by Kristen Mae
I wash the Dorito dust off my fingers and play the Elgar for Liza.
When I finish, she claps for me, her cheeks positively glowing with pride. “You’re going to be famous,” she says. “I just know it!”
Then she sings for me. First, two songs from 42nd Street, fun and upbeat, and her voice is like Mom’s: clear and in tune and free of affectation. I clap for her too, because I think she’s finished, but then she blushes and says, “So, I have a surprise for you,” and brings out a ukulele from the tiny bedroom closet.
“No way.” But now I’m smiling so hard my cheeks are going to burst.
“It’s an easy instrument to learn,” she says. “Not like cello. But I’ve been practicing since school started.”
And then she begins to strum, sweet little plinks like we’re on a tropical island somewhere: “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie which we watched a hundred times when we were kids. I know the tune but can’t remember all the words, and Liza’s perfect, childlike voice is piercing me, gutting me, as she sings of voices in the night and people inventing faith and of a beautiful mystery that awaits on the other side of a world built on false hopes. It’s funny that I used to think this song was about optimism. Now I can see it is about letting go.
When Liza finishes, she thinks I’m crying because the song was so beautiful. I let her believe that’s all it is.
That night, my father creeps into my room, into my dreams. It is not a surprise. Even before I fell asleep, I laid there shivering, crushing my old sheets up under my chin and scrunching my eyes closed like a little girl afraid of ghosts. But my father is no ghost. He’s alive, somewhere, and one night he could come creeping into my room just like he used to.
Very weak, not the kind of person who will leave a special mark on the world.
Like your mother.
He sits on the floor beside me now, his shoulder pressed up against the side of the bed in the dark, a memory I can almost touch. I freeze, exactly as I always have, exactly as he hopes I will.
And he says all the things I’ve been expecting him to say, confirms what I’ve known all along: “I knew you couldn’t handle the pressure. I knew you’d go around fucking every guy you met. You like it rough, don’t you, little girl?”
I should say something. I should tell him to shut the fuck up, get the fuck out of my head. But I never could before, and even now I’m paralyzed, my throat tied up in a knot so tight I can’t swallow. I want to tell him. I know if I could defend myself against him that it would change everything. Or it would have. It would have saved us all. It would have saved my mother.
My father turns then, and I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t look at him, but I feel him rise until he’s hovering over me, and then I have no choice but to see—he has no face. No face, just a black hole, and even though he has no eyes I know he’s looking at me. He whispers, “Of course you didn’t know she was about to slit her wrists. You never were very observant. Now shh, Malory, lie still.” Then his face is coming at me, and he’s going to kiss me, no, no, he’s going to consume me…
And then I’m on the floor of my room in the trailer, on my hands and knees, sweating and crying with my hair all in my face. I’ve managed to buck myself right out of bed, trying to get away from…that thing in my dream. Fuck.
I don’t care that it’s the middle of the night; I get in the shower with the water as hot as it will go and wash myself three times. I feel like he touched me. I don’t want him to touch me, not ever again. I scrub so furiously that when I get out of the shower my skin is flaming and raw.
I’m aching to play my cello, but it’s still hours before sunrise. I get it out of my case in the dark and pull it into bed with me, wrapping an arm around its waist as if it were human, careful not to jostle the strings or the bridge. If Liza has heard any commotion from her bed on the other side of our tiny room, she pretends not to notice.
* * *
Aunt Bonnie did not think to get a Christmas tree, or, if she did think of it, she decided against it. That money could buy her a reasonable stash of pills. So Liza and I head to downtown Sarasota, which, although busy with seasonal shoppers, feels dilapidated compared to Conch Garden. I play for two hours while Liza reads Age of Innocence in the shade of a nearby oak, and then we head to the local Christmas tree seller, who is set up under a temporary tent on a street corner down the road from the trailer park.
The two of us lug the tree inside the trailer and get it set up with decorations we pull from the back of the closet in Liza’s room. I don’t know how she managed it, but she saved several cardboard boxes’ worth of stuff from the old apartment, from when mom was alive. The ancient holiday décor, with ornaments dating from around the time I was born, but also some of mom’s personal possessions—the billowy, weightless sundress she used to wear so often, her hairbrush, her old flip-phone, a pair of slippers. We play Christmas songs on the radio, and even though we cry on and off the entire time we’re decorating, our overall mood is festive, almost…normal.
Aunt Bonnie comes home late that night and draws up short when she notices our efforts. “Damn,” she says, and that’s it. We’re not sure if that means she likes it or hates it. Fuck her, anyway.
* * *
Liza and I wake early Christmas morning like there is some residual childish anticipation still buried within us, a hope that there might be a surprise gift leaning in the corner—something to reaffirm our faith in miracles. But there is no such gift, no big red bows. Instead we exchange our little trinkets, a gauzy scarf and a leather-bound edition of A Tale of Two Cities from me to Liza—she loves that stupid book—and a bottle of pricey perfume and an album of photos from her to me.
“I have tons of pictures in my phone,” I tell her, and she says, “I know, but it’s better this way.” I flip through the album and choke a little when I realize it’s filled with pictures of Mom. Liza is right; it’s better this way.
In the afternoon I’m practicing in Liza’s room with a heavy mute attached to my bridge to dampen the sound. Aunt Bonnie trudges down the hallway and leans on the door frame with her arms crossed and her eyebrows up, and it sends a chill down my spine because her posture, the look on her face, is exactly like my father’s. It’s like he off and died somewhere and has since taken possession of Aunt Bonnie’s body.
I want to tell her to fuck off, but I’m just as paralyzed with her as I was with him. I stop moving my bow and let it swing down, its tip landing on the shag carpet while I wait for her to say whatever it is she’s come here to say.
“It’s your life,” she finally says after a prolonged, awkward silence. She shakes her head while she says it, and, again, I have no fucking clue what she means. My father was the same, always saying things that could be taken a hundred different ways. No wonder I’m such a basket case.
When she leaves I keep playing, crunching out impossible Popper runs, going through etude after etude, singing through the entire Bach Cello Suites and all my orchestral music from college and all 48 versions of major and minor scales, for hours and hours. My fingers go raw and my wrists and back ache from the prolonged abuse, but I have to play it all, have to let my fingers touch every note. I can’t let a single pitch go unplayed.
Because when I stop playing, he will be there, crowding himself into my thoughts. Garrett. He’s always there anyway, always hovering at the edge of my awareness. I imagine what I’ll do when I get back, how he’ll receive me after that last visit—You’re a fucking plaything. You are a nothing. I can dispose of you anytime I want. I fantasize about how it might happen, how I’ll die, and in most scenarios Garrett hovers over me, admiring me with his icy eyes while I float in a tub of red water. He still hasn’t messaged me.
I think about Rome, too. He messaged me to say “Merry Christmas” as did Bethany and Daphne. I miss them all in a surprisingly intimate and fierce way, even Garrett, though I know this is probably the wrong thing to feel. But I can’t help myself; Garrett is another world
, clean and organized and beautiful and full of purpose, even if his purpose is at times cruel. He is something so far removed, so dramatically different from the hellhole where I started out. And yet coolly, sharply familiar.
That thought, that word, familiar, rings in my head like a bell, and I have to remove my practice mute and whale on my cello to cover the racket in my brain. Soon enough, none of it will matter anyway.
Chapter Thirty-One
Here I am again, standing before the five-story brick building that is my dorm, just like I did in September, but now I’m a little older and wiser—or maybe just weather-worn. The place is busy. Students are returning from home, clapping each other on the shoulders and embracing, glad to be back. I glance toward Garrett’s neighborhood, half expecting him to emerge from the shade of that tree-lined street like he’s been waiting for me. My stomach flips. I don’t know if I’m more afraid that he will call or more afraid that he won’t. I’ll feel lost if he doesn’t—I won’t know where to turn when the ugly thoughts file into my head to consume me.
I think he’ll call, though. Garrett’s abandoning a plaything would be like an artist leaving a painting half-finished. I think of Garrett’s spotless floors and pristine countertops and flawless sangria, and I know one thing—he finishes what he starts. Unless he’s already finished with me, and the girl with the white-blond hair is his new plaything. I get a chill at the thought, hug my hoodie tighter around myself, and head inside.
Daphne’s already in the room unpacking clothes from a new zebra-striped suitcase.
“Hey,” I say, dragging my cello case over the threshold. I’m not as shocked by her skinniness now, and I’m not sure if I’m used to it or she’s put on weight or I just don’t give a shit anymore. Maybe all of those things.
“Hey,” she says, turning and smiling, and I wonder what she’s so damn happy about.
“How was break?”
“We went skiing in Utah. It was fun.” She shrugs like skiing in Utah, like having the freedom, the money, to go anywhere, is no biggie. “You do anything fun?”
I picture Liza and I sitting in front of our sad Christmas tree laughing uncomfortably about our lonely gift exchange. “I practiced a lot.”
She zips up her now-empty suitcase and slides it under her bed. “Well, that’s good. You ready for your audition? What, like…two weeks, right?” She’s still smiling at me, but there’s a tightness in her face.
“Yeah, it’s coming up.” I set my duffle bag on my bed and sit beside it. “Everything…okay?”
“My mom…shit.” She sits on her bed, fiddles with her hands. Takes a nervous, shaking breath. “We didn’t go to Utah.”
“Um…”
“My parents sent me to a kind of…rehab. For eating disorders.”
Wait, this is good for her—something to be happy about. So I smile, though I can’t really feel the smile. “How was it? You look healthy. Healthier, I mean.”
“That sounds like ‘You look fat.’” Her face reddens. “Sorry.”
I pause a beat. “What is the right thing to say?”
“Actually…” She chews her bottom lip for a minute. “Nothing. Don’t say anything. Just be here. Call my parents if I get bad. They’d want me to tell you that. I mean…they literally demanded I tell you that.” A self-conscious laugh bubbles out of her.
“Did you tell them about…about you being—”
“No. No, I can’t. The eating stuff is bad enough. My poor mother, I thought she was going to have a stroke. It was awful. She threw a banana at me.”
We both laugh at this, because it’s impossible not to laugh at flying bananas, but it is an uneasy sound. She’s holding back, I can tell in the way she drops her eyes. We’re caught in the no-man’s land between lies and truth. I wonder if she senses how much I withhold. I never even told her about my mother.
I unzip my duffle bag to unpack. I haven’t been a good friend to Daphne, running around in the middle of the night and standing her up at the gym and screaming at her to eat hamburgers. And suddenly I can’t stand the awkwardness. I’m itching to get away, to sink back into my own mind and my own sickness. I’m practically vibrating in anticipation of my first meeting with Garrett, but he hasn’t messaged. I need to…run. I need to get out of here.
“Rome came by looking for you.”
I’m cramming clothes into dresser drawers, trying to hurry so I can escape the pressure of these narrow walls. Shit. I pause, afraid that Rome has given Daphne some idea of what happened before break.
“So…” she says. “Are you seeing him? Or…?”
“Just friends,” I say, and I make my hands move faster, shoving the last of my clothes in the dresser, stuffing my duffel bag into the back of my closet. I grab my running shoes, a sports bra, some shorts. Daphne watches me undress—should I be worried that she watches me?—but every cell in my body is screaming at me to run away. I can’t wait for privacy. My shorts are up with a snap, my bra is on, and now I’m tying my shoes.
“He really likes you.”
“You said he was a thug.”
“I was being a judgmental bitch. And maybe also a little…jealous.” I glance up at her and she quickly looks away. “Anyway,” she says. “Rome’s nice.”
My face is hot. “Doesn’t matter, I’m with…” I trail off because I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m with Garrett, or ever was, and if I’m not…I finish tying my other shoe and grab my phone.
“What happened that night before break? You said you slept in Rome’s room.”
“That’s all we did, was sleep.”
“He seriously didn’t try anything?”
I snort-laugh. I’m not telling her I’m the one who tried something, that Rome had to push my slutty drunken ass off him, and she definitely doesn’t need to know what happened the next day. “We literally just slept side by side, Daph. Okay, I gotta run or I’ll lose my shit.”
I give her a wave before heading out the door, and she waves back but she seems small again, like she shrunk in her clothes while we talked. Gerta the hippo is lying on my bed staring plaintively at the ceiling as if she’s just completely given up on everything.
I run down Garrett’s street, making an effort not to look in the direction of his house. I know I’ll face him later, or tomorrow, or the next day…or never, if he chooses. I cross into the first bank of trees, my feet pounding the sandy ground, leaping over downed palm fronds and fallen tree limbs, my hands brushing away the leaves and branches that have inched their way over the path since the last time I ran here. The January air is chilly and refreshing, kissing the beads of perspiration that pop out on my brow, upper lip, and chest as I push my way further into the forest. It’s quiet today, not like when I first came with Garrett back in September, when the woods were hot and alive with the sounds of singing crickets and croaking toads and creatures skittering away. It must be the cooler weather. All I can hear is the crunch of my shoes on the dry ground and the laboring, rhythmic huff of my breath.
After a while I see the break in the greenery that tells me I’m approaching the water. I pump my legs harder, demand a little more of myself the way I know Garrett would, spurred on by the consolation that the end is near.
And there it is, that sharp-sloping embankment, and I can see right away that there are manatees swimming lazily beneath the surface of the dark water. It makes sense; I remember learning that they seek warmer waters during the winter months, and this inland waterway would surely be warmer than the waters nearer to the ocean.
Panting, I stand at the edge of the drop-off and look out over the glimmering river. God, this place is beautiful—even in the winter with everything all hushed, it’s so green and light-speckled and wild that it almost makes me believe in magic, like a wood sprite or a fairy might appear any moment in a shower of golden sparks. I almost expect Garrett to be here waiting for me, but I keep my eyes on the water. If he is here watching me, I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I c
hecked to see if he was there.
I pull off my socks and shoes, shorts, shirt, and sports bra, and tread carefully down the muddy slope toward the water. The ground is like ice against the soles of my feet, much colder than I expected, and goose bumps spread over me as the chill seeps into my bones, freezing out the heat generated by my run.
The water is even colder than the earth, lapping up over my feet and ankles, my shins, knees, thighs, and now I’m shivering and wrapping my arms around myself in a vain attempt to stay warm even as I slip further into the frigid water.
The first time I came here with Garrett, he intuited this secret vulnerability I was carrying around unawares, and he understood in a way no one else ever had. I thought he was sewing me back up, mashing all my jagged pieces back together. I thought he was giving me something I desperately needed.
But now…now I think he had a greater plan all along, that pulling me under with him was merely a test, one that I passed with flying colors. I always have been an excellent student.
The manatees float by slowly, languid gray blimps, peaceful in their respectful disregard for my presence. I sink deeper into the water, shivering violently as I draw in a breath, and then let the river swallow me whole.
* * *
The walk back takes nearly an hour and a half, and it’s dark by the time I reach the sidewalk leading up to the dorm. My bones are chilled to the marrow, and my feet are wrinkled and blistered in my damp socks.
Rome is standing out front with a group of students, and though he waves at me, I raise a quivering hand to say hi but keep walking. He is happy and smiling with those people, friendly Rome, everyone loves him, and their laughter rings out over the quiet campus. It is an easy happiness upon which I should not intrude. My gut rolls at the memory of how I let myself go with him. What am I supposed to do now? Pretend it never happened? The way I feel toward him is wrong—like he’s a security blanket or a medicine, there to fix me up whenever I let Garrett hurt me too much.