Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  I drank with her memory all over the city, drank myself into emergency rooms and the backseats of cabs and scenes I cannot remember but still regret, and yet here I am, alive, a grown woman, managing to keep it under some kind of control. But every time I stop after a drink or two or three that monster starts to roar, and that’s when I am closest to her again. Still, something has kept me from going too far. I used to think it was fear, but that gives her too much credit, because it’s not brave to do what she did. It’s not brave to drink until you’re blind, either.

  She lied to me all the time—about Bolt, about Jimmy, about where she was and why, how many pills she’d taken. Was I really her best friend, or was I just a sidekick, humored because of the crush she had on my older brother?

  Don’t be so insecure, I hear her say. I thought you’d grow out of that.

  Michigan

  Marlena’s body was found on a Monday morning, less than twenty-four hours after Jimmy last saw her. Facedown in Bear River, a half mile into the woods behind the Goldwater Pub. A hiker from Grosse Pointe, in town for a long weekend, spotted her coat through the pines, a little ways off the path, snagged between some river rocks. Cobalt, a color you notice in the woods. There’d been a thaw that week and it was unseasonably warm for November, though as she traveled that way, wearing her crappy, markered-up Keds, it probably would’ve been getting dark, the weather beginning to turn toward winter again, and so that’s why they said in the papers that she must’ve slipped on some new ice, her, a Michigan girl, grown in those forests, and hit her head hard enough to knock herself out. Nothing out there but more trees, so where in the hell was she going?

  Her skin, the hiker said, looked like eggshell. Like you could put a crack in it.

  If Marlena slipped, she didn’t slip because of ice.

  Technically, the last time we were together was the day before the discovery of her body, a Sunday, just before she met up with Jimmy, but I refuse to let that be our ending. Marlena wouldn’t want it to be, either.

  We were downtown, kicking around in the park in our springtime jackets, our eyeliner too thick, cigarettes tucked behind our ears, our skin spotty but so elastic and young I want to reach right back into my memory and shake us for how much we complained about it. Coffee smell trickling out of the corner bakery every time the door swung open, a wild turkey strutting like a boastful old man around the gazebo, cracking us up when we rushed at it with our arms outstretched, squawking, until it hobbled off. We settled on a bench and I started telling some story, but within minutes she vanished completely into her phone.

  An ordinary Sunday, nothing much to do but variations on what we always did. After some texting, she informed me that Jimmy was going to pick her up on the corner near the courthouse, and that they were going to smoke a joint, kill a little time before his shift started.

  “Come with us,” she said. “It’ll just be a couple hours, and then he’ll go to work and we can do whatever you want.”

  “I’m really not in the mood to sit in the backseat while you guys bicker or like, weird passive-aggressive flirt.”

  “C’mon, Cat. What are you even going to do instead.”

  “Why can’t you find me after?”

  The Blind Assassin was in my bag. I was thirty pages in. I had four dollars in cash plus some miscellaneous change, enough for a cup of coffee with endless refills and probably a lemon-poppyseed muffin.

  “I’ll let you smoke all my cigarettes.”

  “Just have Jimmy drop you off at Mulvie’s before he goes to work.”

  “Fine. Be ready. I don’t want to go inside.” Since Marlena had been fired, she refused to even walk by the storefront. If she had to meet me at Mulvie’s, as she often did, she waited in the alley out back.

  I walked with her through the park and toward the corner, where Jimmy was going to pick her up. She pulled the elastic from her ponytail and mussed her hair at the roots, so that it rose sloppily from her head. “Better?” she asked. Her hair was so fine and straight, in a few minutes it would be sleek again, no matter what she did to try and look sexy.

  “Definitely,” I said. I left her when I saw Jimmy in Mom’s car, slowing at the stoplight outside Great Lakes Shoes. I didn’t even wait for him to pull up to the curb. No hug—though why would we have, planning, as we were, to meet up again so soon.

  I drank four cups of coffee and got to page one hundred and sixty before I realized it was after six. I checked my phone. Nothing. That wasn’t unlike her, in those final weeks. I texted Greg, and he picked me up a little while later, gave me a ride home. We both figured Marlena had found Bolt, something else to do.

  Who can recognize the ending as it’s happening? What we live, it seems to me, is pretty much always a surprise.

  * * *

  I lied to the police when they questioned me about what Marlena and I did that day. They asked why we split up, where Marlena was going, and I told them I didn’t know. It was all I could do in that tiny, sinister room, identical to the ones I’d seen on TV, in front of those two cops with their beards. I don’t know, I said, I don’t know. They asked me about the Oxy in her bag and I faked surprise. So you weren’t aware of her plan to meet up with your older brother, they said, and I started to cry. Later Jimmy asked me why I’d lied, if I really thought he could’ve had anything to do with what happened to Marlena. I had no idea what to tell him. Sitting there, facing down question after question, I felt, more than anything, guilty. I killed her, I almost said.

  I requested a copy of Marlena’s autopsy report a couple of years into college, after taking an elective in forensic science. Because there’d never been a criminal investigation, it was easy to get clearance, especially after I told the records officer my name, what I was studying, that I’d gone to the same high school as his daughter Laura. Although positive test results indicated that Marlena had used heroin at some point within the days preceding her death, Marlena’s official cause of death was asphyxia due to aspiration of fluid, caused by submersion, and consistent with drowning. In the report summary, the coroner noted that because Marlena had fallen and struck her head, she was likely unconscious when her nose and mouth were submerged for a “sufficient” period of time. I was struck by the comment, “consistent with drowning,” thinking that perhaps it might mean that the findings were inconclusive, that Bolt or someone else could be implicated, that there was more to the story than what I’d gotten. But when I asked my professor, she explained that in many drowning cases, especially ones like Marlena’s, where the postmortem is conducted more than twenty-four hours after death, immediate evidence of drowning can be obscured by other decompositional factors. I found the language comforting. It was easier to think of Marlena asphyxiating than to imagine her unconscious, breathing in brackish river water, silt collecting in the back of her throat. I also knew that autopsies, back then, were notoriously unreliable when it came to prescription drug abuse—a fact that had contributed to a kind of delayed awareness of the danger of Oxy and the insidious spread of black tar heroin, which was, for so many users, the next step.

  The report, of course, does not mention why she went into the woods that day, the thing I’d give pretty much anything to know, what she was looking for, whether anyone besides me and Jimmy saw her that afternoon and evening, how much the drugs in her system might have impaired her motor skills, when taking into consideration the extent of her habit. I have imagined it so many times it’s like a memory of something I did myself—the sun welling over the lake, Marlena passing Mulvie’s, me inside with my book, and heading for the woods. At first she follows the path between the trees, lichen spotted and evergreen, but after a few minutes she veers from the trail. She would have wanted to follow the river; that part sounds like her. Sometimes, I let myself believe it was Bolt, that something happened, that he pushed her, that he held her face underwater with his hands, that he opened her mouth, her veins, and forced her to take whatever she took. I want someone to blame. But maybe she was
just taking a walk. Maybe she just slipped. Maybe she’d always intended to turn around, to come back for me. Maybe, maybe, maybe—none of them satisfying enough to lend what happened any sense.

  The article about the discovery of the body is peppered with sensational descriptions and very little fact—several details, including Sal’s name and age, are simply incorrect. And though the Oxy was in an unlabeled prescription bottle, I couldn’t find evidence of any structured attempt by the authorities to find out where an eighteen-year-old girl had gotten so many pills. “Consistent with drowning” was replaced, in the headline, with “Local Girl Drowns.”

  * * *

  Jimmy doesn’t talk about that hour he spent with Marlena, forty-five minutes of it wasted away in the parking lot behind the Sam Goody, where they shared a joint. I can’t get in there, no matter how badly I want to. He shuts me out. He wants to keep it so it’s just the two of them in the Subaru, he wants to have that last bit of her to himself. I hated him for it then, but now I think I understand—if he tells, he’ll change it, he’ll wear the memory out.

  For a while, he fixated on the time, 5:12 p.m., as if in that minute, he could have done something to make a difference. He told me she picked up a pen from his cup holder, drew a cat in blue ballpoint on the thigh of her jeans. But was she acting weird, checking her phone a lot, didn’t he notice that? Was she high, higher than normal, did he get a look at her arms? He never said. But last time I asked, maybe five or so years ago now, after a long time quiet, he told me that she kept singing the opening lines of “Santeria,” little snatches under her breath. The same lines, as if she couldn’t remember the rest. He remembered thinking she must have listened to that song at some point that morning, or maybe the night before. It was the first time I’d heard that detail, and it frightened me. The farther we get from what happened the harder it is to talk to him about it—What is there to say? he asks, or, voice clipped, he just tells me to stop.

  Sam Goody’s security cameras show them parked in the lot; another witness saw her leave his car near the park at around five, which means that she walked right by Mulvie’s the way we’d planned, but, for some reason, decided not to come get me. If I’d been outside, waiting. If I’d stayed with her that day. If I’d never told Greg to post that video; if I’d stopped Ryder from going to the police. If I’d taken the pills myself. If I’d told. If no me and her at all.

  “Is it our fault?” I asked Jimmy at some point that winter, the barn next door lightless and cold, a time capsule for no one, except maybe Sal. “No,” he said, staring into the fridge. “Whatever she did, she did it to herself.”

  * * *

  I see Jimmy once a year or so, at Christmas usually. I call him on his birthday and he calls me on mine and we talk for twenty minutes, half an hour, and it’s always better, easier, than I expect. Our child selves creep back into our voices, that old sibling shorthand. He ribs me, asks about Liam, and I annoy him, act younger and less capable than I am. When my big brother corrects me, even if he’s wrong, I don’t fight back. He lives in an old copper-mining town in the UP where the cliff faces are swirled with mineral-green veins, and black bears, Jimmy says, come right up onto his back deck. Liam and I visited him there a couple of years ago, renting a car and driving it up from Detroit, stopping at Mom’s on the way. The house is stick-built and decorated like a rental—generic landscapes on the walls, plaid rugs, itchy blue blankets in the guest room, where my brother keeps a bunk bed for no reason I can discern. In the winter, Jimmy covers the panes with sheets of tight plastic. He makes less money than I do, but not so much less, building summer homes on Lake Superior. He gets stockier and stockier, and each time I see him I think he might be getting fat until we hug. He looks, as an adult, nothing like Dad did, except for this thing he does when he tells a story, squeezing his hands, giving away his eagerness for you to laugh. The woman he’s been dating for four years or so lives a couple of miles away from him in a house of her own. They haven’t moved in together and have no plans to, at least none that he tells me about, and so in the story I have invented, Janie, a woman I have never met but who lingers on the periphery of all his anecdotes and also the pictures he sends now and then, has suffered a terrible tragedy at the hands of a man, and so will never fully let my brother in. I like that story better than the other one, which is that he’s the one who won’t.

  * * *

  Marlena’s body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive—deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she’d no doubt tell me all about soon.

  Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.

  * * *

  In the weeks after Marlena died, I began to have trouble being alone. Day and night I checked behind my closet doors over and over, convinced I felt a pair of eyes peering through the slats. I slept comatose, for twelve, fourteen hours straight, or not at all. Mostly, that time was full of Mom—Mom tearing the sheets off my bed, Mom packing up boxes of stuff for Sal, Mom snipping the plastic top off a freeze pop, Mom pulling the car to the side of the road because I’m sure that something’s wrong with the wheels, Mom with her arms around Jimmy in the Walmart checkout aisle, his face blank as a piece of paper. Mom even handled most of the details of Marlena’s funeral.

  Mom still looks young for her age. Except for her hands, which, from some combination of years of professional cleaning and genetics, are the opposite of feminine. By fifty she’d be unable to straighten out her ring and pointer fingers, and would lie awake at night with zapping pains running through the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. When I was a teenager it sometimes scared me to see them, resting witchily on her lap, filled with blood, unhappy-looking and at odds with her face, her thinness, her long and not yet gray hair. After moving to New York, I never cleaned for money again, but still I see her hands in mine. When I wear nail polish they look absurd. I understand my mother better now, as I learn what it feels like to move through the world with her dimensions. I massage lotion into my knuckles, my mother’s knuckles, into the cracking skin around my cuticles, and I think of her, too, Marlena, who would have gotten her mother back if she lived even a little longer, in this tiny, physical way, just by being herself.

  * * *

  A few months after Marlena’s funeral at St. Patrick’s—her father howling in the very first row all through the ceremony, Sal in his terrible little suit—Mom arranged for me to go back to Concord, as a boarder, for my senior year. She contacted the school and explained the circumstances; she got my scholarship reinstated, plus a little extra on the basis of need. My grandmother on my dad’s side coughed up the last five thousand and change because Mom convinced her, somehow, that I was in danger. I can’t imagine what that conversation might have looked like. My dad’s mother was never a part of our lives. Maybe she was feeling guilty about Dad, and it was her way of paying us off. Mom made me write her a long and passionate thank-you note; I filled two pages with frilly cursive, my hand cramping.

  Without Marlena, there’s nothing, really, to remember. A quick, wet spring, followed by a quick, hot summer. A revolving stack of books; pink evenings and the microwave and empty packs of cigarettes. There was one drunken night, me and Tidbit and Greg, holed up in my bedroom, talking about her, Tidbit crying and crying, bent over into her own lap, making an animal noise. I put my arm around her, but I felt a cold and disgusted pity, the icy beginning of a numbness that would follow me through my life, presenting itself especially in moments when other people showed emotion. “It was Bolt,” Greg said, mumbling his theory, how it wasn’t first degree but accidental manslaughter, TV talk, she fell and he left her there, he didn’t want to be involved, he was obsessed with her, we all knew it, why else was he always around? He wasn’t stalking her, I knew, but I didn’t say so, didn’t interrupt to t
ell him how just as many times as not, Marlena would be the one trying to get in touch with Bolt.

  Without Marlena to hold us together, Ryder and Greg and Tidbit and I lost touch. In July, Ryder was arrested, caught on camera vandalizing a trout fishery a couple miles from Marlena’s house. Greg got a job at Hooker’s, the dry cleaner downtown, and enrolled in the community college. He didn’t disable his YouTube profile, but he took every last video down. Sometimes I saw one of them from a car window, or at the beach, or just walking on the opposite side of the street. We didn’t talk. As far as I know, they’re all still in Silver Lake.

  I did not succeed at Concord, not as I had as a freshman, and not as I’d imagined I would. My dorm room was a bleak cement square. The cafeteria served stroganoff, cheesy casserole, vats of chili—I survived on apples and chalky cubes of tofu. On Saturdays, I signed off campus and walked to the nearest grocery store, where I stole pints of no-name vodka from the bottom shelf of the liquor aisle. Back in my room, I poured the vodka into plastic water bottles and lined them up in our mini-fridge. My roommate, a serious girl from Mexico City, who was deeply frightened of me, may have known that I was often drunk, and certainly knew that I skipped a lot of class, but did not tell. Haesung had fallen in with a new group of girls, and our interaction was limited to a kind nod when we passed each other in the halls. My genuine apathy and cultivated taste for self-destruction gave me a kind of cool-girl air, so that I found myself left alone and treated with a kind of nervous respect. My grades slipped. I would go weeks without doing work and then suddenly put all my energy into a paper or project, rescuing myself from failure with a single exceptional grade. My closest friend was my suitemate, Jessica, who had a prescription for Adderall—once, desperate for a pill, which I needed to help me write fourteen pages overnight, I traded her my jacket for twenty orange milligrams that I crushed with my school ID. I licked the desk clean of powder and pointed my middle finger at Jessica when she laughed. On cold days, I wore three sweatshirts, one on top of the other. I lost pound after pound, until I was as skinny as Marlena. I had a fling with a very popular boy named Alejandro, who had gauges in his ears and kissed me earnestly. He told me he loved me the first time I gave him a blowjob, his hips jerking when he came, hot and bitter, against my throat, a taste not unlike the nasal drip of a pill, except more and gluier and easier to rinse away. I felt nothing when he said it, and nothing, later, when he held me against his chest in his narrow bed and cried, having heard I’d made out with someone else. Most mornings, come dawn, when the alarms shut off, I sneaked out my dorm’s back exit and wandered down to a semicircle of pines on the far border of campus, where I smoked the cigarettes I somehow always had. I liked to watch the sun come up. I liked how I could rely on its ludicrous beauty—giant slashes of color, a swirl of birds scattering up and up—and how big and empty I felt, watching it without her.