by Julia Kent
Darla was right. She had been saying that for years and now she was caught in her own snare. “Yes, he’s a doctor. No, he’s not an ass. If anybody’s the ass, it’s me.”
“Why are you the ass, Josie?”
“Because I’m stupid.”
Darla laughed. “Anybody can be an ass when they’re stupid. The question is are you being stupid and turning somebody away you really like?”
Josie had to think about that for a few minutes; it filled her brain with too much chaos and she realized that she didn’t have to think about it, she could just defer and deflect. “Darla, I am not gonna talk about this right now,” she said with a weary sigh, “so let’s talk about you moving here. When are you coming?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” Josie shouted. “Tomorrow?” She walked into the spare bedroom and looked around. All of her extra shit was crammed in there. About half the floor was covered with boxes and a stray guitar from years ago, and some UMass-logoed stadium blanket a guy she had dated a few times had left. “Tomorrow?”
“Well, it turns out Uncle Mike has a run and can get me as far as some city in Massachusetts called…Stur…bridge.”
“Sturbridge, yeah.”
“Yeah, well, Mike can get me there and I was hoping maybe you could come and get me? It looks pretty close on a map.”
“Darla, Sturbridge is about…an hour and a half outside of Cambridge.”
“Aw, shit! Well, everything in New England on a map looks like it’s close together.”
Josie shook her head and wisely kept her mouth shut.
“Is there a bus I can take?”
“You could always hitchhike.”
A loud snort came through the phone. “I’ve had enough of hitchhiking, trust me,” she said.
Then Josie remembered, “Oh, that’s right, the naked guy.”
“And the other naked guy.”
“They’re both naked hitchhikers?”
“It’s a long story,” Darla rasped.
“Look, I’ll find a way to get somebody to come to Sturbridge to pick you up. Won’t you have a bunch of stuff that you need to put in a car? I mean, my car is pretty tiny.”
“No,” Darla said, “I decided to leave it all behind. All I need are some clothes, a couple of favorite books, my junky old computer, my phone. If I’m gonna start a whole new life and a whole new relationship, then why not start it clean? Why carry my baggage from my past around?” she said quietly.
If Darla had kicked her in the gut, she couldn’t have knocked the wind out of Josie any harder. “That makes sense,” she choked out. “So, tomorrow…”
“Yeah, tomorrow!”
Darla’s excitement was just a little bit contagious, and it picked Josie’s spirits up. “All right then, we’ll see you tomorrow, and I’m so glad you made this leap.”
“Me too,” Darla said. “The only way to know whether something’s gonna work out is to trust yourself, close your eyes, and just jump. Right?”
“Sure,” Josie said, “if you say so.”
They said their goodbyes and Josie hung up, elated and exhausted at the same time. Josie surveyed her place, this time looking at it through the eyes of a potential roommate. Well, it certainly had worked well all these years that she had been alone, and had even worked well for entertaining Alex. Having another person share the entire place was going to be interesting.
Her apartment didn’t really have a plan; it sort of reflected Josie in that sense. She had the first floor of a triple decker, right across the street from a giant park, but aside from her bedroom and her bathroom, the openness that had once been so appealing to her now became an issue. Darla would need privacy, and the only room that really made sense was this tiny—she wandered over to it…wow, ten by ten would be a stretch—room that didn’t even have a closet. Technically her apartment was allowed to be called a “one bedroom” because the little room lacked the basic functions of a bedroom. On the other hand, she wasn’t planning to charge Darla any rent for it, so free meant that her Ohio niece would have to get used to living in a room smaller than she was used to.
Darla wouldn’t complain, she knew that. The poor girl was used to living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. Josie had grown up in a house. That had seemed to separate kids in their town—if you lived in a house you were somehow better than the kids who lived in the trailer park. Even though Josie didn’t believe that, and had never treated Darla or any of her friends who lived in the trailer park any differently, there was a sense of pervasive shame about growing up in any kind of home that was falling apart.
Both of them had lived in dwellings that seemed to reflect their mothers’ inner cores. For Aunt Cathy, the porch was perpetually falling apart, as if the entrance to her was so unnavigable that in order to reach her you had to get through the impossible and probably cut yourself and get hurt in the process. With Marlene’s house, it was the other way around. The house was never in great shape when her dad had been alive, but he’d cut the lawn, they’d gardened a bit, and even if the house had peeling paint on the outside, on the inside her mom had worked really hard to make it homey and loving.
The first year after the accident, though, absolutely nothing had been done. Literally. Josie had turned eleven just before the accident, and on her twelfth birthday she wanted to invite some friends over and so had surveyed the place. Finding newspapers from the week after her dad had died shoved in a corner had given her a profound sense of just how neglected everything was, as if time had stood still. And as time, in fact, marched on, nothing got done ever again. Marlene didn’t have the gutters cleaned, didn’t mow the lawn, didn’t buy food, didn’t even talk to Josie some days. She just lived in her own dysfunctional and sometimes florid world. Aunt Cathy had tried to explain to Josie that it wasn’t that Marlene didn’t love her, it was that the accident had changed her brain, made her selfish, made her focused on everything butlove. The words had seemed harsh but she had known that they were true.
When you live in a craphole, you grow up fearing that you’re just going to create a new craphole, and Josie had fought so hard not to do that. Living with Darla was going to be a challenge then—if Darla turned out to have succumbed to wanting to invent her own craphole. That wasn’t going to fly. Maybe giving her this smaller space would contain any hoarding nature, if need be.
She began pulling her boxes of old books out of the room. Why was she keeping textbooks from twelve years ago? It was easy now to get rid of them, something she couldn’t have imagined doing six months ago. Back then they had represented her intelligence, as if the book were a physical manifestation of what her brain could do. That seemed so silly. Cleaning out the room made her face years of crap that she had been lugging around with her, and as she spent the next couple of hours sorting and decluttering, she found herself violently throwing object after object into the Goodwill boxes. A broken chess set...gone, an old phone that she’d intended to give to a domestic violence shelter...in the box, clothes that she hadn’t worn in years and never would, but that represented some memory...gone.
Carrying the first box to her car that afternoon, the fresh air, the sun shining in a way that New England didn’t get very often, caught her off guard. A handful of clouds hung in the air like little cotton balls, evenly distributed across a vast sky. The sun shone down, not harsh, but gentle. It reminded her of the day that she and Alex had gone to the river. Her body began to hum as she lifted the box and dumped it into her trunk, not bothering to close it as she marched back into the house. Five boxes later, her mind was still retracing the memory of Alex’s hands on her ass, the power of his thighs lifting her up, how her back had scraped against that stone wall, the leaves pressing into her hair, the scent of him etched into her lungs, the hoarse cry that came from her throat as she came and came in his arms.
Frustration began to feel like anger, then threatened to turn to rage. She told herself sitting still, taking a break with a cup of coffee, would
help her refocus on sorting out the concrete reminders of the burden of her past. And a finished space for Darla would allow her to welcome another person escaping some of that same past. Storming into the kitchen, she filled the holding tank with water, shoved a K-Cup filter into the machine, and hit “On” as if it were an indictment. Before the machine’s burbling death rattle was finished, she snatched the cup out from under the last few drips and gulped it down to fortify herself.
The room was nearly empty when she found it. An old box with a slightly chewed corner from some sort of creature that had nibbled at it back in the closet of her old house in Ohio. The box fell apart when she picked it up to move it and various items tumbled out. An old diary that she recognized from seventh grade, a corsage from some sort of awards banquet that she’d been to in high school, a trophy and…oh, God…her copy of A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. That was her last gift from her father for her eleventh birthday. He’d gotten it for her and taken her all the way up to Cleveland to go to the art museum, showing her the Cleveland Public Library and marveling at all of the newfangled computer systems that Peters just didn’t have. It had geeked him out as a librarian, and she’d found herself asking him all sorts of questions that she’d never felt privy to even ask on the trip. He’d taken her out for a really weird sort of lunch, to a Greek place where she learned that what she had thought in her head was pronounced “gy-ro” was actually pronounced “yee-ro.” The man at the counter had chided her when she’d tried to pronounce it “gyro,” and her dad had just laughed, a good-natured chuckle that made her feel grown up somehow.
Her dad spent plenty of time with her talking about books, but this was different—it was like spending a day being a person with him, and not just a kid. When he had given her the Wrinkle in Timeand talked excitedly about tesseracts and folding time and IT, the one mind that took everyone over until Meg and Calvin fought against it, she decided that she would read it the second she could. She’d been too tired that night, and had gone to sleep, the book set on her dresser. Three days later she’d been consumed with homework and hadn’t gotten to it yet, and that night he'd died.
She cradled the book in her hands, turning it over, and then the tears came, mixing with a diffuse fury so great that her arms began to shake. She had never read the book. It represented everything that she hated about her life. It represented the death of her father, the metaphorical death of her mother, the complete 180 shift in her life, and her own self-abuse at the fact that she had not made reading the book and talking about it with her dad a priority, instead letting silly, childish things get in the way.
She’d been watching Darla that night, babysitting. They were at her house playing. Their parents were supposed to come home that night around eleven. When they didn’t, Josie just thought that they were late. Morning had come, and still no parents. She’d walked next door to ask Mr. Topper, the neighbor, what to do. He was an old, retired man, a bit grumpy, but completely shocked and surprisingly compassionate when she explained that her parents hadn’t come home. Darla was happy munching Cap’n Crunch cereal and watching Saturday morning cartoons as Josie sat in Mr. Topper’s kitchen, drinking an offered glass of orange juice in one of those tiny juice glasses that old people seemed to always have. He’d called the police station, and then very grimly set the phone down, a tortured look in his eyes that had disappeared rather quickly when he cleared his throat, and wouldn’t make eye contact again.
“Someone’s coming, Josephine. They’ll be here soon to…figure all this out.”
The rasp in his voice on his last word had made a hot ball of lead form in her stomach. She was smart enough to know that what Mr. Topper wasn’t saying, told her everything she needed to know. So she didn’t say anything, because what could she say?
“I have to get back to my little cousin,” she hadfinally said, and now as an adult looking back, it was quite remarkable that he had let her, standing in the doorway and watching her make the trek back to her house, where she had walked past Darla, who was now openly fishing handfuls of cereal out of the box, picking out the red berries and eating them while throwing back the rest.
Seventeen years flashed past as she remembered how her room smelled, like the fabric softener her mother had used. The bed wasn’t made, but the rest of the room was tidy, dusted even, back when Marlene did that sort of thing. She had picked up the Wrinkle in Time book and sat down on her bed, turning to the first page. She had started reading it, and made it to page eleven when the doorbell had rung. The appearance of the police hadn’t surprised her, but she hadn’t expected the woman in the dress who told her that they were there to take her and Darla to go somewhere while they figured out what to do about their parents.
Darla had stood there, her giant mop of curls pouring down her shoulders. Wild and crazy, those giant green eyes like saucers. Her hand was all the way in the box, down to the elbow, and she was wearing Powerpuff Girls pajamas. “What’s goin’ on?” she’d asked, and the lady had nearly fallen apart.
“I need you to come with me, honey.”
“Why do we need to go with you?” Josie had snapped, her finger marking the place where she had stopped reading in the book.
“We’re trying to figure out what happened to your parents, and children can’t be left alone when their parents are…”
The cop had cut her off with a hard look. Josie recognized him. Sometimes he came to the library where her dad worked. His last name was escaping her, but she knew that he had a daughter two years older than her in the school. Jane…Jane…something. And then, like an angel, the assistant librarian in town, Mrs. Humboldt, had swooped in. To this day, Josie didn’t know whether Mr. Topper had called her, or whether she had heard the news, or whether, as Josie liked to imagine it in her eleven-year-old mind, by starting to read the book that her daddy had given her, she had somehow sent a cosmic message to the world.
That a fellow librarian needed to come to another librarian’s child’s rescue, and rescue she had.
Emphatic and officious, in a way that only a small-town librarian can be, she’d beaten the cops and the woman, who turned out to be a social worker, into submission. She had insisted with the ramrod-straight back of a woman quite accustomed to being listened to and obeyed that the girls were now in her custody, and that had been that.
As she sat in the room she was clearing for Darla, all of those memories flooded her, as if the book were transmitting them by some sort of pulped paper osmosis. She hated this book. She hated herself. She hated her mother, and her uncle, who had made a terrible, terrible mistake and paid for it with his own life, and her father’s life, and her mother’s sanity. But most of all, she hated that she was such a coward, that she could not bring herself to read that fucking book, yet she carried it around with her, and always would.
Not being with Alex was the right thing. She was too fucked up to be worthy of anyone, to be of any good to anyone other than Darla.
The phone rang, shaking her out of her angry reverie. Of all of the times for Marlene to choose to call, she picked this one. Ignoring it, she let her voicemail click in. She took the book and put it in the farthest corner of the back closet in her bedroom, where it needed to rest, hidden but omnipresent. And then, folding her heart in half like a tesseract, she finished the job with a coldness that filled her with a sense of relief.
Somehow, Darla had convinced one of the two guys she was with to come all the way out to Sturbridge, pick her up at some truck stop, and bring her into Cambridge. She’d accomplished all of this at one in the morning, though, and had failed to call Josie, so the quiet knock at the door in the middle of the night had made her grab a baseball bat and tiptoe to her own front door. The problem was that she was wearing a cami and underpants, and nothing else. So as she stood there, holding a baseball bat, half naked, when she pulled the curtain aside on the window of her front door, she nearly shoved the baseball bat into Darla’s face.
“What the hell are you doi
ng here at 1 a.m.?” she hissed. The taillights of a car moved back down to the main road.
“I got a ride.”
“You got a ride at one in the morning?”
“It was the best time I could get here.”
Josie undid the deadbolt, and the regular lock, and the chain lock, and let her in. “Jesus Christ, Darla, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Apparently I scared the clothes off of you, too. Josie, what are you doing? Isn’t this some sort of entryway where other people could see you?”
“Yeah, well, no one’s looking at 1 a.m.” She tiptoed back to her door, shivering. It may have been warm when she went to bed, but now it was cold. She welcomed Darla into her apartment, and then her little cousin gave her a giant hug. It was almost enough to warm her up. Where Josie was a stick, Darla was all curves and lushness. You would never guess that the two came from sisters. Marlene had been the skinny one, and Cathy had been the pinup girl—at least, that was what their moms always said. Although “pinup girl” wasn’t quite right; she thought that came from her grandma. Darla wore a baby blue v-neck t-shirt, old jeans, and flip-flops, and carried just two suitcases.
Josie looked back. “That’s it, that’s all you brought?”
Darla shrugged. “That’s all I need. Where’s my room?”
“Come here. I don’t even have a bed for you, so you’re gonna have to crash on the couch.”
“That’s okay, I’ve slept on worse.”
“Of course you have.”
“Hey,” Darla said indignantly.
Josie stared her down. “Is what I just said untrue?”
“No.”
“Come here.” Josie went in for a second hug, really giving her the time and the embrace that she needed. Darla was shivering just a bit, and Josie held on until both of them had stopped shaking. When she pulled back, Darla was noticeably more relaxed.