by Julie Buntin
“You’re just going to start accusing me right now? Seven o’clock in the morning? Like I’m not taking this seriously? That is really lovely of you, Cat. Really supportive. Thanks a lot.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore, not in real life, not in the mirror, and her voice had gotten sort of hysterical, so loud I thought she might wake Mom.
“No.”
“Then how could you, of all people, think I’d do something that stupid?”
“I didn’t. I don’t. It was a dumb thing to say.”
She sighed, yellow sparks in her eyes.
“I just can’t believe you’d stand there accusing me. You do this thing, where you just look at me like I’m a train wreck. It’s like a jinx, like you want me to fuck up.”
“Of course I don’t want you to. I get why you might feel like—”
“I get why you might feel like that,” she said back, in her I’m-Cat-the-baby voice. “You think you’re so smart, but there’s some stuff that’s out of your depth. You’re the best friend I ever had, so don’t get all hurt and big-eyed and take this the wrong way. But you don’t get it, and I’ve never expected you or anyone else to.”
I remember that what she said hurt me better than anything, especially since she was right.
* * *
All morning I felt horrible, except during English, where I spent the whole blessed fifty minutes thinking of nothing but Tess of the d’Urbervilles. As soon as class was over I texted Marlena, I’m sorry good luck, and then, when she didn’t answer, 2:30 right? I’ll try to cut trig I have really good tutor anyway. I left campus after lunch, traveling downtown via the long route through the woods, so I could smoke the cigarettes Marlena bought for me. She didn’t answer my texts until a little after three.
can you come i’m inside
The hearing lasted less than twenty minutes. I tried to get more details about what had happened in the courtroom, but all she said was that it was a joke. Two old men deemed Marlena an unfit caretaker for Sal. When she began to cry, one of them handed her a McDonald’s napkin, probably left over from his lunch, and another ushered her to the hallway where there was a bench for scenes like the one she was making. That’s where I found her, the napkin disintegrating in a fist, her eyes dry, cheeks splotched with red. In a few months, Sal would be moved to a new foster home in Charlevoix, a thirty-minute drive away. Marlena was eighteen—she was free to live where she pleased. She could do whatever she wanted, for all they cared.
Now it seems impossible that Candice could really have thought it would work. Maybe it was just a scheme to get Marlena sober, to give her a purpose, even temporarily, to replace the one that drove her. I thought of the gift Candice had given me and my mom, a plastic tub decal-ed with bluebells, full of body cream that smelled like a million flowers slamming into each other. I made it, she told us, but Marlena said that by “made it” Candice just meant that she mixed together a bunch of lotions that already existed and put them in a new jar.
* * *
Marlena lost her hearing at the beginning of October, just at the moment when all the trees in Silver Lake went up in flames, their leaves going orange and red, seemingly at once. One month left, though none of us were keeping track.
* * *
At first, she seemed fine. Quiet, but fine, maybe even relieved that it was over, that now she had her answer. Her family was broken beyond repair. She must have felt at least a little bit free. She stayed with us the next few nights, sleeping in my room with me, and not once did I hear her crying, or wake up to find her gone.
But that Sunday, the two of us trapped at my house without a ride and nowhere to go anyway, she told me she wanted to start staying at her house again. “It’s gonna take two whole paychecks to pay this bill,” Marlena said. The cordless was on speaker, filling the room with the power company’s hold music. The electricity at her house had been shut off since shortly after her dad was arrested. Mom said she was lucky we hadn’t had a real snowstorm yet, otherwise the pipes would have frozen and burst for sure. No one else was home that night, Jimmy working as usual, Mom out on a date with a veterinarian Marlena and I called the Toe. (His real name was Tomas.) We were eating a Mulvie’s apple pie straight out of the tin. Marlena all bones, wearing nothing but a camisole of mine, a pair of Jimmy’s sweatpants, and my coconut hair mask, its scent stronger than the pie.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this. You can just stay here. You really want to sleep in the barn all by yourself?”
“It’s my house. I grew up there.”
“So?”
“So,” she said, that mocking voice again. “So? So maybe I want to go home. Maybe I’m sick of being here all the time. You and Jimmy always breathing down my neck.”
“You’re being such a bitch.”
She tucked the phone under her arm, picked up the pie tin, and slammed off down the hall. The door to my brother’s room banged shut. “Maybe when you’re gone you’ll stop using my shit,” I yelled. I didn’t care. It was a Sunday night and I had a paper to write. I was sick of her, too.
* * *
Sorry, she texted me the morning after we fought, a Monday, the day she moved out. It’s okay, I answered, seconds later. You’ve been going through a lot.
not an excuse
well you’ve always been a cunt
ur the only person in the world who uses apostraphes in texts
because i’m a GENIUSSSS ps it’s apostrOphe
holy shit!
what?
i just died … of boredom
Greg and Tidbit gave me a ride home that afternoon. I knew that Marlena was at her house, not mine, because the barn’s windows glowed, and the leaves in her front yard were raked into a pile. She let me in but didn’t look me in the face, her eyes skating around the periphery of the room. Her words dropped, hit the ground, rolled away. Something about independence, about finally having the time and space to be who she wanted, about focusing on her music, learning to play the electric guitar. A lot of what she said did not make sense. Now she was a grown-up, without her dad, without Sal holding her back, without anyone really, and she needed to figure out how to do that, what that meant. She opened the fridge and handed me a can of Natty Ice, cracked one herself. I was so much younger than her, and Jimmy didn’t really understand her life, they’d had such different childhoods. The golden boy. She knew he thought she was trashy, she said, and then laughed way too loud. “Hot, but trashy.” I objected to that, but she wasn’t listening to me. “My family,” she said. “Tell me honestly he doesn’t look down on my family. What passes for. Can you?” She finished her beer and started in on mine.
The barn was almost empty, all the trash cleared off the Ping-Pong table, the dirtier of the two beanbags atop a pile of trash outside the back door, the sink free of dishes, a perfume-y smell to the air, something that she’d lifted from my mom, a plug-in. Sal’s drawings had been replaced by tack holes in bare wall. Marlena said something about getting in trouble at work, making a mistake with the register, and I just nodded. After she finished venting, after some torturous small talk about school, as stiff as if we’d never met, I left. That was what she wanted, and so that’s what I did. I’d been distracted anyway, antsy, my head whirring with the little details of my day, thinking of my sort-of friend Caroline, how she’d asked me at lunch if the rumors were true, whether Marlena and I were close, how Caroline had leaned in, awe and fear in her voice, and whispered I heard she had sex with two guys at once.
I tuned Marlena out. She was messed up, losing the thread of her conversation right in front of me, and I didn’t want to deal with her. Because that’s what she meant by needing space. She wanted to get high without interruption, and I both knew it and did not object.
* * *
The next time I was over there, I saw a bent spoon on the barn’s kitchen table. It was November, maybe, near the end. I didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. I haven’t, until now. And then, a few days later, I picked up her coat off the co
uch, to make room to sit, and a needle fell out. It slid out of her pocket, a sitcom punchline, so tidy, as if the universe itself was offering us another ending. A couple of centimeters of amber fluid inside. I put the needle back and draped her coat carefully across the armrest. I thought being her best friend meant keeping her secrets. I trusted that she knew what she was doing. That fall, she wore long sleeves even when she slept. I was no longer so naïve.
* * *
Dusk, football weather, the air sulfurous from the fire smoldering in Marlena’s front yard; she’d been burning the trash from the barn in shifts. Mom and I were just back from the grocery store—her Bridge Card was newly full, and we’d returned from our monthly pilgrimage to Walmart with bags and bags of stuff, cans of tomatoes and beans, boxes of pasta, a humongous sack of rice. I was to unload the car while Mom put stuff away. Marlena and Bolt teetered out of the barn. They both wore ridiculous, bubblegum-pink sombreros, the kind you can win as a prize at a county fair, and Marlena had on the high-heeled boots that I knew were a gift from her mom, one of those precious things she was always saving for a special occasion that never came.
“Mar,” I called, but she jumped up into Bolt’s truck and shut the door. I started toward them, leaving a bag of onions on the driveway. The lights flashed on and the truck began backing out of the driveway. Bits of papery ash floated in the wind.
“Call you later!” Marlena shouted through her half-open window, as the glass slid up. A piece of the hat got stuck between the window frame and the glass, so that she had to unroll it and tug it out, jerking her head. I couldn’t see her face, underneath all that brim.
“Just for a drive,” she told me, when later came. “We just went for a drive around.”
* * *
After she moved back into the barn, we still saw each other most days, but she started complaining when I showed up unannounced—more than once, she snapped at me that it was rude. She lost her job at Mulvie’s. When I pressed, she told me it was because the manager was intimidated by how much the customers loved her. Bolt’s car was often parked in her front yard, even when my brother was home. She and Jimmy had been mostly off for weeks, and when I asked about it he dodged me. When I asked her, she said he was controlling. Once, when she was changing, I thought I noticed a bruise on her left arm, irregular and large, just below the crook. Later, in a similar manner—her turned away—I snatched a glimpse of the same spot, laddered with cat-scratch marks, inflamed and hot-looking. She left me a couple of incoherent voicemails. You have no idea when I’m high or not, she said in one of them. Nobody does. Are you okay? I asked her over and over again. I’m fine, is all she ever said. I’m just bored. I was just tired. One evening after school I was studying with Caroline at Mulvie’s when I glanced from my textbook to the window and saw Marlena leaving the Fifth Third Bank, her legs so skinny I couldn’t believe they held her up, her cheeks all puffed out and her hair in a ragged knot. A person I’d never met, a girl I honestly knew nothing about.
New York
I suppose it’s strange that I sometimes direct my inner voice to her—her, or some younger version of myself. There’s an argument we’re always having. But, Marlena, I tell her. It’s November. Scarf weather in New York. It’s been years and years and I’ve stopped hurting myself so much on purpose, taking too many pills, eating nothing just to see if I can. I go to my job. I work hard, and there’s a pleasure in it I never expected. I take the subway with everyone else. Sometimes days, weeks, months go by, and it’s like you never existed at all. I push the garbage bag into the chute and listen to it drop. I ask Liam about his day, I curl up beside him in bed and breathe in the soapy scent of the base of his head. I meet my deadlines. In my early twenties I was pregnant once, for five and a half weeks, and I didn’t think of you until the bitter end, when the blood was coming out in clumps. I’ve never told Liam; it was before him. It hasn’t happened again. Maybe my body won’t let it—maybe I already had my chance.
Being an adult—it is not the same. It is not, actually, anything like what we wanted, what we imagined for ourselves. But, Marlena, mostly it’s better. Sometimes I’m so grateful it feels like a miracle. For the dumbest things—a cup of hot coffee, a funny text from Liam, that I can read George Eliot again and again, every Saturday afternoon, that I hate my body less, that I love my mother more, that I still have time to choose. The colors are less sharp, but I’m glad I’m here.
You’re trying too hard to convince me, I imagine she says.
I forgive her for being a skeptic. She’s still eighteen.
The thing is, Marlena, I’ve messed a lot up. But every day I get to try again.
* * *
When my mother was a couple of years older than I am now, her husband left her after eighteen years, a relationship that began when she was a teenager. So she bulldozed what remained of her life and started over, making up the rules as she went along. Your mom is ballsy, Marlena used to say. She disagreed with my mother’s choice of place—Silver Lake was Marlena’s greatest enemy—but she loved that Mom had just pointed at a spot on the map and said, Has to be better than where I am. I was too angry to admire anything about Mom’s decision, though there was more logic to it than I recognized at the time—the lure of a small town far away from Pontiac, where everyone knew how Dad had switched one woman out for another, and the cost of living, which was cheap enough that Mom could use her divorce settlement to buy property. What a triumph that place must have been; it makes me proud of her. Even if the bank wound up taking the property back when she left for Ann Arbor without a buyer. When I was in college, Jimmy told me our move up north had been inspired, in part, by an email relationship that had fizzled out just days after we arrived in Silver Lake; I’d had no idea. Even as an adult I didn’t believe Jimmy until he coughed up a name. The man, Jimmy said, had been much older than he’d let on. Mom never talked about it with me.
Now Mom and Roger live in his condo near the University of Michigan campus. He taught her how to ski. They are one of those windbreaker-wearing, granola-eating older couples, red-faced and healthy, Mom more strong than skinny, her biceps bigger than mine. Jimmy sees them all the time—he’s an eight-hour drive away, but there’s lots of skiing in the UP. Roger has no children and not very much money and so I send them checks. He’s just an old man; I never expected him to be my father. When Mom comes to visit us, I feel compelled to make everything seem grander than it is—here, here is our expensive furniture, the money in the bank that grows and grows, the whole coffee beans from the specialty store and our long-haired, hypoallergenic cat. My job, the promotions that come every couple of years, our successful friends, all that we’ve built. Haven’t I done well? Haven’t I come so far? Mom gets a little weepy when she leaves, but I can also sense her relief. Maybe she feels the airlessness of this life, the too-goodness, the list of tasks to get through, the recycling bin full of its secret bottles.
When I was thirty, during that long year of trying and failing at sobriety, I got a raise and started making the kind of money my parents never did. I took Mom to Vegas—we were celebrating my engagement. I don’t know why I chose that place when I wasn’t drinking. Mom had been married to Roger for a while, and I sat next to her on a wide pool chair, our pale legs stretched out, and she told me that happiness, she finally knew, was having nothing to say when people ask you how you are but fine. We baked in the white sun, our bodies echoes of each other—mine softer, hers more frail, wrinkles crosshatched on the tops of her arms and thighs, on her lower belly. Just have a drink, honey, she said every night at dinner, holding the baseball-sized goblets of wine that I paid for. If you’re an alcoholic, what am I? And so I did, most of those nights, Vegas like a moonship, all stupid glitter, the two of us dropping buckets of coins into slots and getting sloppy off wine that tasted like sweet gas, like swallowing the light emitted by the city itself. We had fun, Mom and I. I didn’t count those drinks later, back in New York, at my meetings. Or when Liam asked. I was with my
mom. How could I say no?
Never once, back in Silver Lake, did I think about how hard it must have been for her. The money problems. Being alone for the first time, young but still middle-aged, no degree, no job history, no real prospects. I was vicious. Mom would come home with men and shut the door, her music turned up loud, mixes with funky beats and romantic lyrics, and I remember feeling horrified by her sexuality, by the fact that she was doing it in our house, a disgust that lingered well after the men left and was far more pointed than the anger I’d felt at my dad for doing essentially the same thing. But when I tried to talk to Marlena about it, thinking she’d take my side, commiserate, she’d stop me. She always saw my mom as a woman. Finally, now, I do too.
* * *
Everyone has a secret life. But when you’re a girl with a best friend, you think your secret life is something you can share. Those nights Marlena and I spent on the jungle gym, talking, talking. For just a little while, neither of us alone. Overlapping—bright, then dark—like a miniature eclipse.
We were already growing apart, in the weeks before she died—when I moved to New York, we almost certainly would have lost touch, become just another pair of girls who shared a brief and intense friendship that faded, as friendships usually do, with age and geography. But I believed every one of those old promises. I would have pitied any adult who told me that things would change. For you, I would have thought, but not for us. I was going to leave, yes, but she was supposed to come, too. And didn’t she? Those early days in New York, August, the city so hot I walked around drenched in its spit, she was with me all the time, in the things I did if not always in my thoughts. I got a job at a bar where all the waitstaff was Irish and wasn’t it her who made me louder when I needed to be, who made me brave at night, walking home with all that cash? She’s the way I swear and how I let men look at me or not, she’s the bit of steel at my center, either her, herself, or the loss of her. Before that year I was nothing but a soft, formless girl, waiting for someone to come along and tell me who to be.