Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  * * *

  I chose to stay on campus instead of going to Silver Lake for Thanksgiving. It took some convincing, but I got Mom to agree by telling her that I was drowning in schoolwork, that tons of kids stayed behind to work on their college applications. Spring break, I’d do the same. But for winter break, I had no option; the dorms closed.

  The day he came to pick me up, Jimmy waited for me in an armchair in the dorm lobby, his hair in his eyes, causing a ripple of agitated interest in the girls, who pretended not to look at him when they rolled their suitcases by. The two of us passed the long car ride north in silence. After months among the ivy-swaddled buildings of Concord, our house, sitting at the end of its short, unpaved driveway, struck me as unutterably pathetic, the sum total of my family’s failures—a small-windowed, grayish box on a street of trailers and A-frames, closed in by snow and trees and the shadow of Marlena’s barn, which radiated emptiness like a toxic gas. The weather was the same as the day I met her. Sleet. Mom came outside before we were fully parked. You’re so skinny, she kept saying, touching my hair, my shoulders, my arm, trying to hold my hand. She does this still, touches me too much whenever we are together, as if to prove to herself that I, her prodigal daughter, am real.

  With one exception, I spent my fourteen days in Silver Lake almost entirely on the couch, watching TV until my brain felt like static. I could feel Marlena’s house out there, empty but breathing still, watching us. I slept a lot, and ate a lot. Probably, I was withdrawing from the Adderall. Mom had begun a long-distance relationship with Roger, a ski-shop manager she’d met online, who would eventually become her second husband. She wandered around the house chattering to him on the phone; for New Year’s, she drove to Ann Arbor, to celebrate the changing year with him. Jimmy and I sat at home alone. Both of us went to bed before midnight.

  A day or two before I was scheduled to go back down to school, restless and thinking of her, I took my cigarettes, crammed my feet into a pair of Mom’s boots, and set off out back. I went the long way around the house, so that I wouldn’t have to walk through the little section of yard where Marlena and I so often met, that valley between our houses. I passed the jungle gym where I first touched the incongruously silky skin of Ryder’s penis, where Marlena and I made up our stupid songs about love. The trees thickened. I’d done things among them and I remembered as I walked, there, that tipped-over tree where Marlena and I once watched the day break, there, poking up from the snow, a knot of roots where I’d squatted, drunk, and peed as hard and fast as I could, praying the others wouldn’t see.

  On that soggy winter day, numb rows of pines extended out around me for miles, their needles dull and white-tipped. In the clearing, the snow was unbroken. A tatter of caution tape still marked the railcar, hanging limply from the handle. The day was windless and campfire-scented from the neighborhood trash fires and so unseasonably warm that I’d begun to sweat—with every step, my boots sank to my shins, so I had to shuffle the snow aside, building my own snaking path.

  I touched the tape, my fingertips cleaning off the dirt, revealing the brighter yellow underneath. I hadn’t been so close to the railcar since that early day in Silver Lake, when I’d gone out for a walk and discovered it. The times I’d come out here with Marlena, when she’d had to get something from her dad—or probably, it suddenly occurred to me, just Bolt—she’d make me wait way back in the trees, so I wouldn’t be seen. For my own good, she said. Like most of the trailers in Silver Lake, the car was propped up on cinder blocks. The black paint was peeling, especially on the windows. In places the color was scratched or rubbed out, so you could see through the dirty glass to the other black-painted side.

  I climbed up a pile of snow-covered stones that I guess were supposed to be steps, and tugged on the sliding door, not expecting it to give way, not expecting it to slide open and then catch, opening just wide enough for me slip through.

  Inside, the daytime struggled against the darkened windows, so the dark was somehow extra-violet, aglow. It was colder than outside. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that it must have been a dining car—on one side tables were attached to the walls, though the chairs or booths or whatever had been there before were long gone. M + R was carved into one of the tables, the letters big as my hands. To my left, a basin, another longer table with nothing on it but cups and broken glass and pieces of tape, likely left by the cops, and a half-full bag of Huggies that gave me the shivers. Shattered glass crunched under my boots. A poster on the leftmost wall of a girl bent over, holding her ass apart, her face hanging down between her ankles, a cigarette burn in the middle of each cheek. I looked out one of the windows, where an unpainted circle made a little porthole to the field. The glass was covered with a lichen-y layer of ice, but I got very close and looked through it anyway, at the snow scarred by my boot prints, my attempt at a path. It started abruptly, by someone dropped from space, and appeared to be going nowhere.

  * * *

  The drive up to Silver Lake and back down to school marked a permanent shift in my relationship with Jimmy. He was the only person who knew what we hadn’t done for Marlena. Just looking at him, his hands on the wheel, his dirty jeans, the spackle of second-day growth on his jawline, felt like pressing my thumb deep into a bruise. He turned the radio to the Top 40 station, the volume up too loud for us to talk. The heater blew dry gusts into my eyes. The two of us stared at different sides of the same road. I wanted to say something but couldn’t bring myself to start. I feel that silence even now. He hugged me in the girls’ parking lot, squishing my face up against his coat, and I almost did it then—cried, apologized, asked him to be my brother, I don’t know. The possibility died when I squirmed away. “I love you,” he said. “See you,” I said back.

  In the final half of senior year, my grades continued to drop. Every time I talked to Mom, she catalogued the costs, the fees and books and uniforms, the per-hour price of every class, the waste. I suppose Concord came a little too late. But I’m sure the school’s name on my transcript was the only reason I was accepted to Hunter College, one of the two places I’d actually finished the application for. Mom scraped up the money to help me put down the security deposit on a windowless room in a cat-piss-smelling and overcrowded apartment in East Harlem. My room was the cheapest, at five hundred dollars a month. Mom and Jimmy were rattled by my unfriendly roommates, the graffiti on the building door, the chicken place on my block with its bulletproof pane separating the counter from the dining area. But I think they were also relieved. Their sacrifices were over. I was the family offering. I would go to college in a great city, and in doing so, my experiences, so different from theirs, would separate me from them forever—but in return, I would have a better life. They’d done everything they could, by getting me there. What happened next was up to me.

  I made it out, just like I wanted, and not once have I stopped looking back.

  New York

  Sal was late. I felt worse than I had all day, a kind of full-body deflation, as if I’d been freeze-dried. The cure was a drink. I’d chosen a wood-paneled bar/coffee shop near the library, decorated in the style of a summer cabin—bunches of dried lavender hung from the walls, alongside black-and-white portraits of people from a time before electricity. I sat at a sliver of pine, on a narrow stool that tipped on its legs when I moved. The air was misty with coffee dust and cooking steam. I closed my eyes, trying to press the throb out of my temples, and saw the girl from the library being led out the door, a policeman on each arm. The door jangled, infusing the room with a gust of cold, but it was never him. A waiter came by, and I ordered, surprising myself, a lemon tea.

  But then, there he was. A tall young man, blond and light-eyed, wearing a gray zip-up sweatshirt with a Polo logo on the breast, faded jeans, white tennis shoes, an orange knit cap. He scanned the room. I half stood, waved. He made his way between the too-tight tables, bumping into seated people with his Macy’s bag, his wide frame. He had her features, but they didn’t quite
work on him—his nose and mouth too dainty, giving his face a sort of fussy look. Marlena had existed, I realized, and it felt real in a way it never had before. She’d been alive, and we were what was left of her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, when he sat down, his knees bumping into the piece of wood from underneath, sloshing my tea over the brim. “The subway got me all turned around.” His accent. He peeled his hat off and dropped it into his bag, running his hand up the back of his head, which was covered with close-shaved white-blond hair. He was slightly overweight; I’d expected a graceful little boy.

  “I should have picked a different table.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “This is fine.”

  “Can I get you something? A drink, or some food?” The past and present were colliding, a disorienting, almost violent sensation, but on top of it all I still, mostly, just wanted a drink. I had that sober, skinned feeling; everything that touched me hurt. Noises too loud, feelings too loud, people too loud. A drink would blunt the edges. The waiter was taking a long time. Sal was telling me that his wife was nearby, at a clothing store he was grateful he didn’t have to go to.

  “I just sit, you know, in those chairs they have for the men, and wait for her,” he said. I sometimes think you can tell how a man feels about his wife by his tone when he says the word, and Sal said it with pride. I was happy for him, and said so. Sal thought New York was an interesting place, but he would never want to live here. His wife, though, she just loved it, he told me. He had a tattoo on his neck, a small black anchor. I suddenly remembered standing with him in my mother’s bathtub, trimming the hair above his ears with a pair of red-handled scissors. Marlena sat on the bathroom sink, directing.

  He ordered a beer. After a beat, staring at the laminated menu, I asked for more hot water. If I took it one choice at a time, it seemed doable. To order water. Something, anything else. Whenever Sal tried to rest his arm on the table the whole thing shifted to one side. We made small talk for a while, and then he told me that he’d found my information on my old freelance website. That his wife—they’d only been married, I came to realize, a few months—had encouraged him to look up people who knew Marlena, because he didn’t have many connections to his real family and those connections were not the kind he wanted to preserve. Sometimes he felt a little lost, he said, without those roots. When he mentioned his parents, it took me a second to realize he meant his foster parents. He had a solid job managing a lakeside bar in a resort town near the Upper Peninsula. He confessed that he barely remembered me—just that I was nice, and I was shy, and that I’d been around. Greg, who he’d stayed in loose touch with, had told him that I was in New York.

  Sal praised Marlena a lot—her beauty, her intelligence. She had a mythological quality for him too. Her death was a “tragedy.” He didn’t mention the drugs, specifically—perhaps he didn’t really know—but he said that she had her demons. A little blushingly, a hitch in his voice, he told me that he tried to be better because of her. He’d never been much of a student but he stayed away from partying, that whole life. People didn’t realize the danger. He drank fast, though, in long gulps that lowered the level of beer in his glass, centimeters at a time. I could taste the beer, just watching him—the cold, sour mouthful, the buzzing on the tongue, that yellow, wheaty flavor. He was so young when she died. He kept referring to it as an accident, and so I did too. Marlena was more like a mom to him than a sister, Sal said, and because of that, he never really knew her.

  “What was she like?” he asked.

  I tried to explain. He ordered another beer. “Water,” I said, again, and drank it while I talked and talked.

  When we hugged goodbye, all the things I still knew that he never would, the details of her he hungered for, were between us like a presence. I gave him Marlena’s pin, tucked in a sealed envelope with a handwritten note. When he took it, superstitious as it sounds, I felt relief. A long-set curse, unraveling.

  The next morning, I walked to a church near my apartment. I arrived at a quarter after eight, late enough that I almost turned around. Inside, I followed the paper sign to the basement, where, after grabbing a cup of coffee, I took an open chair near the front. Fifteen people or so, most, like me, dressed for work. One by one, they stood up. They told their stories. I’d told mine before, in that very room, but this time I didn’t know how to start. I stared into my lap, at my fingers twisting a drink napkin into a shreddy cone, and stayed silent. A week later, I came back.

  Marlena

  Our real ending was a few days before that dull Sunday in the park. A school night, I want to say Thursday, November and cold, cold, cold. The two of us up in the jungle gym, legs dangling toward the earth, snow falling so slow it would take a lifetime to reach our faces. Her teasing me about how I didn’t answer her texts all day, how I was too busy now, already forgetting about her.

  “I knew this hero-worship phase of yours was only temporary,” she said.

  “Oh, shut up.” I tilted my head onto her shoulder and looked skyward, past the curve of her chin. Her hair itched my forehead. The world was a bowl tipped over—huge, but we could see the end, the curved line where it met the earth.

  “You’ll be out of here soon. I’m just getting ready. College, wherever, whatever you’re gonna be.”

  “What do you think I’m going to be?”

  I wanted so badly to know. Even then, I thought she could tell me. So close, just up ahead, we were in our futures—tasting sushi for the first time, screaming at each other on some city side street, texting good luck on the first day of big jobs, falling in and out of love, father-less and stronger for it, learning how to walk in heels and trim our own bangs and not blow all our money at once and how to explain what we liked and didn’t, speaking up in public, driving cars alone to no particular place, embracing each other after a year apart, growing our hair out and cutting it all off, wandering through endless forgettable minutes, singing our old and still favorite songs, saying remember when, remember when, remember when. I believed in those girls, our older, wiser selves.

  “Whatever you want,” she said, and kissed my scalp with a mwah, like a cartoon mom. “Just try not to forget, okay? When you get there. Promise to come back and visit me. I’ll be an old lady with a thousand cats and I’ll need the company. I’ll be desperate for it, probably, stuck in Silver Lake.”

  “You won’t be stuck here.”

  “Promise,” she said, and I did, a lie so easy it felt like the truth.

  I don’t know how long we were there. An hour? More? It got later. We sat up, smacking our legs to warm them. I was ready to go home, but I stayed a little while for her. I had nowhere else, yet, to be. We jumped off the wooden platform, knees buckling, that old dare, and brushed the stinging flakes off our palms. Arms linked, we traveled the hundred yards or so through the grass, powder clinging to our boots, until we reached the row of trash cans between our two houses. Silver Lake silent, the trailers almost pretty in the slow-falling snow, their windows dark, not a car on the road.

  “Want to come over for a bit? I’ll fix your math.”

  “I’ve got to get up, Mar,” I said, annoyed by the touch of need in her voice.

  And we went in. One of us turned first, one of us was already gone. Into our empty houses, two girls at the end of the world, separated by dim rooms just a few dozen feet apart. One of us fell easily asleep, a million days left except that particular one, forever almost over, an ending that happens again and again no matter how much I don’t want it to. Maybe that’s all loss is. What happens, whether you like it or not. What won’t let you go.

  Marlena—look. I didn’t forget.

  I wrote it down.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to my mother, Elizabeth, for her patience, understanding, and belief in my imagination. Thank you, Mom, for making this book—and everything else—possible. Your grit and grace inspire me. Thank you also to my siblings, Kelsey, Will, and Taylor, for your mighty, astonishing brai
ns. I am proud to come from you.

  For your sustaining belief in this project and my voice, and for the blazing insight I am pretty sure is your superpower, thank you to my agent, Claudia Ballard. I am so grateful to have you on my team.

  My editor Sarah Bowlin’s brilliance and dedication changed this book and this writer. Thank you, Sarah, for helping me find my way. I still believe we might get to do another one. I hope I am so lucky.

  Thank you to everyone at WME, especially Laura Bonner, Caitlin Landuyt, Cathryn Summerhayes, and Matilda Forbes Watson for representing Marlena so well around the world.

  A joyful thanks to the smart and stylish women of Henry Holt, for making my publishing experience so exhilarating and painless: Leslie Brandon, Gillian Blake, Maggie Richards, Barbara Jones, Molly Bloom, and the rest of the team. Extra special super big thanks to Caroline Zancan, for adopting me, and Kerry Cullen, for picking up the pieces.