, and since then she’d seemed, to me at least, completely and one hundred percent sober. Jimmy thought so too—he said that was why she was so quiet and sick to her stomach. She paid attention to how I rinsed my dishes after using them and did so too. She never took food from the fridge without asking, though before she’d helped herself. I walked in on her once in the bathroom, pulling a clump of blond hair from the shower drain. Most nights she sat at the table with my mom and talked to her for a little while, asking her stories about her life, listening with a genuine interest that I just didn’t have. Even when Marlena sang in those weeks, she sang under her breath. We had to tell her that it was okay, that she could sing as loud as she wanted here.

  We three, supposedly a family, were easier with each other when she was around. Or maybe it was just math—the three of us, for balance, required four.

  “That you have the house is good,” said Candice. “But you have to make it livable. You need an income. We need evidence of sobriety, or I do.”

  And so, once a week, she stuck around downtown after her shift at Mulvie’s and went to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at St. Patrick’s. Or at least, that’s what she said.

  * * *

  Just before we were supposed to start school, I asked her, offhand, what she was going to wear.

  “I’m not going back,” she said. “But you should definitely wear that.”

  I stared at my reflection in the mirror, at her reflection behind mine, flipping through a magazine on my bed. The jeans were too tight, but Marlena always said I shouldn’t deprive the world of my body just because I was insecure. I said not everyone was blessed with a thigh gap wider than a baseball.

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  “No, really. I’m not going back. I’ve talked to Candice about it. My grades are shit, Cat. I got an E last year. Do you even know what an E is?”